Hard-right parties are now Europe’s most popular
But our number crunching shows that they have mostly been kept out of power
ON FEBRUARY 23RD more than one in five German voters supported the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The party—which is under surveillance by domestic spooks for suspected extremism—doubled its vote share from the previous election and received more votes than any hard-right group in the country since 1933. Not so long ago this would have been unthinkable in a stable, wealthy and moderate democracy in the heart of Europe. But over the past 15 years hard-right parties have made substantial gains across the region. Drawing on the work of political scientists, our analysis shows that they now make up Europe’s most popular family of political parties by vote share, beating out the conservative and social-democratic blocs for the first time in modern European history (see chart 1).
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