Europe’s punitive welfare systems are fuelling the far-right

Rightwing populists are reportedly adopting a new strategy to woo European voters: the promise of higher welfare benefits. 

This pro-welfare stance is paying off. Rightwing parties in Sweden (Swedish Democrats) and Austria (Freedom Party of Austria) have seen their ratings rise as they promise more state spending on citizens. 

For the first time in modern history, this year far-right populist parties simultaneously topped the polls in Europe’s three biggest economies – France (National Rally), Germany (Alternative for Germany) and the UK (Reform) — all of which have touted similar agendas. 

From raising state pensions and rolling back the retirement age, to increasing spending on healthcare, the far-right increasingly promises to protect the interests of the working class – but only for the national 'in-group'. Migrants and other 'outsiders', they take pains to clarify, are excluded – a position known as “welfare chauvinism”, which stands in stark contrast to social protection as a human right.

How has welfare — long the cornerstone of the left — become a vote-winner for the far-right?

The report I present to governments meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday (22 October) shows the answer lies not simply in years of cuts to social spending, but in decades of welfare restructuring that have left Europeans increasingly receptive to the divisive rhetoric of the far right. 

Today, welfare systems in Europe — once lauded as a bulwark against poverty, insecurity and political extremism — are being hollowed out and twisted into something very different: a machine for policing the 'undeserving' poor.

Take the widespread shift from welfare to workfare — which makes benefits conditional upon engaging in approved work-related activities.

In France, recipients of the country’s minimum income scheme must now clock at least 15 hours of job-related activity a week — a measure denounced by the country’s own human rights commission as opening the door to potential labour exploitation.

In Germany, citizen’s income is conditional upon accepting any “suitable” job proposed by the Job Centre, and authorities can withhold up to 100 percent of benefits if a claimant fails to comply with job-seeking obligations. 

In all countries, sanctions inevitably land disproportionally on those most in need of support: claimants with limited work experience and qualifications, or facing practical barriers to work such as a lack of affordable childcare or not having a car. 

And those that can work are forced to accept low-paid, precarious jobs — insecure, exhausting, and devoid of prospects. Progress is measured not in improved lives, but in boxes ticked: hours worked, appointments attended, hoops jumped through.

Poverty is now a 'failure of the individual'

Europe’s lurch to workfare has sent a dangerous message: poverty is a failure of the individual, rather than society, and benefits must be earned and deserved through compliance.  

Digitalisation has compounded this negative stereotype of benefit recipients — with welfare agencies across Europe, from Denmark to Sweden, embracing algorithms to hunt down supposed fraud.

In France, the service responsible for family allowances quietly profiled 32 million people to identify potential welfare abuses, using algorithms that disproportionately targeted single parents and disabled citizens.

While single-parent households represented only 16 percent of beneficiaries, they accounted for 36 percent of administrative investigations.

In the Netherlands, a “fraud detection” programme wrongly accused thousands of mostly immigrant families of benefit abuse. 

These algorithms aren’t neutral tools; they reflect political choices about who can, or can’t, be trusted.

Even social workers have been recast as enforcers, expected to monitor, report and sanction.

Europe’s most vulnerable citizens therefore experience the state not as a guarantor of rights, but as a hostile interrogator. They are surveilled, stigmatised, and punished. And crucially, they feel abandoned and betrayed.

Far-right populists reap what has been sown.

Punitive welfare systems that treat recipients as 'suspects' also signal to voters that welfare support is scarce. They pit the 'deserving' against the 'undeserving', and breed resentment among those struggling, who come to see migrants or minorities as competitors for dwindling benefits.

And they feed directly into the narrative of Europe’s far-right populists: that ordinary people are being cheated, that the system protects outsiders, that only the far right will defend national workers. 

Such pledges should be met with scepticism.

Experience shows that, once in power, far-right parties tend to maintain the privileges of the very economic elite they denounce in their speeches, slashing income support, healthcare and other life-saving services, further deepening poverty and exclusion.  

European leaders, in a vain attempt to undercut populists’ fearmongering around benefits abuse, are doubling down on punitive welfare. This is the wrong approach and will only boost the radical right.

Instead, mainstream political parties must act fast to reclaim the narrative around welfare — a human right that we will all benefit from at different points in our lives, and that should be provided willingly, respectfully and to all. 

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