THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

THE RADICAL RIGHT

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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

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THE RADICAL RIGHT

Edited by
JENS RYDGREN

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 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rydgren, Jens, editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of the radical right / [edited by] Jens Rydgren.
Description: New York City : Oxford University Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025436| ISBN 9780190274559 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780190274566 (updf) | ISBN 9780190644185 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism—Case studies. | Conservatism—Case stud-
ies. | Right and left (Political science)
Classification: LCC HN49.R33 O94 2018 | DDC 303.48/4—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025436

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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
1. The Radical Right: An Introduction
JENS RYDGREN
PART I IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE
2. The Radical Right and Nationalism
TAMIR BAR-ON
3. The Radical Right and Islamophobia
ARISTOTLE KALLIS
4. The Radical Right and Antisemitism
RUTH WODAK
5. The Radical Right and Populism
HANS-GEORG BETZ
6. The Radical Right and Fascism
NIGEL COPSEY
7. The Radical Right and Euroskepticism
SOFIA VASILOPOULOU
PART II ISSUES
8. Explaining Electoral Support for the Radical Right
KAI ARZHEIMER
9. Party Systems and Radical Right-Wing Parties
HERBERT KITSCHELT
10. Gender and the Radical Right
HILDE COFFÉ

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11. Globalization, Cleavages, and the Radical Right
SIMON BORNSCHIER
12. Party Organization and the Radical Right
DAVID ART
13. Charisma and the Radical Right
ROGER EATWELL
14. Media and the Radical Right
ANTONIS A. ELLINAS
15. The Non-Party Sector of the Radical Right
JOHN VEUGELERS AND GABRIEL MENARD
16. The Political Impact of the Radical Right
MICHELLE HALE WILLIAMS
17. The Radical Right as Social Movement Organizations
MANUELA CAIANI AND DONATELLA DELLA PORTA
18. Youth and the Radical Right
CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS
19. Religion and the Radical Right
MICHAEL MINKENBERG
20. Radical Right Cross-National Links and International Cooperation
MANUELA CAIANI
21. Political Violence and the Radical Right
LEONARD WEINBERG AND ELIOT ASSOUDEH
PART III CASE STUDIES
22. The Radical Right in France
NONNA MAYER
23. The Radical Right in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland
UWE BACKES
24. The Radical Right in Belgium and the Netherlands

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 JOOP J. M. VAN HOLSTEYN
25. The Radical Right in Southern Europe
CARLO RUZZA
26. The Radical Right in the United Kingdom
MATTHEW J. GOODWIN AND JAMES DENNISON
27. The Radical Right in the Nordic Countries
ANDERS WIDFELDT
28. The Radical Right in Eastern Europe
LENKA BUŠTÍKOVÁ
29. The Radical Right in Post-Soviet Russia
RICHARD ARNOLD AND ANDREAS UMLAND
30. The Radical Right in Post-Soviet Ukraine
MELANIE MIERZEJEWSKI-VOZNYAK
31. The Radical Right in the United States of America
CHRISTOPHER SEBASTIAN PARKER
32. The Radical Right in Australia
ANDY FLEMING AND AURELIEN MONDON
33. The Radical Right in Israel
ARIE PERLIGER AND AMI PEDAHZUR
34. The Radical Right in Japan
NAOTO HIGUCHI
Index

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS book would not have come into existence without the generous sup-
port of several individuals and institutions. I wish to thank Signe Svallfors
at Stockholm University, who assisted in the preparation of the final manu-
script. I also wish to thank James Cook at Oxford University Press for the
always constructive conversations from proposal to print, and Emily
Mackenzie and Shalini Balakrishnan for great cooperation during the pre-
production and production stages. Many thanks also to the Swedish Re-
search Council, for funding, and to the Department of Sociology at Stock-
holm University, for providing an excellent research environment. Lastly, I
extend my final thanks to all chapter authors for having contributed cut-
ting-edge pieces to this volume, and for their constructive feedback
throughout the project.

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 CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Arnold (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is Associate Professor

of Political Science at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio, and
most recently the author of Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence:
Symbolic Violence, Lynching, Pogrom, and Massacre (Routledge, 2016).
His papers have appeared in, among other journals, Theoretical Criminol-
ogy, Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal for the
Study of Radicalism, and Nationalities Papers.
David Art is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His field is
comparative politics, with a regional focus on Europe. His research inter-
ests include extremist political parties and movements, the politics of his-
tory and memory, and comparative historical analysis in the social sci-
ences. He is the author of Inside the Radical Right: The Development of
Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press,
2011) and The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Comparative
Politics, German Politics and Society, Party Politics, and West European
Politics. He was co-convenor of the European Consortium for Political Re-
search’s Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy.
Kai Arzheimer is Professor of Politics and Political Sociology at the Uni-
versity of Mainz in Germany. He has published widely on the voters of the
radical right in Europe, and on voting behavior and political attitudes more
generally.
Eliot Assoudeh is currently Adjunct Professor of political science at Uni-
versity of Nevada, Reno, where he received his Ph.D. with a focus in com-
parative politics in 2017. His research interests are modern ideologies and
religion, political extremism, and far-right political parties and movements
in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. He is a recipient of the
Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa research grant for
his project on fascism and religion in the Middle East (2014, 2015, and
2017). He holds an M.A. in political science from Western Washington
University (2010). His articles and analyses have appeared in Religion
Compass, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Fair Ob-
server, and National Security Forum, and on the BBC Persian Service.

10
Uwe Backes is a deputy director at the Hannah Arendt Institute on Totali-
tarianism Research and teaches political science at the University of Dres-
den, Germany. He studied political science, history, and German language
and literature at the University of Trier (Ph.D., 1987), and completed his
post-doctoral dissertation at the University of Bayreuth in 1997. He was a
Feodor Lynen Grantee of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the
Centre d’Étude de la Vie Politique Française in Paris (1997–1998) and a
Heisenberg Grantee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1998–
1999. He was a visiting professor in Paris, Eichstätt, Nancy, and Stras-
bourg. Among his important publications in English are Political Extremes
(Routledge, 2010), Right-Wing Extremism in Europe, coedited with
Patrick Moreau (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2012), and Ideocracies in
Comparison, coedited with Steffen Kailitz (Routledge, 2016).
Tamir Bar-On received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 2000. He is
a Professor-Researcher in the School of Social Sciences and Government,
Tec de Monterrey, Campus Querétaro, Mexico. A member of Mexico’s
Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, Bar-On is the author of four books,
including Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Ashgate, 2007), Rethink-
ing the French New Right: Alternatives to modernity (Routledge, 2013),
The World Through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global Sport (Row-
man and Littlefield, 2014), and Beyond Soccer: International Relations
and Politics as Seen Through the Beautiful Game (Rowman and Little-
field, 2017).
Hans-Georg Betz is currently Adjunct Professor of political science at the
University of Zurich. Previously he taught at York University, Toronto;
the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University,
Washington, D.C.; and Koc University, Istanbul. He is the author of sev-
eral books and numerous articles on political culture, radical right-wing
populism, and nativism in Europe and the United States.
Simon Bornschier directs the Research Area Political Sociology at the In-
stitute for Political Science at the University of Zurich. He has authored or
coauthored two books on the transformation of West European party sys-
tems and the rise of right-wing populist parties, as well as a number of arti-
cles and chapters on the subject. His current research focuses on democra-
tization, representation, and political protest in Latin America and Western
Europe.
Lenka Buštíková is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and
Global Studies at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on party

11
politics, voting behavior, clientelism, and state capacity, with special refer-
ence to Eastern Europe, and has appeared in Comparative Political Stud-
ies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Journal of Contemporary
European Studies, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Swiss Political
Science Review, and World Politics. She is the recipient of the 2015 Best
Article Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association’s
European Politics and Society Section, for “Revenge of the Radical
Right.”
Manuela Caiani is Associate Professor at the Institute of Scienze Umane
e Sociali at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. Her research inter-
ests focus on Populism, Europeanization and social movements, the radical
right in Europe and the United States, political mobilization and the Inter-
net, qualitative methods of social research, and political violence and ter-
rorism. She has been involved in several international comparative re-
search projects and coordinated research units for individual projects and
grants. She has participated as panel organizer or paper presenter at several
national and international conferences. She has published in, among oth-
ers, the following journals: Mobilization, Acta Politica, European Union
Politics, South European Society and Politics, and RISP, and for the fol-
lowing publishers: Oxford University Press, Ashgate, and Palgrave.
Hilde Coffé is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Victoria Uni-
versity of Wellington. Her research interests focus on political representa-
tion, public opinion, and political behavior, including radical right voting.
She has written numerous articles that have been published in leading po-
litical science and sociology journals, such as Electoral Studies, Party Pol-
itics, Political Studies, British Journal of Sociology, European Sociologi-
cal Review, Comparative European Politics, and Acta Politica. She has
also been a visiting fellow and given presentations at several institutions,
including the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Irvine, and
Santa Barbara; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the University of
Manchester; the University of Sussex; and the University of Sydney.
Nigel Copsey is Professor of Modern History at Teesside University in the
United Kingdom. His publications include Contemporary British Fascism:
The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy (2nd ed., Pal-
grave-Macmillan, 2008), Anti-Fascism in Britain (2nd ed., Routledge,
2017), and, coedited with John Richardson, Cultures of Post-War British
Fascism (Routledge, 2015).
Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science and dean of the In-

12
stitute for Humanities and the Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Su-
periore in Florence, where she directs the Center on Social Movement
Studies. She directs a major European Research Council project, “Mobiliz-
ing for Democracy,” on civil society participation in democratization
processes in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Among
her most recent publications are Social Movements in Times of Austerity
(Polity, 2014), Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research
(Oxford University Press, 2014), Spreading Protest, with A. Mattoni
(ECPR Press, 2014), Clandestine Political Violence, coedited with D.
Snow, B. Klandermans and D. McAdam (Cambridge University Press,
2013), and Mobilizing on the Extreme Right, with M. Caiani and C. Wage-
mann (Oxford University Press, 2012). In 2011, she was the recipient of
the Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of polit-
ical sociology and Ph.D. honoris causa from the universities of Lausanne,
Bucharest, and Goteborg.
James Dennison is a Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for
Advanced Studies in Florence. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled
“Re-thinking Turnout: Explaining Within-Individual Variation in Electoral
Participation” at the European University Institute. While writing his dis-
sertation, he published articles on migration attitudes, electoral choice, po-
litical participation, the Italian constitutional referendum, the United King-
dom’s European Union referendum, and European politics. He has previ-
ously held positions at the University of Oxford and the University of
Sheffield, where he taught quantitative methods. He is also the author of
The Greens in British Politics: Protest, Anti-Austerity and the Divided
Left.
Roger Eatwell is Emeritus Professor of Politics as the University of Bath.
He has written widely on both historical fascism and the contemporary ex-
treme and populist rights. Recent publications include the chapter “Fas-
cism” in the Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (2013), “Fascism
and Racism” in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism
(2013), and “Populism and Fascism” in the Oxford Handbook of Populism
(2017). He is currently writing a book with Matthew Goodwin for Penguin
on national populism.
Antonis A. Ellinas is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Uni-
versity of Cyprus. He works on comparative European politics. He is the
author of The Media and the Far Right in Western Europe (Cambridge
University Press, 2010) and The European Commission and Bureaucratic
Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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Andy Fleming is a writer and anti-fascist researcher based in Melbourne,
Australia.
Matthew J. Goodwin, University of Kent and Senior Visiting Fellow at
Chatham House, is author of the books New British Fascism: Rise of the
British National Party (Routledge), Revolt on the Right: Explaining Public
Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Routledge), UKIP: Inside the
Campaign to Redraw British Politics (Oxford University Press), and
Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press).
Naoto Higuchi is Associate Professor at Tokushima University. He has a
Ph.D. in sociology from Hitotsubashi University, Japan. His underlying re-
search interest lies in xenophobia, social movements, and social capital of
migrants. He conducted fieldwork on radical right activists and is now en-
gaged in research on Peruvian migration to Japan. Among his works in
English is Japan’s Ultra-Right (Trans Pacific Press, 2016). His Japanese
and Korean books (edited and coauthored) include Zaitokukai and Japan’s
Radical Right, Ethnic Businesses in Japan, Invisible Residents: Japanese
Brazilians vis-à-vis State, Market and Migrant Network, Crossing Bor-
ders: Sociological Analysis of Muslims in Japan, and Sociology of Social
Movement.
Aristotle Kallis is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at
Keele University, United Kingdom. His main research interests are in the
field of generic, comparative, and transnational fascism and the radical
right, with a particular focus on the relation between extremism and the
mainstream. He is particularly interested in the patterns of diffusion of
transgressive ideas across both political spaces and national borders. He
has recently published work on the transnational dynamics of Islamopho-
bia, as well as on the mainstreaming of radical discourses and policies. He
is the coeditor of Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship (2014) and the au-
thor of Genocide and Fascism (2009). He is currently directing an interna-
tional project on the violent radicalization of far-right movements in Eu-
rope.
Herbert Kitschelt is the George V. Allen Professor of International Rela-
tions in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He spe-
cializes in political parties and elections and comparative political econ-
omy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
(AAAS). From 1993 to 1996, he also held a joint appointment with Hum-
boldt University, Berlin. Among his many publications, he is author, coau-

14
thor or editor of The Transformation of European Social Democracy
(Cambridge University Press, 1994), The Radical Right in Western Europe
(University of Michigan Press, 1995), and Latin American Party Systems
(Cambridge University Press, 2010). Most recently, he coedited The Poli-
tics of Advanced Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is
currently completing two research projects, one on democratic partisan
linkage in competitive democracies around the world, based on the data
collected under his direction by the Democratic Accountability and Link-
age Project, and one on partisan realignment in postindustrial democracies,
together with Philipp Rehm.
Nonna Mayer is CNRS Research Professor Emerita at the Centre d’études
Européennes de Sciences Po, Paris. She edits the series Contester at the
Presses de Sciences Po. Her main research topics are right-wing extrem-
ism, electoral behavior, racism, and anti-Semitism. Among her recent
books are Les faux semblants du Front national. Sociologie d’un parti
politique, edited with S. Crépon and A. Dézé (Presses de Sciences Po,
2015), and Les inaudibles. Sociologie politique des précaires, edited with
C. Braconnier (Presses de Sciences Po, 2015).
Gabriel Menard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at
the University of Toronto. His dissertation examines why Great Britain
and the United States have arrived at contrasting policies for regulating the
Internet. His publications have appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies,
British Journal of Sociology, and Information, Communication and Soci-
ety.
Melanie Mierzejewski-Voznyak is an Associate Research Fellow at the
Institute of International Relations, Prague. Her areas of expertise include
party politics and democratization in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
Her research has appeared in East European Politics and New Eastern Eu-
rope.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Associate Professor of Education and Sociology
at American University in Washington, D.C., where she also directs the In-
ternational Training and Education Program and runs the biannual Global
Education Forum. Her most recent books include The Extreme Gone
Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany
(Princeton University Press, 2017) and Seeing the World: How US Univer-
sities Make Knowledge in a Global Era, with Mitchell Stevens and
Seteney Shami (Princeton University Press, 2018).
Michael Minkenberg is Professor of Comparative Political Science at Eu-

15
ropean University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. He held the
Max Weber Chair for German and European Studies at New York Univer-
sity from 2007 to 2010. His research interests include the radical right in
liberal democracies, the relationship between religion and politics in West-
ern societies, and the politics of architecture in capital cities. Among his
publications are “Politik und Religion,” a special issue of Politische
Vierteljahresschrift, coedited with U. Willems (Westdeutscher Verlag,
2003); The Radical Right in Europe: An Overview (Verlag Bertelsmanns-
tiftung, 2008); and The Radical Right in Eastern Europe: Democracy
under Siege? (Palgrave, 2017).
Aurelien Mondon is a Senior Lecturer in comparative politics at the Uni-
versity of Bath. His research focuses predominantly on elite discourse and
the mainstreaming of far right politics, particularly through the use of pop-
ulism and racism. His first monograph, A Populist Hegemony? The Main-
streaming of the Extreme Right in France and Australia, was published in
2013.
Christopher Sebastian Parker is Professor of Political Science at the
University of Washington. He is the author of two award-winning books:
Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in
America (Princeton University Press) and Fighting for Democracy: Black
Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South
(Princeton University Press). He is at work on another book, White Fright:
Race and the Crisis of American Politics, from the Ku Klux Klan to Don-
ald Trump. He resides in Seattle.
Ami Pedahzur is Professor of Government and the Arnold S. Chaplik
Professor in Israel and Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at
Austin, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Israel
Studies. His main areas of interest are radicalism, political violence, Israeli
politics, and methods. His books include The Triumph of Israel’s Radical
Right (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Israeli Secret Services and the
Struggle Against Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2009), Jewish
Terrorism in Israel, with Arie Perliger (Columbia University Press, 2009),
and Suicide Terrorism (Polity Press, 2005). He is currently studying the
evolution of special operations forces.
Arie Perliger is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Justice
Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Previously he was Di-
rector of Terrorism Studies and Associate Professor at the Combating Ter-
rorism Center and Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military

16
Academy at West Point. Perliger is studying issues related to terrorism and
political violence; the politics of security; the politics of the far right in Is-
rael, Europe, and the United States; Middle Eastern politics; and the ap-
plicability of social network analysis to the study of social phenomena. His
studies have appeared in six books and monographs as well as in more
than thirty articles and book chapters by publishers such as Columbia Uni-
versity Press and Routledge and in journals such as Security Studies, Polit-
ical Studies, Social Forces, and others.
Carlo Ruzza is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of
Trento, where he teaches courses on European and international politics.
He has previously taught at the Universities of Leicester, Essex, and Sur-
rey. His research interests focus on social movements, populism, and right-
wing parties. He is also interested in advocacy processes at European
level, which include a focus on the efforts of civil society groups to affect
policy-making in areas such as European Union anti-discrimination policy
and environmental policy. His book publications include Reinventing the
Italian Right: Populism, Post-Fascism and Territorial Identity, with Ste-
fano Fella (Routledge, 2009) and Europe and Civil Society (Manchester
University Press, 2007). His edited books include Europe’s Prolonged
Crisis, coedited with H. Trenz and V. Guiraudon (Palgrave, 2015), and
several volumes on EU politics. His journal publications include articles in
the Journal of European Integration, Innovation, Theory and Society,
Telos, West European Politics, International Journal of Sociology, Euro-
pean Political Science, Journal of Political Ideologies, Social Science and
Medicine, and Policy and Society.
Jens Rydgren is Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University. He is
working within the fields of political sociology, ethnic relations, and social
network analysis. He is the author and editor of several books; most re-
cently he edited Class Politics and the Radical Right (Routledge, 2013).
He publishes regularly in leading social science journals, such as the
American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, European
Journal of Political Research, and Social Networks.
Andreas Umland (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is Senior Research
Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, and general
editor of the book series Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (ibi-
dem-Verlag, 2004) distributed, since 2014, by Columbia University Press.
His articles have appeared in, among other journals, e-Foreign Affairs, e-
Foreign Policy, Political Studies Review, Perspectives on Politics, Euro-
pean Political Science, Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Euro-

