As European democracies get increasingly harder to govern, finding their political centre has become a wild goose chase at best — and a mythical quest at worst.
This dilemma is particularly acute in Germany, where the concept of “centrism” looms large in political discourse. Extremism tore the country, and Europe, apart, making moderation an attractive antidote to any ideological disease that might threaten the democratic body politic.
It helps explain why three of Germany’s establishment parties — the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) — all proudly lay claim to the “middle.” A fourth, the Greens, got their start as dogmatic idealists, but they climbed to power as pragmatic realists.
Such reverence for a middle way, however, has not insulated Germany from the polarisation and fragmentation that has taken hold across European democracies. Politics are veering right, and self-described centrist parties are in hot pursuit.
This leads to a reasonable question: When is a “centrist” party no longer in the “centre”?
“If you generalise in the European context, the centre is pro-democracy, pro-rule of law, pro-basic rights and freedoms and pro-European integration,” Ilke Toygür, director of the IE Global Policy Centre at the IE University in Madrid, told The Parliament.
Friedrich Merz may struggle to meet that definition. Germany’s likely next chancellor has helped push his Christian Democrats (CDU) closer to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), hoping to suck the wind out of their sails. In February’s general elections, the AfD came in second — around eight points behind the CDU.
While Merz has gone to great rhetorical lengths to keep his distance from the AfD, he has also worked with them in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. One analysis showed the parties’ manifestos overlap by around 75%.
Merz has called for permanent border controls, more restrictive migration measures, and easier deportation and rejection procedures for asylum seekers. He has also flirted with stripping certain people of citizenship and expressed interest in inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Germany, despite an arrest warrant for war crimes charges.
Each of these positions, if translated into policy, risks Germany’s adherence to international law. The CDU’s likely coalition partner, the SPD, has made similar appeals to far-right tropes. The effect is a shift in the meaning of centrism, a phenomenon hardly unique to Germany.
"The decline of mainstream journalism, and the exploitation of certain issues and means of communication by extreme right parties are leading centrist parties to desert the centre," Catherine Woollard, director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, told The Parliament.
Europe’s disappearing political centre
With roots in the 18th-century French Revolution, centrism has become a concept associated with compromise and balance. The term, at least in a European context, developed from moderates who identified neither with the reactionary nor radical factions in French politics at the time, sitting themselves literally in the middle of the two.
Several decades and two World Wars later, European democracies — especially big ones such as the UK, Germany and France — have mostly oscillated between establishment parties hewing just to the left or right of that idea of the “centre.” Relatively low levels of immigration, economic growth helped by the military and financial backstop of the US, and a more homogenous political elite lent a degree of stability to the ups and downs of electoral politics.
Such clean, left-right-centre delineations are breaking down, yet European politicians still cling to them. Despite a far-right surge in European elections last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared that the “centre has held.”
Less than a year later, her Commission has made the far-right idea of “return hubs” for deportation and processing asylum-seekers an official European policy objective.
“The context has changed. It's no longer between centre-right and centre-left parties, both of whom share a broader framework and commitment to the system,” Ronan McCrea, a professor of constitutional and European Law at University College London, told The Parliament. “Populism is on one side, and the system parties are on the other.”
A 2024 EU study found that since the Covid-19 pandemic, trust in national governments has decreased. That souring sentiment is unevenly distributed in the population. Students, some types of workers and retired people have registered higher trust compared to the unemployed or those outside the labour market, the study showed.
Social media and alternative media platforms, used effectively by nationalist or populist voices, have amplified that discontent.
Centrism searching for answers
The 2007-2009 global financial crisis helps explain some of that. Though it kicked off nearly two decades ago, many of the consequences remain part of daily life, exacerbated by economic and political crises since.
“The worsening overall of our economic prospects," McCrea said, “exert the downward pressure on our living standards."
A 2024 Eurobarometer survey found that for Europeans, security and defence became a top priority in the medium term, followed by migration. The same survey ten years earlier showed inflation, unemployment and household finances as the biggest concerns. Immigration was at the bottom of the list, with just 5% of respondents calling it a problem the EU needed to deal with.
“Centrist parties are struggling to provide the kind of economic prosperity and cultural security that they were able to do during the height of the Cold War,” Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, told The Parliament.
The shift suggests that economic anxieties of the early 2010s gave way to corollary concerns for which establishment parties had unsatisfying answers. The far-right pounced, reframing migration as a threat to both economic stability and national security, despite the boost it gives to the former and the lack of a link to the latter.
Democracies that are more polarised become harder to govern because they struggle to find common ground, which is the centrist’s argument for centrism in the first place. This is becoming clearer in France and could be Germany’s future, as gains for the AfD and the socialist Left might make the legislative process difficult.
“Management of asylum and migration questions without reverting to hysteria, crisis language or racism would also define a centrist approach,” Woollard, the migration researcher, said, noting how far-right rhetoric has spread across the political spectrum.
Centrists in glass houses
Even as they recoil in disgust at steps US President Donald Trump has taken against the rule of law, many self-described centrists have engaged in or supported similar action on this side of the Atlantic.
Belgium recently launched a new social media campaign discouraging people from seeking asylum there. Denmark has openly planned to house unwanted migrants on a remote island. Suella Braverman, the former UK Home Secretary, told a Holocaust survivor that she would not apologise for her description of migrants as an “invasion,” which the survivor said was akin to Nazi rhetoric.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has been praised for rebuilding democratic norms in Poland after years of national-conservative rule that undermined an independent judiciary, has also pushed for closing borders and denying asylum claims.
“Certain factors are leading centrist parties to desert the centre,” Woollard said. “It's certainly extremely risky in democratic terms because as they do that, they tend to start engaging in anti-democratic behaviour.”
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