If the faux “center”-left wishes to reverse the advance of the “far right,” it needs to walk away from policies considered by many to be extreme.

The use and abuse of the term “far right” has become a cliché, but even so, some sections in this recent editorial in the Financial Times (more and more a newspaper of the radicalized “center”-left) are worth a look.

Consider this, for example:

Some argue making radical right parties share the responsibilities of power can deflate their anti-establishment appeal. It has worked to some degree in Nordic countries.

But before doing so, note a sentence that comes a little later:

It is foolish to think that voters’ concerns can be explained away rather than addressed. Concerns over uncontrolled immigration are an obvious example.

Indeed they are. Those concerns were ignored for years and were hugely intensified by Angela Merkel’s decision to fling open Germany’s doors still wider in 2015. And how did the Financial Times react to that? Why, it made her its “person of the year”:

The cautious, “step-by-step” chancellor who had led Germany for a decade was gone, replaced by a politician with bold convictions.

“Bold convictions.”

It was a big gambit, and it is far from clear whether it will pay off. If it does, however, it will cement her reputation as one of Germany’s great chancellors. By keeping Europe’s doors open for more than 1m mostly Muslim refugees, Ms Merkel will leave a legacy as enduring as her mentor, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, who presided over German reunification and the birth of the euro. For this reason, the Financial Times has named Angela Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year.

But back to 2025. The FT writes that handing “radical” parties a share of power in the Nordic region has worked “to some degree,” a curiously lukewarm description. In fact, this strategy has worked pretty well. Voters’ concerns over immigration at least, and in part, are now being addressed — controls have been tightened to a degree unthinkable a decade or so ago — but that might be something that the FT cannot bring itself to salute.

The story varies throughout the Nordic region, sometimes considerably, but in each of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, the populist right has either been brought into government (or given a supportive role to a government) in a process that also included shedding its more unsavory elements. And, significantly, this has also been mirrored to varying degrees on the Nordic center-left, most strikingly in Denmark, where the Social Democrats’ hard turn toward immigration restrictionism goes a long way to explaining their return to government. In the 2022 elections, the party’s showing was the best in two decades.

The Nordic countries, above all Sweden, still have to work out how to deal with the legacy of their mass immigration binge.  That will be extremely difficult (state-enforced multiculturalism is not the answer), but substantially slowing the migrant inflow into these countries is an important first step. And no, there is no threat to the Nordic democracies from the “far right.”

Writing more broadly, the FT’s editorial writers observe that “mainstream” conservatives (an adjective that may, on current electoral trends, have to change in some countries) have not done well, aping what they refer to as the “hard right” through “mimicry,” especially when it is “mostly rhetorical.” That’s true, especially over immigration, as they note. But back in 2015, the FT praised Merkel, the EU’s leading center-right politician, for making a mockery of her earlier (hollow) attacks on multiculturalism:

The chancellor once criticized multi-culturalism. But today she praises migrants, not only for their economic contribution but also their role in “enriching German cultural life”. Knowing that a fifth of Germans are first- or second-generation immigrants, she is pushing the nation to be more inclusive. Thomas Schmid, political editor of Die Welt, says she seeks a “new, different, more colorful, ever less homogenous and fairly rugged republic”.

The rise of the AfD is a complete mystery.

And those statistics are an argument for assimilation, for less multiculturalism, not more.

The FT’s editorialists write that “with the pandemic, high inflation and war, the past five years have been a bonanza for populists in Europe,” a comment that passes over the fact that the rise of populism was well underway before then. The FT maintains that these factors “will dissipate” but that “anti-establishment anger is here to stay, fueled by a narrative of elite betrayal.”

And why might that be? Other than immigration, there is the ratchet of European integration, an imposition from above that the FT’s editorialists choose not to mention, perhaps because this was something that the paper has typically supported. This ratchet (“ever closer union”) was what led to Brexit, perhaps the most dramatic example (so far) of the rise of the “populism” the paper deplores. That ratchet was made more painful by introduction of the euro, a catastrophic act of elite hubris, unwanted by quite a few in the countries that adopted the single currency, most critically, perhaps, in Germany (where it was the trigger for the formation of the AfD, although the party’s principal focus soon changed). Naturally, the FT makes no mention of the destructive and futile pursuit of net zero, a policy with which it is broadly sympathetic, and which is already contributing to “anti-establishment anger.” The more net zero bites, the more voters will bite back.

But the FT appears to see such voters as manipulated simpletons, riled up by rhetoric rather than reality:

Aided by social media, Europe’s populists have become masters at polarisation, simplification and denunciation.

The reference to “social media” is, in all probability, a call for more censorship. As for Europe’s populists becoming “masters at polarization, simplification and denunciation,” has the FT heard the language (and noticed the policies) that Brussels, its British imitators, and many EU member-states use against the “far right”?

If this faux “center”-left (and those on the center-right that have, self-destructively, gone along with them) wishes to reverse the advance of the “far right,” it needs to walk away from the policies that would have been considered extreme until very recently and are still considered by many to be extreme today.

The FT’s editors:

Moderate parties need bolder policymaking. . . . Plodding centrism will not do it.

“Bolder.”

Translation: Extremist “center”-leftism has never been tried.