Europe: The Rise of the Fringe Parties Continue

TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images

Europe: The Rise of the Fringe Parties Continue

Even Germany is beginning to succumb to the upstarts.

The biggest political trend in Europe over the last few years has been the rise of fringe parties. Each month, the established parties in Europe sink further, giving rise to groups once considered beyond the pale, as well as new political parties. The trend is moving beyond the edges of Europe and those countries hit hardest by the euro crisis. The rise of fringe parties is reshaping politics in Scandinavia; even the heartland of the European Union—France and Germany—is feeling their presence.

A Newcomer in Germany

Germany’s newest party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) continued its dramatic rise on September 14. This time last year, in Germany’s federal elections, it fought its for first-ever election campaign. It started strong, but with 4.7 percent of the vote, it fell just short of the 5 percent threshold necessary to enter Germany’s parliament.

In May, it did much better, winning 7.1 percent of the vote in the European Parliament elections. Then, on August 31, the AfD won its first seats in the German regional parliament in Saxony, with just under 10 percent of the vote. This Sunday the party repeated that success, winning 10.6 percent of the vote in Thuringia and 12.2 in Brandenburg. The AfD has officially arrived on the German political scene.

Alternative for Germany’s rise shows that a large number of Germans reject the traditional political parties.
The AfD is further right than Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (cdu), but it’s not far right. It began as a movement fed up with Germany bailing out other European nations. It called for the end of the euro and return to the deutsche mark, and it opposed the EU centralizing power in Brussels. Recently it has broadened its stance to oppose immigration, take a harder line on crime, and call for a return to family values.

Its rise shows that a large number of Germans reject the traditional political parties. We saw the same trend with the sudden rise, and then fall, of the Pirate Party. A growing number of voters want a change from business as usual.

Germany’s Left Party is part of this trend too. It can hardly be considered an upstart—it descended from the ruling communist party in East Germany. But it is thought to be extreme by many in Germany. Cooperation with the party is considered taboo. Other left-wing parties will work with it in regional parliaments within what used to be East Germany, but those in former West Germany refuse to work with the Left.

In elections in Thuringia, an eastern state, the Left came in second with 28 percent of the vote. If the Social Democratic Party (spd) and the Green Party team up with the Left Party, they could lead the state. The Left has never been the senior partner in a German state before. Chancellor Merkel has called for the spd to refuse to allow this to happen. At the same time, her party (the cdu) has refused to work with the AfD. This means that in Thuringia, nearly 40 percent of voters chose a party that the mainstream considers too extreme to cooperate with—i.e., 40 percent rejected traditional German politics.

Sweden Swings Right

Sweden’s main left-wing party, the Social Democrats, won its national election on September 14, leading many in English-language media to hail “a swing to the left.” But a more detailed look reveals a different picture.

Look into Sweden’s “swing to the left,” and you will see that the Social Democrats won because of the collapse of its rivals, not necessarily because Sweden is swinging to the left.
The 2010 elections were a disaster for the Social Democrats: It received its worst result since 1914, with only 30.7 percent of the vote. This time it only improved by about half a percent. The party may have attained the largest share of the vote, but it was still its second-worst result in 100 years.

Its victory came because of the collapse of its rivals. The Moderate Party, Sweden’s largest center-right party, saw its share of the vote drop from 30.1 to 23.2 percent.

All of the country’s mainstream parties performed poorly at the polls; it’s just a case of who was worst.

The winners were the Sweden Democrats, a group that has played only a minor role in Swedish politics for years and has been condemned as racist by the mainstream parties. Last election, it won 5.8 percent of the vote, but this time it increased that to 13 percent.

Sweden has a Muslim immigration problem that the mainstream parties are reluctant to address, pushing many toward the Sweden Democrats.

Sweden now faces an increasingly common dilemma, one that plagued Europe in the 1930s. Together, the left-leaning parties have 43.7 percent of the vote. The right-leaning ones, not including the Sweden Democrats, have 39.3 percent. Neither side can form a government on its own.

One side could form an alliance with the Sweden Democrats, normalizing a group long portrayed as extremist, and invite it into government. This normalization could easily lead to the Sweden Democrats winning more votes.

The alternative is for groups on the left and right to come together and form a left-right coalition. But coalitions formed by parties that fundamentally disagree on almost everything are usually ineffective. Both sides would be forced to make compromises, making people even more fed up with the traditional political parties, and the Sweden Democrats would end up gaining more votes.

So it’s lose-lose for the mainstream groups.

History Rhymes

Recent news from the rest of Europe shows this trend intensifying in other countries. On July 31, a poll in France found that Marine Le Pen’s party, the far-left National Front, would win more votes than any mainstream party if a presidential election were held today.

Together, the left-leaning parties have 43.7 percent of the vote. The right-leaning ones, not including the Sweden Democrats, have 39.3 percent.
French presidential and mayoral elections are divided in two parts. If neither candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the two candidates go head-to-head in a second round.

Traditionally, if a National Front candidate makes it to the second round, both left and right parties unite to oppose him. But that tradition is breaking down. A second poll, published September 5, found that Le Pen would win a second-round election against President François Hollande. This is the first time any poll has predicted a victory for the National Front in the second round of a presidential election.

Meanwhile, in Spain, a new left-wing party, Podemos, continues to rise. Founded on January 16 of this year, the group won 7.9 percent of the vote in the European elections in May—after existing only four months. A poll published a few weeks ago found that 21.2 percent of voters would vote for it in general elections, making it Spain’s third-most popular party behind the conservative Popular Party (30 percent) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (22.3 percent).

Perhaps it seems unfair to lump all these different groups across Europe together: The AfD in Germany, led by an economics professor, has almost nothing in common with the neo-Nazi thugs of Greece’s Golden Dawn nor with the socialist Podemos. The only common factor is that they are all fringe parties. A vote for each one of these parties shows, in some way, that the electorate is fed up with the established groups.

Europe saw this same process play out in the 1930s. In the ’30s, the extremist groups took power.

It won’t necessarily play out the same way today, but the same instability is there. So is that same desire for a new way of doing things, a new type of politics with new leaders. Europe has been a relatively stable and prosperous place for the past 70-odd years. But that prosperity stopped growing in 2008, and more and more voters think Europe needs a new way forward.

Watch for this dissatisfaction to bring about a political transformation across Europe.

For more on the parallels with the 1930s, read our article “Déjà Vu.”