Election poster of Björn Höcke for the AfD party with the slogan roughly translating to "forbidden good" in Sonneberg, Thuringia, Germany, on August 4, 2024. Photo: Shutterstock.

Germany’s 2024 EP Elections: The Populist Challenge to the Progressive Coalition

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Please cite as:

Arzheimer, Kai. (2024). “Germany’s 2024 EP Elections: The Populist Challenge to the Progressive Coalition.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0071

 

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Abstract

The 2024 European parliamentary election in Germany marked a significant shift in the political landscape, with devastating results for the governing coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats (FDP). Chancellor Scholz’s SPD and the Greens experienced substantial losses, while the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) saw a modest increase in their vote share. The most notable gains were made by the populist radical-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the newly formed left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a breakaway from the Left (Die Linke), highlighting a growing demand for populist politics in Germany. The Left itself suffered heavy losses. Despite internal scandals and controversies that contributed to a considerable drop in support in pre-election polls, the AfD leveraged anti-immigration sentiments and economic concerns to gain substantial support. The BSW capitalized on left–authoritarian positions, emphasizing welfare and anti-immigration policies. Both parties also criticized Germany’s support for Ukraine and styled themselves as agents of ‘peace.’ The election results underscored the unpopularity of the ‘progressive coalition’ in Germany and reflected the impact of high inflation, energy security concerns and contentious climate policies on voter behaviour. Voter turnout was the highest since 1979, indicating heightened political engagement. Like in previous elections, populist parties were much more successful in the post-communist eastern states. While its impact on the European level is limited, the election sent shock waves through Germany, suggesting a shift in future policy directions, particularly concerning the green transformation and relations with Russia.

Keywords: Alternative for Germany (AfD); Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW); Germany; Russia; Ukraine; east–west differences

 

By Kai Arzheimer* (Institute for Political Science, University of Mainz)

Introduction and background

The result of the 2024 European parliamentary election in Germany was devastating for the governing three-party coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats (FDP). Chancellor Scholz’s SPD lost 2 percentage points compared to the 2019 EP election, polling just 13.9%, the worst result for the party in any national election since the Second World War. The Greens, which had done exceedingly well in the 2019 ‘green wave’, lost nearly half their votes and fell back to 11.9%. The Liberals lost only 0.2 percentage points, but their result of 5.2% put them precariously close to the electoral threshold that applies in national elections (although not in European ones).

Conversely, the main opposition Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) polled a combined 30%, a modest 1.1-percentage-point improvement on their 2019 result. While the result ensures they are the strongest party, it is low given both historical standards (they won 44.5% just 20 years ago) and the abysmal approval ratings of the government parties.

The combined vote share of these mainstream parties was just 61%. At least as far as perceptions were concerned, the big winner in these elections was the populist radical-right ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD, 15.9%), followed by the new left-wing populist ‘Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance’ (BSW, 6.2%). An additional 17% of the vote went to smaller parties, including the arguably populist ‘Left’ (2.7%), the arguably right-wing populist ‘Free Voters’ (FW, 2.7%), and ‘The Party’ (1.9%), a satirical outfit.

These results were almost perfectly in line with pre-election polls. The so-called ‘progressive coalition’ and its policies have been deeply unpopular almost from the get-go (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, n.d.), and the radical-right AfD has been the main beneficiary of this discontent. More specifically, after the initial rally-round-the-flag effect following Russia’s renewed attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the government’s popularity began to decline due to high inflation and worries about (energy) security.

In 2023, things went from bad to worse for the government and have not improved since. The coalition had planned to re-purpose unused special credit lines enacted during the pandemic to fund their programs for a green transformation of Germany’s economy. The intention was to reconcile the Greens’ ambitious plans for climate protection with the SPD’s interest in expanding welfare and the FDP’s insistence on not declaring a ‘budgetary emergency’ for 2024. While such a declaration would have allowed the government to suspend the constitutional ‘debt brake’, abusing the older credit allowances to notionally comply with the deficit rules was a dubious move at best. Following a complaint by the Christian Democrats, Germany’s Constitutional Court declared the federal budget unconstitutional and void, throwing the coalition in disarray just six months before the election (Kinkartz, 2023). With no money left to paper over them, the fundamental conflicts within the coalition were laid bare.

Early in 2023, the Christian Democrats, alongside much of the media, had also launched a campaign against a government flagship policy aimed at reducing Germany’s CO2 emissions by accelerating the phasing out of older oil and natural gas heating systems. Subsequently, all of the opposition parties and much of the media framed this policy as ideological and removed from the lives of ordinary people, making heat pumps a part of the culture wars and forcing the government to water down its proposals.

As previous Christian Democrat-led governments had signed up to the relevant European and international rules and agreements and had enshrined in German law the very climate targets the policy was designed to meet, this was arguably a populist (in a broader sense) move by the main opposition, one that was happily supported by smaller opposition parties and even by some FDP MPs. Both mainstream and populist opposition parties also sided with large-scale farmers’ protests against some cuts to agrarian subsidies that eventually forced another government U-turn (Arzheimer, 2024).

Finally, Germany accepted more than a million Ukrainian refugees after Russia’s 2022 invasion. While this caused few large-scale problems, an ongoing and very public conflict over funding between the federal government, the state governments and the municipalities, as well as the Christian Democrats’ constant push for harsher rules and stricter enforcement, helped to bring the issue of immigration back onto the agenda in 2023, after its salience had been low for several years (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen n.d.). The Israel–Hamas war played only a minor role in the campaign, but a knife attack by an Afghan man on an anti-Islam activist that left a police officer dead just days before the election triggered a fresh debate about immigration, Islamism and the longstanding policy against deportations to Afghanistan (Deutsche Welle, 2024c).

Against this background, the result of the European elections was hardly surprising. Nonetheless, it sent shock waves through the German polity that still reverberate.

The supply side: populist parties in the ascendancy

Alternative for Germany

The AfD was founded in 2013 as a right-of-centre, soft-Eurosceptic outfit that presented an ‘alternative’ to the bailout policies that followed the 2010–2011 Eurozone crisis (Arzheimer 2015). It quickly transformed into a characteristic radical-right populist party that attracted the prototypical electorate (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019). While many radical-right parties are striving to soften their public image, the most radical faction has dominated the AfD since 2017 (Pytlas & Biehler, 2023), and the AfD embraces openly extremist actors both within and outside the party (Arzheimer, 2019). As a consequence, the party as a whole is under surveillance by the domestic intelligence agency, and its youth wing, as well as several state branches, have already been classified as right-wing extremist. Like many other far-right parties in Europe, the AfD also has a longstanding association with Russia and has repeatedly voiced sympathy for Putin and his regime. Although the party toned down its statements immediately after the February 2022 invasion, it has since highlighted the economic consequences of the war and the sanctions for Germany and re-invented itself as a party of ‘peace’ (Arzheimer, 2023), even adopting the classic dove symbol in some of its publicity materials.

In the run-up to the 2024 European elections, the party floated the idea of including a call for the dissolution of the European Union in its manifesto, dropping this idea from the final version after a public backlash. However, the selection of candidates was strongly influenced by the most radical elements within the party. The top spot of the list went to Maximilian Krah, a sitting MEP with well-documented connections to German right-wing extremists, Russia and particularly China. Krah’s membership in the Identity and Democracy (ID) group had previously been suspended over allegations of fraud (Dahm, 2023). Petr Bystron, the second on the list, was a sitting MP in Germany’s Bundestag, known both for his extreme views, his fondness of conspiracy myths, and his support for Putin’s Russia. Asked why he would give up his seat in the Bundestag to become an MEP, he said he needed to get to ‘the source of the poison’ (Fiedler, 2023).

In January 2024, the AfD’s campaign got in trouble even before its official start. Investigative journalists reported on a meeting between representatives of the AfD, members of the extremist ‘Identitarian movement’, and potential donors. At the meeting, the participants had discussed plans for a ‘remigration’ – a euphemism for the expulsion of millions of immigrant-origin Germans. This story triggered a large-scale countermobilization, with hundreds of thousands of Germans taking to the streets to protest the AfD (Deutsche Welle, 2024a). These events contributed to a relative decline of AfD support in the polls, which had risen to an unprecedented 22% in December 2023 but dropped to around 17% over the next six weeks or so. It also negatively affected the relationship between the AfD and Marine Le Pen, who dominates the ID group in the European Parliament.

But his was just the beginning of the campaign’s woes. Two months before the election, a Czech newspaper published audio files that strongly suggested that Bystron had received at least 20,000 euros from the Russian propaganda portal ‘Voice of Europe’. As Bystron was a German MP at the time and vote buying is illegal in Germany, he quickly became the object of a full criminal investigation, which is still ongoing. Just a couple of days later, Krah’s parliamentary offices were searched by the police, and one of his aides was arrested as an alleged Chinese spy. While Krah himself has not been charged so far, a preliminary probe into allegations that he sold his vote to China and Russia is still underway (Deutsche Welle, 2024b).

Things came to a head in mid-May when Krah played down the atrocities committed by the Waffen SS in countries occupied by Nazi Germany in an interview with an Italian journalist. In response, the whole AfD delegation in the EP was excluded from the ID group (Reuters, 2024). Krah resigned his seat on the AfD’s national executive and was formally barred from speaking on the stump by the leadership, leading to the paradoxical situation that the campaign rolled on without the two top candidates.

As much of the AfD’s activities are social media-centric anyway, it probably did not matter too much. The AfD continued to push their core issues – first and foremost immigration, but also the economic impact of the war on Germany, climate denialism and hard Euroscepticism – without too much regard for their invisible candidates.

The Left and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance

The Left party is the product of a merger between the (primarily eastern) PDS, itself the successor of the GDR’s former state party, and the WASG, a mostly western group that broke away from the SPD over welfare reforms enacted in the early 2000s (Hough, Koß & Olsen, 2007). It is considered far left and populist (Rooduijn et al., 2023), although many in the party take a rather pragmatic approach to politics, especially at the local and regional levels.

Sahra Wagenknecht was arguably the party’s most prominent, controversial and charismatic politician. She started out as an orthodox communist in the early 1990s, a position that left her isolated within a decidedly post-communist party even after she changed her views. She gladly embraced the role of the outsider. As a gifted and very telegenic public speaker, she has been one of the most frequently invited guests on political talk shows for decades, although she stands for minority positions within a minor party.

During the so-called immigration crisis of 2015–2016, Wagenknecht became a (moderate) immigration sceptic. In 2018, she helped launch a leftist network that brought together tens of thousands of supporters but collapsed when she abandoned it the following year instead of turning it into a personal party, as many had expected. Wagenknecht was also critical of the anti-COVID measures and began cultivating a sizeable audience on social media during the pandemic (MDR, 2024).

In 2021, Wagenknecht published a book that was widely seen as the manifesto of an upcoming political project. In it, she accused her party of pandering to a ‘lifestyle left’ while ignoring the concerns of true working-class voters: welfare and immigration.

The Left’s reaction to Russia’s attack then provided the final straw. The 2011 basic program stresses the party’s links to the peace movement, highlights its ‘internationalist’ credentials and calls for the dissolution of NATO and a ‘common security architecture’ that would include Russia. However, the sheer scale of human suffering in Ukraine has led many in the Left to reconsider these positions. The Left’s manifesto for the European elections reflects this ambiguity. On the one hand, the document is highly critical of the US and NATO and even claims that the eastern enlargement of NATO has ‘contributed to the crisis’ (Die Linke n.d., 65). On the other, it highlights Ukraine’s right to self-defence, condemns the attack as a war crime, and demands that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory (without specifying whether that includes Crimea). Wagenknecht, however, took a more clearly pro-Russian stance. She routinely claims that the US and the collective West are blocking a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine for reasons of their own.

In September 2023, Wagenknecht and her supporters in the Left’s parliamentary registered the ‘Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance — Reason and Justice’ (BSW), which legally became a political party on 8 January 2024. Ten of the Left’s 38 MPs in the Bundestag eventually joined the new group. Amongst state-level MPs and the rank-and-file, the rate of defections was much lower.

This new party created much interest amongst political observers even before it was formally founded because it was assumed that it would cater to the so-far neglected demand for left–authoritarian (i.e., pro-welfare but anti-immigrant) politics in Germany (Wagner, Wurthmann, & Thomeczek, 2023). The EP election manifesto published in April 2024 (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, 2024) offers precisely that, dressed up in a populist fashion. The preamble blames politicians and EU elites for broken promises and ignoring the problems of ordinary citizens. The BSW wants to shrink the bureaucracy and, more importantly, the scope of the European Union by shifting back competencies to the member states.

At the same time and somewhat contradictory, they want the EU to enact higher minimum wages, higher corporate tax rates, stricter rules against money laundering, and limits on financial transactions. The BSW also demands new policies that would allegedly strengthen Europe’s industrial base through a ‘reasonable’ approach to climate protection and securing access to cheap energy and raw materials. This policy is framed as a precondition for expanding welfare. The BSW also rejects future enlargements and wants to curb not just illegal migration but also the recruitment of qualified workers from outside the EU. Instead, the party wants to reduce the ‘push factors’ for immigration by creating more equitable conditions globally. While the rejection of Islam is more muted than in the AfD’s statements, and while the AfD in turn keeps their most radical demands out of their manifesto, this is quite similar to the policies that the AfD offers.

However, the highest degree of overlap with the AfD can be seen in the BSW’s approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The sanctions, which are mentioned 14 times in a manifesto of 20 pages, are painted as harmful for Germany while having no effect on Russia itself. For the BSW, the attack on Ukraine is a ‘proxy war’ between the US and Russia (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, 2024: 14) that was ‘started on a military level by Russia’ but ‘could have been prevented and stopped by the West’ (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, 2024: 17). The only (alleged) violations of international law that the manifesto addresses are the Western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Ibid.). The BSW even adopts an idea that the AfD previously launched in parliament (AfD Fraktion im Bundestag, 2023: 3) – making support for Ukraine conditional on Kyiv’s willingness to enter negotiations with Russia – albeit with a twist. It would incentivize Russia by offering to stop all military aid for Ukraine immediately should Russia agree to negotiate.

Demand for populism in Germany

Taken together, the AfD (15.9%), Left (2.7%), and BSW (6.2%) achieved a significant (nearly 25%) share of the vote. Moreover, at 64.8%, turnout was the highest since the EP’s first direct election in 1979, which suggests a high degree of interest and political involvement. Put differently, there is considerable demand for populist politics in Germany, even if the level is still lower than in France or Italy.

In line with second-order-election theory (Reif and Schmitt 1980), domestic actors and attitudes (the unpopularity of the federal government in particular) dominated the campaign. In a post-election poll (see ZDF Heute, 2024), just 10% of the AfD’s voters, 38% of the BSW’s voters, but a massive 85% of the Left’s remaining voters said that ‘Europe’ was more important for their decision than ‘Germany’. This poll result suggests that AfD voters are (even) more inward-looking and fundamentally Eurosceptic than the BSW’s. The average across all parties was 47%.

However, the issues at stake (immigration, Russia’s war against Ukraine, social and economic transformations) are international by nature and were often presented within a European frame of reference by the parties. Moreover, the AfD’s ouster from the ID group, as well the overtures of the (German) president of the commission towards Giorgia Meloni and her European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, helped to make this one of the most Europeanized EP elections ever.

Nonetheless, support for all three populist parties showed a striking geographical pattern that is very specific to German politics: they are much more successful in the eastern states (i.e., the territory of the former German Democratic Republic). Outside some university towns and the Berlin/Potsdam region, the AfD became the strongest party in all eastern districts and states, with state-wide results varying between 27.5% in Brandenburg and 31.8% in Saxony. In their heartlands in rural Saxony, they won up to 40% of the vote. Conversely, their best results in the western states were 14.7% in Baden-Württemberg and 15.7% in Saarland. There is no western district where they won more than 21%.

These lopsided results are hardly surprising: the multi-faceted legacy of the GDR, the shock and aftermath of the transformation in the 1990s and specific patterns of outmigration have led to a situation where individual levels of populism, nativism and place resentment — the feeling that one’s locale does not get the recognition and resources it deserves — are substantively higher in the eastern states than in the west even decades after unification (Arzheimer and Bernemann 2024). It is, however, important to note that AfD has made considerable inroads in the west of Germany, particularly in regions and even neighbourhoods that could be described as ‘left behind.’

The AfD also drew more support from men (19%) than women (12%), a gender gap that has been stable since 2014, whereas gender differences for the Left and BSW were within the margin of error. For a decade, the AfD was a party of middle-aged voters that struggled to mobilize the very young and the elderly. The latter is still true, but for the first time, AfD support amongst the under-30s is now (just) above average. The Left remains somewhat more popular (6%) in this group than with older voters, while BSW support hardly varies with age.

In socio-structural terms, workers (25%) and voters with medium levels of education (23%) had the highest propensity to vote for the AfD. For the Left and the BSW, there are no clear patterns, but one must bear in mind that in national polls, relatively few of their voters are sampled. Exit polls also suggest that 29% of the BSW’s voters had previously voted for the SPD and another 24% for the Left, while less than 10% were former AfD voters (Palzer, 2024). However, such transition analyses are fraught with methodological problems.

Across all respondents, the AfD remains deeply unpopular, with an average rating of –2.9 on a scale running from –5 to +5. The average values for the Left and BSW are –1.7 and –1.2, respectively. For comparison, the Greens, which have a smaller voter base than the AfD and are the least popular government party, receive a rating of –0.9. This suggests a considerable level of polarization between populist (and particularly radical-right) voters on the one hand and the voters of non-populist parties on the other.

Discussion and perspectives

Both the AfD and the BSW are nationalist parties, and the BSW, in particular, saw the EP election chiefly as an opportunity to gain media attention and access to public funds in preparation for the upcoming state elections. The AfD is still not welcome in the renamed ID (now Patriots for Europe, PfE) group and was forced to team up with a motley crew of fringe MEPs to reach the requisite number for forming a ‘Europe of Sovereign Nations’ group that gives them access to proper funding. BSW has not managed even that, and their MEPs are now sitting as Non-attached (NA). Nonetheless, both the AfD and the BSW will likely vote against any policies related to the green transformation or support for Ukraine and will push for ‘negotiations’ with – and closer economic ties to – Russia.

At least in the short term, however, their most significant impact will be on German politics. If they end up as the strongest or second-strongest party in one or more of the eastern states that go to the polls in autumn, that will have dramatic consequences not just for the Länder in question but for Germany’s system of decentralized and consensual policymaking, which could leave the country in uncharted waters.

 

(*) Kai Arzheimer is Professor of German Politics and Political Sociology at the University of Mainz. He works in the field of political behaviour, broadly defined and is particularly interested in far-right parties and their voters.

 

References

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Arzheimer, Kai (2015). ‘The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?’ West European Politics 38: 535–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1004230

——— (2019). ‘Don’t Mention the War! How Populist Right-Wing Radicalism Became (Almost) Normal in Germany’. Journal of Common Market Studies 57 (S1): 90–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12920

——— (2023). ‘To Russia with Love? German Populist Actors’ Positions Vis-a-Vis the Kremlin’. In The Impacts of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Right-Wing Populism in Europe, edited by Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina, 156–67. Brussels: European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0020

——— (2024). ‘The Far-Right Is Piggybacking on the German Farmers’. Euobserver, 11 January, https://euobserver.com/eu-political/arc8e852f9

Arzheimer, Kai and Theresa Bernemann (2024). ‘“Place” Does Matter for Populist Radical Right Sentiment, but How? Evidence from Germany’. European Political Science Review 16 (2): 167–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773923000279

Arzheimer, Kai and Carl Berning (2019). ‘How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Their Voters Veered to the Radical Right, 2013-2017’. Electoral Studies 60: online first. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.04.004

Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (2024). ‘Programm Für Die Europwahl 2024’. https://bsw-vg.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/BSW_Europawahlprogramm_2024.pdf

Dahm, Julia (2023). ‘German Far-Right Led into European Elections by Anti-EU Hardliner’. Euractiv, 31 July 2023. https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/german-far-right-led-into-european-elections-by-anti-eu-hardliner/

Deutsche Welle (2024a, 3 February). ‘Germany: Tens of Thousands in Berlin Protest Far Right’. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tens-of-thousands-in-berlin-protest-far-right/a-68164252

——— (2024b, 16 May). ‘Germany: Money-Laundering Probe into Far-Right AfD Lawmaker’. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-money-laundering-probe-into-far-right-afd-lawmaker/a-69094119

——— (2024c, 4 June). ‘Mannheim Knife Attack: Authorities Suspect Islamist Motive’. https://www.dw.com/en/mannheim-knife-attack-authorities-suspect-islamist-motive/a-69259747

Die Linke (n.d.) ‘Zeit Für Gerechtigkeit. Zeit Für Haltung. Zeit Für Frieden’. Accessed 21 June 2024. https://www.die-linke.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Europawahlprogramm.pdf

Fiedler, Maria (2023). ‘Extrem, Rechts Und Bald in Brüssel: Wen Die AfD Ins Europaparlament Schicken Will’. Tagesspiegel, 29 July, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/extrem-rechts-und-bald-in-brussel-wen-die-afd-ins-europaparlament-schicken-will-10233988.html

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MDR (2024, 13 June). Sahra Wagenknecht: from outsider to left-wing icon and party founder, MDR, https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/sahra-wagenknecht-partei-bsw-biografie-100.html

Palzer, Kerstin (2024). ‘Aus dem Stand auf 6,2 Prozent’ Tagesschau, 10 June 2024, https://www.tagesschau.de/europawahl/bsw-linkspartei-100.html

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Geert Wilders (PVV) during an interview at the Plenary Debate in the Tweede Kamer on June 4, 2024, in The Hague, Netherlands. Photo: Orange Pictures.

Waking the Sleeping Populist Giant: The 2024 European Elections and Populism in The Netherlands

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Please cite as:
Verbeek, Bertjan & Zaslove, Andrej. (2024). “Waking the Sleeping Populist Giant: The 2024 European Elections and Populism in the Netherlands.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0086

 

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Abtsract

The results of the 2024 European elections for populist parties in the Netherlands are intimately related to the events in national Dutch politics since 2021. The relative success of the Party for Freedom (VVD) since 2023 has been related to its more moderate position on European integration and Islam. This change of tone was part of increasing the party’s credibility at home and abroad. The European elections were presented as a litmus test for the proposed centre-right government in the Netherlands, and they testified to the increased room for the populist vote in general and the increased competition for that vote between various populist parties in particular. The European elections also proved a defeat for populist contenders such as JA21, Forum for Democracy and the left-wing populist Socialist Party. The impact of Dutch populists on European policies is most likely to be felt via the newly formed government, which contains two populist parties. At the level of the European Parliament, its impact will depend on the success of the newly formed Patriots for Europe (PfE) group.

