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Authoritarian populism is not new to Europe. Numerous political parties on the far right and the far left have long called for a radical overhaul of Europe’s political and economic institutions.

What is new is that, in the past decade, such parties have moved from the margins of Europe’s political landscape to its core. As the historic memories of World War II and Soviet communism fade, so has the social stigma previously associated with advocating for policy agendas that destroy democratic institutions and human lives. What is more, the parties themselves have undergone dramatic changes and spurred a wave of political innovation. New populist movements have emerged, defying old ideological categories. Old populist groups have changed too, sometimes dramatically. Instead of stale ideological proselytizing, populists now offer excitement and rebellion—and use cutting-edge social media strategies to do so.

Although populism and authoritarianism are conceptually separate, they often go together in practice. After the global economic downturn of 2008, the vote share of authoritarian populist parties in Europe increased dramatically. Elections have ushered such parties into government—most notably in Hungary and Poland—providing the first real-world indications of how modern authoritarian populists behave when in power. The record is not encouraging. In each country affected, checks and balances and the judiciary have been weakened, and governments have sought to silence opposition voices in media and civil society.

The changing political landscape has also prompted a response from mainstream politicians. Some have tried to use elements of populist political messaging to capture the segments of the electorate disenchanted with conventional center-left and center-right politics. Others have tried to imitate the appeal of populists by adopting their substantive promises on immigration, the economy, and national sovereignty.

This report examines the drivers of populist support, focusing first on the current state of play before endeavoring to understand the reasons for populism’s resurgence in Europe. It then offers a series of policy recommendations that policymakers can use to fight back. Although the jury is still out on which political strategies work in which contexts, reconnecting European voters with mainstream politics is a critical part of addressing the challenge that authoritarian populism poses.

The report was inspired by conversations with academics, strategists, and policymakers, which were held in early 2018 at workshops convened jointly by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Florence and Prague under the auspices of our common project, “Defending Democracy and Underwriting the Transatlantic Partnership.”

While authoritarian populism encompasses different groups from across the political spectrum, most of these groups share several characteristics: a rhetoric that divides society between good, pure-hearted ordinary people and a self-serving, out-of-touch elite; a lack of patience with the standard procedures and constraints of liberal democracies, often accompanied by demands for direct democracy; and promises of radical changes to policies and institutions—both at home and internationally. As a result, although not every form of populism is invariably authoritarian, the overlap between the two is substantial.

When judged by vote share, the radical right represents the largest segment of authoritarian populist movements and parties. Authoritarian populism is not, however, a uniquely right-wing phenomenon. A similar style of politics can be found on the left among parties of the traditional Marxist, Maoist, or Trotskyite variety as well as among those that have emerged more recently in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, whose ideological allegiances are more fleeting. Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, for example, has adopted policy positions across the political spectrum.¹ Similarly, on the right, the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands has morphed from its pro-market, reformist origins into a populist force increasingly preoccupied with Islam and halting migration.

In the most recent elections, around a fifth of Europe’s electorate—almost 56 million people—voted for a left- or right-wing populist party.² Although the vote share of authoritarian populists has been on the rise since the early 1980s, the growth of support for such movements gained strong momentum in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. The support for right-wing populists peaked in 2016 at 12.3 percent of all votes across Europe’s democracies. The largest share is in Hungary at 68.5 percent, followed by Poland, 46.4 percent; Switzerland, 30.8 percent; and Austria, 26 percent. The authoritarian far-left is still underperforming in parliamentary elections relative to the levels of support it enjoyed in the early 1980s, with an average vote share of 6.3 percent across European democracies in 2017.³ Nevertheless, it has seen a dramatic rise in support lately—especially across Southern Europe and, most notably, in Greece, where the far-left Syriza party received 45.1 percent of all votes in the last election.⁴

While voters are becoming increasingly attracted to populists, they are also turning away from established parties of the center-right and center-left. The erosion of support has been especially dramatic in the cases of large social democratic parties that once commanded significant levels of support, especially among working-class voters. The Dutch Labour Party, France’s Socialists, Germany’s Social Democrats, the Czech Social Democrats, and Italy’s Democratic Party all performed poorly in their most recent parliamentary elections, especially compared with their historic vote shares.

Until recently, the question of how authoritarian populists govern was mostly academic. In the abstract, such political forces face three basic options. First, they can moderate their populism and campaign promises once confronted with the reality of governing. In that case, such parties tend to deliver policies that are the same as those of conventional center-right or center-left parties.⁵ Second, they can attempt to deliver on their promises, which may mean transforming not only large swaths of public policy but also political and legal institutions underpinning democracy. Third, when failing to deliver the promised change, they can choose to become confrontational and distract from their own ineffectiveness by picking fights with political opponents, media, international partners, and so forth.

