Europe's Populist Parties Keep Gaining Ground

Gulf Insider

16-06-2025

Across the European continent, despite gaining considerable proportions of the vote, populist parties are increasingly being frozen out of governing in coalitions by political opponents who regard them as extremist.
Proponents of the tactic known as a 'cordon sanitaire' or 'firewall' say it's not an attack on democracy but a defense of it. But one war expert said the tactic will only arouse anger in voters and that 'there is no potential for peaceful political change.'
Coalitions are part and parcel of political life in many European countries.
But the cordon sanitaire, a measure normally directed at keeping out fringe outliers, is now being used to keep out parties that are gaining majority-level support.
Such parties include the Alternative for Germany, France's National Rally, Austria's Freedom Party, Spain's Vox, and the Netherlands' Party for Freedom.
They all deny being 'far-right' as they are often dubbed by media, opponents, or academics, but their political opponents regard them as beyond the pale and have formed coalitions on the promise of shutting them out of governance.
The AfD, an anti-mass immigration party, which came second in Germany's national parliamentary elections, earning nearly 21 percent of the vote, was recently denied allotted committee chairmanships and vice-chairmanships.
The party is locked in a legal battle with the state to avoid being branded an 'extremist' right-wing movement by Germany's domestic intelligence agency.
AfD's policies include strong support for traditional marriage between a man and woman and the nuclear family, the preservation of national independence in the face of the European Union's increasing power, the preservation of German culture amid 'European integration' and Islamization, and border security, including the expulsion of illegal immigrants.
But this doesn't seem to have dented the party's popularity in the polls. According to a recent INSA survey, the AfD is at 24.5 percent, hot on the heels of the CDU at 26 percent.
A similar pattern is being seen in other countries.
Early in June, the Dutch government collapsed after Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders said his party would pull out of the governing coalition.
Wilders asked coalition partners to sign up to a plan to cut illegal immigration, which included using the army to protect Dutch borders, rejecting all illegal immigrants, sending Syrian refugees back to their country, and closing asylum shelters.
At the time, he said that if the country's immigration policy was not strengthened, the PVV would be 'out of the Cabinet.' He followed through on the threat.
In Austria, conservatives, Social Democrats, and liberals formed a coalition in March to block the anti-immigration and euro-skeptic Freedom Party from taking power, even after it won an electoral victory with 29 percent of the vote last September.
The party was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, a former SS officer and member of the Reichstag.
Last year, French President Emmanuel Macron called a surprise snap election on June 9, following his centrist Renaissance party's poor performance in European Parliament elections when the populist and nationalist party National Rally (RN) performed very strongly.
But RN has increased its voter share ahead of the French presidential elections, which are scheduled to be held in or around April 2027, and is currently polling at 35 percent.
In 2023, Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called a snap national election after his party was beaten in local government polls by the conservative People's Party (PP) and the nationalist Vox.
Sanchez managed to retain power but only after months of wrangling with regional parties and a controversial power deal with Catalan separatists.
Vox, founded in 2013, is now the third-largest force in the Spanish Parliament.
Explaining the AfD situation in Germany, Richard Schenk, research fellow at MCC Brussels, told The Epoch Times that freezing out the AfD will have 'certain consequences.'
'AfD can now just exactly claim: 'We were excluded from the decisions that led to this chaos. You excluded us. We wanted to participate, to put forward proposals, to take responsibility, but you excluded us. So we really do not have to do anything with the mess that's currently going on,'' said Schenk.
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