Crises have split European voters into five ‘tribes’, survey suggests
Crises have split European voters into five ‘tribes’, survey suggests
Attitudes to climate, migration, global economic turmoil, Ukraine and Covid will dominate this year’s elections, research indicates
Voters who view immigration as the biggest crisis mostly back rightwing parties such as the National Rally in France or Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD); those who prioritise the climate tend to support green or leftist parties such as Spain’s Socialists or Poland’s Left.
This seems like a misrepresentation. It is not as if the followers of right-wing parties see the climate crisis as the smaller problem, they usually outright deny its existence and want to sabotage any attempts to limit its impact by actively favouring fossil fuels and other technologies harmful for the climate.
Maybe that differs per culture, but here in the Netherlands I know plenty of right-wing voters who don't deny the issue at all. They acknowledge it's a problem, sometimes even want to put effort into fixing it. Their arguments against are usually "we're such a small country, so whatever we do won't really affect anything anyway" and "it's already going quite well, no need to be ahead of the curve". I'd say that's actually by far the largest group of right wing voters in my personal experience.
Now personally I don't agree with them of course. Yes we're a small country, but als relatively rich and relatively bad for the climate. Also, adding all small countries together still adds up to a big amount of emissions. If all small countries would reason like this nothing would happen. And we're not exactly ahead of the curve either, even though we're relatively rich.
We had more of that here in Germany maybe 10 years ago, the people wouldn't claim we are that small but the closely related argument that we are already doing more than the US and China and they are so much larger than us. Today there is more denial but also more of that "we are for everything that is against what the Greens want" attitude.
Maybe that differs per culture, but here in the Netherlands I know plenty of right-wing voters who don’t deny the issue at all. They acknowledge it’s a problem, sometimes even want to put effort into fixing it. Their arguments against are usually “we’re such a small country, so whatever we do won’t really affect anything anyway” and “it’s already going quite well, no need to be ahead of the curve”. I’d say that’s actually by far the largest group of right wing voters in my personal experience.
It is not just happening in the Netherlands, I can see it in Germany too and there is this study that found it all over Youtube. It is the same group and the same denial, just their agenda framed differently, because they could not win over people with right out denying climate change anymore. They just switched the narrative to "can't do anything against it" :
The report published on Tuesday shows a shift from the “old denial” – that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic – to the “new denial”.
These new denial narratives that question the science and solutions for climate change constituted 35% of all climate denial on YouTube in 2018, but now represent the large majority (70%). Over the same period, the share of old denial has dropped from 65% to 30% of total claims.
The report authors believe that this shift is because the scientific evidence is now more accepted and hard to dispute, so those aiming to win people over to climate denial and delay must discredit the solutions and people pushing for climate action.
In a proper democracy some of these tribes wouldn't exist because all voters would be educated and have proper information about the state of the world and would vote based on what they think is the correct way forward, not based on irrational fears.
Doesn't really work if one of the tribes is fundamentally about denying human rights to a specific group of people. Any compromise with that position is already accepting that position as viable. Also the right outright denies the problem of climate change all together - and therefore are not interested in any compromise about something they don't believe exists, too.
The left and center parties can still work together but sadly the right has drifted too far away from what reasonable positions that you can compromise with are.
You don't need unanimous decision making, as long as people's voices are represented. But I do indeed hope that a large majority of people will always refuse to compromise on denying human rights to specific groups of people.
Democracy only works if people are more or less on the same page about reality - since than they can find a conses or compromise. If people can't agree on the nature of reality (is climate change real, is there a problem with immigration, are viruses even real? ) than democracy can do nothing, since there is no way to bridge that differences in a peaceful manner.
That is another sign of a well-functioning democracy, indeed.
The five tribes identified are not present in each country, but rather it is a regional split according to which topic is dominating the current political debate.
In Southern Europe it is economic turmoil, in eastern Europe it is Russian agression, in some areas of western and central Europe it is climate change and in other areas it is migration. Finally there is the Covid, which is an issue in all countries.
Yeah I mean, all tribes that are present among the voting populace should be represented. (I was mainly just making a dig at the US's two-party system :P )
And in a proper democracy, each citizen votes directly on matters.
Someone who represents only some of your views cannot effectively act as your representative.
Mir si im momänt grad chli unbeliebt, darum wei sis nid ghöre.. aber säubschtverständlech hesch rächt
So they didn't ask
Which issue is most concerning to you?
But asked instead
Which of the following issues has, over the past decade, most changed the way you look at your future?
If someone has been most concerned about some issue for decades, they wouldn't necessarily give it as an answer to the second question.
Keep in mind this is a report from a Think Tank (which is not funded by individuals but rather by organisations with a certain political slant) rather that some kind of peer reviewed scientific paper.
(The Guardian is pretty big on presentings Think Tank reports, which are almost invariably "opinion making" pieces, as "the way things are")
I'm involved in politics locally (in Portugal) and whilst most of those things are indeed important concerns of people, you would be hard pressed to find anybody for whom any one of them is such a higher priority versus the other that they're 'tribal' about it - generally people have a bit of each as a concern.
Also were in this report are represented concerns such as Corruption in Politics or Human Rights (specifically with what's going on in Gaza)?!
That report reeks of selective framing.
I've lived in the UK and this report looks a lot more like how politics is fragmented over there, which is mainly because that country has no real Leftwing beyond the Green Party (which gets about 1 million votes out of around 40 million) since Labour became New Labour, and even this newspaper is "the voice of the neolib" and only sounds sane by comparisson with the rest of the media landscape over there (were most newspapers would long ago already be deemed far-right by the standards of the rest of Europe), and even there I would say it's more the product of Press and Politicians framing it in a certain way for "opinion forming" purposes - in the absence of left vs right, stories had to be spinned to make politics seem representative - rather than these things being genuinelly some kind of "tribalist" boundaries.
