Flirting with the far right

Welcome back. You might say that Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat leader tipped to become Germany’s next chancellor, is making history for the wrong reasons.

In what looked like an attempt to throw his liberal opponents off balance in the campaign for Germany’s February 23 elections, he introduced a parliamentary motion on migration policy that passed with far-right support – the first time such a Bundestag majority had emerged since the Federal Republic’s creation in 1949.

Are Europe’s centre-right parties abandoning the decades-old “firewall” intended to underline that they abhor co-operation with rightwing extremists? Can working with the far right benefit the mainstream conservatives, or will it simply boost the respectability and electoral appeal of the far right?

You can pose questions on Europe’s biggest challenges to the FT’s correspondents who will gather for a free webinar on February 27 to unpack the results of the German elections. Reserve a spot here. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com. 

The firewall erodes

The answer to the question about the “firewall” is – yes, it’s crumbling, but it hasn’t completely disappeared. Across Europe, at national, regional and local level, there are now many examples of co-operation between mainstream conservatives and the far right.

In some cases, such as the Netherlands and (soon, it seems) Austria, it takes the shape of formal coalition agreements. In others, such as Sweden, the far right offers parliamentary support to a right-leaning government, but holds no ministries of its own.

The dividing line, or cordon sanitaire, between the centre right and hard right is also being eroded in the European parliament elected last year, as explained here by Sophia Russack.

Alongside these patterns, more than a few countries display a trend in which conservative parties borrow the political style, rhetoric and to some extent the policies of the far right – especially on migration – in a bid to blunt its support.

This is visible in France and the UK and, I would argue, is essentially what Merz was up to in Germany – although his gambit proved to be highly controversial in his own party.

Merz’s initiative certainly carried risks, as suggested in this column for the Guardian by Jörg Lau, a writer for the German weekly Die Zeit. He outlined a post-election political landscape in which Merz’s CDU doesn’t succeed in forming a coalition government with the Social Democrats and/or the Greens – generally considered the most likely way to keep the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) out of power.

Lau foresees a possible Swedish scenario:

… if coalition talks between the mainstream parties fail, Germany may be heading for a conservative minority government informally held up by the far right. This would be destabilising not just for Germany, but for the whole continent.

‘Revolutionary conservatism’

The increasing co-operation, and shared outlook on specific issues, of centre-right and far-right forces raises an important question, discussed last year in the Times of London by William Hague. The former UK Conservative party leader wrote:

Attempts to distinguish between “centre right” and “far right” do not really capture [a] major eruption in the nature of conservatism. Some parties and leaders who think of themselves as conservatives have effectively become revolutionaries …

Hague mostly had in mind his own party’s bruising experience under Liz Truss, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, and the US Republicans under Donald Trump.

In the UK, time will tell whether the Conservatives will veer further to the right. It’s turning into a big issue for the party after an opinion poll this week put the rightwing populist Reform UK party in a nationwide lead – a narrow one, for sure, and within the margin of error – for the first time.

Hague touched on one point that resonates across the mainstream and hard-right side of the political spectrum across Europe: a mockery, mistrust and impatience with venerable institutions of liberal democracy, such as a professional civil service and an independent judiciary. He wrote:

If conservatives set out to destroy respect for courts, senior officials and government agencies, they open the way for their political opponents to do the same …

Our problems do not result from a secret deep state but from a very public lack of the investment and skills needed to compete. The solutions to those problems are painstaking and complex, not immediate or simple.

Wolves and the European right

In what areas are the mainstream and far right beginning to find common cause? Migration and asylum policies, national identity and climate change come to mind.

But a particularly interesting example concerns Europe’s wolves.

Wolves, once a threatened species in Europe, have made something of a comeback over the past decade. Thanks to wildlife protection measures, championed as a green cause at European level, there are more than 20,000 wolves in the 27-nation EU, up 81 per cent since 2012.

For far-right parties such as the AfD, however, the reappearance of wolves is intolerable – and exactly the kind of issue useful to attract support from rural and small-town voters.

In a concession to this point of view, the European Commission proposed reducing the wolf’s status from “strictly protected” to “protected”. Ursula von der Leyen, the centre-right commission president, said:

“We need a balanced approach between the preservation of wildlife and the protection of our livelihoods.”

Mimicking the far right

Do mainstream conservatives gain anything from flirting with the far right, borrowing their ideas and mimicking their behaviour?

Frans Timmermans, a Dutch moderate leftist and former European commissioner, said this week:

“If the centre right starts imitating the radical right, the radical right wins, and the centre right loses.”

What do politicians and strategists on the moderate right think? A good insight comes from this analysis by Wojciech Gagatek for the Wilfred Martens Centre for European Studies, which is the official think-tank of the centre-right, pan-EU European People’s party.

Gagatek writes:

By implementing a cordon sanitaire and refusing to co-operate with the radical right as a matter of principle, mainstream parties can keep [them] out of the government in the short term.

However, to achieve this, they typically have to build a broad and diverse governing coalition that may lack internal unity.

Gagatek suggests that the moderate right should “acknowledge the shifting political climate in Europe, preparing responses to the concerns stirred up by the far right”.

Lessons from Austria

Bringing the far right into government does not necessarily work out well. In this article for Social Europe, Cas Mudde and Gabriela Greilinger recall what happened in Austria when Sebastian Kurz was leader of the conservative Austrian People’s party.

Kurz formed a government in 2017 with the far-right Freedom party, hoping to keep them in a subordinate role and retain for his own party the dominant position on Austria’s right.

That coalition fell apart after the Freedom party was engulfed in scandal. In Austria’s 2019 election, Kurz’s party won a convincing victory and the Freedom party’s vote collapsed. It seemed as if Kurz was vindicated.

Now, however, the tables are turned. The Freedom party won last year’s Austrian elections and, for the first time, it is set to form a coalition government as the senior partner.

Mudde and Greilinger contend:

Mainstream parties often co-opt far-right frames and positions, suggesting this is necessary to “win voters back” or “defeat the far right” . . . academic research is very clear on this: it does not work. In fact, when immigration is the key issue of an election, and the dominant frame is a far-right one (i.e. immigration as a threat), far-right parties do well.”

More bark than bite?

We should be careful not to draw sweeping conclusions from Austria’s experience. In countries with long traditions of multiparty ruling coalitions, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, giving the hard right a share of power seems less of a risk.

Belgium is entering a new political era after agreement was reached to form a coalition led by Bart De Wever of the New Flemish Alliance, a party that advocates more self-government for Flanders as well as promoting rightwing themes.

But De Wever is cut from different cloth from, say, Herbert Kickl of Austria’s Freedom party, a distinctly more radical politician.

A couple of years ago, De Wever published a pamphlet entitled “On Woke” – but on close inspection, this turns out to be no straightforward far-right rant against trendy progressive ideologies.

For example, he said “the speech of minority groups is often perfectly legitimate”, and he even offered qualified praise for the #MeToo movement.

In conclusion, national differences in Europe matter. Co-operation with rightwing populists may seem relatively safe in Belgium, but much less so in Germany. Later this month, German voters will deliver their verdict on Merz’s tactics.

More on this topic

Growing transatlantic illiberal ties risk undermining European unity – a commentary by Armida van Rij, senior research fellow at London-based Chatham House

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