Populism, public opinion, and the mainstreaming of the far right: The ‘immigration issue’ and the construction of a reactionary ‘people’

The success of parties, such as the French Front National (now Rassemblement National), the Danish People’s Party, and UK Independence Party (UKIP) could infer that they responded best to what were rising concerns in the population. However, just as easily, rising concerns about immigration could follow a rise in their discussion in the public arena, as these parties and their pet issues are often given disproportionate coverage, something I will return to in the analysis. The peak happens in 2015 and 2016. Here, this matches the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ which saw an influx of refugees into the EU following the Syrian conflict. While this influx was shared unevenly across EU countries, with Germany taking in far more refugees, it was widely covered and became core to many far-right parties’ discourse and propaganda, as exemplified by the infamous Leave.eu ‘Breaking point’ poster in the Brexit campaign. In the EU, and in France in particular, although this country was not added to the graph, terrorist attacks conducted in the name of Islam, such as that against Charlie Hebdo, and their widespread and often racialised coverage, have also participated in fostering anti-immigrant sentiment (see Titley et al., 2017).

In the United Kingdom, these developments also coincided with the referendum campaign which had been promised by then Prime Minister David Cameron following the 2014 European election, despite UKIP being the only party running on such an issue, demonstrating their ability to set the agenda through their performance at a second-order election with massive abstention and despite a lack of representation at the national level. As demonstrated by Martin Moore and Gordon Ramsay’s (2017: 7–8) extensive survey of the media coverage of the referendum, while the economy was the most covered issue, ‘coverage of immigration more than tripled over the course of the campaign, rising faster than any other political issue’, and became ‘the most prominent referendum issue, based on the number of times it led newspaper print front pages’. Added to this priming of immigration itself, ‘coverage of the effects of immigration was overwhelmingly negative. Migrants were blamed for many of Britain’s economic and social problems – most notably for putting unsustainable pressure on public services’. This is corroborated by research done by Elizabeth Dekeyser and Michael Freedman (2021:13) which demonstrates that ‘individuals hold more negative attitudes toward immigration during electoral periods’ and that ‘this change is most significant in elections where anti-immigration sentiment is part of the political discourse, and among individuals across the political spectrum’. It is therefore no surprise that immigration as a major concern appears to recede dramatically after 2016 both in the United Kingdom and in the EU. While Brexit had won and the ‘refugee crisis’ abated, freedom of movement remained in place in the United Kingdom and refugees continued to arrive, demonstrating a disconnect between the reality and perception of immigration, something which has been well documented and again points to the mediated effects discussed earlier (Duffy, 2018).

It is not just the Eurobarometer that appears to paint a picture in which immigration is indeed a central concern. A similar question asked by Ipsos Mori (2021) returns very similar results over the same period. Yet, this picture is nuanced by an added question in the Eurobarometer, where the same respondents are asked what the two most important issues they are personally facing are. While the difference in wording would seem minimal at first thought and it would seem logical to expect similar answers, the reality differs markedly.

Figure 3 shows the respondents who put immigration as one of their top two issues of concern when they thought about themselves personally rather than their country. While for the latter in the United Kingdom, immigration only dips below 20% after 2017 and reaches a high of 43.69% in the Autumn survey of 2015, it only reaches 10% once when respondents think of their own personal situation (in the Summer survey of 2016, at the height of the referendum campaign). A similar trend can be witnessed for the EU where immigration is never one of the top two issues of concern for more than 10% of the respondents.