With National Rally having stormed to victory in the first round of France’s legislative election, commentators are once again asking: why do ‘far Right’ parties keep winning votes in Europe? (I put ‘far Right’ in quotation marks, as I realise the designation is contested.)
Left-wing academics view the ‘far Right’ the same way early European explorers viewed the native people they encountered – as primitive, dangerous and in need of ‘civilising’. They have come up with all manner of convoluted and implausible answers to the question above. It must be austerity. Or income inequality. Or ‘disinformation’.
Notice how ideologically convenient these answers are: they’re essentially the Left’s favourite hobby horses. Leftists already want action on austerity, income inequality and disinformation, so they just kind of assume those things are behind the rise of the ‘far Right’. Why is the ‘far Right’ on the rise, you ask? Turns out it’s because we haven’t been doing everything the Left wanted to do anyway.
The preceding answers don’t make much sense either. Why would people concerned about austerity and income inequality vote for the ‘far Right’ when they could just vote for the Left, which is much more focused on those issues? And why would people be more susceptible to ‘disinformation’ than to the supposedly correct information that’s constantly broadcast through all mainstream media?
The real reason the ‘far Right’ is on the rise is very simple: immigration – particularly Muslim immigration. Of course, Left-wing commentators refuse to believe this because it would mean their own preferred policies are the root cause of something they claim is an existential threat to democracy.
The fact that immigration – and not austerity, income inequality or ‘disinformation’ – is behind the rise of the ‘far Right’ can be seen very clearly in the case of Denmark.
Like most of Western Europe, the small Scandinavian country had seen large-scale immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, which prompted the formation of several ‘far Right’ parties. At the 2015 election, one such party (the Danish People’s Party) came second with 21% of the vote. At the next election in 2019, the Social Democrats (the country’s main Left-wing party) ran on a platform of immigration restrictionism and support for the welfare state. It won the most votes and was able to form a government with the other Left-wing parties. At the most recent election in 2022, the two ‘far Right’ parties got only 6% of the vote.
This example shows that the ‘far Right’ ceases to be an important political force when centrist parties adopt immigration restrictionism.
All those parties have to do is not pursue a policy that radically changes the country’s demographic composition and makes housing increasingly unaffordable. But they can’t help themselves: for some inexplicable reason, they just have to keep letting people in.
If the Left really wanted to neutralise the ‘far Right’, they would pursue the same strategy as the Danish Social Democrats. Since they choose not to, it’s hard to take their hand-wringing over ‘threats to democracy’ seriously.
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