If mainstream parties don’t listen to voters, extremists will be rewarded at the ballot box.
By Sheri Berman
October 2024
This essay is part of a package on the elections that mattered most in 2024.
Across Europe, the rise of right-wing populists seemed at first to be what was most significant about the EU elections. But first appearances can deceive. In fact, beyond shifting some policy priorities, the EU elections will not on their own change much. But their significance is deeper than the tally of votes and instead lies in their lesson for little-d democrats: When mainstream parties fail to take citizens’ concerns seriously, the appeal of antiestablishment and even extremist parties will grow, and democracy may become endangered.
Right-wing populists, of course, run on anti-immigration platforms, leading many mainstream politicians and commentators to assume that votes for these parties are motivated by racism and xenophobia. In fact, there is little evidence for this: Racism and xenophobia in Europe have declined over the decades. Moreover, there is little correlation between levels of racism and xenophobia in a country and support for right-wing populist parties — they perform well in some countries where racism and xenophobia are not prevalent, such as Sweden, and poorly in others where such attitudes are prevalent, like Ireland and Portugal.
Although racists and xenophobes certainly exist, most citizens who support limiting immigration are motivated by other concerns: high illegal immigration, failure to repatriate asylum seekers whose applications have been denied, growing crime and terrorism, and strained government resources. Such concerns have been growing, but mainstream parties failed to address them. Indeed, until fairly recently many were moving in the opposite direction from voters, with the average lawmaker — whether on the left, right, or center — becoming more liberal than the average voter on cultural matters, especially immigration.
This reflects a more general trend: Views on cultural issues, including immigration, became more liberal in general between 1990 and 2006. After 2006, however, the views of highly educated citizens continued to grow more liberal, while those of less-educated citizens did not. The result was a significant divide on immigration between the educated and less educated and between mainstream parties and voters.
What is to be done? Scholars and commentators tend to warn parties and politicians to avoid appeasing or “copying” the far right. If that means mainstream parties should not advocate racist or xenophobic policies, then such admonitions are well-taken, if trivial. But rarely offered are suggestions for addressing voters’ nonracist, nonxenophobic concerns. Yet it was precisely this failure to distinguish between racism and xenophobia and legitimate concerns about immigration that got establishment parties into trouble in the first place. When mainstream parties ignore voters’ concerns, opportunities emerge for antiestablishment, even extremist parties, to exploit, potentially endangering democracy. Democrats cannot afford to make “own goals.”
Sheri Berman is professor of political science at Barnard College. Her works include Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (2019) and The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (2006).
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images
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FURTHER READING |
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Democracy and Diversity in Western Europe |
The 2024 EU Elections: The Far Right at the PollsThe far right celebrated big wins in the 2024 European Union elections, but it has struggled to translate that success into political power. Victory at the ballot box has not made its ideological and organizational divisions any easier to solve. |
Liberal Democracy in an Age of Immigration |