The far right is on the rise everywhere in Europe.

This is different from a while ago.

Just until recently, I used to use Spain or Portugal as examples of countries that didn't have the far right as a significant force.

The problem is not just that these parties are getting a lot of votes.

The problem is that many of these parties are now in government.

Look at Italy, for example; look at Hungary; look at countries in Scandinavia.

Or when they're not in government, they are actual contenders for it.

I don't want to think about the next French presidential election, or many other countries where these parties are significantly contending for power.

Now, why is that?

And why do other parties, more importantly, think that in order to defeat the far right, they need to copy the far right? Why do they think they need to become the far right?

That is because we hear a story, wherever we look at why this is happening, the story we hear is that it's all about immigration.

It's all about culture.

It's all about people now not wanting globalization, not wanting immigrants, not wanting transnationalism, people just wanting nationalist politics.

And all the parties are doing is that they are responding to this kind of popular demand, as we call it in academia, and therefore the far right is on the rise.

What I want to do is debunk this myth and disagree with this, saying this is not a simple story at all, and it's not a story only about immigration.

And it's not a story only about culture.

Actually, what it is, is that on what we call in academia the demand side, the people or the insecurities that drive people to vote for particular parties are multiple and extend way beyond culture.

They extend way beyond immigration.

But on the supply side, or in other words, the parties themselves, they are adopting very clever nationalist narratives that are really able to capture this very, very broad coalition of voters.

So, let me start by actually showing some of this.

This is just some data.

I'm an academic, as I said, and so I love to talk with data and with evidence.

This is just a very simple graph that shows what the voters of far-right parties across different European countries look like, or what their preferences are.

The one key thing that I take away from that is that there is a non-immigration route to far-right voting.

This shows you that one third of far-right voters in Europe don't report immigration concerns at all.

It also shows you that in many countries where voters do have immigration concerns, these are economic.

In other words, these people have become susceptible to narratives that say that immigrants take away jobs, they take away access to the labor market, and they take away access to social services.

What I am arguing is that while focusing on immigration is perhaps one driver of far-right party support, for these parties to gain the percentages that we are seeing now – the 20 percent, 30 percent, and 40 percent – we need to look way beyond immigration to see the other insecurities that drive them.

This is my visualization of the successful far right versus a non-successful far right.

What it shows you here is that voters with cultural concerns, whom I call the culturalists, are definitely going to vote for the far right.

But actually, they are a very small part of the electorate.

The voters that allow the parties to extend well beyond their voter base are people I call the materialists, meaning people who have been convinced that immigrants take away jobs and access to the labor market, etc. They are also the welfarists.

I've done a lot of research on how social policies actually limit the propensity.

They moderate and compensate insecure people, thus limiting their propensity to vote for the far right.

They are the distrustful.

We have so much data about people losing trust in institutions – political and social institutions, in the parliament, in the government, in the state – to deliver on its social contract obligations.

And the anti-greens.

There is a new, big cleavage emerging across Europe.

Those people who don't want to pay more for the environment are actually voting for the far right because they believe that they are being hurt by environmental policies.

These people are living particularly in rural areas of Europe, where they can't afford to, say, give up their car and buy a new one that has no emissions, or buy more environmentally-friendly cars or vehicles, etc.

So I call these the peripheral voters.

It is capturing these voters that allows far-right parties to extend well beyond their secure voting base and get people to vote for them.

How do they do that?

This is the key of what I'm arguing because, do you know any society that doesn't have insecure people?

There is no society that has no insecure people.

There are always going to be people who are worried about their economic situation, and they're worried about their status in society.

But these may or may not be captured by voters, depending on what the parties do.

So parties have the power to shape their own electoral fortunes.

How are the far-right parties in Europe doing this?

They are putting forward what I call civic nationalist narratives.

In other words, they are shifting the boundaries of toleration on its head.

These parties are no longer saying, "I'm extreme, and I don't want people who are biologically different to me."

Because who's going to vote for a party that is openly racist?

Instead, what they say is, "We exclude those who do not espouse our liberal democratic values."

We exclude those who don't espouse our liberal democracies.

They are antithetical to the very essence of the democracies that Europe is based on.

I've got some really interesting campaigns.

The AfD campaign: the AfD was recently called an extreme party in Germany.

Yet it's saying, "No, we're not extreme."

It had this bikini campaign a few years ago when it was competing for elections, saying, "Well, you know what? We just don't want these others, who come in with their intolerant ideas and tell us we can't wear bikinis on the beach."

We can't drink our wine, and we can't eat our pork, because we are a liberal democratic party, and we just don't want to include those who ideologically exclude us.

This is a very clever strategy because it makes parties appear more moderate.

It takes away the stigma of fascism.

It takes away the stigma of extremism.

So a voter will say, "It's okay, I can vote for these people because they are not actually extreme."

But unfortunately, these parties are extreme.

And we see that these parties are extreme as they increasingly enter government and increasingly attack liberal democratic institutions.

So, what am I saying here, just to finish?

I'm saying that if it were simply a story about society changing – society no longer being divided simply by haves and have-nots, but divided on a transnational cleavage – then we could tackle immigration, and that would be it.

But this is not what is going on.

This is not at all.

Other parties copying the far right on immigration are only making this problem worse.

They are only normalizing the far right and making the far right bigger, because the problem is not necessarily one that comes from the demand side.

It's a problem of the supply side.

But what I'm saying is actually a good thing.

It's a positive thing because it means, if I am right, that parties have agency.

And if the far right has the agency to capture broader and broader coalitions, that's a bad thing.

But it means that we also have agency to put forward our own narratives.

Parties that oppose the far right can also put forward successful narratives to tackle the far right.

We have agency, and that agency cannot be to copy the far right.

That agency has to be to contradict the far right, to expose it for what it is – extreme – and to also put forward and promote the positive aspects of immigration.