Keywords: populism; populist radical right; European elections; Dutch national elections; the Netherlands

 

By Bertjan Verbeek* & Andrej Zaslove** (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)

On 6 June 2024, the elections for the 31 Dutch seats in the European Parliament were held. The total number of Dutch seats had been expanded first from 26 to 29 in 2020 (because of Brexit) and again in 2023 to 31 (because of a redistribution of the total number of seats based on demographic changes [European Parliament, 2023]). Turnout was slightly higher in 2024 at 46%, which was under the European average of 51% but up from the 2019 Dutch turnout of 42%. The 2024 outcome witnessed the resurgence of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) while the centre-left held its ground. In this contribution, we argue that the Dutch results must be understood in the context of the political drama that has been unfolding since the provincial and national elections in 2023 and the subsequent formation of a new government coalition in 2024. In what follows, we first describe the landscape of populist parties in the Netherlands and then compare the 2024 results with the previous European, provincial and national elections. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future role of Dutch populists in Brussels.

Varieties of Dutch populism: Between continuity and fragmentation

The Netherlands has long been a breeding ground for populism (especially the right-wing variety) since the appearance of Pim Fortuyn and his party List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) in 2002. Over the years, there has been a succession of populist parties competing for populist voters, tapping into different constituencies, ranging from right-wing nativist and left-wing populist to agrarian–populist. Elsewhere, we refer to such a situation as ‘mutating populism’ (Verbeek and Zaslove, 2016). Mutating populism refers to a party system in which new populist parties enter a system where a populist party is already present, thus potentially ushering in a change in outlook. The entry of these additional populist parties forces all populist parties to distinguish themselves not only from the mainstream parties but also from the other populist parties in the system.

Currently, the Netherlands boasts three types of populist parties (see De Jonge et al., forthcoming 2024). The first type is the populist radical right, consisting of the PVV, Forum for Democracy (FvD), and the Right Answer 2021 (JA21). The second is the populist–agrarian Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB). Third is the left-wing Socialist Party (SP), which is, however, often considered a borderline case of populism (Meijers and Zaslove, 2021). Irrespective of their individual orientations, all populist parties adopt a rather Eurosceptic position.

A crowded landscape: three populist radical-right parties in the Netherlands

The PVV is a populist radical-right party, much like other populist radical-right parties in Europe, such as the National Rally (RN) in France, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), and Lega in Italy. Much like these parties, the PVV combines populism with nativism. The core of its ideology pits the ‘good’ people versus the ‘corrupt’ elite in both The Hague and Brussels. The party is critical of excessive immigration, in particular from non-Western countries.

Traditionally, opposing Islam and favouring the Netherlands exiting the European Union (EU) – a so-called ‘Nexit’ – have been part and parcel of the PVV program. However, during the 2023 Dutch and 2024 European elections, the PVV moderated its opposition to Islam and its demands for Nexit. This moderation resulted from the VVD’s opening up to a coalition with the PVV in the Summer of 2023 (see also below). Economically, the PVV takes a more protectionist and welfare state chauvinist position aimed at protecting its voters in specific economic and social sectors, such as voters with lower incomes and those who, for example, suffer from high energy prices.

FvD is also considered to be a populist and nativist party. However, FvD has more radical stances regarding opposition to EU integration and relations with Russia; it favours Nexit and propagates a more pro-Russia and pro-Putin line. FvD is also more free-market oriented than the PVV and most other populist radical right parties in Europe. JA21 is also regarded as a populist radical-right party. JA21 is slightly less populist than the other populist radical-right parties, while it is nativist and more market oriented than the PVV and most other populist radical-right parties in Europe. In a way, JA21 and its leader, Joost Eerdmans, can be seen as the heirs to Pim Fortuyn’s legacy as a populist with some liberal tendencies, especially regarding the economy.

Beyond the populist radical right: agrarian and left-wing populism

Much to the surprise of political pundits, a new type of Dutch populism entered the national parliament in 2021 – the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB). The BBB can be considered a populist party insofar as it posits the good people versus the corrupt elite, tapping into the latent centre–periphery cleavage in the Netherlands. The BBB pits the ordinary citizen and farmer against ‘oat milk cappuccino drinking city dwellers’ and the unresponsive politicians from the major cities in the country’s west (the so-called Randstad). BBB’s core issues centre on support for farmers and opposition to radical climate policies (in particular, policies to control nitrogen output), while the party also campaigns for the dignity of the regions in the hinterland.

The SP is often considered among the first populist parties in the Netherlands, constituting the only left-wing populist party in the country, albeit less populist than the other populist parties. Although it identifies a clash between the working people and the economic and political elites, it has a less pronounced homogenous view of the people. Over the years, its leaders have strongly varied in their anti-elitist rhetoric. Jan Marijnissen (party leader between 1988 and 2015) was considered the most populist SP leader. Economic issues dominate the party’s ideology, while it always contains a critical stand towards the unequal distribution of wealth due to globalization and neoliberal policies, targeting large corporations, financial institutions and the EU.

The electoral fortunes of populism in the Netherlands

In order to understand the outcome of the 2024 European elections, we need to understand the political space for populism in the Netherlands. Figure 1 shows the electoral results at the national level of the Dutch populist parties since the formation of the PVV in 2006.

Several observations are in order. First, apart from the 2006 elections, the PVV has consistently been the leading populist voice, reaching a peak of 23.5% of the vote in the 2023 national elections, six months before the European elections. Second, due to the increased fragmentation of the Dutch party system, the total space for populism increased to some 38% of the vote in 2023. Third, support for left-wing populism has consistently diminished. Finally, since 2017, a growing number of parties have been competing for the populist vote, forcing them to profile themselves not only vis-à-vis mainstream parties but also each other. The inability of the SP to attract economically left-wing and welfare chauvinist voters is particularly interesting, speaking, perhaps, to what voters may see as the party’s lack of true commitment to an anti-immigrant stance and because the populist radical right’s (i.e., the PVV) focus on creating an economic safety net – as opposed to calling for economic redistribution to combat inequality – is more appealing to populist voters.

 

Figure 2 draws our attention to the European elections. It describes not only the results of those parties that succeeded in obtaining at least one seat but also the percentage of votes for all populist parties. A caveat is in order: the increase in Dutch seats from 26 to 31 complicates comparisons with previous European elections.

 

In the 2024 elections all populist parties combined earned some 28% of the Dutch vote, compared to 18% in 2019 – a considerable gain. Right-wing populists scored 20.1% of the vote in 2024 compared to 14.5% in 2019, again showing a substantial increase. Figure 2 shows that the PVV and the BBB were the only two populist parties that could turn these votes into seats in the 2024 elections, while FvD was the only populist party to obtain seats in the 2019 elections. These figures represent the volatility of the populist vote: between the two European elections, we have seen the rise and fall of FvD, the comet-like rise of the BBB, and the resurgence of the PVV, which failed to win a single seat in the European Parliament in 2019. On the left of the political spectrum, the SP has shown a decline since its success in 2014, when it obtained almost 10% of the vote. At the same time, Dutch mainstream parties succeeded in holding the fort, gaining 51% in 2024 compared to 54% in 2019.

The main question, therefore, is how to explain the extreme volatility in the (right-wing) populist vote and the eventual comeback of the PVV on the European scene. In other words, how do we account for the awakening of the sleeping populist giant? Here, we argue that in order to understand the results of the European elections, we have to take political developments within the Netherlands into account, in particular, the fall of the Rutte IV government in the summer of 2023, the subsequent national elections on 22 November 2023 and the following government formation negotiations, which only formally ended after the European elections with the appointment of the Schoof I government on 2 July 2024. In that sense, the European elections were part and parcel of the political drama that had characterized Dutch politics effectively since the 2021 national elections.

A second-order election? The crucial domestic context of the 2024 EP elections

In Dutch politics, European elections are part of a five-year cycle encompassing municipal, provincial, national and European elections. Since the European elections of 2019, the Netherlands has witnessed national elections in 2021 and 2023, municipal elections in 2022, provincial elections in 2023 and European elections again in 2024.

Our story begins with the 2023 provincial elections, which saw the unexpected emergence of the newest kid on the populist block, the agrarian–populist BBB. Its success, at the time, came at the behest of both the populist PVV and the mainstream Christian democratic party, the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). The BBB’s rise was partly the result of the politicization of climate policies in compliance with the European Green Deal of 2019. The Green Deal was particularly important for farmers and fishermen who mobilized against EU climate policies. In addition, the BBB succeeded in exploiting the latent centre–periphery tensions in the Netherlands.

The provincial elections and the rise of the BBB bring us to the second part of our story. In previous years the reputation of governments led by Mark Rutte had been tarnished by political scandal, in particular the tax office’s treatment of socially vulnerable groups and the government’s reluctance to act decisively after reports that gas exploitation in the northern province of Groningen had provoked earthquakes causing severe damage to houses. In 2023 the fourth coalition under Mark Rutte (composed of CDA, CU, D66, VVD) was made vulnerable by the farmers’ protests, the rise of BBB and the troubles these events caused for the CDA. 

Anticipating a potential deadlock within the government over climate policies, Prime Minister Rutte and his VVD sought to profile themselves by politicizing the issue of asylum and migration, exploiting images of overburdened asylum registration centres and the suggestion that family unification of migrants had accelerated migration. The Rutte IV government eventually fell in July 2023 over intra-coalition conflicts over family unification, leading to new elections in November. It also ushered in a leadership change within the VVD. Importantly, two EU-related themes were explicitly selected to dominate the national elections campaign and would also affect the 2024 European elections campaign: EU asylum and migration policies and EU climate policies.

This brings us to the third part of our story: the 2023 Dutch national elections. These elections coincided with several significant developments. First, the change in VVD party leadership produced a change of strategy towards the PVV. Rutte had consistently excluded the PVV as a coalition partner since 2012. The new VVD party leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, openly suggested that her party would no longer exclude forming a government with Wilders. Second, the mainstream parties suffered from the rise of a new maverick party, New Social Contract (NSC), founded by former CDA MP Pieter Omtzigt. The NSC positioned itself in the centre-right with a major emphasis on good governance, migration and economic security, polling some 20% in the summer of 2023. The NSC drew voters from a broad range of parties, particularly the CDA and VVD. This situation made a future coalition of mainstream parties look increasingly difficult.

Taking advantage of the new situation, Wilders presented himself as a more moderate candidate: he claimed to no longer favour a Nexit, promised to reform the EU from within, and toned down his opposition to Islam. This shift changed the overall political landscape and the nature of party competition, and Wilders profited from the politicization of migration and his ostensible moderation regarding the EU and Islam. No longer perceived as a pariah by former opponents and an increasing number of voters, Wilders’ PVV succeeded in becoming the largest political party, increasing the number of seats in parliament from 17 to 37.

The November 2023 elections were just the beginning of a lengthy government formation process, which would last until July 2024, encompassing the June European elections. This brings us to the fourth part of our story. Initially, the government formation process was characterized by a long-drawn-out testing of the PVV’s democratic credentials. In the end, the four negotiating right-wing parties (the BBB, the NSC, the PVV, and the VVD) were able to find each other on policies aimed at curtailing migration and slowing down EU-required climate policies. This brings us to the fifth and final part of the story: the European elections. These occurred after the four negotiating parties had reached a formal but tentative agreement for a possible government coalition in May 2024. In that sense, the European elections were a litmus test of the legitimacy of the newly proposed coalition.

Indeed, the European election campaign was framed by the centre-left (the GreenLeft–Labour party, GL–PvdA) as an opportunity for voters to express their discontent with the likely government that, in their words, consisted of anti-EU populists and extremists (GroenLinksPvdA, 2024). The actual electoral outcome witnessed a poor performance for the incoming coalition (some 38% of the vote, compared to 56% at the 2023 national elections). It confirmed, however, the PVV’s leading position in that coalition despite the drop in support for the PVV between the general and the European elections. At the same time, the centre-left did not emerge as strong enough to challenge the newly formed coalition despite GL–PvdA’s success in becoming the largest party at the European elections.

The populist campaign for the European elections

The campaign for the European elections was relatively short, even by Dutch standards, lasting about five weeks but never inviting excitement. The PVV canvassed only rarely. Only FvD toured the entire country extensively with their ‘Freedom Touring Bus’, which was, however, ignored by most media outlets. Observers complained that the campaign hardly touched upon party programs and instead focused, for example, on the European friends of Geert Wilders who would profit from a PVV victory (Mudde, 2024). Although Wilders himself did not extensively campaign in the Netherlands, he proved visible at the European level, where he appeared with the likes of Marine le Pen and Matteo Salvini (France 24, 2024).

In this section we first describe those populist parties that were the only two to receive seats in the EU parliament (BBB and PVV). Next, we discuss the party programs of the other relevant populist parties (FvD, JA21 and SP).

In line with its more moderate campaign during the 2023 national elections, the PVV’s European electoral program emphasized the need to reform the EU from within rather than to leave the Union. Within that context, focusing on safeguarding sovereignty, it vehemently called for opt-out possibilities for the Netherlands regarding asylum seekers and migration and for relaxing obligations concerning climate change, especially nitrogen. Importantly, the PVV supported strengthening defence, albeit without singling out Russia as the main threat. In its populist rhetoric the PVV targeted power-seeking Eurocrats who spend money at the expense of ordinary citizens (PVV, 2024).

The BBB’s program reflected its roots in the agrarian sector and its attention to regional interests. It proposed a ‘European Senate’ based on the European Committee of the Regions. At the same time, the BBB campaigned for curbs on the European Commission’s power and to protect member states’ veto rights. It focused on reducing the European Green Deal policies, arguing for a “Real Deal” instead. Notably, it presented itself as the champion of Dutch fishermen, who, according to the BBB, suffer from European fishing policies. Like the PVV regarding asylum and migration policies, the BBB favoured a toughening of asylum policies and an increase of national competences regarding labour migration (BBB, 2024). There are signs that the BBB is moving in the direction of a populist radical-right party. However, at this moment, the party’s core issues concern the rural–urban divide, while it is too early to tell if the party and its voters are as nativist as other populist radical-right parties.

This discussion warrants several important observations. First, the PVV has moderated its position regarding EU integration. Second, the rise of the BBB has broadened the range of populist issues to be represented in Brussels, particularly climate change policies. Despite the moderation of the PVV, both parties remain decidedly Eurosceptic, lambasting Eurocrats as ‘enemies of the people.’

FvD, JA21 and the SP are the three other populist parties that competed in the European elections. FvD was in favour of a, opposed sending troops to Ukraine, and remained critical of sanctions against Russia. It demanded the protection of Europeans from mass immigration from non-Western countries, while it also opposed ‘wokeism’ and climate policies (FvD, 2024). JA21 presented itself as a party of free trade that seeks to reform the EU on the basis of subsidiarity. It called for an immigration policy that resembles the Australian model, implying the regional accommodation of asylum seekers, more robust return policies, and limited access to social programs (JA21, 2024). In short, JA21 presents itself as more market oriented and less Eurosceptic than the other populist radical-right parties. In its electoral program, the left-wing populist SP pleaded for a Europe that does not work at the behest of capital. The party sees the current EU as an entity under the tutelage of international economic elites. Despite the party’s criticism of the current EU model, it is less Eurosceptic than the other populist radical-right parties (SP, 2024). Unlike in other European countries, such as France, where parties such as La france insoumise (LFI) are able to mobilize left-wing opposition to EU integration, there appears to be less room for a left-wing Eurosceptic party among left-wing voters in the Netherlands. At the same time, the populist radical right has solidified the Eurosceptic vote among right-wing voters.

The EU elections were important for Dutch politics for several reasons. First, the elections tentatively confirmed the nascent government coalition. The fact that the PVV was the second-largest party in the EU elections confirmed its credibility among a sizeable number of Dutch voters. Historically, voter turnout among PVV voters at European elections tends to be relatively low. Actually, 56% of those who voted PVV in the 2023 national elections did not vote in the EU elections (NOS, 2024). Despite this lower turnout among PVV voters in comparison with the 2023 national elections, the party emerged as the second-largest party in the European elections. The BBB, a relatively new party, obtained two seats. The populist members of the nascent coalition thus appeared to have passed the litmus test of the European elections.

The populists go to Brussels

What do these election results imply for the positions of the Dutch populists within the EU and, more specifically, within the EP? First, the combination of results of the Dutch national elections and the European elections positions the Netherlands as a more Eurosceptic country than under previous Dutch governments. The incoming Schoof I government has not called for Nexit. However, at the same time, the incoming government has set its mind on demanding special considerations from Brussels, particularly regarding asylum and migration policies, climate policies and the plight of Dutch fishermen.

The role that the Dutch populists will play in Brussels is less clear. The BBB, although a small party, intends to sit with the European People’s Party (EPP). Even though the BBB is an agrarian–populist party, its roots are in the Christian democratic tradition. The degree to which the party will be able to influence the more conservative and more climate-sceptical forces within the EPP remains uncertain.

The influence of the PVV depends in part on the degree to which the populist radical right can form a cohesive group within the EP. Geert Wilders has long had a compelling international reputation among other radical-right populists in Europe, ranging from Orbán in Hungary and Salvini in Italy to Le Pen in France. At the time of writing, the most recent developments have seen the PVV joining Orbán’s newly formed EP group, Patriots for Europe (PfE), whereas, in the last parliament, it belonged to the Identity and Democracy group.

At this moment, the extent to which the PfE will be able to have a tangible impact is uncertain: It does appear that the newly formed group has been able to attract the most important populist radical-right parties, holding 84 seats (at the time of writing this chapter) in the EU parliament. However, the question is: will the PfE group have enough influence to strike deals with, for example, the EPP and thus contribute to the PVV’s domestic success? Moreover, will this group continue to hold together, despite differences on issues such as relations with Russia? The PVV may find it difficult to walk the tightrope between an EU group that has pro-Russian tendencies within the group and forces within the Netherlands that are clearly pro-Ukraine, especially given the PVV’s allies in the new Schoof I government.

In general, the future impact of the Dutch populists in Europe, in particular that of the PVV, is likely to be felt via the intergovernmental route: because of its weight in the new, more Eurosceptic, government coalition, its impact will resonate through meetings within the institutions where member states dominate. Nevertheless, it is also possible that the PVV will play a decisive role within the PfE group in the EP. The PVV is one of the leading actors within the current Dutch government, despite its playing a typical populist strategy by placing one foot in the cabinet and one foot in the parliament (Zaslove, 2012). Nevertheless, the strength and influence that the PVV has within the current Dutch government may strengthen its influence within the PfE in Europe.

 

(*) Bertjan Verbeek is Professor of International Relations at the department of political science of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His research focuses on international organizations and foreign policy decision-making.

(**) Andrej Zaslove is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the department of political science of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His research examines populism and political parties, focusing on measuring populism (citizens’ attitudes), as well as populism and democracy, populism and gender and the influence of populism on party systems.

Together, the two authors have published extensively on the relationship between populism and foreign policy. See, for instance, Bertjan Verbeek and Andrej Zaslove, ‘Populism and Foreign Policy’. In Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (eds), Oxford Handbook of Populism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 384–405.

 

References

BBB (2024). BBBeter Nederland. Er staat veel op het spel. Verkiezingsprogramma Europees Parlement 2024–2029. https://boerburgerbeweging.nl/europese-verkiezingen/#verkiezingsprogramma-ep-2024

De Jonge, Léonie, Matthijs Rooduijn, & Andrej Zaslove (forthcoming 2024). The Evolution of Populism in Dutch Politics. In Sarah De Lange, Tom Louwerse, Paul ‘t Hart, and Carolien van Ham (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

European Parliament (2023). 2024 European elections: 15 additional seats divided between 22 countries (13 September 2023). https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230911IPR04910/2024-european-elections-15-additional-seats-divided-between-12-countries

FvD (2024). Verkiezingsprogramma Europese Verkiezingen 2024https://dnpprepo.ub.rug.nl/87863/1/FVD%20Verkiezingsprogramma%20EP%202024.pdf

France 24 (2024). Far-right party leaders meet in Prague ahead of EU vote (25 April 2024). https://www.france24.com/en/20190425-far-right-party-leaders-meet-prague-ahead-eu-vote

GroenLinksPvdA (2024). Ons Europese Verkiezingsprogramma. https://groenlinkspvda.nl/verkiezingsprogramma-europa/

JA21 (2024). Vrijheid door Vrijhandel Voor een EU die werkt voor Nederland. https://stem.ja21.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Verkiezingsprogramma-EP24_A4_final-klein.pdf

Meijers, Maurits J., and Andrej Zaslove (2021). Measuring populism in political parties: Appraisal of a new approach. Comparative Political Studies, 54(2), 372–407.

Mudde, Cas (2024). ‘“De Vrienden van Wilders”; een hypocriete en gevaarlijke campagne’, StukRoodVlees (21 May 2024).  https://stukroodvlees.nl/de-vrienden-van-wilders-een-hypocriete-en-gevaarlijke-campagne/

NOS (2024). Groot deel kiezers coalitiepartijen bleef thuis bij Europese verkiezingen (7 June 2024). https://nos.nl/collectie/13972/artikel/2523459-groot-deel-kiezers-coalitiepartijen-bleef-thuis-bij-europese-verkiezingen

PVV (2024). Nederland op 1, https://www.pvv.nl/images/2024/EP/PVV-Verkiezingsprogramma-EP-2024.pdf

SP (2024). Mensen voorop, niet het kapitaal. Verkiezingsprogramma SP Europese verkiezingen 2024. https://www.sp.nl/sites/default/files/verkiezingsprogramma_sp_ep2024.pdf

Verbeek, Bertjan, and Andrej Zaslove (2016). Italy: a case of mutating populism? Democratization, 23(2), 304–323.

 

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Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are seen at the conclusion of a political meeting for the Rassemblement National party in Marseille on March 3, 2024. Photo: Obatala-photography.

A Tipping Point for Far-Right Populism in France

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Please cite as:
Ivaldi, Gilles. (2024). “A Tipping Point for Far-Right Populism in France.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0070

 

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Abstract

The 2024 French European election took place against the backdrop of an economic and cost-of-living crisis in a context marked by global uncertainty arising from the war in Ukraine, social unrest and deep political discontent with President Emmanuel Macron. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) emerged as the big winner with 31.4% of the vote, while Macron’s Renaissance list trailed far behind at 14.6%. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing populist La France Insoumise (LFI) won 9.9%, reflecting current internal dissent within the party and deep ideological divisions exposed by the Israel–Hamas war. National issues dominated the electoral agenda in June. Populist voting across both sides of the political spectrum was strongly fuelled by political discontent with Macron, making the 2024 European elections primarily a ‘second-order’ national election. A crucial test for Emmanuel Macron, the outcome of the European election led to the decision by the incumbent president to call a snap legislative election. The election confirmed the electoral strength of the RN; however, it showed the revitalization of the Republican Front against the far right, which blocked Le Pen’s party from winning an absolute majority, delivering instead a hung parliament split into three blocks.

Keywords: European elections; populism; France; Le Pen; Zemmour; Mélenchon

 

By Gilles Ivaldi* (Sciences Po Paris-CNRS (CEVIPOF))

Background

The 2024 French European election took place against the backdrop of the economic and cost-of-living crisis in a context marked by global uncertainty arising from the war in Ukraine, social unrest and deep political discontent with President Emmanuel Macron.

The European election showed substantial gains by populist parties, particularly on the right of the political axis, with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) emerging as the big winner at 31.4% of the vote. The outcome of the European election led to the decision by Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly. The snap election that immediately followed confirmed the electoral strength of the RN; however, it showed the revitalization of the traditional Republican Front (Front Républicain) against the far right by both parties and voters, which had been significantly weakened in the 2022 legislative election. This revival blocked Le Pen’s party from winning an absolute majority, delivering a hung parliament split into three blocks, which more generally reflected the shape and increasing polarization of the French party system since 2017.

