But with the state of Europe these days, it’s also an utter waste of time.

It’s a rare week lately that our best laid plans from Friday are not cast violently aside by Monday due to some new, wild turn the euro-crisis has taken or general strike or riot yanking us journos off our earlier assignments.

It certainly does seem sometimes that we should just replace all our careful planning with a rigid routine:

- on Monday, the market vultures start circling overhead a new debt-laden eurozone country;

- on Tuesday, a government somewhere announces brutal austerity measures slashing public spending and privatising anything that moves;

- on Wednesday, pensioners in some EU member state riot and storm a parliament or two;

- on Thursday somewhere else, a long-tenuous government coalition collapses;

- and on Friday, some brand new far-right formation with either a silver pompadour hairdo or a paramilitary wing wins umpteen percent of the vote in an election.

Europe is not a happy bunny at the moment.

But of course, this is a grotesque oversimplification and for all our newspaper’s scheduling frustrations, the rise of extremism is in reality a complex, multi-causitive phenomenon and does not fit easily into any simple arithmetic.

However, at times my imagined new ‘schedule’ is not that far from the very real but faulty reductionism commentators and politicians make explaining the rise in support for the extreme right: economic crisis = social dislocation = Hitlermussolinijackbootspanic-Aaaaaaaah!

It is understood for example that some in the German government at the highest levels are petrified of the thought that the current banking-turned-sovereign-debt crisis will turn into a social crisis that will allow some new form of right-wing populism to make a return to the country, until now the nation with probably the most isolated and electorally luckless far right in Europe.

There has indeed been a rise in support for the far-right across Europe in the last couple of years and the economic crisis has very much played a major role in this development, but the mainstream political parties, both centre-right, and, particularly, the centre-left, carry just as much blame, if not more.

In the 2009 European elections, far-right parties made moderate to significant advances in ten member states, with the seat-count up in nine: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and the UK.

Three countries in particular saw very high levels of far-right support. Hungary’s anti-gypsy and anti-semitic Jobbik, or Movement for a Better Hungary, which maintains its own outlawed-but-not-really paramilitary outfit, the Magyar Garda won 17 percent, a massive gain on its two percent in the 2006 Hungarian general election.

The Freedom Party (PVV) of Dutch anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders won 17 percent of the vote and four of the country’s 25  euro-deputy seats. And Austria’s two far right parties, one of which also takes the name Freedom Party (FPO), together won a clean 18 percent.

But European elections, with their low turn-outs and mistaken belief that they are of no consequence, often deliver up a much higher share of fringe parties than national elections.

Except that in April of this year, Jobbik, which deployed activists as slickly web-savvy as any Obamaniac of 2008, in Hungary, where eight Roma were targeted and killed last year, actually boosted its support to 17 percent in parliamentary elections.

Nevertheless, we must be careful not to panic. Support for these extremists is very uneven, often very shallow and frequently goes up like a rocket but falls like a stick.

As high as these votes have been, the parties’ lack of experience, frequent infighting and predilection for parliamentary truancy means that voters quickly fall out of love with the ‘radical alternative’ they embraced with gusto only months before.

In March local elections, 2009, Geert Wilders’ PVV made did exceptionally well in Almere and the Hague, with the country’s main pollster predicting the party would beat both Labour and the Christian Democrats on 27 seats to their 24 a piece.

But in the space of a few weeks, the PVV’s support has slumped to 18 percent as a result of battles over the lack of internal democracy (Wilders is the only member of his party and all decisions are made by him) and the effective refusal of the party to enter local government in the towns where it had done well.

Indeed, Wilders in the Netherlands can be seen in some ways as the second coming of Pim Fortuyn, the anti-Islam populist but at the same time openly gay and flamboyant owner of a pair of fluffy King Charles spaniels named Kenneth and Carla, who was murdered in the middle of the 2002 election campaign.

Winning 26 seats, his Lijst Pim Fortuyn was the second largest party in the chamber and entered into a coalition with the Christian Democrats and the VVD, a right-wing-liberal party. But after just 86 days, the new cabinet fell, a result of bickering, scandals and general chaos surrounding the LPF.

The Austrian far-right’s shocking 18 percent in the EU elections was actually down from the combined 28 percent they had won in the 2008 general elections. In the country’s May presidential election, the FPO’s candidate, Barbara Rosencranz, backed in her campaign by the biggest selling daily tabloid, Kronen Zeitung, but described by opponents as the ‘Reich Mother’ for here extreme views and ten children with antiquated Germanic names, scored 15 percent.

This is high, but nowhere near as high as the 20-25 percent that had been feared, following revelations about her opposition to bans on Nazi revivalism and Holocaust denial and her husband’s role as fundraiser for imprisoned neo-Nazis and one-time leading member of the banned fascist National Democratic Party.

