The Politics of Being Right Too Late: How Mainstream Parties Lose Issues to the Radical Right

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Germany’s Brandmauer is the political norm that keeps the Alternative für Deutschland outside normal coalition politics. Other parties can compete with it and try to win back its voters, but cooperation is supposed to remain beyond the pale. The principle is understandable, particularly in a country where the boundaries of democratic politics carry unusual historical weight.

It has not made the AfD disappear. In the 2025 federal election the party received 20.8 per cent of the vote, almost exactly twice its 2021 share. Sweden operated a looser version of the same strategy for much of the period after the Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010. SD grew until it received 20.54 per cent in 2022 and became the second-largest party in the Riksdag. In the 2026 election, however, its share fell to 17.48 per cent and 62 seats. Exclusion is therefore not a simple one-way ratchet either: SD remains a major party, but its growth did not continue indefinitely.

The tempting conclusion is that exclusion itself strengthens radical parties. European experience does not support anything so neat. Austria has repeatedly allowed the Freedom Party into government, yet the FPÖ returned in 2024 to win the national election with 28.8 per cent. Inclusion is no reliable cure either.

The more interesting question comes earlier. By the time a radical-right party commands a fifth of the electorate, the more consequential strategic failure may already have occurred. It has not merely accumulated votes. It has acquired a reputation for recognising a problem that other parties were unwilling, unable or too slow to address. A mainstream party can later change its policy; changing who gets credit for having seen the problem first is much harder.

How a party comes to own a problem

Political parties accumulate reputations. Social democrats have historically been associated with welfare and employment. Greens acquired ownership of environmental policy. Conservative parties often enjoy advantages on taxation, defence or law and order. Voters do not reconstruct every manifesto from first principles before each election. When a problem becomes salient, they already have an idea of which party understands it and which is likely to act.

Immigration has become one of the clearest examples. For many European radical-right parties, the breakthrough was not simply persuading voters to support unusually restrictive policies. It was persuading them that they were the parties willing to notice problems surrounding immigration and integration when others preferred to discuss something else.

Three questions are easily blurred together. Is there a real problem? What is causing it? What should be done about it? A voter can believe that immigration has placed pressure on housing, that integration is working poorly in some communities or that the asylum system needs reform without accepting ethnic nationalism, collective suspicion of immigrants or hostility to liberal institutions. Equally, voters can believe a problem exists while being wrong about its scale or causes.

That leaves mainstream parties with more choices than denial or imitation. If a radical challenger identifies a measurable problem but proposes a bad explanation and a worse remedy, denying that the problem exists does not refute the challenger. It allows the challenger to claim not merely that it has a different policy, but that it possesses a truth respectable politics refuses to acknowledge. That can become more politically valuable than any individual proposal.

Sweden shows how such a reputation can develop, although immigration alone cannot explain the rise of the Sweden Democrats. Jens Rydgren and Sara van der Meiden point to several changes occurring together: declining class loyalties, the growing salience of sociocultural politics, greater convergence between mainstream parties and SD’s own attempt to distance itself from its extremist origins.

Immigration nevertheless gave SD something particularly useful. For years it could argue that Swedish immigration and integration policies were producing problems that the established parties were reluctant to confront. The credibility of that argument did not depend on every SD claim being correct. It depended on enough voters concluding that SD was more willing than its competitors to discuss the subject.

Then Sweden changed course. After the migration crisis of 2015, the country sharply tightened its asylum regime. Parliament’s 2016 temporary legislation introduced time-limited residence permits, tighter family-reunification rules and stricter maintenance requirements. Positions that had previously sat well outside the Swedish mainstream moved much closer to its centre.

For an established SD voter, that sequence did not necessarily provide a reason to return to the older parties. It could just as easily be read as vindication: SD warned about a problem, its opponents resisted or downplayed the warning, and policy eventually moved towards ground SD had occupied. The mainstream could change policy while leaving SD’s ownership of the issue intact. The political reward went not necessarily to whoever eventually arrived at the best policy, but to whoever could plausibly say, we told you so.

The 2026 election complicates that account in a useful way. SD’s vote share fell by just over three percentage points from its 2022 peak. That is consistent with the possibility that issue ownership can erode once competing parties establish more credible positions of their own, but a single election cannot identify the cause: government participation from outside cabinet, changing issue salience, leadership, economic conditions and ordinary electoral movement all matter. The Swedish case therefore supports neither permanent ownership nor an easy recipe for taking it back.

Timing and credibility: Sarkozy and Le Pen

This suggests that timing matters, but not in the mechanical sense that mainstream parties can prevent radical-right growth by adopting tougher positions early. The evidence supports the negative proposition much more strongly than the positive one. A comparative study by Werner Krause, Denis Cohen and Tarik Abou-Chadi found no general evidence that mainstream parties reduce radical-right support by moving towards anti-immigration positions. The researchers explicitly tested whether accommodation worked better against newer challengers and still found no reliable effect.

