German Chancellor Friedrich Merz holds a news conference in Berlin. If mainstream leaders want to stem the tide of extremist parties, the answer is not to bend themselves toward the chimeral imaginings of voters, Doug Saunders writes.Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Your political party used to attract the votes of half the population. Now it’s been driven into the single-digit margins by a protest party so extreme and hateful you are forbidden to work with it. Have you done something wrong?
This week, it was the turn of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to ask that question, after the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a racial-intolerance party considered by courts to be ideologically similar to Nazis, on Sunday won the largest share of votes in an eastern German state for the third time in two years. His venerable big-tent conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union, was driven below the 5 per cent threshold needed to have any seats in the state’s legislature.
“We are experiencing a dramatic shift of the party-political system in Germany, as are many other countries,” Mr. Merz explained this week. He asked whether his party had ceased to offer the answers people wanted: “We no longer reach considerable parts of the population.”
The same question is being asked today by Conservative and Labour Party politicians in Britain and by the major parties of moderate left and right in France, all of them facing potential electoral annihilation by extremists.
But what actually is the question? The simplest and most obvious version of it is: “How did we fail to satisfy these voters?” Under what is sometimes called the “demand-side” view, the voters are rational actors who are simply expressing their values. The mainstream parties have ignored these issues, or abandoned them to serve the interests of more elite constituencies, causing a bloc of their voters to defect to crude but effective parties that speak their language.
In eastern Germany, the headline-grabbing issue is immigration. Under the demand-side view, the CDU could win these voters back simply by putting controls on immigration.
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There are several immediate problems. One is that there really is almost no immigration, or diversity, in the states that vote heavily for the AfD. You can spend days in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania or Thuringia without encountering an immigrant or AfD-targeted minority – Jews and Muslims together make up less than 2 per cent of the population. Another problem is that Mr. Merz is an anti-immigration chancellor with conservative views on diversity who has restricted immigration and sealed borders. He is hardly failing to address those voter “grievances.”
A larger problem for mainstream parties of left or right hoping to win back power by addressing those grievances, and not just in Germany, is that these grievances didn’t exist in voters’ minds until the extremists put them there.
The most consequential example was the 2024 U.S. election. Polls showed that there were two issues that pushed Donald Trump to victory: the out-of-control inflation and unemployment, and the violent swarm of immigrants and refugees characterized by the Haitians eating people’s pets.
Of course, neither existed outside of Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The post-pandemic inflation had long since been reversed by fast-rising incomes, low unemployment and record-high living standards. The pet-eating Haitians were a fiction, and irregular immigration hadn’t been a problem for a year. Those “issues” had not existed in the minds of voters until Mr. Trump put them there.
This week, the economist Luis Guirola analyzed the AfD landslide and concluded that a stricter CDU immigration policy would do nothing to reduce it. As he writes, votes are being scooped up by “political entrepreneurs” who notice that “a group of voters is generically unhappy with mainstream parties (they have lost trust in traditional elites) for complex pre-existing reasons.” Immigration isn’t an issue in these voters’ lives – it’s just a reason provided by the far-right party to vote for them.
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The overwhelming body of evidence points to this “supply-side” interpretation. The most comprehensive empirical study of the problem was conducted by the U.S. political scientist Larry Bartels, who studied the shifting views of more than 350,000 voters in 23 countries over 17 years – a period that included the 2008 economic crisis and the 2015-16 migration crisis.
Voters in most European countries didn’t experience any decline in trust in institutions, enthusiasm for the EU or desire for democracy. Anti-immigrant sentiment actually declined measurably. Both German and U.S. voters have grown more tolerant and favourable toward immigration and diversity during the period when intolerant candidates have triumphed.
Dr. Bartels has a name for this phenomenon, the title of his book chronicling it: Democracy Erodes from the Top. If mainstream political leaders want to stem the tide of extremist parties, the answer is not to bend themselves toward the chimeral imaginings of their voters. It’s to aim squarely at the people at the top of those parties, and the hateful lies that give them a grip on power.