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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hume.
Why do seemingly ordinary people come to believe extreme things and engage in extreme acts?
In her talk, political researcher Daphne Halikiopoulou explores the curious rise of populism and far-right politics across Europe and the globe, sharing why extreme parties like neo-Nazi political parties become attractive to voters and what might really be behind this shift in beliefs.
So the far right is on the rise everywhere in Europe.
Now, this is different from a while ago.
Just until recently, I used to use Spain or Portugal as examples of countries that didn't have the far right as a significant force.
And the problem is not just that these parties are getting a lot of votes.
The problem is that many of these parties are now in government.
Look at Italy, for example.
Look at Hungary.
Look at countries in Scandinavia.
Or when they're not in government, they are actual contenders for it.
I don't want to think about the next French presidential election or many other countries where these parties are significantly contending for power.
Now, why is that?
And why do other parties, more importantly, think that, in order to defeat the far right, they need to copy the far right, they need to become the far right?
Well, that is because we hear a story.
Wherever we look at why this is happening, the story we hear is that well, you know, it's all about immigration.
It's all about culture.
It's all about people now not wanting globalization, not wanting immigrants, not wanting transnationalism, people just wanting nationalist politics.
And all the parties are doing is that they are responding to this kind of popular demand, as we call it in academia, and therefore the far-right is on the rise.
And what I want to do is debunk this myth and sort of disagree with this and say this is not simple story at all and it's not a story only about immigration and it's not a story only about culture.
Actually what it is is on what we call in academia the demand side, or the people, or the insecurities that drive people to vote for particular parties, are multiple and extend way beyond culture.
They extend way beyond immigration.
But on the supply, or in other words, the parties themselves.
They are adopting very clever nationalist narratives that are really able to capture this very, very broad coalition of voters.
I'm an academic, as I said, and so I love to talk with data and with evidence.
And this is just a very, very simple graph that shows what the voters of far-right parties across different European countries look like, or what their preferences are.
And the one key thing that I take away from that is that there is a non-immigration route to far-right voting.
This shows you that one third of far-right voters in Europe don't report immigration concerns at all.
It also shows you that in many countries where voters do have immigration concerns, these are economic.
In other words, these people have become susceptible to narratives that say that immigrants take away jobs, they take away access to the labor market, they take away access to social services.
So what I am arguing is that while focusing on immigration is one, perhaps, one driver of far-right party support, for these parties to gain the percentages that we are seeing now, the 20 percent and the 30 percent and the 40 percent, we need to look way beyond immigration to see the other insecurities that drive them.
In this is my visualization of the successful far-right versus a non-successful far-right.
Voters with cultural concerns.
I call them the culturalists.
They are definitely going to vote for the far-right, but actually they are a very small part of the electorate.
The voters that allow the parties to extend well beyond their voter base are people I call the materialists, people who have been convinced that the immigrants take away jobs and access to the labor market, etc.
They are the welfarists.
I've done a lot of research on how social policies actually limit the propensity.
They moderate, they compensate insecure people, thus limiting the propensity to vote for the far right.
They are the distrustful.
We have so much data about people losing trust in institutions, in political institutions, in social institutions, in the parliament, in the government, in the state, to deliver on its social contract obligations.
And the anti-greens.
There is a new big cleavage emerging across Europe.
Those people who don't want to pay more for the environment, who are actually voting for the far right because they believe that they are being hurt by environmental policies.
These people are living particularly in rural areas of Europe where they can't afford, to say, give up their car and I don't know, buy a new one that has no emissions, or buy more environmentally friendly.
Environmentally friendly cars or vehicles, etc.
So with these, I call these the peripheral voters.
It is capturing these voters that allows far-right parties to extend well beyond their secure voting base and get people to vote for them.
How do they do that?
This is the key of what i'm arguing, because you know, do you know any society that doesn't have insecure people?
There is no society that has no insecure people.
There is always going to be people who are worried about their economic situation.
They're worried about their, their status in society, but these may or may not be captured by voters, depending on what the parties do.
So parties have power to shape their own electoral fortunes.
How are the far-right parties in Europe doing this?
Well, they are putting forward what I call civic nationalist narratives.
Or in other words, they are sort of shifting the boundaries of toleration on its head.
These parties are no longer saying I'm extreme and I don't want people who are biologically different to me, because you know who's going to vote for a party that is openly racist.
No, what they say is, we exclude those who do not espouse our liberal democratic values.
We exclude those who don't espouse our liberal democracies.
They are antithetical to the very essence of the democracies that Europe is based on.
I've got some really interesting campaigns The AFD campaign.
The AFD was recently called an extreme party in Germany, yet it's saying no, we're not extreme.
It had this bikini campaign a few years ago when it was competing for elections, saying well, you know what?
We just don't want these others who come in with their intolerant ideas and tell us we can't wear bikinis on the beach, we can't drink our wine and we can't eat our pork because we are a liberal democratic party, and we just don't want to include those who ideologically exclude us.
Now, this is a very, very clever strategy because this makes parties appear more moderate.
It takes away the stigma of fascism.
It takes away the stigma of extremism.
So a voter will say well, it's okay, I can vote for these people because they are not actually extreme.
But unfortunately these parties are extreme and we see that these parties are extreme as they increasingly enter government and they increasingly attack liberal democratic institutions.
So what am I saying here?
Just to finish, I'm saying that If it was simply a story about society changing, society no longer being divided simply by haves and have-nots, but divided on a transnational cleavage, then we could tackle immigration and that would be it.
But this is not what is going on.
This is not at all.
Other parties copying the far right on immigration are only making this problem worse.
They are only normalizing the far right situation and making the far-right bigger, because the problem is not a problem necessarily that comes from the demand.
It's a problem of supply.
But what I'm saying is actually a good thing.
It's a positive thing because it means, if I am right then this means that parties have agency.
And if the far right has the agency to capture broader and broader coalitions, that's a bad thing, but it means that we also have agency to put on our own narratives.
Parties that oppose the far right can also put forward successful narratives to tackle the far right.
We have agency.
And that agency cannot be to copy the far right.
That agency has to be, to contradict the far right, to expose it for what it is and to also put forward and promote the positive aspects of immigration.
That was Daphne Holly Kiopoulou speaking at TEDxVitoriaGastais in Spain in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sungmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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