Far-right parties could become the largest force on the right in Europe within a decade, experts have said, as mainstream conservative parties look to copy their hardline agendas, especially on immigration, in a vain effort to win back votes.
Germany’s conservatives last week sparked fury when their leader, Friedrich Merz, the country’s likely next chancellor, broke a longstanding pledge by relying on far-right votes to adopt a non-binding motion urging a drastic immigration crackdown. The leader of Alternative für Deutschland, Alice Weidel, hailed “a historic day for Germany” as the Bundestag, for the first time in its history, passed a vote with the backing of her party, which is second in the polls weeks before this month’s elections.
Amid a wave of protests, parliament later rejected a similar conservative-tabled draft law thanks partly to rebel members of Merz’s own centre-right CDU/CSU alliance, with his predecessor as party leader, Angela Merkel, calling his move “wrong”.
In France, controversial remarks by the centrist prime minister, François Bayrou, about French people feeling “submerged” by immigration were hailed by the far-right National Rally as evidence that it had “won the ideological battle”.
And talks in Austria between the mainstream Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) conservatives and the pro-Kremlin Freedom party (FPÖ), which wants to expel all asylum seekers, are progressing and look set to lead to the country’s first far-right-led government since the second world war.
For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating.
“We’re in a vicious cycle,” said Tarik Abou-Chadi, an associate professor of European politics at the University of Oxford. “It starts with the radical right being more successful, winning more seats, entering government in more countries.”
When that happens, “mainstream parties move right on immigration. It’s strategic, to win back votes. So you have this accommodation. Except it doesn’t work – it doesn’t bring the votes back. But two things do happen that reinforce the trend.”
So first, Abou-Chadi said, norms change. Accommodation normalises and legitimises far-right parties: voting for them is no longer a transgression. Second, opinion shifts: if mainstream parties say something is really important, people tend to believe it. “And then mainstream parties see that shift in public opinion and think: ‘We have to keep moving further to the right.’ And you end up broadening the coalition of people saying ‘we have to do something’ about immigration.”
However, political scientists say electoral and polling evidence from many countries strongly suggests that, for mainstream centre-right parties, the process of accommodation merely results in their being “cannibalised” by the far right.
Radical-right parties have already vanquished centre-right rivals in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ Freedom party leads the government, and Italy, where Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy dominates the rightist bloc that won in 2022.
In September’s elections in Austria, Herbert Kickl’s far-right FPÖ beat the conservative ÖVP to finish first, and in France, Marine Le Pen’s RN far outnumbers the mainstream Les Républicains and has grown into the largest single party in parliament.
Elsewhere, far-right parties are signed-up members of conservative-led coalitions in Finland and Croatia, lending parliamentary support to another in Sweden, and on track to win elections and lead a coalition later this year in the Czech Republic.
In the UK, several recent polls have shown Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform party has leapfrogged the Conservative party, which in recent years has veered sharply right on immigration, passing a controversial bill to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“Far-right parties advance in waves and we are certainly seeing an acceleration,” said Sarah de Lange, a professor of political pluralism at the University of Amsterdam. “In several countries they have become the biggest party, and in politics that matters.”
And it was a “mistaken assumption” for parties such as Germany’s CDU and the Netherlands’ People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) to think that “going tough” on immigration would win back votes. “The radical right clearly has more credibility here,” De Lange said. “And mainstream centre-right parties have been in office across Europe over the past few years. Voters simply ask why, if immigration was so important, they did nothing about it.”
Abou-Chadi said there was no question that far-right parties benefited electorally when mainstream parties collaborated with them. “We’ve seen it time and time again,” he said. “Even signalling a willingness to cooperate strengthens them.”
As long as there is a cordon sanitaire, he said, voters who are not just sympathetic to a far-right agenda but want to see it put into practice are less likely to vote for far-right parties, because they know there is little chance of them entering government.
Once that firewall crumbles, however, the floodgates are opened. Nathalie Tocci, the director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, a thinktank in Rome, contends that mainstream parties’ willingness to work with the extremes is “political suicide”. “When moderate parties rule out cooperation with the radical right citizens know … a vote for the far right is wasted,” she said. “But when they wink at the far right, that disincentive evaporates. And voters tend to prefer the original to the copy.”
Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years, Abou-Chadi predicted: “It’s already happened in some countries; in others it’s under way. We still talk about them as if they’re fringe. That has to change.”
De Lange agreed. “I think that’s very probable,” she said. “We’re seeing far-right parties scoring up to 30% now, mainstream parties’ share declining, and increasing fragmentation on the left. All that makes it look possible.”
