From radical centre to populism: the forgotten branch and Europe's 23% far-right vote

The words "radical centre" have a past that the reform movement prefers to forget. Before they meant Halstead and Lind's programme of universal health coverage and personal accounts, they meant something much angrier. In 1976 the sociologist Donald Warren used them for the Middle American Radicals, voters who felt the middle class was being squeezed from above and below. That branch of the idea went somewhere else entirely, and Europe is now living with where it went.

Two branches from one root

Warren's radicals, as John Judis summarises his surveys, were middle and lower-middle income, mostly without a college degree, and politically homeless. They were the group most hostile to big corporations and among the strongest supporters of Social Security, Medicare and national health insurance. They were also harsh on welfare agencies and crime, distrustful of Washington, and keen on a strong leader.

The other branch is the independent centrism of the early 2000s. John Avlon's Independent Nation (2004) argued that a large share of voters are moderates alienated by both parties, and built a tradition of centrist leaders from Theodore Roosevelt onwards. Avlon's centrists and Warren's radicals are, to a large extent, the same people seen from two angles: voters who trust neither party and feel nobody speaks for them. David Frum made the sharp point in his review of Avlon's book. Independence and moderation are different things, he wrote, and most independent movements in American history were more radical than the parties they challenged.

History has sided with Frum. Judis follows Warren's voters from George Wallace in 1968 and 1972 to Ross Perot's 19 per cent in 1992, Pat Buchanan's primary insurgencies and Donald Trump. None of those candidates simply wanted less government; Wallace backed higher Social Security benefits and Perot higher taxes on the rich. What they shared was an attack on Washington's gridlock and a promise of a stronger executive. Judis cites Samuel Francis, who in 1982 called that appetite Caesarism.

Europe's version

The European numbers are now hard to ignore. The PopuList, a database of populist, far-left and far-right parties in 31 European countries built by a team of political scientists including Matthijs Rooduijn and Cas Mudde, released its fourth version in May 2026. It defines populist parties as those that divide society into a pure people and a corrupt elite and want politics to express the general will of the people. Reporting on the research in June 2026, the Morning Star summarised the headline finding: about 23 per cent of European voters backed far-right parties at their latest national elections, against roughly 10 per cent a decade earlier and 5 per cent in 1995. Rooduijn described the change in plain terms. When the project started in 2018, one in four Europeans voted for populist parties of left and right; now one in four vote for the far right. The same report gives national examples: Austria's Freedom Party went from 16 to 29 per cent in 2024, France's National Rally from 19 to 37 per cent, Portugal's Chega from 7 to 18 per cent, and Germany's AfD from 10 to 21 per cent in 2025.

Spain tried the centrist answer early. In 2015 Ciudadanos rose fast on a message of moderation and reform. The Local's report from March that year lists the pitch: a labour reform to curb the abuse of short-term contracts, tax credits for workers earning below the minimum wage, skills-based education, a hard line on corruption. It also records the mood the party was feeding on: in the official CIS survey only 2.9 per cent of Spaniards rated the political situation as good or very good. Ciudadanos spoke to exactly the alienated, reform-hungry voters Warren had described. Within a few years it had collapsed and its leader, Albert Rivera, had resigned.

What the forgotten branch teaches

Moderation alone did not hold these voters, in America or in Spain. Warren's data says why. His radicals did not want calm; they wanted protection and they wanted someone to take on concentrated power. A centre that offered them good manners and fiscal prudence left the field open to people offering them a Caesar.

A radical centre that wants them back has to draw on more than one tradition at once.

From the left: real social insurance for the middle. Pensions, health care, unemployment cover and help with housing that people pay into and can count on. Warren's voters supported these programmes strongly, and so do their European counterparts. A centre that treats every universal programme as a fiscal problem to be trimmed is talking to someone else.

From the right: a state that keeps order, lives within its means and enforces the rules it sets, from tax to public contracts to borders. Warren's radicals resented a government they thought broke its own promises and favoured groups other than them. Credibility comes from rules applied evenly and visibly.

And the idea that fits neither camp: channel the anti-establishment energy into institutional reform. The populist answer to a blocked system is one strong leader. The radical-centre answer is to make power visible and accountable: transparent lobbying rules, competition policy that breaks up entrenched incumbents, decisions taken at the level closest to the people affected, and public services measured on whether they deliver. Warren's own book gives its later chapters to reducing alienation and to institutional change. That is the agenda.

Combined, those pieces make a position that neither the old centre nor the populists offer. Protect the middle, take on concentrated power in business and in the state with the same vigour, and rebuild institutions until people can see who decides and what changed. When a democratic system visibly works, the promise of a strongman loses its point. Europe's 23 per cent are, in large part, voters the centre could have kept. The forgotten branch of radical centrism shows what they were asking for.