European politics already offers several examples of authoritarian populist parties that arrived in power with substantial political mandates and opted for a dramatic societal transformation in an authoritarian direction, with results that have yet to play out fully. The most striking examples are the Fidesz party in Hungary and the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland.

Fidesz

Since its creation in the early days of Hungary’s transition from communism, Fidesz—an abbreviation of “Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége,” which translates to “Alliance of Young Democrats”—has morphed from an anti-communist, libertarian-minded youth group to a center-right, reformist, and staunchly Atlanticist party at the turn of the century into a populist nationalist party that seeks to move Hungary toward “illiberal democracy.” Under Viktor Orbán’s leadership, Fidesz first formed a coalition government in 1998. In 1999, the government, credited with being reformist and pro-Western, oversaw Hungary’s accession to NATO.

After eight years in opposition, in 2010, Fidesz gained enough seats to form a one-party government, followed by a two-thirds majority in 2014—one large enough to allow the incoming government to change the country’s constitution. Fidesz’s two terms in office provide a glimpse into what can be expected from authoritarian populists who gain power. Consistent with the distrust of liberal democratic institutions characteristic of authoritarian populists, Orbán has spearheaded a political takeover of all elements of the state.⁶ He outlined this in his famous speech on “illiberal democracy” delivered in Romania in summer 2014.⁷

According to economist János Kornai, “[T]he executive and legislative branches are no longer separate … Parliament itself has turned into a law factory, and the production line is sometimes made to operate at unbelievable speed: between 2010 and 2014 no less (sic) than 88 bills made it from being introduced to being voted on within a week; in 13 cases it all happened on the same or the following day.” Furthermore, the entire public administration has been populated by party loyalists—from the statistical office to the state audit office to the constitutional court.⁸ Thanks to Fidesz’s sizeable majority, the new Hungarian constitution was approved without any attempts to reach a broad societal or political consensus, ignoring domestic and international criticisms. The large parliamentary majority has provided a cachet of legality to any government decision, even while providing favoritism to specific individuals or groups.⁹ In October 2016, a financial group close to the prime minister bought the largest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, and closed it down overnight.¹⁰

In early 2017, Fidesz officials promised to sweep out civil society organizations funded by left-wing financier George Soros.¹¹ The government then adopted a law requiring nongovernmental organizations receiving foreign funding to register as “foreign agents.”¹² This is reminiscent of a similar piece of legislation adopted in 2012 in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The government also passed a bill stripping the Soros-funded Central European University, one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in Central Europe, of its accreditation—leaving the university in legal limbo.¹³ In early April 2018, despite winning a little less than 50 percent of the vote, Fidesz returned to office with over two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Subsequently, the Soros-funded organization, Open Society Foundations, announced that it was closing its Budapest office and moving its Eastern European operations to Berlin.¹⁴

PiS

Since PiS’ victory in parliamentary election in October 2015, Poland’s experience with authoritarian populism has mirrored that of Hungary. That is not a surprise since, as early as 2011, PiS’ leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, promised to “have Budapest in Warsaw.”¹⁵ Poland already had a colorful landscape of populist parties, including in government. The 2005 parliamentary election brought to power a coalition of PiS, the Catholic League of Polish Families, and the anti-establishment Self-Defense party, which was then led by Andrzej Lepper, who became known for his disruptive campaigning and wild conspiracy theories.¹⁶ PiS combined social conservatism, inspired by Poland’s Catholic traditions, with a critical view of the European Union—though never explicitly rejecting Poland’s membership—and an embrace of the political traditions of prewar Poland. Still, the 2005–2009 coalition steered clear of making irreversible changes to Poland’s political institutions.

Political divides in the country sharpened with the refugee crisis of 2015, which enabled PiS to adopt an uncompromising anti-immigration position in its election campaign. It did so despite the fact that Poland, which is among the most ethnically homogenous countries in the world, has not seen any significant migration inflows—in fact, quite the reverse.¹⁷

Following PiS’ return to power in October 2015, the party enacted an almost complete takeover of the public administration, including remaking public service broadcasting with political appointees. Shortly after the election, the government introduced sweeping changes to the constitutional tribunal, which the court itself struck down as unconstitutional. The government then packed the court with political appointees, abrogating any effective judicial review of new legislation. Additional reforms have given the justice minister the ability to select, dismiss, and discipline presidents of ordinary courts.¹⁸ The National Council of the Judiciary, a formerly self-governing body, was brought under the full control of the parliament. A new law forces nearly 40 percent of the Supreme Court’s judges into early retirement and creates a retroactive mechanism for extraordinary review of final judgments. Since the average age of judges in Poland is currently around 40, attempts to bring the judiciary under the control of the majority cannot be regarded as seizing levers of power out of post-communist hands, as the PiS claims.¹⁹

Italy’s parliament election in March 2018, populists will likely form a government in one of the founding members of the European Union. While it is too early to say which path they may take, their impact on Italy and the EU as a whole may well be unprecedented.

