The Far Right Is Winning Europe’s Immigration Debate

foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/01/the-far-right-is-winning-europes-immigration-debate

Anchal Vohra

Analysis

Mainstream parties are adopting increasingly radical positions—at

their own expense.

Vohra-
Anchal-
foreign-
policy-
columnist18
Anchal
Vohra

By Anchal Vohra, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

Demonstrators wave German flags with the writing WE ARE THE PEOPLE as
people protest against the rising cost of living in a demonstration organized by
the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party on October 8, 2022
in Berlin, Germany.
Demonstrators wave German flags with the writing WE ARE THE PEOPLE as
people protest against the rising cost of living in a demonstration organized by
the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party on October 8, 2022
in Berlin, Germany. Omer Messinger/Getty Images

November 1, 2023, 5:02 PM

Mainstream parties across Europe are shifting their positions on
immigration in hopes of impeding the rise of the far right. But there’s
growing reason to think that the effort may be self-defeating,
strengthening the radical right at their own expense.
Earlier this month, the far-right German party Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) made strong gains in elections in Hesse and
Bavaria—expanding its footprint from its stronghold in the former east.
It came second in Hesse and third in Bavaria as all three parties of the
ruling coalition took a beating.

Ricarda Lang, a co-leader of the Green Party, which is a coalition

partner in the German national government, said AfD’s surge must
“worry every democrat in this country.” She argued that instead of
“finger-pointing,” the coalition must ponder over “what we can do” to
have a favorable electoral outcome in the future. One way to perform
better at the ballot, the Green Party seems to have concluded, is to be
stricter on immigration.

Days before the state elections, Lang called on the government to

make quick progress on “repatriation agreements” with third countries,
accused her allies in the coalition of not doing enough to deport
migrants who may not qualify for asylum—for instance, those who
didn’t escape war zones—and said that the government must come up
with a plan “to avoid more and more people arriving.”

Members of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP)—also a coalition

partner in Berlin—weren’t far behind and vowed to cut social payments
for asylum-seekers, block any attempts to relocate refugees from the
island of Lampedusa in Italy to Germany, and said that Morocco,
Tunisia, and Algeria must be declared safe countries for returns.

And yet, despite these statements, neither the Greens nor the FDP
performed better in elections a fortnight later. The FDP was nearly
decimated—gathering just 3 percent of the vote in Bavaria and 5
percent in Hesse.
The conservatives of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its
Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), however, seem
to have benefited. They emerged as clear winners, with the former
winning nearly 35 percent in Hesse and the latter netting 37 percent of
the vote in Bavaria.

A broader examination of parties across Europe supports this trend.

According to a study of 12 Western European nations that was
published last year by Cambridge University Press, there is “no support
for the claim that accommodating radical right positions [on
immigration] weakens the radical right electorally.”

On the contrary, the electorate often credits the far right for these
positions and likely defects to it instead. “By legitimising a framing that
is associated with the radical right, mainstream politicians can end up
contributing to its success,” the researchers of the study wrote in an
article for the Guardian.

There is, however, earlier research, done between 2015 and 2018, that
claims an advantage for center-right parties when they tweak their
stance on immigration to sound more like the far right—primarily due to
these positions sharing ideological similarities with center-right parties’
existing narratives. But there is no disagreement that over the long
term, the shift in stance strengthens the radical right.

The CDU has the most to lose in Germany, since conservative voters
are more susceptible to anti-immigration politics of the far right. Some
of its leaders have become more vocal against asylum-seekers in
recent years. In 2020, at a beer hall in Thuringia in the former East
Germany, CDU leader Friedrich Merz said that Syrians can’t be
accepted in the country—in stark comparison to the welcoming and
reassuring words of his predecessor Angela Merkel, who famously
opened doors to refugees in 2015 and said, “Wir Schaffen Das,” or “we
can do this.”

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A man walks
past a torn AfD
banner.

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Macron
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Vladimir Putin

BYD electric
cars wait to be
loaded on a ship
at an export
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Suzhou, China,
on Sept. 11.

This year, Merz went a step further: He seemed to come closer to

endorsing collaboration with the far right, alluding to an alliance with
the party, albeit at a local level. “We are, of course, obliged to accept
democratic elections,” he said. “If a district administrator, a mayor is
elected there who belongs to the AfD, it’s natural that you look for ways
to then continue to work in this city.”

