POLICY PAPER Daphne Halikiopoulou, University of York Tim Vlandas, University of Oxford Five far right voter groups progressives can sway A core–periphery strategy for winning back voters The challenge: winning back voters from rising far-right parties Far-right 1 – or»nation-first« – parties have been making significant electoral gains across Europe and have come to wield growing influence over policymaking. Their success is not limited to winning votes or seats, however. Far-right parties are increasingly shaping political agendas, refram­ing policy debates and pushing key elements of their plat­forms into the mainstream. As a result, long-standing strat­egies of isolation or institutional exclusion – the so-called »cordon sanitaire« – have weakened or collapsed. Far-right parties now benefit from greater parliamentary legitimacy, stronger organisational and financial resources, denser transnational networks and a more moderate public image. In several countries, they have entered government or become dominant governing forces, while at the Europe­an level they have expanded their representation and agen­da-setting power. This has created a dual challenge for mainstream progres­sive actors: not only do they have to compete electorally with far-right parties, but they also have to counter their growing ability to define political priorities. In these cir­cumstances, many mainstream parties and politicians are trying to win back voters who have»defected« to the far right. If they are to manage this so effectively, however, they require a more precise understanding of who those far-right voters are and why they support such parties. 1 In this brief we use the umbrella term»far right« to refer to political parties and groups that resort to nationalism to justify their positions on all socioeconomic issues. These parties also adopt authoritarianism and populism in their ideologies and programmatic agendas to different degrees but may vary in their extremism and relationship to democracy(Halikiopoulou and Vlandas 2022). Five far right voter groups progressives can sway 1