If Keir Starmer’s Labour party wins power this year, it will be bucking a trend. In many European countries, it’s not the centre left but the right – and all too often the far right – that seems to be on a roll.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is leading in the polls. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ equally extreme Freedom party (PVV) scooped nearly a quarter of the vote at last November’s general election and has increased its support as coalition negotiations drag on.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the supposedly “post-fascist” Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), is already running the country. And, although Rishi Sunak’s new best friend is playing nice with foreign leaders, at home she’s attempting to make yet another change to the country’s electoral system. If she gets her way, not only will Italy get a directly elected prime minister but whichever party emerges as the largest at the next election (as Fratelli did in 2022 with just 26%) will win a majority of parliamentary seats irrespective of its vote share.
The situation in Germany is not much rosier. In 2021, the Social Democrats (SPD), led by the defiantly uncharismatic centrist, Olaf Scholz, won a narrow victory, enabling them to form a “traffic light” coalition with the Free Democrats and the Greens.
Sadly, things have gone downhill ever since. With the country mired in a so-called winter of discontent, the SPD is now polling at just 15%, down 10 points on its 2021 showing, putting it in third place behind not only the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU (on 32%) but also the worryingly extreme Alternative for Germany (AfD), which now has the support of over one in five Germans.
A “black-blue” (CDU/CSU and AfD) coalition after 2025’s general election remains unlikely but it can’t be ruled out. Indeed, talking up the possibility may actually be the SPD’s only hope of a last-gasp recovery.
After all, framing last year’s election in Spain as “a showdown between the forces of progress and the forces of reactionary conservatism” represented by a putative government of the centre-right Partido Popular and the far-right Vox saw the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Whether his subsequent decision to cling on to office via a controversial deal with Catalan separatists is such a wise move, however, remains to be seen.
Sánchez’s dramatic escape and Vox’s disappointing performance serve as a useful caveat to anyone overly inclined to see the far right triumphing and the centre left losing everywhere they look. So, too, at least for the moment, do Denmark and Norway. That said, it is impossible to deny that the 21st century has seen the far right thrive and the centre left descend into long-term decline throughout western Europe.
The reasons are myriad and complex, and they vary between countries. We do need, though, to avoid falling into the trap of assuming that, simply because populist radical right parties have increased their support at the same time as social democratic parties have lost theirs, the change is due to working-class voters moving en masse from one to the other.
Indeed, the latest research suggests that this is far from the case, with most of those flocking to the far right coming either from more mainstream rightwing parties or from the ranks of the serially disillusioned. Meanwhile, many of those fleeing the centre left are going either to the Greens and the radical left or (and this should never be underestimated) switching to the centre right rather than the far right.
In fact, the loss of traditional working-class voters experienced by Europe’s centre left is mainly due to the disappearance of many of the industrial, often heavily unionised, jobs that they used to do, and the concomitant rise in more diverse, fragmented and, frankly, more middle-class, service-sector employment.
Yet there’s an extent to which centre-left parties only have themselves to blame. And that includes Labour, even if, so far, it has got off relatively lightly compared with its continental counterparts – thanks mainly to first-past-the-post discouraging Britain’s progressive voters from supposedly “wasting” their vote on more radical alternatives.
By insisting for years that we should all embrace (or at least learn to live with) a more marketised, less welfarist economy, the centre left has sacrificed its ability to offer voters the safety net against insecurity that many, not unreasonably, still crave.
At the same time, with politics becoming an overwhelmingly graduate profession, centre-left politicians look and sound less and less like the people they claim to represent.
All this has played (and continues to play) into the hands of charismatic political entrepreneurs on the populist radical right who draw a rhetorically powerful distinction between an apparently out-of-touch establishment elite and “the people” they’ve arguably let down and ignored.
It’s a distinction that populist politicians have found particularly easy to dramatise, too, as their more mainstream counterparts, in their desperation to prove they are “listening to voters”, have consistently overpromised and underdelivered – most obviously on controlling immigration.
Those same mainstream politicians – on the centre left as well as the centre right – have also done the far right a favour by adopting many of its populist tropes and hardline policies. Rather than stealing their thunder, that strategy has served only to make them look to more and more voters like an increasingly viable and legitimate option.
Starmer, then, may be bucking the trend if he makes it into No 10. But, once he gets there, he also needs be careful. By overdoing the fiscal orthodoxy and the tough talk on migration, he could easily end up reinforcing Europe’s big shift to the right instead of becoming a beacon of hope for the continent’s battered progressives. Sometimes it’s good to be the odd one out.
• Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and co-editor with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser of Riding the Populist Wave