In recent years, authoritarian populists in Europe have seen a surge in popularity, often with deleterious effects on liberal democracies. In order to better understand that trend and respond to it, it is first necessary to understand who the voters of these parties are and why they are voting this way. It is difficult to ascertain a complete picture of populist voters across Europe—specifically, whether they were previously nonvoters and whether they came from traditionally left, right, or centrist parties. However, available country-level and survey data provide insights into specific contexts.

A study by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris analyzed data on European political parties and European Social Surveys from 2002 to 2014. In terms of demographics, the support for populists across Europe is “greatest among the older generation, men, the less educated, ethnic majority populations, and the religious.”²⁰ Many of such voters appear to have been previously disengaged from politics before being inspired to re-engage or to switch parties. That could be a result of increasingly weakened political parties, as populist candidates are presenting ideas and views that resonate with these voters or because voters see these candidates as a way of giving the unresponsive political elites a kick in the face.²¹

As economic and political integration in Europe progressed, some important political decisions started being made by European institutions instead of member states. Because of the EU’s real or perceived democratic deficit, those decisions were sometimes seen as detached from the will of popular majorities in member countries.²² That made such policies—ranging from questions on regulation of the single market to immigration to fiscal governance—vulnerable to attacks by demagogues. Furthermore, in some countries, a persistent gap has opened between policy positions of major mainstream parties and voters. In Germany, according to the polling agency Infratest dimap, between 1998 and 2015, all mainstream political parties, with the exception of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU), moved to the left of the political center, which has created an opening for right-wing challengers of the status quo in the form of the Alternative for Germany (AfD).²³

According to the policy director at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, Roland Freudenstein, who participated in CAP and AEI’s workshop in Florence, three main drivers are pushing people toward populist parties. First, financial and economic crises have affected people’s incomes and the economic opportunities available to them. Second, culture and identity politics—fear of immigration, globalization, and “others”—have prompted a backlash as rapid social and cultural changes have taken place within societies. Third, social media and technological developments—whether post-truth politics, echo chambers, or a changing media landscape—have helped normalize populist arguments as well as make it easier for more radical groups to identify and organize like-minded individuals into movements.²⁴

Economics, culture, or both?

While a growing stream of literature investigating support for right-wing populists in European countries has found that cultural and political concerns drive populist voters more strongly than economic ones, country-level data show a somewhat different picture.²⁵ With a data set covering 20 advanced countries since 1874, one 2015 study examined the link between the incidence of financial crises and support for political extremism.²⁶ The authors of the study found that the presence of a financial crisis led to an average increase of 30 percent in vote share for the far right five years after the onset of the crisis. Meanwhile, a 2012 study looked at the Great Depression’s influence on voting behavior and found low growth lasting for at least three years to be linked to an increased vote share for the far right.²⁷ However, the effect appeared strong only in countries that either lost World War I, had no pre-existing tradition of democracy, or maintained a prior presence of radical-right parties in parliament. Slow growth thus contributed to the rise in right-wing extremism in the 1930s but only in cases where the context was fertile.²⁸ Notably, it is also clear that financial crises contribute to the increase in fractionalization and polarization of politics, making democracies less likely to respond to economic crises through thoughtfully crafted economic reforms.²⁹

Given the magnitude of the economic and financial shock of 2008, the rise of populist politics across the Western world is not altogether surprising. In Western Europe, some identified the higher rates of unemployment during the 1970s as responsible for the rise in right-wing populism.³⁰ Rather than claiming a direct link between the two, the association suggests that the effect of unemployment might work indirectly, with higher rates of unemployment contributing to a climate of political dissatisfaction.³¹ A 2017 study, which looked at elections across Europe between 1980 and 2016, found that there is an asymmetry in drivers of support for right- and left-wing authoritarian populists.³² While the right wing seems unresponsive to changes in objective economic characteristics, the support for left-wing extreme populists, such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, is sensitive both to rates of economic growth and to unemployment. The rise of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, can be viewed in a similar fashion.

