Europe’s shift to the right has been called into question as recent elections in Britain and France defy expectations. In Britain, the Labour party has achieved a landslide victory, winning 411 seats to the Conservative party’s 121. In France, the extreme Left has won the most seats, followed closely by Emmanuel Macron’s Centrists. Marine Le Pen’s hard-right Rassemblement National has been relegated to third place.
While commentators may have initially hailed a rightward shift, closer examination reveals that the usual factors driving voters to the right – mass migration, inflation, and war – are still at play. The headline results are also misleading, with Le Pen winning the popular vote in France and the Conservatives getting a disproportionate number of seats in the UK due to the first-past-the-post voting system.
What we are seeing is the convergence of three major political shifts. Firstly, there is a general shift to the right as voters react to tough domestic and international circumstances. Secondly, there is an anti-incumbency mood that has persisted since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Voters are now refusing to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions and are instead blaming their politicians for their misfortunes.
Lastly, the attention span of voters is shrinking. This is the first time Labour has been in power in the age of smartphones, and people are becoming more demanding, more short-tempered, and more prone to conspiracy theories. Any government failure is now attributed to malice or a hidden hand, rather than the lack of resources.
This tendency tends to benefit the political extremes, who offer simple solutions. However, Centrists can also take advantage of this trend by using social media to campaign on single issues that resonate with voters. The British Liberal Democrats, for example, went from 11 to 72 MPs by focusing on the issue of sewage in rivers.
Voters are no longer interested in nuance or explanation, and instead demand immediate results. This has significant implications for our democratic culture, as we become simultaneously more demanding of our politicians and less interested in the trade-offs they must make. We may eventually find ourselves running through governments like we scroll through our social media feeds, never satisfied and always grumpy.