17
pean History Quarterly, Problems of Post-Communism, Communist and
Post-Communist Studies, Russian Review, Nationalities Papers, East Eu-
ropean Jewish Affairs, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Demokratizat-
siya, Internationale Politik, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwis-
senschaft, Osteuropa, Jahrbuch für Ostrecht, and Voprosy filosofii.
Joop J. M. van Holsteyn is Senior Lecturer and Supernumerary Professor
in Electoral Research at the Department of Political Science, Leiden Uni-
versity, the Netherlands. His research focuses on voting behavior, public
opinion and opinion polling, right-wing extremism, and party membership
in the Netherlands. He has published articles (in English) in journals such
as Acta Politica, Electoral Studies, International Journal of Public Opin-
ion Research, Party Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and West Euro-
pean Politics.
Sofia Vasilopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of
York. She holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. Her work
examines political dissatisfaction with democracy and democratic institu-
tions across Europe. Specific themes include Euroskepticism, extremism,
and loss of faith in traditional politics. She leads an Economic and Social
Research Council Future Leaders Project entitled “Euroscepticism: Di-
mensions, Causes and Consequences in Times of Crisis.” Her research ap-
pears in the European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Common
Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Government and Op-
position, and South European Society and Politics, among others. She has
coauthored The Golden Dawn’s Nationalist Solution: Explaining the rise
of the far right in Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) with Daphne Ha-
likiopoulou, also published in Greek by Epikdro. She is the convenor of
the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Politi-
cal Parties.
John Veugelers is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at
the University of Toronto. His current project ties Europe’s colonial legacy
to contemporary politics in explaining the rise and decline of the National
Front in a French city. Other research examines the changing relations be-
tween neofascist parties and non-party organizations in postwar Italy.
Leonard Weinberg is Foundation Professor of Political Science Emeritus
at the University of Nevada and has served as a senior fellow at the Na-
tional Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma
City and at the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa,
Israel. He has been a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow for Italy; a visiting

18
scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles; a visiting professor at
King’s College, University of London, and the University of Haifa; and
the recipient of an H. F. Guggenheim Foundation grant for the study of po-
litical violence. He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations
Office for the Prevention of Terrorism, Agency for Crime Control and
Drug Prevention. For his work in promoting Christian-Jewish reconcilia-
tion Weinberg was a recipient of the 1999 Thornton Peace Prize. Recent
books include Democracy and Terrorism (2013), The End of Terrorism
(2011); Democratic Responses to Terrorism (2007, ed.), and Global Ter-
rorism (2005).
Anders Widfeldt is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Aberdeen.
His research has focused on the organization of political parties and the
European extreme, populist, and radical right. Recent publications include
Extreme Right Parties in Scandinavia (Routledge, 2015) and “Tensions
Beneath the Surface: The Swedish Mainstream Parties and the Immigra-
tion Issue,” Acta Politica 50 (2015): 399–416.
Michelle Hale Williams is Chair of the Department of Government and
Professor of Political Science at the University of West Florida. Her re-
search interests include radicalism and extremism, radical right-wing par-
ties, nationalism and ethnic politics, immigration and migration policy, po-
litical parties and party systems, political institutions, and European poli-
tics. Her books include The Multicultural Dilemma: Migration, Ethnic
Politics, and State Intermediation (ed., Routledge, 2013) and The Impact
of Radical Right-wing Parties in West European Democracies (Palgrave,
2006). Her published work also appears in Party Politics, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Análise So-
cial, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, German Politics, PS: Political Sci-
ence and Politics, and Journal of Political Science Education.
Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at
Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated with the University of Vienna.
Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for
Elite Researchers in 1996 and an honorary doctorate from University of
Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She is member of the British Academy of So-
cial Sciences and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2008, she was
awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament at Uni-
versity of Örebro. Her research interests focus on discourse studies, iden-
tity politics and politics of the past, language and/in politics, prejudice and
discrimination, and ethnographic methods of linguistic fieldwork. Recent
book publications include The Handbook of Language and Politics,

19
coedited with B. Forchtner (Routledge, 2017), The Politics of Fear: What
Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015; German translation
Politik mit der Angst Konturen, 2016), Right-wing Populism in Europe:
Politics and Discourse, coedited with M. KhosraviNik and B. Mral
(Bloomsbury, 2013), Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in
Talk and Text, coedited with J. E. Richardson (Routledge, 2013), The Dis-
course of Politics in Action: “Politics as Usual” (rev. ed., Palgrave, 2011),
Migration, Identity and Belonging, with G. Delanty and P. Jones (Liver-
pool University Press, 2011), and The Discursive Construction of History:
Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation, with H.
Heer, W. Manoschek, and A. Pollak (Palgrave, 2008).

20
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
THE RADICAL RIGHT

21
CHAPTER 1

22
 THE RADICAL RIGHT
An Introduction

JENS RYDGREN
THE resurgence of strong radical right-wing parties and movements con-
stitutes one of the most significant political changes in democratic states
during the past decades. This process has been particularly pronounced in
Europe but is also significant elsewhere, such as in Australia, Israel, Japan,
and the United States (see Chapters 22–34 in this volume).
An overwhelming majority of books and papers published on the con-
temporary radical right focus on party politics and electoral politics. This
handbook includes chapters covering all major theoretical and method-
ological strands in this literature. At the same time, however, there has
been considerably less focus on the instances when the radical right mani-
fests itself as social movements rather than as political parties. The interac-
tion between the party sector and the non-party sector of the radical right
has similarly received little attention in previous research, with the result
that we still have scant knowledge about the extent to which other organi-
zational forms of the radical right (e.g., think tanks and more informal cir-
cles of intellectuals, the party press, Internet sites, radio stations, and civil
society organizations) enhance or restrict radical right-wing parties’
chances to mobilize an electorate (e.g., Rydgren 2007). This handbook
makes an important contribution to the field by covering these important
issues (see Chapters 15 and 17 in particular).

THE IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL PROGRAM

Radical right parties and movements share an emphasis on ethnonational-

ism rooted in myths about the past. Their programs are directed toward
strengthening the nation by making it more ethnically homogeneous and—
for most radical right-wing parties and movements—by returning to tradi-
tional values. They also tend to be populists, accusing elites of putting in-
ternationalism ahead of the nation and of putting their own narrow self-in-
terest and various special interests ahead of the interests of the people.
Hence, the radical right shares a core of ethnonationalist xenophobia and
anti-establishment populism. In their political platforms, this ideological
core is often embedded in a general sociocultural authoritarianism that
stresses themes such as law and order and family values (Rydgren 2007;

23
see also Minkenberg 2001 and Mudde 2007). The radical right claims the
right of national majorities to protect their cultural identity. According to
the radical right, there are several threats against their nation’s identity, of
which immigration is the most important. Immigrants from Muslim coun-
tries are singled out as particularly threatening, allegedly because they
have the least in common with the native population, are the least inclined
to assimilate, and are potentially tied to Islamist terrorism. Other threats
include supranational entities such as the European Union (see
Vasilopoulou, Chapter 7 in this volume) and—for some but not all radical
right-wing parties and movements—multinational corporations, economic
globalization, and other processes believed to foster universalism and ho-
mogenization (Betz and Johnson 2004; Griffin 2000).
According to Powell (1986, 359), an extremist political organization
“represents a demand for major transformation of the society, either to-
wards some future vision or back to an idealized past. Such demands di-
verge from the general, current policy consensus.” It may also be useful to
consider Lipset and Raab’s more specific definition of political extremism
as anti-pluralism or monism. The “operational heart of extremism,” to fol-
low their argument, “is the repression of difference and dissent, the closing
down of the market place of ideas. More precisely, the operational essence
of extremism, or monism, is the tendency to treat cleavage and ambiva-
lence as illegitimate” (1970, 6). Political monism of the extreme right is
expressed in two ways: as a rejection of the democratic political system
and/or as a rejection of universalist and egalitarian (sometimes called de-
mocratic) values. We should here distinguish between two different sub-
types of right-wing extremism: one that is opposed to democracy and one
that is not explicitly opposed to democracy but nonetheless is hostile to the
way representative democracy functions in contemporary society (cf.
Mudde 2000, 12). I will reserve the use of the term “right-wing extrem-
ism” for the former subtype, whereas the latter will be referred to as the
“radical right” (see, e.g., Eatwell 2000, 410–411). The radical right does
not usually oppose democracy per se, although they are typically hostile to
the way existing democratic institutions actually work. In fact, radical
right-wing parties argue that they represent true democracy (in contrast to
the sham democracy that they believe characterizes contemporary soci-
eties). Hence, although the radical right rejects cleavages and division lines
within “the people,” they are extremists primarily because they reject plu-
ralist values. Despite the radical right’s acceptance of procedural democ-
racy, its ideal society is ethnocracy, which in many ways runs counter to
the pluralistic values of liberal democracy (Betz 2005; Minkenberg 2000).

24
 As indicated by its name, this handbook deals mainly with the radical
right, as defined above. Yet it is sometimes difficult to make a watertight
distinction between the radical right and the extreme right. Many of the
radical right-wing social movements, in particular, are situated on the bor-
der between the radical right and the extreme right, and several representa-
tives and activists of some radical right-wing parties and movements main-
tain contacts with the extreme right (Copsey, Chapter 6 in this volume).
Moreover, the counter-jihadist movement, for example, with its networks
of bloggers and Internet sites, influenced Anders Breivik to mount his ter-
ror attack in Norway in 2011. And in at least some aspects there are ideo-
logical affinities, sometimes rather strong, between the extreme right and
the radical right.
Let us then turn to the question of the manner in which radical right-
wing parties and movements are right-wing. One common way to distin-
guish between “left” and “right” is to view the former as egalitarian and
the latter as non-egalitarian (Bobbio 1996). Parties that actively work
against inequalities are usually placed on the left, whereas parties that view
inequalities as natural, or at least accept them without active political inter-
vention, are placed on the right. Although economic politics has not been
prioritized by radical right-wing parties and movements, it is fair to say
that usually they have not been preoccupied with fighting class inequali-
ties. More important, however, is their hostility to measures aimed at re-
ducing inequalities based on ethnicity, immigration status, or even gender.
Here their political program has been directed toward not only maintaining
but also radically augmenting inequalities in favor of the “natives.” More
broadly, we should not place the radical right to the right primarily be-
cause of its position on socioeconomic politics, as here we find relatively
large variations over time and across countries. Rather, we should look at
its positions on sociocultural politics, which relate to value-laden issues
such as national identity, “law and order,” immigration policy, abortion,
and so on (i.e., sociocultural liberalism versus authoritarianism).

NATIONALISM AND ETHNIC EXCLUSION

The radical right gives priority to sociocultural issues, in particular to is-

sues related to national identity. Its central political program can be under-
stood as “a response to the erosion of the system of ‘ethno-national domi-
nance,’ which characterized much of the history of modern nation states”
(Betz and Johnson 2004, 323). More specifically, the contemporary radical

25
right builds on the idea of ethnopluralism, an idea that in modern times
was elaborated by the French nouvelle droite. “Nouvelle droite” was an
overarching term for intellectual groups that, inspired by Gramsci’s notion
of “cultural hegemony,” formed in France during the late 1960s and 1970s
in order to counter the intellectual and cultural dominance of the left. For
the nouvelle droite, as for related groups in Italy and Germany, the princi-
pal aim was Kulturkampf, not party politics (Minkenberg 2000). Departing
from the left’s notion of différence, the notion of ethnopluralism states that
in order to preserve the unique national characters of different peoples,
they have to be kept separated. According to this perspective, mixing of
different ethnicities leads only to cultural extinction (see Griffin 2000;
Minkenberg 1997; Taguieff 1988). Moreover, in this doctrine culture and
ethnicity are seen as deterministic and monolithic; the likelihood of indi-
vidual change and of in-group variation is believed to be slight. Yet, con-
trary to the traditional conception of racism, the doctrine of ethnoplural-
ism, as such, is not hierarchical: different ethnicities are not necessarily su-
perior or inferior, only different, incompatible, and incommensurable
(Betz and Johnson 2004; Taguieff 1988). Hence, whereas “old” racism,
common in colonial settings, aimed at subordination, the ethnopluralist
doctrine basically aims at expulsion (Fennema 2005).
The French Front National adopted this notion from the nouvelle droite
and made it the core of the party’s political program and rhetorical profile
(see Rydgren 2003b). Today it is one of the most distinctive ideological
characteristic of the radical right-wing party family (Rydgren 2005; see
also Betz 2005). By using the ethnopluralist ideology, radical right-wing
parties claim the right of national cultures to protect their cultural identity.
According to the radical right, there are several threats to their national
identity, of which the alleged “invasion” of immigrants is the most impor-
tant.
Also, more generally, anti-immigration issues are the core message of
the new radical right, in particular in Western Europe but increasingly also
in Eastern Europe (see Buštíková, Chapter 28 in this volume). These par-
ties and movements have framed immigrants as problems in four different
ways: first, as implied above, as a threat to ethnonational identity; second,
as a major cause of criminality and other kinds of social insecurity; third,
as a cause of unemployment; fourth, as abusers of the generosity of the
welfare states of Western democracies, which results in fewer state subsi-
dies and other benefits for “natives” (see, e.g., Rydgren 2003a). In address-
ing the third and fourth frames, the new radical right-wing parties have

26
promoted the idea of “national preference,” that is, giving “natives” prior-
ity when it comes to jobs, housing, health care, and so on. Their proposals
can be characterized as a sort of “reverse affirmative action” (e.g., Zaslove
2004; Rydgren 2003b).
The resonance for anti-Muslim messages grew after September 11,
2001, and in connection with recurrent Islamist terror attacks around the
world (see Kallis, Chapter 3 in this volume). In fact, September 11 can be
seen as an important turning point in the rhetoric of the radical right—and
in the resonance of this rhetoric. After this date, as Arzheimer notes (Chap-
ter 8 in this volume), criticizing “Islam abroad and at home has become the
socially acceptable alternative to more openly xenophobic statements.”
More generally, there is a trend that radical right-wing parties and move-
ments increasingly mobilize in terms of not only national identity but also
religious identity, defending what they call the Judeo-Christian identity
against the threat of Islam (see Minkenberg, Chapter 19 in this volume). At
the same time, however, the radical right has continued with their exclu-
sionary rhetoric—and, in some places, also practices—against other
groups as well, such as Roma. In addition, although antisemitism is not as
central for the contemporary radical right as it was in earlier generations—
and still is among neo-Nazi groups and related extreme right-wing organi-
zations—it is still visible within some parties and movements (see Wodak,
Chapter 4 in this volume).

POPULISM

Some scholars (e.g., Betz 1993, 1994; Taggart 1996, 2000) have argued
that populism is a defining characteristic of the new radical right. This is
true insofar as these parties tend to view society as “ultimately separated
into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the ‘pure’ people versus
‘the corrupt elite’ ”—a worldview that, according to Cas Mudde (2004,
543), is characteristic of populism—and also insofar as the populist anti-
establishment strategy has been crucial to the success of the new radical
right-wing parties. A party that uses this strategy tries to construct an
image of itself as in opposition to the “political class” while trying actively
not to appear anti-democratic. A party that is viewed as anti-democratic
will be stigmatized and marginalized as long as the overwhelming majority
of the electorate is in favor of democracy per se (Schedler 1996; see also
van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005). In order to create distance be-
tween themselves and the established political parties (i.e., both the gov-

27
ernment and the anti-incumbent opposition), populist parties aim at recod-
ing the political space, with its diversity of parties, into one single, homo-
geneous political class. One way of achieving this goal is to argue that the
differences between government and established opposition parties are ir-
relevant surface phenomena. Part of this strategy may also often involve
both criticizing the established parties for their focus on obsolete issues
and at the same time suppressing political issues associated with the “real”
conflict between national identity and multiculturalism.
The populist anti-establishment strategy makes it possible for the radical
right to present themselves as the real champions of true democracy—as a
new kind of party or movement that takes the worries and interests of “the
common man” into account and that dares to speak up against the political
correctness characterizing the establishment (see, e.g., Betz and Johnson
2004; Mudde 2004). Yet the Manichean worldview of the new radical
right-wing parties makes the politics of compromise and bargaining, an el-
ement of liberal democracy, difficult (Eatwell 2004).
One can argue that populism is a characteristic but not a distinctive fea-
ture of the new radical right. Other parties use the populist anti-establish-
ment strategy as well, and a number of parties of other political shades can
be said to be populist in some way or another. More generally, it is the eth-
nic nationalism, not a populist ideology, that primarily defines the contem-
porary radical right (Rydgren 2017). And it is also ethnic nationalism that
largely influences the radical right’s populist message: these parties’ and
movements’ anti-elitist message emanates primarily from the notion that
an elite of established parties, media, and intellectuals have betrayed their
country by embracing multicultural and internationalist ideas—or, in vary-
ing degrees, by selling out their country’s sovereignty to the European
Union or other supranational associations. As noted by Bar-On (Chapter 2
in this volume), to “advance a liberal multicultural perspective is to be
[seen as] a ‘traitor’ to one’s people.” Hence, although the radical right put
itself in opposition to the elite in general, comprising not only political
elites but also cultural and educational elites, its main enemy is cosmopoli-
tan liberalism and the sociocultural left, which are seen as betraying the
nation and corrupting the “natural” organic order and values within a soci-
ety (cf. Canovan 1999; Saull 2013).

FASCISM?

Some authors have claimed that the contemporary radical right is just a

28
modern manifestation of fascism, whereas others see less historical conti-
nuity and claim that the radical right represents a political current distinct
from fascism. I will argue for a middle position. If we take a look at the
three mythic components that, according to Griffin (1991, 201), constitute
the “fascist minimum”—the rebirth myth, populist ultra-nationalism, and
the myth of decadence—we find similarities as well as differences be-
tween fascism and the new radical right-wing parties. First, although the
populist ultra-nationalism (i.e., organic ethnonationalism) of the new radi-
cal right is less aggressive and expansive, and rather turned inward, it still
constitutes the ideological core of these parties. The new radical right’s
longing for ethnic purity, homogeneity, and organic order places them in
the same tradition as fascism. Second, while decadence has been a recur-
rent ideological and rhetorical theme of some of the new radical right-wing
parties, it is less prominent in others. In any case, the ideological differ-
ences between fascism and the radical right-wing parties mainly concern
the third point, the rebirth myth. According to Griffin, the fascist myth of
rebirth, what he calls the palingenetic myth, refers “to the sense of a new
start or of regeneration after a phase of crisis or decline . . . At the heart of
palingenetic political myth lies the belief that contemporaries are living
through or about to live through a ‘sea-change,’ or ‘water-shed’ or ‘turn-
ing-point’ in the historical process” (Griffin 1991, 33, 35). Although such
a myth does exist among the new radical right-wing parties, it is consider-
ably weaker, and it does not aim at replacing the democratic system with a
new order (Griffin 2000). Equally important, whereas fascism was ori-
ented toward the future (Sternhell 1986), these parties are oriented toward
the past (or, in fact, toward an idealized idea of the past). Rather than
movements create a “new society” rising “phoenix-like after a period of
encroaching decadence” (Griffin 1991, 38), the new radical right-wing
parties wish to restore the status quo ante (see von Beyme 1988).
Although the new radical right-wing parties are not fascist, they still
have affinities to fascism. As argued by Copsey (Chapter 6 in this vol-
ume), we confront the problem of how to make a watertight demarcation
between fascism and the radical right “in particular when it comes to ac-
tivist cultures and organizational histories. It is an undeniable fact that
within the activist cultures, there is a history of interaction between so-
called radical-right actors and (neo)fascists. This interaction reveals itself
in myriad forms, through such things as multiple membership and affilia-
tions, joint mobilizations, transnational networks, social media, voicing
support for particular election candidates, personal friendships, and so on.”

