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Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

They don't win elections because of their conservative takes but because of protest voters. If you need a concrete statistical example: in the state of Hessen, the far right party AfD gained by far the most new voters from the social democrats which are firmly center left; ten times more than from the largest conservative party. This is an alternative to not voting or destroying your ballot paper because it actually reflects in polls shown on TV (which do not show absent voters). They just want to piss off other parties, it's not motivated by support for the (barely existing) far right's programme for the largest part.

Obviously you also have people who actually support the far right ideologies but lot of these voters were recently found to be willing to switch to a new far left party as soon as it runs at an election (catapulting it to 20 % off the cut at a federal level); same motivation. Protest votes

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I'll be honest, I'm inclined not to believe this in the slightest. (Far-right voters voting far-left, or vice versa? En masse? In some kind of ill-defined protest?) But if you have any stats I'd love to see them.

Source for the far right to far left statistic is Insa Consulere, one of the large public opinion institutes. These companies are so reliable that the live results on election days used to announce a winner on TV are actually from their analyses at polling stations throughout the day, not from government institutions. If the figure should change it's because these people have changed their mind afterwards, but as it stands right now, a lot of far right voters consider it a better alternative. Percentage wise, out of all parties, the far right loses the most to this new far left party. This was already predicted before any statistics were in because they just want to flip the bird to established parties.

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/sahra-wagenknecht-parte...

The voter movement from center left to far right is from the official election results from a few weeks ago.

Huh, interesting. (And thanks for the link!) I wouldn't foresee American voting blocs behaving like that in a million years, but German voters apparently have it in them.

That's because politics in the US isn't pluralistic but a static duopoly that's treated like a team sport by a lot of voters. In Germany the opposing player to the far right is the Greens for example because the two parties are both benefiting from the cosmopolitism vs communitarism cleavage that drives a lot of political debate. Voters will hardly switch between these two parties specifically. But if you are in a de-facto two party system where the opposing party is at the opposite end of each cleavage then you'll barely have any voter movement. It's entrenched this way for decades

Most democracies are pluralistic with more parties which is why the Germany anecdote makes more sense than the US one

> Far-right voters voting far-left

Considering the horseshoe effect, this is totally plausible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

> The horseshoe theory does not enjoy wide support within academic circles; peer-reviewed research by political scientists on the subject is scarce, and existing studies and comprehensive reviews have often contradicted its central premises, or found only limited support for the theory under certain conditions

The horseshoe theory 100 % applies to Germany and most certainly to other pluralistic countries too because the far left and far right are fishing in the same pond, for socioeconomically weak voters. They thus end up also sharing some views that you wouldn't expect to resonate on both sides like reducing immigration.

The people who desperately dispute the horseshoe theory are usually politically extreme themselves and hate the thought of having such similarities with the opposite end.

Yikes. Centrist yells at “socioeconomically weak” cloud.

I’ll just say this: horseshoe theory is wrong because when there are similarities they’re inconsistent and shallow. If that wasn’t true, political scientists would be able to write papers about the consistent and deep similarities, but they can’t so they don’t.

fyi good article on where the ends of the horsehoe have bent toward each other I think: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55957298

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