This chapter examines the strategies and performances of populist parties and the array of economic, cultural and political factors behind the rise in support for populism in France, particularly on the right of the political spectrum. Based on survey data, the analysis suggests that the 2024 French European election was primarily a ‘second-order’ national election fought on domestic issues, in which voters on both sides of the populist spectrum essentially expressed their political dissatisfaction with the incumbent president.

A topography of populism in France

In Western Europe, populism is predominantly found in the radical left and radical right (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2018). Reflecting such diversity, three main parties currently dominate the populist scene in France, namely Marine Le Pen’s RN and Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête on the right of the political spectrum, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) on the left.

The RN exemplifies the typical radical right-wing variant of populism, operating on its core defining features of nativism and authoritarianism (Mudde, 2007; Pirro, 2022). The 2024 European campaign led by its popular young leader Jordan Bardella emphasized typical RN nativist policies calling for a ‘stop to the immigration flood by controlling borders and expelling illegal immigrants’ and for ‘defence of the security and civilizational values of the French through zero tolerance and the deportation of foreign delinquents and Islamists.’

Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the RN has embraced ‘social populism’, namely, a mix of egalitarian social protection and economic nationalism (Ivaldi 2023a). In the 2022 presidential election, this move allowed her to exploit the Russia–Ukraine War-related issues of energy and rising prices among working- and lower-middle-class voters most hit by the crisis (Ivaldi 2023b). The cost of living was again a key issue in the RN’s communication strategy in the 2024 European election, where the party pledged to ‘lower electricity bills’ and ‘reject all European taxes on energy’. Meanwhile, the party continued its economic nationalist agenda, declaring it would ‘prioritize French companies in public procurement’. Riding the wave of discontent among French farmers, the RN also pledged to ‘put an end to punitive ecological policies and fight unfair competition’ to protect farmers’ interests.

Euroscepticism has been a central feature of the FN/RN in France since the mid-1990s (Hainsworth et al., 2004), tapping into a wide range of institutional, economic and cultural issues (Ivaldi, 2018a). Since 2017, the RN has moderated its positions and abandoned its previous policy of ‘Frexit’, adopting, however, a more ambiguous stance vis-à-vis the EU and de-emphasizing European issues to increase its appeal to moderate voters. The RN’s 2024 campaign reiterated the call for ‘a Europe of nations against Macron’s Europe’ while pledging to ‘put an end to European Union enlargement’ and preserve France’s ‘sovereignty and right of veto’ so that ‘no decisions could be made contrary to France’s vital interests.’

Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête shows a populist radical-right profile similar to the RN’s (Ivaldi, 2023a). A well-known political commentator, columnist and author, Zemmour entered national politics at the 2022 presidential election, making nativism and anti-Muslim rhetoric a centrepiece of his presidential bid. In 2024, the Reconquête campaign led by Marion Maréchal, a former member of the RN and Marine Le Pen’s niece, exhibited the central ideological tenets of nativism and authoritarianism alongside populism and Euroscepticism. The manifesto called for a halt to ‘the Islamization of Europe’ and pledged to erect a ‘naval blockade against immigration in the Mediterranean’ while explicitly endorsing the extreme right-wing idea of ‘remigration’ by promising to deport all illegal immigrants, criminals and ‘foreign Islamists.’ Reconquête’s 2024 campaign was significantly hampered, however, by growing disagreement between Zemmour and Maréchal over party strategy and a possible rapprochement with the RN.

On the other hand, Mélenchon’s populist radical left LFI presents a universalistic profile, embracing a more socially inclusive notion of the people, which is essentially pitted against economic and political elites (Ivaldi, 2018b). LFI shows strong anti-establishment features, and its discourse and ideology illustrate radical left populist mobilization, which seeks to offer an alternative to the neoliberal hegemony. In June 2024, the campaign led by the party’s young leader, Manon Aubry, strongly opposed austerity and advocated economic redistribution and public spending.

LFI’s economic policies included higher taxes on capital, the expansion of public services, nationalizing the banking sector to fight speculation, raising the minimum wage and abolishing the 2023 pension reform to return the retirement age to 60. Additionally, the 2024 platform emphasized environmental issues and ecological transition policies, attesting to the more general ‘greening’ of the populist radical left in France since 2017. Like the RN, LFI has toned down its Euroscepticism in recent years, moving away from its previous call to leave the EU and that France should ‘disobey’ the European treaties to ‘preserve the national sovereignty of the French people’ (Ivaldi, 2018b).

LFI took a more radical course in the months before the election, however, reflecting Mélenchon’s ‘revolutionary’ strategy and the controversial stances taken by the party’s leadership concerning the Israel–Hamas war. Following the October 2023 attacks, Mélenchon came under fierce criticism for what was perceived as his ambiguous reaction to the events in Israel, declining to condemn Hamas as a terrorist group and adopting aggressive pro-Palestinian positions. Mélenchon and members of LFI were later accused of antisemitism and of fuelling political anger at Macron and the government while also targeting some of their allies in the newly formed left-wing alliance (New Ecological and Social People’s Union, NUPES) in parliament. Mélenchon’s strategy of radicalization caused enormous turmoil inside the party as prominent leaders such as François Ruffin openly expressed their criticism.

All three populist parties have made significant gains in recent national elections. The April 2022 presidential election saw a surge in electoral support for populism across the political spectrum (Perrineau, 2022). Le Pen won 23.2% of the presidential vote, coming in second place behind incumbent centrist President Emmanuel Macron (at 27.9%), progressing into the run-off where she received a record high 41.5%. In the first round, Zemmour made a significant breakthrough at 7% of the total votes cast. Finally, Mélenchon came in third place with 22% of the vote, taking the lead on the left from the once-dominant Socialist Party (PS).

In the subsequent legislative election of June 2022, the RN received 18.7% of the vote and 89 seats, by far the best result ever achieved by the far right in France, making the RN the largest parliamentary opposition. Mélenchon’s LFI was the dominant player within NUPES, which won a total of 26% of the vote and 157 seats, 75 of which were taken by the LFI.

The context of the 2024 EP elections in France

The 2024 French European election took place against the backdrop of the economic crisis and the rising cost of living in a context marked by global uncertainty arising from the war in Ukraine, social unrest and deep political discontent with President Emmanuel Macron.

Politically, the European elections were located halfway through Macron’s second presidency since April 2022, which had been significantly weakened by the loss of its absolute majority in the 2022 legislative election. Between 2022 and 2024, minority governments led by Élisabeth Borne and Gabriel Attal struggled to find agreements to pass legislation in an increasingly ideologically polarized parliament dominated by LFI and the RN. The Borne government was strongly criticized for repeatedly using the provisions of Article 49(3) of the Constitution, which allows bills to be passed without a vote. Political unrest culminated in March 2023 after the government used Article 49(3) to pass a highly unpopular law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Both LFI and the RN opposed the reform, which was overwhelmingly rejected by the French, resulting in mass demonstrations and strikes.

The new Attal government and Emmanuel Macron entered the 2024 election with low popularity ratings: in June, less than a quarter (24%) of the French said they ‘trusted the president to handle the country’s biggest problems’; the comparable figure for Prime Minister Attal was 29% (Elabe, 2024). The European election campaigns of both the RN and LFI tried and capitalized on such political discontent by making the election a referendum for or against Emmanuel Macron and the government, essentially emphasizing domestic concerns over European issues.

Economic fears clearly dominated the campaign, creating a propitious context for populist politics across the board. According to polls, no fewer than 54% of French voters said the cost of living and purchasing power would be important to their vote. Meanwhile, immigration emerged as a salient issue for another 44%, followed by law and order at 26% (CEVIPOF, 2024a). This salience reflected growing public concerns over Islamist terrorism and debates surrounding immigrant integration in France following the urban riots of summer 2023 throughout the country. In December 2023, a vote for a new restrictive immigration law marked a significant shift to the right by the government. The law was widely seen as emulating the nativist policies of the RN, some of which had been brought into the draft bill by the mainstream right, attesting to the radical right turn of the Républicains (LR) under the leadership of Éric Ciotti (Ivaldi, 2024).

Populist voting in the 2024 EP elections

The 2024 French European election saw a rise in electoral support for far-right populism. Turnout was 51.5%, representing a mere increase of about 1.4 points compared to five years earlier and very close to the European average (51.1%). Le Pen and Bardella’s RN emerged as the big winner at 31.4% of the vote (up 8 percentage points compared to 2019), taking 30 of France’s 81 seats in the European Parliament. Macron’s Renaissance list came in a distant second at 14.6%. Meanwhile, Mélenchon’s left-wing populist LFI won 9.9%, a gain of 3.6 percentage points on its previous result in the 2019 EP elections, which was, however, far lower than Mélenchon’s performance in the 2022 presidential election. To the left, LFI was outperformed by the socialist list led by MEP Raphaël Glucksmann in alliance with his Place Publique movement, which came third with 13.8%. Finally, the Reconquête list led by Maréchal received 5.5% of the vote and five seats, making its first entry into the European Parliament.

Polling data confirm that the mix of economic insecurity, immigration fears, and political discontent with Macron may have created a ‘perfect storm’ for far-right populism in the 2024 French European election. Economic grievances and issues have been important factors in the electoral revitalization of far-right populism in France since the early 2010s. Support for the FN has been fuelled by feelings of economic alienation mediated by cultural concerns over immigration and strong anti-elite sentiments (Ivaldi, 2022). In the 2024 EP election, support for the RN was primarily motivated by immigration (77%), the cost of living (67%), and law and order (40%). Similarly, immigration (89%) and security issues (58%) were paramount to Reconquête voters, reflecting the typical far-right agenda. In contrast, LFI voters said they were primarily concerned with the cost of living (61%), social inequalities (49%), and the environment (34%) (CEVIPOF, 2024a).

Polls indicate that the 2024 European election served as a referendum on Macron and the Attal government. Political protest and anti-incumbent sentiments were key to populist voting across the spectrum. While 39% of the French (36% in 2019) said they essentially voted to manifest their opposition to the president and the government, it was 53% among LFI voters, 54% in Reconquête, and no less than 68% among those who had turned to the RN (IPSOS, 2024a). Finally, polls showed a different trade-off between domestic and European issues across voters. Overall, 45% of the electorate said they voted based on domestic concerns, a proportion like the one observed in 2019 (43%). To the left, LFI voters were like the national average at 45%. On the other hand, national issues clearly dominated the electoral agenda of far-right populist voters, with 62% of Reconquête voters and nearly three-quarters (73%) of RN voters saying these issues had been decisive at the ballot box. In contrast, European concerns were paramount to over 80% of Renaissance, socialist, and ecologist voters (IPSOS, 2024a).

Such differences were reflected in attitudes towards Europe, which varied significantly across parties. Overall, only 22% of the French said they opposed European integration, with a majority (57%) saying they supported Europe but would like it to take a different course. Opposition to the EU was substantially stronger among Reconquête (42%) and RN (43%) voters. On the other hand, LFI voters showed more positive views of Europe, with only 16% expressing opposition to further integration (CEVIPOF 2024b).

With nearly a third of the vote, the RN list managed to attract voters across most socio-demographic groups. As in 2022, the RN closed the traditional radical-right gender gap (Durovic & Mayer, 2022), winning 32% and 30% of the vote among men and women, respectively. The Bardella list also did significantly better than the other parties among young voters under 25 years (25%). While consolidating its traditional working- and lower-middle-class constituencies – with no less than 54% of the vote among workers and 40% among white collars – the RN further widened its electoral base by making significant inroads in other occupational groups, winning 29% of the vote among technicians and associate professionals while also going neck-and-neck with the socialists among managers and professionals at 20% of the vote. Finally, the RN won no less than 29% of the vote among pensioners – up to 36% among those from a lower social strata background – thus making significant gains in a group traditionally more resilient to far-right populism in France (IPSOS, 2024b).

To the left, the LFI list led by Manon Aubry essentially overperformed among young voters, receiving a third of the vote (33%) among those aged 18–24 years and 20% among those aged 25–34 years. This result may reflect the strong position taken by LFI on the war in Gaza, which emerged as one of the main concerns in those age groups (IPSOS, 2024b). The salience of the Israel–Hamas conflict was also confirmed by the extremely high level of support (64%) for LFI among the small group of self-declared Muslims in polls (CEVIPOF, 2024a), in line with Mélenchon’s appeal to voters from an immigrant background. More generally, LFI voters showed higher average educational attainment than their RN counterparts, and Aubry’s list achieved a higher level of support amongst voters with a university degree (15%).

The snap legislative election

The outcome of the European election led to the unexpected decision by Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and call a snap election within three weeks despite anticipations of an RN victory and forecasts of a far-right absolute majority. Macron’s political gamble was seen as a strategic move to make parties and voters both face up to their own responsibilities in the event of an RN majority in parliament while also exposing the RN’s unpreparedness for government. Macron called upon the ‘silent majority of voters’ against the ‘disorder’ caused by radical parties (AFP, 2024), hoping to form a new centrist majority by aggregating the centre-left and centre-right against the immediate and tangible threat of the far right gaining power.

Within the extremely short pre-election period, tactical alliances were built across both sides of the political spectrum. Most notably, despite diverging positions on Europe, Gaza and Ukraine, the major parties of the left agreed to form a broad coalition dubbed the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), bringing together LFI, the Communist Party, the Greens and the Socialists together with Glucksmann’s Place Publique. While they had all competed individually in the European elections, the NFP member parties agreed to select single candidates (i.e., avoid running against one another) in almost all of France’s 577 constituencies, and there were few dissident left-wing candidates. The breakdown of NFP candidates showed that LFI remained the dominant force (229 candidates), followed by the socialists (175) and the Greens (92).

At the centre, Macron’s Renaissance movement rallied its previous allies in the outgoing parliament inside his Ensemble coalition, i.e., François Bayrou’s centrist Mouvement démocrate (MoDem) and Édouard Philippe’s centre-right Horizons. Further to the right, the 2024 legislative election saw a notable reshuffling of the sub-party system. Éric Ciotti, head of the Republicans, struck an electoral pact with the RN, eventually running a total of 62 candidates with the far right under the new À Droite (To the Right) banner. Other LR leaders vehemently opposed such a decision, including Laurent Wauquiez, a close ally of Ciotti and hardliner within the party. This resulted in bitter infighting and the attempt by LR to expel Ciotti, which was overturned by a Paris court before the election. The Republicans entered the legislative election significantly divided and weakened, running candidates in 305 constituencies.

The results of the first round of the June legislative election showed a surge in voter turnout (to 66.7%), a substantial increase (about 19 percentage points) from the previous 2022 election, reflecting both voter desire for change after seven years of Macron’s presidency, and growing fears of the far right getting closer to power. On election night, the RN was again the big winner, receiving 29.3 % of the vote – its best performance ever in a legislative election – to which one must add the 4% received by Ciotti’s À Droite candidates, giving a total of about a third of the total vote cast for the far right. RN candidates topped the polls in 297 out of 577 constituencies, and they could progress to nearly all the second-round run-offs. This result confirmed the geographical spread of the RN vote across all regions of France, which had already been observed in the European election.

Further to the right, the results of the snap election showed the electoral marginalization of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête, reflecting growing intra-party dissent and disagreement over party strategy between Zemmour and Maréchal. Ahead of the first round, Maréchal was expelled from the party together with two other vice presidents – Guillaume Peltier and Nicolas Bay – after she had initiated talks with the RN leadership and had publicly called for a union of the two far-right parties. Reconquête entered the election independently and fielded 330 candidates who collectively polled a mere 0.75 % of the vote in the first round, making Zemmour’s party politically irrelevant. To the left, the newly formed NFP came second at 28.5% and took the lead in 159 constituencies. Macron’s Ensemble coalition finished third with 21.8% of the vote cast, topping the polls in 70 constituencies, essentially in the western part of the country and the more bourgeois areas inside and around Paris.

Legislative run-offs were fought in the 501 constituencies where two or more candidates had surpassed the institutional threshold of 12.5% of registered voters to be allowed to progress into the second round. Between the two rounds, the traditional Republican Front – that is, the ad hoc alliances of parties and voters across the spectrum that coalesce whenever the RN is likely to win a decisive round – was revitalized, resulting in 217 candidates withdrawing from three-way races in their constituencies to reduce the chances of an RN victory.

The second round attested to the mobilization of voters against the far right. At 66.6%, voter participation rose to the highest level since the 1997 legislative elections (up from 53.8% in 2022). Between the two rounds, mass protests against the RN were a strong sign of growing public concern about the far right getting into power in France. The second round delivered a hung parliament divided into three blocks. The left-wing NFP secured the most seats after the second round, winning a total of 180, falling short, however, of the 289 seats needed for an overall majority. LFI lost its predominance inside the broad left-wing coalition, taking 72 seats, as opposed to 66 for the socialists and 38 for the Greens. Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance came third with 163 seats, down 87 seats from the already relative majority it had secured in the 2022 election.

The 2024 legislative election came as a disappointment for the RN after its historical first-round performance and the presence of its candidates in most second-round run-offs. With a total of 143 seats (including Ciotti’s À Droite MPs), Le Pen’s party fell well short of the absolute majority needed to form a government, although this represented a substantial increase in the total number of RN seats compared with 89 in the 2022 elections. Because of the Republican Front put forward by mainstream parties, the number of three-way run-offs featuring the RN and two other parties was reduced from 306 to 89, significantly impacting the outcome for the far right: the RN lost no fewer than 154 constituencies where it had taken the lead in the first round.

Other factors contributing to the RN’s electoral setback included the party’s poor credentials for government and the extreme right-wing profile of its candidates. The campaign exposed the RN’s unpreparedness for the government despite the Matignon Plan – essentially a list of candidates for all 577 constituencies in the National Assembly – put forward in haste by Bardella just before the first round. The election was punctuated with hesitations and U-turns on some of the party’s key economic and immigration policies, such as lowering the retirement age back to 60 and restricting access to public jobs for people with dual citizenship. Meanwhile, the media revealed that many of the RN candidates hastily brought to the campaign from the party rank-and-file had repeatedly posted racist, homophobic, pro-Putin, COVID-19 denial and anti-Semitic comments on social media, casting doubt about Le Pen’s claim that she had detoxified her party. Additionally, some RN candidates had links with violent ultra-nationalist organizations in France, and one of them was found to have a criminal record for armed robbery.

Discussion and perspectives

The 2024 legislative election has left France in a political deadlock, delivering a hung parliament split into three blocks. The outcome of the 2024 European and legislative elections have more generally reflected the shape and increasing polarization of French politics since 2017; that is, a weakened yet still resilient centrist block squeezed between two radical alternatives on the left (LFI) and right (RN) of the party system. While parties of the left have managed to somewhat overcome their ideological and policy divergences, electoral support for the left remains relatively low, casting doubt about the possibility of a credible left-wing alternative while also attesting to the shift to the right that has taken place in French politics, a trend seen in many other European countries.

With an ever more fragmented parliament and no stable government in sight, the outcome of the 2024 elections will undoubtedly prolong uncertainty and political instability in a context marked by social unrest, growing economic anxiety and public debt and deficit. Such uncertainty will likely fuel electoral support for populism across the political spectrum in the forthcoming months, as economic and cultural fears will continue to top the political agenda. Macron and his centrist party face the challenge of building ad hoc alliances across ideologically diverse parties to pass legislation to address such concerns. Meanwhile, both LFI and the RN will need to work on their policy credibility, organization and membership to try and establish themselves as viable alternatives in the 2027 presidential election.

 

(*) Gilles Ivaldi is researcher in politics at CEVIPOF and professor at Sciences Po Paris. His research interests include French politics, parties and elections, and the comparative study of populism and the radical right in Europe and the United States. Gilles Ivaldi is the author of De Le Pen à Trump: le défi populiste (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2019), The 2017 French Presidential Elections. A political Reformation? 2018, Palgrave MacMillan, with Jocelyn Evans. He has recently co-edited The Impacts of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Right-Wing Populism in Europe, European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), 2023, with Emilia Zankina. His research has appeared in journals such as Electoral Studies, the International Journal of Forecasting, Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales, French Politics, Revue Française de Science Politique or Political Research Quarterly.

 

References

AFP (2024) Macron defends surprise snap-election call as ‘most responsible solution’, 18 June, https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240618-macron-defends-surprise-snap-election-call-most-responsible-solution-france

CEVIPOF (2024a) Enquête électorale française Élections européennes – vague 6, Ipsos, Le Monde, Fondation Jean Jaurès et Institut Montaigne, June.

CEVIPOF (2024b) Enquête électorale française Élections européennes – vague 5, Ipsos, Le Monde, Fondation Jean Jaurès et Institut Montaigne, May.

Durovic, A. & Mayer, N. (2022) Wind of change? The reconfiguration of gender gaps in the 2022 French presidential election: The reconfiguration of gender gaps in the 2022 French presidential election. Revue française de science politique, 72, 463–484. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfsp.724.0463

ELABE (2024) Baromètre ELABE pour Les Échos, 13 June. https://elabe.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/20240613_les_echos_observatoire-politique.pdf

IPSOS (2024a) Comprendre le vote des Français, Enquête Ipsos pour France Télévisions, Radio France, France24/RFI, Public Sénat/LCP Assemblée Nationale, 6–7 June.

Ivaldi, G. (2018a) Contesting the EU in Times of Crisis: The Front National and Politics of Euroscepticism in France, Politics, 38(3): 278–294.

Ivaldi, G. (2018b) Populism in France, in Daniel Stockemer (ed.) Populism around the world: A Comparative Perspective, Cham: Springer, pp.27–48.

Ivaldi, G. (2022) Le vote Le Pen, in Perrineau, Pascal (dir.) Le Vote clivé. Les élections présidentielle et législatives d’avril et juin 2022, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble/UGA éditions, pp.153–164.

Ivaldi, G. (2023a) When far right parties compete: a case study of Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen in the 2022 French presidential election, French Politics, online first 13 July 2023.

Ivaldi, G. (2023b) The impact of the Russia-Ukraine War on right-wing populism in France, in Ivaldi, Gilles and Zankina, Emilia (Eds). (2023) The Impacts of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Right-Wing Populism in Europe. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). 8 March 2023. Brussels, p.141–154.

Ivaldi, G., Torner, A. (2023) From France to Italy, Hungary to Sweden, voting intentions track the far-right’s rise in Europe, The Conversation, 4 October, https://theconversation.com/from-france-to-italy-hungary-to-sweden-voting-intentions-track-the-far-rights-rise-in-europe-214702

Ivaldi, G. (2024) The Populist Radical Right Turn of the Mainstream Right in France, in The transformation of the mainstream right and its impact on (social) democracy, Policy Study, Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), April, pp.80–93.

Mudde, C. (2007) Populist Radical Right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2018) Studying Populism in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on the Contemporary and Future Research Agenda. Comparative Political Studies, 51(13), 1667–1693.

Perrineau, P. (2022) Le Vote clivé: Les élections présidentielle et législatives d’avril et mai 2022. Presses Universitaires de Grenoble.

