When the major parties copied a measure from the National Front, or imitated its language, Jean-Marie Le Pen remained calm. “Voters prefer the original to the copy,” the historic leader of the far right used to say, a phrase that has become a cliché in French politics.
But what if there was some truth to the cliché? Then Alberto Núñez Feijóo would have reason to worry.
Until the emergence of Vox, the PP did not have any relevant parties on its right. This allowed it to apply the “general rule” of using a discourse on immigration that did not sound “too harsh” to the centrist voter, since it guaranteed the support of the most extremist electorate, explains political scientist Pablo Simón, professor at the Carlos III University. Now the reaction of Feijóo’s party to the competition from other anti-immigration forces, especially Vox but also Alvise Pérez or Aliança Catalana, shows that this moderation was not based on “firm convictions”, but on a “catch-all strategy”. “As the pressure from Vox has increased, which focuses more on immigration as the territorial issue cools, the PP has moved to blend in with the extreme right with the aim of neutralising it,” explains Simón.
As soon as he was elected president of the PP in the summer of 2018, Pablo Casado tried to stop Vox by toughening his discourse, with episodes such as an alert launched from Algeciras (Cádiz) about the “millions of immigrants” who would come from Africa due to the “pull effect” of the Government. That strategy by Casado, which divided the leaders of the PP, did not manage to contain Santiago Abascal’s party. Vox entered the institutions in December of that year, specifically in the Parliament of Andalusia, with a force that no survey had predicted.
If anyone took note of that experience, the paper has been lost. Compared to the current one, Casado’s hardening was a small thing. Feijóo already came out in May, in the campaign for the Catalan elections, with a call to vote to prevent “illegal immigration from occupying our homes.” But it was this week when he went further. In the midst of tensions over the distribution of immigrant minors, which the PP must manage from the communities under pressure from Vox, Feijóo and his people have appropriated the two basic elements of the extremist repertoire: drama in the diagnosis and presentation of immigration as a risk to internal security and the integrity of the borders.
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In addition to using the term “menas”, typical of Vox and with pejorative connotations, the leader of the PP has spread the idea that the Executive transports immigrants in planes to leave them “wandering” through “certain neighborhoods”. He then asked the EU for help to stop “irregular immigration”, giving the impression of a phenomenon out of control. And finally he warned of a “pull effect”, an essential ingredient of any tough anti-immigration speech. The PP spokesperson, Miguel Tellado, has escorted his boss, accusing the Government of turning Spain into a “sieve” and has demanded the deployment of the Army on the African coast to prevent the arrival of cayucos, a proposal that Vox champions.
Does this rapprochement with Vox pose risks for the PP? In other words, was Le Pen right? Werner Krause, a researcher specialising in comparative politics at the University of Potsdam in Germany, is inclined to say yes. “This strategy,” he explains by email, “does not usually work. On the contrary, traditional parties run the risk of normalising the positions of the extreme right, making them more socially acceptable, which ends up reinforcing them.”
Krause knows what he is talking about. Together with two other researchers, he is the author of the study Does adaptation work?published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press, which analyses partisan strategies and vote transfers between 1976 and 2017 in 12 countries: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Austria and Switzerland. The conclusion can be summed up as follows: the radicalisation of anti-immigration positions, whether by conservative or social-democratic parties, has the effect of placing an issue that is especially profitable for the most right-wing formations at the centre of the debate, which is why as an electoral tactic it is “unsuccessful at best” and “harmful at worst”.
Although there are shades of grey and nuances throughout the sample, the pattern described in the study is that moving closer to extremist positions “does not benefit conventional parties, even if they harden a position they previously defended.” “On the contrary, voters desert these parties towards the radical right in significant numbers,” the study adds. “This scenario can also be applied to Spain,” Krause now responds.
Does the PP consider that its positions on immigration could be strengthening Vox? The party’s official response, sent in writing, is no, because in fact the PP has not hardened its position “in the slightest”. The idea that the PP shares “extremist” ideas, it adds, is the result of “manipulation”.
