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 argument always makes me laugh. It’s not that they think that they’ll get more votes with it. It’s that the option of “do what leftists want” makes them lose all their donations/bribes/support from the ruling elites. So their only option is to appeal to the more right wing of their base.
Yep, it’s pretty obvious that if a voter bought into the anti immigration stuff, or whatever other culture war bullshit the right is peddling, they’re going to vote for the real thing, not some halfway measures from Labor/the socialist party.
More generally speaking, adopting any policies from currently more popular parties purely for votes is stupid. Why would any voter who already likes that policy with a party that is ideologically convinced of that policy switch to a party that merely adopted the policy for votes except maybe for the edge case where the ideologically convinced party is so small that it could never get elected at all or grow to that stage?
If someone could tell fucking Kier Starmer, that would be lovely.
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.
The original article contains 824 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
And since when is this anything we didn’t know already?
What would’ve helped the center-left to win votes today was to not fuckup the majority of countries and economies they ruled over… when you send people into borderline poverty with your policies its kind of obvious you’ll lose support.
It’s adorable that people think there’s any actual left in mainstream western politics.
Says the supposedly left wing person that constantly peddles right wing BS articles here on Lemmy 🙄
Oh hey the warmonger has logged in. How many more Ukrainians need to die before you’re satisfied?
