Centrist Antiestablishment Parties and Their Struggle for Survival

In Europe today, new political parties rise to prominence by portraying themselves as outsiders and mobilizing citizens to cast protest votes against corrupt political elites. Many of these parties, such as Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia in Italy and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale in France, can be found on the populist fringes of the extreme right and left. Yet some of these upstart parties initially emerge from the political center. This study argues that when such centrist antiestablishment parties emerge, they confront a dilemma: How can they maintain their antiestablishment credentials from the middle of the political spectrum? Most fail the test and collapse, as did the Free Party in Estonia, while the few that survive do so by moving to the extremes and, ironically, by adopting the corrupt clientelism of the predecessors they once criticized, as the Law and Justice Party did in Poland a decade ago. Europe’s traditional Christian democratic, liberal, and social democratic parties may thus face less centrist competition than they have in recent years. At the same time, the conditions that enabled innovative new parties that bolstered centrist politics, such as Renaissance in France and ANO in the Czech Republic, may no longer obtain.