I would be very very wary of taking any Think Tank report on politics at face value or The Guardian's view on the rest of Europe as anything but highly poluted by a British exceptionalism, projection and misunderstanding, and I say this as somebody who read that newspaper for almost a decade and has lived in a couple of countries in Europe including the UK.
Weird how they sometimes link their sources and sometimes not - here they link to the report being quoted, but most Guardian articles about a US court decision or a government report etc. just quotes the document without linking it.
It's also weird how all five of the suggested problems are consequences of unleashed capitalism but yet are represented like they were five completely different issues.
Interesting split. In my case, the biggest issue is the cost of living, including the housing crisis, so I guess "economic turmoil"?
Nope, if housing and cost of living is an actual problem for you, you're obviously too poor to be relevant to The Economy™ and its turmoils.
Not in my opinion, "economic turmoil" is if you are worried that speculative gambling numbers are too low so the poor serial investors will miss out on short term profits and if you are worried that taxes on people making over 10 million a year are rising to a small fraction of what the poor have to pay. That's "the economy"
I don't think the housing crisis and cost of living crisis is even represented in many goverments outside of pan-party press talking points to appease "the poors" that are worried about it while doing little to nothing.
Kinda surprising Palestine isn't one of them.
Only my perspective, but Palestine while certainly an issue, it's not as big an issue as in the US. The EU did not park an aircraft carrier on the shore of Gaza to support Israel, and while policy positions slide back and forth, the initial response was mostly a call for ceasefire. The US is the sole country that has been consistently supporting Israel.
Ukraine is a much bigger thing because of its proximity and because we back a horse in the race. And neither of them are as big as housing or cost of living or climate change, apparently.
I see. Yeah that makes sense.
I guess the study was started before the Israel Palestine conflict emerged.
This is a report from a Think Tank funded by organisations with specific political slants, including the George Soros Fundation.
It looks suspiciouly like it was framed - the purpose of Think Tanks is generally to generate technocratic explanations of for pre-determined "conclusions" - and they would be highly unlikely to give relevance to anything that makes Israel look bad, and if they did, then The Guardian would not publish it, as that British newspaper is aligned with New Labour and the Libdems and was a heavy participant in the "anti-semitism" slandler campaign to see off the threat of a leftwinger - Corbyn - as Labour party leader and which was so ridiculous they implied a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was an anti-semite in order to slander Corbyn by association for having sat on a panel in a conference were said Holocaust Survivor made some negative comments about Israel.
This would also explain why concerns like Corruption aren't mentioned in this "reporty", even thought at least in Southern Europe that's pretty high in people's minds - conceens about Corruption show a broader distrust and discontentment with mainstream politics after decades of it being dominated by the kind of politics this Think Tank espouses, and cannot just be framed as being about "external agents".
Some people believe Covid is the most important topic in this election? I'd say that is practically over. What concerns these citizens??
Also some people are still miffed about the measures taken.
As I understand them, they feel very strongly that anything that curbed their rights in the face of the pandemic was unacceptable regardless of the consequences (which they seemed non-existent or acceptable). Therefore they (the think different people) think this is an important subject.
All the covid measures where taken by "the elite" to exercise power over the masses and thus this must be countered structurally.
I do not agree, but this is how I understand some of it.
anything that curbed their rights in the face of the pandemic was unacceptable regardless of the consequences (which they seemed non-existent or acceptable).
For most of them it isn't that deep. They don't really think. They were simply annoyed they couldn't do things they enjoyed, and got angry. Not unlike little children.
Anything more is a rationalisation and a justification of their feelings, in order to sound less impulsive and irrational.
Presumably the problems in health care systems shown by Covid, Long Covid and of course new variants affecting people with compromised immune systems.
I'd say that is practically over
The problem is that the media and political class has conspired to make you think that. It is most definitely not "over". Not as a live pandemic, and not as the aftermath ie long covid, lost school years, etc. It's like if in 2009 people said the financial crisis was over.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The polling suggests 2024’s European parliament and national elections will be fought over attitudes to five major crises that have affected voters’ lives in recent years: the climate emergency, the 2015 migration crisis, global economic turmoil, the war in Ukraine and Covid.
The report’s authors argue that all five of these crises “were felt across Europe, although to varying intensities in different corners of the continent; experienced as an existential threat by many Europeans; dramatically affected government policies – and are by no means over”.
Ivan Krastev of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, said the study showed that in terms of how they saw the EU, citizens were “drifting away from the ideological bonds of right and left” and were instead swayed more by their views of these crises.
Dutch voters placed Geert Wilders’ anti-immigrant Freedom party (PVV) top of the poll, with the pro-environment Green-Labour alliance headed by the former European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans finishing second.
The survey – of nine EU member states representing 75% of the bloc’s population, plus Great Britain and Switzerland – suggested that 73.4 million European voters believed the climate emergency was the single most important crisis affecting their future.
In Italy and Portugal, both of which were badly affected by the 2008 financial crash and ensuing eurozone crisis, a plurality (34%) of respondents said worldwide economic turmoil and the rising cost of living were paramount among their concerns.
The original article contains 965 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So the major concerns are climate change and it’s too expensive to live. Sounds like reasonable concerns that a continent spanning government agency should be able to address…
Now the part about the anti-immigration party being the most popular is concerning.
And in proper democracies, all of these tribes are represented in parliament and make policy together.