I KIP, U KIP, WE ALL KIP - a discussion on the limited appeal of the radical right

This week has seen a lot of attention on Marie Le Pen's Front National and how they were in line to win a number of the French regional elections and that right up until the last moment it appeared as though Le Pen herself would be running a French region before the final results pushed her party into third. The hype surrounding the rise of the Front National mirrors the hype seen in this years General Election where a predicted UKIP sweep (that would change the electoral map forever) failed to materialise with even Nigel Farage himself failing to get elected.

There have been a lot of discussions about tactical voting in both elections where parties that cannot win have been urging their supporters to back other candidates in order to lock the parties of the radical right out of power. People have suggested that this form of tactical voting is particularly prevelent in the UK but is more down to the voters themselves rather than any explicit direction from their party.

The failure of the radical right to achieve election though is, to me at least, based not on other parties but on the limited appeal of the radical right itself. We often hear politicians around the globe talking about building a broad coalition and in my understanding of politics this is essential to claiming victory because if your policies appeal to the plurality (if not majority)of voters you will come out ahead.

Have a look at this chart (taken from the electoral calculus site) which shows voter migrations during the 2015 General Election:

The first thing many of you will notice is that the Conservative bloc lost 4 'people' to UKIP. More important to note however is that the Conservative bloc gained 5 'people' from other sources. This is because during the election the Conservative party were seen as the most inclusive party. They had policies which were appealing to the sort of centrist moderate voter that win elections in the UK.

Now look at the chart again and see the UKIP voters. They took 7 'people' off other parties and yet failed to win anything more than a single seat in parliament despite coming second in an estimated 90 seats. This is a quirky oddity of the UK electoral system but not one which is inherently unfair, it simply means parties need to try and reach outside their traditional bases in contestable seats so that they can win. Again I turn to the good folks at electoral calculus who helpfully wrote a piece on UKIP and why they were only seat to win a large number of seats if they polled over 20% nationally at the elections citing a number of reasons such as a lack of well known strong candidates, a low base from which to build themselves and - the big one - tactical voting due to their parties limited appeal outside their core base.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Moderates win elections. It's why Ed Miliband tried to steal the One Nation Mantle and it's why David Cameron took it back after the election win. It has come to stand for the moderate policies which appeal to the kind of voters that delivered Blair a Labour landslide in 1997 yet deserted the party en-mass under Brown in 2010.

It is why suggestions that our Conservative party should move to the right always irk me because simply put it was the right that kept us out of power for 13 years...