The Far Right Is Winning Europe’s Immigration Debate

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.”

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.”