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| Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland, co-leaders of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, arrive to speak on immigration and crime on September 18, 2017 in Berlin. |
ARGUMENT
The Party Is Over
The mass political movements that once dominated Europe are
fading fast—and the nationalist populists and upstart parties taking their
place are here to stay.
BY MATTHEW GOODWIN | OCTOBER 24, 2018, 9:22 AM
The current political volatility that is sweeping through
much of the West marks the beginning, not the end, of a new era of great churn
and change. Europe, the United States, and other democracies have entered an
age of dealignment. The fragmentation of political systems, the rise of
populist parties, higher rates of electoral volatility, and an ever-tightening
squeeze on the traditionally dominant parties have become the new normal.
This process was decades in the making, and it will continue
to have profound effects on politics—effects that may be much stronger than we
currently apprehend.
The West has come a long way from the golden era of mass
politics, which ran from the early 20th century through to the 1990s. While
there have always been populist insurgents and periodic explosions of
volatility, in broad terms, the golden era was characterized by strong bonds
between citizens and the traditional parties—such as Germany’s Christian
Democrats or France’s Socialists, both of which are now in steep decline.
During peacetime, this system of mass politics brought relative stability. Its
success owed much to its underlying foundations.
The traditional parties drew strength from deep divides in
Western societies that been shaped by nationalist upheavals and the Industrial
Revolution—rifts between national and periphery identities, between church and
state, between a landed elite and a bourgeois class, and between capitalists
and workers. These foundations provided not only a framework for many political
systems but also a durable and typically reliable source of votes for the
traditional parties. Workers leaned left, the old property-owning middle class
leaned right, territorial disputes fueled regionalist parties, and Catholics
voted for Christian Democrats. It was these foundations that led the
influential scholars Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan to observe in the
1960s that many political systems had essentially “frozen”—they looked much
like they had in pre-World War I Europe.
Those systems have now thawed, if not melted away entirely.
The long-term continuities that once delivered loyal voters, dominant major
parties, and stable, experienced governments have been disrupted.The long-term
continuities that once delivered loyal voters, dominant major parties, and
stable, experienced governments have been disrupted. The key disrupters include
the left’s drift away from workers to focus on the culturally liberal and
degree-holding middle class, the way in which new value conflicts have cut
across traditional electorates, and how this has been exacerbated by the rise
of new issues such as immigration that do not sit easily within the classic
left versus right framework.
This process began in the 1980s and 1990s, long before the
Great Recession, and it accelerated during the 2000s and is now producing
unprecedented political change. In only a decade, between 2004 and 2015, the
average share of the vote going to the traditional mainstream parties in Europe
slumped by 14 points to 72 percent. Meanwhile, the share of the vote going to
new populist challengers, whether on the left or the right, more than doubled
to reach 23 percent. The center-left is experiencing record losses, and in
several political systems the combined share of the vote going to the
traditional mainstream parties has reached record lows. In Germany, social
democrats plunged last year to their worst result since 1933. In Sweden, they
just fell to their lowest since 1908.
At the root of these shifts is dealignment, the way in which
the bonds between citizens and the traditional parties are erodingAt the root
of these shifts is dealignment, the way in which the bonds between citizens and
the traditional parties are eroding or, in some cases, have broken down
completely. It hasn’t happened overnight, but the erosion of support for
once-dominant parties has been stubbornly persistent. By 2009, before the
effects of the global financial crisis had really taken hold, the share of
people in Europe who did not feel close to any party reached 54 percent. It is
this dealignment that has cleared the path for an assortment of new
challengers.
Some observers were shocked by the recent election result in
usually stable Sweden, where the Social Democrats had their worst showing for
more than a century, while the center-right Moderates fell to their
second-worst result since the late 1980s. Meanwhile, the national populist
Sweden Democrats reached a record high, and the combined share of the vote for
the two major parties dropped to just 48 percent, the lowest since Sweden’s
party system reorganized itself in the late 1970s.
But if one looks at the deeper currents, then this
volatility would not have been a surprise. By the time of the election, and
compared to the 1960s, the percentage of Swedes who identified with a party had
crashed from over 50 percent to just 17 percent.
It is a similar story in Germany, where during last year’s
general election the two major parties took their lowest combined share of the
vote since the country was reunified (53 percent), while the upstart
Alternative for Germany (AfD) captured 92 of the 709 seats in the Bundestag.
And in the state election in Bavaria earlier this month, the picture was even
bleaker: The two main parties combined took just 47 percent of the vote.
Again, the writing had been on the wall. Between 1972 and
2009, the percentage of people in what was West Germany who felt strongly
aligned to one of the two main parties dropped from 55 to 32 percent, while in
the East, where the AfD has emerged as a major force and where there is no
tradition of multiparty politics, these weak loyalties had been on full display
since the early 1990s.