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Sweden Democrats' Square Meeting in Umeå. Jimmie Åkesson speaks to the people on the city square where opposition left-wingers have formed a chain and protest in Umeå, Sweden on August 14, 2018. Photo: Shutterstock.

A Speed Bump in the Road or the Start of an Uphill Journey? The Sweden Democrats and the 2024 European Parliament Election Setback

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Please cite as:
Bolin, Niklas. (2024). “A Speed Bump in the Road or the Start of an Uphill Journey? The Sweden Democrats and the 2024 European Parliament Election Setback.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024.https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0085

 

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Abstract

Leading up to the 2024 European Parliament election, much attention was given to the anticipated gains of populist parties across Europe. While some populist parties made significant advances, the overall outcome was more moderate than expected. Sweden deviated from this general trend, witnessing gains for left-wing parties and a surprising setback for the populist radical right. The 2024 elections marked a historic decline for the Sweden Democrats, the first instance since their formation in 1988 that they regressed in comparison to previous national and European Parliament elections. This decline is particularly notable following their strong performance in the 2022 national elections, where they became Sweden’s second-largest party. This article examines these developments, drawing on existing research, media reports and exit polls, with a focus on the Sweden Democrats’ campaign strategies, election results and voter behaviour. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these election outcomes for both Swedish domestic politics and the broader European political landscape.

Keywords: radical right; populism; Sweden Democrats; European Union; elections, voting behaviour

By Niklas Bolin* (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden)

Introduction

The expectations for the European Parliament elections among parties to the right of the mainstream right were certainly high. Media forecasts were clear, proclaiming that ‘a populist wave surges’ (Vinocur, 2024) and ‘a far-right takeover of Europe is underway’ (Vohra, 2024). The question was not whether the disparate group of far-right parties would gain influence but how significant that influence would be. However, while the results must be seen as a success for these parties, it is probably more accurate to describe it as moderate rather than a landslide victory. While some parties – for example, the French National Rally, the Brothers of Italy and the Alternative for Germany – made significant gains, the development was more modest elsewhere.

Sweden was one country bucking the trend. Parties on the left made gains while parties on the right generally fared somewhat worse. Most surprisingly, it was a defeat for the populist radical right. The 2024 European Parliament election will go down in history as the first election ever where the Sweden Democrats regressed compared to the previous election. Until this point, the party was unique in the sense that in all national elections – both to the national and the European Parliament – since its formation in 1988, it had advanced compared to the previous election. The decline is even more remarkable given that the general expectation was for the party to continue its trend of success. Instead of repeating the achievement from the national parliamentary election in 2022, when it attracted more than 20% of the votes and became Sweden’s second-largest party for the first time, the party experienced a shock. On election night, it became clear that they were not only far behind the result of the 2022 national parliamentary election but also lost ground compared to the previous 2019 European election. Rather than continuing its surge, the party only managed to secure 13% of the votes, making them merely Sweden’s fourth-largest party.

Against this background, this chapter addresses party-political populism in Sweden in connection with the 2024 European Parliament election. Specifically, it describes and analyses the populist radical right Sweden Democrats, with a focus on the campaign, the results and voting behaviour. The article is based on previous research, media reports and exit polls.

Populist parties in Sweden

In a European comparison, the successes of party-political populism came late to Sweden. Except for the brief presence of New Democracy in the Swedish Parliament (the Riksdag) from 1991 to 1994, populist representation was absent until 2010, when the Sweden Democrats were first elected to the Riksdag. 

Since then, the Sweden Democrats have monopolized the position of the populist party in Sweden. Although it has occasionally been claimed that the socialist Left Party is populist, a consensus has emerged that the Sweden Democrats is the only Swedish party that unequivocally meets the criteria (Meijers & Zaslove, 2021; Rooduijn et al., 2023). Some believed the newly launched People’s List could become a new populist challenger. The movement, which adamantly rejected the designation of being a party, was founded just over a month prior to the election by a former Social Democratic MP known for winning a reality TV show and a sitting MEP from the Christian Democrats who had been removed from the party’s list. With decent name recognition, the People’s List initially received significant media attention. Interest quickly waned, and with only 0.6% of the votes, the People’s List is destined to become a small footnote in Swedish party history. The initiators announced shortly after the election that they would not continue their involvement with the movement (Rogvall & Nordenskiöld, 2024).

As the only relevant populist party, this article thus focuses on the Sweden Democrats. The party was founded by outright racist groups with neo-Nazi links (Larsson & Ekman, 2001). Because of this history, the party was completely shut out from co-operation with other parties on the national stage for many years due to a cordon sanitaire. This began to change before the 2018 election and, more explicitly, before the 2022 parliamentary election, when three of the centre-right parties expressed a more open stance towards the Sweden Democrats (Bolin et al., 2023). Despite an election outcome in 2022 where these parties lost ground, they managed, with the support of the Sweden Democrats, to regain control of the government after eight years of Social Democratic-led rule. With 20.5% of the votes as the country’s now second-largest party, the Sweden Democrats’ support was crucial for the new government. The party was also rewarded through a far-reaching co-operation agreement. Many observers suggested that the Sweden Democrats had significant influence over the agreement (Aylott & Bolin, 2023). The 2024 European Parliament election was thus the first election in which the Sweden Democrats participated while having formal influence over the government, serving as a potential test of how voters viewed the party’s collaboration with former adversaries from the establishment.

The party’s political profile and priorities resemble those of other parties in the populist radical right family (e.g., Jungar & Jupskås, 2014). Its main priorities have been a restrictive immigration policy and a tough stance on crime. Regarding the EU, the party long favoured exiting the EU. However, following the aftermath of Brexit and a surge in pro-EU attitudes among the electorate, the party moderated its criticism. Prior to the 2019 European Parliament election, the party dropped its demand for a referendum on EU withdrawal (Bolin, 2023a). Despite abandoning its hard Eurosceptic position, it remains the most EU-sceptical party in Sweden, possibly alongside the Left Party.

A key issue, similar to those faced by comparable parties in other EU countries, is the party’s stance on Russia. Despite having taken a stance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, other parties in Sweden have accused the Sweden Democrats of having an ambiguous attitude towards the Russian regime. Such attacks have not prevented the party from adopting, in turn, a critical stance towards several other similar parties, primarily within the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, precisely because they have shown a more openly friendly attitude towards the Putin regime (Bolin, 2023b).

The party succeeded in entering the European Parliament for the first time in 2014. One of the most decisive issues for the party has been how the Swedish public perceives its actions at the European level. This concern is particularly evident in the party’s group affiliation in the European Parliament, as there are fears of being tainted domestically by association with other populist radical right parties with extreme pasts and reputations (McDonnell & Werner, 2018). After the 2014 election, the Sweden Democrats applied for membership in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) but were not accepted. Instead, it was admitted into the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), which actively recruited MEPs from elsewhere after the Danish People’s Party left to join the more mainstream ECR (Bolin, 2015). However, a few years later, resistance to the Sweden Democrats decreased somewhat, leading the party to join its Nordic neighbours, the Danish People’s Party and the Finns Party, in the ECR just one year before the 2019 election (Johansson et al., 2024). Despite the Danish People’s Party leaving the group to join ID a few years later, the Sweden Democrats remained in the ECR for the remainder of the parliamentary term.

The election campaign

Over time, the Sweden Democrats have built up a highly effective communications department that has successfully attracted media and public attention. The communication has often been controversial. In a TV advertisement ahead of the 2010 election, for example, the party illustrated the need for economic prioritization by showing a group of niqab-clad women with strollers racing against an elderly woman with a walker to reach the benefit payment first (Bolin et al., 2022). And in 2020, when party leader Jimmie Åkesson travelled to the border between Turkey and Greece, he distributed flyers with the text ‘Sweden is full’ (Fridolfsson & Elander, 2021).

The campaign strategy in the 2024 European Parliament election initially followed previous patterns. A year before the election, the party leadership proposed a ‘referendum lock’, a law stipulating that all major transfers of power and demands for larger payments to the EU must first be approved in a referendum (Åkesson & Weimers, 2024). This move was seen by many as a way to assert the party’s position as the most EU-sceptical. The campaign continued to be characterized by opposition to further transfers of power to the EU. However, the main focus was consistently related to immigration, often with connections to crime. The party invested heavily in the slogan ‘My Europe builds walls’, a paraphrase of the former Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s statement during the 2015 refugee crisis that ‘My Europe does not build walls.’ The message appeared on the party’s campaign posters and YouTube channel, where it was accompanied by various dramatic videos showing people with seemingly foreign backgrounds engaging in violent protests or otherwise behaving in a disturbing manner. The message was clear: immigration creates problems, so Sweden and Europe need to close their borders.

The campaign initially had the intended effect of creating media attention around the party. The election campaign soon took a new turn when, about a month before the election, it was revealed that the party’s communications department hosted a so-called troll factory, where anonymous social media accounts spread disinformation and derogatory portrayals of other politicians. The revelation was condemned unanimously by all other parties, including those in the government that the Sweden Democrats were co-operating with. The party responded with a strong counterattack through a five-minute ‘speech to the nation’ on YouTube, where Åkesson claimed that the reporting and the following reactions were ‘a massive domestic influence operation by the collective left–liberal establishment’ (Sverigedemokraterna, 2024). Given the Sweden Democrats’ conventional approach of handling troublesome revelations by downplaying or ignoring the accusations, many were surprised by Åkesson’s strong counterattack. After the election, reports also emerged of rare internal criticism regarding how the party leadership handled the situation. It is plausible that the party’s handling of the crisis also contributed to some voters refraining from voting for the party. 

Possibly facilitated by the party’s increased confidence after being given formal influence for the first time, there were also tendencies to express certain controversial positions more openly than before. The party was, for example, once again criticized for its stance on Russia. This recurring discussion was reignited after Åkesson stated that there is an upper limit to how much support Sweden should give to Ukraine (Carlsson, 2024) and, perhaps even more so, after the party’s top candidate, Charlie Weimers, suggested that their own party group, ECR, should be open to co-operating with parties in the ID group, whose stance on Russia has been characterized as relatively friendly (Nordenskiöld, 2024). 

Åkesson also received criticism when, just days before the election, he claimed in an opinion piece that multiculturalism had led to a population replacement in Sweden (Åkesson, 2024). A reference akin to the well-known ‘Great Replacement’ theory within right-wing extremist and conspiratorial circles (Mudde, 2019), despite Åkesson himself having distanced himself from the concept just a year before the election.

The ‘demand side’ of populism

Unlike many other populist radical right parties, the Sweden Democrats failed to make gains in the 2024 European Parliament elections. As illustrated in Figure 1, this is an exceptional occurrence since the party had never previously lost ground compared to a preceding national election. Despite securing 13.2% of the votes and retaining its three MEPs, the party experienced a decline of just over 2 percentage points compared to the 2019 election. The contrast with the 2022 national parliamentary election, the Riksdag, underscores the magnitude of this setback.

The Sweden Democrats usually perform worse in the European Parliament elections than in the Riksdag elections. But even taking this into account, the result must be seen as a disappointment, especially since pre-election polls indicated a clear success for the party. Before the election, the question was whether the Sweden Democrats would succeed in becoming the country’s second-largest party. The images broadcast from the party’s election night event, when the exit poll results indicated that they had not only failed to surpass the Moderates but had also been overtaken by the Green Party, were almost of a party in shock.

Turning to the question of who voted for the party based on the exit poll (SVT, 2024), no major surprises emerge. The sociodemographic patterns from previous elections reappear. While 18% of men voted for the Sweden Democrats, only 9% of women did so—at the voter level, the Sweden Democrats are as many other similar parties still männerparteien (Harteveld et al., 2015). Age-wise, there is no clear profile even though the party performs relatively well among the youngest voters (18–21 years old), much like in the parliamentary election of 2022. The party is overrepresented among the unemployed (20%) and those receiving sickness or disability benefits (24%). The party’s voters are also relatively strong among those with the lowest education levels. Additionally, the party is underrepresented among voters who grew up outside Sweden. The relatively low voter turnout of 53.4%, a decrease of nearly 2 percentage points since 2019, and the fact that the party is overrepresented in some of the groups that typically vote to a lesser extent provide some indication of why the Sweden Democrats did not perform as well as it did in the 2022 parliamentary election.

Additional clues are given if we focus on voter mobilization and issue prioritization. It appears that the Sweden Democrats failed to mobilize their supporters to the polls. The party stands out from the others in that it had the highest proportion of voters (59 % compared to the average of 38%) who had decided which party to vote for before the start of the election campaign. Consequently, the party performed the worst relatively in mobilizing voters in the week leading up to the election (23% compared to the average of 40%). The impression that the party failed to convince its supporters to turn out is strengthened by the fact that the proportion of voters who actually voted for the party was similar to those who said they would vote for the party if there were a parliamentary election today, while other opinion polls on voting intentions for the Riksdag, both shortly before and shortly after the election, showed significantly higher support for the party. So rather than switching to other parties, some Sweden Democrats sympathizers chose to abstain from voting.

The fact that the party supports the incumbent government might partially explain the problem of mobilizing voters. However, the aforementioned troll factory scandal is likely a more plausible partial explanation for why some voters chose to stay home. Even more likely, it was an agenda effect. While crime prevention, one of the party’s more important issues, was just as important to voters in 2024 as it was in the 2019 European election, the party’s main issue, ‘refugees/immigration’, was less significant than it had been in both the previous European election and the Riksdag election of 2022. In the exit poll, it was only ranked 11 out of 17 when voters were asked about the importance they attributed to different issues in their choice of party. Only 36% of voters indicated that this issue was of very great importance, which can be compared to 67% for ‘peace in Europe’, 60% for ‘democracy in the EU’, and 53% for ‘climate’, issues not highly prioritized by the Sweden Democrats.

Similarly, the issue of ‘national independence’, closely related to the Sweden Democrats’ message of resistance to transferring more power to Brussels, decreased somewhat compared to the 2019 election and ranked low on voters’ priority list. At the same time, the party’s positioning as the most EU-sceptical seems to resonate with voters. Among respondents who want Sweden to leave the EU, a significant 54% voted for the Sweden Democrats, compared to 11% for the Left Party, the second Eurosceptic party. The survey also confirms that the European Parliament election is primarily a domestic issue for Sweden Democrats voters. 59% of the party’s voters stated that the Sweden Democrats’ efforts in Swedish politics were very important in their choice of party. The corresponding figure for other parties varied between 19 and 46%.

Implications for the future

The 2024 EP election was a serious blow to the self-image of the Sweden Democrats as the eternal election winners. The result was surprising. However, there is no overwhelming evidence that this is the beginning of the end. Rather, it is reasonable to consider the vote decline as an indication that the party will now face ups and downs like most other parties. Moreover, in many respects, the election took place during a perfect storm that resulted in the party’s underperformance. The political agenda was dominated by issues not prioritized by the Sweden Democrats. The troll factory revelations also overshadowed the campaign and, perhaps even more importantly, how the party mishandled this crisis. In addition, and most likely due to this mishandling, many potential voters opted for abstention.

For the Sweden Democrats, European elections are still second-order elections. What happens in European Parliament elections and in Brussels is important primarily insofar as it has repercussions on their reputation at home. Despite harsh condemnations from the Swedish government parties following the troll factory revelations, they seemed equally inclined to move on. After all, the government parties are entirely dependent on the support of the Sweden Democrats for their continued survival. Despite the electoral defeat in the European Parliament election, it is important to note that the party still holds three seats in the EP. Most likely, these will be used strategically to join the group that offers the best leverage for their domestic agenda. The party will continue to maintain its position as the most EU-sceptical party in Sweden and express opposition to further transfers of power and money to the EU. At least for now, the most reasonable interpretation of the party’s election results seems to be more of a temporary speed bump in the road rather than the start of an uphill journey.

 

(*) Niklas Bolin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden. His main research interests include parties and elections, with a specific focus on party organization, leadership, intra-party democracy, youth wings and radical right parties. He has published in high-ranking international journals, including the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics and West European Politics. E-mail: niklas.bolin@miun.se

 

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Flag of Finland and the European Union flag displayed in the European Council offices in Brussels, Belgium, on April 10, 2024. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis.

The Loss of the Populist Radical Right in the 2024 European Parliament Elections in Finland

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Please cite as:

Herkman, Juha. (2024). “The Loss of the Populist Radical Right in the 2024 European Parliament Elections in Finland.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0069

 

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Abstract

In the 2024 European Parliament (EP) elections, the populist radical-right Finns Party had a disappointing result; it came sixth nationally and lost 6.2% of the vote and one seat compared to the 2019 elections. The centre-right National Coalition (NC) party won the elections with 24.8% of the vote and four seats, but the real winner was the Left Alliance, which came second (17.3%) and gained three seats. The elections revealed voters’ deep distrust towards the government, in which the Finns Party supported significant austerity measures and cuts to public spending through its leader and finance minister, Riikka Purra. People’s fear of the rising far right in Europe was also a salient theme in campaign debates, which diminished the Finns Party’s support, alongside a low voter turnout.

Keywords: Election campaign; populist radical right; Finns Party; antagonism; government/opposition

 

By Juha Herkman* (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland)

Introduction

In Finland, one political party is commonly referred to as ‘populist’ – the Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset, which was initially called True Finns). However, depending on how populism is defined, other political parties and individual politicians may sometimes be described as being populist when they use provocative language, make unrealistic promises and encourage strong antagonisms (see Herkman, 2022). Therefore, the label ‘populist’ has occasionally been used to refer to liberal green or leftist actors and minor political parties with little or no representation in parliament. Here populism is understood as an affective process in which strong antagonisms are exploited to construct a united political group identity and movement mobilization as ‘the people’ (Laclau, 2005; Herkman, 2022). In this, no other parliamentary party than the Finns Party can be called ‘populist’ as such in Finland.

The Finns Party was established in 1995 as the successor of the Finnish Rural Party, an agrarian populist party created in 1959. The legacy of the Finnish Rural Party (SMP) has made the Finns Party a more normal political player compared to the populist parties of the Nordic countries (Herkman & Jungar, 2021). Under the leadership of Timo Soini (1997–2017), the Finns Party was a rather traditional populist party with an anti-elitist, nationalist and Eurosceptic agenda, as well as left-leaning economic policies. However, in the 2010s, Soini started flirting with actors opposed to immigration, and the party became very popular. Under the leadership of Jussi Halla-aho (2017–2021) and Riikka Purra (2021–present), the party has become a clear example of the European populist radical right, with a strong anti-immigration message and nativist ideology (Jungar & Jupskås, 2014; Norocel, 2016). Regarding economic policies, the party has also turned to the right. During the Soini’s period, the party followed the SMP legacy as a proponent of the disadvantaged groups as the ‘workers’ movement without socialism’, whereas the new leaders have promoted ‘welfare chauvinism’ and attacked the ‘exploiters of the welfare state as the enemy of the real hard-working people’ in the wake of immigration criticism (see Norocel, 2016).

The Finns Party has traditionally been the only openly Eurosceptic parliamentary party in Finland, although the Centre Party has also promoted Euroscepticism, especially in agricultural policies. However, compared to national elections, in which it has been the second or third largest party in Finland with 17.5–20.1% of the vote between 2011 and 2023, the Finns Party has had limited success in the EP elections (see Figure 1). In the 2019 EP election, the party obtained its best result to date, with 13.8% of the vote, coming in fourth among Finland’s parties. After these elections, the party joined the new Identity and Democracy group, but it moved to the more moderate European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in 2023 because they did not want to be identified with such political parties as France’s National Rally or Italy’s Lega, which were seen far too extreme in Finnish public discussions prior to the 2024 EP elections. In 2019–2024, the Finns Party had two members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Teuvo Hakkarainen and Laura Huhtasaari; as a country, Finland had 14 MEPs (as a result of Brexit, Finland now has 15 MEPs).

Because of geopolitics and its high dependence on European markets, Finland has been among the countries with the most favourable disposition towards the European Union (EU) in the twenty-first century. Based on the figure above, it seems that populist anti-immigration rhetoric and Euroscepticism do not take you as far in the EP elections as in national elections in Finland. In opinion polls, two-thirds of Finns have expressed positive thoughts about EU membership; however, only 22% of Finns Party supporters shared this attitude, and 58% of them were negatively disposed towards EU membership (YLE, 2023). In Finland, the voter turnout is much lower for the EP elections compared to national elections, which usually diminishes the share of the Finns Party’s vote because their voters channel the general disappointment and protest at politics and are therefore unsure of voting. In the 2019 EP elections, the turnout was 42.7% of the voter population living in Finland, whereas it was 72% in the 2023 parliamentary elections and 71.6% in the first round of the 2024 presidential elections.

The 2024 EP elections were very interesting in Finland because the Finns Party has been part of the right-wing government with the NC since 2023. Also, in April 2023, Finland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Since entering government, the Finns Party has diminished its populism and promoted very right-wing economic policies based on strong austerity measures and considerable cuts to public spending thanks to its leader, Riikka Purra, who is currently the finance minister. According to polls, support for the Finns Party has decreased remarkably after the parliamentary elections. In the spring of 2024, the relationship between the government and workers became very polarized, with numerous strikes taking place in response to the government’s actions.

The Finns Party has traditionally been the Eurosceptic party in Finnish EP elections, promoting an agenda opposed to the EU, immigration and climate change policies. However, concerning the war in Ukraine and NATO, the party has been in line with the position of the other major parties in Finland because the population strongly supports Ukraine and criticizes Putin’s Russia. On this point, the Finns Party differs from the European far right, which has often supported Putin’s regime and opposed NATO. Among the parties, the NC – which usually comes first in EP elections in Finland – has been the strongest supporter of the EU and NATO. The constellation of the NC and the Finns Party in government and the liberal Greens and the Left in opposition makes the analysis of the 2024 EP elections extremely interesting from the perspective of populism.

Populist antagonism in the election campaign

EP elections are often seen as second-order elections because, in many countries, national and local issues take precedence over European ones during campaigning (see Reif & Schmitt, 1980). This is not completely true in Finland: in the EP elections, European issues are highlighted, even though they are discussed from a national angle (Herkman et al., 2024).

In total, 232 candidates registered to campaign across all Finnish political parties before the deadline of 10 May 2024. The Finns Party fielded 20 candidates, as did the other major parties. In the campaign, the opinion polls ranked the Finns Party third with an estimated 16%–17% of the vote. The time available for campaigning was rather short – no more than three or four weeks. The parties launched their election manifestos about six weeks before the election.

The Finns Party’s manifesto, Päätetään itse (Let’s Make the Decisions Ourselves), was published on 24 April 2024. It was seen as milder compared to the past, as the party abandoned its long-term goal of withdrawing from the EU as ‘unrealistic’. The manifesto recognized the benefits of the EU for Ukraine and the Common Market, even though it saw the euro as damaging for Finland. However, the document contained several familiar themes, such as a strong anti-immigration agenda, according to which asylum seekers should be sent to third countries outside Europe. The manifesto also criticized what it saw as the EU’s unwise expansionism, failed income-transfer politics and eagerness to meddle in matters that are the preserve of the member states.

During the campaign, the Finns Party repeatedly criticized the recent regulation of plastic bottle tops as a striking example of ‘stupid’ EU policies, and it mocked the regulation in several comments, blog posts and YouTube videos. The previous leader and a key figure in the party, Jussi Halla-aho, argued in a campaign video that the EU makes decisions that do not consider national interests because European decision-makers are not interested in them. According to Halla-aho, a vote for the Finns Party would be a vote for the idea of Finland ‘making the decisions ourselves.’

