Is Europe’s Populist Right Surging Because Its Leaders Are Ignoring Voters About Immigration?
A new study offers an intuitive explanation for why right-wing populists are gaining ground in Europe.
State elections in Germany earlier this month brought with them a shocking result. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right nationalist party, achieved the best vote totals for any far-right party in the country since World War II.
The party won more votes than any other in the east German state of Thuringia while coming in at a close second in Saxony, another state in the eastern half of the country.
Because of Germany’s proportional electoral system, a party winning a plurality of votes — meaning they get the most votes but not a majority — doesn’t guarantee running the government. The other major parties in Germany loathe the AfD, meaning that it won’t be able to take control of these states. But their surge in support suggests that they are doing something to overcome the country’s postwar taboo against far-right political organizations.
An analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue offers a window into the digital messaging used by the AfD in the run-up to the election. It shows that while the AfD communicated to voters about a range of topics, the one they capitalized most on was immigration. The term “remigration” showed up over and over again, referring to the removal of some residents who came to the country from abroad as well as some Germans who have parents from other countries.
Another analysis by a local academic suggested that areas that have seen dwindling population and have more voters without college degrees were associated with AfD votes (economic factors they tested didn’t appear to have a big relationship).
All of this adds up to the country’s far-right party gaining greater mainstream support and acceptance by capitalizing on fears about immigration and demographic change.
A new study suggests that a similar effect may be at work all over the European Union — and that social-cultural issues, namely immigration, are driving the power of the far-right.
Filling a “Representation Gap”
Germany is hardly the only place in Europe where populist right-wing parties have gained ground in recent years. France’s National Rally is rapidly becoming a mainstream party within the country and in Europe’s parliament, even if a coalition of the center and left prevented them from taking over France’s legislature. In Italy, the hard-right Brothers of Italy now controls the country, having elevated Giorgia Meloni to the Prime Minister’s position.
While hard right parties don’t run most European countries, they have gained an air of respectability they once lacked. Most of them are no longer on the fringe.
German political scientist Laurenz Guenther was interested in understanding what was behind the rise in right-wing populism across the continent. He noticed that despite immigration surging as a relevant issue across Europe, the established parties weren’t really saying the same things as people he would talk to.
“I would say the area where I would come from and [my] friends or family…they’re relatively representative. They are not super left or right-wing. And all of them were in favor of much less immigration,” he noted.
So he collected a broad sample of data drawn from comparative surveys given to both parliamentarians and the general public. He used that data to see where the public and politicians agreed and where they disagreed.
What he found was that on issues like economic policy, how they felt about membership in the European Union, or abortion, voters and the people in power were fairly close in worldview. Where he found a divergence was over how voters felt about assimilation, immigration, and criminal sentences. On all three cultural issues, voters tended to be significantly more right-wing than parliamentarians. You can use the chart below to compare — the purple line is where voters stand while the blue line is where Members of Parliament (MPs) are.
“There are all these cultural issues, and they are all correlated with each other,” he explained, saying that people who are more right-wing on immigration tend to be more right-wing on the other issues as well.
Guenther calls this disagreement between voters and MPs a “representation gap.” It exists almost everywhere in Europe, although he found exceptions like Poland.
In another graph, he mapped out where different mainstream parties sit relative to their country’s voters.
The graph shows that most mainstream parties are considerably more cultural liberal than voters in their country are.
But if you graph the populist parties, as he does later, you can see that right-wing populist parties like Meloni’s Brothers of Italy sit pretty close to the center of where the country’s voters are on cultural issues.
“These are…the only ones who are filling the gap,” Geunther explained.
Preventing a Far-Right Victory by Listening to Voters
Geunther suggested two paths for avoiding the rise of parties like the AfD in Germany. First, immigration could become a less salient issue in politics. The rise of these populist parties seems mostly due to immigration and related issues.
But the other path is for mainstream parties to change course.
“If the mainstream parties would have closed this [representation] gap then there would maybe not be any political space for the AfD to exploit,” he told me.
Indeed, some leftists in the German political spectrum are trying something new.
Earlier this year, former Left Party politician Sahra Wagenknecht built a new party from the ground up (something Germany’s proportional electoral system allows you to do easily because even achieving a small share of the vote guarantees you seats).
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice, known as the BSW, has positioned itself as a party of the economic left that is also culturally conservative on issues like immigration. Unlike the AfD, BSW does not endorse right-wing views on economics that could alienate voters in Germany, and it is very anti-war. But it also seeks to suck the oxygen out of the right by advocating for a more restrictive stance on immigration.
This sort of “left conservatism” has found some luck beating back the far-right — they came in third in the aforementioned state elections in Saxony and Thuringia. This allows them to play kingmakers in Germany’s proportional electoral system.
It’s possible that immigration may simply lose some of its political steam in Europe, particularly in countries like the UK where the nativists were seen as egging on mob violence and racism. But where the far-right continues to rise, fulfilling the promise of democracy and simply listening to the voters may move policy more towards the middle while also preventing a victory by the most extreme parties.
If the idea of having a nation state with borders and citizens having input on immigration levels is considered "far-right", you already have a problem. The idea that this would not be the case would have been considered insane across the West thirty years ago.
Why do you say Sahra Wagenknecht "seeks to suck the oxygen out of the right by advocating for a more restrictive stance on immigration". Maybe she just thinks the costs of the current level/type of immigration outweigh the benefits. And it's not a simple political strategy to win downscale voters.