Paul Hilder (CEO, Datapraxis)

CEO of Datapraxis Paul Hilder thinks 2024 might become the year of the “Fuck-You vote”: the tendency amongst voters to cast their ballot in protest – whether against rising prices, the curtailing of long-cherished rights or perceived missteps made by parties in power. Hilder explains how progressives can harness the power of this growing electoral phenomenon.

2024 looks set to be the year of the “Fuck-You vote”. Price rises may be moderating, but irreversible double-digit inflation shocks have already eaten up discretionary income for many Europeans. We have seen dramatic increases in our polling in the number of people who say they no longer have money left at the end of the month. Many have been struggling for months to pay for food, heat, and other basic necessities. This painful reality is particularly concentrated amongst swing voters in most European countries where we conduct research. The political implications of the far-reaching hit to living standards among these decisive groups could prove catastrophic. 

​

As of today, private European Parliament seat projections conducted for Datapraxis by Professor Simon Hix and Kevin Cunningham indicate that the populist right blocs of ECR (European Conservatives & Reformists) and ID (Identity & Democracy) are on track to make massive gains in June 2024, winning almost 40% more seats than they did in 2019. Our forecast finds the center-left Socialists & Democrats, the liberal Renew Europe/ALDE bloc, the Greens, and the center-right EPP (European People’s Party) all losing a significant number of seats. The only other bloc which gains in our projection is the left-wing GUE/NGL. While this could yet change, we are projecting a right-wing majority in the Parliament.

The “Fuck-You vote” is not a new trend. In 2022, the poor and precarious in Italy swung toward Giorgia Meloni, whose Fratelli d’Italia traces its roots directly to Mussolini’s fascists. The far-right Sweden Democrats benefited from widespread anger over an epidemic of violent crime and mismanaged immigration, surpassing the center-right Moderates to become, for the first time, a decisive pillar of the new right government. 

On the other side of the Atlantic later that same year, the US Democrats benefited from a wave of “Fuck-You” anger over the curtailing of abortion rights, while in Brazil, the PT’s Lula da Silva won a narrow victory over the disastrously incompetent populist Jair Bolsonaro. Progressives in the Americas dared to hope the tide was turning in their direction. But they were riding a tiger they hardly understood. 

The “Fuck-You” trend intensified in 2023. Just last month, chainsaw populist Javier Milei, who plans to abolish 50% of existing government ministries and legalize the selling of organs, won an unexpected landslide victory in the Argentinian presidential elections. In the meantime, in the Netherlands, missteps by the nominally liberal VVD and the progressive PvdA/GroenLinks coalition smoothed the way for Geert Wilders and his radical-right Party of Freedom (PVV) to win a stunning 37 seats, with both new populists and formerly establishment voters choosing to roll the dice with him. 

In Spain, the Partido Popular and the radical-right Vox won big victories in the regional and municipal elections of May 2023, powered by deep and widespread dissatisfaction with the progressive government coalition. But Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez turned the tables by calling a snap election and warning of the risks of a PP-Vox government. “Fuck-You” voters in Spain have not forgotten the brutal effects on their livelihoods and living standards of the right-wing austerity policies pursued in reaction to the global financial crisis more than a decade ago. 

Sanchez and his Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Diaz of the new populist-left Sumar movement had also taken aggressive measures to raise wages and pensions and to control the cost of living, including through direct price controls. The pair rallied enough swing voters to fight the right to a technical draw, and have formed a fragile government with the support of the Catalan separatist Junts. 

Few may remember this now, but the Polish opposition was struggling in the summer of 2023. A repositioned far-right Konfederacja had surged to around 15% in the polls, winning support from a plurality of young men under 40 and a growing number of young women and other “Fuck-You” voters. Similarly to Milei in Argentina, Konfederacja was offering Poles a seductive fever dream of pure economic freedom: lower taxes, cutting social benefits and health provision for weak and parasitic malingerers, whipping up resentment toward Ukrainian refugees and raising doubts about the EU. For a time, they lassoed the large anti-system constituency in Poland, which did not want the re-election of the Law and Justice government, but also did not want Donald Tusk’s old Civic Platform elite to return.

Behind misleading media headlines about a stunning victory for Tusk, there is a far more interesting untold story about how the “Fuck-You voters” in Poland considered and then rejected Konfederacja, who lost around half their support by the time voters went to the polls. Anger became concentrated again where it belonged, on the incumbents Law and Justice (PiS). Indeed, Konfederacja increasingly became bracketed together with PiS, their likely coalition partners, as opponents of greater abortion rights and of a healthy relationship with the EU.

According to Datapraxis post-election research, the main reasons voters opted for Tusk’s Civic Coalition were to bring Poland closer to Europe – making the blocked billions in European funding flow to renew the creaking Polish health system, where waiting lists were worsening, as well as to invest in economic transformation. The next most important reasons were “to defeat PiS”, to improve rights for women and to reduce the influence of the church in politics. Only 7% cited a desire to make Donald Tusk prime minister. 

Civic Coalition increased its vote share by 3%, but most of this came from former voters for other opposition parties – particularly the Left. The real game-changer was Third Way, an alliance of Szymon Hołownia’s new Poland 2050 movement and the old agrarian PSL, which took on and defeated Konfederacja in the fight for anti-system voters, winning 6% more votes than its predecessor Koalicja Polska. A fifth of voters decided in the final two weeks, and a disproportionate number of them opted for Third Way. It won much of the Fuck-You vote. 

The rest was mobilized through a broad swarm of civil society turnout campaigns, epitomized in a video by climate activists Wschód, which presented the suffering and humiliation of women by right-wing politicians and created a spine-tingling viral visual image, in which women holding a finger to their lips then turned it into a “Fuck-You” middle finger of outrage and empowerment. Turnout overall increased to over 74%, up almost 13% on the already-high level of 2019. This was almost 12% higher than it was in the first democratic elections in 1989. And for the first time, women’s turnout was higher than that of men, while young voters also turned out in unprecedented numbers.

The cases of Spain and especially Poland show that there is hope for progressives, if we can do four things. First, we must ramp up our efforts to address the cost of living crisis. Second, we must draw sharp contrasts with our opponents, who will make daily life worse, not better for swing voters. Third, we must engage, persuade, and mobilize the Fuck-You voters who are vulnerable to the populist right in this time of crisis. Fourth and not least, we must run inventive and well-structured campaigns that take advantage of the new digital and networked campaigning landscape. 

Wars in Ukraine and Gaza are only heightening the scale of the political crisis in the West and risk undermining faith in the system and the establishment further. National polling trends across Europe’s battleground states look bleak. The Austrian general election is expected to be held between June and September 2024, although the Black-Green coalition government may fall sooner over a recent corruption scandal. The far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) is leading polls there by as much as 13 points, running under the twin slogans of Fortress Austria, and Project Volkskanzler – a term last used by Adolf Hitler.

The ruthless and intense Herbert Kickl has brought FPÖ roaring back from a near-death experience after the Ibizagate scandal, in which their former leader Heinz-Christian Strache was caught on camera taking cocaine and agreeing to millions of Euros in donations and media help from a Russian oligarch just four years ago. Meanwhile, in Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose youth wing and Saxony regional parties were recently designated as domestic extremist organizations by internal security agencies, is leading polls for all three of the Eastern German state elections scheduled for September 2024. Mainstream right-wing leaders like Friedrich Merz of CDU and Markus Söder of CSU are triangulating with and appeasing the AfD. From France to Finland, too, trends look increasingly dark, while Biden’s approval ratings are dropping sharply.

The stark reality is that in 2024, either progressives on both sides of the Atlantic will find new ways to engage the Fuck-You vote – or the Fuck-You vote will fuck us.