The Finns Party’s status as a populist radical-right actor coloured the whole campaign of the 2024 EP elections in Finland, and an anti-populist struggle took place against them. The Social Democratic Party’s (SDP) campaign slogan and manifesto title was Jo riittää–pystymme parempaan (This Is Enough–We Can Make It Better) in reference to the challenges to European unity, equal rights, the rule of law and the fight against climate change posed by the far right. The Left Alliance and the Greens spoke of the same issues in their campaign manifestos, underscoring their anti-populist and anti-far-right credentials. Interestingly, the NC, the party of the prime minister and one of the companions of the Finns Party in government, chose security as the most important theme in their election manifesto, entitled Oikealla puolella Eurooppaa (On the Right Side of Europe), in addition to their traditional themes of the free market and innovation. In their program, security also meant strict border controls for asylum seekers that aligned with their long-standing Western orientation and support of NATO but also echoed the collaboration with the Finns Party in the governing cabinet.

Online candidate questionnaires have been popular in Finland for several decades, and all major media outlets publish them during an election campaign (Carlson & Strandberg, 2005). The most influential questionnaires are published by the public broadcaster YLE, the leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the oldest national commercial television channel MTV3, and national tabloid papers. The questions posed to candidates vary across the media outlets; however, their results are generally similar to the value map of YLE’s questionnaire (see Figure 2, YLE, 2024a). Even if there is some variation among the candidates in a party, the value map demonstrates the clear differences among the parties in terms of their economic (left–right axis) and value orientations (conservative–liberal axis).

The more a party is on the right of the map, the more it supports the free market, and vice versa. The higher a party is on the map, the more it holds conservative values, and vice versa. By looking at Figure 2, one can see that the Finns Party and the Christian Democrats are the most conservative actors in Finnish politics, as well as the strongest proponents of the free market. Only their companion in government, the NC, is more to the right economically, although this party is more moderate in terms of values, making it a traditional representative of the centre-right. In contrast, the Social Democrats and the Greens are very liberal and economically left-wing, together with the Left Alliance, which is even more to the left regarding the economy. The figure visually demonstrates how far apart the left–green camp and the Finns Party were in the 2024 EP election.

The same chasm was evident in the election debates aired by the major national television channels. Whereas the most important topic in the 2019 EP elections was climate change, which explains the success of the Greens at the time (Herkman et al., 2024: 103), in the 2024 elections, security was the key theme. This was due to the war in Ukraine and Russia’s influence on asylum seekers’ crossings on Finland’s eastern border. As mentioned above, the support for Ukraine in Finland has been almost unanimous among the country’s parties. Stricter border controls as a result of Russian operations have been supported even by the left–green parties, even though they have made some criticism concerning human rights. The focus on security made the Finns Party the agenda setter during the 2024 EP election campaign.

Despite this, the Finns Party was forced onto the defensive in other areas. Due to the predicted victory of the far right across the continent and its consequences for the EU, the media and the left–green parties constantly discussed these issues on the air. The Social Democrats based their campaign on attacking the far right for its damaging influence on European unity, the support for Ukraine, human rights, climate change policies and the principle of the rule of law. The Left Alliance and the Greens attacked the Finns Party on immigration and environmental issues, accusing it of representing the far right. The NC supported the government’s security policies, developed with the Finns Party, but it tried to keep out of the clash between the liberal opposition and the far right. In this situation, the Finns Party remained a ‘fringe populist movement’ (Herkman & Palonen, 2024: xxix).

The leader of the Finns Party, Riikka Purra, who is also the finance minister, had become a symbol of the government’s austerity policies, which created problems for the party during the campaign debates. Even though the party leaders tried to hold back in the debates, some party members had a more aggressive stance. For example, a well-known Finns Party MP, Sebastian Tynkkynen, used much more provocative rhetoric on immigration than Purra. This division of labour, according to which the leaders appear more moderate when there is a large audience while others are more aggressive in their communications with radical supporters, is typical of the populist radical right (Herkman, 2022: 77).

The populist radical right has often been seen as the political force that benefits the most from social media because these tools help them to use the double-speech strategy mentioned above, bypass journalistic scrutiny and appeal to hardcore far-right supporters (e.g., Krämer, 2017). The Finns Party has also been successful in its social media use, from Halla-aho’s and Soini’s blog posts to the more recent use of TikTok and Instagram by its MPs. Tynkkynen has a popular YouTube channel and successfully used Facebook in his campaigning. However, a study of Twitter use during the 2019 EP elections found that the most active tweeters were from the liberal, pro-EU camp and that Finns Party members mostly retweeted other people’s content and commented aggressively on it (Herkman et al., 2024). During the 2024 EP elections, Palonen and Jokinen (2024) systematically monitored social media campaigns. According to them, the Finns Party was not particularly active. Social media debates focused on attacking the government, of which the Finns Party is a member.

Surprising election results

In Finland, the 2024 EP elections were held on 9 June, but there was an advance voting period between 29 May and 4 June. The electoral district was the whole country for the 15 MEPs elected from Finland, who were chosen with the d’Hondt method. Some hoped the turnout would increase from the previous elections, and there was a significant increase in advance voting. However, in the end, the turnout was just below that of 2019, with 42.4% of those eligible in Finland casting their votes. The results surprised everyone because they differed radically from the polls, which are usually very reliable in Finland (see Figure 3).

As predicted, the NC took first place in the elections with 24.8% of the vote, gaining a couple of percentage points more than the polls had predicted and increasing its seats from three to four. The biggest surprise was the Left Alliance, which came in second with 17.3% of the vote and three seats (previously, they had only one). The Social Democrats were third (14.9%). The Finns Party was the most obvious loser, coming in sixth (7.6%), having taken 13.8% of the vote and fourth place in the 2019 elections.

Overall, it seems that the government/opposition divide remarkably affected the election results. Although the prime minister’s party (the NC) came first, the opposition was arguably much more successful. The Left Alliance, SDP, Centre Party and Greens gained nine seats combined, whereas the NC, Finns Party and Swedish Folk Party obtained only six. Therefore, the 2024 EP elections in Finland reflected the voters’ dissatisfaction with the government’s policies. This dissatisfaction was evident not only in the decline of the Finns Party but also in the success of the liberal left–green bloc.

The media made sense of these surprising results in several ways. The main explanation for the victory of the Left Alliance was the remarkable success of its leader, Li Andersson, a 37-year-old female politician who had already attracted positive attention during Finland’s presidential elections in early 2024. Andersson has been a popular figure beyond party lines. In the EP elections, she alone received an astonishing 13.5% of the vote, and she brought two other party members to the EP with their relatively modest percentages. The defeat of the Finns Party was explained by their participation in government, especially that of their leader, Purra, who has become a symbol of painful cuts to public spending. Also, the low voter turnout may harm the Finns Party, whose voters are unsure about voting and prefer voting in the parliamentary and local elections – an effect of the Euroscepticism promoted by the party.

The Finns Party did not have previous MEPs as candidates because Laura Huhtasaari moved from the European to the national parliament after the 2023 parliamentary elections. Also, the party did not accept its previous MEP, Teuvo Hakkarainen, as their candidate for 2024 because he had received significant negative attention for being very passive and incompetent. However, Hakkarainen campaigned as an unaffiliated candidate, and he received a significant number of votes, which also diminished the Finns Party’s share. Interestingly, the party’s most-voted candidate and only MEP for 2024–2029 was Sebastian Tynkkynen, who adopted a more provocative stance during the campaign compared to party leaders.

Finns Party voters’ social and demographic characteristics have changed over the years. Initially, the party was supported by blue-collar workers, the unemployed and the disadvantaged. Today, its voters are mostly middle-class individuals and small entrepreneurs. This change has been due to the party’s shift from the left to the right. In recent elections, its voters have come from average socioeconomic backgrounds, with a clear male preponderance (Isotalo et al., 2024). In the 2024 EP elections, the party received votes from all parts of Finland, but it lost its position as the most popular party in the northern and eastern parts of the country to the Centre Party. Traditionally, the latter dominated these provinces, but it lost them to the Finns Party in the 2023 parliamentary elections (YLE, 2024b).

Conclusion

The 2024 EP elections were surprising in Finland. Despite the predictions, there was no victory for the populist radical right. The Finns Party obtained about half of the votes they won in the 2019 EP elections and only a third of those they received in the 2023 parliamentary election. The real winner was the Left Alliance with its leader, Li Andersson. This result revealed the people’s dissatisfaction towards the government and the Finns Party’s leader and finance minister, Riikka Purra, who has become a symbol of strict austerity and cuts to public spending.

However, even though the populist radical right failed, the overall context of the election was populist due to the strong antagonism between the Finns Party and the liberal left–green bloc (Herkman & Palonen, 2024, p. xxx). The Finns Party was backed into a corner due to its role in government, which all the opposition parties challenged. The most successful Finns Party candidate, Sebastian Tynkkynen, represented the provocative and radical faction of the party. Therefore, it seems that populism lives on in the anti-hegemonic challenger, whose approach did not help the Finns Party in the 2024 EP elections. Tynkkynen will join the ECR group in EP and continue critical activity on his social media channels. He announced that he would recruit assistants for social media campaigns during his MEP career to make the Finns Party voters aware of what is going on in the EU (YLE, 2024c).

 

(*) Juha Herkman (PhD) is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has studied, among other things, the relationship between populism and media, and he has published extensively on the topic in academic articles. Herkman is an author of the book A Cultural Approach to Populism (2022, Routledge) and editor of the book Populism, Twitter and the European Public Sphere: Social Media Communication in the EP Elections 2019 (2024, Palgrave) together with Emilia Palonen. E-mail: juha.herkman@helsinki.fi

 

References

Carlson, T., & Strandberg, K. (2005). The 2004 European parliament election on the web: Finnish actor strategies and voter responses. Information Polity, 10 (3–4), 189–204. DOI: 10.3233/IP-2005-0075

Election Statistics (2024a) Vaalien tieto – ja tulospalvelu. Oikeusministeriö. https://tulospalvelu.vaalit.fi/

Election Statistics (2024b). Europarlamenttivaalit 2024. Oikeusministeriö. https://tulospalvelu.vaalit.fi/EPV-2024/index.html

Herkman, J. (2022). A Cultural Approach to Populism. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003267539

Herkman, J., & Palonen, E. (2024). Introduction: European public sphere, populism and Twitter. In J. Herkman & E. Palonen (eds.) Populism, Twitter and the European Public Sphere: Social media communication in the EP elections 2019(pp. xix–xliv). Palgrave. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-41737-5

Herkman, J., Sibinescu, L., & Palonen, E. (2024). Finland: Populist polarisation of the Finnish political communication. In J. Herkman & E. Palonen (eds.) Populism, Twitter and the European Public Sphere: Social media communication in the EP elections 2019 (pp. 85–113). Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41737-5_4

Herkman, J., & Jungar, A-C. (2021). Populism and media and communication studies in the Nordic countries. In E. Skogerbø, Ø. Ihlen, N. Nørgaard Kristensen & L. Nord (eds.) Power, Communication, and Politics in the Nordic Countries (pp. 241–261). Nordicom. DOI: 10.48335/9789188855299-12

Isotalo, V., Sipinen, J., & Westinen, J. (2024). Sukupuolikuilu arvoissa ja puoluevalinnassa. In E.- Kestilä-Kekkonen, L. Rapeli & P. Söderlund (eds.) Pääministerivaalit polarisaation aikana: Eduskuntavaalitutkimus 2023 (pp. 245–274). Oikeusminiteriö. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-400-875-4

Jo riittää – Pystymme parempaan (2024). Sosialidemokraattien eurovaaliohjelma. Sosialidemokraatit. https://www.sdp.fi/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/sdp-n-eurovaaliohjelma-2024.pdf

Jungar, A-C., & Jupskås, A. R. (2014). Populist radical right parties in the Nordic region: A new and distinct party family? Scandinavian Political Studies, 37 (3), 215–238. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9477.12024

Krämer, B. (2017). Populist online practices: The function of the Internet in right-wing populism. Information, Communication & Society, 20 (9), 1293–1309. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1328520

Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Polity.

Norocel, O. C. (2016). Finland: From agrarian to right-wing populism. In T. Aalberg, F. Esser, C. Reinemann, J. Strömbäck & C. de Vreese (eds.) Populist political communication in Europe (pp. 42–53). Routledge.

Oikealla puolella Eurooppaa (2024). National Coalition Party’s EU election program 2024. https://www.kokoomus.fi/national-coalition-partys-eu-election-program-2024/?lang=en

Palonen, E., & Jokinen, H. (2024). HEPPslaining the EP2024 elections. Seminar at the University of Helsinki on 12 June 2024. https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/emotions-populism-and-polarisation/news-events/heppsplaining-the-european-parliamentary-elections-results-in-2024

Päätetään itse (2024). Perussuomalaisten eurovaaliohjelma 2024. Perussuomalaiset. https://www.fsd.tuni.fi/pohtiva/ohjelmalistat/PS/1540

Reif, K., & Schmitt, H. (1980). Nine second-order national elections – A conceptual framework for the analysis of European election results. European Journal of Political Research, 8 (1), 3–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.1980.tb00737.x

YLE (2023). Suomalaisten EU-myönteisyys on yhä ennätystasolla. https://yle.fi/a/74-20030707

YLE (2024a). Näin EU-vaaliehdokkaasi sijoittuu arvokartalle. https://yle.fi/a/74-20090715

YLE (2024b). Eurovaalit 2024: Tulospalvelu. https://vaalit.yle.fi/epv2024/tulospalvelu/fi/

YLE (2024c). Sebastian Tynkkynen lupaa viestiä somessa Brysselistäkin – entistäkin isommalla vimmalla. https://yle.fi/a/74-20093110

 

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Several people during a rally calling for the contra la amnistía resignation of Pedro Sanchez, at Plaza de Cibeles, on March 9, 2024, in Madrid, Spain. Photo: Oscar Gonzales Fuentes.

Euroscepticism and Populism on Europhilic Soil: The 2024 European Parliament Elections in Spain

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Please cite as: 
Marcos-Marne, Hugo. (2024). “Euroscepticism and Populism on Europhilic Soil: The 2024 European Parliament Elections in Spain.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0084

 

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Abstract

This chapter deals with the association between radicalism, populism and Euroscepticism in the context of the 2024 European elections. It first examines the electoral platforms of leading political parties and shows that Eurosceptic ideas, while not highly prevalent, are more common among forces of the radical right. It also suggests that, as second-order theories expect, national issues dominated the electoral campaign for the European Parliament (EP) in Spain. Second, public opinion data is used to describe the general state of attitudes towards the EU and their association with voting for different political parties. The main results from this section are evidence that voters of radical-right parties are more critical of the EU. They also underline a potential reconfiguration of the radical-right space that now includes Vox and a new anti-establishment, outsider formation, The Party is Over (Se Acabó La Fiesta, SALF).

Keywords: Euroscepticism; populism; radical-right; ideology; Spain

 

By Hugo Marcos-Marne* (Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Salamanca, Spain)

Introduction

The 2024 European Parliament (EP) elections in Spain took place against a backdrop of political polarization and instability. The general elections in July 2023 resulted in a fragmented parliament, requiring the candidate from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE), Pedro Sánchez, to secure the support of eight different parties and coalitions to be re-elected prime minister. The coalition supporting Sánchez, which included peripheral nationalist parties heavily criticized by right-wing forces, only intensified the existing trends of polarization (Parker, 2022). Political discussions often included accusations of lawfare, insults, and questioning of the government’s legitimacy to a scale not seen before (Jones, 2024). It is no surprise that more than 75% of the population defined the political situation as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’, according to data gathered in June 2024 by the Spanish Centre of Sociological Research (CIS) (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2024c).

The number and relevance of ongoing national-level political issues often sidelined European ones during the 2024 campaign. Topics recurrently discussed included the amnesty law applied to events referring to the independentist movement in Catalonia between 2012 and 2023, alleged corruption scandals around Sánchez and the PSOE, and international issues not directly related to the European Union (EU), such as Spain’s recognition of the Palestinian State and a diplomatic incident with the Argentinian president Javier Milei. Analysts widely agreed that the electoral campaign was framed as a referendum against Sánchez by the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and far-right Vox (Kennedy & Cutts, 2024). Still, European issues appeared during the campaign, and special attention was given to the potential success of the radical right and its influence on EP alliances. Relevant in this regard was the emergence of a new anti-establishment, outsider formation in Spain, The Party is Over (Se Acabó La Fiesta, SALF), led by the former political adviser and alt-right influencer Luís Pérez (known as Alvise Pérez). The Spanish party system, once depicted as immune to the radical right (Alonso & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2015), included two genuinely radical-right contenders for the EP elections in 2024.

Building upon this background, this chapter focuses on the association between Euroscepticism, radicalism and populism before and during the European elections campaign in Spain. For that, it uses secondary sources and public opinion data from the CIS (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2024b; 2024c). The main results suggest that Euroscepticism was comparatively low in Spain both on the demand and supply side, although it was stronger among radical-right parties and their supporters (see Llamazares & Gramacho, 2007). They also evidence a potential re-composition of the radical-right space with the competition between Vox and SALF, the latter with a more heterogenous voter profile regarding self-positioning on the left–right scale and an even stronger impugning discourse towards mainstream politics.

Euroscepticism and populism in Spain

Spain is depicted as a Europhilic country. Citizens and parties had always had positive perceptions of the EU until 2008 (Powell, 2003; Real-Dato & Sojka, 2020; Vázquez García et al., 2010), and widespread critical positions among the public disappeared with the more negative consequences of the crisis (Gubbala, 2023). In April 2024, the CIS gathered data on attitudes towards the EU (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2024a). This report showed that Spaniards acknowledged the importance of the EU (more than 82% of the respondents thought that EU decisions matter a lot or quite a lot for the life of the Spaniards) and considered that EU membership had been more positive than not for salaries, employment opportunities, culture, development of less developed regions, business opportunities, and the relevance of Spain in world affairs (this was not the case only for one item, the price of consumption goods). In fact, large majorities supported strengthening EU common foreign policy, creating a European army, having a common policy of migration and asylum, harmonizing taxes, having a common policy of rights and obligations, and economically contributing to creating a European welfare state (Table 1).

Table 1. Percentage of respondents in favour or against key EU policies and actions

  In favour% Against%
Strengthen European common foreign policy  83.3 13.4
Creating a European army  63.5 32.7
Having a European common policy of migration and asylum 78.1 19.2
Harmonizing taxes 62.9 29
Having a common policy of rights and obligations  87.1 9.9
Economically contribute to creating a European welfare state  80.7 16.5

Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (2024a)

Nevertheless, post-2008 outcomes included a comparatively more Eurocritical party system with the emergence of Podemos and especially Vox. While Podemos mostly targeted neoliberal policies at the EU level, Vox included more explicit references against the EU as a supranational organization, which could have attracted voters who oppose the European integration process (Marcos-Marne, 2023). Data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) confirm that both PSOE and PP had a favourable/strongly favourable position towards EU integration, Podemos had an opinion between neutral and somewhat positive, and Vox had a somewhat opposed one. The most critical party in Spain, Vox, still ranks higher in EU support than other parties of the radical-right family, such as the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), the French Rassemblement National (RN), or the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Hooghe et al., 2024). The position of the recently created SALF remains unclear because the candidature did not present a structured manifesto for the EP elections. Still, the strongly nationalist and anti-establishment discourse of its leader anticipates a critical discourse towards the EU that might take different forms and intensities.

Considering that both Euroscepticism and populism are often found at the extremes of the ideological spectrum (Hooghe et al., 2002; Rooduijn & Akkerman, 2015), it is no surprise that Podemos and Vox have been more frequently studied regarding populism. According to the ideational approach, populism is found in the intersection between anti-elitism, people-centrism, and a Manichean understanding of politics (Hawkins et al., 2019; Wuttke et al., 2020). Following this definition, Podemos has been said to display a more populist discourse than Vox (Marcos-Marne et al., 2020, 2024), but recent analyses signal a decline in the use of populist ideas by Podemos, which has turned more clearly to radical-left ones (Roch, 2024; Rojas-Andrés et al., 2023). As for Movimiento Sumar (‘Unite Movement’), evidence suggests it does not include populist ideas in its discourse (Thomassen, 2022). Regarding SALF, there is little doubt that anti-elitism, especially against parties of the left, is a fundamental part of its electoral platform, but the use of people-centred ideas is much less clear. At the moment of writing, SALF may be characterized as a far-right protest movement that expresses a demagogic/impugning discourse. It must be acknowledged, however, that there is space for SALF to incorporate populist ideas in a more consistent manner.

Overall, the electoral competition in 2024 Spain seemed better explained by where parties sit in the economic, cultural and centre-periphery axes of competition. This does not mean that populist ideas were irrelevant during the electoral campaign, and it certainly does not preclude populism from again becoming a key component of the political competition in the future. However, it helps to understand that most of the electoral claims, including positioning towards the EU, correlated strongly with left–right positioning in the economic and cultural dimensions. For example, in the Spanish public television debate for the EP elections, Jorge Buxadé (Vox) was the politician who most clearly framed his intervention as an opposition between the interest of Brussels and the Spanish people. Candidates from Podemos and Sumar directed criticisms towards the EU due to its (non)response to the Israel attacks in Palestine but also emphasized the importance of a green and fair Europe that considers the welfare of its peoples. This clearly evidences the relevance of the thick ideology to which populist ideas attach when it comes to EU contestation (Massetti, 2021; Roch, 2020).

The EP 2024 elections: Results, trajectories and electorates

The results of the EP elections in Spain (Table 2) resembled general trends at the European level. A movement towards the right was observed, with the PP being the most-voted force (34% of the valid votes) and parties defending radical-right platforms increasing their vote share (Vox and SALF received together almost 15% of the valid votes). Nevertheless, mainstream forces of the left and right retained most of the MEPs (PP and PSOE secured more than 64.2% of the valid votes and 42 out of Spain’s 62 MEPs). In line with aggregate results, parties integrated into The Left group experienced a decline in electoral support, which can also be attributed to a series of public disputes between Sumar and Podemos.

To put these results into perspective, Vox clearly improved its results from the 2019 EP elections (6.21%), but it lost significant support when compared with the 2023 general elections (12.4%). The emergence and success of SALF are likely to have contributed to this, as according to CIS data, more than 50% of its electorate had supported Vox in the past general elections. Podemos, which together with Izquierda Unida (IU) received 20% of the vote in 2016, only gained two seats in the EP (3.3% of the valid vote). The declining electoral trajectory of Podemos can only be explained by referring to multicausal explanations from punishment to internal divisions, organizational disputes, engagement with institutional power, and the recovery of both macroeconomic indicators and mainstream parties (crucially, PSOE).

