Next, on the other side of the political spectrum, the center-left Party of European Socialists (PES) suspended its Slovak member party Smer and its autocratically inclined leader Robert Fico in October 2023. The suspension came immediately after the announcement that Smer would be forming a government with a radical-right party.
The comparative speed with which PES acted suggests that at least some Europarties are becoming more sensitive to the possible reputational costs of allying with radicals and aspiring autocrats at the EU level. And a study we recently published with colleagues Michele Fenzl and Pit Rieger provides strong evidence that mainstream Europarties would do well to resist such alliances.
Based on a survey experiment involving over 8,000 voters in Germany and Italy, our study explored whether mainstream voters failed to react to their parties partnering with radicals at the EU level because they didn’t care about such arrangements, or simply because they didn’t know about them.
Our results confirm that most voters actually knew very little about these alliances — 72 percent of our respondents couldn’t even identify which Europarty their national party belonged to. However, once they were made aware that the party they support was cooperating with a radical-right or autocratic party, we found that 65 percent would oppose such cooperation, and 41 percent said they would be unlikely to vote for their party in the next national election.
These findings are staggering when contrasted with attitudes about cooperating with a centrist party in the same Europarty — only 9 percent of our respondents said they would oppose this, and a mere 11 percent said they were unlikely to vote for their party as a result of such an alliance.
In fact, we found that voters reacted to mainstream parties cooperating with radicals in Brussels’ Europarties just as negatively as when they cooperate with them in coalition governments at home. And while we found that mainstream voters react negatively to cooperation with extremist parties of all sorts, they react most negatively when their party allies with those from the radical right.
