On April 28, the BMW Center for German and European Studies hosted Dr. Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, a Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Director of the Laboratory for the Study of the Far Right (Ultra-Lab). Rovira Kaltwasser delivered a presentation on the transformation of mainstream-right parties in Western Europe and the European Parliament.
“If you want to understand why democracy has been so successful in Europe, it is not necessarily because of social democracy. It’s mainly because there are Christian Democratic Parties and conservative parties that are willing to stick to the Democratic rules of the game,” he began.
Rovira Kaltwasser says the issue is that those mainstream conservative parties are changing: they’re adopting the policies of the radical right. The radicalization is defined by two factors: to what extent they are developing moderate policy positions and to what extent they adhere to the rules of democracy.
“The populist radical right will present itself as being democratic. The extreme right, by contrast, will present itself as being authoritarian. These are parties that will tell you, if we win the election, we want to close the system,” Rovira Kaltwasser said.
Social Democratic parties are enjoying less success due to political fragmentation – that is, the rise of liberal alternative parties such as the Greens – and the fact that their historical voter base is elderly and dying. Christian Democratic parties are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
“Fewer, fewer and fewer and fewer people vote for those parties, and this means that these voters will move to another party family, and probably they will move to the far right,” he said.
Even in cases where the mainstream right remains relatively strong, if alliances are made with the radical right, far-right ideas become normalized and democracy suffers.
“The bigger the transformation of the mainstream right, and the more they are willing to make an alliance or incorporate the ideas of the far right, the bigger is going to be the Democratic threat,” Rovira Kaltwasser said.
There are situations across Europe now that show the mainstream right appropriating far-right ideas and essentially accomplishing the goals of extremist parties for them. Rovira Kaltwasser said the trend necessitates a change in how scholars approach their research.
“We should not only study how many votes do populist radical right parties get, but to what extent mainstream right parties are changing their programmatic agendas because of the rise of the population of the radical right,” Rovira Kaltwasser said.
