Are you talking about the rise of the far right? Is it also the case, as in the UK, that the former center-left parties have gradually moved further to the right, so that the ideological space that was before occupied only by traditional conservative parties becomes squeezed, and the only opportunities to create (illusory) difference come through rhetoric, not policy?
In the UK, it's not really that the right has made any real gains, it's just that many previous Labour voters didn't bother voting. For anyone. I think they probably would've voted for a popular left-alternative, but there was nowhere to turn. There are something like six or seven very small left-to-far-left parties, usually with very similar names Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Labour Party (although I note this one did quite well in some areas, if only because it's Scargill's party), The Communist Party, Workers Power! and so on. People have no idea who they are...
The Greens might've been an alternative but I think many working-class people are suspicious of them, there's still an air of puritanism & sacrifice, plus they're probably too middle-class and liberal.
I'm not sure about the BNP (the far right), unfortunately I know two people that voted for them, and they're both middle-class Thatcherite zealots, who probably have close to 0% interaction with ethnic minorities or asylum seekers or Polish immigrants in their day to day lives. What they have in common is that they're both chronologically retarded, both suffer infantile imaginations; and were inspired toward the BNP by a shared belief in pre-literate Nordic folk religion; a romantic fantasy of a bucolic idyll occasionally interrupted by the appearance of Faeries.
Both these people thought the BNP were a much bigger party than they actually were. Which is unsurpising given the disproportionate attention the media allowed them. But it's also possible that many people are actually racist. And what's also laughable... With a consistent media agenda of fear, fear of Islam, fear of being 'swamped' by 500million Polish Turkish muslims, fear of bogus illegal asylum seekers that eat babies, added to the normal fears that recession brings - it's not surprising that when the same newspapers who've pushed this agenda day after day - when they tell people that the BNP are dangerous fascists for wanting to do some about these things (which is what they've pushed in their campaigns), it's not surprising that they're ignored... most people can at least see the incongruence.