Netherlands actually didnโt change much. PVV got +5, but FvD (a worse PVV) lost 4. And the VVD (where Wilders came from originally) also lost 1, so it kinda cancels out. Same goes for the left parties which went from 9 to 8, but that seat went to a progressive center party.
Overall very little has shifted here. And it seems at the European level the same coalition will continue too.
But I still havenโt seen a definitive explanation of why so many voters are switching to far right parties, and how exactly they can be won back*. Because the far right parties sure arenโt going to solve their problems (although they do name them), and the center assume they just need to do more of the same but better, and that hasnโt and wonโt work either.
It makes me wonder whether a) the whole system of parliamentary democracy has reached its limit and cannot logistically please its voters any more than now, or whether b) voters just have too high expectations/are too selfish.
*I imagine that some voters that have been sucked too deep down the propaganda hole, like those of Trump or Orbรกn, cannot be won back.
Hereโs my hot take: people arenโt switching to far right parties all that much. In a moderately healthy democracy, up to 30% of voters are often protest voters. They are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs and vote for whoever promises the largest upset of the status quo that they could see as potentially benefitting them.
Often the media then likes to massively overinflate their popularity, artificially enhancing their electoral success. But itโs also often short-lived. If you look at Dutch elections, youโll find that a group of voters went for LPF, then PVV, then FvD and then PVV again. Each time itโs broadly talked about as the โrise of X partyโ but almost every time nothing truly materializes.
In the US you see a hardcore group of approx. 30% of voters vote for Trump religiously. Then thereโs a smaller group of moderate Republicans that dislike the Democrats enough to end up voting for Trump too. They donโt like Trump but heโs โok enough, and better than Obama/Clinton/Biden/Sanders etcโฆโ.
In France, Le Pen got around 30% of the vote. She didnโt perform dissimilarly to the last presidential election results, it was more noticeable that the other parties got much smaller than they were. But whether or not Le Pen can actually take the crown remains to be seen.
Iโve seen one take that (maybe over-) simplifies to that thereโs a wave of anti-establishmentalism, and while the best party to embody that under FPTP (e.g. UK, USA) is the other big party, many European parliamentary systems have proportional voting systems that allow smaller alternative parties. And the alt right sells a load of coherent, anti-establishmentalist talking points.
Dutch examples: PVV? The problem is Islamic immigrants. FvD? The problem is the Deep StateTM!
And although a lot of problems that we are experiencing (skyrocketing housing prices & cost of living, worsening labour conditions, millennials and gen Z/Alpha being worse off than their parents) are the result of the right, the left does not have a thing to sell as easily as the alt right has been able to.
Results of bad management of 2015 immigration crisis, and populist manipulation during the COVID lockdown powered by russian propaganda and American talking points.
In short: situation crazy, people mad, current governments no handle good, people more mad, bad people take advantage
Does anyone remember before the 2015 crisis? That could plausably have been the trigger, at least in Europe. I donโt even know if the rise of social media needs to be roped in to this.
I think for many people who feel desperate, everything starts to look like a zero-sum game.
This is a good observation
It often happens when a societyโs prosperity decays
It will be interesting to see whether the far right rises in a country like Denmark, which afaik still has the definition of a well functioning social safety net.
Thatโs part of it another is that the right offers some easy answers to some very complex questions. They arenโt the right answers but theyโre easier to wrap your head around. As prosperity drops, the time, effort and resources the average person can commit to understanding the complex problems facing their country also drop. This means the easy answers take root easier, and spread further and faster because the less informed are less resilient to them.
The simple reason is that a lot of people feel that the status quo just isnโt working for them and hasnโt been for a number of years. So theyโve ended up gradually voting for more and more extremes as the years have gone by, to express their distaste.
Hopefully these results are a wake-up call for EU nations, so they can try and get these voters back to the more moderate parties. I suspect not though.
