February 6, 2024 - 1:00pm
The rise of populism is the most disruptive political trend of the last two decades, and there’s no sign of it fading away. Just in the last few days, we’ve seen hard-Right parties hitting record highs in the Netherlands and Portugal.
Evidently, the populist phenomenon has not been overhyped. And yet it may be helping to mask a less obvious but nonetheless important trend, which we might call “party swapping”. This is what happens when voters get tired of an established party and shift their support to a substitute party in the same part of the political spectrum.
Contemporary examples include France, where the centre-right Republicans (i.e. the French Tories) haven’t just lost support to Marine Le Pen, but also to Emmanuel Macron — who, for all his liberal posturing, has governed from the centre-right.
Then there’s the Netherlands, where the once-mighty Christian Democrats were overtaken by the equally centre-right Liberals and then, at the last election, by New Social Contract — a breakaway faction from their own party.
In the 1990s, the Italian Christian Democrats, mired in scandal, were displaced by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. But that was just the start of the party swapping — Forza was subsequently elbowed aside by Matteo Salvini’s Lega, which was in turn superseded by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Admittedly, there was a lot populism involved along the way, but Meloni governs Italy as a no-nonsense conservative, not the mad neo-fascist some feared she was.
So for all the undoubted appeal of contemporary populism, it’s important not to overlook the desire of voters to replace failing centre-right parties with improved versions. The radical change they seek is far more institutional than ideological.
In Estonia, the governing Reform Party is currently haemorrhaging support to the rival Fatherland Party. There are some differences of style and values between the two — Reform is classical liberal, trendy and urban; Fatherland more conservative, traditional and rural — but both hail from the centre-right. What actually matters to voters is that the party in power is dogged by embarrassing allegations, while the other one isn’t. In France it went the other way, scandal-ridden conservatives driving voters into the arms of Macron’s reformists.
Could something similar happen in the UK? Thanks to the voting system, the British Conservatives have thus far had a near monopoly on centre-right politics. Alienated Tory voters have little choice but to defect to the centre-left or populist Right, or to not vote at all. That’s why the total right-of-centre vote in the UK is so low by international standards (roughly 35% including Reform).
Yet the UK is not an unusually Left-leaning country. Tory governments have dominated the democratic age and the most electorally successful Labour leader, Tony Blair, was also its most centrist. Instead, what’s happening is that centre-right voters can’t express their essential conservatism unless they endorse a fundamentally broken Conservative Party. Meanwhile, conservative challenges to the party are largely coming from the Right, as with Reform and today’s launch of the Popular Conservatism group.
The Tories are fortunate that there’s no alternative to them in the same political niche. If there were, they’d have been replaced by now. However, there’s a price for combining this natural monopoly with staggering political incompetence — and it will be paid at the next election.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI vowed to never vote for any party that supported vaxx passports and vaxx mandates during Covid. Right now, that limits my choices in the upcoming elections to the far right and the far left.
Reform aren’t “far right”, merely “right”. Richard Tice is not a fascist, and neither is Nigel Farage.
I may well vote Reform at the next election. If I really thought the party was racist, for example, I wouldn’t dream of doing so.
That’s what bugs me about essays like this. It’s not me the voter who has shifted right. Traditional political parties have all shifted to the left. It’s not even that though; traditional parties have morphed into some kind of amorphous political blob that all share the same fringe, unreasonable political beliefs.
I will never endorse any politician who wants to send my young relatives off to war and death.
The next election is going to usher in Technocrat B to replace Technocrat A. It will take another couple of years of disillusionment that the replacement technocracy is a mere continuation of the existing technocracy before populism really kicks off in this country.
The forthcoming general election is one that I will follow through the night as results are called.
Does anyone know how late in the electoral cycle a sitting MP can announce a party switch? Presumably a conservative candidate could not switch to the Reform Party two days before polling day if already listed on the ballot?
I cannot find the answer but after posting my question it occurred to me that when Parliament is Dissolved prior a general election all sitting MPs become ex. MPs who no longer hold that title. Apparently MPs have to clear out their office space in Parliament a few days after dissolution.
My restated question is “How late in the 3 week General Election process could the presumptive conservative candidate in a constituency switch to the Reform Party?”.
That’s true, but it’s equally true for Labour. What also usually happens when either party is in trouble is the ideological side of the party threatens to break away and split the party.
Maybe we should welcome a proper shake up, after all, what we have currently is a political wasteland that fails to inspire anyone.
When was the last time you were passionate about voting?
June 2016 for me.
How about a party that understands its members work for the public and not the other way around? While we debate the vagaries of “populism,” what’s lost is the belief of many voters that they are essentially disenfranchised no matter the party they support. Politics seems designed to serve the interests of a small moneyed class instead of populations at large. Attacking speech, farms, and national traditions is not likely to engender widespread support. Neither is the wholesale importation of people who are often hostile to the ways of the host country.
its annoying to read an essay which turns on the rise of “populism” without any attempt to define what the word means.
You can be anything as long as you’re a centrist. If anything, the centrist can hold.
The Popcons are the British expression of a neoliberal turn in populism. These Milleiists no longer want the votes of the left behind, but instead are turning back to the barrow boys and Essex men of the 1980s.