In politics, centrism or the centre is a political outlook or specific position
that involves acceptance or support of a balance of a degree of social equality
and a degree of social hierarchy; while opposing political changes which would
result in a significant shift of society either strongly to the left or the
right. Centre left and centre right politics both involve a general
association with centrism combined while leaning somewhat to their respective
sides of the spectrum. The term is often used interchangeably with the Third Way,
a political position popularized by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Paul Keating in
the 1990s, whereby policies favored a balanced approach and the removal of
extreme ideologies. Definitions
Voters may identify with moderation for a number of reasons: pragmatic,
ideological or otherwise. It has even been suggested that individuals vote for
'centrist' parties for purely statistical reasons.
Centrists usually support to a degree of equal opportunity and economic freedom.
They can generally lean conservative on economic issues and lean liberal on
social issues and sometimes vice versa. Usage by political parties by country
= Australia= The Australian Democrats is a centrist
party with a social liberal ideology. South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon
had launched his own centrist political party called the Nick Xenophon Team in
2014. The Palmer United Party has been suggested as being a centrist party as
well however the party itself does not make such formal claims of being
politically centrist. = Belgium=
The utmost centrist party of Flanders has been the Volksunie, which not only
embraced social liberalism but also displayed the national sentiment of the
Dutch speaking Belgians who felt culturally suppressed by Francophones.
The New Flemish Alliance is the largest, and since 2009, the only successor of
that party. Among French speaking Belgians the
Humanist Democratic Centre is a centre-right or centre party as it is
considerably less conservative than its Flemish counterpart, Christian
Democratic & Flemish. Another party in the centre of the political spectrum is
the liberal Reformist Movement. = Canada=
Although the Liberal Party of Canada was the dominant centre party for most of
the country's history, it lost that title in the 2011 federal elections to
the Conservative Party of Canada. The Liberals have typically positioned
themselves as being more moderate and centrist than the Conservatives, putting
them somewhere between the centre and centre-left. The Liberals are currently
the largest party in Canada's House of Commons.
= Czech Republic= Czech Republic has only one centrist
political party named ANO which was founded in 2011 and has seats in the
Government of the Czech Republic. = France=
France has a tradition of parties that call themselves centriste. The most
notable centrist party, often also called liberal, was the Union for French
Democracy, created in 1978. Among its successors belongs the small Centrist
Alliance, the most successful of them is the Democratic Movement of François
Bayrou, founded in 2007. = Germany=
Zentrismus is a term only known to experts, as it is easily confused with
Zentralismus; so the usual term in German for the political centre/centrism
is politische Mitte. Historically, the German party with the most purely
centrist nature among German parties to have had current or historical
parliamentary representations was most likely the social-liberal German
Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic. There existed during the Weimar Republic
a Zentrum, a party of German Catholics founded in 1870. It was called Centre
Party not for being a proper centrist party, but because it united left-wing
and right-wing Catholics, because it was the first German party to be a
Volkspartei, and because his elected representatives sat between the liberals
and the conservatives. It was, though, distinctly right-wing conservative in
that it was not neutral on religious issues, being markedly against more
liberal and modernist positions. The main successor of Zentrum after the
return of democracy to West Germany in 1945, the Christian Democratic Union,
has throughout its history alternated between describing itself as right-wing
or centrist, and sitting on the right-wing. The representatives of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany, although they have, since the 1990s,
many times referred to themselves as "the new middle", feel less at ease in
describing their party as centrist due to their history and socialist identity.