29
EXPLAINING SUPPORT FOR RADICAL RIGHT-WING PARTIES
AND MOVEMENTS

Few other topics within the study of the radical right have received as
much attention as electoral politics: how to describe its voter constituency
and how to predict or explain variation in voting results for the radical
right. In Chapter 8 of this volume, Kai Arzheimer provides an up-to-date
discussion on this literature, and there is no need to repeat that discussion
in this introduction. But let me just mention a few key characteristics,
which tend to be common across most or even all countries. First, anti-im-
migration sentiments are the single most important reason why voters sup-
port the radical right (Rydgren 2008; Arzheimer, Chapter 8 in this vol-
ume). Second, there are important sociodemographic patterns, in that male
voters (see Coffé, Chapter 10 in this volume) and working-class voters
(Rydgren 2013; Bornschier, Chapter 11 in this volume) are overrepre-
sented among radical right-wing parties’ electorates, whereas highly edu-
cated voters are underrepresented (Ivarsflaten and Stubager 2013;
Kitschelt, Chapter 9 of this volume). As shown by Oesch (2008, 2012),
these voters—including working-class voters—are attracted by the socio-
cultural program of these parties, nationalism and immigration politics in
particular, and not because of economic policy preferences.
Previous research has identified several relevant demand-centered as
well as supply-centered reasons for the emergence of radical right-wing
parties (e.g., Eatwell 2003; Mudde 2007; Rydgren 2007). One influential
strand in this literature has focused on realignment processes (see Born-
schier, Chapter 11 in this volume): During much of the postwar period,
party politics was dominated by a conflict between different socioeco-
nomic positions. This dimension of conflict between socioeconomic right
and left concerned issues such as taxes, economic redistribution, jobs, and
the extent to which the state would finance and become involved in human
welfare. As long as such socioeconomic issues predominate, radical right-
wing parties find it difficult to mobilize voters (Kriesi 1999). In order to
attract voters, the socioeconomic conflict dimension needs to become less
prominent in relation to the sociocultural conflict dimension, which in-
cludes issues that touch on culture, values, and identity. When such issues
become more prominent in the political discourse—and are placed higher
in the preference order of voters—radical right-wing parties’ chances for
voter mobilization increase. What we have seen in recent decades is pre-
cisely a process in which the socioeconomic dimension has diminished in
salience, while the sociocultural dimension has become increasingly

30
prominent. One reason for this development is that the scope for an inde-
pendent national economic politics has been reduced as a result of interna-
tionally established stability and inflation agreements, the establishment of
independent central banks, and a general globalization of the economy
(Mair 2013). This has contributed to increased convergence between the
established parties regarding socioeconomic policy, and this convergence
has—to varying degrees—been reinforced by a movement toward the cen-
ter by, in particular, Social Democratic parties (Kitschelt 2007). As the dif-
ferences along the socioeconomic scale have decreased, it has become
harder to engage voters and, not least, the media, a development that in
turn has contributed to a partial depoliticization of the socioeconomic di-
mension (Rydgren and van der Maiden 2016). Instead, sociocultural issues
—issues that are often polarizing and that easily create conflict—have be-
come increasingly prominent. It should be emphasized that it is not only
advocates for a more exclusionary, authoritarian, or conservative view of
culture, values, and identity who have contributed to the increased politi-
cization of the sociocultural conflict dimension; a part has also been
played by those who have campaigned for greater multiculturalism or a
more liberal approach to issues relating to values and identity. In a certain
sense, the rise of the radical right parties can be seen as a delayed reaction
to the emancipatory politics that has its origins in the 1960s and 1970s
protest movements and which the radical right now calls for cultural strug-
gle against (see Ignazi 1992).
The politicization of the immigration issue is particularly important, es-
pecially in Western Europe. Radical right-wing parties tend to benefit
when issues pertaining to immigration is placed high on the agenda. Gen-
erally, immigration gains importance for voters when a political party mo-
bilizes around the issue. Radical right-wing parties, once they are estab-
lished in the political field, take part in this politicization. However, these
parties may not have been the most important actors in the politicization of
immigration (Meyer and Rosenberger 2015). Instead, as argued by
Kitschelt in Chapter 9 of this volume, the politicization results largely
from the way “conventional party politicization highlighted a new issue di-
mension, but also may have let a genie escape from the bottle that the es-
tablished politicians could no longer control.”
The role of the media—both traditional news media and the Internet—is
increasingly recognized as an important factor for understanding radical
right-wing mobilization. As Koopmans (2004, 8) has argued, for instance,
the “action of gatekeepers [within the mass media] produce the first and

31
most basic selection mechanism . . . visibility.” The media play a role in
their own right as well, by taking part in agenda-setting and framing of po-
litical issues. There also seems to be a growing tendency to personalize is-
sues within the media, which may benefit parties, such as the new radical
right-wing parties, that give the party leader a pronounced central role
(Eatwell 2003, 2005). With the increasing struggle for readers and viewers
that has resulted from new technologies and from the growing privatiza-
tion of mass media in many countries, the media have exhibited a stronger
tendency to focus on the most scandalous aspects of politics, which may
contribute to anti-establishment sentiments (Mazzoleni et al. 2003; Mudde
2004; Ellinas, Chapter 14 of this volume). As noted by Ellinas (Chapter 14
of this volume), the media are “an important resource for all political ac-
tors but are even more important for smaller or new actors that lack alter-
native resources to communicate their program.”
Over the past decade, alternative, online-based news media have be-
come increasingly important, and the radical right has been successful in
directly or indirectly launching such media that propagate its political pro-
gram. As argued by Betz (Chapter 5 in this volume), “the Internet has been
instrumental in creating the space for an alternative reality where conspir-
acy theories abound and ordinary people, often under the cover of
anonymity, are given the opportunity (for instance, in the commentary sec-
tion of the online edition of major newspapers and news magazines) to
give vent to their anger and thus provide others the reassurance that they
are not alone with their resentment.”

THE RADICAL RIGHT AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT AND NON-

PARTY SECTOR

As stressed above, the literature on the radical right is strongly party-fo-

cused, whereas radical right-wing social movements have received less at-
tention. Here the radical right is an even more diverse phenomenon than
the radical right-wing parties, and the lines between the radical right and
the extreme right are often more blurred (see, e.g., Caiani and della Porta,
Chapter 17 in this volume). We also know less about the social character-
istics of movement activists than we do about the voters (but see Klander-
mans and Mayer 2005). Yet there are a few things we do know. For exam-
ple, research on the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des
Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the
West) demonstrators at the Berlin Social Science Center confirms the gen-

32
der pattern found among radical right parties, with an overwhelming ma-
jority of male activists (see Coffé, Chapter 10 in this volume).
The lines between party politics and social movement activities are
blurred as well, as when the radical right organizes local initiatives in
order to provide social services such as helping the old, repairing housing,
and supporting socioeconomically vulnerable (but native) segments of the
population, as has been observed in Britain, Germany, and Greece (Art,
Chapter 12 in this volume; Eatwell, Chapter 13 in this volume). This is an
important mobilization strategy, as it signals to potential supporters that
the radical right is taking over responsibilities that the state—due to its al-
legedly failed elites—no longer does.
The non-party sector of the radical right can be of varying kinds, rang-
ing from circles of intellectuals and press and publishing houses to profes-
sional groups and other civil society organizations. Some of these are di-
rectly linked to a radical right-wing party, but others are a loose part of the
wider radical-right-sympathetic environment. Such groups and organiza-
tions may be important in several ways: they may function as bridges be-
tween the radical right and the political mainstream (Mudde 2007, 248);
they may contribute to make the radical right’s pet issues more salient, fa-
cilitating the chances for mobilization (Mudde 2007, 248); they may con-
tribute to political socialization, causing its supporters to identify more
deeply with the radical right; they may be foci for recruiting party ac-
tivists; and they may provide an arena for keeping alive the collective
memories that are important for the sense of belonging to a political cause
(see Veugelers and Menard, Chapter 15 of this volume).
As argued above, the Internet—with its low entry barriers and its geo-
graphical compression—has become increasingly important for the radical
right, and today many of the non-party activities play out on that area. This
is something Veugelers and Menard address in Chapter 15 of this volume.
As they argue, the Internet “has made it easier for the radical right to share
ideas, coordinate activities, disseminate propaganda, form alliances, sell
merchandise, and recruit members . . .. Online networks can [also] foster
collective identity among participants with little or no connection to offline
mobilization.” It should be added that a substantial part of the violence as-
sociated with the radical right either takes place on the Internet (e.g., hate
speech and threats) or is largely triggered by online mobilization (see
Weinberg and Assoudeh, Chapter 21 of this volume).
On a more formal basis, party groups within the European Union may

33
function as an important meeting place for radical right-wing parties, pro-
viding opportunities for them to make themselves “visible” and “account-
able” and to “recognize each other and establish coordination” (Caiani,
Chapter 20 in this volume). More generally, international contacts are im-
portant for the radical right, and a recent study of representatives of the
most important radical right organizations in Austria, France, Germany,
Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and the United States has shown that a large
majority have frequent international contacts with similar organizations
abroad or with umbrella organizations (Caiani, Chapter 20 of this volume).

IMPACT OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

The impact of the radical right may be direct, as when radical right-wing
parties are in government (as they have been in Austria, Finland, Italy, and
—in the form of more recently radicalized right-wing parties—in Hungary
and Poland)1 or are striking long-term deals with ruling coalitions (as in
Denmark). It may also be indirect, as when radical right-wing parties influ-
ence mainstream parties to adjust their political programs in the direction
of the radical right’s exclusionist nationalist program, whether in order to
win back lost votes or to prevent losing votes to the radical right in future
elections (see Williams, Chapter 16 in this volume). I think it is fair to say
that the radical right has had some substantial impact in both ways, al-
though perhaps especially in the latter way. Yet there is significant cross-
country variation, which is to a certain extent systematic. As argued by
Buštíková (Chapter 28 in this volume), for example, “Eastern European
mainstream parties are, comparatively speaking, much more comfortable
with their radical right cousins. Therefore, radical right parties operate in a
much more permissive environment, where they are often incorporated
into the governing coalitions.”
More broadly, radical right-wing parties, social movements, and non-
party organizations have been instrumental in influencing political articu-
lation and thereby shifting focus to issues propelled by the radical right. As
argued by Kallis (Chapter 3 in this volume), for example, the radical dis-
course against Islam and Muslims articulated by the radical right “has been
touching much wider sympathetic mainstream audiences, thereby reveal-
ing a far deeper penetration of strands of Islamophobia in Western soci-
eties as a form of racial-cultural prejudice magnified by security con-
cerns.” Hence, in the words of Minkenberg (Chapter 19 in this volume),
the radical right has increasingly established a political-religious master

34
frame with a large influence on the public discourse, far beyond the con-
fines of the radical right voters and activists.

35
NOTE

1. And here we may add also Donald Trump in the United States, albeit
not the Republican Party as a whole (see Parker, Chapter 31 in this
volume).
REFERENCES
Betz, H.-G. 1993. “The Two Faces of Radical Right-Wing Populism in
Western Europe.” Review of Politics 55, no. 4: 663–684.
———. 1994. Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe. London:
Macmillan.
———. 2005. “Against the System: Radical Right-Wing Populism’s Chal-
lenge to Liberal Democracy.” In Movements of Exclusion: Radical
Right-wing Populism in the Western World, ed. J. Rydgren, 25–40.
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39
PART I

40
IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE

41
CHAPTER 2

42
 THE RADICAL RIGHT AND NATIONALISM

TAMIR BAR-ON
SINCE the 1990s, we have seen the explosion of electorally successful
radical right-wing political parties and movements in Western, Central,
and Eastern Europe. De Lange (2012, 173, 192) trenchantly highlights
how in the 1990s and the new millennium these parties joined coalition
governments in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Nor-
way, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Rydgren (2007) notes that these po-
litical parties have also made inroads in Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand. Moreover, there are successful radical right-wing parties in coun-
tries as diverse as Israel, Japan, Russia, and Turkey.
This chapter will explore the relationship between the contemporary
radical right and nationalism. In this respect, it is important to stress that
the radical right includes political parties, social movements, Internet sites,
radio stations, intellectuals, and think tanks, all of which promote national-
istic or ultra-nationalistic discourses. While I focus especially on the politi-
cal parties of the radical right, I agree with Rydgren (2007) that the rela-
tionships between political parties and non-party movements and think
tanks of the radical right are seldom explored in the literature. In previous
works I examined the ways in which French nouvelle droite (ND, or New
Right) intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist have provided ideological
ammunition for the radical right-wing populist parties, including the no-
tions of radical ethnopluralism and the “right to difference” for peoples
and nations against the steamrollers of capitalist globalization, American-
ization, state homogenization, multiculturalism, and the European Union
(EU) (Bar-On 2007, 165–176; 2013, 212–226).
In this chapter, I argue that nationalism is the master concept of the radi-
cal right. I borrow the notion of “master concept” from Dan Stone (2013)
to connote the main animating feature of any movement or political party.
Rydgren (2004, 475) uses a slightly different term, arguing that radical
right-wing populist parties’ “master frame” is the combination of ethnona-
tionalist xenophobia and anti-political-establishment populism. Stone
(2013, 111) suggests that “when one examines the cultural politics of the
radical right fascism is not the master concept.” I posit that the radical
right’s nationalism is different from that of the mainstream right in its radi-
calism (or far-reaching and fundamental nature), its obsession with the
dominance of the main ethnic group, and its longing for the erection of ho-

43
mogeneous nations and states. In addition, this nationalism is often pop-
ulist in tone; it is indebted to direct rather than representative variants of
democracy; and in some cases, it is ambiguous about its relationship to
fascism, Nazism, collaborationist regimes, or the Holocaust. In short, with-
out ethnic nationalism, the master concept of the radical right, its thinkers,
its political parties, and its movements would lack a stable anchor.
As the radical right’s understanding of nationalism is ethnically driven,
it privileges ethnic variants of nationalism as opposed to more liberal, civic
variants (Kohn 2008, 574). As we shall see, ethnic nationalism is the sav-
ior of the radical right, its daily oxygen, and—without any disrespect to
Christianity—its Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Without ethnic nationalism,
the radical right would be deprived of its principal arguments in respect to
the following issues:
1. Threats to cultural and national identity and even ethnic survival
stemming from capitalist globalization, Americanization, terrorism,
and especially pro-immigration “demographic swamping” and cul-
tural ghettos created through the growing presence of nonwhite and
Muslim immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Williams (2006,
4–5) remarks that radical right parties have moved away from main-
stream material concerns: “What people fear perhaps more than the
economic conditions that confront them is the loss of their identity. It
is not that people do not fear poor conditions, but perhaps that they
view these as more easily reversed than loss of identity, culture, and
values.” Betz (1993, 417) points out that the French Front National
(FN) and the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest; formerly
Vlaams Blok), as well as the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs
(FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria), were the first radical right parties
“to draw a connection between falling birthrates and foreign immi-
gration.” As one FN propaganda pamphlet stated, immigration
“threatens the survival of the French nation, the security of its terri-
tory, the integrity of its patrimony, its culture, its language” (quoted
in Betz 1993, 417).
2. The ways established national political parties and the EU “collude”
to create a permissive immigration regime and support multicultural-
ism, which leads to the “destruction” of the nation and ultimately a
“one-world civilization” (Faye 1981, 2000). Umberto Bossi, the
leader of the Lega Nord (LN, Northern League), accused the main-
stream parties of wanting to turn Italy into a “multiracial, multiethnic
and multireligious society” that “comes closer to hell than to par-

44
 adise” (quoted in Betz 1993, 417). As Pelinka (2013, 8) argues,
“Right-wing populism sees multiculturalism as a recipe to denation-
alize one’s (own) nation, to deconstruct one’s (own) people.” Fen-
nema (2004, 3) insists that “the only programmatic issue all radical
right parties have in common is their resentment against immigrants
and against the immigration policies of their government.” Against
the mainstream right and left, the radical right aims to instill its sup-
porters with radical nationalist fervor as well as profound pride in the
accomplishments of the national past. It also seeks to concretely
overturn a policy of open borders for immigrants and refugees, and
to replace multiculturalism with monoculturalism.
3. How various EU states spend too much money on a welfare state de-
signed for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers at the expense
of “original” European nationals. Thus, the radical right promotes na-
tional preference in citizenship, government jobs, corporate support,
and welfare benefits. As Kitschelt (2007, 1199) argues, “the generos-
ity of the welfare state” oils the immigration issue and “helps to
boost radical right-wing party support.” The radical right’s “anti-wel-
farism” is rooted in “a populist mistrust of elites, directed even at
leaders of leftist parties, and a generalized rejection of intermediary
representations in favor of plebisicitarian politics” (Kitschelt 2007,
1184). Thus, in order to bypass “elitist” parliaments, the radical right
proposes referenda on the welfare state, immigration, multicultural-
ism, the EU and its treaties, and a number of other issues. In this
way, by consulting the people, the nation would be better repre-
sented.
4. The ways in which allotment of government jobs, citizenship laws,
state support for corporations, or educational curricula discriminate
against nationals and favor “foreigners.” As a result, the radical right
longs for ethnocracies, or the political, economic, legal, and cultural
dominance of titular European ethnic groups in all realms of the state
and society, which challenges the pluralistic values of liberal democ-
racy (Betz 2005; Bar-On 2013, 138).
5. The linkages between rampant criminality, the breakdown of law and
order, and unemployment (of European nationals) and an excess of
foreigners. During the 1984 European elections, the French FN used
the slogan “Two million immigrants are the cause of two million
French people out of work” (quoted in Chebel d’Appollonia 2012,
241).

45
 6. The dangers of the EU in relation to national sovereignty, the “impo-
tence” of national parliaments, and the lack of popular, democratic
participation. In studying the positions of radical right parties in re-
spect to the EU, Rodriguez-Aguilera de Prat (2013, 14) argues that
unlike the radical left, which focuses on the anti-worker, neoliberal,
and pro-big-business nature of the EU, “the ideological and program-
matic centrality of the doctrine of national sovereignty” unites the
radical right parties. In addition, ethnic or religious differences, mi-
nority rights, immigration, multiculturalism, immigrants, refugees,
and the EU are viewed as anti-democratic and contrary to the will of
the dominant ethnic majority, as a threat to the existence of homoge-
neous nations and sovereign states, and as steps toward a universal,
“totalitarian” world order in which equality and cultural sameness
reign (Griffin 2000). As Mudde (2010, 1169) explains, the radical
right embraces “monism,” or “the tendency to treat cleavages and
ambivalence as illegitimate.” As a result, the radical right challenges
pluralism within the nation and constitutional limits on popular sov-
ereignty. The principal aim of the radical right is to restore national
sovereignty through the establishment of ethnically and culturally
homogeneous nations and states, which would restore European na-
tions to the glories of their pasts. In some cases, nationalist pride
leads to ambiguity about fascism, Nazism, or collaborationist
regimes. Yet while the radical right shares with the fascists of the
past a preference for ethnic nationalism, they do not openly reject
parliamentary democracy like their interwar-era fascist counterparts
(Fennema 2004, 11).
7. The penchant for conspiracies, scapegoats, and “the politics of fear”
(Fennema 2004, 10–12; Wodak 2015) directed against “enemies,”
whether internal (e.g., liberals, socialists, Muslims, Jews, Rom, etc.)
or external (e.g., Zionists, the EU, the United States, capitalism, etc.).
Ultimately, the radical right wants to make the boundaries of the
state equivalent with those of the titular and dominant ethnic group
(Mudde 2007), as well as to cleanse the nation of these internal and
external “enemies.”
The purpose of this chapter is fivefold. First, I define both nationalism
and the radical right. Second, I demonstrate how a general consensus ex-
ists in the literature that ethnic nationalism is the master concept for the
radical right. Despite this consensus, the discourses changes of the radical
right are significant in relation to nationalism, including the belief in radi-

46
cal ethnopluralism and a tendency toward pan-Europeanism (Bar-On
2013). Third, I explore the discourses of movements and political parties
of the radical right in relation to nationalism, focusing on immigration—
the bread and butter of the contemporary radical right. Fourth, I highlight
both similarities and important differences among the ethnic nationalisms
of the radical right in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. In the conclu-
sion, I suggest areas of opportunity for researchers studying the radical
right and nationalism.