Table 2. EP electoral results in Spain

Party or coalition  European family Vote share (%) Seats in the EP
Partido Popular (PP) European People’s Party (EPP) 34.2 22
Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) Socialists and Democrats (S&D) 30.2 20
Vox European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) 9.6 6
Ahora Repúblicas  Greens–European Free Alliance (EFA) / The Left 4.9 3
Sumar  Greens–European Free Alliance (EFA) / The Left 4.6 3
Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF)  Other 4.6 3
Podemos  The Left 3.3 2
Junts-UE Non-attached (NA) 2.5 1
Coalición por una Europa Solidaria (CEUS) Renew Europe 1.6 1

Source: https://results.elections.europa.eu/es/

To explore the central ideological, attitudinal and sociodemographic differences between voters of different parties, I pay attention to voters of the two mainstream parties of the left and right (PSOE and PP) and the four statewide parties that can be clearly associated with the radical left (Podemos and Sumar) and right (Vox and SALF). This section has used CIS data, particularly the 2024 May barometer (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2024b) (N= 4,013) and the pre-electoral study conducted for the EP elections (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2024c) (N=6,434). The study conducted in May 2024 incorporates different questions that are important to understand the profile of voters, but it did not include voters of SALF.

Relevant differences can be seen in the positions of voters on key issues that affect the EU, such as climate change or the war in Ukraine and Palestina (Table 3). Podemos and Sumar voters were by far the most concerned about climate change, followed by PSOE voters. The percentage of voters of PP and Vox that were very concerned about climate change did not reach 20%, and it was the lowest for Vox, reflecting general associations between attitudes towards climate change and left–right ideology (McCright et al., 2016). Vox and Podemos voters were the least concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These voters perceive the negative consequences of the war to a similar extent as the average population, but they seem less concerned for different reasons. On the one hand, Podemos voters declared higher levels of sympathy towards Russians. On the other hand, Vox voters declared comparatively lower levels of sympathy towards both Russians and Ukrainians.

Accordingly, it could be that more pronounced preferences for one side and indifference towards both contribute to explaining lower levels of concern about the conflict. In any case, this does not speak of a general perception towards international conflict. Podemos voters were also the most concerned about war in the Middle East region. Overall, voters of left-wing forces were clearly more concerned about war in Palestine than Ukraine. This was particularly visible among Podemos voters and can be explained by the association between left-wing ideologies/parties and the Palestinian people in Spain (Musuruana & Hermosa Aguilar, 2022).

Table 3. Percentage of different parties’ voters very concerned about…

  PSOE PP Vox Sumar Podemos
Climate change  40.9% 19.9% 13.2% 59.7% 61.3%
Russian invasion of Ukraine  32% 26.2% 15.5% 26.6% 13.5%
War in the Middle East  41.6% 25.6% 17.9% 52.3% 53.3%

Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (2024b).

Moving to data from the pre-electoral study, Figure 1 shows relevant information regarding voters’ positioning on the left–right scale. Unsurprisingly, voters of Podemos and Sumar were more clearly positioned to the extreme left of the scale. Voters of PSOE were more often situated to the centre-left of the scale, and PP voters were more to the right. Despite the transfer of votes and some attitudinal similarities between Vox and SALF voters, their ideological profiles seemed quite different. Vox voters self-identified with right and especially radical-right positions, but voters of SALF were more numerous at the centre-right of the ideological scale. This raises important questions about the extent to which the voters widely share the radical-right platform of Pérez or whether his electoral success is partially explained by the dynamics of protest voting that is more easily expressed in the European elections (Hix & Marsh, 2007).

Tables 4–6 below show the aggregated sociodemographic and attitudinal characteristics of the supporters of the most-voted parties. Vox and especially SALF had clearly masculinized electorates (only 21% of SALF voters were women), but the profile of their voters differed regarding catholic identification (more Catholics support Vox), level of studies (SALF gathered more support among people with higher education), economic features (SALF was comparatively more popular among employed people and performed the worst among those with the lowest income), and mean age (SALF voters were the youngest in the sample). Voters of SALF were those who more clearly defined themselves as ‘mostly Spanish’ and showed the lowest levels of identification with Europe. Similarly, voters of Vox also thought of themselves mostly as Spanish but showed a comparatively higher level of dual Spanish–European identity. The more cosmopolitan voters were those of Podemos and Sumar (Table 5). Results in Table 6 suggest that voters of Vox and SALF were also the most critical regarding the benefits of EU membership (PSOE voters were the most satisfied).

Table 4. Sociodemographic features in voters for main parties in the EP elections

  PSOE PP Vox Sumar SALF Podemos
Female 55.9% 53.1% 39.4% 48.1% 21.3% 52.2%
Catholic  62.1% 80.1% 72.7% 12.2% 52.9% 14.2%
Higher studies  30% 35.1% 21.4% 49.8% 40.2% 39.3%
Less than €1,100  13.4% 12.5% 18.2% 9.8% 9.2% 10.6%
Employed 44.2% 53.2% 59.4% 66.8% 79.6% 57%
Mean age 55.8 55 42.9 47.5 36.9 49.2

Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (2024c).

Table 5. European identity among voters for main parties in the EP elections

  PSOE PP Vox Sumar SALF Podemos
Mostly European 4.7% 2.5% 1.5% 7.4% 0.5% 7.3%
Mostly Spanish 18.2% 31.7% 56.6% 8.6% 64.9% 11.8%
Both European and Spanish  54.7% 55.9% 31.6% 39.6% 20.5% 21.2%
Citizen of the world  21.8% 9.6% 9.1% 43.5% 13.7% 54.7%

Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (2024c).

Table 6. Spain mostly benefited from or affected by EU membership

  PSOE PP Vox Sumar SALF Podemos
Mostly benefited 87.8% 79.2% 43.5% 82.5% 33.3% 78.3%
Mostly affected 8.8% 15.9% 50.8% 12.5% 58% 18.4%

Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (2024c).

Conclusion and implications

The results of the 2024 EP elections in Spain resembled larger trajectories unfolding at the EU level. Mainstream parties of the centre-left and right were still the most supported forces, but radical-right forces grew both in number and votes. These forces are characterized by more Eurosceptic discourses that also resonate more strongly with their voters. While populist ideas are sometimes present in their discourses, it is essentially the anti-elitist component of populism that they use more often, sometimes combined with demagogy (especially visible in SALF). While there is no evidence to support a short-term electoral earthquake in Spain that would push forward radical-right forces, mainstream parties should reflect on the extent to which normalizing and incorporating discourses of the radical right complicates both their electoral performance and the project of the EU.

 

(*) Hugo Marcos-Marne is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Salamanca and a member of the Democracy Research Unit (DRU) at the same institution. Before joining USAL, he occupied postdoctoral positions at SUPSI-Lugano (Switzerland), the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), and UNED (Spain). His research focuses on public opinion, electoral behaviour, populism and national identities. His work has been published in Political Behavior, Political Communication, Political Studies, Politics and West European Politics, among other journals. He is also a co-author of a book recently published by Cambridge University Press.

 

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Powell, C. (2003). Spanish Membership of the European Union Revisited. South European Society and Politics, 8, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608740808539647

Real-Dato, J., & Sojka, A. (2020). The Rise of (Faulty) Euroscepticism? The Impact of a Decade of Crises in Spain. South European Society and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2020.1771876

Roch, J. (2024). De-centring Populism: An Empirical Analysis of the Contingent Nature of Populist Discourses. Political Studies, 72(1), 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217221090108

Rodon, T., & Rodríguez, I. (2023). A bitter victory and a sweet defeat: the July 2023 Spanish general election. South European Society and Politics, 28(3), 335–357. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2024.2326300

Rojas-Andrés, R., Mazzolini, S., & Custodi, J. (2023). Does left populism short-circuit itself? Podemos in the labyrinths of cultural elitism and radical leftism. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2023.2269375

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Thomassen, L. (2022). After Podemos: Yolanda Díaz’s Post-Populist Project For Spain. https://www.psa.ac.uk/psa/news/after-podemos-yolanda-díaz’s-post-populist-project-spain

Vázquez García, R., Delgado Fernández, S., & Jerez Mir, M. (2010). Spanish political parties and the European Union: Analysis of Euromanifestos (1987–2004). Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 11(2), 201–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/15705851003764380

Wuttke, A., Schimpf, C., & Schoen, H. (2020). When the Whole Is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: On the Conceptualization and Measurement of Populist Attitudes and Other Multidimensional Constructs. American Political Science Review, 114(2), 356–374. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000807

 

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Demonstration at Freedom Square in NATO state Estonia in support of Ukraine and against the Russian aggression while Ewert Sundja was singing at Freedom Square, Tallinn, Estonia on February 26, 2022. Photo: Margus Vilbas.

Populism in the 2024 European Parliament Elections in Estonia

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceHomeReports

Please cite as:

Jakobson, Mari-Liis. (2024). “Populism in the 2024 European Parliament Elections in Estonia.” In: 2024 EP Elections under the Shadow of Rising Populism. (eds). Gilles Ivaldi and Emilia Zankina. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS. October 22, 2024.
 
 

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Abstract

Although past European Parliament (EP) elections in Estonia have witnessed the success of an anti-establishment candidate, Estonian EP elections are not generally fertile soil for populism. Estonian EP elections tend to be dominated by the liberal and progressive parties and candidates with notable foreign policy track records. The 2024 EP elections generally confirmed this pattern but also witnessed the conservative parties running on a second-order election agenda critical of the government and parties both on the right and left-wing edges of the spectrum tapping into the small but nonetheless committed pool of Eurosceptic voters. Moreover, most parties made use of the stylistic repertoires of populism, attempting to perform various crises. While the election results changed little in the overall composition of the Estonian MEP delegation, the events unravelling immediately after the election suggest that the Estonian populist radical right will become more diverse but also more isolated from its sibling parties on the European level.

Keywords: Estonia, populism, Euroscepticism, sovereigntism, second-order elections, European Parliament

 

By Mari-Liis Jakobson* (School of Government, Law and Society, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia)

Background

In Estonian politics, populism tends to manifest as a discursive or performative strategy or a policy logic rather than an ideological fixture (Jakobson et al., 2012). Only a handful of parties have been dubbed as populist. For example, the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) has typically been characterized as a populist radical-right party (Petsinis, 2019; Kasekamp et al., 2019; Saarts et al., 2021). It entered the European Parliament (EP) and joined the Identity and Democracy (ID) group in 2019. Historically, the Centre Party under the charismatic leadership of Edgar Savisaar (1991–1995, 1996–2016) was characterized as left-wing populist (Jakobson et al., 2012). However, since 2016, the party has undergone two leadership changes and substantive shifts in both its political style and program. In addition, populism has been a strategy of new protest parties, but most of them have been relatively short-lived (Auers, 2018).

The limits of populist appeals have applied in EP elections, in particular, as they are characterized by a generally low electoral turnout and lower level of populist performance since, typically, the more highly educated voters with a political preference turn out to vote. The notable exception occurred in 2009, when a protest candidate, Indrek Tarand, scored over a quarter of the popular vote on an anti-partitocracy platform, criticizing the cartelization of (established) parties and neglecting the actual will of the people (Ehin & Solvak, 2012). Hence, the present report will also analyse the use of populist strategies across parties regardless of whether they are mainstream or fringe or where they are placed on the socioeconomic (left–right) or sociocultural (GAL–TAN) spectrum.

The 2024 EP elections took place 15 months after the general election in Estonia, and a liberal coalition consisting of the Reform Party, Estonia 200 and the Social Democratic Party were in power. Unlike in the previous electoral cycle, where stable coalition formation was difficult due to the distribution of parliamentary seats, the liberal parties had a comfortable majority during the 2024 EP elections. Nevertheless, there were notable tensions in the air regarding the national budget. Due to the war in Ukraine, where Estonia has been one of the most generous supporters of Ukraine in terms of GDP, Estonia has raised its defence spending to 3% of GDP and now struggles with a looming budget deficit. These budget tensions prompted the new government coalition to plan cuts and propose new taxes (e.g., a previously non-existent car tax) and raise existing ones (e.g., VAT and income tax from 20% to 22%), which has been politically difficult, especially as the Reform Party and Estonia 200 are economically right-leaning parties. Upon formation, the governing coalition christened itself as the Pain Coalition, forced to take painful decisions.

Due to this, also the EP 2024 election followed the logic of second-order elections to a great extent, where many parties tried to pitch the election as a referendum on the government’s policy, although for a large share of voters, this was outshined by issues related to the Russia–Ukraine War. Second-order elections essentially entail a significant share of anti-establishment politics, with the opposition in the national government criticizing the ruling elites and attempting to position themselves as the true representative of the virtuous people (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2017). Populism’s emphasis on popular sovereignty also entails Eurosceptic attitudes, although, in Estonia, most parties resort to, at worst, soft Euroscepticism (Taggart & Szerbiak 2001), and this remained true in the 2024 EP election.

In total, Estonia elected 7 MEPs in the 2024 election, and a total of 78 candidates on 9 party lists and as individual candidates ran for the mandates. In addition to the six parties represented in the parliament (four of which were also represented in the 2019–2024 EP), four smaller parties and five individual candidates ran. However, none of the challengers managed to win a mandate.

The supply side of populism

Due to the small number of MEPs Estonia elects (just seven), EP elections in Estonia tend to be candidate-centric, where candidates compete not only concerning the ideological platforms of their parties but as individual candidates, with their personal traits and career tracks playing an important part. This tendency means EP elections are more elitist than populist, with former government ministers and foreign policy experts performing well.

In general, Estonian parties also tend to be notably pro-European integration. In 2019, only two parties, the populist radical-right EKRE (ID group) and the right-wing conservative Isamaa (EPP group), ran soft Eurosceptic campaigns (Ehin et al., 2020). In 2024, Isamaa’s campaign was somewhat less Eurosceptic (the party had meanwhile also changed its leadership), but in addition to EKRE, two new parties complemented the Eurosceptic scene, challenging EU integration and accusing it of overregulation or even harming Estonia’s national interests. Furthermore, many parties touched upon migration and asylum policy, human rights, foreign affairs and, notably, environmental policies (a significant and divisive topic in these elections). However, the main emphasis continued to be the Russia–Ukraine War and defence policy.

EKRE (still a member of the ID group during the campaign) continued to be the leading Eurosceptic party in Estonia in the 2024 EP elections, with a core pledge to maintain the EU as a union of nation-states. It called for better representation of national interests on the EU level (especially for smaller and newer member states like Estonia), ‘preserving Estonian national culture and identity from the attacks of woke-culture’ and stated that in case the EU treaties are opened for discussion, a new referendum over EU membership ought to be held (EKRE, 2024). It also challenged the EU for allegedly moving towards ideological control and suppression of individual rights, the overregulation of all domains (especially vis-à-vis the common market) and objected to introducing EU-level taxation. In addition, EKRE’s platform challenged the EU’s Green Deal as environmental extremism that favours only certain businesses and would ‘hurl majority of the people into poverty’ (Ibid). Another core policy topic in their program was immigration. The party warned that ‘immigration propaganda’ would force the public to accept ‘the rapid rise in numbers of Muslim and Eastern Slavic immigrants’ and asserted that devising immigration policy ought to be the sovereign right of nation-states. EKRE proposed returning immigrants to their countries of origin, also urging the return of Ukrainian refugees after the end of the war in order to avert a demographic crisis there.

Overall, EKRE’s campaign focused on the party’s core national–conservative ideology rather than its populist elements. The party emphasized the need to persuade the more conservative voters to participate in the EP elections, which have been, to date, dominated by more liberally minded voters (which is accurate, as liberal parties tend to perform better in the EP elections compared to national ones).

Founded in 2022 by a group of politicians expelled from the Isamaa party, the economically liberal, right-wing Parempoolsed (‘the Right-wingers’), which positioned itself as a potential member of the EPP group, is not a populist party as such (i.e., does not claim to represent the ‘real’ people) but frequently takes a decidedly anti-establishment position in claiming that the ruling elites are incompetent or not interested in dealing with pressing problems, especially from the entrepreneurs’ perspective. Hence, it somewhat resembles certain technocratic populist parties in Eastern Europe (Guasti & Buštíková, 2020). Their soft Euroscepticism also manifested in a similar genre, namely in their criticism toward overregulation, deepening integration (which can harm the interests of nation-states) and the decline in global competitiveness of the common market. In their platform titled “We protect liberty”, the Right-wingers claimed to be the ‘antidote to socialism’ proliferating in Europe (Parempoolsed, 2024). Similarly to EKRE, the party also took a critical stance toward the current EU-level environmental and immigration policy. However, it proposed different solutions, for example, emphasizing the need to attract international talent (but also keeping refugees in screening camps outside of EU borders) or supporting market-based solutions to the climate crisis. Nevertheless, as technocratic populists do more generally, The Right-wingers also emphasized its candidates’ apolitical, expert background, featuring renowned Estonian defence policy experts and entrepreneurs (among others).

Another newly established party, KOOS (Together), ran on a left-wing conservative platform, which also includes a notable pro-Russian note, especially given that the party’s chairman and only candidate in the 2024 EP elections, Aivo Peterson, is currently on trial for treason due to supporting Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. In the 2024 EP election, the party’s platform called for neutral foreign policy, strengthening international cooperation (but not mentioning with whom), dropping sanctions which they see as harmful to both the sanctioned and the sanctioning countries’ economies), but also protecting traditional family values and fostering multiculturalism. While the party did not campaign from an explicitly Eurosceptic position, the complete avoidance of even mentioning the EU in their manifesto and proposing a sovereigntist, alternative foreign policy program to Euro-Atlantic integration evidently indicates opposition to EU integration. The party’s rhetoric is notably inclusionary, as the party positions itself as the protector of the interests of ‘all Estonia’s inhabitants’, but also sets itself in a notably anti-establishment position, emphasizing that Aivo Peterson, who was in custody during the election campaign ‘demonstrates his will in practice, which does not bend under the pressure of the state.’

The right-wing conservative Isamaa (EPP group) did not run on a Eurosceptic platform per se, although it also criticized the overregulation on the EU level in passing and cited uncontrolled migration and radical Islamism as threats to the foundations of European values alongside authoritarianism and terrorism (Isamaa 2024). However, as the leading opposition party in the national parliament (according to party ratings at the time of the EP election), it took an anti-establishment stance and attempted to frame the election as a vote of confidence against the national-level ruling coalition government. It borrowed one of its election slogans, ‘Enough of false politics and deceiving people’ from an anti-establishment popular movement of 2012 (although at the time, Isamaa’s predecessor, IRL, was in government and subject to public protests). Hence, it cannot be described as a populist party par excellence, but it still utilized some of its stylistic features.

The other moderate left-wing and right-wing liberal parties (namely, the Reform Party, the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and Estonia 200) did not refer to similar Eurosceptic arguments nor emphasized policy positions that could be considered populist. Even the left-wing Centre Party, considered populist in the past (Jakobson et al., 2012), ran on a notably pro-EU integration platform and did not attempt to gain attention with populist topics. However, virtually all parties utilized populism as a performative style in their campaign tactics. According to Moffitt (2016: 8), one core aspect of populism is ‘emphasising crisis, breakdown or threat’. As a result, populists ‘perform crisis’ by ‘spectacularising failure’ and amplifying the looming threats to the level of crisis (Ibid.: 121–122). In addition to Isamaa and the Right-wingers, who campaigned under slogans like ‘Do not let yourself be deceived by those who gave baseless promises the last time’ or ‘A vote to the Social Democrats and [Marina] Kaljurand is support for the government of [Kaja] Kallas. Don’t let yourself be deceived again. Vote for Isamaa!’, the moderate and liberal parties also utilized crisis performance. For instance, candidates of the Reform Party and Social Democrats warned the voters of the ‘radicals’ who would ‘destroy Europe’s unity’ (Social Democrats) or emphasized the fragility or complexity of the security situation in which the EP elections took place (Reform Party).

The demand side of populism

With the notable exception of Indrek Tarand, who scored a mandate as an individual candidate in both 2009 and 2014, populist candidates tend not to fare very well in Estonian EP elections. While Euroscepticism is not prevalent in Estonia – 77–78% of the population supports EU membership (Eurobarometer, 2024; State Chancellery, 2024) – it thrives in certain societal segments, being associated with lower trust in government and lower levels of economic welfare. Euroscepticism is particularly concentrated in the country’s northeast, where the population is predominantly Russian-speaking (State Chancellery, 2024).

The EP 2024 results reflected the same trend, with five out of seven Estonian MEPs maintaining their mandate after the election. EKRE, which became the first Eurosceptic party in Estonia to win a mandate in EP elections in 2019, also maintained its seat, although after the elections, when an internal schism developed in the party prior to party chairman elections, their MEP Jaak Madison left the party and joined the ECR group.

Foreign, defence and security policy took central stage both in the campaigns and in public opinion, with 55% of Estonians seeing the war in Ukraine as the most important issue facing the EU at the moment, while only 15% viewed immigration as such (Eurobarometer, 2024). While economic insecurities are viewed as of the highest importance on the national level, these were not seen as relevant in EU-level politics (ibid).

While the media coverage of the campaign was relatively low-key in general (campaigning mainly took place on social media and other paid advertisements), it also did not amplify the populist messaging of the parties. Instead, the media resorted more to the moderator role, organizing numerous debates and potentially only sensationalizing the personal branding campaign of former prime minister Jüri Ratas (who ran under the Isamaa banner) on various social media channels.

The biggest winner in these elections was Isamaa, who gained a seat for Jüri Ratas (who scored in total the third-best individual result). At the same time, the Reform Party lost a seat of its incumbent MEP Andrus Ansip (also a former prime minister), who did not run in the election due to differences in opinion with the incumbent prime minister, Kaja Kallas. Overall, while the parties identified here as featuring some elements of Euroscepticism gained somewhat in their share of the popular vote, the pro-integration parties still hold the majority of seats (See Table 1).

As there are no exit polls conducted in Estonia, it is not possible to interpret the results in terms of socio-demographic or attitudinal profiles of the voters. However, what is evident from available data is that Isamaa performed best in almost all counties except for the largest cities, Tallinn and Tartu and the predominantly Russian-speaking Ida-Viru County in the northeast. Isamaa’s success has been popularly interpreted both as a result of its antigovernment campaign as well as the success of Jüri Ratas’ personal campaign. However, pre-election survey data suggests that mistrust in the Estonian government was a poor predictor of support for Isamaa and instead predicted support for KOOS and EKRE (Keerma, 2024). Furthermore, Isamaa was perceived as having ownership in defence and foreign policy by lower educated voters, while more highly educated voters perceived the Reform Party as the issue owner (ibid).

EKRE also scored more votes than in 2019 in almost all counties but lost support among external voters and in the rural county of Jõgeva. Their support was largely predicted by anti-immigrant attitudes and mistrust in government (Keerma 2024). Meanwhile, the Right-wingers party scored its best results in larger towns and most likely not among populist voters, but rather more entrepreneurially minded voters who would favour a more minimal state.

Finally, KOOS performed best in regions with the highest share of Russian-speaking voters, particularly in the Ida-Viru County, where more voters are disposed to its sovereigntist foreign policy and pro-Russia messaging. In Ida-Viru County, KOOS scored 19.6% of the vote and in the capital city, Tallinn, 3.9%. Both regions feature a sizeable Russian-speaking population. The Centre Party experienced losses in all other regions except for Tallinn and Ida-Viru County, where it presumably improved its result with the Russian-speaking voters.

