What we are reading: Nostalgia in the Netherlands and radical right voting
How important is nostalgia for the far right in the Netherlands? We read Versteegen (2024) to find out. Here is what we learned
Category: Political Science
What we are reading: EU issue voting in European Union member states
Is “Europe” still an issue that can (positively) motivate voters? 3 authors say ‘yes’, but we are not fully convinced.
Radical right voting as class-voting, 2024 edition
Studying the far-right vote in Europe, again This winter, I’m teaching a new iteration of my MA reading class on far-right voting in Europe. I have been doing this for a long time, and every now and then I feel the urge to summarise decades of research by stating the obvious: some people are simply…
For AfD voters, Trump is an angel of peace
Here is a little gem from today’s Politbarometer survey. Most Germans (71%) don’t believe that Trump is able to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal (whatever that means), and only 24% think that he could do it. But for nearly two thirds of the far right AfD’s voters, the answer to that question is a hearty…
Three months before the election, just how strong is the far-right Alternative for Germany?
Germany will hold an early election in February 2025. It looks like the AfD could increase their 2021 result by half.
New publication: the 2024 European parliamentary elections in Germany and 26 other EU member states
After the 2019 Green wave, many observers expected a blue-brownish backlash for 2024. And in many countries, these observers (who are these people, and why are they always so well-informed?) were not disappointed. In Germany, the governing “progressive” coalition took a rather spectacular beating, while the main opposition, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) performed ok-ish. The…
Friedrich Merz has a women problem
Friedrich Merz, the CDU/CSU candidate for the chancellorship, is much more popular with men than with women. It makes you wonder why.
How does the Far Right end up in government? And do Far Right governments make a difference?
How it started: far right governments as an exception A decade or two ago, far right governments were a rarity in Europe. Of course, there were the Berlusconi governments of the 1990s and early 2000s that included the radical right Lega (then still the Lega Nord) and the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale, i.e. the rebranded MSI.…