The more plausible timing effect concerns reputation. When a concern first emerges, its political meaning is still unsettled. A mainstream party can examine the evidence, accept some claims, reject others and develop a response without appearing to borrow somebody else’s worldview. It can distinguish labour migration from asylum, national policy from local integration, temporary capacity constraints from permanent cultural incompatibility. If it waits until a rival has spent years building a reputation around the subject, the same policy move acquires additional baggage.

That baggage is credibility. Is the shift a genuine change of mind? Will it survive the election? Does the party intend to implement it, or is it saying what frightened strategists think defecting voters want to hear? Timing therefore matters because political reputations accumulate, not because early ideological convergence has been shown to work automatically.

France’s 2007 presidential election is useful precisely because it complicates a simple early-versus-late story. Jean-Marie Le Pen was hardly a new challenger. He had reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election with 16.9 per cent of the vote, and the Front National had spent decades making immigration and national identity central to its politics.

Nicolas Sarkozy nevertheless challenged it on that terrain. As interior minister and later presidential candidate, he argued for tighter immigration control, greater selectivity and stronger integration requirements while rejecting the Front National’s more radical programme. More importantly, Sarkozy already had a political reputation on crime, immigration and state authority. His position did not suddenly appear during the closing weeks of an election campaign.

In 2007 Le Pen fell to 10.4 per cent. Research comparing Sarkozy’s strategies in 2007 and 2012 estimates that 26 per cent of Le Pen’s 2002 voters transferred their support to Sarkozy, while Sarkozy substantially challenged Front National ownership of immigration.

Five years later, a similar strategy worked much less well. Marine Le Pen had taken over the Front National and worked to make it appear more credible and politically respectable. Sarkozy was no longer the energetic challenger promising a break with the status quo; he was the incumbent who had governed. Marine Le Pen received 17.9 per cent. The difference was not simply ideological distance. The credibility relationship had changed.

Sarkozy therefore provides something more useful than a rule to “move right early”. An established party can sometimes contest an issue already associated with a radical challenger, but the alternative has to look independently held, credible and governable. Once a shift looks like reluctant imitation, the challenger has an obvious defence: why vote for the copy?

Denmark, Austria and the limits of co-option

Denmark is often presented as the strongest European example of mainstream parties absorbing the radical right’s popular concerns. The Danish People’s Party received 21.1 per cent in 2015. By 2022 it had fallen to 2.6 per cent. Over roughly the same period, restrictive immigration politics became increasingly embedded across the Danish mainstream.

The Social Democrats were particularly important. In the 2019 election they deliberately campaigned on a more restrictive immigration platform than before, partly in an effort to recover voters lost to the Danish People’s Party, while retaining a recognisably centre-left economic programme.

The sequence looks highly favourable to the co-option thesis, but sequence is not causation. The 2022 election also complicates the apparent victory. While DF fell to 2.6 per cent, the Denmark Democrats won 8.1 per cent and New Right 3.7 per cent. Aggregate results cannot tell us that those voters simply migrated from DF, but they do show that a sizeable electoral market for restrictive and populist-right politics remained.

Denmark therefore demonstrates something narrower than the disappearance of radical-right demand. A particular party organisation can collapse while much of the political space that sustained it remains available to competitors. Parties are vessels; electorates can find new ones.

There is nevertheless something important in the Danish development. Immigration became an ordinary subject of disagreement across much of the political spectrum rather than the exclusive property of one insurgent party. That may matter even if it does not reliably eliminate populist competitors. It deprives them, at least to some extent, of the claim that the subject itself cannot be discussed within mainstream politics.

Austria provides a useful contrast. In 2017 Sebastian Kurz refashioned the Austrian People’s Party, adopted a much tougher line on migration and asylum, and competed directly for terrain long associated with the FPÖ. Contemporary election research described Kurz as undermining FPÖ ownership of immigration while adopting several of its positions. His personal appeal, party rebranding and reputation as a former foreign and integration minister were part of the same package, making it difficult to isolate immigration policy as the sole cause of the ÖVP’s success.

What looked like a successful transfer was not permanent. The FPÖ survived scandal, coalition breakdown and repeated changes of government. In 2024 it finished first with 28.8 per cent, ahead of Kurz’s former ÖVP.

Austria exposes the danger of confusing temporary voter transfer with permanent realignment. If the underlying concern remains salient, voters can return to the original party. If the mainstream competitor fails to deliver what its new supporters expected, the radical challenger gains another argument: the establishment borrowed our language because it needed our voters, but never really believed what it was saying.

Why copying usually fails

The broader comparative evidence is correspondingly sceptical of accommodation. Krause, Cohen and Abou-Chadi examined both party-level results and individual voter movements across Western Europe and found no evidence that mainstream parties generally reduce radical-right support by adopting more anti-immigration positions. If anything, the radical right sometimes emerges as the net beneficiary of the resulting voter movements.

The mechanism is easy to imagine. When a mainstream party moves sharply towards a challenger’s preferred position, it may increase the salience of the challenger’s strongest issue. It can also validate part of the challenger’s framing: apparently the problem really was serious enough to justify a major policy reversal. Voters then have to decide which party they trust to follow through, and the organisation that has discussed the issue for years begins with a substantial reputational advantage.