DEFINING NATIONALISM

Nationalism, writes Roger Griffin (2003, 152), “has an aura of antiquity

about it, even of the pre-historical.” Yet Gellner (1983) and Anderson
(1983) are united in their belief that the various types of nationalisms, as
well as the nation-states that are based on them, are distinctively modern
(Griffin 2003, 152). For Kohn (2008), nationalism is a modern idea with
ancient roots. While it is based on the unity of strangers linked through an
“imagined community” (Anderson 1983), nationalism is a form of group
solidarity based on a number of shared characteristics, including common
language, common traditions, common territory, and attachment to the na-
tive soil, and it finds its highest expression in the destiny of the nation and
a sovereign state (Kohn 2008, 18–19). For Gellner (1983, 1), nationalism
is “primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the na-
tional unit should be congruent.” Or as Mudde (2010, 1173) puts it, “The
idea of the nation-state holds that each nation should have its own state
and, although this is often left implicit, each state should have only one na-
tion.” For ethnic nationalists of the radical right, this principle is sacred be-
cause the nation can achieve its destiny only through a state that represents
and ultimately favors the dominant ethnic group. To advance a liberal mul-
ticultural perspective is to be a “traitor” to one’s people and the single na-
tion, argue ethnic nationalists.
Griffin (2003, 154) defines nationalism as “the sense of belonging to
and serving a perceived national community.” For the radical right, “serv-
ing a perceived national community” means first serving the “French
French,” “Hungarian Hungarians,” or “true Finns,” as well as excluding
non-dominant groups from the political community. Moreover, Griffin
(2003, 154–155) highlights five other characteristics of nationalism:
1. The belief that the nation possesses a distinctive cultural identity,
which makes it unique from other nations and gives it a special his-

47
 torical mission.
2. The belief that the nation has a unique set of constitutional, histori-
cal, geographical, religious, linguistic, ethnic, and/or genetic realities.
3. Pride in national culture and traditions.
4. The belief that the national community should form a state in which
sovereignty resides in the people and the state is recognized by the
international community.
5. Both civic and ethnic forms, with the latter prone to chauvinism, eth-
nocentrism, xenophobia, racism, or in extreme cases, genocide. The
radical right rejects liberal or civic nationalism and supports ethnic
nationalism. It favors “natives” above foreigners in society and the
state. It complains that the “true racism” is the liberal state’s pro-im-
migration, pro-minority, and pro-multiculturalism regime, which
“discriminates” against “natives.” Buštíková (2014, 1739, 1758)
claims that radical right parties aim to reverse the political gains of
minorities, and she cites Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Switzer-
land, where popular discontent has been generated by an excess of
accommodation for minorities.
Like Griffin, Kohn (2008, 574) distinguishes between ethnic and civic
variants of nationalism. Ethnic nationalists valorize tribal solidarity, an
emotional and mystical connection to an idealized past, and national devel-
opment. In contrast, civic nationalism focuses on liberal universalism, ra-
tionality, individual rights and self-transcendence, and a community of nu-
merous sovereign states living in harmony. This latter type of nationalism
is, in theory, more cosmopolitan and colorless than ethnic nationalism and
based on shared republican values. This distinction between ethnic and
civic variants of nationalism is fundamental because it separates the radical
right from the mainstream right. Civic nationalists stress the unity of all
social and ethnic groups born on the national territory. In theory, they pro-
vide members of dominant and non-dominant ethnic groups with access to
citizenship, welfare benefits, and government jobs. In contrast, ethnic na-
tionalists promote national preference, which allows the state to privilege
nationals or “pure nationals” above non-nationals. Ethnic nationalists long
for a homogeneous state cleansed of minority ethnic, cultural, religious, or
biological differences.
For ethnic nationalists, “dangerous others” (e.g., immigrants, Muslims,
or Jews), who are supposedly outside of the nation, must be removed from

48
the body politic (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008). Whereas civic national-
ists are united by merit and shared liberal values, ethnic nationalists appeal
to the mists of history, blood origins, and homogeneous cultural roots. It is
thus no accident that the radical right advances an ethnic variant of nation-
alism, or a “specific, Manichean, form of nationalism, which emphasizes
the antagonistic relationship between the Good nation and Evil outsiders”
(Rooduijn 2014, 80). In practice, this means that ethnic nationalists of the
radical right are more radical in their immigration and asylum policies than
civic or “moderate nationalists,” preferring a full halt to immigration from
non-Western or Muslim countries; citizenship based exclusively on jus
sanguinis (right of blood); a complete end to worker immigration, asylum,
and family reunion programs; zero tolerance for those who entered the
country illegally; a drastic curtailing of permanent residency in order to
protect the “nation” from decay; and the interrogation of dual nationals as
threats to the “nation” and national identity (Akkerman and Rooduijn
2015, 1141). Radical right parties also demand cultural assimilation, tests
of loyalty to the nation, civic education, extensive knowledge of the lan-
guage, culture, and history of the country, and a commitment to the domi-
nant cultural and political values (Jacobs and Rea 2007). Countries with
stronger radical right parties “help to reduce immigration, whether by
making conventional parties in government tighten immigration laws
and/or by generating a political climate that makes potential immigrants
move elsewhere” (Kitschelt 2007, 1199). Importantly, established politi-
cians in power, from former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to a former
British Prime Minister (David Cameron) to German chancellor Angela
Merkel, have questioned the merits of multiculturalism because it suppos-
edly creates ethnic ghettos, encourages the rise of radical Islamists predis-
posed toward a “clash of civilizations,” and provokes charges of dual loy-
alty, thus co-opting the message of the radical right (Bar-On 2013, 45).
The Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (known as Jobbik; Movement
for a Better Hungary) and other radical right parties promote an ethnic
variant of nationalism based on “monuments and graveyards, even harking
back to the mysteries of ancient times and of tribal solidarity” (Kohn 2008,
574). Gábor Vona, the Jobbik party leader, once stated that “we [Hungari-
ans] are the descendants of Attila” (quoted in Kovács 2013, 227). Geert
Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for
Freedom), could invoke the metaphor of the fall of the Roman Empire in
relation to the West’s support for immigration and multiculturalism: “They
did not perceive the immigration of the Barbarians as a threat until it was
too late” (quoted in Wodak 2013, 31).

49
 Despite this opposition between civic and ethnic variants of nationalism,
Calhoun (2008, xii) warned that we should not be “too complacent” and
posit a simplistic dichotomy between our “good” liberal nationalism in the
West and “bad” ethnic nationalism in Russia or Hungary today. We might
also ask why we continue to base our political communities on nationalist
distinctions between “us” and “them,” which unites ethnic and civic vari-
ants of nationalism. We underestimate how even civic liberal forms of na-
tionalism, which have their origins in the American and French Revolu-
tions, are in part based on ethnic forms of belonging rather than merely
commitment to shared liberal ideals, values, and constitutional principles
(Bar-On 2014, 2). Moreover, Billig (1995, 6) uses the term “banal nation-
alism” to refer to “ideological habits which enable the established nations
of the West to be reproduced.” The celebration of national holidays, which
is an expression of “banal nationalism,” thus unites civic and ethnic sup-
porters of nationalism.
Changes toward more restrictive citizenship laws and citizenship tests,
as well as inviting radical right parties into national coalitions, point to the
ways in which liberal and civic variants of nationalism can converge in
practice. Vasilopoulou (2013) demonstrates that electorally successful rad-
ical right parties (e.g., the Swiss Schweizerische Volkspartei [SVP, Swiss
People’s Party], the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List and PVV, and the French FN)
have oscillated between ethnic and civic variants of nationalism, some-
times arguing in a civic vein that they are the true defenders of the nation’s
tolerant and democratic values. Zaslove (2004, 99) noted that “the Free-
dom Party and the Lega Nord have been instrumental in passing more re-
strictive immigration policy, limiting the flow of immigrants and the abil-
ity of non-EU labour to live, work or settle in either Austria or Italy.”
Mudde (2010) argues that sometimes there are more “dangers” to the
health of democracies from the mainstream than from the radical right.
Bale (2008, 12) insists that the mainstream right is more responsible than
the radical right for a rising anti-immigrant tide, suggesting that they
adopted stricter immigration policies in some countries. This is the case
with the ruling Fidesz party in Hungary, which has become a “prisoner” to
the “illiberal” rhetoric of the radical right (Pytlas 2016). In 2015, Hungar-
ian prime minister Viktor Orbán called for internment camps for illegal
immigrants. At a summer university camp, he argued that Hungary and
Europe were fighting for “the survival or extinction of European values”
and stated that he wanted “to preserve Hungary as a Hungarian country”
(Mudde 2016). Yet in official Fidesz election manifestos, the party refrains

50
from such overtly radical right discourses (Mudde 2016). While its anti-
Semitism is not as obsessive as Jobbik’s, some of its members of parlia-
ment have resurrected anti-Semitic tropes about “anti-national” elements
and “Jewish financial control” of Hungary (Rensmann 2013, 227). These
examples lead us to reflect on the ways in which the mainstream is influ-
enced by the radical right, or how the radical right informs the ideals and
policies of the mainstream. In this respect, Fidesz is often classified as
mainstream, conservative right and Jobbik as radical right, but perhaps this
approach needs some reassessment.

DEFINING THE RADICAL RIGHT: A RADICAL RIGHT

FAMILY?

The term “radical right” was used by Daniel Bell (2008) in an edited vol-
ume in 1955. Bell’s object of study was the radical right in the United
States, which was distinguished by its vociferous opposition to domestic
and international communism and rejection of the pro-welfare-state poli-
tics of the New Deal. In the context of the Cold War, the U.S. radical right
tended toward McCarthyism—an obsessive, dogmatic, and surreal search
for communist enemies of the nation. Bell’s analysis could apply to many
contemporary European radical right parties: their anti-communism, na-
tionalism, and fear of the excesses of the welfare state. In an age of “com-
munism in ruins,” the radical right’s anti-communism still exists, although
today immigrants and Muslims are often viewed as the primary threats to
the nation.
A literature emerged in the 1990s arguing that a radical right populist
family existed. The French FN was inspired by the neofascist Movimento
Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian Social Movement) (Ignazi 2006), and in turn
the Belgian Vlaams Belang engaged in “copying not just the posters but
even whole programmes” of the FN (Mudde 2010, 1180). Mudde (2002, 2)
noted that the concept of “the party family” is often constructed ideologi-
cally. Von Beyme (1985) highlighted nine ideological or “spiritual fami-
lies,” which included regional and ethnic parties and right-wing extremist
parties. Rydgren (2005) opined that the radical right parties embraced a
new “master frame” in the 1980s and 1990s, which led to more respectable
profiles and the dropping of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-democ-
ratic tendencies. Yet, as Akkerman and Rooduijn (2015, 1141) argued,
leaders of parties with neofascist subcultures were unwilling to, or could
not always, distance themselves from overt fascist and Nazi symbolism or

51
anti-Semitism. Eatwell (1996, 174) made a crucial distinction between “es-
oteric and exoteric appeal” related to the radical right and its supporters,
with the former limited to “closed circles” and the latter connoting what is
“considered wise to say in public.”
Scholars do not agree on this “new consensus” or even on basic termi-
nology in respect to the radical right. So, for example, Mudde (2007) uses
the term “populist radical right,” while Carter (2005) prefers “extreme
right.” For Carter, parties are radical right if (1) they are nationalistic in a
xenophobic way, (2) they are racist or culturally conformist, and (3) they
reject liberal democracy or call for its restriction or expansion (Kitschelt
2007, 1178). There are disagreements about which parties to include under
the ambit of the radical right, such as the Italian MSI, which was deeply
indebted to its fascist past and later made a transition to “post-fascism” and
national coalition government under a new name in 1995, Alleanza
Nazionale (AN, National Alliance). Art (2011) argues that the Austrian
Freedom Party only became a radical right party after Jörg Haider captured
control of the party in 1986, while Rydgren (2004) explains that the
Progress Parties in Denmark and Norway only joined the radical right fam-
ily after they adopted the anti-immigrant issue in the 1980s.
Moreover, the radical right populist party literature is rather Eurocentric,
focusing on parties in Europe and especially Western Europe. Kitschelt
(2007, 1198) notes that Norris (2005) and Mudde (2007) include Central
and Eastern European countries in their analysis of the radical right, al-
though “they are often not sufficiently sensitive to these contextual differ-
ences between regions and types of political economies.” In countries such
as Russia or Romania, former communists appeal to the same constituency
as radical right parties (Kitschelt 2007, 1198), which means that we should
examine both the radical left and radical right. Furthermore, there is little
research on the right or radical right in the Americas outside of the United
States and Canada, in Africa, and in Asia. As intellectuals in Latin Amer-
ica are largely left-wing, they identify more with research about the left,
the people, social movements, and indigenous peoples. Yet Latin Ameri-
can intellectuals err in not studying the right because of its importance and
resilience in the region, including its connections to the military, conserva-
tive and neoliberal parties, ultra-Catholic circles, business elites, and even
drug cartels (Luna and Rovira Kaltwasser 2014).
While radical right populist parties such as the FN under Marine Le Pen
argued that they were a “mass” or “popular” party (Fourest and Venner
2011, 75), Betz (1994, 4) posited that such parties combined radical right-

52
wing and populist ideals: they are “right-wing” because they reject politi-
cal projects that sought to attain individual and social equality, they are
radical because they oppose the “established socio-cultural and social-po-
litical system,” and they are populist since they appeal to “the superior
common sense” of the “common man.” Mudde (2007) highlighted three
characteristics of what he termed the “populist radical right” parties: (1)
nativism, or the defense of the privileges of a homogeneous native popula-
tion against immigrants; (2) authoritarianism, or the belief in strong leader-
ship and a strong state, and (3) a pronounced populism, or a strong anti-es-
tablishment stance, disdain for established parties, and a valorization of the
“little man on the street” against the political, economic, and cultural
elites.
Yet in an earlier work, Mudde (1995, 206) noted that scholars of the
“extreme right” and “radical right” could not agree on core concepts, while
nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy, and the strong state
tended to repeat as core concepts in the literature. This point is significant,
as I argue that ethnic nationalism is the master concept of the radical right.
Racism, xenophobia, and a strong state are tools used by the radical right
in order to advance an ethnic conception of the nation and nationalism.
While some radical right outfits are more critical and dismissive of democ-
racy, most of the radical right today is not against democracy per se.
Rather, they are against liberal variants of democracy, which hinder the
emergence of the “true democracy” wedded to the homogeneous nation.
In terms of the relationship between the radical right and nationalism,
Mudde (2007, 18–24) holds that nativism is the key factor linking all “pop-
ulist radical right” parties. This nativism, argues Mudde, is based on “the
belief that states should be inhabited exclusively [emphasis added] by
members of the ‘native’ group,” while “non-native elements (persons and
ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-state.”
What Mudde calls “nativism” is what I have in mind with the term “ethnic
nationalism.” In short, nativism or ethnic nationalism is what ideologically
drives the radical right. It is the master concept fueling the ideals of the
radical right. Furthermore, for Mudde (2010, 1181), this nativism should
not be viewed as a “normal pathology,” but rather is a “pathological nor-
malcy” and “a radicalisation of mainstream values.” It should be noted that
this nativism can, on occasion, lead to a defense of the West, Europe,
Christianity (or sometimes the Judeo-Christian tradition), humanism, or
secular values—insofar as they are presented as “authentic native culture”
(Zúquete 2008). “Denmark belongs to the Danes. . . . A multiethnic Den-

53
mark would mean the breaking down of our stable homogeneous society
by anti-development and reactionary cultures,” stated the Dansk Folkeparti
(DF, Danish People’s Party) in its 2007 Work Program (Fryklund 2013,
267). The radical right targets non-Europeans, Africans, Muslims, immi-
grants, refugees, and asylum seekers as the carriers of non-nativist values
and cultures.

THE MASTER CONCEPT: ETHNIC NATIONALISM

In this section, I suggest that ethnic nationalism, or what Mudde dubs “na-
tivism,” is the master concept for the radical right. Recall that Kohn made
the distinction between ethnic and civic variants of nationalism, while
Griffin insisted that with ethnic variants of nationalism, common stances
include chauvinism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia. Or as Dunn (2015,
369) writes, “An ethnic/cultural conceptualization of nationalism largely
follows from a ‘primordial’ belief regarding the nature of the nation—the
belief that nations have existed since the dawn of human history. This
sense of nationalism is narrow, traditional and unchanging.” For the radi-
cal right, ethnic nationalism, or what Dunn dubs “exclusive nationalism,”
connotes that the national borders and the state should be equivalent with
the dominant ethnic group; that national preference should be promoted;
the homogeneous nation is idealized; that ethnocracies are longed for; and
that “enemy Others” constantly threaten to tear the nation asunder and
hence should be removed from the body politic. For the nation to be free,
sovereign, and whole, the state must be cleansed of non-nativist influences
and cultures. Remember that immigrants, asylum seekers, and Muslims
(and at times Jews or Rom) are viewed by the radical right as mortal dan-
gers to the nation, more lethal than guns.
Some of the literature on nationalism suggests that ethnic nationalists of
the radical right are “nationalists” and civic nationalists are merely “patri-
ots.” This position is best exemplified by Blank and Schmidt (2003, 305):
Nationalism supports homogeneity within society, blind obedience,
and idealized excessive valuation of one’s own nation, whereas pa-
triotism supports heterogeneous structures within the society and a
critical distance to the state and the regime. They are linked to dif-
ferent attitudes toward objects that are strange and different: Na-
tionalism leads to the denigration of such outgroups and minorities,
whereas patriotism strengthens tolerance toward such groups.

