Because many centrist parties in Europe are actually more centre right and neo-liberal and actively hold back progress. They invest little to nothing in public infrastructure, privatise public services, lower taxes on the rich, and weaken worker’s rights. They do it more slowly than right-wing parties and extreme right wing parties, but they do it nonetheless. Once in a while they decide to try and balance the scales but not enough.
This has lead to deteriorating public infrastructure, rising cost of living, dependence on private companies (especially foreign ones), more corruption, a frequent attack of workers and green parties, more brash public discourse, and loss of trust with major disdain of politics. Their approach to resolve it has been to adopt right-wing discourse to try and win back their voters who have drifted off to the right due to populism.
As I said, left wing, progressive, and green parties have responded very meekly towards other parties, but respond harshly to parties that share similar ideologies, which leave the right wing field wide open. It is a wide failing of all parties left of right, more progressive than conservative, and non-populist ones.
Nailed it. Mainstream centrist and even the centre left are responsible for rise of far right. Look at CDU and SPD in Germany. Both incompetent and corrupt.
Centrist parties are not progressive enough idealistically, they are mostly opportunistic. Instead of making politics to bring society forward and make people’s lives better, tgey mostly care about being and staying in power. Somehow, many centrist parties concluded that early successes of the rising far right parties beyond the usual few percent meant that voters bought far right programs and did not (also) want to make a statement against who’s in power, so centrist parties started to adopt far right policies, believing that would get voters back to voting them. Instead, they normalized far right positions, helping push the overton window further to the right, continuing to worsen the situation for most people instead of improving and making extremist parties not looking that extreme anymore but a valid choice in elections, resulting in further gains for far right parties.
Why would people slip to the right because the centrists aren’t progressive enough?
Because many centrist parties in Europe are actually more centre right and neo-liberal and actively hold back progress. They invest little to nothing in public infrastructure, privatise public services, lower taxes on the rich, and weaken worker’s rights. They do it more slowly than right-wing parties and extreme right wing parties, but they do it nonetheless. Once in a while they decide to try and balance the scales but not enough.
This has lead to deteriorating public infrastructure, rising cost of living, dependence on private companies (especially foreign ones), more corruption, a frequent attack of workers and green parties, more brash public discourse, and loss of trust with major disdain of politics. Their approach to resolve it has been to adopt right-wing discourse to try and win back their voters who have drifted off to the right due to populism.
As I said, left wing, progressive, and green parties have responded very meekly towards other parties, but respond harshly to parties that share similar ideologies, which leave the right wing field wide open. It is a wide failing of all parties left of right, more progressive than conservative, and non-populist ones.
Nailed it. Mainstream centrist and even the centre left are responsible for rise of far right. Look at CDU and SPD in Germany. Both incompetent and corrupt.
Centrist parties are not progressive enough idealistically, they are mostly opportunistic. Instead of making politics to bring society forward and make people’s lives better, tgey mostly care about being and staying in power. Somehow, many centrist parties concluded that early successes of the rising far right parties beyond the usual few percent meant that voters bought far right programs and did not (also) want to make a statement against who’s in power, so centrist parties started to adopt far right policies, believing that would get voters back to voting them. Instead, they normalized far right positions, helping push the overton window further to the right, continuing to worsen the situation for most people instead of improving and making extremist parties not looking that extreme anymore but a valid choice in elections, resulting in further gains for far right parties.