However, Inglehart and Norris’ findings are mixed regarding the role of economic conditions and insecurities. For instance, although populist parties had “significantly greater support among the less well-off” voters, “populist voting was strongest among the petty bourgeoisie [typically small business owners], not unskilled manual workers.”³³ Additionally, they found that populist parties had significantly less support from those “dependent on social welfare benefits as their main source of household income and among those living in urban areas.” Inglehart and Norris, then, promote a cultural backlash theory of populism, concluding: “[C]ultural values, combined with several social and demographic factors, provide the most consistent and parsimonious explanation for voting support for populist parties.”³⁴ However, a strict distinction between economic and cultural factors is not tenable in light of the evidence that connects the two. Economic insecurity, after all, is a cultural factor too, as suggested by recent focus group work undertaken by the think tank Demos in the United Kingdom and the pressure group More in Common in the United Kingdom and France.

At the roundtable in Florence, Sophie Gaston, deputy director and head of international research at Demos, stressed that in many Western nations, contemporary social and political polarization is often a reflection of people seeing political capital and economic security as a zero-sum game. For example, focus groups in the United Kingdom with individuals over age 50 were dominated by two core themes: negative reactions toward perceived political correctness from liberal elites and concerns over welfare competition—particularly the idea that some groups should not have access to the welfare state.³⁵

Such welfare chauvinism is clearly borne from a sense of individual economic precariousness; however, it also represents the failure of political leaders to build cohesive national narratives to match the upheaval wrought by globalization and cosmopolitanism. Similarly, Demos’ focus groups revealed the extent to which the growing political agency of minorities is viewed by some citizens as eroding the settlement between them and the political classes, reflecting the fear that it could escalate toward the privileging of certain groups at their own expense.³⁶

Since the roundtable, Demos has undertaken comparative qualitative research in France and Germany; its findings suggest that, in particular, white older citizens in these countries are experiencing similar anxieties regarding the scarcity of state resources and political capital. In Germany, this has formed a recurring theme in discussions regarding the integration of recent migrant arrivals and the benefits they are able to access, particularly in the East where salaries and pensions are considerably lower. At the same time, there was a palpable sense among citizens that the refugee and migration crisis has been monopolizing the political attention ordinarily given to other areas of social need—a sentiment often echoed by focus group participants in France, who frequently asked why “our own French men and women are homeless on the streets.”³⁷

Demos’ findings were in line with those of More in Common. According to More in Common’s public opinion polling on the appeal of populist sentiments in France³⁸ and Germany,³⁹ while much attention is paid to those on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the majority of the population, which identified as the “conflicted middle,” has mixed views about a number of important political issues that populists have recently seized—including refugees, immigrants, and national identity—which come from across the political spectrum.⁴⁰ To better understand the conflicted middle, for both the French and German reports, More in Common segmented it into three broad groups. All three groups believed that they had failed to reap the benefits associated with their respective country’s economic growth and held varying degrees of reservations about immigrants and refugees. As summarized by More in Common’s Global Connection Director Jonathan Yates during the Florence workshop, those in conflicted middle groups who also live in relatively segregated communities tend to gravitate toward populist parties more than those living in more diverse settings.⁴¹

New media environment

The early days of the internet inspired hopes for a more egalitarian and democratic society with decentralized control over information and communications—a society in which the wisdom of the crowd would allow for the best ideas to float to the top. In part, technology has delivered on that promise by enabling new forms of social and political organization. It has also made vast stores of human knowledge accessible to anyone with a smartphone and has transformed how citizens engage with governments and how consumers engage with markets. Yet its unintended consequences, which include cyberattacks and mass surveillance, threaten to undermine the benefits of a digital society. More recently, another problem has emerged: disinformation weakening the integrity of liberal democracies.

Just as those who live in segregated communities are more likely to be attracted to populist messages, social media have helped to erode the shared narrative that once bound societies together. As research by the Berggruen Institute and Omidyar Network illustrates, within the digital space, polarization, fragmentation, tribalism, and a virulent form of populism that rejects reason and fact are now the hallmarks of contemporary politics.⁴² There is no question that social media algorithms, with their ability to predict users’ interests and capture their attention, provide them with information that appeals to individual biases and that can amplify them over time. Although the magnitude of social media’s effect on political polarization remains uncertain, such practices risk contributing to filter bubbles and fragmenting society into isolated information and political communities.⁴³

As recent elections on both sides of the Atlantic and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom have demonstrated, the new context creates novel challenges for liberal democracies. Political discourse now happens online and conforms to the internet’s norms with unfortunate results. From hacks to trolls to fake news and disinformation, social media have created a platform on which nefarious agents, both foreign and domestic, have used a plethora of new tools to disrupt democracy.

During elections across Europe, including the Brexit vote, in an effort to influence beliefs and voter behavior, foreign actors used social media platforms to purchase advertising, publish content, and troll political discussions using bots.⁴⁴ At the same time, the Pew Research Center has reported that, in democracies across the West, trust in institutions—particularly in government and media—is at an all-time low, with those favoring populist parties in Europe demonstrating deeper levels of distrust in government.