In Europe, the center-right is losing its battle against populism

In Germany, after dominating politics for almost two decades, the center-right is now on the defensive, with the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, now leading in some polls for the first time since its creation in 2013. In the U.K., the Conservative Party, after losing an election to the Labour Party last year, is now in danger of being overtaken on the right.

While center-right parties remain in government in large parts of Europe, they are losing votes and popularity to more radical upstarts, a trend fueled by frustration over rising immigration and slow economic growth.

In France, the far-right National Rally is the largest single party in the Assemblée Nationale, while the center-right Republicans and their allies hold 48 of the chamber’s 577 seats. And in Italy, Giorgia Meloni became prime minister in 2022, backed by her populist party, Brothers of Italy.

Right-wing populists are now in government or supporting ruling coalitions in the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Croatia, Slovakia and Hungary, a marked increase from last year. They also made big gains at last year’s European elections.

The U.K.’s Tories and Germany’s Christian Democratic Union have been two of the holdouts. But they are now under siege—and oscillating between three strategies in response: imitation, opposition and collaboration.

Nothing appears to be working.

The rise of the populist right “reflects a gradual erosion of confidence in democratic institutions: Parliament, the government, etc.," said Manfred Güllner, head of the German Forsa polling group. In Germany, recent political instability, including the premature collapse of the last government, was feeding this erosion of trust.

In some countries, the center-right has addressed the challenge by adopting antiestablishment policies and discourse—an approach that has often backfired.

In 2016, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron held a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union to appease the Conservative Party’s euroskeptic fringe, which he went on to lose. Almost a decade on and after burning through a succession of leaders, the party is facing an existential threat from Reform UK.

Polling this week by YouGov shows startup party Reform UK with 29% of the vote share and the Conservatives lingering on 17%. If that polling persists until the next general election expected in 2029, the Tories, historically one of the most electorally successful political franchises in Europe, would be almost wiped out, pollsters say.

Led by euroskeptic champion Nigel Farage, Reform is now peeling away large numbers of Tory voters with a tough line on immigration and climate policies, while courting traditionally left-wing supporters with an interventionist economic pitch that includes nationalizing the steel industry. Last week, it won against both the Tories and the center-left Labour Party in local elections.

The Tories have a difficult choice: try to outflank Reform on the right or attempt to orchestrate a merger with Farage, said Rob Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester.

The Conservatives’ new leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said she needs time to rebuild the Tory brand after it was ousted from government last year. She has ruled out going into coalition with Reform and is fleshing out anti-immigration measures instead.

Conservative strategists are wary of chasing Farage down the right. They point to Canada’s Pierre Poilievre and Australia’s Peter Dutton, who trumpeted populist policies and not only lost elections but also their own seats.

Elsewhere, centrists of various hues have reacted to far-right surges not by stealing their message but by banding together to form moderate governments. But these cross-party alliances have at times struggled to govern given their ideological differences, with the result being increased instability and declining popularity for moderates.

For the first time in Germany’s post-World War II history, it took Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, two votes in parliament to secure an endorsement from lawmakers even though his proposed coalition had a relatively comfortable majority. Merz, chairman of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, is governing in an alliance with the center-left Social Democratic Party. He now faces an ascendant AfD.

Born as a fiscally conservative protest movement opposed to the bailout of eurozone member states during the region’s sovereign-debt crisis, the AfD has morphed into one of Europe’s most radical far-right parties. It is stridently anti-immigration, wants Germany to leave the EU, and has called for a rapprochement with Russia.

Last week, after years of investigation, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, classified the AfD as a right-wing extremist organization, giving the agency more leeway to spy on the party.

That move—now suspended pending the outcome of a legal complaint by the AfD—has irked some American conservatives, drawing public criticism from Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who called it “tyranny in disguise" in a social-media post.

Germany’s Nazi past has made any talk of cooperation between traditional parties and the AfD highly controversial. And despite pressure from the Trump administration, the Christian Democrats under Merz have so far stuck to the “firewall," an agreement between all other parties to keep the AfD out of power at the regional and national levels.

Yet the AfD’s recent rise in the polls has rekindled a debate on the center-right about how best to deal with the challenge. Andreas Rödder, a historian and head of the conservative think tank Denkfabrik R21, says the CDU should ditch the firewall and replace it with “red lines," a list of positions the AfD would need to abandon as the price of linking up with the CDU in government.

This, says Rödder, could bolster moderates in the AfD and offer voters a new political option after almost two decades of the country being run by left-right coalitions with similar agendas.

Others think it is too late for that. With the AfD now ahead of the CDU in polls, its leaders are in no mood to compromise.

Instead of adopting the AfD’s discourse, Merz should tackle the problems behind their rising popularity, starting with high immigration, said Stefan Marschall, a professor of political science at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf.

Merz has pledged to start turning back undocumented migrants, including asylum seekers, on day one of taking office and said he would cut immigration by half in the medium term.

“Politicians need to address the areas of dissatisfaction," said Marschall. “If they do that, and if they succeed, there is a chance that support for the AfD might be lower this time next year."

Former Conservative Party leader William Hague agrees, saying the populist right in the U.K. is a threat not just to the Tories but to all establishment parties, whose successive governments have failed to improve living standards, control immigration or improve public services.

The Tories, he said, should admit their past mistakes and blunt Reform by pushing for tighter restrictions on asylum seekers, while promoting forms of legal migration that boost the economy. The party should also focus on making the stagnant economy more dynamic.

“This is the final warning, I think, to the main political parties. They really have to reinvent themselves now," he said.

Write to Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com and Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com