US presidential candidates join global rightward shift on immigration | News about the 2024 US election

The trend extends beyond the US to European nations such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

In July, for example, the nativist Reform Party UK secured the third largest share of the vote in the British election after a campaign in which the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, promised a “freeze” on immigration.

Then, in September, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) also became the first far-right party to win a state election in that country since World War II.

He even came close to ousting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the state of Brandenburg that month.

Meanwhile, in France, Marine Le Pen led a coalition of parties known as the National Rally (RN) to third place in recent national elections, attacking immigration, Islam and multiculturalism.

Many center and left parties responded with their own efforts to strike a hard line.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s government has tried to deflate the far-right by co-opting many of their ideas on immigration, promising further restrictions on asylum and prison sentences for people who enter France illegally.

These moves come in response to conservative parties, such as Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s, forming an unprecedented alliance with the far right.

“It is undeniable that Michel Barnier seems to have, on migration, the same assessment as us,” Le Pen recently noted with satisfaction in La Tribune newspaper.

While immigration is a central issue among far-right parties in the West, it is not the only factor in their growing appeal.

A study published in Cambridge University Press in April 2023 found that economic austerity measures – which often result in cuts to government benefits and services – have contributed to the rise of non-mainstream parties and political instability.

But immigrants can serve as a convenient scapegoat amid feelings of downward mobility.

“Far-right populist parties have ebbed and flowed in different countries across the European Union and made immigration a real issue,” said Judith Sunderland, associate director for Europe and Central Asia. division of the watchdog group Human Rights Watch.

The result, she added, is that parties on both sides of the political spectrum are reacting to the new power of the far right.

“Mainstream parties on the right and left have moved slowly, and sometimes quite quickly, to the far right on these issues in a scramble for votes and political support, arguing that if they don’t adopt these policies, the extreme right will take over.”