Also, electoral participation rose slightly. While in 2019, 332,859 voters cast a ballot, in 2024, 367,975 (37.6% of the electorate) turned out. Electoral turnout in EP elections tends to be higher in the liberal-leaning larger cities of Tallinn (the capital) and Tartu (a university town) and even lower in the predominantly Russian-speaking Ida-Viru County and the rural regions. In 2024, electoral turnout rose in all electoral districts, most notably in liberal-leaning Tartu and Tallinn.

Discussion and perspectives

As a rule, populism does not play a notable role in Estonian EP elections. Almost all parties use certain features of populist performance. However, the ideological core issues of populism, such as Euroscepticism, sovereigntism or overruling minority rights (on the populist right), do not find overwhelming support. This rule also applied in 2024, when voters still tended to prefer candidates who could be described as belonging to the political or intellectual elites and running on moderate and non-populist platforms. As a result, six out of the seven Estonian MEPs will return to Brussels and Strasbourg. Six out of seven MEPs elected in 2024 belong to the three moderate EP groups (EPP, SD and Renew) and one MEP, Jaak Madison – formerly a member of the ID group and the EKRE party in Estonia – will be joining the ECR group as an independent candidate when the parliament reconvenes. Hence, it is relatively unlikely that Estonian MEPs will engage in markedly populist politics in the EP. While the election campaign of Isamaa (EPP) involved some hints of soft Euroscepticism and anti-immigrant positions, neither of their elected MEPs has a notable track record of supporting such a policy line. Jaak Madison, who, as an ECR group member, was likely to continue his earlier anti-immigration and sovereigntist policy line, surprisingly joined the Estonian Centre Party on 22 August 2024, which may signal either a moderation of his stances or a crystallization of the soft Eurosceptic position of the Centre Party, whose members became represented both in the Renew and ECR groups.

With Madison leaving EKRE, the link between EKRE and the populist radical-right parties in the EP is likely weakened. However, with a new conservative nationalist party – the Estonian Nationalists and Conservatives – being established, it is possible that in future EP elections, Estonia will witness both candidates of the ECR as well as the PfE competing for a seat. Furthermore, the 2024 election demonstrated that there are at least two Eurosceptic pockets in the Estonian electorate – one on the radical right appealing primarily to national– conservative voters (with anti-immigrant attitudes), and another among Russian-speaking voters who favour sovereigntist, antigovernment and pro-Russia messaging, which collides with the dominant policy line of both the Estonian government and the EU. The election results in Ida-Viru County demonstrate particularly well the importance of moderate alternatives (in this case, the Centre Party) but also draw attention to the potentially harmful cocktail of low economic welfare, societal marginalization and receptiveness to Russia’s strategic narratives that sits well with populist sovereigntism.

 

(*) Mari-Liis Jakobson is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at Tallinn University, Estonia. Her research interests centre around populism, politics of migration and transnationalism. She is currently the PI for the project ‘Breaking Into the Mainstream While Remaining Radical: Sidestreaming Strategies of the Populist Radical Right’ funded by the Estonian Research Council, which investigates how populist radical-right parties reach out to atypical supporter groups. Her most recent publications include articles on transnational populism in European Political Science, Contemporary Politics, Journal of Political Ideologies and Comparative Migration Studies, and an edited volume, Anxieties of Migration and Integration in Turbulent Times with Springer (2023). E-mail: mari-liis.jakobson@tlu.ee

 

References

Auers, D. (2018). Populism and political party institutionalisation in the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 11, 341–355.

Ehin, P., & Solvak, M. (2012). Party voters gone astray: Explaining independent candidate success in the 2009 European elections in Estonia. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, 22(3), 269–291.

Ehin, P., Saarts, T., & Jakobson, M. L. (2020). Estonia. The European Parliament Election of 2019 in East-Central Europe: Second-Order Euroscepticism, 83.

EKRE (2024) Eesti Eest Euroopas! EKRE programm 2024. aasta Euroopa Liidu Parlamendi valimisteks [For Estonia in Europe! EKRE’s program for the 2024 European Union Parliament elections] https://www.ekre.ee/eesti-eest-euroopas-ekre-programm-euroopa-liidu-parlamendi-valimisteks-2024/

Eurobarometer (2024). EP Spring 2024 Survey: Use your vote – countdown to the European Election. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3272

State Chancellery (2024). Avaliku arvamuse seireuuring. 18. seire, 21.-25. märts 2024 [Public opinion monitoring. 18. round, 21.-25. March 2024] https://www.riigikantselei.ee/sites/default/files/documents/2024-04/Avaliku%20arvamuse%20seireuuring%20%2821.%20-%2025.%20m%C3%A4rts%202024%29.pdf

Guasti, P., & Buštíková, L. (2020). A marriage of convenience: Responsive populists and responsible experts. Politics and Governance, 8(4), 468–472.

Isamaa (2024). Isamaa’s program for the European Parliament elections in 2024 https://isamaa.ee/ep24-program-eng/

Jakobson, M. L., Balcere, I., Loone, O., Nurk, A., Saarts, T., & Zakeviciute, R. (2012). Populism in the Baltic States. Tallinn University.

Kasekamp, A., Madisson, M. L., & Wierenga, L. (2019). Discursive opportunities for the Estonian populist radical right in a digital society. Problems of Post-Communism, 66(1), 47–58.

Keerma, K. (2024). EP valimised on välispoliitika küsimus [EP elections are a question of foreign policy] https://salk.ee/artiklid/epvalimised/

KOOS (2024). Hääl rahu eest Euroopa Parlamenti [A Vote for Peace in the European Parliament]. https://www.eekoos.ee/articles.php?n=98

Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style and representation. Stanford University Press.

Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Parempoolsed (2024). Parempoolsete väärtusprogramm “Kaitseme vabadust!” [The value program of The Right “We protect liberty!”] https://parempoolsed.ee/vabadust/programm/

Petsinis, V. (2019). Identity politics and right-wing populism in Estonia: The case of EKRE. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 25(2), 211–230.

Saarts, T., Jakobson, M. L., & Kalev, L. (2021). When a right-wing populist party inherits a mass party organisation: The case of EKRE. Politics and Governance, 9(4), 354–364.

Taggart, P., & Szczerbiak, A. (2001). Parties, positions and Europe: Euroscepticism in the EU candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 5–6). Brighton: Sussex European Institute.

 

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An Afghan woman in a burqa and locals are seen on the streets of Kabul. Photo: Shutterstock.

Theocracy, Radicalism and Islamist/Secular Populism in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan 

by Editor’s ChoiceHomeReports

Please cite as:

Bottura, Beatrice. (2024). Theocracy, Radicalism and Islamist/Secular Populism in Iran, Afghanistan & Tajikistan. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). October 18, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0089

 

“Theocracy, Radicalism and Islamist/Secular Populism in Iran, Afghanistan & Tajikistan” was the 15th session of the “Mapping Global Populism” panel series hosted by the European Center for Populism Studies’ (ECPS). The session was held online on the 26th of September and was moderated by Dr. Simon P. Watmough. The panel featured an extensive and diverse analysis on the manifestations of authoritarianism, extremism, and populism from distinguished scholars.

Report by Beatrice Bottura

The 15th session of the European Center for Populism Studies’ (ECPS) “Mapping Global Populism” panel series, aimed at creating a comprehensive understanding of populism worldwide, was held online on September 26, 2024. Titled “Theocracy, Radicalism, and Islamist/Secular Populism in Iran, Afghanistan & Tajikistan,” the session featured insights from distinguished scholars on various manifestations of authoritarianism, extremism, and populism in these countries. This report provides an overview of the topics analyzed, with detailed accounts of each speaker’s contributions.

The panel was moderated by Dr. Simon P Watmough, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leipzig and a non-resident research fellow in ECPS’ research program on authoritarianism. Dr. Hélène Thibault, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Nazarbayev University, illustrated the authoritarian nature of Tajikistan’s anti-extremism policies. Dr. Zakia Adeli, former Deputy Minister of Justice of Afghanistan and a professor at Kabul University (2018–2021), explored the Taliban regime’s government structure and impositions in Afghanistan. Dr. Zahoor Ahmad Wani, Assistant Professor in Political Science at Lovely Professional University, focused his presentation on gender issues under Taliban rule. Finally, Amir Hossein Mahdavi, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut, discussed the potential rise of populist actors in Iran. Originally, Dr. Kathleen Collins, a Professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty affiliate in Islamic Studies at the University of Minnesota, was scheduled to present on “Radical Islamism vs. Extremist Secular State in Tajikistan.” However, due to her absence, Dr. Thibault covered several key aspects of her colleague’s presentation during the session.

Dr. Hélène Thibault: “Counter-extremism and Authoritarian Governance in Tajikistan”

Having discussed the repressive aspect of counter-extremism policies in Tajikistan, Dr. Thibault then proceeded to cover its performative facet. She described how anti-extremism is used as a tool to promote lifestyles considered “safe” and “in line with national traditions.” To this end, she discussed how the regulation of female clothing is utilized to ensure the secularization of the state. She provided examples such as the ban on the hijab in schools and state institutions, as well as the prohibition of wearing, importing, or selling “foreign clothing” in public places, which international organizations have recognized as a violation of religious rights. She also mentioned restrictions on religious education.

Dr. Hélène Thibault commenced her presentation by addressing the presence and extent of extremism in Tajikistan, with the aim of depicting an accurate picture of the evolution of Islamic radicalization since independence in 1991. She began by demonstrating that the level of radical Islamization in Central Asia is, in practice, less extensive than originally predicted by the media and scholars. Citing works by Edward Lemon (particularly a 2018 report), she highlighted that most recruitment and attacks occur abroad. Based on this information, Dr. Thibault argued that the threat of extremism is exaggerated to create a perception of danger and is used to “eliminate political opponents of all allegiances,” including Islamist parties or other political mobilizations. In other words, the threat of extremism has been used to “sideline all sorts of political mobilization” in a repressive and authoritarian manner, which has become characteristic of politics in Tajikistan.

Dr. Thibault provided examples to support her case. First, the classification of the legally registered Islamic Revival Party as an extremist organization in 2015 led to the imprisonment, persecution, or exile of party members, their families, and lawyers. Second, she cited the harsh repressions and imprisonments during protests in the autonomous region of Gorno-Badakhshan.

Having discussed the repressive aspect of counter-extremism policies in Tajikistan, Dr. Thibault then proceeded to cover its performative facet. She described how anti-extremism is used as a tool to promote lifestyles considered “safe” and “in line with national traditions.” To this end, she discussed how the regulation of female clothing is utilized to ensure the secularization of the state. She provided examples such as the ban on the hijab in schools and state institutions, as well as the prohibition of wearing, importing, or selling “foreign clothing” in public places, which international organizations have recognized as a violation of religious rights. She also mentioned restrictions on religious education. By analyzing these aspects, Dr. Thibault addressed the concept of “authoritarian secularization,” central to Dr. Kathleen Collins’ work, thus connecting her presentation to that of her colleague.

Dr. Thibault concluded her presentation by stating that the exploitation of the concept of extremism, used as a tool for authoritarian and repressive politics, does not address the root causes of extremism—namely unfairness and feelings of exclusion from socio-economic well-being—which she also discussed in one of her 2018 publications.

Dr. Zakia Adeli: “The Taliban’s Totalitarian Regime: Governance, Extremism, and Control”

Dr. Zakia Adeli emphasized how the Taliban’s removal of democratic processes—such as the suppression of elections and political opposition, along with a shift toward decision-making concentrated in the hands of a small religious group—has established a theocratic totalitarian system. This system is characterized by the complete control of the leader, the erosion of human rights, and the restriction of individual and civil freedoms. Examples include the detention, torture, and intimidation of journalists and activists, as well as control over the media and women’s bodies and activities.

Dr. Zakia Adeli introduced her lecture by providing an overview of its core themes, particularly focusing on how the Taliban regime has “systematically centralized power, without any electoral process or legal accountability,” and the consequences of this trend. Hence, the subtitle of her lecture: “Analyzing the Features and Impact of the Taliban’s Rule in Afghanistan.”

The presentation outlined the characteristics of the Taliban’s totalitarian regime: centralization of power, suppression of dissent, the use of ideology to control public and private life, strict censorship, media control, and the homogenization of people. Dr. Adeli expanded on this last point by addressing the enforcement of uniformity through fear and violence, control over institutions (media, civil society, education, and culture), and the imposition of ideological conformity through decrees.

She then described the processes undertaken by the regime to dismantle democratic institutions, including the abolition of:

– Constitutional Law, the core framework of democracy ensuring legal representation and civil rights;

– Parliament, representing the removal of legislative authority;

– The Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution;

– The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan;

– The Ministry of Women’s Affairs;

– Political Parties.

The author explained that, by doing so, the Taliban ensured a lack of checks and balances within the country, which allowed them to centralize power. Under the regime, there are no democratic processes to elect officials, and power is “centralized under the exclusive authority of Hibetullah Akhundzada” (the Taliban’s religious leader), who alone makes and ratifies all political and legal decisions. The institutions and individuals involved in governance—such as ministers—act under the direct orders of the Taliban leader. This structure enforces a “highly centralized and non-electoral regime” with no transparency or accountability, as power is concentrated in one individual, excluding citizens from governance.

Having provided an overview of the Taliban regime’s governance structure, Dr. Adeli focused on the monopolization of power, particularly analyzing the abolition of all political activities. She described how Afghanistan is now a one-party state, with the Taliban controlling media and communication while suppressing political opposition. She noted that in 2022, the Taliban approved a decree banning gatherings not previously approved, leading to the breakup of over 100 peaceful protests, with some individuals disappearing. These practices are enforced with religious justifications, often accompanied by extremist tactics, such as public executions of both previous political actors and individuals not conforming to the Taliban Regime’s ways. 

Following this, the presentation covered the importance of ideology in the totalitarian Taliban regime. Ideology is used as a tool to justify the extreme concentration of power, the elimination of opposition, and the enforcement of obedience from the population. In practice, this destruction of cultural diversity in favor of a singular way of life is executed through:

– Cultural suppression: replacing traditional cultural symbols with their own […];

– Destruction of Historical Heritage: eliminating ancient statues and monuments;

– Ban on Music and Arts: suppressing music, dance, and other forms of artistic expression.

This “homogenization of the people” comprises the core aspects of the Taliban regime, which the speaker carefully outlined throughout the presentation: the enforcement of unity through fear and violence, control of institutions (media, society, education, and culture), and the imposition of ideological conformity. These practices allow the Taliban regime to control both public and private life, depriving people of individual freedoms. In this context, Dr. Adeli highlighted the condition of women under the regime, providing examples such as mandatory dress codes and restrictions on women appearing in public spaces without men.

Dr. Adeli concluded with a brief summary of the main aspects of her presentation. She emphasized how the Taliban’s removal of democratic processes—such as the suppression of elections and political opposition, along with a shift toward decision-making concentrated in the hands of a small religious group—has established a theocratic totalitarian system. This system is characterized by the complete control of the leader, the erosion of human rights, and the restriction of individual and civil freedoms. Examples include the detention, torture, and intimidation of journalists and activists, as well as control over the media and women’s bodies and activities.

Dr. Zahoor Ahmad Wani: “Gender Dynamics and the Plight of Afghan Women under Taliban Rule”

Dr. Zahoor Ahmad Wani emphasized the role of external powers and how their attempts to maintain an imperial presence contribute to understanding the complexity of the region’s cultural, economic, and military heritage. He argued that these external actors destabilized social, tribal, and customary practices in a nearly Manichean manner, leading to decades of conflict, which form the backdrop to the current regime. Dr. Wani continued his historical approach by describing the systematic discrimination faced by Afghan women throughout history, often exacerbated by war and social norms influenced by foreign involvement in national conflicts.

Dr. Zahoor Ahmad Wani’s presentation consisted of a brief history of Afghanistan, aimed at providing context for his analysis, followed by a description of the characteristics of external intervention in Afghanistan and their relation to the current regime, and concluding with an analysis of how language affects the social condition of women. 

Dr. Wani began by discussing Afghanistan’s location, describing it as a crossroads in Central Asia and highlighting how this has given the country a crucial multicultural and multiethnic background. He explained how the high level of cultural and ethnic diversity across regions—intrinsically tied to Afghanistan’s geography—has shaped the complexity of external relations, as outsiders often required different, sometimes conflicting, approaches to connect with various regions. This factor, according to the speaker, has made Afghanistan a frequent site of “geopolitical entanglements” and internal conflicts, evidenced by the presence of different internal and external powers throughout history. 

Dr. Wani emphasized the role of external powers and how their attempts to maintain an imperial presence contribute to understanding the complexity of the region’s cultural, economic, and military heritage. He argued that these external actors destabilized social, tribal, and customary practices in a nearly Manichean manner, leading to decades of conflict, which form the backdrop to the current regime.

Dr. Wani then asserted that, within this political context shaped by “historical diversity and ongoing struggles for power,” one of the most pressing issues has always been the inequality between men and women. He continued his historical approach by describing the systematic discrimination faced by Afghan women throughout history, often exacerbated by war and social norms influenced by foreign involvement in national conflicts. Dr. Wani focused on the importance of terminology, referencing Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (1979), explaining how identity is socially constructed through language. He emphasized how this applies to the current Taliban regime, where both policy and informal institutions (social norms, customs, and discursive narratives) shape the daily lives of women.

Note: Due to connection issues, a more in-depth reporting of Dr. Wani’s presentation was challenging.

Amir Hossein Mahdavi: “The Rise of Populism  in Iran: Inequality, Class Conflict, and Nationalist Authoritarianism”

Mr. Amir Hossein Mahdavi’s presentation began with an overview of how left-wing and right-wing populism can be defined in the Iranian context.He first associated left-wing populism with Iran’s past politics, particularly following the 2005 elections and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, and right-wing populism as a possibility in today’s politics in Iran. The speaker contends that, given Iran’s current political context, right-wing populism is more likely to develop. Mr. Mahdavi argues that due to the current government’s limited capacity and resources, left-leaning rhetoric on redistribution may be less credible to the public.

Mr. Amir Hossein Mahdavi’s presentation began with an overview of how left-wing and right-wing populism can be defined in the Iranian context. He first associated left-wing populism with Iran’s past politics, particularly following the 2005 elections and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, and right-wing populism as a possibility in today’s politics in Iran. Mr. Mahdavi then proceeded with an in-depth analysis of both left- and right-wing populism and how they could manifest in the current Iranian context.

Mr. Mahdavi defined left-wing populism as focusing on “anti-austerity measures, social justice, opposition to economic inequality, and the perceived dominance of large corporations and financial elites.” Consequently, its main ideas are economic equality, social justice, opposition to neoliberalism and austerity policies, advocacy for the rights of marginalized groups, and criticism of global capitalism and large corporations.

He then explained how these ideas could manifest in the current Iranian context and how left-wing populists might leverage them:

  1. Economic inequality and social justice: Left-wing populists could exploit the growing socio-economic inequalities in Iran. The combination of economic sanctions, particularly those tied to Iran’s nuclear program that have intensified since Donald Trump’s presidency, and poor domestic management has increased inequality. Currently, the ratio of income in the top 1% compared to the bottom 10% is among the highest in the world. Meanwhile, 25-30% of the population lives in severe poverty, unable to secure 2,000 calories per day.
  2. Opposition to neoliberalism and austerity policies: Left-wing populists could tie the rising inequalities to neoliberalism and austerity measures. The speaker emphasized the skyrocketing inflation, now over 40%, as a potential target for linking mismanagement and government deficit to neoliberal policies.
  3. Advocacy for the rights of marginalized groups: The economic disparities have prompted marginalized groups to form active social movements, such as the “labor and teacher movement,” which seeks greater political representation and rights—potential support bases for left-wing populist rhetoric.
  4. Criticism of global capitalism and large corporations: In Iran, major corporations are government-controlled, but privatization has been on the rise. Left-wing populists could now tie labor issues to capitalist policies and actions, attributing problems to both private corporations and the government.

To conclude on left-wing populism, the author pointed out how the neglect of fundamental rights, such as those of gender and sexual minorities, could increase people’s receptiveness to any form of left-wing populism that may emerge from the current Iranian context.

Concerning right-wing populism, the author defined it as often emphasizing “nationalism, anti-immigration policies, and a strong stance against political elites, globalism, and multiculturalism.” Its main ideas are: “nationalism and anti-immigration sentiments, opposition to political elites and globalism, preservation of traditional cultural values.” 

The speaker then explained how these ideas manifest in the current Iranian context and how right-wing populists might leverage them:

  1. Nationalism and anti-immigration sentiments: The large influx of Afghan migrants and refugees after the Taliban came to power has sparked heated debate in Iran. Many images and videos showing the presence of these immigrants and refugees in public spaces (such as streets, schools, and health settings) have fueled this debate further, especially in the context of employment and tax contributions. Right-wing populists could exploit these fears to fuel anti-immigration sentiments and gain support.
  2. Opposition to political elites and globalism: Public disenchantment with political elites is widespread in Iran, evidenced by the lowest voter turnout in 46 years during the June presidential elections. The speaker argues that in this context, right-wing populists could present themselves as a “new political voice” against established political elites, gaining momentum and power.
  3. Preservation of traditional cultural values: The author suggests that right-wing populists could appeal to the era before the Islamic regime to gather voter support. Instead of upholding the current state-enforced values, they could draw on older traditions to gain influence.

Finally, the speaker contends that, given Iran’s current political context, right-wing populism is more likely to develop. Mr. Mahdavi argues that due to the current government’s limited capacity and resources, left-leaning rhetoric on redistribution may be less credible to the public.

SummerSchool

ECPS Summer School 2024 — Populism and Foreign Policy: How Does Populist Politics Influence Foreign Affairs?

by ECPS YouthHomeReports

ECPS organized its fourth virtual Summer School on July 1-5, 2024, focusing on the relationship between populism and foreign policy. The five-day program offered young participants a dynamic, engaging, and interdisciplinary learning environment. Presented by world-class scholars of populism, this intellectually stimulating program helped participants develop as future academics, intellectuals, activists, and public leaders. It also provided an opportunity to gain valuable cross-cultural perspectives and foster knowledge exchange beyond European borders, preparing them for future endeavors.

By Radoslav Valev

ECPS organized its fourth virtual Summer School on July 1-5, 2024, focusing on the relations between populism and foreign policy. The goal was twofold: to examine the theories related to the influence of populism on international relations and analyze case studies such as the US, Turkey, India, Brexit, and Israel to see how leaders use populist instruments in external politics. 

Populism has often been studied as a subject of political science and investigated as a topic of domestic affairs, namely party politics and elections. Nevertheless, a growing body of literature suggests that this phenomenon is not confined to the borders of nation-states; it interferes with international relations thanks to populist leaders’ desire to shape foreign affairs with a populist and mostly revisionist view. Trump’s threats to withdraw the US from NATO, Modi’s handling of India’s relations with Pakistan, Erdogan’s diaspora politics towards European countries, Orbán’s instrumentalization of migration in the EU, Netanyahu’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Johnson’s management of the Brexit process and numerous attempts by populist leaders to undermine or subvert international or supranational organizations, such as the UN, WTO, and EU, are among many examples that showcase how external relations can be blended with populism. 

