Germany and the Future of National Populism

Global elites left and right breathed a sigh of relief after last month’s German elections. While the national populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) doubled its vote share, the old parties of the center-left and center-right performed just well enough to form a tenuous grand coalition. Once more, the firewall against cooperation with populist parties held.

But that’s only the short-term outcome. The long-term signs show that national populism is far from a spent force. In Germany and elsewhere in the world, populist parties and figures continue to increase in size at the expense of the old parties, left and right.

The outlook for reversing that trend seems dim. Populists of all stripes are gaining because the old elites are failing. They rose to power by delivering peace, social solidarity, and prosperity. They have failed to deliver any of these now for most of this century, and the prospect of them changing course is not good.

This can only point in one direction: the likelihood that in a decade, perhaps two, most of the West will be governed by a conservative-populist coalition not unlike what Donald Trump has created in America.

That might seem alarmist given the election outcome. Something similar happened in last year’s Austrian vote, where the national populist Freedom Party finished first, but the government was formed by three traditional parties spanning the center-left Social Democrats to the center-right People’s Party. France’s parliamentary election also had a similar outcome, with the national populist National Rally consigned to the margins as a tenuous majority ranging from the center-left Socialists to the center-right Republicans emerged.

That, however, is confusing the signal with the noise. In all these outcomes the direction is clear: national populists are quickly gaining, while the task of governing from the center grows harder as the range of viewpoints needed to placate the parties in power grows.

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France’s domestic “coalition of the willing” has already failed once, as Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government lost a no confidence vote late last year. The current Prime Minister, Francois Bayrou, is skating on the edge as he tries to assuage Socialists who want more spending and changes to the controversial law cutting pensions and the Republicans who want less spending and maintaining the law. Bayrou recently angered the Socialists and unions when he seemed to backtrack on a pledge to consider reducing the retirement age in ongoing negotiations to change the pension law. There’s no assurance he can thread such a tiny needle.

Even governments of the center that manage to stay together still suffer. Denmark’s Social Democratic Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, surprised observers when she left her longtime left-leaning allies to form a government with the centrist Moderates and the Social Democrats’ longtime foes, the center-right Venstre party. Polls show all parties in the coalition have markedly declined since then. The latest polling average shows the three parties combined would get only 35 percent, with extreme parties to the left and right picking up the difference.

These facts suggest two things. First, coalitions as diverse as those required to keep national populists out find it difficult to make the needed changes to policy that can solve the problems that put wind in the populists’ sails. Second, as they fail, voters move to parties advocating more extreme alternatives, choices that none of the traditional parties can actively compete with.

While far-left parties are gaining support in Europe, most of the change is accruing to the national populists’ advantage. Indeed, the advent of the centrist Austrian coalition has strengthened the Freedom Party at the People’s Party’s expense. Recent polls show the Freedom Party has gained five points since last fall’s election while the People’s Party has lost six. It seems many conservative-leaning Austrians would prefer a more radical version of the right than compromise with the center.

That competition between traditional center-right parties and their populist competitors is a recurring feature in European elections. While populist parties do attract voters from the old center-left, especially among working-class voters, they catapult into the lead when they cannibalize the old center-right.

That’s what populist leaders such as France’s Marine LePen have done. LePen barely beat the Republicans’ presidential nominee, Francois Fillon, in the first round of 2017’s presidential election. By 2022, support for the Republicans had collapsed. She and another conservative populist, Eric Zemmour, received about a third of Fillon’s vote in that year’s first round. Nearly all of Zemmour’s support then backed LePen in the runoff against Emmanuel Macron. By 2024, LePen had consolidated Zemmour’s support behind her party and added a fifth of the remaining vote from 2022 Republican nominee Valerie Pécresse.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni also moved existing center-right voters to the populist camp while adding people who previously backed other parties. In the 2013, her Brothers of Italy party received only two percent of the vote. The leading center-right party, the People of Freedom, won 21.6 percent and the center-right coalition received 27.6 combined. By 2018 Brothers had advanced to only 4.4 percent, while the successor to the People—Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia—dropped to 14 percent and the center-right won 37 percent combined.

