Fascism’s historical victory in Germany is usually associated with Hitler’s electoral success in 1933. Nowadays it’s often forgotten that the German Communist Party had been identifying various German leaders as would-be tyrants long before Hitler’s rise. Those warnings may well have made some Germans ignore the special noxiousness of Nazism.

Fascism may well have been defeated 70 years ago but fascism as an accusation has remained current. During the Flower Power era of the 1960s, protestors accused establishment politicians of being fascist – but the barracking activists were sometimes accused of being fascist themselves.

Ronald Reagan was seen as a dangerous demagogue during his rise to the top of the Republican Party in the 1970s. Some of his support came from racists (including the Ku Klux Klan) and another faction supporting a stronger military build-up by the United States. These factors, among others, gave support to the accusation that Reagan was (in the words of one critic) the face of friendly fascism.

Since then, Reagan’s reputation has undergone a complete overhaul. He is credited with winning the Cold War and sometimes even hailed as the greatest US President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

You, like me, might be as bewildered by this praise as you are by the original charge of fascism. But the case serves to remind us of the elasticity of the term ‘fascism’ – irrespective of how precise and prescient the accusers think they are. And it’s a warning that the best way to understand our age, with its undoubted populisms, is to hold back on the use of ‘fascism’ and focus on other issues.

The European events of this week give us no fewer than three critical issues to focus on.

First, there were the votes in Austria and Italy. In the first, a far-right candidate for president was soundly defeated, despite or because of his Eurosceptic rhetoric. In Italy, the incumbent Prime Minister was likewise decisively defeated in a referendum on constitutional reform – with the victory being ascribed to his populist adversaries.

The first thing to note is that while, at face value, these two electoral encounters appear to move in opposite directions, they actually plough the same furrow.

In Austria, the Green candidate won the presidency because he positioned himself as the centrist. In fact, he couldn’t have won without the support of the political establishment.

Renzi’s proposals to lead Italy out of the perpetual postponement of important decisions must have seemed to a decisive number of voters to destabilise the system itself

In Italy, it betrays some political illiteracy to read the defeat of Matteo Renzi as a victory against the establishment. The opposition to his proposed reforms came from prominent members of the political establishment – both the left (Renzi’s own party) and the centre.

You cannot get more establishment than the former European commissioner, Mario Monti, who became prime minister a few years ago under pressure from the European establishment itself. Yet he has been prominently against Renzi’s reforms as well (for principled reasons while sharing Renzi’s aims).

Renzi’s reforms failed because they proposed to centralise political power considerably. Indeed, he was accused of undermining the safeguards written into the Italian constitution after World War II with the aim of preventing the rise of another Duce.

We need therefore another way of interpreting the votes in Austria and Italy. How could a far-right politician get close enough to winning the presidency in Austria – but then fail clearly when it’s apparent that he’s close? Why are Italian voters ready to shake the Italian political system out of its lethargy but then not be prepared to pave the way for a system that would conveniently centralise power for their favoured political party should it win power?

I think there is only one convincing answer. Voters want to give their political system a good shaking – but only if they trust the system to handle the consequences. In a way, voters are relying on the existing institutions to be able to tame the mavericks.

This time round, though, the Austrian far-right candidate overreached, making promises that sounded as though he would change the system fundamentally in itself – including Austria’s relationship with the EU.

Likewise, Renzi’s proposals to lead Italy out of the perpetual postponement of important decisions must have seemed to a decisive number of voters to destabilise the system itself.

Of course, I’m not denying that many voted against the proposals to get rid of Renzi himself. But it is significant that some of his adversaries emphasised that, should he lose the referendum, they would not object to his staying on at the helm.

This suggestion, that voters are behaving in a way that rattle democracies while counting on democracy to take care of itself, needs to be seen in the light of two other events that happened over the past week.

One is the clamorous defeat of a pro-Brexit Tory candidate in a by-election at the hands of a Liberal Democrat – in what is usually a safe Tory seat.

The point worth making about this result is not that Brexit may be already being reversed before our eyes. A look at the detailed results of June’s Brexit referendum shows that, in the south of England, pro-EU parties like the Liberal Democrats were likely to make significant gains, even while being unable to make headway elsewhere in the country.

The Lib-Dem victory is not a sign of an anti-Brexit resurgence. It is, first, a possible sign of the Lib-Dems becoming a regional party. More importantly, it shows how English partisan politics are being reconfigured by European politics.

This reconfiguration is likely to be expressed elsewhere in Europe. How it happens will depend on decisions that political elites make.

The eurozone’s discussions on the restructuring of Greece’s debt, earlier this week, zipped under most people’s radar. But the insistence by Germany and Holland that only short-term measures be taken was obviously guided by the coming 2017 general elections in each country.

The elites are obviously being conditioned by national populist sentiment. They cannot be accused of being unresponsive. But are they taking the right decisions – or will sparking off an electoral revolt in Greece, perhaps even a Grexit, actually lead to what they hope to avoid?

Bandying accusations of fascism will get you nowhere in analysing some of the key developments in Europe today. Fascism (or its threat) is always with us. So smelling it doesn’t tell you enough about the nature of today’s politics.

ranierfsadni@europe.com