The effects of “yielding to stop”
Krause believes that the conclusions of his study have been confirmed by the dynamics of action-reaction observed this year in European politics. In the EU, as well as in France and Germany – among other countries – the same vicious circle has been repeated: first, a hardening of the discourse and regulations on immigration, with the aim of containing the extreme right; then, a greater media focus on the issue; finally, an electoral rise of those who were intended to be stopped. And in no case a cooling of the debate, marked by the belligerence of the anti-immigration parties.
In the case of the EU, the European Parliament approved in April a migration pact that tightens entry conditions, an agreement that was intended to “remove arguments from the extreme right”, according to the social democrat Ylva Johansson, Commissioner for the Interior. But the extreme right did not reduce one iota its obsession with immigration, a key issue of the campaign, and improved its results from 2019. In France, the National Assembly approved in December a law promoted by Emmanuel Macron and celebrated as an “ideological victory” by Marine Le Pen, who – far from being satisfied – focused her campaign for the European and legislative elections on immigration. Her party won both elections by a wide margin. As for Germany, the AfD ultras came second in the European elections after a hardening of the immigration policy promoted by the government of social democrats, liberals and greens, which in turn marked the campaign. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, with the AfD gaining ground in the polls, went so far as to advocate “large-scale deportations.”
“It is always the same logic, giving in to the extreme right in order to stop it. And it never works. All the rules and speeches that have tried to neutralize the extreme right parties by assuming their premises have achieved exactly the opposite: they have legitimized them and caused a transfer of votes in their favor,” he analyzes. Blanca Garcesa migration researcher at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (Cidob), for whom all this is a warning to the PP. Its rapprochement with Vox, she says, is a “perfect example” of the type of manoeuvre that ends up “reinforcing” those it is intended to “deactivate”.
Pablo Simón agrees: “Based on the evidence we have, the PP’s rapprochement with Vox will neither take away control of the immigration issue, nor short-circuit the loss of voters, nor reduce the radicality of its positions.” And he adds: “We are already seeing this with the distribution of minors from the Canary Islands. Vox has no incentive to moderate its positions, so it will always continue to put pressure on the PP.” This Friday, after a whole week of crescendo In Feijóo’s speech, Abascal raised the stakes again and announced that he will break the regional pacts with the PP if they agree on the distribution of migrant minors. Vox wants more concessions. This is how the vicious circle is fuelled.
Vox’s permanent agitation is due, explains Simón, to the fact that “the extreme right advances simply by this issue being hot.” In other words, it not only benefits from the concessions of its rivals, it already wins by getting everyone to talk about it. his topic even if others do not assume its postulates. There are studies that support this statement. At least two investigations – published in 2007 and 2018 by Electoral Studies and Oxford University Press– have proven a relationship between media attention paid to immigration and the growth of the ultra vote in Holland. Another 2018 study in The Political Quarterly He links the success of far-right parties to the importance that voters give to immigration when voting, which is determined in turn by the presence of the issue in the media. Simón concludes: “Even if it did not give in to Vox, it is already an electoral risk for the PP to devote so much attention to immigration. Even more so if it does so with Abascal’s language.”
Vicente Valentim, a researcher at the University of Oxford, argues that the “risks” of the PP imitating Vox on immigration are not limited to electoral ones. He also warns of the “serious negative effect” on social perception of immigration caused by traditional parties, such as the PP, when they copy the extreme right. Together with Elias Dinas and Daniel Ziblatt –one of the authors of the popular essay How democracies die–, Valentim has compared the impact in Germany of similar speeches made by leaders of the centre-right (CDU) and the far-right (AfD). The conclusion, set out in the article This is how dominant politicians erode the rulesis that the “social expansion of anti-democratic ideas, for example xenophobia”, is greater if the politician is from a traditional party. In the case of the study, if he is from the CDU. “Based on these conclusions, it is reasonable to think that the damage to the democratic values of the PP by expressing itself in the same terms as Vox is greater than the damage of Vox saying exactly the same thing,” says Valentim.
This “negative effect” could in turn turn against Feijóo and his supporters in the elections, warns Valentim. The PP’s “harsh” statements have a “strong capacity” to drag public opinion towards “hard” positions, which in the medium to long term entails an electoral “risk” for the PP, adds the researcher, since the available evidence shows that Le Pen Sr.’s famous quote was well-addressed: “Voters prefer the original to the copy.” The phrase is a cliché, but also a warning.
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