After the Dutch parliamentary elections of March 2017, the prime minister, Mark Rutte, triumphantly declared that “good populism” had defeated “bad populism”, a claim eagerly and uncritically repeated in media around the world. It confirmed received wisdom that the best way to defeat the populist radical right, is to co-opt a moderate version of their agenda, while excluding the party itself.

Few cared that Rutte’s claim rested on dubious empirical grounds: compared with the 2012 election, Rutte actually lost big (-5.2%), whereas Geert Wilder’s Party for Freedom (PVV) made gains (+3.0%) and was joined by a new far-right party, Forum for Democracy (FvD), with 1.8%, making their combined scored of 14.9%. That’s less than one percentage point lower than the PVV’s high score of 15.45% in 2010.

Three 2018 elections will provide more ammunition for the debate on how best to respond to the radical right. In Sweden, the rise of the Sweden Democrats was not halted in the parliamentary election in September, despite a significant turn to the right by the center-right Moderates and even the center-left Social Democrats. Both the Moderates (which lost 3.5% of their vote share) and the Social Democrats (which lost 2.8%) lost, while the Sweden Democrats were the biggest winners, coming in third with 17.5%, an increase of 4.7%.

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The results were fairly similar in the much-anticipated state elections in Bavaria, where the hegemonic Christian Social Union (CSU) had practically copied the agenda of the populist radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD), just as they had done with the Republicans in the early 1990s. In fact, the CSU’s regional struggle with the AfD had crippled the already troubled Grand Coalition in Berlin, with leading CSU politicians regularly defying “their” chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Berlin and Brussels.

As polls had been indicating for months, it stopped neither the ascendance of the AfD, nor the downfall of the CSU. After decades of ruling the state as a party fiefdom, the CSU lost its parliamentary majority and 10.5% of its vote share – a loss of 22% of its 2013 electorate. The AfD entered the Bavarian parliament in its first election, with 10.2% of the vote, not only less than polls had been predicting for months, but also some 2% less than the party had received in Bavaria in the 2017 federal elections.

Finally, in the much less covered local elections in Belgium, the “democratic nationalist” New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) lost big, despite having veered staunchly right, and making opposition to immigration, and its tough (and popular) secretary of state for asylum, migration and administrative simplification, Theo Francken, the focus of its campaign.

At the same time, the populist radical right Flemish Interest (VB) returned from the dead, after focusing its campaign on opposition to the “soft” Francken, gaining its best score in decades. While extrapolations of local elections to national elections should always be treated with extreme care, the local elections indicate a possible big loss for N-VA and win for VB in next year’s mass election year – Belgium will hold regional, national and European elections on 26 May 2019. And the recent withdrawal from the federal government of the N-VA, over the contentious but non-binding Marrakesh agreement will do little to mitigate that.

Does this mean that voters prefer the original over the copy, as Jean-Marie Le Pen already declared in the 1990s?

So what, if anything, can we learn from these three important elections in 2018? First, the populist radical right is still on the rise in western Europe. Second, mainstream parties that co-opt the populist radical right agenda, even if they exclude the party, still lose elections. Third, the focus on socio-cultural issues – such as immigration and, to a lesser extent, European integration – helps not just the populist radical right, but also the Greens, who were the second biggest winners in both Bavaria and Flanders.

Does this mean that voters prefer the original over the copy, as Jean-Marie Le Pen already declared in the 1990s? Not necessarily so. Both AfD and SD fell well below the numbers they polled several months ago, let alone in late 2016, when the EU-Turkey deal had taken the so-called “refugee crisis” off the top of the political agenda. Some defenders of the co-option strategy therefore claim that they would have done much better if the mainstream right (and sometimes left) had not moved staunchly right.

Unfortunately, this is hard to disprove. The “immigration realistic” Turkey deal has clearly lowered the salience of the immigration issue, which generally leads to lower support for populist radical right parties, whose main issue is immigration. Following the same logic, focusing election campaigns of the issues of the populist radical right, and using their frames (immigration as threat), will heighten their importance and therefore strength. Even if a more anti-immigrant position will keep some voters from abandoning the center-right for the radical right, many voters are not just nativist but also populist, distrusting the mainstream parties, and therefore not open to leaving the radical right for the mainstream right.

In the end, of course, the question is, or should be, a moral one. Copying the issues and frames of the populist radical right leads to populist radical right discourses and policies, whether adopted by populist radical right parties or mainstream parties. This is also the lesson of the Netherlands, where the exclusion of the PVV has not prevented the mainstream right from even further toughening immigration and integration policies.

Assuming that we (still) consider both the messenger and the message as a threat to liberal democracy, “good populism” is both empirically and normatively the wrong strategy to fight “bad populism”.