Recent electoral inroads for the far right reflect public dislike of government cuts in public services

The author is dean of international affairs and professor at Bocconi University in Milan

As the far right surges in Europe, the centre right is trying to defeat it by taking a tougher line on migration. But this would be a mistake, based on wrong lessons drawn from the far right’s rise.

Immigration motivates a hard core of far-right voters. But an important driver of the far right’s current success is the centre right’s hollowing out of public services through austerity. Attempts to get tougher on migration will do little to reverse the far right’s advances. 

A good example is the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ Freedom party won last month’s election. One of Europe’s most divisive politicians, convicted in court for his inflammatory anti-Islam rhetoric and deliberately kept out of government by centrist parties, he might become the new prime minister after the centre right broke the previous coalition over immigration.

Ahead of a crucial year for the EU in which a new European Commission will be appointed after elections to the European parliament, politicians and pundits are wondering about what lessons to draw from upsets like the Dutch vote.

Manfred Weber, the head of the centre-right European People’s party, says far-right victories will persist unless European countries massively curb migration. “People want to have solutions. And that’s why the numbers of arrivals must go down,” he told the FT.

However, reducing recent far-right gains to immigration in this way ignores more structural issues plaguing European societies in which the centre right itself played a prominent role — in particular, cuts to key services.

An overlooked aspect of the Dutch election illustrates this. A newly established party, New Social Contract, was also a big winner, gaining 20 seats. Its leader, Pieter Omzigt, condemned Wilders’ rhetoric and called many of his proposals unconstitutional. What Omzigt and Wilders have in common is a relentless focus on the failure of the previous governments of Mark Rutte to protect “bestaanszekerheid”, loosely meaning “livelihood security”.

Under Rutte’s premiership, policies that erected barriers to social benefits and reduced access to public services raised concerns among many parts of the Dutch population about what they are getting in return for the taxes they pay. In this context, it is important to remember that opposition to cuts is a key theme of Wilders, next to immigration. In 2012, for example, Wilders withdrew his support for the first government of Rutte, a minority coalition between Rutte’s liberal party and the Christian Democrats, over reductions in public expenditure.

Research, including my own, suggests that cuts to public services play an important role in explaining the rise of the far right. Concerns about reduced access to public services, such as hospital care, state schooling, affordable public transport and housing, leads people to question the extent to which their government cares about people like them. Waning public services may also fuel immigration concerns out of fear of more congestion and overcrowding.

Centre-right parties have an interest in diverting public attention from their own policy failures — and research shows that shifting attention from unpopular economic policies to sociocultural issues that inflame public opinion, such as immigration, can be an effective short-term electoral strategy for government parties, especially those on the centre right. But in the long term, this strategy strengthens the far right — and could even lead to a far right EU, as Hans Kundnani has argued.

A better strategy would be to understand why discontented voters have flocked to far-right parties recently. European politicians who serve a continent challenged by sluggish growth prospects, an ageing society and labour shortages should look beyond immigration as the culprit of far-right success and start addressing deeper structural problems plaguing European societies.