54
While ethnic nationalism is shared by most of the radical right, there are
some minor exceptions. As different lefts and rights mutate over time,
some elements of the radical right have increasingly stressed regionalism
and pan-Europeanism. In fact, the ideal European community for French
nouvelle droite leader Alain de Benoist is “hundreds of independent re-
gions” (i.e., a “Europe of a hundred flags”) under the ambit of a sovereign,
“respiritualized, secular, hierarchical, pan-European framework” (Bar-On
2008, 339). For most of the radical right, the notion of a “Europe of a hun-
dred flags” challenges the sanctity of the nation and state borders. It would
lead to the creation of more European states, including for the Basques,
Bretons, and Kosovars. Each state would be internally ethnically homoge-
neous, while a pan-Europeanism would prevail in common defense, cur-
rency, and banking concerns, among other areas of political life. A “Eu-
rope of a hundred flags” would challenge existing borders and create more
nations, states, and nationalism.
While this conception of a “Europe of a hundred flags” is regionalist
and clashes with the radical right’s ethnic and territorial appraisal of na-
tionalism, it shares with the radical right a desire to create homogeneous
regions or nations cleansed of immigrants and bent on preserving ethnic
homogeneity within the “authentic,” historic regions of Europe (Spek-
torowski 2003, 55–70). This “ultra-regionalism” conceives of the rebirth
of hundreds of ethnically “pure” states within a larger post-liberal, pan-Eu-
ropean framework (Spektorowski 2007). This framework is usually also
associated with what Spektorowski (2012) has dubbed a “multiculturalism
of the right”: a new, innovative way to publicly recognize foreigners and
immigrants to Europe, while ultimately excluding them from the polity
and refusing to assimilate them.
Zaslove (2011, 4) points out that the Italian LN has been classified by
some scholars as radical right, although it “combines regionalism with rad-
ical right populism.” In the history of the LN, this regionalism has been
expressed, at different times, as separation from the Italian state (national-
ism), as a radically reconstituted federalist state (federalism), or as devolu-
tion (Zaslove 2011, 14). The LN’s “regionalist nationalism” targets either
internal or external “outsiders” for political exclusion (e.g., the former in-
cludes southerners and the latter immigrants, refugees, and asylum seek-
ers). Indeed, Zaslove (2011, 15) calls the LN’s positions, which target
“outsiders” for political exclusion, “nativist nationalism.” Not all variants
of regionalism are interested in creating sovereign states. While the Bel-
gian Vlaams Belang seeks to create an independent Flemish republic free

55
of liberal multiculturalism, the LN has become more autonomist rather
than outright separatist. Yet all this invites an obvious question: is region-
alism the new nationalism?
While the radical right might flirt with regionalism and pan-Euro-
peanism, its bread and butter is ethnic nationalism. This has been con-
firmed by the literature on the radical right. In his Populist Radical Right
Parties in Europe, Mudde (2007, 22) argues that nativism, or the combina-
tion of nationalism and xenophobia, is the main ideological feature of the
radical right parties. Mudde uses the term “nativism” in order to exclude
liberal forms of nationalism (which are supported by the center, main-
stream right, and left) and to suggest that the radical right advances an eth-
nic conception of nationalism. In a review of Mudde’s book, Ellinas (2008,
561) explains, “The book joins a growing consensus in the literature that
distinguishes nationalism as the single characteristic that all radical right
parties share.” As (ethnic) nationalism unites the radical right, its political
parties “divide the world into friends and foes thriving on the spread of
fear about ‘non-natives’— especially Muslims, Jews, and Rom” (Ellinas
2008, 561). Note that ethnic nationalism implicitly posits a politically
dominant religious group, while minority religions are conceived as threats
to the nation. Muslims or Jews are viewed as “enemies” of the “true na-
tion” because they undermine nation-state homogeneity. Radical right po-
sitions on the EU, economy, liberal democracy, minorities, immigration,
multiculturalism, and capitalist globalization are informed by the master
concept, namely, ethnic nationalism.
Other scholars have supported the characterization of the radical right as
driven by nationalism. Rooduijn (2014, 80) states that “one of the key
characteristics of PRR [populist radical right] parties is their nationalism.”
Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou (2012) agree with this position.
Yet recall that for Rooduijn this nationalism “is not just nationalism in
general that these parties propagate; it is a specific, Manichean, form of
nationalism, which emphasises the antagonistic relationship between the
Good nation and Evil outsiders.” In short, this exclusive form of national-
ism is what Mudde calls nativism and I have called ethnic nationalism.
This nationalism is illiberal, ethnically driven, and xenophobic (Mudde
2007, 24). This nativism or ethnic nationalism is generally, but not neces-
sarily, racist and based on ethnicity. If we take the Dutch PVV, “a reli-
gious [minority, i.e., Muslims] instead of an ethnic minority constitutes the
main ‘enemy’ ” (Rooduijn 2014, 82).
Rydgren (2007) is unambiguous in highlighting ethnic nationalism as

56
the key characteristic of the contemporary radical right: “First, although
the populist ultranationalism (i.e., organic ethno-nationalism) of the new
radical right is less aggressive and expansive, and rather turned inwards, it
still constitutes the ideological core of these parties.” What Rydgren means
is that the radical right today is divorced from the fascism of the past be-
cause it does not generally seek to expand its borders beyond existing na-
tion-states. Under the influence of the nouvelle droite and historical cir-
cumstances, the radical right today is for the “right to difference” of all na-
tions—that is, the right to maintain their cultures and traditions against the
homogenizing tendencies of liberal democracy (and hence civic national-
ism), multiculturalism, capitalist globalization, the EU, or even a global
human rights regime. Within their state borders, the best way for nations to
protect the “right to difference” is through “ethno-nationalism,” “na-
tivism,” or “ethnic nationalism.” In short, it is through the erection of ho-
mogeneous political communities. For Rydgren (2007), this “organic
ethno-nationalism” is tied to myths about the glories of the national past, a
desire to return to traditional values, and the right of national majorities to
protect their culture against incursions from internal minorities or interna-
tionalist pressures.
As a result of the ethno-nationalist core at the heart of the radical right,
immigrants and in particular Muslim immigrants are seen as the primary
threats to the “health” of the nation. Yet even if immigrants are not openly
scapegoated, as with Alain de Benoist and some sectors of the AN in Italy
(i.e., instead global capitalism is blamed for immigration) (Ignazi 2006,
35–61), the aim is nonetheless for immigrants to return to their countries
of origins. If France belongs to the French, similarly Algeria belongs to the
Algerians. A radical, worldwide cultural and ethnic ethnopluralism is pro-
moted in which internal ethnic homogeneity is highly valorized. Global
processes of homogenization promoted by established parties, the EU, cap-
italism, or the UN are seen as “killers” of nations, ethnic groups, and cul-
tures (Faye 1981, 2000).
Givens (2005, 20) notes that “one of the main defining characteristics”
of the radical right is “nationalism,” but suggests that this nationalism is
not ordinary, mainstream, or liberal nationalism but rather ethnic national-
ism, as the radical right parties are “anti-immigrant” and promote “national
preference in citizenship and welfare benefits (or welfare chauvinism).”
The radical right, insists Givens, plays on the fears associated with multi-
culturalism: cultural sameness and the obliteration of national cultures and
communities. In comparing the party positions of radical right parties on

57
immigration, the EU, and economy, Givens (2005, 35) suggests that “most
of the positions of the radical right are derived from nationalism.” Slogans
of the radical right such as “Austria First” (FPÖ), “France for the French”
(FN), or “Our program is Germany” (the Republikaner Party in 1990) con-
note an ethnic nationalism as the highest political principle. These political
outfits insist that the “true patriots” are the radical right because they pro-
tect the nation, its culture, and its past. The radical right is thus viewed as
“the only possible guide of the nation” and the true representative of the
people; it is a nationalist antidote to supranational institutions, corrupt es-
tablished elites, and political “infiltration” of the state by ethnic or reli-
gious minorities (Pirro 2015, 8).
Norris argues that the “signature” issues of the radical right are related
to xenophobia, nationalism, and cultural protectionism. She posits that
supporters of radical right parties have “homogeneous values” (2005, 30–
31), and that the parties have encouraged more restrictive immigration
policies compared to established parties. The radical right parties promote
strong cultural protectionism, the repatriation of immigrants, the closure of
borders to foreigners (as foreigners are linked to criminality and the break-
down of law and order), and economic protectionism (Norris 2005, 25).
Taken together, the combination of fear of foreigners, nationalism, and de-
fense of culture amounts to “nativism,” “ethno-nationalism,” or “ethnic na-
tionalism.”
Fennema (2004, 11) notes that the Italian MSI, the Belgian Vlaams Be-
lang, and some members of the French FN go further than merely embrac-
ing “ethnic nationalism,” instead “referr[ing] quite openly to pre-war fas-
cist intellectuals as their ideological inspiration.” He also highlights how,
in addition to ethnic nationalism, anti-materialism and a tendency to con-
spiracy theories unite the contemporary radical right. What distinguishes
today’s radical right from the fascist right, argues Fennema, is that they do
not reject parliamentary democracy.
If we move to Central and Eastern Europe, the radical right’s biological
racism has become less pronounced and more ethnocentric, while its
stances on democracy are “softened” (Minkenberg 2002, 340). Nonethe-
less, the sharp rhetoric of the radical right toward “enemies of the nation”
has even led to open violence against minorities. Jobbik’s use of paramili-
tary uniforms mimics its interwar-era fascist counterparts. Moreover, the
radical right promotes at its core the myth of an “extreme” homogeneous
nation, as well as a “romantic and populist ultranationalism,” against the
“perils” of liberal and pluralistic democracy, individualism, and universal-

58
ism (Minkenberg 2002, 337). Minkenberg (2002, 46) insists that Central
and Eastern Europe are infused with “high levels” of nationalism mixed
with rabid anti-Semitism, territorial concerns, and anti-system sentiments.
What drives all these issues is an ethnic conception of nationalism. Or, as
Pelinka (2013, 14) maintains, both “open anti-Semitism and ethno-nation-
alism—directed especially against minorities” drive the radical right in
Central and Eastern Europe.
In contrast, in 2010 the European Freedom Alliance, consisting of Heinz
Christian Strache (FPÖ), Felip Dewinter (Vlaams Belang), and other
politicians, traveled to Israel and the West Bank in order to stand with Is-
rael and highlight their anti-Muslim stances (Shroufi 2015). Sectors of the
radical right in Western Europe, including the FN under Marine Le Pen,
have toned down their anti-Semitism and seek “to prevent Islam’s sup-
posed contamination of the nation’s cultural heritage” through “post-na-
tional cooperation and European identity” (Shroufi 2015, 24). In short,
some of these parties have moved “from nationalist anti-Jewish hatred to
European philo-Semitism,” arguing that Jews represent an integral part of
the Western Judeo-Christian tradition and hence are allies, while “Islam”
(not Islamism) represents a “totalitarian ideology” and Muslims (immi-
grants and refugees, or even sometimes citizens) are a real threat to na-
tional and pan-European cultures because of their radically different “civi-
lization” (Shroufi 2015, 35–36). As a result, most of the radical right has
positioned itself against Turkey’s entrance into the EU, arguing that it rep-
resents an existential threat to Europe. Dewinter, a Vlaams Belang leader,
highlights this position: “If Turkey becomes a member of the European
Union that will mean once again eighty million Muslims, who will join the
European Union, that means that Europe will come to about one hundred
and twenty, one hundred and thirty million Muslims. Then it’s over and
out for Europe” (Shroufi 2015, 27). Or, as Heinz-Christian Strache, the
chairman of the FPÖ, argues, European states do not advance a coherent
“family policy” for “European peoples” and instead choose immigrants
from Muslim countries for entrance into the state, while “original” Euro-
peans are allowed to “become a minority” and the “downfall of Europe” is
an imminent reality (Shroufi 2015, 27).
In summary, the master concept of the radical right is ethnic national-
ism. Most scholars have suggested that a variant of ethnic nationalism,
whether “nativism,” “welfare chauvinism,” “ethno-nationalism,” or “or-
ganic ethno-nationalism,” drives the contemporary radical right. At times,
regionalism and pan-Europeanism have made their marks on the radical

59
right. Yet even pan-European initiatives of the radical right such as a com-
mon parliamentary group have been troubled by nationalistic tensions such
as between Hungarian and Slovak ethnic nationalists.

RADICAL RIGHT DISCOURSES

In this section, I sample the discourses of radical right parties and highlight
how they are related to ethnic nationalism. Moreau (2012, 75–76) pointed
out that the major preoccupation of radical right-wing parties is national-
ism, but this nationalism is ethnic in that it longs for a return to a national
“golden age”; denounces genetic miscegenation and national or (white)
European demographic collapse; engages in xenophobic agitation against
foreigners; rejects multiculturalism and the integration of foreigners; pro-
motes radical ethnopluralism and homogeneous political communities; and
supports economic protectionism on behalf of the nation and the dominant
ethnic group. If we examine the discourses and rhetorical strategies of the
radical right, they follow those themes, all of which revolve around de-
fending the ethnically conceived nation.
Following are examples of radical right campaign discourses and how
they are connected to the nation, nationalism, and ultimately ethnic nation-
alism:
1. In its founding charter, Jobbik (2003) insists that the spirit of a more
direct democracy best represents the nation: “Jobbik the Movement
for a Better Hungary wishes to represent the entire nation.” It sug-
gests that it is “a patriotic party, which lays its political foundations
on the protection of national values and interests.” Like Guillaume
Faye in France, the Hungarian party asserts that “we confront the in-
creasingly blunt effort to eliminate nations as the fundamental com-
munities of human existence.” The Hungarian nation is ethnic and
transcends the boundaries of Hungary, claims the group’s charter:
“In the age of globalism and consumerism, there is an increasingly
pressing need to truly form a common nation with the Hungarian
communities living in the territories torn away from us so that we
could connect with them more closely and demonstrate the vitalizing
force of national togetherness to the upcoming generations.”
2. The Austrian FPÖ’s 2008 election platform, “Our Promise to Aus-
tria,” advocated “a humane and consequential return of foreigners to
their homelands, especially criminals and ‘parasites’ ” (Moreau 2012,

60
 84). This position is the same as the French nouvelle droite’s Mani-
festo for the Year 2000 (Champetier and de Benoist 2000), arguing
that immigration is negative for both “hosts” and “immigrants.”
3. In the same election platform, the FPÖ called for “the protection of
the labor market by a national preference system” (Moreau 2012,
85). Recall that back in the early 1990s the French FN was advocat-
ing national preference, thus privileging an ethnic rather than civic
conception of the nation.
4. In 2009, the British National Party (BNP) used an electoral slogan
called “Campaign Against Islam,” thus associating Islam with a
“clash of civilizations,” pitting it against the United Kingdom and the
West, and associating it with Islamist terrorism and with demo-
graphic fears of “Eurabia” (Ye’Or 2005). The implication is that non-
European cultures and ethnic groups, particularly from Muslim coun-
tries, are “unfit” for entrance to the United Kingdom and upset the
nation’s ethnic demographic balance. Thus, Muslims are left with no
chance of gaining citizenship.
5. In the 2010 Dutch general elections, the PVV reached dizzying
heights with its anti-Muslim polemics: “Eradicating Islam should be
the primary target of Dutch foreign policy” and Islam (not Islamism)
is a “totalitarian doctrine.” Voting for its leader, Wilders was seen as
equivalent to struggling “against Islam and mass immigration”
(Moreau 2012, 108). While the PVV rails against Islam and Muslim
immigrants, it argues that attachment to the Dutch nation is cultural
and based on shared democratic values.
6. In the French FN’s program published in April 2011, the party calls
for reforms to the current practice in which people whose father or
mother is French automatically acquire French nationality (Fourest
and Venner 2011, 185). The party also makes acquisition of French
nationality contingent on good conduct (that is, no criminal record)
and ability to integrate into French society. In short, the FN wants to
promote a more ethnically “pure” France.
7. Under the influence of former nouvelle droite number two Guillaume
Faye, the FN declared “Islamicization” as “the new peril,” while
making no distinctions between Islam, Islamism, and Islamicization
(Fourest and Venner 2011, 249). For the French radical right party,
even under new leader Marine Le Pen, the political formula was sim-
ple: Islam = immigration = the “occupation of France.” Le Pen has

61
 openly compared the demographic changes in French society (i.e.,
more mosques, prayers on the streets, and the proliferation of hijabs
and burqas) to France under the Nazi occupation and the Vichy pe-
riod. If we read between the lines, this means that Islam and immi-
grants are “un-French.” In addition, these Muslim immigrants “oc-
cupy” France with their values and lead the political class toward a
politics of multicultural tolerance, thus diluting the ethnic conception
of the nation. Moreover, the FN muddies the historical record by sug-
gesting that Muslim immigration to France is worse than pro-Nazi
Vichy occupation—a false and dubious analogy.
8. Typical LN propaganda and posters use the figure of a North Ameri-
can native (a Native American) in order to argue that the peoples of
northern Italy (also called Padania) are “victims” of “cultural geno-
cide” at the hands of the Italian state and its pro-immigration and
pro-multiculturalism regime. For the LN, the “right to cultural de-
fense” against immigration and multiculturalism is “normal,” and
“true racism” is to be found in a “global, Anglophone, and totalitar-
ian village on the ruins of people” (Moreau 2012, 116). Both Faye
and de Benoist have argued that liberal multiculturalism is “totalitar-
ian” and a silent, genocidal “killer” of rooted cultures, peoples, and
nations. Referenda on immigration policy, refugee and asylum is-
sues, or multiculturalism would eventually restore more ethnically
homogeneous political communities to Italy and the European conti-
nent.
9. The Belgian Vlaams Belang views immigration, especially Muslim
immigration, as a “machine to kill the peoples” (Moreau 2012, 120).
This means not merely the “killing” of Flemish peoples, but also the
“killing” of various “original” ethnicities and peoples of Europe.
10. An election platform of the Slovenská Národna Strana (SNS, Slovak
National Party) states that Slovaks should rediscover their roots and
identity as a mechanism “to counterbalance the risks of globalization
of the culture and the creation of global pseudo-values” (Moreau
2012, 127). Under the influence of the nouvelle droite, the Slovak
radical right rebelled against “liberalism and socialism because they
were universal and ‘abstract’ ideologies, which assimilated and ho-
mogenized diverse peoples worldwide. Moreover, the human rights
agenda of the West and the new wars of humanitarian intervention
are presented as fake projects hiding a neo-imperialist ‘will to
power’ ” (Bar-On 2013, 225). A politics based on “roots” would

62
 mean attacking any traces of liberal multiculturalism, refusing to
support minority rights, and promoting a politics of ethnic protec-
tionism for Slovaks.
11. The manifesto of the UK Independence Party (UKIP 2015), “Believe
Britain,” includes its immigration section early in the manifesto, only
second after the economy. Nigel Farage, its former leader, states in
the introduction to the manifesto in a nationalistic tone, “If you be-
lieve we should have the sovereign right to control our own borders, .
. . then we are the party for you.” The immigration section opens
with these lines: “Britain is a compassionate, caring nation. In the
course of our island’s history we have welcomed millions of people
to these shores and we are proud of that record. UKIP does not have
a problem with migration. What we do have a problem with is the
uncontrolled, politically-driven immigration that has been promoted
and sustained by Labour and the Conservatives.” It also notes, in a
nouvelle droite–like formulation, “Immigration is not about race: it is
about space. Immigrants are not the problem, it is the current immi-
gration system that is broken.” Note that, like the French right-wing
intellectuals, the UKIP does not want to be labeled racist and hence
blames not immigrants themselves but the immigration system. Yet
UKIP sees immigration as a national demographic threat and a strain
on the welfare system: “The sheer weight of numbers, combined with
rising birth rates (particularly to immigrant mothers) and an ageing
population, is pushing public services to breaking point.” Although it
discriminates against immigrants and creates a negative climate for
potential immigrants, UKIP claims that the current immigration
regime is discriminatory: “Our current immigration rules ignore the
wishes of the British people. They discriminate in favour of EU citi-
zens and against the rest of the world.” In short, UKIP supports a less
liberal and anti-multicultural conception of the nation.
12. The current electoral platform of the French FN, “Le Projet du Front
National” (2016), includes main sections on “the authority of the
state” and “the future of the nation”—both connected to the party’s
primordial nationalistic concerns. The “immigration” subsection,
within the section on “the authority of the state,” notes that “immi-
gration must be stopped” and French national identity should be “re-
inforced.” Immigration is condemned for three reasons: (1) it is not a
“humanist project” but an “arm in the service of big capital,” (2) it is
a huge cost for “the national community,” and (3) it causes problems

63
 for the French Republic. Among those problems are ghettoes, in-
terethnic conflicts, threats to national identity, conspicuous expres-
sions of Islamism, and ethnic communitarianism (which is called a
“poison” against “national cohesion”). In essence, “immigration must
be stopped” because it is a threat to the ethnic conception of the
French nation.

WESTERN, CENTRAL, AND EASTERN EUROPE, AND BEYOND

It has been suggested that ethnic nationalism is the key animating feature
of the radical right. In this section, I highlight similarities and important
differences in the nationalisms of the radical right in Western, Central, and
Eastern Europe. While the contemporary radical right emerged earlier in
Western Europe, the radical right is now part of mainstream party politics
in Central and Eastern Europe (Minkenberg 2015; Pytlas 2016). Ethnic na-
tionalism is the uniting characteristic of the contemporary radical right in
all these areas. However, as we move toward Central and Eastern Europe,
the nationalism is more racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. Ethnic na-
tionalists in the region make more allusions to the possible utilization of
violence and the delegitimization of the system. However, it is important
not to overstate the differences between the radical right in Western and
that in Central and Eastern Europe. So, for example, some radical right
politicians in Western Europe have made extremely vitriolic and fear-
based anti-Muslim statements, failing to distinguish between law-abiding
Muslim citizens and violent Islamists. The PVV’s Geert Wilders compared
the Qur’an to Mein Kampf, while the FN’s former leader, Jean-Marie Le
Pen, once warned of France being turned into an Islamic state.
If we examine the differences between the radical right in Western Eu-
rope and that in Central and Eastern Europe, the intensity and conspicuous
nature of anti-Semitism stands out in countries in the latter regions, includ-
ing Russia, Hungary, and Slovakia. Holz (2011) notes that in former Stal-
inist-communist European countries, anti-Semitism has a “unifying” role
because the Jew is conceived as an internal enemy—even “the enemy of
the entire world” (Wodak 2015, 25). In contrast, in Western Europe there
are pro-Israel radical right parties such as the Dutch PVV, and in some
countries such as Britain and Germany “anti-Muslim prejudice and stereo-
types seem to have replaced, or at least backgrounded, anti-Semitic
rhetoric” (Wodak 2015, 26). And, as we have seen, the four Western Euro-
pean radical right politicians calling themselves the European Freedom Al-

64
liance sought to “frame Islam as the new totalitarian threat facing Europe
and insinuate that it is not Nazis that Europe’s Jews have to fear, but Mus-
lims” (Shroufi 2015, 37). They also sought to distance these parties from
the perception that the radical right is always and necessarily anti-Semitic.
In any case, whereas elements of the Austrian FPÖ or Vlaams Belang are
today more pro-Israel and less anti-Semitic, one is less likely to witness
such philo-Semitism and pro-Israel sentiments coming from sectors of the
radical right in Central and Eastern Europe.
Volen Siderov, leader of the Bulgarian Attack Party (Атака), is an old-
school, open anti-Semite. He published a blatantly anti-Semitic book
called The Boomerang of Evil (Ivanov and Illieva 2005, 9). He advanced
crude anti-Masonic conspiracy theories in which puppet regimes, interna-
tional organizations, and the press seek to control the world and commit
“ethnocide” (i.e., a silent genocide) against the Bulgarian people.
In eastern Germany, anti-Semitism is more problematic than in western
Germany. Germany’s Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des
Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the
West) movement, which is based in Dresden, has declared open “war” on
the Muslim community. But Pegida has been infiltrated by neo-Nazi
groups and anti-Israel radicals, and so it is no accident that Pegida demon-
strations have included signs such as “Just Say No to Israel” and “Let Ger-
many Finally Be Germany,” suggesting that Germany cannot be a “normal
nation” because it must deal with an “imposed” war guilt and Holocaust
remembrance.
Hungary is a country in which anti-Semitic discourses are promoted
openly and Jews are often viewed as enemies of the nation and even the
world. Here is a sample of the most vociferous anti-Semitic statements of
radical right politicians in Hungary:
1. Founded in 1993 by Hungarian playwright Istvan Csurka, the Mag-
yar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIÉP, Hungarian Justice and Life Party)
called for a Hungarian Lebensraum in clearly racist and anti-Semitic
terms; dubbed NATO an agent of “US-Zionist plans”; insisted that
the IMF and World Bank are “Zionist” organizations; attacked the
Frankfurt International Book Festival as anti-national and used the
phrase “the Holocaust of Hungarian literature”; and denounced
bankers as “Jews who suck away little people’s money to distribute it
among themselves” (Bernath, Miklosi, and Mudde 2005, 76).
2. Before the 2009 elections to the European Parliament, a comment

65
 was posted on an unofficial political Internet forum under the name
of Krisztina Morvai, the head of Jobbik’s electoral list. Claiming to
speak to Hungarian Jews, the post stated that the party “would be
glad if the so-called proud Hungarian Jews went back to playing with
their tiny circumcised dicks instead of vilifying me” (Lahav 2009a).
3. “Given our current situation, anti-Semitism is not just our right, but it
is the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover, and we must prepare
for armed battle against the Jews,” wrote Judit Szima, a Jobbik can-
didate for EU parliament (Lahav 2009b).
4. In November 2012, Jobbik’s deputy parliamentary leader, Márton
Gyöngyösi, posted a video of a speech on the party’s website in
which he united classical anti-Semitism with ethnic nationalism: “I
think such a conflict makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish an-
cestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian Parliament and the
Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a national security risk to
Hungary” (Ynetnews 2012).
What also differentiates the radical right in Western Europe from its
counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe is that the latter are “a combi-
nation of old and new politics” (Pirro 2015, 1). What Pirro means is that
while these parties are simultaneously attached to old-style politics (in-
cluding anti-Semitism, historical revisionism, and conspicuous ethnic na-
tionalism), they also deal with new “post-materialist” issues such as immi-
gration, defense of cultural identity, and security (Taggart 2000). Pirro
(2015, 9) argues that while these parties emphasize nativism and authori-
tarianism, they are different from their Western counterparts because they
are not reactions to the liberal-left values of the 1968 activists but rather a
response to “the transformation of 1989.” In short, the radical right parties
in Central and Eastern Europe are reacting to structural conditions as a re-
sult of the transitions to capitalism and liberal democracy, but also ex-
pressing resentment of challenges to authority and values. For Minkenberg
(2009, 454), the ideological tool kit of the past is “revived—and reinter-
preted—by the radical right” in Central and Eastern Europe, while new is-
sues related to disaffection with the post-1989 transitions are raised. These
parties are inspired by a “synthetic construct” consisting of communist and
pre-communist pasts and ideologies (Tismaneanu 2007; Minkenberg
2014), as well as novel issues such as defense of cultural identity. Some
have suggested that a “national communism” has emerged in some parts of
Central and Eastern Europe (Shafir 2000).

66
 FUTURE RESEARCH POSSIBILITIES

This chapter has defined both nationalism and the radical right. I suggested
that a radical right party family exists, but its relationships to fascism,
Nazism, and pro-collaborationist regimes remain bones of contentions
among academics. Second, I showed how a general consensus exists in the
literature that ethnic nationalism is a central animating force, or master
concept, for the radical right. Yet the discourses changes of the radical
right are significant in relation to nationalism, including the belief in radi-
cal ethnopluralism and a tendency toward pan-Europeanism. Third, I ex-
plored the discourses of movements and political parties of the radical
right in relation to nationalism, focusing on immigration. Fourth, I ana-
lyzed the similarities of and important differences between the ethnic na-
tionalism of the radical right in Western Europe and that in Central and
Eastern Europe.
Yet I have examined the radical right in only a limited sense. I have fol-
lowed the general academic trend by looking at the radical right largely in
Western Europe. Thus, Central and Eastern Europe are ripe for more re-
search on the radical right. In addition, we must move beyond our Euro-
centric lenses and study the radical right in Latin America, Asia, and
Africa. Some interesting countries for further research include Japan (but
see Higuchi, Chapter 34 in this volume), China, India, Pakistan, South
Korea, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
If I were charting a research agenda for radical right studies and nation-
alism, I would include the following elements:
1. More comparative studies of Western and Central and Eastern Eu-
rope.
2. Greater attention to think tanks, social movements, and the media, as
well as their relationships with radical right-wing parties, in promot-
ing the rise of ethnic nationalist solutions.
3. Detailed studies of center, mainstream right, and social democratic
parties throughout Europe in terms of how they have resisted or
given in to the radical right’s vision of ethnic nationalism.
4. Country-by-country studies of the radical right in the non-Western
world.
5. An analysis of the radical right in the Muslim world and how it navi-
gates between ethnic nationalism, on one hand, and pan-Islamism, on

67
 the other hand.
6. Sensitivity to the specific cultural, historical, and political contexts
and meanings of nationalism in various regions of the world.
7. An appraisal of how civic and ethnic variants of nationalism in prac-
tice can unite against liberal multiculturalism in Europe.
8. A clearer understanding of how nationalistic conceptions of the fas-
cist and Nazi pasts inform some contemporary radical right parties.
9. More discourse analyses of the ethnic nationalist core of the radical
right.
10. Greater attention to how “economic nationalism,” including the re-
jection of a common currency (Marcus 1995), and national prefer-
ence solutions proposed by the radical right are functions of histori-
cal, political, social, or spiritual crises.
11. An understanding of how the radical right appeals to women as the
guardians of the ethnically based nation in different political contexts
and countries.
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CHAPTER 3

75
 THE RADICAL RIGHT AND ISLAMOPHOBIA

ARISTOTLE KALLIS
THE contemporary radical right is overwhelmingly hostile to Islam. This
trend has acquired disturbing momentum since 9/11 and the subsequent
terrorist attacks in different parts of the globe. However, at the heart of this
existential hostility lies the “othering” of Islam and Muslim communities,
which has much deeper roots and a longer presence in the history of the
European radical right (Qureshi and Sells 2003). Since the 1980s, the pio-
neering radical discourse of the Front National (FN) in France and the
Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest; formerly Vlaams Blok) in Belgium
have had a particularly negative image of Islam as the basis of what both
parties perceive as an immigration “problem” in their respective societies.
At the time, such views were considered to be on the fringes of the politi-
cal spectrum. While intensifying nativist anxieties about non-European im-
migrant communities had already registered on the radar of populist views
—and would continue to grow in significance throughout the 1990s—hos-
tility to Islam was only part of the radical right’s much wider repertoire of
“othering.” In other words, hostility to Islam, still far from a declared
mainstream concern among European societies at the time, constituted a
tributary of the much more predominant anti-immigrant discourse.
The tipping point of hardening attitudes toward immigration in host Eu-
ropean societies came during the 1970s, when labor markets had reached
—and, more important, were perceived to have exceeded—a point of equi-
librium. At that point, a zero-sum mind-set of fierce competition for in-
creasingly scarce resources (Kallis 2013), fueled by old and new insecuri-
ties magnified by economic crisis, started to take shape—initially at the
extreme fringes of the political spectrum but gradually also among the po-
litical and social mainstream (Bauman 2011). In hindsight, however, the
1980s and 1990s witnessed a second tipping point, this time involving the
crystallization of a largely autonomous anti-Muslim and anti-Islam dis-
course that mixed religious, cultural, and historical arguments and that
only partly overlapped with entrenched anti-immigration attitudes (Taras
2012, 193–195; Taras 2013).
Thus when a landmark 1997 Runnymede Trust report used the term “Is-
lamophobia” to describe the growing hostility toward Muslim communi-
ties in Britain, it essentially labeled and formalized something that was al-
ready well under way. The term “Islamophobia” may have been in circula-

76
tion since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, in a variety of
languages (Lopez 2011), but until the 1990s its multiple usages had been
inconsistent and often contradictory in meaning (Allen 2010). It was only
at that point that Islamophobia came to signify both unfounded hostility to-
ward Islam and fear or dislike of all or most Muslims. The report also
noted that this dual trend had grown so strong and visceral in the preceding
years that it needed to be labeled separately from racism or anti-immigra-
tion sentiment (Runnymede Trust 1997, 4).
Then came the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, followed
by a string of terrorist attacks in an ever-growing number of countries per-
petrated in the name of a radical, intolerant, and militant Islam. If Islamo-
phobia had developed a menacing presence in the late twentieth century, it
acquired a very different momentum in the post-9/11 ideological, political,
and social context (Allen 2010, 83–84). Parties of the radical right seized
the opportunities generated in an atmosphere of heightened insecurity, this
time pointing to an allegedly transnational, indeed global enemy. The ca-
pacity of a post-9/11 anti-Islam political platform for reaching much fur-
ther into the mainstream, setting agendas and capturing new votes, was not
missed by many a radical right leader in Europe. It was Pim Fortuyn in the
Netherlands who rode the wave of Islamophobia and was rewarded with
an unprecedented share of votes (17.5 percent) in the 2002 parliamentary
elections, in the process lending legitimacy to a far more radical, taboo-
shattering discourse against Islam and immigrant Muslim communities in
the country and across Europe. Fortuyn, who in 1997 had published an in-
flammatory treatise with the title Against the Islamization of Dutch Cul-
ture, became the emblem of a novel strand of Islamophobia, based less on
traditional religious and cultural beliefs and more on the notion of defense
of a “liberal” Europe (Camus 2013, 119; Rydgren and van Holsteyn 2005;
Hafez 2014, 482). Assassinated shortly after his party’s electoral break-
through, Fortuyn left behind a fertile ground for the normalization and
mainstreaming of Islamophobia in Dutch political discourse—a ground
that Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party
for Freedom) both mined and cultivated, turning a visceral kind of hostility
to Islam into the raison d’être of his political movement (Todorov 2010,
128; Vossen 2010). Nowadays, radical right parties and movements with a
strong ideological-political attachment to Islamophobia operate in many
Western countries—from Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung
des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of
the West) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany)
to the English Defence League, the Platform for Catalonia, and Golden

77
Dawn in Greece.
The ways in which Islamophobia has become, especially post-9/11, so
intimately linked with the ideology and discourse of most radical right par-
ties has invited controversial analogies with the place of anti-Semitism in
1930s Europe. Back then, a visceral hostility to Jews was supported by
layers of racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic prejudices, sedi-
mented over centuries but also aggravated or reframed by new anxieties
and insecurities. This type of anti-Semitism bound together the majority of
the transnational forces of the “new” radical right (fascism predominant
among them) in the interwar years, turning them into willing accomplices
in the brutal campaign of genocide against the continent’s Jewish commu-
nities in the 1940s. It is of course striking that parties such as the FN, the
VB, or the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Aus-
tria) have nowadays adopted a pro-Israel attitude—in the case of the FN
and the FPÖ only after performing a spectacular ideological U-turn from
their earlier visceral anti-Semitic positions. This shift, part of a much
wider strategy employed by the new radical right to shake off the suspicion
of ideological continuity with interwar fascism or postwar neo-fascism
(Copsey 2013; cf. Wolin 2006; Art 2011, 189–229), has allowed the radi-
cal right to characterize Islam and Muslim immigrant communities as their
new “contestant enemy” of the nation, of Europe, and of the West (Bau-
man 1991).
The precedent of interwar anti-Semitism holds critical heuristic value
for the understanding of the current dynamic and future devastating poten-
tial of Islamophobia in the ideology and discourse of the contemporary
radical right. Islamophobia, not unlike anti-Semitism in the 1930s and
early 1940s, is fed by both long- and short-term dynamics, by both ideo-
logical constants and volatile contextual psychological variables (cf.
Døving 2010). The radical right’s embrace of Islamophobia provides it
with uniquely powerful electoral and agenda-setting advantages, both
within states and transnationally. More alarming, however, is that the radi-
cal discourse against Islam and Muslims has been touching much wider
sympathetic mainstream audiences, thereby revealing a deeper penetration
of strands of Islamophobia in Western societies as a form of racial-cultural
prejudice magnified by security concerns and the perception of a zero-sum
resource competition (Thomas 1998, 224).

ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE RADICAL RIGHT PRE-9/11

78
Fear of and aversion to Islam have deep historical and cultural roots in
Western culture. Edward Said alluded to the shared “orientalist” refraction
of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim prejudices (Said 1985, 207; Librett 2014,
254; Zebiri 2008; Ansari and Hafez 2012). It is in the orientalist facile ab-
straction and sweeping generalization that both anti-Jewish and anti-Mus-
lim stereotypes have been allowed to grow and fester, albeit in very differ-
ent historical settings more than half a century apart. The case for a con-
nection between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia was reiterated with
greater clarity in a 2003 report of the European Monitoring Centre on
Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) titled “The Fight Against Anti-Semitism
and Islamophobia: Bringing Communities Together.” The report high-
lighted critical similarities in the way hostility against both Judaism and
Islam sees them as the long-term “ ‘other’ in what was perceived by many
as an exclusively white Christian Europe.” The report also stressed the
need to move beyond a “single-minded focus on protecting the rights of
very specific groups” and embrace a wider perspective based on universal
human rights applicable to all minority groups facing hostility and discrim-
ination (EUMC 2003).
Whether this kind of analogy between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia
is helpful or even warranted in the first place remains a matter of debate
(Hafez 2012b; Betz 2007). One of the leading academic experts on both
forms of prejudice, Matti Bunzl (2005, 2007), has criticized the joint per-
spective of the EUMC report and cautioned against exaggerating the simi-
larities between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. For him, there is little to
justify a comparison beyond the historical function of hostility to both
Jews and Muslims as devices of exclusionary identity formation in Europe.
Bunzl rejects the anchoring of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia “on a
timeless Christianity,” as this would exaggerate the diminishing signifi-
cance of religion for European and Western identity formation. Approach-
ing them both as secular prejudices, he concludes that hostility to Judaism
and Islam are time- and space-specific phenomena, with very different his-
torical functions in correspondence to equally diverse historical settings:
Whereas anti-Semitism was designed to protect the purity of the
ethnic nation-state, Islamophobia is marshaled to safeguard the fu-
ture of European civilization. That an extreme right-wing fringe
holds both ideologies simultaneously cannot obscure these funda-
mental distinctions. (Bunzl 2005, 506)
Nevertheless, the temptation to treat, qua Said, hostility to Jews and Mus-
lims as the two dominant forms of contestant enmity in the recent history

79
of the West is hard to resist. Enzo Traverso (2016) has convincingly com-
pared the current “wave of Islamophobia” with the diffusion of “old” (pre-
racialist) antisemitism in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Be-
sides, the role of right-wing hypernationalist radicalism in popularizing,
reframing, and in the end normalizing the two prejudices offers fruitful ter-
rain for an instructive historical comparative perspective. In the dexterous
political hands and taboo-shattering words of radical right populists, inter-
war anti-Semitism and contemporary Islamophobia were transformed into
obsessional prejudices—extreme, supremely resilient skewed belief sys-
tems and attitudes around which entire societies become organized, target-
ing a particular group of “others” that has become demonized by being
presented as omnipotent, omnipresent, invested with extraordinary power
mixed with malice, and thus existentially threatening in the most extreme
sense (Young-Bruehl 1996, 33; Sells 2003, 371–372).
Said has noted how, in the case of both anti-Semitism and Islamopho-
bia, “the old religious patterns of human history and destiny and ‘the exis-
tential paradigms’ were . . . reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed in . . .
secular frameworks” (Said 1978, 121). Indeed, the contemporary ferment
of Islamophobia has formed around three major fault lines of space and
time, geography, and history. One reaches deep into long-standing anti-
Muslim prejudices in Europe whose genealogy supposedly leads all the
way back to the Islamic conquests and the Crusades through the imagery
of the Ottoman “other” (Betz and Meret 2009; Cherribi 2011). Another re-
lates to the similarly enduring European “nativist” prejudice against immi-
grant groups, steeped in racist and ethnopluralist orientalist doctrines
(Priester 2003). The third traces more recent socioeconomic, cultural, and
existential insecurities, deepened after 9/11 and radicalized after the 2008
global financial crisis.
This striking temporal continuity and resilience of hostility to Islam in
many Western societies, coupled with its capacity for subsuming old hos-
tile stereotypes (about religion) into ever-renewing secularizing, pseudo-
rational, and pseudo-scientific frameworks (such as race, culture, civiliza-
tion, identity, human rights, or material resources), offered the radical right
a terrain of unique political opportunities even before 9/11. New genera-
tions of radical right-wing populist leaders and thinkers, with their slick
presentation skills and “post-fascist” affidavits, have reinvented them-
selves for a different world and seized these opportunities far more effec-
tively than their predecessors. Beginning with the ideologues of the nou-
velle droite (ND) in the 1960s and 1970s, the radical right’s most success-

80
ful politicians have correctly diagnosed that the demand for old-fashioned
extremist politics, steeped in religious or ethnic intolerance, overt racism,
and crude authoritarianism, has run dry, and they have adapted accordingly
(Bar-On 2007). Parties of the radical right may have overwhelmingly ac-
cepted, however strategically, democracy and the principle of human
equality, but they did so while eschewing old-style racism for a more nu-
anced perspective that alleged an insurmountable cultural incompatibility
between host nations and (particular) immigrant groups (Spektorowski
2003). Immigration became the radical right’s new, acceptable cause
célèbre in the 1980s and early 1990s. Behind rational-sounding arguments
about absorption capacity, integration potential, and cultural compatibility,
Islamophobia reentered the discourse of the radical right in new, more re-
spectable garb. The 1992 “70-Point Plan,” drafted by VB leader Filip
Dewinter and presented as the “solution to the problem of aliens,” largely
conflated immigration with Islam, describing the religion as “anti-West-
ern,” intolerant, and incompatible with European values (Betz 2007, 40;
Leman 2012, 73–74). A year earlier, the FN’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen,
had issued his own party’s fifty-point program in which he called for,
among other things, a ban on minaret construction. In 1993, the populist
leader of the Lega Nord, Umberto Bossi, echoed the sentiment, writing
that Islam was the most significant threat to the future of European identity
(Betz 2003, 201; Ruzza 2005). At the dawn of the new millennium, in
2000, the call of one of the pioneers of the ND, the maverick Guillaume
Faye, for a pan-European alliance against the specter of Islamic conquest
through immigration was perhaps still taboo even by the dubious standards
of the radical right, but Faye’s main tenet—that Islam was the principal
enemy of the West and immigration was its chosen weapon for conquest—
had already won many adherents in the family of the radical right (Bar-On
2013, 187–200; cf. Faye 2000).

