Europe is not that left leaning. While it has common agreement on certain topics that in the US are still a big left-right debate on other Europe is way more radical than US. For example hating a certain minority (eg. gypsies) is pretty much mainstream in Europe and has little blowback. There's far right parties with quite a strong base in pretty much every European country.
> There's far right parties with quite a strong base in pretty much every European country
This is more a function of more proportional representation systems than anything else. Both the US and UK have first past the post, and in both of those countries both the more extreme left and right politicians are part of the major parties, whereas this happens less in more PR based systems.