That does not mean mainstream parties should move in the opposite direction regardless of evidence. If an immigration policy is failing, maintaining it merely to avoid agreeing with the radical right would be an equally strange form of political dependence. A German party should be able to conclude that asylum procedures need reform without accepting the AfD’s conception of German identity; a Swedish party can decide that migration exceeded integration capacity without accepting SD’s broader interpretation of immigration.

The useful distinction is between recognition and imitation. Recognising a problem means testing whether it exists, working out its causes and responding within your own political framework. Imitation starts with the challenger’s framing and asks how much of it the mainstream can safely borrow. The first can contest issue ownership. The second may reinforce it.

None of this means that popular concern is itself reliable evidence of the underlying problem. Some concerns promoted by radical movements are real; others are exaggerated, misattributed or manufactured through selective examples and political mobilisation. Governments sometimes should tell voters that the evidence does not support what they believe. The point is that the argument has to be made. Refusing to examine a subject because an objectionable party has claimed it is another way of conceding ownership.

This is where timing becomes politically important without turning into a simple electoral formula. A mainstream party pays a reputational price when it leaves a concern to a rival for years and only begins to engage once that rival becomes dangerous. By then the policy question has acquired a second layer: not only is this solution sensible?, but why should we believe you now?

What Germany’s AfD firewall can—and cannot—do

Seen from this perspective, Germany’s present argument about the AfD firewall begins rather late in the political process. The immediate question is whether established parties should cooperate with a movement supported by more than one fifth of German voters in the last federal election. That is an important question, but it is not the same as asking why those voters chose the AfD or how they might be persuaded otherwise.

Germany also presents a harder constitutional question than Sweden or Denmark. The AfD’s federal classification as a right-wing extremist “suspected case” became legally final in July 2025. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution then attempted to upgrade the whole party to a “confirmed” extremist organisation. In February 2026 the Cologne Administrative Court suspended that higher classification pending the main proceedings; the court did not exonerate the party, and the underlying suspected-case status remained in place. As of late September 2026, the main proceedings were still ongoing, and the whole party remained at the legally confirmed suspected-case classification.

A firewall can therefore be defended on grounds quite separate from electoral strategy. A measure may succeed institutionally even if it fails to reduce a party’s vote. Refusing coalition power to an organisation considered a potential threat to constitutional norms is not rendered pointless simply because that organisation becomes more popular.

But the firewall cannot answer the political questions that produced the votes on the other side of it.

Once an excluded party becomes large enough, there is also the possibility of a self-reinforcing dynamic. Keeping it outside government may require increasingly broad combinations among the remaining parties. Voters who already distrust the political establishment then see parties that normally disagree governing together, while the excluded party retains the cleaner role of opposition. Its claim that “all the others are the same” becomes easier to sell.

That is a plausible mechanism, not proof that the firewall caused the AfD’s rise. Immigration, regional differences, economic dissatisfaction, distrust of institutions, the legacy of eastern German reunification, opposition to climate policy and other factors all compete for explanatory weight. The narrower claim is more defensible: as the excluded constituency grows, a firewall may remain institutionally meaningful while becoming less useful as an electoral strategy.

A firewall can protect institutions without solving the political problem represented by the voters behind it.

The choice before the firewall

European democracies have experimented with most of the obvious strategies. Radical-right parties have survived exclusion, recovered after disastrous periods in government and benefited even when mainstream competitors moved towards their positions. Denmark shows that a party can collapse while much of its political market survives. Sarkozy shows that issue ownership can sometimes be contested even when the radical competitor is well established. Sweden shows how a delayed mainstream shift can be interpreted as vindication rather than defeat.

No case provides a reliable formula for making a party supported by 20 per cent of the electorate disappear. The more consequential decisions may come before anyone is debating coalitions or firewalls: when a concern first begins spreading and mainstream politicians decide whether to investigate it, challenge its interpretation or leave the entire subject to someone they regard as beyond the pale.

If a problem emerges, measure it. If the evidence supports it, acknowledge it. If voters are identifying the wrong cause, argue why. If government policy contributes to the problem, change it. If the radical solution is disproportionate or unconstitutional, explain what a workable alternative looks like. None of this guarantees that the challenger will disappear, but it makes it harder for one party to monopolise both the problem and the language used to describe it.

Once a rival has spent years building a reputation as the only organisation willing to recognise a concern, changing policy may no longer be enough. The mainstream competitor must also overcome accumulated memories of what it previously said and doubts about whether its conversion is sincere. The answer is not to copy radical parties sooner. It is to deny them exclusive ownership of reality.

A democracy can exclude a party from government. It can refuse coalitions, maintain constitutional red lines and reject policies that violate liberal principles. What it cannot safely do is allow that party to become the only credible voice for a concern shared by millions of voters.

By the time the argument is about the firewall, it may already be too late.