So while still a concern, Austria’s far right has been on a downward path since its 2008 high. A similar decline occurred after the FPO shocked Europe in the 1999 election with its 29 percent support that delivered the party into a coalition with the centre-right People’s Party and international pariah status.

Belgium’s Flemish separatist far-right, the Vlaams Belang, or ‘Flemish Interest’, only a few years ago was the most popular party in Flanders and fascists from across Europe made pilgrimages to the small northwestern European nation to learn how they had modernised and successfully rebranded themselves with slick media relations, has seen its vote split with the upstart Lijst Dedecker, a more ‘Fortuynist’ hard-right formation founded in 2007, combining anti-immigrant rhetoric and tough-on-crime promises with a libertarian economic agenda.

At the same time, the opposite can and does happen. France’s Front National was in the doldrums for a number of years as a result of splits, infighting and economic problems largely a result of struggles over who would replace the aging Jean-Marie Le Pen after he stepped down, a reverse of their spectacular showing in the 2002 presidential elections where he made it into the second round, eclipsing the Socialist candidate.

In last year’s European elections, the party won a brutal 6.8 percent, only slightly up from the abysmal 4.3 percent Le Pen won in the 2007 presidential elections. But a disillusionment with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had copied some of the far-rights language of the FN, if not their policies, has resulted in a triumphant return to form in the recent regional elections, where the party bounced back, reaping almost 12 percent, very much unexpected by pollsters.

Furthermore, while on the surface it may appear that the far-right vote has gone down substantially in Italy, this is more a reflection of the fact that such parties - apart from out-and-out neo-nazis - have for the most part been integrated into the mainstream right-wing political alliance, either within the People of Liberty (PdL) umbrella party of Berlusconi, or in coalition with the PdL, as with the case of the anti-immigrant devolutionists Lega Nord.

There is much to be concerned about, but the point is that it is important to have a sober, long-term look at the far-right and populism, and not be caught out by the shock headlines that appear on election night. And when one does, one sees that there has been a steady but uneven growth in support for such politics in recent years; it has been made worse by the crisis, but at the same time is not a sudden phenomenon.

Graeme Atkinson, a long-time watcher of the far-right, from the venerable UK anti-fascist monitoring group Searchlight, often is frustrated with how the media can be a bit of a flibertigibbet when it comes to the subject.

- [The far-right] are treated as cranks, so papers don't write about them, don't notice them. And then suddenly something like this happens and they think the sky is falling, he told me just after Jobbik scored well in the recent general election.

- I don't go for either picture. It's not that the crisis has suddenly caused this. This is a phenomenon that goes back much further than the last two years ... Of course it exacerbates the situation - it would be surprising if the crisis did not result in some increased support for the far-right. But it's a long-term phenomenon that needs monitoring and countering. It's no reason to panic and then forget about it once the next big news item happens.

Secondly, the abandonment of the traditional democratic socialism by the centre-left parties across Europe has left a vacuum that the far-right fills with easy rhetoric and promises targetting people that have for many years been taken for granted in the rush to a Blairite centre.

One does not have to embrace such politics to recognise that it most often voters from working class and unemployed communities that historically voted for the left or even communist parties that have switched their allegiance to the Front National, the Lega Nord or Britain’s BNP.

Unfortunately, as in the case of Britain’s Labour Party in the wake of their election defeat, the conclusion many social democrats are drawing is that they should move further to the right on questions such as immigration, when it is moving back to the left is what would drain the swamp in which the far-right breeds - specifically on questions of housing, jobs, strong minimum wages, cracking down on temp agencies and tackling the question of cheap, unregulated foreign labour.

Worse still, the EU’s solution to the sovereign debt crisis that has bludgeoned so many European economies - embraced by social democrats as much as by liberals and conservatives - is slashing public salaries, cutting social programmes and ‘reforming labour markets’ - effectively making it easier to fire people and lower wages.

This is a strategy that will only further strengthen the far-right as working families will be the hardest hit by such moves.

In Greece, Spain and Portugal, voters backed political parties with strong left-wing mandates. At the insistence of the IMF, Germany, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, they are abandoning election promises and gutting the public sector.

This can only further damage people’s already cynical and growing abstentionist approach to politics and democracy, paving the way for anti-democratic forces to appear attractive.

The growth of the far-right and populism across Europe is frightening, but it is the EU’s market-fundamentalism that is most chilling of all.

To be clear: brownshirted men in jackboots are not around the corner. And in any case this time around they wear sharp suits, chat on Facebook and Twitter and post viral videos on YouTube.

But European elites are unwittingly doing their very best to create the conditions for such men to reappear.

This is not the 1930s - at least not just yet.

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