Parties intending to contain the advance of radical right parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz or the German AfD do well in not adopting the far-right positions. This is the result of an international study of Dr. Denis Cohen, political scientist at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research and his colleagues Dr. Werner Krause (University of Vienna) and Professor Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi (University of Oxford). For the most part, copying far right positions helps legitimizing them and thereby increases the success of right-wing parties.
“As a reaction to the continuing success of radical right parties, politicians, pundits and the public have been arguing that mainstream parties need to accommodate positions and policies of the far right, in order to respond to the concerns of the public. The idea is that this would make mainstream parties more attractive and would win back voters from the right. We have analyzed empirically whether this strategy proves to be successful”, explains Denis Cohen of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) of the University of Mannheim.