The far-right doesn't have to win to set the legislative agenda

Across Europe, parties that have won less than one-quarter of the national vote are redefining the parameters of public debate and bringing ideas and policies that were once beyond the pale into the mainstream.

Since 2015, when nativist parties began to chalk up impressive electoral triumphs from Provence to Pennsylvania, there has been much hand-wringing among establishment politicians and left-wing voters in Europe and the United States.

Some breathed a sigh of relief after Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 victory over Marine Le Pen and the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte’s defeat of Geert Wilders, taking solace in the refrain: “At least they didn’t win.”

They should not be comforted. The fact is far-right parties don’t have to win to set the legislative agenda.

In Italy’s March election, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League party and a hardline Euroskeptic and anti-immigration candidate, won just under 18% of the vote, far less than the Five Star Movement’s 32%. But it is Salvini – not Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio or the figurehead prime minister, Giuseppe Conte – who is in the driver’s seat.

When ships carrying hundreds of rescued refugees tried to dock in Italian ports, Salvini turned them away; ultimately Spain allowed one of the vessels to dock in Valencia. And despite the fact that Italy, along with Greece, has borne a disproportionate burden during the refugee crisis due to its geographic position, Salvini has in recent weeks been abandoning Italy’s national interests by making common cause with Eastern European leaders who refuse to accept quotas of refugees – precisely the sort of burden-sharing that could help relieve the pressure on Italy.

In Denmark, the harshly anti-immigrant Danish People’s party took 21% of the vote in the 2015 election and ever since has masterfully manipulated the rest of the country’s politicians – forcing the center-right prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen to push through many of their preferred policies, while dragging the center-left Social Democrats, who fear losing even more working-class voters to the far right, along with them.

Because Denmark’s nativists have, like Marine Le Pen in France, combined xenophobic populism with a spirited defense of a generous welfare state, they’ve managed to siphon working-class voters away from the left. Earlier this year, Denmark’s Social Democrats endorsed the idea of offshore detention camps in North Africa to prevent refugees from ever setting foot on Danish soil – an Australian-inspired vision of putting asylum seekers out of sight and out of mind that has long been a fantasy of the European far right.

In Germany, the upstart Alternative for Germany party (AfD) won just 12.6% of the national vote in 2017. Despite the party’s modest numbers in parliament, however, it is influencing the policies of Angela Merkel’s government by threatening to poach votes from her sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), in the state of Bavaria. The CSU has long been the only political player in town in the wealthy southern state where many refugees first arrived in Germany in late 2015.

As the AfD’s support base has grown, thanks to growing anti-immigrant sentiment, the CSU has scrambled to shore up its right flank in advance of state elections in October. As a consequence, the CSU interior minister, Horst Seehofer, has become a thorn in Merkel’s side, threatening to bring down her government. Merkel lived to fight another day, but not before Seehofer succeeded in forcing concessions earlier this month, when Merkel announced she would set up “transit camps” for migrants along the German border.

This is not an accident, it is the result of a conscious strategy on the part of the far-right’s leaders to pressure the CSU and CDU. When I interviewed Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s co-leader, in July 2016, he made it clear that the party’s immediate goal is to influence and drive debate rather than win power or join a coalition. Referring to leftwing politicians who have adopted harsher rhetoric on immigration, he gleefully told me Germany’s “discussion has totally changed. This is what we have done”.

And in the United States, thanks to an electoral college victory that put him in the White House despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes, Donald Trump has managed to implement policies that forcibly separated migrant children from their parents and banned the entry of visitors from certain Muslim-majority countries – until public outrage and the courts compelled him to slightly soften his stance on both fronts (in late June, the supreme court upheld a watered-down iteration of his travel ban).

Trump’s hostile takeover of the US Republican party and his effective control of all three branches of government has given him a free hand. In Europe, nativist parties have leveraged their minority status to force draconian immigration policies on center-right and center-left politicians who live in constant fear of losing voters to the far right. In so doing, nativist parties have created a new normal – bringing policies like turnbacks of refugee boats, offshore detention and family separations from the margins to the mainstream. It is an extremely effective form of political blackmail.

Some defenders of nativist populism claim that the backlash against immigrants and refugees is harmless. They regard it as the decent and acceptable expression of citizens’ rage about immigration – a resentment ignored for too long by technocratic elites who didn’t have to live with the consequences of immigration. But the fact that some voters’ grievances are genuine does not mean that the solutions proposed by populist leaders are valid.

As the political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser have shown, populist parties can serve as either a corrective or a threat. When they give voice to marginalized groups they can improve the functioning of democratic political systems, but they can also erode those systems by conflating democracy with crude majoritarianism. For all their talk of defending democratic values, Europe’s anti-immigrant populists have pursued a decidedly illiberal policy agenda that places the supposed “will of the people” above constitutional checks and balances and the protection of minority rights.

Leading officials in these nativist parties have openly expressed their admiration for Viktor Orban, the Hungarian president who has unapologetically touted “illiberalism” as the solution to the continent’s problems. They deliberately deploy inflammatory rhetoric resembling that of the Hitler-admiring Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and casually dismissing the Nazi period as a “birdshit” stain on Germany’s proud history.

They have spearheaded efforts to outlaw or shut down mosques; ban the constuction of minarets; forbid Muslims from wearing burqas; end the sale of halal meat; and confiscate the valuables of arriving refugees. Most recently, in Denmark, nativists led a push to crack down on so-called ghettoes by, among other things, doubling the penalties for crimes committed in these predominantly non-white areas, separating “ghetto children” from their families for a minimum of 25 hours per week of mandatory education in Danish culture and values and imposing curfews on youth in immigrant “ghettoes”. Many of these measures have now become law, with the support of centrists in parliament. If parents don’t comply, they lose welfare benefits, putting children at risk of impoverishment; ethnic Danes, of course, face no such requirements.

These laws, like so much of the nativist populists’ agenda, are marketed as the true expression of the people’s will to disguise the fact that they are an affront to basic liberal democratic values like freedom of religion and equal treatment under the law.

As much as they despise Muslims, Europe’s far-right leaders advocate a political program that is actually far closer to the illiberalism of Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, than the democratic traditions of France, Britain and the United States. And no matter how hard nativist politicians and their intellectual fellow travelers try to claim the mantle of conservatism, their ideology and political endgame are more Duterte than Disraeli.

• Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and the author of Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy