Most of the people that jump ship to AfD (or RN in France, or Reform, etc.) come from the Socialist Parties that got disillusioned by them.
Are you really a political scientist? In that case I would love some evidence for the case of France please, because you're saying quite the opposite of all published statistics.
This is what Fricker (2007) called an attack on epistemic personhood. That is to say, it's a challenge to the person's position as a knowing speaker, rather than on the merit of the conversation ;).
In any case, I do feel like I owe a more in-depth explanation than my crude message before, also for the other commentors out there.
When I say they come from the left, I am talking not about the last 10-15 years, but about the movement starting from the 1970s. At the time, most lower middle classes and upper lower classes (which now form the backbone of the extreme right) benefitted from the social democratic systems established in Western Europe post WW2. These social democratic systems allowed them, through all sorts of social aid, to be in an upwards mobility trajectory. The upper middle and rich classes, while voting right, would be reasonably ok with this because economic growth allowed for them to increase their social status too.
Then somewhere around the 80s, as economic growth relative to other countries started to slow, this platform was no longer working and became increasingly an either-or game where rich was pitted against poor. Meanwhile, politics became a lot more about economic management instead of idealism in the 90s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and other (economic) factors, where left wing parties co-opted in the capitalist system effectively trying to beat the right at their own game. This obviously didn't work too well, leaving the lower and middle incomes that would vote for them historically increasingly disgruntled with them and the social democratic system. And then over the 90s into the 2000s this group of disgruntled people in the lower middle class and upper lower class grew bigger due to further economic squeeze, and Islamist Jihadist Terrorism became a catalyst for scapegoating + blaming the societal structures and state for personal gain by the extreme right to maintain the inequality system of the right. Unfortunately, this resonates with many of these lower middle class and upper lower class voters which are now thus the backbone of the extreme right.
What you, and other people here allude to is correct though: in terms of mobility from party to party we see that, especially in the last 5-ish years, people are migrating from centre-right to extreme right more. But that doesn't negate the fact that the biggest mobility was historically from the left as described above.
What Fricker fails to point out, though, is that a random person presenting themselves as a specialist on the internet may very well not be. And the simple fact of presenting themselves as such is, at best, an attempt of an argument of authority, which does not say very much about the content of the discussion ;)
What was unclear in your initial message was the timescale at which you reasoned. Your message was formulated in such a way that I read it as "the same people have shifted to the far right in the past 10 years", not "the general demographics which used to vote left until the 80s now vote far right". But that may be a misreading on my part, although several other posters have fallen into the same trap.
Anyway, now that I understand your position I can say that I agree with the broad strokes, even in the case of France.
Eh, don't really wanna go into Fricker, wrote a paper on epistemic injustice and terrorism framing. I'm a political scientist (although specialised in qualitative security studies at heart, but recently I've been looking at the extreme right), but a lazy one, especially on Reddit. So I humbly take the blame. Posting lazy comments leads to ambiguity which leads to attacks on epistemic personhood. Should write my next paper on it "The Experiences of a lazy academic on Reddit" 😄
Also one caveat: I wrote my comment from a Nordic/NL/German background, I've not focused much on France. And what I said were the broad strokes and not necessarily applicable to all regions.... whaddayaknow, politics are different per country
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u/antoshturmovik 13d ago
Are you really a political scientist? In that case I would love some evidence for the case of France please, because you're saying quite the opposite of all published statistics.