In the United Kingdom, in the three decades before people
voted for Brexit, the ratio of people who felt as though they had a strong
relationship with one of the two dominant parties dropped from around half to
one-third, a trend that has been accompanied by a strong sense of
disillusionment. This year, when Ipsos MORI asked people whether they felt that
“traditional parties and politicians” cared about people like them, the replies
in Europe were sobering—47 percent of people in Germany, 51 percent in Italy,
57 percent in Britain, 64 percent in Hungary, and 67 percent in France felt
that they had been abandoned by the old guard.
The wider tendency to dismiss this sentiment as ephemeral
protest is misleading. The drivers of dealignment are deep-rooted. The globalization
revolution that began in the post-war era ushered in a new era in which
political conflicts between communitarians and cosmopolitans, underpinned by an
educational divide, have revolved around new and far more potent issues.
Immigration, refugees, Islam, the declining power of the nation amid
supranational integration, gender equality, and challenges to the traditional
family unit have gradually crept up the agenda. The traditional parties were
too slow to adapt to the new reality or unable to reconcile what are
irreconcilable value divides within their own electorates. On the critical
questions of identity, liberal middle-class professionals and blue-collar
workers hold fundamentally different views.On the critical questions of
identity, liberal middle-class professionals and blue-collar workers hold
fundamentally different views. As a consequence, new and more flexible
political movements have emerged to tear off chunks from the old dominant
parties, whether it’s the Greens going after middle-class voters in Germany or
national populists seeking the support of the more socially conservative
working class.
It is from this dealignment that higher rates of volatility
have flowed. We now live in an era in which the Italian Five Star Movement can
be founded and win an election within a decade, in which Emmanuel Macron can
step outside traditional party politics and capture total power in France in
just a couple of years, and where our political systems are fragmenting as more
ideologically radical parties draw strength from the way in which older
coalitions of voters are breaking apart. And these changes are also having
another important effect: pulling previously apathetic voters back into
politics.
In Germany, the top source of votes for the national
populist AfD were nonvoters, people who had given up on politics but now saw an
opportunity to regain a seat at the table. In the U.K., a substantial number of
traditional nonvoters turned out to vote in the 2016 referendum, and most of
them supported Brexit.
Amid the new age of dealignment, it is tempting to look for
solutions in democracies that seem to have escaped the broader trend. In the
U.K., for example, while Brexit divides the parties and voters, the most recent
election, in 2017, saw the share of the vote for the two main parties surge
above 80 percent, the highest combined vote share since 1970. But headline
figures can be misleading. As my colleague Jon Mellon has shown, when you drill
down beyond party vote shares to look at how individual voters are behaving,
then you see that both the 2015 and 2017 elections were actually among the most
volatile in the entire post-war era. What disguised the fact that many Liberal
Democrats and Greens switched to Labour, while many working-class Labour and UK
Independence Party voters switched to the Conservatives, was the “first past
the post” system, which unlike proportional systems awards seats by the
achievement of a simple majority.
In the United States, too, from the 1970s onward numerous
studies have pointed to the same weakening bonds between citizens and the main
parties. Whereas in the early 1960s, a solid 70 to 75 percent of people lined
up between the two main parties, by the time Donald Trump was mulling over
whether or not to run for the White House, it had sunk to a record low of 56
percent. Both the share of Americans who see themselves as independent or who
felt that a new party is needed have surged to record highs.Both the share of
Americans who see themselves as independent or who felt that a new party is
needed have surged to record highs. This much greater fluidity no doubt helped
the insurgent Trump, not least among some former Obama voters.
Central and Eastern Europe offers a glimpse into one
possible future that awaits democracies in the West. As the scholars Tim
Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause point out, since the 1990s, many of these
democracies have experienced substantial losses by established parties, rapid
gains by “uncorrupted newcomers,” but then equally rapid newcomer losses to
even newer parties. The result, they point out, is often “accelerating
party-level cycles of birth, death, and replacement.” They hint at a political
future in which, amid broader dealignment, major successes by new parties
triggers a steady stream of “start-up parties,” which “bear closer resemblance
to their technology-industry counterparts than to traditional political
parties.”
The new, awkward reality is that, while the age of
dealignment and volatility make it easier to create and build new parties,
these deep trends simultaneously make it harder to keep challengers alive. So,
while the old traditional parties will continue to struggle, it might also be
that even new populist challengers come under threat from even newer parties.
States in Western Europe, much like their Central and Eastern neighbors, may in
the coming years find that they too are increasingly heading into a
never-ending cycle of birth, death, and replacement.
All of this means that it will be harder for Europe to get
the strong, stable, and ideologically coherent governments that are a
prerequisite for dealing effectively with a growing list of challengesAll of
this means that it will be harder for Europe to get the strong, stable, and
ideologically coherent governments that are a prerequisite for dealing
effectively with a growing list of challenges: how to respond to the rising
support for national-populism, how to craft a durable solution to the refugee
crisis, how to resolve economic inequality that continues to exacerbate tensions
between North and South, and, more broadly, how to deliver a model of
integration that can simultaneously satisfy the liberal and (increasingly
strong) conservative wings of Europe.
The demise of traditional parties is not a blip. The
evidence suggests that it is a lasting transformation of the party system. And
as a consequence, European politics is likely to become far more volatile in
the years to come.
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