Alliance '90/The Greens was found in 1993 as a merger from the East German
Alliance 90, a group of centrist/transversalist civil rights
activists, and the German Greens. The Latter was a coalition of various
unorthodox-left politicians and more liberal "realists". This Bundestag party
also hesitates in using the term centre, although it does distance itself as well
from the tag of left. The transversalist moderation of the party and its position
in the Bundestag in the middle of the way, between the Social Democrats and
the Christian Democrats also points somewhat to The Greens being a more or
less centrist party. In the state parliaments of specific
German states there are other specifically regional parties which
could be identified as centrist. The South Schleswig Voter Federation, of the
Danish and Frisian minorities in the state of Schleswig-Holstein has
currently a centrist political position, although in the past the party usually
leaned to the left. In the German presidential elections of 2009, 2010 and
2012, it supported the candidates of the Social Democrats and the Greens. In
Bavaria, the Free Voters party present at the state parliament may also be seen
as a centrist party. = Greece=
In Greece centrism has its roots to centrist politician and founder of
Agricultural and Labour Party, Alexandros Papanastasiou. In 1961
Georgios Papandreou created along with other political leaders the coalition
party of Centre Union. Five parties were merged: Liberal Party, Progressive
Agricultural Democratic Union, National Progressive Center Union, Popular Social
Party into one, with strong centrist agenda opposed equally to right wing
party of National Radical Union and left wing party of United Democratic Left.
The Centre Union Party was the last Venizelist party to hold power in
Greece. The party nominally continued to exist until 1977, when its successor
Union of the Democratic Centre party was created.
Union of Centrists was created by Vassilis Leventis in 1992 under the
title "Union of Centrists and Ecologists". The name was changed
shortly after. The Union of Centrists claims to be the ideological
continuation of the old party Center Union. The party strives to become "the
political continuance of the centrist expression in Greece". Leventis aimed to
become part of the Venizelist legacy of some great politicians of the past, such
as Eleftherios Venizelos and George Papandreou Sr. However, the party's
total influence has been marginal, with 1.79% of the total vote being its
highest achievement to date. = Ireland=
In the Republic of Ireland, the two main political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine
Gael, both claim the political centre ground, but seem to mostly lean to the
centre-right and be mostly made up of centre-right memberships. The two
parties have shared broadly similar policies in the past, with their primary
division being perceived as being steeped in Irish Civil War politics.
Fine Gael is aligned to Christian democratic parties in Europe via its
membership of the European People's Party, and is described internationally
as centre-right by the likes of Reuters. The consensus in analysis seems to be
that Fianna Fáil is mostly centrist, expanding to the centre-right space, and
that Fine Gael is mostly centre-rightist, expanding also to the
centre space. = Netherlands=
In the Netherlands, four parties have, more than once, sent members into the
cabinet. From them, the Christian Democratic Appeal tends to be
centre-right and the Democrats 66 centrist.
Livable Netherlands was originally a centrist political movement of local
grass-root parties with an anti-establishment touch similar to
early D66. However, the party entered in 2002 national parliament with a
right-wing populist programme based on security and immigration as the major
issues. The fundamentalist Protestant
ChristianUnion has a transversalist position that can be confused with a
certain kind of centrist position, in so far it is left-leaning on social issues,
immigration and environment, and right-leaning on drugs issues and
euthanasia. = New Zealand=
In New Zealand, there are two main current centrist parties. One is the
United Future party, founded by a fusion of a previous centrist social liberal
party and a previous Christian conservative party. United Future
currently has one seat in the New Zealand parliament, supporting the
current Government led by the National Party alongside ACT and the Maori Party.
The other is New Zealand First, which was founded by Winston Peters, and has a
mix of nationalist and populist views with a conservative social policy. It is
currently in opposition with 12 seats, in the 121 seat House of
Representatives. = Nordic countries=
In most of the Nordic countries, there are Nordic agrarian parties. These share
in addition to the centrist position on the socio-economic left-right scale a
clear, separate ideology. This position is centred on decentralisation, a
commitment to small business and environmental protection. Centrists have
aligned themselves with the Liberal International and European Liberal
Democrat and Reform Party. Historically, all of these parties were farmers'
parties committed to maintaining rural life. In the 1960s, these parties
broadened their scope to include non-farmer related issues and renamed
themselves Centre Party. Neither the Centre Democrats nor the
Liberal Alliance, both of Denmark, are rooted in centrist agrarianism.
= Pakistan= Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf(PTI) founded by
Imran Khan, claims to be a centrist/centre-right political party.
PTI emerged as the second largest political party in Pakistan, following
the general election of 2013, by number of votes.
