The Growth Of UKIP Should Be A Wake-Up Call For Traditional Parties.

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is taking the country by storm. Some polls claim that the British Eurosceptics will beat all three traditional political parties in the upcoming EU election. Even if this prediction does not come true, the fact is that UKIP has grown larger than many could have imagined, and is now the unofficial representative of political discontent in the United Kingdom. All throughout Europe, similar chauvinistic, isolationist parties- from the Nordic Sweden Democrats and True Finns to Greece’s Golden Dawn- have become too large to ignore.

Established political parties throughout Europe have struggled to find an adequate response to this new threat. In Sweden, representatives of the Sweden Democrats are often just ignored by other political parties, possibly in the hope that the problem will go away with time. In Britain, the most common response has been to state that UKIP is a racist party in order to weaken its public image. Sure enough: UKIP’s most recent posters will make some people’s racism alarms go off. But take a careful look at the party’s policy statements, and you will come to the conclusion that they were thought up by a madman.

One of UKIP’s controversial election posters

UKIP representatives have denied the established scientific fact that climate change is worsened by human action. They have also criticised stem cell research, all while gladly embracing  homeopathic products in the national health care system. Their reaction to marriage equality laws has been childish, to say the least. One of their candidates recently proposed compulsory abortions for disabled people. And yet, despite the ridiculous policy statements and a recent campaign manifesto that was described as ‘drivel’ by the party’s own leader, UKIP marches on. Why?

The causes of UKIP’s growth

The fact that this party and similar ones throughout Europe continue to grow despite their policies being complete nonsense tells us more about the other players in the political game than it does about UKIP and its mirror images. The new millennium has seen an unprecedented weakening of the established political parties. This has happened almost everywhere in the continent, and has affected those on both sides of the political spectrum. In countries like Spain, France or the United Kingdom, elections are no longer the two horse races they previously were. And with this, the traditional left-right division where people voted for one party or the other according to their general ideology is no longer valid.

So why has this happened? Why have the traditional rules of the political game changed so drastically in recent years? To a large extent, this is all a side-effect of the end of the Cold War. While most of Western Europe’s social democratic parties had already renounced Marxism by then, the slow death of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 forced them to reconsider their policies even further. Schröder made Germany’s SPD embrace market capitalism, Göran Persson set the Social Democrats on a similar path in Sweden, and Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ reforms came to symbolise this international trend.

Election results of Social Democratic parties in Europe, 1988-2012

It made sense for Europe’s social democrats to go through such reforms at uncertain times. However, the fact is that many ideological left-wingers were outraged by the changes and turned to communist parties during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The power base of social democratic parties was further weakened by mass immigration. Many working class voters who feared that their jobs would go to foreigners were not convinced by these new liberal social democratic parties, and neither did they believe in the internationalism proposed by the communists. Their natural reaction was turn to the right.

Enter the recession

Election results of populist parties in Europe, 1988-2012

After social democratic parties embraced market reforms throughout Europe, they managed to retain the support of the middle classes but not that of the workers, whose votes were spread more thinly than ever before. The crisis that began during the last years of the ‘noughties’ introduced a further variable into the equation. The conservative parties that had been in power at some point during the crisis in the UK, France, Sweden or Finland were blamed by many for the economic situation, and thus lost popular support. Therefore, the average European worker voting in 2014 may no longer trust a social democratic party that has embraced market liberalism, or a communist party that is too internationalist, or a conservative party that is partially responsible for leading the country into an economic crisis. The natural response? To vote for those who claim to be against the system, who are not internationalists, and who have never held real power before; even if their policies are indeed bonkers.

Many on both the left and the right will be tempted to try to see the storm through and wait until economic growth brings back the status quo. But this would be a risky strategy given that we have no idea what a post-crisis Europe will look like. If traditional political parties want to play a role in the long term, they are going to have to re-think their policies. Whether they like it or not, they will have to tackle the issues that have contributed to the growth of groups like UKIP. During the coming years, you shouldn’t be surprised to find social democratic parties openly calling for limits on migration, or conservative parties demanding to leave the EU. If this does not happen, groups like UKIP, True Finns or the National Front will remain key players in the long term. In politics, just like in the natural world, actors need to adapt or perish.