Meloni triumphed, however, in the 2022 vote that made her Prime Minister. Brothers was the only major party not to participate in a so-called “technocratic” government that spanned the left to the right, and Italians who wanted change flocked to her. Brothers won 26 percent while Forza Italia dropped to a mere 8.1 percent even as the center-right captured nearly 44 percent. Meloni clearly added both voters who once backed other parties of the center and center-left while attracting most of the traditional center-right.

This dynamic was on clear display in the German vote. The Social Democrats’ sharp decline, leading to their worst electoral outcome since the 19^th century, was the headline result, but the underlying results show the tension between the AfD and the incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrat/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) grouping was the more fateful.

The Infratest Dimap exit poll shows the AfD gained over 1 million votes from people who backed the CDU/CSU in 2021. They also attracted about 890,000 from the economically conservative Free Democrats (FDP). The CDU/CSU also picked up 1.35 million voters from the FDP. In short, the CDU/CSU was in direct competition with the AfD for voters formerly attracted by traditional center-right parties. Those 3.2 million votes were about 6 percent of the total: had the CDU/CSU lost more of them, they could easily have finished in a near tie with the AfD.

The parties also clearly competed on the margin for a certain type of voter, those concerned about immigration and “internal security” (crime and social order). One third of Germans said one of those issues played the greatest role in their vote. AfD won among voters in each group, but the CDU/CSU finished second.

Germans looking to solve those problems clearly chose between the AfD and CDU/CSU. This puts Merz’s much criticized decision to rely on AfD votes in the Bundestag to approve measures sharply cracking down on immigration into focus. He reasonably decided that he would lose more votes to AfD if he didn’t show he could be trusted on those issues than he would from the center by tacitly working with the ostracized party. That tension won’t go away and will likely intensify as his Social Democratic coalition partners work to water down his immigration policies.

This means that the center-right has more to fear from the populist right’s rise than does the center-left. Unless somehow, they can turn back time and start to regain appeal with their defecting voters, they will increasingly face a clear choice: become the rightward faction in a left-dominated coalition or join forces with the populists. They will likely pursue the latter course rather than sink into near oblivion like their French compatriots.

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That’s what many center-right parties have already decided. Italy’s center-right clearly prefers being in coalition with Meloni than with their traditional center-left rivals. Governments in Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands are center-right coalitions that include strong populist parties. Belgium’s new government is led by the conservative populist Bart DeWever, whose New Flemish Alliance won last year’s election. Conservative populist parties are also part of the Bulgarian, Croatian, and Lithuanian governments, and Spain’s center-right Popular Party governs in alliance with the populist Vox in many Spanish regions.

Those coalitions will likely take Europe in a much different direction than it has been traveling for decades. While the precise nature of every new conservative-populist coalition government will differ depending on country and circumstances, they all share similar grounds for agreement and discord. Cultural policy will move sharply to the right, de-emphasizing or reversing some of the woke, anti-Western impulses of modern times. They will also make it difficult if not impossible for migrants from non-Western nations to enter. The Danish consensus, pioneered by the conservative and populist Danish People’s Party and adopted by the Social Democrats to regain power, will become the continent’s norm.

Late 20^th century lenience towards refugees from the war-torn south will also be replaced with a much tougher model. Europe has seen how the lenient system is easily gamed by those simply looking for work and those bent on trafficking drugs or committing terrorist acts.

Economics will be a blend of the old free-market model and a renewed emphasis on a modern version of the social market economy. Most populist parties favor lower taxes on working people but place less emphasis on corporate or high-income tax cuts. They also tend to support increased government support for families (think Hungarian tax breaks for women who bear children) and the less educated.