Experts said that such accommodation of the AfD illustrates how the
cordon sanitaire—the informal agreement between the traditional
parties to keep the radical right out of power and executive decision-
making—is crumbling.
There are several reasons behind the spike in AfD’s popularity—
primarily, dissatisfaction with the performance of mainstream parties on
everything from rising energy costs to climate change policies. But the
biggest factor driving German voters into the arms of the far right is the
influx of asylum-seekers. More than 200,000 people applied for asylum
in Germany between January and August—a 77 percent increase from
the same period last year.

Jakub Wondreys, a political scientist at the Hannah Arendt Institute for

Totalitarianism Studies in Dresden, said that there is a general feeling
among people that their concerns on immigration have been ignored by
the established parties.

“Mainstream [parties] acted like the issue didn’t exist—they didn’t want
to tackle it. That irritated people,” he said during a phone interview with
Foreign Policy. “Since the far right has been talking about it for a long
time, it makes people think that they have some sort of expertise on
it.” Wondreys added: “Instead of adopting the rhetoric of the radical
right, the mainstream parties should communicate better. Share some
stories, and evidence, of how we might benefit from the presence of
asylum-seekers.”

The idea that copying or accommodating the far right’s vision on

immigration can halt its rise picked up pace in Europe in 2019,
when the center-left Social Democrats in Denmark borrowed the hard-
line anti-immigrant agenda of the far-right Danish People’s Party and
defeated it.

The Social Democrats of Denmark introduced some of the harshest

recent policies in Europe, including a deal with Rwanda to deport
“spontaneous asylum-seekers” for protection and “the option of settling
in Rwanda.” Soon enough, the Conservative Party in the United
Kingdom offered a similar policy as a panacea to the country’s
immigration woes and passed a law that called for all asylum-seekers
who arrive through irregular means to be deported to so-called safe
third countries, such as Rwanda.

“They [European governments] look at Denmark, where Social

Democrats successfully minimized the far right,” said Wolfgang Muno,
a political scientist at the University of Rostock. “But we know from
studies that if you try to take over far-right positions, it is the far-right
who profits.”

On a recent trip to several cities in former Eastern Germany, many

people told me that by following the AfD on immigration, the
mainstream parties were conceding they were wrong all along.

Instead of getting mired in a domestic debate—which also runs the risk

of running afoul of human rights organizations—traditional parties have
seen a way out of the quagmire through Brussels. This strategy could
allow them to come up with a coherent and united policy, creating an
effective narrative to bring the far right to a halt.

According to a recent survey conducted by Deutschlandtrend, more

than 70 percent Germans were unhappy with the distribution of
refugees, while nearly 80 percent felt that asylum-seekers were not
sufficiently integrated and two-thirds favored limiting their numbers.

A new migration pact being discussed in Belgium will reshape how to

process applications and distribute asylum-seekers across the union.
Those unwilling to host asylum-seekers, such as some Eastern
European nations, will have the option to pay 20,000 euros for each
asylum-seeker they refuse to accept. The money will go into a common
EU fund to deal with the root causes of migration.
But these so-called asylum reforms have already been labeled as
dangerous by human rights activists, since the criteria to be accepted
as an asylum-seeker has been made stricter and would lead to “more
detentions, fewer safeguards.” According to Amnesty International, the
purported asylum reform under discussion “risks leaving people
stranded, detained or destitute along Europe’s borders.”

The new reform package is already controversial, yet few doubt that a
united response by parties stretching from the center right to center left
across Europe is required to stem the progress made by the far right.

Wondreys, the researcher with the Hannah Arendt Institute, said it has
become “politically unfeasible to be pro-immigrant” in Europe. And yet,
traditional parties must tread cautiously as they copy the far right.
There is a risk they might become unidentifiable.

“Danish Social Democrats,” Wonderys said, “became a completely

different party.”
Anchal Vohra is a Brussels-based columnist at Foreign Policy who
writes about Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. She has
covered the Middle East for the Times of London and has been a TV
correspondent for Al Jazeera English and Deutsche Welle. She was
previously based in Beirut and Delhi and has reported on conflict and
politics from over two dozen countries.
Twitter: @anchalvohra
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