Mainstream Europarties should spurn radical populists

R. Daniel Kelemen is McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Jonathan B. Slapin is professor and chair of political institutions and European government at the University of Zürich’s Department of Political Science.

With the populist radical-right projected to make major gains in the June 2024 European Parliament election, the mainstream center-right will face a fateful choice. Should it ostracize these radicals, or betray its own principles and embrace them?

At the national level, center-right parties have already answered this question — some maintaining a cordon sanitaire against cooperation with radicals and others entering coalitions. But curiously, many of the mainstream parties that spurned alliances with radicals in their home countries seem perfectly content to ally with them at the EU level, through Europarties and political groups in the Parliament.

So, why this double standard?

Presumably this is because these parties thought their voters would react differently to such cooperation at the European level. And while numerous domestic examples suggest that they were right, there is now a shift on the horizon.

Take the experience of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU): The CDU has long maintained a strict redline against cooperation with the far-right domestically. And on the rare occasions that this redline was breached, voters have reacted very negatively — for example, the ouster of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer as party leader in 2019. Moreover, recent mass demonstrations against the rise of the far-right across Germany remind us just how important this redline remains.

Yet, the very same CDU that treated the far-right as toxic domestically, happily allied with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s far-right and increasingly authoritarian Fidesz party in the European People’s Party (EPP) for a decade — and CDU voters didn’t seem to care.

There are signs, however, that voters’ reactions to such unsavory alliances at the EU level may be starting to change. And it looks like mainstream parties — and not just those on the center right — may increasingly start to pay a political price for allying with radicals in Brussels and Strasbourg.

The first signs of this change came in 2021, when the EPP finally moved to oust Orbán, leading him to jump before he was pushed. After a decade of shamelessly defending the Hungarian leader as he eroded democracy in his country, what made the EPP finally turn against him was that the backsliding in Hungary became important enough for a number of EPP member parties to see the alliance as an electoral liability.

Next, on the other side of the political spectrum, the center-left Party of European Socialists (PES) suspended its Slovak member party Smer and its autocratically inclined leader Robert Fico in October 2023. The suspension came immediately after the announcement that Smer would be forming a government with a radical-right party.

The comparative speed with which PES acted suggests that at least some Europarties are becoming more sensitive to the possible reputational costs of allying with radicals and aspiring autocrats at the EU level. And a study we recently published with colleagues Michele Fenzl and Pit Rieger provides strong evidence that mainstream Europarties would do well to resist such alliances.

Based on a survey experiment involving over 8,000 voters in Germany and Italy, our study explored whether mainstream voters failed to react to their parties partnering with radicals at the EU level because they didn’t care about such arrangements, or simply because they didn’t know about them.

Our results confirm that most voters actually knew very little about these alliances — 72 percent of our respondents couldn’t even identify which Europarty their national party belonged to. However, once they were made aware that the party they support was cooperating with a radical-right or autocratic party, we found that 65 percent would oppose such cooperation, and 41 percent said they would be unlikely to vote for their party in the next national election.

The CDU treated the far-right as toxic domestically, but happily allied with Viktor Orbán’s far-right and increasingly authoritarian Fidesz party in the European People’s Party | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images

These findings are staggering when contrasted with attitudes about cooperating with a centrist party in the same Europarty — only 9 percent of our respondents said they would oppose this, and a mere 11 percent said they were unlikely to vote for their party as a result of such an alliance.

In fact, we found that voters reacted to mainstream parties cooperating with radicals in Brussels’ Europarties just as negatively as when they cooperate with them in coalition governments at home. And while we found that mainstream voters react negatively to cooperation with extremist parties of all sorts, they react most negatively when their party allies with those from the radical right.

For years now, supposedly centrist Europarties have been able to coddle pet autocrats and radicals without their mainstream voters taking much notice. But as issues of democratic backsliding and the rise of populist parties become more publicly significant across the Continent, these voters are starting to take more notice of unsavory partnerships at the EU level — and it seems they don’t like what they see.

Despite this, recent polls suggest that either the radical-right Identity and Democracy or the far-right nationalist European Conservatives and Reformists may emerge as the third largest group in the new European Parliament. This means that even though the centrist coalition of the EPP, the PES and the liberal Renew group is likely to maintain a slim majority, their hold on power will be tenuous, and populist radical-right forces will increasingly influence policymaking in Brussels and Strasbourg.

With the far right ascending in this manner, the temptation for center-right parties to ally with them at the EU level will be greater than ever. But as our research suggests, they should resist this temptation not just on moral grounds but on strategic grounds as well. Public awareness of such alliances is growing, and mainstream voters strongly disapprove of them.

Simply put, center-right parties that ally with the populist far right in pursuit of power are likely to pay an electoral cost for doing so moving forward.