There will also be the potential for more of an overlap on foreign policy than might be though at this time. Many populists are suspicious of the U.S.-led NATO alliance, but many others are not. Their nationalism may resist European Union-dominated efforts to build a common European defense policy, but it also leads them to want to rearm. The areas for conflict are obvious, as the center-right/populist disputes over aid for Ukraine in its war with Russia demonstrate, but the areas for cooperation are also evident once that conflict ends.

Anglosphere readers will easily recognize this agenda. It resembles that which President Donald Trump is promulgating in the United States, and which leaders in other Anglosphere nations such a Britain’s Nigel Farage and Canada’s Pierre Poilievre enunciate. That should be no surprise, as these nations are all moving their center-right parties to capture the emerging populist elements.

The same demographic trends pushing Anglosphere populism are behind Europe’s swerve rightward as well. It doesn’t matter where you look: the societal segments most likely to back populist figures and parties tilt towards men, the less educated, workers, and people outside of the major urban and wealthy suburban areas that elites favor.

All these trends have been apparent in American and British elections for some time, as Trump’s victories and the Brexit era show. They are also manifest in Europe, as the German results demonstrate.

• The German gender gap is not as large as America’s, but it is still substantial. Men favored the AfD, CDU/CSU, and FDP by 22 points, 59 to 37 percent, over the four left-leaning parties. Women backed the right by only one point, 49 to 48 percent.

• Germans with a low level of formal education gave the right a whopping 63 percent. Those with high levels of education, on the other hand, gave the left parties a 50 to 45 percent majority.

• Workers gave the AfD a massive 38 percent of their votes, and backed the conservative-populist coalition by a 64 to 30 percent margin.

• AfD did poorly in Germany’s major cities and suburbs. Munich is a good example, where the populist party won only 9.3 percent in the city and 11.7 percent in its suburbs. It also received well under its 20.8 percent national total in Bonn (8.9 percent), Münster (6.9 percent), Frankfurt (10 percent), Cologne (10 percent), Hamburg (10.9 percent), Düsseldorf (11.5 percent), and Bremen (13.5 percent). It did much better in depressed industrial cities in the West (Duisburg, 21.1 percent) and cities in the East (Leipzig, 21.9 percent; Dresden, 26.7 percent), but even in the East those shares were ten to twenty points lower than they received in the regions around those cities.

Germans even demonstrated the same patterns as Americans in terms of when and how they vote. Germans who voted by mail (Briefwahl) gave the AfD only 13.2 percent while 25.3 percent of those voting on election day in person (Urnenwahl) voted AfD.

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When the same types of people make the same choices worldwide, it’s time to discard the idea that conservative populism is a passing fad and realize it’s a strengthening trend.

Those on the center-left will surely feel despondent at this analysis. They should. They are pressured from their left and the populist right, and moving to shore up support in one direction creates irrepressible tension and conflict with the other. Democrats see this every day in the ongoing disputes over how the party should react to its 2024 defeat. Those angst-filled debates are not unique to America, nor can they be easily solved.

In this sense, the traditional center-right has an easier, if no less painful, option. Coalition with the populist right bars the left from power and comes with many benefits. Yes, they must give up their pre-eminence and sacrifice some agenda preferences. But they remain relevant and possess some of their once undiluted power.

The traditional center-left has no such option. Moving left makes them a minority. Moving to the center to recapture working-class votes creates tensions with the left. Governing from the center costs them in both directions. Many parties have solved this dilemma for one or two elections; none has yet found a lasting solution.

It’s increasingly clear that we are not experiencing a populist moment; we are living in a populist age. Traditional parties came to life to answer the political disputes of their eras. If they want to survive as more than powerless specters in the new era, they must provide relevant and successful answers to the disputes of today. If they do not—and so far, none have—national populism will likely be to the 21^st century what social democracy was to the 20^th.

Henry Olsen is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of the weekly podcast, Beyond the Polls.