Primed to celebrate victory but left explaining why his party finished third, the leader of France’s hard-right National Rally blamed Sunday’s surprise election result on the “caricature” of his party as extremist. That “disinformation,” he said, handed victory to “formations of the extreme left.”

The speech to glum supporters on election night by Jordan Bardella, leader of the nationalist party formerly known as the National Front, captured a Europe-wide trend: intense political polarization in which each side denounces the other as “extremist.”

Europe is far from what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm termed the “age of extremes” in the 20th century, when the continent succumbed to the twin extremist ideologies of fascism and communism. There are no violent street battles in Berlin, Paris or Vienna as there were before and sometimes after World War II between rival camps, or urban terror campaigns like those in the 1970s and ’80s by the would-be left-wing revolutionaries of Germany’s Red Army Faction and France’s Direct Action.

Instead, today’s battles are mostly confined to hurling insults across a widening and increasingly poisonous political divide, though an assassination attempt in May against the prime minister of Slovakia showed that the ghosts of past violence were still lurking.

“Don’t underestimate style. It often gives the true message. Substance in democracy is in the style — in the unwritten rules of behavior,” said Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher who describes himself as a “moderately conservative communist.”