The AfD’s third-place finish shows that populism in Europe is here to stay – but it can be beaten

After the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise to power in the US, pundits predicted that a wind of populist, anxious, resentful, anti-politics-as-usual change would sweep across Europe.

Like a series of dominoes, the governments of the Netherlands and France – and possibly, if rather more implausibly, even Germany – would fall to the Eurosceptic forces of Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and Frauke Petry.



The heavy defeats of Wilders’ Freedom party and Le Pen’s Front National (now in deep crisis) in elections this year ended that narrative and swung the momentum the other way: in Europe, or at least western Europe, populism was dead.



The 13% share and third-place finish of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s federal elections are a reminder that both narratives are flawed. Populism in Europe is here to stay – but evidently can be beaten.

Even Germany, with the weight of its history, is not immune. The context of its vote was, though, particular: it took place barely two years after chancellor Angela Merkel’s humane but politically risky decision to open the country’s borders to more than a million refugees and migrants.

Nearly 90% of AfD voters, who came from all of Germany’s established parties and none (35% did not vote in the 2013 election), said they wanted stronger borders and felt Merkel’s migrant policy ignored people’s concerns.

One of a string of populist parties across the European Union claiming to be “the voice of the people” abandoned by a supposedly corrupt, unaccountable elite, the AfD would have struggled to clear 5% in national polls without that decision.

But populist parties have successfully harnessed the broader fears and resentments of discontented voters across the EU, and are generally performing better in elections now than at any time since the second world war. There is no reason to think they will go away any time soon.

The illiberal governments of Poland and Hungary, with their attacks on the independence of the media and judiciary and steady erosion of democratic checks and balances, show what happens when populists run the country.

In Norway, the populist, anti-immigration Progress party is a junior coalition partner again after elections in which it won with just over 15% of the vote. Populist parties are also in governments in Finland, Hungary and Slovakia.

Austria’s populist Freedom party is polling at 24% before elections on 15 October, on course to join a government led by the centre-right People’s party – successfully rebranded the New People’s party by its 31-year-old leader, Sebastian Kurz.

But as events in the Netherlands, France and Germany showed, populist parties – even when they have polled at or near 20%, as the PVV, Front National and AfD did during their respective campaigns – can be beaten back. All ended up winning around 13% of the vote.

And even if, like the AfD, they make a significant electoral breakthrough, they are not predestined for government. If your support is based mainly on opposition, it has a ceiling. Populist parties also collapse more readily than others into infighting and factionalism – as the AfD appears already to be doing.

Nonetheless, as the Dutch political scientist and expert on populism Cas Mudde remarks, in an electoral landscape increasingly fragmented by the decline of traditional mainstream parties and the rise of new alternatives, populist parties, even if they win 10-15% of the vote, can still wield considerable influence.

In recent years populist parties have won an average of 20% of the vote, often split between two or more parties, in elections in many European countries, Mudde notes: unprecedented since the war, but far from being a majority.

“Populists tend to ask the right questions but give the wrong answers,” Mudde says. “They force issues on to the agenda that mainstream parties have ignored.” Liberal parties will have to start treating them like regular parties, he says.

“You fight populists not by ignoring them, demonising them or adopting their agendas, but by clearly addressing all the issues – including the ones they care about – on the basis of your own ideology. By making a positive, clear and convincing ideological case.”

• This article was amended on 27 September 2017. An earlier version said Progress won 16% of the vote. This has been corrected to say just over 15%.

