Blog/Analysis

The radical right in Europe is achieving its best election results in history. In Germany, the far-right AfD surged to 21% of the vote in last month’s election, finishing in second place nationally for the first time.

Across Europe, hard-right parties, social democrats, and conservatives are each capturing around 25% of the vote on average. Our latest UK poll, conducted 26-28 February, reflects this pattern, with Labour on 24%, the Conservative on 22%, and Reform UK on 21%.

A consistent pattern is at play across Western Europe. Support for radical right parties is rising, driven by economic stagnation, historically high migration rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and widespread public discontent with politics.

To understand these dynamics, we conducted a survey across France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The study examined four key issues – security, immigration, no growth and social spending, which gave us the catchy acronym ‘S.I.N.S’. Given the recent prominence of foreign policy and European defence in the news, this post will examine the first component of that acronym: security.

Our Chief Research Officer presented findings from our survey at the CEPS Ideas Lab in Brussels last week. The complete slide deck is attached here.

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Defence spending

Western European voters are fairly split on defence spending, with none of the three options we tested receiving majority support. When presented with the tradeoffs (i.e. increasing defence spending, even if it means higher taxes or cuts elsewhere / reducing it to invest elsewhere, even if it reduces military readiness), pluralities in Germany (47%) and the United Kingdom (46%) favoured increasing defence spending.

In France, support for increasing defence spending was lower, at 34%, with the plurality (39%) wanting to keep defence spending at the current level.

Reform UK differs markedly from other radical right parties in France and Germany. While 63% of Reform UK voters favour increasing defence spending, only 41% of AfD voters in Germany and 37% of National Rally supporters in France share this view.

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Mainstream security views

Alongside defence spending, our survey asked questions about each country’s future foreign policy direction, NATO membership, the Russia-Ukraine war, and which countries respondents consider allies.

From UK responses, we identified the ‘mainstream’ security view – likely to become the UK government’s position in coming months as the White House grows more isolationist. A plurality of UK voters support the following positions (individually, rather than collectively): increasing defence spending, view Ukraine as an ally, favour closer European collaboration on foreign policy, want to remain in NATO, and prefer maintaining current levels of aid to Ukraine.

Among people who follow politics obsessively, these five positions probably seem like a coherent world view for a hypothetical centre-ground, internationalist party, but there is surprisingly little correlation between the five statements among voters.

Regarding agreement with these statements, Reform UK voters position themselves between the major UK parties and Western Europe’s radical right, agreeing with an average of 2.22 statements. The mean Reform voter occupies an uneasy middle ground between the National Rally and the UK Greens.

Though Reform voters show no consensus on security positions, it’s Labour who may face the greatest vulnerability when security becomes the political focus. Labour voters demonstrate the highest standard deviation in agreement with the mainstream positions among all UK parties. Furthermore, despite these five positions likely becoming Labour government policy in the coming months, the party’s supporters rank merely 8th out of 16 parties in average agreement with them.

While a longer survey would have allowed for a more detailed PCA analysis of voters, we can still offer a snapshot of where each party’s voters fall on defence, split into a collaboration axis and a spending axis.

We constructed the collaboration axis using three equally-weighted variables: a voter’s stance on NATO membership (via a hypothetical referendum), their perception of their country’s number of allies, and their preference for an independent foreign policy versus alignment with the EU or US. The spending axis combined attitudes toward defence spending with whether defence was selected as a top issue.

UK voters show more party-aligned consensus on defence matters compared to their French and German counterparts. The largest ideological gap – between Reform UK and the Greens – is notably smaller than that between Germany’s Greens and the AfD.

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Allies and enemies

In a striking shift which would have been unthinkable just 15 years ago, UK voters now view Ukraine as a closer ally than the United States. More voters in all parties – except those of Reform UK – rank Ukraine as an ally than the US. This particular position aligns Reform more closely with other European radical right parties.

However, Reform voters are the most anti-Russia of any UK political party – a clear divergence from Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally, who tend to be much more Russia-sympathetic, particularly the former. Nigel Farage’s previous comments on Vladimir Putin and the war’s origins, which have resurfaced in recent weeks, may pose a problem for Reform’s strongly anti-Russia base if the conflict escalates further.

Views on the United States in the UK saw the largest divergence between radical right and other party voters over all three countries. Across the 19 countries/groups we tested, Reform UK voters ranked the United States as the UK’s second biggest ally, while the rest of the population placed them just 13th.

In response to Donald Trump and JD Vance’s recent actions towards Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, this ranking is likely to decline across Europe as approval of Trump and the US government wanes even further. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally has already distanced herself from Trump, but in the UK, Reform’s brand is far more closely tied to its key ally in the White House than other radical right parties. The crucial question is whether voters will reassess their support for the party based on its closeness to Donald Trump and past positions. If US-Ukraine relations deteriorate further in the months ahead, Reform may face a critical choice: maintain allegiance to its American ally or pivot towards the median British voter.

While France and Germany may experience minor changes, the UK shows the greatest potential for defence and security issues to disrupt the political landscape – creating risks for both the radical right and the governing Labour Party.

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