= Palestinian Authority= The Third Way is a small centrist
Palestinian political party active in Palestinian politics. Founded on 16
December 2005, the party is led by Salam Fayyad and Hanan Ashrawi. In the January
2006 PLC elections it received 2.41% of the popular vote and won two of the
Council's 132 seats. The party presents itself as an alternative to the
two-party system of Hamas and Fatah. = Spain=
The national party which Spanish voters most traditionally consider to be the
closest to the centre, according to several opinion polls, is the Union,
Progress and Democracy. Electors also consider as centrists the Convergence
and Union coalition from Catalonia and the Basque Nationalist Party from the
Spanish Basque Country. = United Kingdom=
In the late 1990s, the traditionally socialist Labour Party, under the
leadership of Tony Blair, began to move towards a centrist Third Way policy
platform, creating the New Labour movement.
Traditionally, however, the party commonly seen as holding the centre
ground is the Liberal Democrats which is placed between the centre left and the
radical centre. In March 2011, Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal
Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stated that he
believed that his party belonged to the radical centre, mentioning John Maynard
Keynes, William Beveridge, Jo Grimond, David Lloyd George and John Stuart Mill
as examples of the radical centre that preceded the Liberal Democrats'
establishment in 1988. He pointed to liberalism as an ideology of people, and
described the political spectrum and his party's position as follows: "For the
left, an obsession with the state. For the right, a worship of the market. But
as liberals, we place our faith in people. People with power and
opportunity in their hands. Our opponents try to divide us with their
outdated labels of left and right. But we are not on the left and we are not on
the right. We have our own label: Liberal. We are liberals and we own the
freehold to the centre ground of British politics. Our politics is the politics
of the radical centre." = United States=
Independent candidate H. Ross Perot garnered nearly 19% of the popular vote
in the 1992 Presidential election. His "get under the hood" campaign focusing
on balancing the budget has been one of the most successful centrist efforts in
U.S. history, but he did not carry a single state in the Electoral College.
He went on to form the Reform Party and run a second time in the 1996
Presidential election with less success. A late 2011 Gallup poll of Americans'
attitudes towards government reported that 17% expressed conservative views,
22% expressed libertarian views, 20% expressed communitarian views, 17%
expressed centrist views, and 24% expressed liberal views.
Americans Elect, a coalition of American centrists funded by wealthy donors such
as business magnate Michael Bloomberg, former junk-bond trader Peter Ackerman,
and hedge fund manager John H. Burbank III, launched an effort in mid-2011 to
create a national 'virtual primary' that would challenge the current two-party
system. The group aims to nominate a presidential ticket of centrists with
names that would be on ballots in all 50 states. The group banks on broad
cultural dissatisfaction with the partisan gridlock in Washington, D.C.
The Christian Science Monitor has stated that "the political climate couldn't be
riper for a serious third-party alternative" such as their effort, but
the "hurdles Americans Elect faces are daunting" to get on ballots.
Journalist and political commentator E.J. Dionne wrote in his book Why
Americans Hate Politics, published on the eve of the 1992 Presidential
election, that he believes American voters are looking for a "New Political
Center" that intermix "liberal instincts" and "conservative values." He
labelled people in this centre position as "tolerant traditionalists". He
described them as believers in conventional social morality that ensure
family stability, as tolerant within reason to those that challenge those
morals, and as pragmatically supportive of government intervention in spheres
such as education, child care, health care as long as budgets are balanced.
In addition, Washington political journalist Linda J Killian describes the
current situation in her book The Swing Vote. She writes that Americans are
frustrated with Congress and its dysfunction and inability to do its job.
A growing number of Americans are not satisfied with the political process
because a number of factors from influx of money into politics and the influence
of special interests and lobbyists. The book classifies four types of
independent voters including "NPR Republicans", "America First Democrats",
"The Facebook Generation" and "Starbucks Moms and Dads" who will be big
determinates of Swing votes in the 2012 Presidential election.
Currently, centrists in the two major US political parties are often found in the
New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition of the Democratic Party and
the Republican Main Street Partnership of the Republican Party.
See also Golden mean
Independent politician Independent voter
Left-right politics Moderate
Radical centrism Syncretic politics
Third Way Triangulation
References External links
The US Centrist Party, an attempt for an American centrist party
Centrist Democratic Party of the Philippines