9/11 AND ISLAMOPHOBIA: A TURNING POINT?

The 9/11 attacks were quickly seized upon by the radical right as the al-
leged confirmation of a dire prophecy and a jolt to urgently needed action
(Bonney 2008). Immediately, populist politicians such as Jörg Haider,
leader of the FPÖ, and Jean-Marie Le Pen argued that the terrorist attacks
were a spectacular, brutal, terrifying performance of the very essence of
the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington had written about back
in 1993 and the likes of Faye had adapted for the nativist, ethnopluralist
discourse of the radical right (Wodak 2015, 40–44). Unsurprisingly, then,

81
since 9/11 the radical right has made a comprehensive political investment
in Islamophobia, transforming it into an extreme obsessional prejudice at
the heart of its discourses and political programs. This Islamophobia has
become the overarching idée fixe that subsumes the sedimented layers of
long-term prejudice toward Islam and nativist hostility to the Muslim im-
migrant under acute contemporary insecurities about the status and even
the very existence of the in-group, all refracted through a terrifying per-
spective of existential, all-out zero-sum competition (Bauman 2011; Mam-
mone, Godin, and Jenkins 2013, 5).
It was the radical right’s most charismatic leaders and their controversial
party programs that broke the taboo of scapegoating Islam and communi-
ties with Muslim background in Europe, fanning the flames of Islamopho-
bia and gradually establishing it as a form of widely “accepted racism” in
many contemporary Western societies (Hafez 2014, 2). From the wider
pressure for immigration restrictions (ranging from assertion of strict bor-
der controls to bans on particular categories of immigrants and even mass
deportations) to more blatantly anti-Muslim campaigns targeting mosques
and traditional Islamic customs, the radical right has broken one taboo
after the other, set ever more radical precedents, and often forced ostensi-
bly “mainstream” political forces to at least take note and, sometimes, to
even concede ground to them (Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart 2007). In an
atmosphere of growing and protracted moral panic, parties of the radical
right have led a chorus of hostility to Islam as the unifying theme that drew
together fears of “invasion,” “oppression,” and “colonization” by immi-
grant Muslims, on one hand, and the spectre of an all-out global civiliza-
tional Armageddon that cast into doubt the very survival of the West
(Testa and Armstrong 2012). In addition, Islamophobia became an integral
part of the radical right’s anti-elite/anti-establishment discourse, directed at
both national and supranational (e.g., the European Union) political classes
(Fennema 2005). In 2010, following his party’s breakthrough in the Dutch
local elections, Wilders claimed that he spoke for the “silent majority . . .
[and not for] the leftist elite still believing in multiculturalism, coddling
criminals, a European super-state and high taxes” (Traynor 2010). Such di-
agnoses (of alleged civilizational incompatibility [Allen 2010, 46–48] and
“zero-sum” competition for finite resources) and pessimistic prognoses
(erosion of “European” values, Islamification [Vossen 2010], and height-
ened insecurity) found increasingly receptive audiences well beyond their
traditional electoral constituencies.
Thus, post-9/11, Islamophobia was reinvented and revitalized as a po-

82
tent exclusionary ideology upon which the radical right has radically rede-
fined and narrowed the notion of “us” in opposition to “them,” mixing race
with culture, prejudice with rational arguments about integration, compati-
bility, and absorption capacity (Gingrich 2005; Bunzl 2005). In intellectual
terms, very little original or new was added to the Islamophobia ferment
after 9/11; instead, what makes 9/11 such a critical watershed in the trajec-
tory of Islamophobia was the radical right’s ever bolder composite framing
of hostility to Islam by radical right populists. The radical right has been
particularly successful in embedding a menacing conflictual component in
this encounter between Islam and the West. Terrorism, immigration, inte-
gration and so-called absorption capacity, identity and multiculturalism,
austerity in the wake of the global financial crisis, and more recently the
flow of refugees from predominantly Muslim countries have been ex-
ploited by the radical right in order to reinforce a key zero-sum message—
either Islam is defeated and stamped out from host societies or the West
will perish culturally, demographically, politically, intellectually, even in
pure existential terms (Huysmans 2006, 65–67; Kalin 2011).
As a result, it now seemed that a lot of what had been considered taboo,
unacceptable, or illegal only a few years earlier, often provoking judicial
sanction, could now be aired publicly—not just with impunity but bearing
appreciating rewards for the populists. When Dutch populist Hans Jan-
maat, of the small Centre Party and Centre Democrats in the 1980s and
1990s respectively, called for a ban on immigration (with the slogan “full
is full”) and a rejection of multiculturalism, invoking both cultural and so-
cioeconomic justifications, he faced serial judicial investigations and a
conviction for incitement to racial hatred. Barely a decade later, Wilders
would be prosecuted under similar charges but sensationally would get
away with far more radical, inflammatory declarations (Mudde 2011;
Berkhout, Sudulich, and van der Brug 2015, 99).
Geert Wilders and his PVV have ridden the post-9/11 anti-Islam wave
with chilling consistency and a knack for taboo-breaking Islamophobic
narratives. In fact, while Islamophobia has become a key ideological and
political attribute of the contemporary radical right, it was Wilders and the
PVV that offered it a central place in their program and expanded its dis-
cursive reach (Vossen 2014, 178). For Wilders, the problem with Islam
was that it was allegedly a monolithic extremist ideology, philosophically
opposed to the Enlightenment foundations of Western society, incompati-
ble with the European “way of life,” and above all bent on an aggressive
pursuit of global dominance. The heir to the political legacy of the assassi-

83
nated Fortuyn, Wilders spoke daringly of an apocalyptic future—what he
called the Islamization of Europe—as a “tremendous danger looming [and]
. . . in its final stages” (PVV 2008).
In 2008, in the shadow of the controversy about the publication two
years earlier in Denmark of cartoons the prophet Muhammad, Wilders fi-
nally launched his long-nurtured project, Fitna—a short online film that
featured a chillingly taboo-breaking image of Islam as an extremist, dog-
matic, violent, intolerant ideology of hatred that should have no place in
Europe. The film was a succinct public blueprint as to how the radical
right in general would frame its Islamophobia rhetoric in subsequent years:
as part religious critique, part cultural critique (the film was a collage of
religious verses and curated media clips from terrorist and violent attacks).
Islam was presented as barbaric, repressive, misogynistic, anti-Semitic,
anti-liberal, hostile to the West, and terroristic (Ellinas 2010, 211; Allen
2010, 3).
Predictably, Fitna was overwhelmingly condemned by governments
across the world but was effusively praised by leaders of the radical right
in other countries, such as Le Pen and Haider. Like Le Pen and Dewinter,
Haider had been one of the pioneer political popularizers of the radical
rhetoric centering on Islam’s alleged incompatibility with European values
and culture (Wodak 2005; Cheribbi 2011, 53–56). In the lead-up to the
1993 Austrian referendum on immigration, Haider used a mixture of his-
torical references (the Ottoman attacks on Vienna as symbolic legacy),
ethnopluralist arguments (the notion of discrete “cultural spheres” for the
West and Islam), and current fears (at the time, migration from Turkey and
the country’s potential membership in the EU [Hafez 2012a, 53–55]). But
in the 1990s, Haider’s critique followed broadly the theme of Islam as a
figurative threat to the “European” and “Western” way of life; by contrast,
in 2008 Haider’s rhetoric was echoing the broader shift of the radical
right’s Islamophobic perspective toward Islam as the allegedly most lethal
existential threat to “the West” (Rosenberger and Hadj-Abdou 2013).

MINARETS, BURQAS, BURKINIS: MILESTONES OF

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Mosques soon became the battleground, symbolic as well as real, of the

radical right’s campaign against Islam (Green 2011; Schmitt 2012). In
2008, shortly before his death, Haider had called for a ban on all mosques
in the Austrian state of Carinthia, predictably on security grounds. By the

84
end of the year, his party in alliance with the mainstream Austrian right in
Carinthia and Voralberg had legislated such landmark regional bans
(Hafez 2016, 26; Der Spiegel 2008). But it was the controversy surround-
ing plans for the construction of a large new mosque in the Ehrenfeld dis-
trict of Cologne, Germany, in 2007–2008 that offered the first real test
case for the radical right’s campaign to break the taboo of restricting free-
dom of worship for Muslim communities in the name of security. An ini-
tial agreement between the city authorities and the representatives of the
local Muslim communities to build the mosque provoked a dynamic coun-
termobilization by a wide spectrum of political and social forces that ex-
tended well beyond the extremist constituency of the far right and neo-
Nazi groups (Shavit 2009, 145–147). If the Cologne-Pro movement (on
paper, a local citizens’ initiative but with long-term links to Germany’s
far-right organizations) emerged as a vocal umbrella organization for the
most uncompromising voices against the project, prominent figures from
the ostensible mainstream also joined the opposition. In the city council
vote that gave final authorization to the mosque construction project,
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) councilors sided with their Cologne-
Pro counterparts in voting against it (Häusler 2012a). Meanwhile, a promi-
nent CDU local politician, who vehemently criticized the plan from the
outset by warning against the prospect of Cologne becoming like “Lon-
donistan,” spoke of a “shattered wall of silence” and a “broken taboo.” He
was referring not only to the mobilization of local residents (far exceeding
the electoral strength of the Cologne-Pro movement, which has hovered
around the 5 percent mark in local elections) but also to the high-profile
criticism of the project by prominent local figures across the left/right ide-
ological divide (Cesari 2010, 209–210; Schellenberg 2013). The strong op-
position voiced by the Jewish left-wing intellectual Ralph Giordano high-
lighted the degree of penetration of anti-Islamic ideas into much wider
mainstream constituencies—particularly those opposed to what they per-
ceived as religious segregation and to the threat of a “parallel society” built
on fundamentally different social and cultural values within an otherwise
“multicultural” Germany (Kallis 2012).
Construction of the Cologne mosque began in November 2008, only a
few days before a landmark referendum on banning minarets in Switzer-
land (Ehrkamp 2012). In hindsight, few people could have predicted the
profound significance of an incident that had taken place in Wangen bei
Olten, Switzerland, as far back as 2005. A local Turkish cultural associa-
tion, which two years earlier had been granted permission to use an indus-
trial building as a cultural and worship space, applied to the authorities for

85
the construction of a single “symbolic” minaret, merely six meters high.
The Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party)—a national
conservative party that underwent significant transformation in a radical
populist direction in the 1990s and emerged as a major party in the follow-
ing decade—took up the issue, marshaling the 100,000 signatures required
for there to be a nationwide referendum on banning the construction of
minarets. Parties of the center-left and center-right, as well as the majority
of Swiss religious organizations, urged voters to reject the proposal. The
Swiss courts warned that approval of the measure would risk running afoul
of international human rights principles, damage relations between com-
munity groups, and negatively affect Switzerland’s image. Opinion polls
indicated that public support for the initiative, albeit constantly rising in
the months before the referendum, remained reassuringly below 40 per-
cent. On the day of the referendum, however, November 29, 2009, 57.5
percent of voters endorsed the measure, with the strongest support in rural
cantons where the number of Muslims and immigrants in general was low
(Langer 2010; Mayer 2011a, 2011b).
The Swiss ban on minarets was a disturbing milestone in the parabola of
Islamophobia. This was largely because of Switzerland’s unique popular
plebiscite system, which provided it with democratic legitimacy. The SVP
campaign framed the ban as a security issue that had very little to do with
religious freedom (in the infamous party campaign poster, minarets were
unashamedly depicted as missiles). In so doing, it confirmed the broader
strategic shift of the radical right’s Islamophobic focus toward the theme
of existential insecurity and underlined the electoral success of this strat-
egy among voters far beyond the party’s traditional base of support. In ad-
dition, however, the outcome appeared to have shattered a barrier of self-
restraint, unleashing more and more extreme Islamophobic discourses both
inside and beyond Switzerland (Skenderovic 2007). In the wake of the
shocking result, many European radical right parties called for a similar
referendum in their respective countries. Although this orchestrated de-
mand petered out relatively quickly, without yielding another similar deci-
sion, the taboo-shattering Swiss ban on minarets appeared to set in motion
a hardening of anti-Muslim stances and rhetoric across a much wider range
of issues throughout Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen, who in 2011 suc-
ceeded her father in the leadership of the FN, capitalized on moral panic
about Muslim street prayers and the availability of halal meat (a moral
panic that her party had helped create in the first place) and began speak-
ing about an “invasion” of France, deliberately invoking the parallels of
the German attack on the country in 1940 (Mondon 2013, 90; Göle 2011,

86
389) and of the “barbarian” invasion of ancient Rome (Reuters 2015).
Some parties of the radical and extreme right have continued to campaign
locally against new mosque projects, whether directly or (more typically)
by supporting citizen initiatives. The semiotic significance of the mosque
in the radical right’s attempt to normalize an Islamophobic security agenda
has also been illustrated in the United States (Cesari 2011). In addition to
the controversy caused by the decision to construct a mosque near the
Ground Zero site in Manhattan, in recent years citizen groups have cam-
paigned against mosque construction in a number of U.S. states (Cesari
Botman 2013, 98–100). Meanwhile, some radical right parties have esca-
lated the campaign against places of Muslim worship, embracing a call for
outright national bans on mosque construction. In October 2014, tens of
thousands of people took part in a march on the streets of Milan organized
by the Lega Nord (but also with the participation of far right constituencies
from CasaPound Italia) (Corriere della Sera 2015). The march was orga-
nized as a protest against immigration, but the organizers turned the de-
mand for an immediate outright ban on mosques into the central call of
their rally. In the Netherlands, Wilders made a ban on mosque construction
and the closure of existing mosques into a central electoral pledge in his
party’s platform for the 2016 Dutch parliamentary elections (Mortimer
2016). A similar dual ban on construction and operation of mosques was
adopted by the Bavarian wing of the AfD in the spring of 2016 (Tharoor
2016).
A few months after the Swiss referendum, in April 2010, the Belgian
parliament approved a new law banning from all public spaces any form of
women’s dress that partially or fully covered the face. This taboo-breaking
legislative arrangement was followed in July 2010 by a vote in the French
National Assembly that banned the burqa and the niqab in public places.
Unlike a 2004 ban on “conspicuous religious symbols” in state schools—
the culmination of a much longer debate about hijabs—the 2010 parlia-
mentary votes in Belgium and France focused significantly on the aspects
of national security and women’s rights (Goodliffe 2012, 332). French
president Nicolas Sarkozy argued that the burqa “is not a religious prob-
lem, it is a problem of liberty and dignity of woman. It is not a religious
symbol, but a symbol of subjugation and humiliation” (Gabizon 2009).
Unsurprisingly, the French public debate and the eventual approval of the
ban ushered in a demonstration effect in other countries. In Italy, it was
once again the Lega Nord that seized the opportunity to propose a bill em-
ulating the Belgian and French precedents. Meanwhile, in October 2010
the agreement between Dutch mainstream parties and Geert Wilders’s

87
PVV to form a new coalition government contained an explicit reference
to a law implementing a full ban on Islamic women’s dress in the Nether-
lands.
Like mosques, Islamic women’s dress has long been of quasi-totemic
significance for the radical right’s attack on Islam as an allegedly alien ide-
ology, set of values, and “civilization” that presents a real threat to the
very essence of “Western values” (Betz 2013). In France in 1989 an inci-
dent involving three girls who were expelled from their state school after
refusing to remove their hijabs soon escalated into what became known as
the affaire du foulard, or “the scarf affair.” FN politician Bruno Megret
broke the taboo of singling out Islam, calling it an “invading civilization.”
For Megret, the hijab was the symbol of Islam’s conquest of France and
confronted French society with the ultimate zero-sum question: “Is it
France that has to adapt her principles for the immigrants or is it the immi-
grants who must adapt their customs to the rules of this country?” (quoted
in Baubérot 1996). Back then such a statement could be brushed aside as
emanating from the extreme fringes of the political system. The Front Na-
tional was considered to have reached the peak of its electoral appeal. The
mainstream politicians of the French Republic responded with common
sense to the matter, seeking to defuse the crisis without heavy-handed leg-
islation. But it was striking how, over the course of a few months, an anti-
immigration and blatantly Islamophobic rhetoric that up to that point had
been confined to the FN made its way to the mainstream media and politi-
cal parties of the center-right and center-left (Witte 2014; Foray and Mole
2003, 104–105).
Little was said specifically about security in 1989. When the issue resur-
faced in 2004, however, Sarkozy, then interior minister, referred to the
threat from an “Islam des caves,” by which he meant “an underground,
clandestine Islam that feeds fundamentalism and extremism” (Silverstein
2004, 115). It is security in its multiple senses—existential (against terror-
ism, both home-grown and international), social (against immigration),
and identity-related (against multiculturalism and globalization)—that has
enabled Islamophobia to stretch deep into mainstream society and politics,
feeding off an explosive mix of new fears and old stereotypes. The terror-
ist attack on the assembled crowd celebrating Bastille Day on the prome-
nade in Nice in July 2016 prompted the mayor of the city to introduce a
ban on the so-called burkini, a women’s swimsuit that covers all but the
hands, face, and feet. Soon numerous other French coastal towns intro-
duced similar bans and insisted on enforcing them even when the coun-

88
try’s highest court ruled the ban unconstitutional. Public opinion seemed
divided, with both strong support for the measure and vocal criticism on
the grounds that the response was disproportionate and endangered funda-
mental human right. Unsurprisingly, the FN embraced the ban, with Ma-
rine Le Pen justifying it as a response to “Islamist provocation.” Still, the
most vocal and persistent defense of the measure, even after its suspension
by the country’s high courts, came from the mainstream center-right, in-
cluding French prime minister Manuel Valls and former president Nicolas
Sarkozy. Of all the mayors who endorsed the ban, the majority belonged to
Sarkozy’s party, with some FN mayors and even a few Socialist ones mak-
ing up the rest—in other words, a pretty representative microcosm of con-
temporary French politics and not a far-right fringe.

