ANDREW NEIL: Centre-Right is being crushed by the hard-Right in Europe
The mainstream centre-Right is in crisis in much of the democratic world, but nowhere more so than in Britain. Either it embarks on a radical realignment to widen its appeal – or it faces certain oblivion.
In Britain, the Tories were thumped as never before in July’s general election, reduced almost to a rump.
In the US, the Republican Party is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donald Trump and his peculiar brand of populism. In France, the old Gaullist centre-Right has been replaced by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR), a much more robust stew of Right-wing nationalism, even if it now rejects its neo-fascist roots.
Its Italian equivalent, the Brothers of Italy, which has even nastier fascist antecedents than the NR, has been the lead part of a coalition government in Rome for almost two years, with its leader, Giorgia Meloni, the country’s prime minister.
Now comes perhaps the most scary development of all. Germany’s hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won its first state election since it was created 11 years ago, taking 33 per cent of the vote in Thuringia, and scattering the mainstream parties of the Left, Right and centre to the wind in the process.
It also came close to winning the other eastern state, neighbouring Saxony, where the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) held on to first place by the skin of their teeth.
Supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Thuringia last week
Normally, regional German elections wouldn’t cause much of stir in the rest of the country, never mind the wider world. Only six million people live in Thuringia and Saxony, about seven per cent of the German population.
But what happened there on Sunday is pregnant with implications, not just for Germany but for the democratic world, not least our own Conservatives as they try to work out how to handle Nigel Farage’s Reform party, a rather large problem on their right flank.
First, a little perspective. Yes, this is the first time the German hard-Right has won a major election since the Nazis in 1933. But it doesn’t mean a horrible future for the country.
Björn Höcke, the extremist leader of the AfD in Thuringia, who has two criminal convictions for using Nazi rhetoric, won’t even become state president because the mainstream parties have constructed a ‘firewall’ around the AfD and won’t do business with it, much as the NR is excluded in France.
This works in the short-term, but can store up trouble if large numbers of voters feel that the people they vote for are not allowed to take power. Nor is it a credible long-term strategy for dealing with the populist Right.
The CDU is Germany’s equivalent of the British Conservative Party, if traditionally a bit more centrist. It is on track to win next September’s federal elections and replace the current rudderless, fractious coalition government led by the Social Democrats (SPD) with a coalition of its own. So some regard the CDU as a template for the mainstream centre-Right in coping with the rise of the populist Right.
A triumphant Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the state of Thuringia, where it has just won its first state election
But the CDU has had to tack far to the Right of its usual centrist politics to keep the AfD at bay – so far with only limited success.
On the issues which have fuelled the AfD’s rise – above all immigration and the rising cost of net zero energy policies – the CDU, under its leader, Friedrich Merz (probably Germany’s next chancellor), has started to advocate closing Germany’s border to people who have requested asylum in another EU country, a blanket ban on Syrian and Afghan refugees, indefinite detention for migrants earmarked for deportation and – listen to this – emergency powers to suspend European law where it interferes with a robust response to migration. No British Eurosceptic government ever asked for that!
Enough of a heady brew to warm the cockles of Farage’s Reform, but perhaps too rich for more mainstream Tories.
Nor has it solved the CDU’s populist Right problem, even though it’s also junked a lot of the expensive and unpopular paraphernalia (like
ripping out gas boilers) of Germany’s so-called Green Energy Revolution.
True, the CDU has topped the national polls for some time. But the AfD is in second place. It is ahead of all three parties – SPD, Greens and Free Democrats – in the governing coalition.
A strong AfD showing next year would complicate the CDU’s ability to form a coalition. It might even have to turn to the discredited SPD to help it out, which would merely convince more Germans that Berlin politics is a game of establishment musical chairs. That would further fuel the AfD’s appeal.
Plus, for all the CDU’s lurch rightwards, it still ended up almost ten points behind the AfD in Thuringia, and held pole position in Saxony by only one point.
So moving Right, CDU-style, is not a slam dunk strategy for Britain’s Tories. It might win back some Reform votes, but it would also lose what centrist votes it has left. It might help facilitate a Reform-Tory merger, though, in its current feeble state, this would more likely become a hostile takeover of the Tories by Reform. The alternative for the Tories is to ignore Reform and to make no effort to move in its direction. But the potential risk is high: extinction.
The French and Italian centre-Right largely ignored the rise of their countries’ populist Right. As a result, the mainstream Right barely exists in France or Italy anymore, squeezed out by a harder Right with broader appeal, especially among working-class voters to which the old centre-Right had only limited appeal.
As the centre-Left scoops up more middle-class votes, any realignment of the Right that doesn’t appeal to working-class voters will fail.
Activists hold banners during a protest against the far-right AfD party on Monday’s election day in Thuringia
How you go about the realigning is, I grant you, a conundrum. The AfD and its kind have grown in popular appeal by exploiting fears of mass migration, crime linked to that migration, the sense of a ruling elite unconcerned by people’s needs, as evinced by their obsession with open borders and reaching net zero, a bourgeois boondoggle paid for by the proletariat.
If the mainstream Right moves too far in this direction, it risks becoming contaminated. If it barely moves at all, it risks being condemned to irrelevance.
In Britain, the prize for getting it right could be enormous. Most of the mainstream policies which have fuelled the rise of the populist Right are being pursued pell-mell by Keir Starmer and his Cabinet: a lax attitude to mass immigration; massive investment in the new green socialism – net zero – with ordinary folk picking up the tab; and the championing of a woke agenda which denigrates our past and downgrades our achievements.
Despite its massive majority, the Starmer Government could be very vulnerable in this Parliament to a sensible, united populist Right. Majorities which used to guarantee two or three terms in power now might not last for more than one. Just ask the last Tory government (majority of 80 on election day) how easy it is to throw away a landslide these days.
But there can be no Tory comeback without a sensible realignment that builds a broad and acceptable Right-of-centre coalition.
The Right needs something fresher, tougher, sharper. That is the challenge for those who want to be the next Tory leader. They should be talking much more about it instead of mouthing platitudes through a narrow, partisan Tory lens. That way beckons the political wilderness.
