Conditional Allies: Party Positioning and the Electoral Power of Anti-Racist Mobilization

• In Event: Political and Other External Consequences of Social Movements

Abstract

When do protests translate into electoral gains for allied parties? A growing literature shows that anti-far-right street mobilization can hurt targeted parties. Yet, we know far less about which parties benefits from such mobilization in multi-party systems, where voters face multiple alternatives. We argue that protest benefits for allied parties are conditional: parties must simultaneously maintain credible policy alignment with movement goals, hold opposition status, and be electorally competitive. When these conditions are met, protest signal strength, operationalized as event frequency and participant numbers, amplifies electoral gains, with diminishing marginal returns. We test this theory by examining two large waves of anti-racist street mobilization in Germany: demonstrations following the 2020 Hanau terrorist attack, when a far-right actor killed several people, and the 2024 revelation of far-right mass deportation plans. Using voting data from 401 electoral districts and a difference-in-differences design, we exploit variation in local protest presence, frequency, and size across two protest waves. This provides two independent tests of our theory, i.e. same country, same parties, but with crucial variation in party positioning across periods. We find consistent evidence that protests reduced support for the anti-migration AfD in both the 2021 federal and 2024 European elections. However, the Greens, which are the AfD's main ideological opponent on migration, only benefited in 2021, when they held a credible pro-migration position and were in opposition. After joining the governing coalition and shifting toward a more migration-critical stance, they failed to benefit from the 2024 protests, even as mobilization was substantially larger. Our findings underscore that in multi-party systems, protest-induced losses for institutional enemies do not automatically translate into gains for their opponents. Movement-party alliances are fragile and contingent on parties' strategic positioning.

Authors

• Meret Stephan, European University Institute

• Lennart Schürmann, European University Institute