Catherine de Vries is Dean of the Faculty of International Relations and Professor of Political Science at Bocconi University.
After years of policies aimed at relatively broad inclusion of migrants and refugees, growing anti-immigration sentiment across Europe is pushing governments and legislation to the right.
The EU has backed tough new immigration rules. The migration pact recently adopted by the bloc is a series of laws that expand criminalization and digital surveillance of migrants. It proposes detaining unaccompanied minors, who are considered a potential security threat and could result in migrants being detained for up to six months.
Independent of the EU, Emmanuel Macron’s administration in France passed tough legislation that even far-right leader Marine Le Pen welcomed. In the UK, there are calls for the Conservative Party to support the fiercely anti-migration policies of Nigel Farage, who leads the right-wing Reform Party, during the upcoming elections. These hostile policies and attitudes are designed to deter future migrants, thereby solving many problems in the receiving countries.
European elections showed an increase in votes for anti-migration parties. The good results of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally prompted President Macron in France to call early parliamentary elections. The AfD has made progress in Germany. The results will push the main center-right parties further to the right as they try to win votes from more outspoken anti-immigration parties.
However, research does not confirm that a party’s turn to the right on migration leads to better electoral results. While immigration issues may motivate a core of right-wing voters, for many moderate voters it is not a key issue. European voters tend to vote on a wide range of issues, not just or even primarily on immigration.
Economists Julia Cage and Thomas Piketty. extensive research found that low-income rural residents in France now vote right-wing, while low-income urban residents vote left. Cage and Piketty also found that it was socioeconomic factors that determined the shift of rural voters to the right rather than xenophobia: a sense of falling behind the traditional right and left led them into the arms of more radical and anti-government parties.
Research shows that, overall, European voters care about larger issues that affect their daily lives, their sense of well-being and security, and their belief in the future and their place in it.
Research, including my own, shows that persistent cuts in public services and the accompanying decline in the country’s quality of life play an important role in explaining the rise of the far right. Concerns about the quality and negative experiences of government services such as health care and education lead to anti-government politics among large numbers of voters, not necessarily simple xenophobia. Even classic left-wing positions such as opposition to austerity, backed by extensive plans to deliver on post-government promises, may be far more attractive to these voters than anti-migration rhetoric and action.
These problems are often caused due to budget cuts by center parties or, at best, a lack of public investment as society ages and economic growth slows. Successive neoliberal governments, spanning parties from both the left and right of centre, have devastated key services through radical, brutal and sustained cuts.
Until the mainstream parties show they can protect the public services they themselves helped destroy, anti-establishment parties will continue to harvest the voices of the disaffected and ignored.
The ruling parties want to divert attention from their historical and recent failures in governance. By scapegoating migrants, politicians are trying to divert public attention from failures of governance and public resentment towards ruling elites and the destruction of public services for which they are responsible. But this will most likely only strengthen far-right parties.
If the main parties had the public’s trust and promised to rebuild what they had destroyed, then their turn to the right might not have been necessary. Left and center-left parties, many of which are now close to the mainstream right on many issues, stand a better chance of gaining credibility for the recovery if they can overcome decades of mistrust, a shift to the right and a failure to stem the decline.
Whoever leads Europe in the future should focus on addressing the instability of public services, rather than blaming migrants.
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