The slump in support for the nationalist Freedom party (FPÖ) in Austria’s elections on Sunday is the latest indication that if the tide has not turned against Europe’s far-right populists, it does seem – for the time being, at least – to have stopped rising.

Sebastian Kurz’s conservative People’s party (ÖVP) won 37.1% of the vote, its best score since 2002, while the share held by FPÖ, until May his junior coalition partner in government, collapsed to 16.1%, down a full 10 percentage points.

Voters deserted the FPÖ after its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, was filmed offering lucrative public contracts in exchange for campaign support to a woman claiming to be the niece of a Russian oligarch. But the result fits into a wider continental pattern of far-right, nationalist and populist parties facing increasingly stiff political or institutional resistance and failing to capitalise on their advances in the polls to the extent that many observers had predicted.

Austrian elections: support for far-right collapses Read more

While the social and economic discontent and the dissatisfaction with Europe’s mainstream parties that fuelled their recent surge have far from vanished, the populists seem no more able than anyone else in Europe’s fragmenting political landscape to secure clear majorities for their cause.

In Italy, the former interior minister Matteo Salvini, of the far-right League party, is out in the cold after collapsing the government in the mistaken belief that his soaring poll ratings meant the country wanted a hard turn to the right.

Instead his coalition partners, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, formed a government with the centre-left Democratic party, and while Salvini will doubtless be back, for the moment the nationalists are nursing a self-inflicted bloody nose.

In elections in two crucial German regions this month, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party made big gains and posted record scores, but it did not win in either and was shut out of power in both.

In France, Emmanuel Macron seemed under serious threat earlier this year, shaken by the violent Saturday demonstrations of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement and the advance of the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen. But the centrist president is now ahead in the polls, his approval rating at its highest since July 2018. With Le Pen failing to land a knockout blow in May’s European elections – she won by a whisker, and with a smaller share of the vote than in 2014 – and the French economy faring better than many, Macron will be quietly optimistic.

In Spain, the far-right Vox party has managed to lose ground in the polls despite the failure of the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to form a government; and support for Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the Netherlands has plummeted following infighting and divisions.

Far-right and illiberal populism continues to prosper in Poland and Hungary. But elsewhere in central Europe, the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, is facing some of the biggest protests since the fall of communism, and the new president of Slovakia is a progressive liberal.

The underlying causes of far-right populism – rising inequality, austerity, fear of immigration, globalisation, automation – remain, and the parties they sustain are fixtures in Europe’s political landscape. In several countries, far-right policies, particularly on immigration, have been adopted and normalised by both the centre right and centre left.

But as the Austrian results confirm, the nationalists are not having things all their own way.