What has happened to western Europe's centre right?

By Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Professor at the School of Political Science, Diego Portales University

As a species, we humans are inveterate pattern makers. We’re also plagued by recency bias – the tendency to give more weight to things that have only just happened. Hardly surprising, then, that when analysing party politics, we tend to take the results of the latest elections and try to fit them into a trend.

That’s why the results of the recent election in Germany have caused a tailspin. The country looks set to have its first social democratic chancellor since 2005 after Olaf Scholz’s party emerged as the biggest in the Bundestag. That, in turn, has led at some point to the fact…

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