Adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy does not help centre-left parties win votes, according to new analysis of European electoral and polling data.
Faced with a 20-year decline in their vote share, accompanied by rising support for the right, far right and sometimes the far left, social democratic parties across Europe have increasingly sought salvation by moving towards the political centre.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy does not help centre-left parties win votes, according to new analysis of European electoral and polling data.
However the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or unrelenting on public spending are both unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.
Analysis showed little real voter competition between the centre left and the radical right, as some social democratic politicians argue.
Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left.
Fiscal orthodoxy – cutting taxes, capping spending, limiting public debt – worked for social democratic parties such as Tony Blair’s New Labour and Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany, but that was “a period of relative stability and growth”, he said.
Even in Denmark, where a Social Democrat-led government has introduced one of Europe’s toughest anti-immigration regimes, electoral data suggested that restricting immigrants’ rights is not popular with a significant number of the party’s voters.
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