Considering the current political landscape in which the number of populist figures is on the rise, we may witness more similar instances in the international political arena in the period to come. Populism in international relations has the potential to complicate existing problems, create new ones and bring about repercussions for the multilateral liberal global system. In this light, this year, the summer school examined the theoretical background of the interplay between populism and foreign affairs and examined a number of case studies from different parts of the world with a view to see similarities as well as differences between the ways populist leaders craft external politics.

The lecturers for this year’s summer school were Professor Sandra Destradi, Associate Professor Angelos Chryssogelos, Associate Professor Jessica Greenberg, Dr. Thorsten Wojczewki, Dr Georg Loefflman, Professor Cengiz Aktar, Professor Emeritus Louis Kreisberg, Professor Bertjan Verbeek, ECPS President Irina Von Wiese, Professor Craig Calhoun and Professor Joanna Dyduch. Each session was moderated by a scholar. Hence, the moderators were Dr Rubrick Biegon, Dr Gustav Meibauer, Dr Jonny Hall, Professor Ana E. Juncos Garcia, Professor Franco Zappettini, Professor Allison Carnegie, Dr Ajay Gudavarthy, Dr Aleksandra Spancerska, Professor Alexandra Homolar and Dr Andrei Zaslove.

The opening lecture by Professor Destradi examined the international implications of populism, first by outlining how populism has been conceptualized in comparative politics and political theory. It also introduced the current state of research on the global effects of populism, particularly its potential impact on foreign policy, international disputes, contributions to global public goods, participation in multilateral institutions, and the formation of partnerships with authoritarian and populist governments. The following lecture by Dr Angelos Chryssogelos examined the global rise of populism and how it sparked debate about its impact on the liberal international order. He argued that a deeper understanding of populism is needed to appreciate its varied effects on the international system. 

On the second day, the first lecture by Dr Jessica Greenberg explored the paradox of increasing reliance on international legal institutions to address conflict and bolster governance while populists use these same institutions to authorize antidemocratic policies. The lecture discussed the conditions under which this paradox emerged and how to address it, examining the relationship between populism and the rule of law and how populists subvert the law from within. 

The following two lectures by Dr Georg Loefflman and Dr Thorsten Wojczewski examined the practical manifestations of populism on foreign policy in the cases of the United States and India. 

On the third day, Professor Cengiz Aktar examined another practical populist case, namely Turkey. The following lecture by Professor Louis Kriesberg examined populism as non-governmental actions aimed at changing the conduct of resistant groups, often influencing established institutions. The presentation also examined such actions in the US, Europe, and other countries, assessing their constructiveness or destructiveness based on conflict resolution research, including factors like persuasion, promised benefits, and coercion.

On the fourth day, Professor Bertjan Verbeek and Irina Von Wiese’s lectures examined the role of populism in the EU’s foreign policy and what the EU could do as a foreign affairs actor. 

On the final fifth day, the opening lecture by Professor Craig Calhoun examined Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in the context of populist politics and argued that it stemmed from contingent circumstances, mobilizations, and deeper political shifts, notably influenced by national conservatism and English nationalism prioritizing ethnonationalist identity. The final lecture by Professor Joanna Dyduch gave insights on populism and foreign policy based on the example of Israel, distinguishing between ‘liberalist’ and ‘historicist’ orientations, highlighting how historical memory drives state actions, with ‘Foreign Policy Historicism’ emphasizing a hawkish, emotionally charged approach tied to national identity and othering.

This year’s program was enriched by the participation of around 60 attendees from diverse backgrounds and various parts of the world. They found the opportunity to engage in discussions with the lecturers on the topics mentioned, and they networked with each other in small groups and practiced peer-to-peer learning in a truly international environment.

The Summer School also featured a unique learning opportunity in the form of a case competition, held over five days from 1-5 July. The competition was designed to help participants transform their academic knowledge into practical policy suggestions, providing a hands-on learning experience. 

The competition tackled a real-life problem within the broad topic of populism, specifically populism and US foreign policy. The groups were expected to focus on a specific foreign policy or action Trump has carried out during his past presidency, or that he may carry out if he were to be re-elected in Autumn. These included the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, the renegotiation of NAFTA to USMCA, the trade war with China, immigration policies and the border wall, North Korea diplomacy, the withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), NATO relations and defense spending, the response to the Syrian civil war, and US relations with Russia. 

The participants could position themselves as think tank members preparing policy suggestions for the US Department of State, the EU, or NATO; advisors to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense or the Vice President; lobbyists aiming to change a policy in a particular direction; or academics drawing policy suggestions from their research on a specific foreign policy topic.

Participants were divided into teams to work together on solving the case and were expected to prepare policy suggestions. The proposals of the participants were then rigorously evaluated by an assessment committee composed of scholars and experts. The committee assessed the proposals based on criteria such as creativity, feasibility, and presentation skills, ensuring a high standard of competition. On the first day of summer school, ECPS provided the groups with an information pack that included documents and sources that outlined the case and its context. Moreover, each day, a one-hour-long consultation session was arranged for the competitors when the teams could discuss their progress and partake in the case-solving activity together. On the final day of the competition, short presentations were carried out and thoroughly evaluated by the assessing committee, which gave valuable feedback to the attendees.

The participants were divided into ten working groups, each named after a US state, and examined the various populist policies enacted by Trump. Two teams, the Texas group and the Utah-Kansas group, finished with the same number of points. Utah-Kansas group (Chiara Cerisola, Martina Micozzi, Muhammad Muhammad, Junsoek Lee, Adriana Duthon, Mohammad Shakib, Sana Akhter, Syed Waqas Bokhari) positioned themselves as a think-thank, examined the populist aspects of US migration policy and designed national and regional policy suggestions to address migration issue and brought recommendations to ensure the continuity of policies across different administrations. Texas group (Anton Miguel De Vera, Olivia Gheyselinck, Giada Pasquettaz, Reka Koleszar, George Kutty, Viktoriia Hamaiunova, M. Fahmi Asshidgy, Sara Torabian) brought suggestions for the EU to strengthen its technology security resilience in light of US technology policy towards China during Trump administration. Taking this opportunity, ECPS congratulates the teams for their diligence and professionalism in research and great talent in presenting their policy suggestions. 

All in all, our five-day schedule provided young people with a dynamic, engaging, and interdisciplinary learning environment. This intellectually challenging program, presented by world-class scholars of populism, allowed them to grow as future academics, intellectuals, activists, and public leaders. Participants had the opportunity to develop invaluable cross-cultural perspectives and facilitate a knowledge exchange beyond European borders, empowering them for their future endeavors.

ECPS Academy Summer School 2024

A rally on the main square of Bishkek. Photo: Omurali Toichiev.

Tracing the Pathways of Autocracy and Authoritarianism across Central Asia

by ArticlesEditor’s ChoiceHomeReports

Valev, Radoslav. (2024). “Tracing the Pathways of Autocracy and Authoritarianism across Central Asia.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). July 10, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0058

 

The fourteenth event in ECPS’s monthly Mapping Global Populism (MGP) panel series, titled “Tracing the Pathways of Autocracy and Authoritarianism Across Central Asia,” convened online on June 20, 2024. This event delved into the evolving autocratic political landscape of Central Asian countries. Moderated by Dr. David Lewis, a respected professor of Politics at the University of Exeter, the panel featured insightful presentations that dissected various aspects of autocracy and authoritarianism from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Report by Radoslav Valev

In a comprehensive examination of Central Asia’s political landscape, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) hosted the fourteenth and final event of its academic year in the monthly Mapping Global Populism (MGP) panel series. Titled “Tracing the Pathways of Autocracy and Authoritarianism Across Central Asia,” this online event convened on June 20, 2024, bringing together a distinguished panel of scholars to discuss the region’s evolving dynamics. Moderated by Dr. David Lewis, a respected professor of Politics at the University of Exeter, the panel featured insightful presentations that dissected various aspects of autocracy and authoritarianism from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Dr. Lewis set the stage by reflecting on the evolving discourse around authoritarianism and democracy in Central Asia. He noted the increasing complexity of political systems influenced by populism and regional dynamics, underscoring the shift in international engagement shaped by geopolitical factors rather than clear democratic promotion strategies. Dr. Lewis emphasized the importance of understanding the nuanced aspects of authoritarian regimes, including informal economics, clan politics, and power struggles, beyond mere repression.

The subsequent presentations offered deep dives into specific manifestations of autocracy in the region. Dr. Aksana Ismailbekova, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, analyzed Sadyr Japarov’s rise to power in Kyrgyzstan, attributing his sustained popularity to his portrayal as a “man of the people” and his strategic adaptation to different cultural contexts despite authoritarian measures. Dr. Dinissa Duvanova, Associate Professor at Lehigh University, examined Kazakhstan’s shift towards populism under President Tokayev, arguing that it is a strategic adaptation to maintain autocratic rule by balancing elite interests with popular demands. Oguljamal Yazliyeva, a Ph.D. researcher at Charles University, explored how Turkmenistan’s autocratic system, influenced by Soviet legacy and tribal traditions, cultivates a personality cult around its leaders through controlled media and traditional respect for authority.

Although one of the speakers, Dr. Diana T. Kudaibergen(ova), could not join due to connectivity issues, the panel provided a rich exploration of Central Asian political systems. Dr. Lewis concluded by highlighting the value of this nuanced approach to understanding governance in the region, moving beyond simplistic binaries of democracy and autocracy, and expressed enthusiasm for the ongoing research in this complex field.

Moving Beyond Simplistic Binaries of Democracy and Autocracy 

Dr. David Lewis, the moderator of the panel, gave an overview of the context of the topic of the panel. He began by reflecting on the evolution of discourse surrounding authoritarianism, democracy, and liberal values in Central Asia over the past two decades. Initially, in the early 21st century, liberal democracy was seen as the dominant global paradigm, but this has been increasingly challenged. The rise of populism in Western democracies and a more nuanced understanding of political systems in regions like Central Asia have contributed to a more complex view of authoritarianism and democracy.

Dr. Lewis noted that populism, once associated with revolutionary movements, is now also prevalent in regime politics and authoritarian systems. He highlighted the shift in international engagement with Central Asia, often driven by geopolitical factors rather than a clear strategy for promoting democracy. Dr. Lewis emphasized the importance of understanding the complexities of authoritarian regimes beyond simple repression. This includes examining informal economics, clan politics, regional dynamics, and power struggles that persist even in non-democratic systems.

He remarked that the new generation of political scientists in Central Asia is providing more nuanced insights into these political systems, contributing to a more complex body of literature on the topic. Dr. Lewis concluded by expressing enthusiasm for the panel’s focus on this subject, seeing it as an opportunity to explore the latest research on Central Asian political systems. He emphasized the value of this more intricate approach to understanding governance in the region, moving beyond simplistic binaries of democracy and autocracy.

Dr. Aksana Ismailbekova: “Clean Politics: Kyrgyzstan between Informal Governance and Democracy”

Dr. Aksana Ismailbekova discussed Sadyr Japarov’s rise to power in Kyrgyzstan following the October 2020 revolution. She began by arguing that despite implementing authoritarian measures, Japarov has maintained popularity by portraying himself as a “man of the people” and leveraging his personal history of suffering and injustice. Japarov has demonstrated a talent for speaking the language of local people and using simple language that resonates with them. Dr. Ismailbekova argued that Japarov’s success lies in his ability to wear “several hats” simultaneously. He presents himself as a simple man, a Native Son, while proposing authoritarian power.

The presentation by Dr. Aksana Ismailbekova discussed Sadyr Japarov’s rise to power in Kyrgyzstan following the October 2020 revolution. She began by arguing that despite implementing authoritarian measures, Japarov has maintained popularity by portraying himself as a “man of the people” and leveraging his personal history of suffering and injustice. Kyrgyzstan has experienced three revolutions in recent history (2005, 2010, and 2020), driven by public dissatisfaction with government corruption, fraudulent elections, and mismanagement. The 2020 revolution, sparked by the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, led to the overthrow of President Jeenbekov and the rise of Japarov to power.

According to Dr. Ismailbekova, Japarov, who was released from prison during the 2020 protests, quickly seized the opportunity to become acting president and prime minister. He criticized previous leaders for corruption and mismanagement while promising justice. However, he soon began consolidating power by amending the constitution to increase presidential authority, restricting media freedom, and taking control of the judiciary and foreign policy. Dr. Ismailbekova attributed this to Japarov’s ability to mobilize mass support by playing on emotions and using strategies of kinship. His personal suffering and tragic life story have become key elements in his political narrative, allowing many Kyrgyz citizens to identify with him.

Japarov’s biography plays a crucial role in his political appeal. In 2013, he organized protests to nationalize a gold company, leading to criminal charges and forcing him into exile. He often refers to this experience, claiming to understand the hardships faced by millions of Kyrgyz migrants, primarily in Russia. Dr. Ismailbekova emphasized how Japarov has become an “embodiment of injustice” in Kyrgyzstan. His attempted suicide in prison, which he claimed was a protest against the corrupt court system, resonated with many citizens. Furthermore, Japarov’s personal tragedies, such as losing his son and parents while in prison, have garnered sympathy and support from the public.

Dr. Ismailbekova underscored that Japarov’s suffering has been translated into political capital. He is perceived as more relatable than other candidates, someone who has experienced the injustices of the system firsthand. This narrative of suffering has been cultivated as a necessary virtue for being a good president. Dr. Ismailbekova noted that Japarov has positioned himself as the “hope of the nation” in a failed democracy. This narrative has been well-received by many of his constituents.

Interestingly, since Japarov became president, historians have begun searching for his ancestors to legitimize his right to lead Kyrgyzstan. Some claim that Japarov is a direct descendant of the Khans (a title historically given to rulers and military leaders in Central Asia), suggesting that the search for justice is “in his blood.” Dr. Ismailbekova highlighted how Japarov adapts his image to different situations. For example, when visiting southern Kyrgyzstan, he wore the hat of Iskhak Razzakov, the first Secretary of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan, appealing to villagers and relatives by claiming to continue Razzakov’s mission.

Japarov has demonstrated a talent for speaking the language of local people and using simple language that resonates with them. Dr. Ismailbekova argued that Japarov’s success lies in his ability to wear “several hats” simultaneously. He presents himself as a simple man, a Native Son, while proposing authoritarian power. 

The international media has taken notice of Japarov’s rise to power, with many articles focusing on his journey “from prison to presidency.” This narrative reinforces his image as someone who has overcome adversity. 

In conclusion, Dr. Ismailbekova suggested that the popularity of Japarov stems from citizens’ identification with his tragic life story and his ability to tap into the emotional experiences of the Kyrgyz people. Japarov’s political strategy involves constantly referring to his personal history, particularly during elections. Dr. Ismailbekova concluded that Japarov’s approach has maintained his popularity. His ability to understand cultural nuances and to present himself as one of the people have been key to his success. 

Dr. Dinissa Duvanova: “Autocracy’s Past and Present in Kazakhstan”

Dr. Dinissa Duvanova argued that the seeming populist pivot in Kazakhstan is better understood as a strategic adaptation within a stable autocratic framework. The balance between elite interests and popular demands, mediated through regulatory constraints and economic management, continues to define the country’s political landscape. The increase in state capacity and regulatory oversight, influenced by economic conditions, highlights the nuanced strategies employed by the regime to maintain its authority.

Dr. Dinissa Duvanova began her presentation by stating that in Kazakhstan, the link between the autocratic nature of its political regime and populism appears tenuous compared to other cases. After the January 2022 protests, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev addressed the joint session of the Senate and Mazhilis (The Lower House of the Parliament in Kazakhstan) via a Zoom call. In his speech on January 11, 2022, he criticized powerful elites and profitable companies in Kazakhstan, suggesting it was time they paid their dues to the people. Tokayev proposed establishing a National Fund to collect these debts and redistribute them to the population. Dr. Duvanova suggested that this can be seen as a potential shift towards a populist style of governance, though it may also reflect a continuation of established strategies to maintain autocratic stability.

Following the protests, Tokayev initiated a crackdown on elite leaders behind the unrest, leading to the imprisonment and asset seizure of key figures. However, the extent of asset seizures varied significantly; for instance, only a small fraction of the estimated wealth of members of former President Nazarbayev’s family was confiscated. This indicates that while there was a response to popular demands, it may not represent a deep-rooted commitment to populism but rather a tactical move within a broader autocratic framework.

Dr. Duvanova added that in her research, detailed in her book “Thieves, Opportunists, and Autocrats,” she argued that what appears as a populist pivot in Kazakhstan is actually another iteration of maintaining stable autocratic power perfected during Nazarbayev’s era. This involves strengthening and institutionalizing authoritarian state mechanisms, balancing elite interests with those of the masses. This balance is crucial for autocrats to sustain their rule, ensuring both elite support and popular acquiescence.

Moreover, Dr. Duvanova argued that one way to think about state-building by autocrats is the need to balance the particularistic demands of elites with the promotion of collective goods. Neglecting the latter can lead to economic decline, intensifying competition for rents and destabilizing the regime. Therefore, autocrats must invest in economic performance, benefiting the national economy and, by extension, the populace.

A notable quote from Tokayev’s January 11, 2024 speech highlights this balancing act: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” This saying, originally attributed to Latin American politician Oscar Benavides, encapsulates the Kazakh autocracy’s approach to governance, rewarding loyal elites while maintaining a facade of legal accountability for others.

The concept of a regulatory authoritarian state, which Dr. Duvanova explored in her research, involves the systematic construction of formal regulatory constraints on state agencies. These constraints ensure more predictable and accountable bureaucratic behavior. Data from Kazakhstan show a significant increase in formal regulatory constraints since the mid-2000s, driven primarily by ministerial orders rather than legislative statutes. This regulatory expansion corresponds with fluctuations in oil revenues, with more stringent regulations emerging during times of declining oil rents and vice versa.

Popular protests, such as those in January 2022, often prompt autocrats to streamline state institutions to improve responsiveness and effectiveness. Additionally, declining resources necessitate a focus on enhancing economic performance to maintain regime stability. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, leading to rising oil prices, provided Kazakhstan with increased resources, potentially alleviating some pressures to pursue populist policies aggressively.

Dr. Duvanova’s quantitative research demonstrates that in times of economic difficulty, characterized by declining state resources, there is an increase in regulatory oversight to curb bureaucratic opportunism. Overall, Kazakhstan has emerged as a high-capacity autocracy, evidenced by its regulatory quality and state capacity ratings. This increase in state capacity has occurred alongside systemic corruption and favoritism towards regime associates. Despite the heavy-handed use of regulations to manage economic activity, these regulations are often biased towards private interests.

The signs of liberalization under Tokayev can also be seen as the rise of digital authoritarianism, with increased digitalization of state services improving efficiency and state capacity. However, there is little evidence of reliance on transparency, public accountability, and oversight, as restrictions on press freedom and an independent judiciary persist.

In conclusion, Dr. Duvanova argued that the seeming populist pivot in Kazakhstan is better understood as a strategic adaptation within a stable autocratic framework. The balance between elite interests and popular demands, mediated through regulatory constraints and economic management, continues to define the country’s political landscape. The increase in state capacity and regulatory oversight, influenced by economic conditions, highlights the nuanced strategies employed by the regime to maintain its authority.

Oguljamal Yazliyeva: “Autocracy in Turkmenistan and the Role of Media in Cultivating Personality Cult”

Oguljamal Yazliyeva argued that Turkmenistan’s autocratic system is deeply entrenched, supported by a tightly controlled media apparatus that perpetuates a strong personality cult. The government’s use of historical tribal traditions recycled Soviet methods, and modern media techniques has created a robust system of authoritarian control. While this system appears stable, the lack of alternative media and independent information sources poses significant challenges for potential democratic development in the country.

Oguljamal Yazliyeva began her presentation by stating that Turkmenistan’s autocratic system and the role of media in cultivating a personality cult is a complex topic that intertwines historical, political, and cultural elements. The country, one of the five Central Asian republics, gained independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then, it has developed into one of the most isolated nations in the region, with a political system characterized by authoritarianism and a strong personality cult surrounding its leaders.

Yazliyeva argued that the foundations of Turkmenistan’s current political culture can be traced back to two main sources: the recycling of the Soviet system and the historical tribal traditions of the Turkmen people. The first president of independent Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, promised to develop the country towards democracy but emphasized that it would be a step-by-step process. In reality, this approach led to the state maintaining control over every aspect of life, including the media system.

The Turkmen government has utilized various strategies to legitimize its power and consolidate its authoritarian rule. One such method is the use of national symbols, such as the five patterns on the Turkmen flag representing the country’s five provinces. This symbolism serves to connect the current political system with the tribal history of the Turkmen people.

Yazliyeva also importantly noted that the media plays a crucial role in strengthening and consolidating the authoritarian regime in Turkmenistan. All media channels, including television, radio, print media, and the internet, are under strict state control. The constitution of Turkmenistan nominally guarantees freedom of speech and prohibits censorship, but in practice, the government exercises complete control over all media outlets.

Television remains a significant platform for the government to disseminate information about its policies. A survey conducted by Yazliyeva among Turkmen people revealed that more than 25% of media consumption is through television. Interestingly, over 50% of respondents prefer Russian-language media, which the government also uses to spread its message.

The Turkmen government employs the media to create a cult of personality around its leaders. This is particularly evident in the use of specific epithets and phrases to glorify the president, such as “Father of the Nation, be healthy.” In news broadcasts, these glorifying phrases are repeated multiple times, even in short reports about mundane events like sports.

According to Yazliyeva, the media landscape in Turkmenistan is characterized by repression, propaganda, and suppression. Academic literature on the subject is limited, but existing studies describe a system where all media channels are under state control. Even the single platform considered “private” was launched under government leadership and remains under strict official control.

Yazliyeva  added that the government uses media to consolidate its power through various means. One strategy involves broadcasting content that instills fear in the population. For example, television shows often depict the wrongdoings and subsequent imprisonment of individuals who deviate from government policy. Another tactic involves showcasing acts of extreme deference to the leader, such as hand-kissing or bowing, which are not traditional in Turkmen culture.

Yazliyeva underscored that the personality cult surrounding Turkmenistan’s leaders is a central feature of the country’s political culture. This phenomenon takes root in the historical tribal conditions, the legacy of Soviet communist control, and the idiosyncratic personality of the state leaders. The media consistently promotes the key role of the state leader in Turkmen society by glorifying them on various platforms.

Interestingly, Yazliyeva argued that the consolidation of this authoritarian regime is not solely the work of the political elite. Ordinary citizens also participate in and accept this system, partly due to traditional respect for patriarchal structures and tribal kinship. This acceptance makes it easier for the government to maintain its grip on power.

The development of Turkmenistan’s political system and media landscape since independence has resulted in a unique model of political culture. This model, based on authoritarianism and one-man rule, has played a significant role in building and maintaining the cult of personality around the country’s leaders, from the first president Saparmurat Niyazov to his son and current president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.

In conclusion, Yazliyeva argued that Turkmenistan’s autocratic system is deeply entrenched, supported by a tightly controlled media apparatus that perpetuates a strong personality cult. The government’s use of historical tribal traditions recycled Soviet methods, and modern media techniques has created a robust system of authoritarian control. While this system appears stable, the lack of alternative media and independent information sources poses significant challenges for potential democratic development in the country. As such, the introduction of alternative media could be crucial in providing Turkmen citizens with diverse perspectives and information about their country and the world at large.