ISLAM AS A SECURITY THREAT—AND “MAINSTREAMING”

ISLAMOPHOBIA

The surge of Islamophobia in recent years has not unfolded in a social, cul-
tural, and political vacuum. In essence, the radical right has been particu-
larly successful in reframing Islam as an extraordinary existential assault,
unprecedented in scope and vehemence, on the proverbial “West.” The
overarching framing of hostility to Islam as a matter of “security” has revi-
talized and redeployed more traditional anti-Muslim reflexes based on
stereotypes of religious and cultural alterity, as well as drawing on memo-
ries of alleged historical confrontations. In promoting a populist, anti-Is-
lam, and anti-immigration security agenda, the radical right has accurately
sensed the profound roots of a nativist backlash that runs through main-
stream society, constantly fed and reshaped by new anxieties about cul-
tural, economic, and existential security. The current, rapidly escalating
refugee crisis in Europe and its sensationalistic coverage by mainstream
media have only fanned the flames of insecurity and exposed Muslim mi-
norities in Europe to new verbal and physical attacks. This is the kind of
insecurity in which a normalized Islamophobia can thrive, with the em-
boldened forces of the radical right only too eager to exploit it to their po-
litical and electoral advantage (Cesari 2010; Krzyzanowski 2013; Mudde
2013).
And thrived it certainly has. The murderous attack against the journal-
ists of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo in early January 2015 prompted a
fresh wave of moral panic and knee-jerk backlash against Islam. This situ-
ation offered the radical right a whole new range of political opportunities

89
for both gaining votes and continuing to set an ever-radicalizing Islamo-
phobic political agenda firmly anchored on its favorite theme, existential
security for the West. Politicians of the radical right hastened to extract as
much political capital out of the attack on Charlie Hebdo as possible, por-
traying the incident as a terrible vindication of their dire warnings about
the alleged danger that Islam posed for Europe. Almost immediately, the
leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, blamed “state
multiculturalism” for the rise of home-grown terrorism across Europe,
while in the Netherlands Wilders called for an all-out “war against the Is-
lamization of Europe.” Subsequent terrorist attacks in France, Belgium,
Turkey, the United States, Britain and elsewhere have done nothing to
lessen mounting insecurities or expose the cynical opportunism of the radi-
cal right’s swapping of “the former Jewish demon-enemy for the current
Muslim criminal-immigrant” (Primor 2010).
Evidently, then, Islamophobia—not unlike anti-Semitism in the interwar
years—has become a shared political and discursive terrain for the vast
majority of radical right parties and movements, functioning as a unifying
force for transnational strategic alliances. The family of radical right par-
ties is notoriously fractious, with competing hypernationalist agendas and
personal egos militating against any lasting transnational alliances. Still, an
intensifying shared hostility to Islam has provided the most successful
platforms for joint initiatives from radical right parties (Hafez 2014). A
planned 2008 Anti-Islamization Conference, organized by the Pro-Cologne
movement with the expected participation of Dewinter and former Lega
Nord minister Mario Borghezio, was called off at the last minute due to
protests (Taras 2012, 166–167), but in 2010 Jerusalem became the unlikely
scene of the most prominent transnational initiative by radical right parties.
Heinz-Christian Strache from the FPÖ, Rene Stadtkewitz from the German
party Die Freiheit—Bürgerrechtspartei für mehr Freiheit und Demokrati
(Freedom—Civil Rights Party for More Freedom and Democracy), Kent
Ekeroth from the Sweden Democrats, and the veteran Filip Dewinter de-
clared their joint support for the state of Israel in what they described as an
existential fight against Islamic terror (Häusler 2012b, 180). Wilders had
also spoken at roughly the same time of his desire to form an international
alliance of like-minded forces in a critical “fight against Islam.” In the
summer of 2015, after years of failed attempts, Le Pen’s FN and Wilders’s
PVV finally overcame their declared differences to form, together with
representatives from the FPÖ, the Lega Nord, the VB, and others, a group-
ing of radical right parties in the European Parliament (Europe of Nations
and Freedoms). Their shared political platform was the fight against glob-

90
alization, against mass immigration in Europe, and predictably against the
“Islamization” of the continent—the last of these seen as both an existen-
tial and cultural threat, a matter of security and of defense of “Western val-
ues” (Mudde 2016, 39–42).
And yet, even beyond the dividends reaped by the parties of the radical
right for their Islamophobic taboo-breaking stunts, the recent and sadly on-
going spasm against Islam and Muslim communities in many Western
countries has touched raw nerves well into what we may call mainstream
society and politics. In the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks,
French prime minister Manuel Valls, by all standards a moderate and usu-
ally measured politician, refused to use the term “Islamophobia” or to ac-
cept that Islamophobia posed a serious threat to France’s social cohesion—
just as the number of anti-Muslim violent incidents was picking up a dev-
astating momentum that saw the overall number of physical attacks in-
crease fivefold in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders (Goldberg
2015). During the summer of 2015, amid the unprecedented refugee crisis
that hit Europe, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, representing
Fidesz, a mainstream conservative party with a huge share of the vote, in-
voked history (the long period of the Ottoman rule in the Balkans) to assert
that “we [the Hungarian state] have a right to decide that we do not want a
large number of Muslim people in our country.” He also presented the in-
flow of refugees as an existential threat to Europe’s “Christian values.”
Orban’s government had made headlines earlier that year with its decision
to erect a barbed-wire fence along its border with Serbia to stop migration
into Hungary. Now, boldly claiming that “Hungary is the defense of Eu-
rope against Islam,” he seriously began considering another wall, this time
along the border with Croatia (Cendrowicz 2015). On the other side of the
Atlantic, Donald Trump made the taboo-breaking call for a full ban on
“Muslim immigration” to the United States a central premise of his presi-
dential campaign (Abdelkader 2016). Since being sworn in as president in
January 2017, Trump has vied to turn this promise into flagship policy of
his administration with a series of travel bans against particular majority-
Muslim counties.
Could it be that the radical right’s investment in Islamophobia has been
far more attuned to mainstream concerns and insecurities than the liberal
mainstream would like to admit? Radical right-wing populists such as Le
Pen and Wilders are operating on the notion that this “mainstream” society
is less liberal—or at least less consistently or irrevocably liberal—than the
values it professes may suggest. Seizing a moment of deepening popular

91
distrust in the political establishment, populist leaders have sought to acti-
vate and give legitimate expression to this demand, taking on difficult is-
sues that mainstream parties have for so long tried to avoid or failed to ad-
dress convincingly. Their populism gave voice to fears and misgivings and
even prejudices simmering under the surface of a supposed liberal main-
stream consensus. Their calls for ever more radical anti-Islam policies
have not so much generated as cognitively “liberated” Islamophobic un-
dercurrents well within mainstream society and politics (that is, allowed
them to shed their taboo stigma and become a “legitimate” political/social
discourse). And if indeed there is a generalizable cautionary tale from the
spasm of intolerance that marked the 1930s, it is that taboo-breaking radi-
calism is at its most potent when it benefits from a close alignment be-
tween radical supply and radicalized popular demand.

CONCLUSION

It is impossible to speak of the recent successes of the radical right in

terms of elections and agenda-setting power without referencing the role of
Islamophobia in this development. From its propagation by certain parties
of the radical right in the 1980s as part of a nativist backlash on immi-
grants, when it was camouflaged under the seemingly less extreme garb of
ethnopluralism, it has mutated into the primary populist anti-paradigm for
the overwhelming majority of the radical right. In different yet comple-
mentary ways, international terrorism and the global financial crisis have
played straight into the radical right’s (in)security agenda. As a result, for
the radical right Muslims and immigrants have come to perform the role of
the transnational, demonic, and existentially threatening “other” to the
Western “we”—national, transnational, and civilizational. This way of
framing Islam and Muslims as both a local/national and European/Western
threat chimes with the ideological construction of Jewish “otherness” in
the interwar years. In both cases, the role of the radical right (back then,
predominantly fascist; nowadays, a new wave that is polished, ethnoplural-
ist, and post-fascist) has been instrumental.
Since the turn of the new millennium, the Islamophobic rhetoric of the
radical right has become more and more pervasive, more radical in con-
tent, more extreme in scope, and more potent in reach. It has functioned as
the discursive and political glue for a transnational convergence of radical
right parties, otherwise notorious for their unwillingness to move out of
their fiercely national political focus and strike cross-border alliances. But

92
above all, Islamophobia, like interwar anti-Semitism, seems to have be-
come so widely normalized because it has mined deeply held beliefs and
activated fears located well within the so-called political and societal
mainstream. In this process, the radical right has functioned as the taboo-
breaker and arch-normalizer of Islamophobia, straddling fractious bound-
aries between the extreme fringes of the political system and the heart of
the supposedly liberal center. That it has performed this function of nor-
malizing Islamophobia (and further breaking taboos about it) with depress-
ing effectiveness is manifested in the bidding war between radical and
(mostly) mainstream politicians—of both right and left—in relation to the
2016 row about burkinis in France. When it comes to Islamophobia, the
radical right has been pushing at the mainstream’s half-open door.
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CHAPTER 4

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT AND ANTISEMITISM

RUTH WODAK
MANY scholars in the area of right-wing populism believe that anti-
semitism has practically vanished from the political arena and become a
“dead prejudice” (Langenbacher and Schellenberg 2011; Beer 2011; Betz
2013; Botsch et al. 2010; Albrecht 2015; Rensmann 2013; Stögner 2012,
2014) or that anti-Muslim beliefs and Islamophobia have more or less
completely replaced it (Bunzl 2007; Fine 2009, 2012; Kotzin 2013; Wodak
2015a, 2016). However, political debates continue to confront us with nu-
merous and massive prejudices directed against Jews as a homogeneous
group. Thus should antisemitism today be regarded as a genuine structural
feature of contemporary society or rather as a relic of an old but now over-
come European ideology? As the British sociologist Robert Fine critically
observes, “Antisemitism is tucked away safely in Europe’s past, overcome
by the defeat of fascism and the development of the European Union. . . .
Antisemitism is remembered, but only as a residual trauma or a museum
piece” (Fine 2009, 463). Fine addresses the core problem of how to deal
with history: the view that turns antisemitism into a museum piece repro-
duces an exclusive and unmediated juxtaposition of the past and the pre-
sent and disregards the multifaceted correspondences between them (Ben-
jamin 2003), or what Adorno called “the survival of National Socialism
within democracy” (Adorno 1998a, 1998b; see also Stögner 2012, 2016).
According to Wetzel (2014, 1), antisemitic prejudices, resentments and
stereotypes have proved to be very flexible, accommodating new sociopo-
litical developments over the course of two thousand years. Zick and
Küpper (2005) propose labeling all new variants of antisemitism as “trans-
formed.” They argue that the concept of transformation can encompass all
the differing realizations of an inherently consistent antisemitism, accord-
ing to the respective zeitgeists. Although racist antisemitism has become
weaker and less visible, culturally racist topoi, such as “Jews don’t belong
to ‘us,’ ” “Jews are different,” and “Jews are strangers,” remain virulent
(Holz 2005). Hence antisemitism is not, Wetzel claims, a sub-form of
racism: antisemitism imagines Jews as rich, cosmopolitan, and powerful,
whereas racism usually perceives “the other” as uneducated, barbaric, and
marginalized. It is specifically envy that seems to trigger antisemitism,
stigmatizing Jews as privileged and wealthy; in regard to racism, however,
economic competition and fears about losing jobs seem to be the mobiliz-
ing factors.

103
 Antisemitism occurs in various contexts—for example, in the public
sphere and anonymously in online postings and other Internet genres
(Melzer et al. 2016; Wodak 2007, 2011; Schwarz-Friesel and Reinhart
2013). And antisemitism and Islamophobia can appear together, as recent
public debates about banning halal and the practice of circumcision in
Austria, Germany, and France illustrate (Erb and Kohlstruck 2016). More-
over, it is important to emphasize that there are several antisemitisms—
racist, capitalist, cultural, religious, or syncretic; Muslim or Christian; left-
or right-wing; “old” or “new”; traditional, structural, or secondary; hard-
core or latent; explicit or coded; and soft or violent, the latter resemiotized
in physical acts of hatred (Botsch et al. 2010; Fine 2012; FRA 2013, 2015;
Macmaster 2001; Mammone et al. 2013; Seymour 2013; Stögner 2014,
2016; Stögner and Wodak 2014, 2015; Wodak 1989, 2011, 2015a; Wodak
et al. 1990). Indeed, Marin (2000) provocatively states that after the
Shoah, we are dealing with an antisemitism without Jews and without anti-
Semites (e.g., Botsch and Kopke 2016). Fine poignantly describes the
many polarized debates about occurrences of antisemitism:
To deny the issue of antisemitism in Europe on the grounds that
Europe has learned the lesson from the Holocaust, or to deny the
issue of antisemitism on the left on the grounds that the left is in-
herently anti-racist, or to deny the issue of antisemitism within rad-
ical Islam on the grounds that Muslims are oppressed within Eu-
rope and have a history of tolerance, is in every case a kind of clo-
sure, a refusal to engage critically with the legacies of European,
left and Muslim antisemitism. (Fine 2009, 477)
The old (fascist) far right had one common denominator despite all the dif-
ferences between nations and nationalisms: antisemitism. “Jews” were
constructed as the “defining others” of those who constructed themselves
as true or real members of a nation or people (Simmel 1950). Even the
communist regimes used this stereotype in the immediate aftermath of
1945, for example in Czechoslovakia when Rudolf Slansky and other vic-
tims of Stalinization were labeled “cosmopolitans”—a negative code word
for Jews (Pelinka 2013; Rudling 2012, 2013). The contemporary far right
and right-wing populist parties are vehemently anti-cosmopolitan and anti-
globalization—even if in some regions, especially Western Europe, tradi-
tional (Christian and racist/biological) antisemitism plays a significantly
lesser role than in the past.
Indeed, as a Human Rights First report (2014, 30) states, antisemitism
has remained a constitutive element of neo-Nazi and right-wing populist

104
ideologies and rhetoric across Europe, frequently alongside anti-Muslim,
homophobic, and anti-Ziganist beliefs and stereotypes (Wodak and
Richardson 2013). This could confirm, as Stögner (2014) argues, the view
put forth by Adorno et al. (1967)—that we are dealing with an authoritar-
ian syndrome, in which racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia,
and sexism reinforce each other and converge into one exclusionary na-
tivist belief system, based on a völkisch, ultra-nationalist ideology (Wodak
2015a, 2016). The authoritarian syndrome’s nine facets are (1) convention-
alism (rigid adherence to the conventional values of the middle class), (2)
submission (uncritical obedience to the idealized moral authority of the in-
group), (3) aggression (a law-and-order mentality that seeks to condemn
and punish norm violations), (4) lack of introspection, (5) superstition, (6)
admiration of power and strength, (7) cynicism, (8) projectivity, and (9) an
excessive fixation on sexuality. One of the few quantitative opinion polls
correlating the radical right with antisemitic beliefs also provides signifi-
cant evidence for Adorno’s theory (Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann 2011).
In this chapter, I first provide some working definitions of the most
prominent forms of current expressions of antisemitism, which have be-
come the topic of many different polarized debates. I then briefly describe
some relevant antisemitic stereotypes as well as related strategies of de-
nial. I summarize the few existing opinion polls oriented toward right-
wing populism that correlate with antisemitism. Finally, two typical mani-
festations of antisemitism from right-wing populist parties, analyzed in a
qualitative discourse-analytical way, will illustrate explicit as well as
coded manifestations recurring across Europe (and beyond).

DEFINITIONS

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC, su-

perseded in 2007 by the Fundamental Rights Agency [FRA]) noted an up-
swing in antisemitic incidents in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, the
United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands between July 2003 and
December 2004. In September 2004, the European Commission Against
Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) called on its members to ensure that anti-
racist criminal law covers antisemitism. And in 2006, the EUMC offered a
working (standard) definition to be used for data collection: it defined anti-
semitism as
a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred to-
wards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism

105
 are directed towards Jews and non-Jewish individuals and/or their
property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious fa-
cilities. (EUMC 2006)
Moreover, the EUMC added that criticism of Israel cannot be regarded as
antisemitism so long as it is “similar to that levelled against any other
country.”1
In contrast, Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann (2011, 40) define anti-
semitism as
social prejudice directed against Jews simply because they are Jew-
ish. Its particular power seems to be that it can be very flexibly ar-
gued and instrumentalized to justify discrimination. Antisemitism
takes many different forms: political (“Jewish world conspiracy”),
secular (usury), religious (“responsible for the death of Jesus”) and
racist (“Jewish character”).
They also state that other scholars, especially Europeans, argue for a
broader, more sweeping definition that extends beyond Jewishness to en-
compass anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-modernism (EUMC
2006). They emphasize that “the narrower definition of antisemitism as so-
cial prejudice is helpful when analysing the expression, dynamics and
function of antisemitism in practice and in relation to research findings on
other prejudices.”
Moreover, we are confronted with two new forms of antisemitism that
emerged after the Second World War: secondary antisemitism and anti-
semitism related to Israel and “Zionism.” Quite similar to anti-Judaism
(i.e., religiously based antisemitism) and to both modern and traditional
antisemitism, both new variants refer to the imaginary of a homogeneous
Jewish collective. This collective, according to prominent world conspir-
acy theories, is perceived to strive for power in all socially relevant do-
mains; alternatively, such theories claim that the “Jewish collective” has
already achieved such power and is abusing it—claims that are frequently
combined with anti-American sentiments.
Soon after the end of the Second World War, Adorno (1963) coined the
term “secondary antisemitism” (see also Kovács 2010) in order to address
public opinion in postwar Germany that claimed the Jews were exploiting
Germany’s guilt over the Holocaust. Wodak and colleagues (1990, 12; see
also Wodak 2011) define this phenomenon in the following way:
Secondary antisemitism in post-war (Western) Europe, specifically

106
 in countries with fascist and national-socialist past, must therefore
be viewed primarily in relation to the various ways employed in
dealing with alleged or real guilt, with alleged or actual accusations
about the Nazi and fascist pasts. Discursive manifestations may be
found not only in the large, traditional reservoir of antisemitic prej-
udice and in a general discourse of collective experiences and atti-
tudes, but in several new topoi as well. The forms of expression
chosen vary significantly: They may be manifest or latent, explicit
or very indirect. But each and every one appears to be embedded in
a discourse of justification.2
Usually, accusations of antisemitic beliefs or utterances are met with
justifications and denials in political debates and in the media, typically as
elements of blame avoidance (Hansson 2015; Wodak 2006, 2007). In a
nutshell, as the historian Tony Judt states, “what is truly awful about the
destruction of the Jews is not that it mattered so much, but that it mattered
so little” (Judt 2008, 14). In other words: no or few lessons were learned
from the past.
Some aspects of modern/racist antisemitism remain virulent in the form
of a closed antisemitic worldview, where all problems are explained by
scapegoating Jews. This is what I label “Judeus ex machina” (Wodak
1989, 2015a, 2016)—a mechanism that allows blaming an imagined ho-
mogeneous collective of Jews for whatever issue might seem opportune
for political ends. This was true once again during the financial crisis of
2008: fantasies of powerful and greedy Jewish bankers, Jewish capitalism,
and Jewish speculation served to trigger many stereotypes of a Jewish
world conspiracy (see Example 1, below).

COMMON ANTISEMITIC STEREOTYPES IN RIGHT-WING

POPULIST RHETORIC

The accusation of Jews being untrustworthy clearly stands in the tradition

of an ancient antisemitic trope: “Ahasver, the eternally wandering Jew.”
This myth, dating back to the thirteenth century, has been a core element
of Christian hatred of Jews since the seventeenth century and was placed at
the center of National Socialist antisemitic propaganda (Körte and Stock-
hammer 1995). In the nineteenth century, when European nation-states
were established, the lack of a homeland was reinterpreted as rootlessness;
forced exclusion from European societies was turned into an essential and
essentialized Jewish characteristic. The effect of this prejudice is to sus-

107
pect Jews of not being wholly reliable with regard to their loyalty to the
nation-state, thereby subtly drawing on the Christian myth that Jesus
Christ allegedly damned Ahasver to eternal wandering because of his dis-
loyalty. Denied the capability of building an “authentic” nation in the mod-
ern sense, Jews were regularly regarded as aliens within nations, and
sometimes as “parasites” (Musolff 2010). Thus, Jews were vulnerable to
being viewed not as a distinct nation among other European nations but as
cosmopolitan “anti-nationalists.” The figure of the anti-national Jew was
also used as a projection surface for the unacknowledged uncertainties,
fragilities, and antagonisms of the modern nation-state—something that
resonates with the right-wing populist imaginary of a homogeneous na-
tion-state.
Furthermore, within antisemitic prejudice, Jews are usually viewed as
overstated intellectuals, as people who live in their books rather than in the
“real world,” thus having no real home and not being part of any nation.
The critical element ascribed to the Jews is connected to social mobility,
and thus has a strong association with the age of emancipation. Anti-intel-
lectualism goes hand in hand with the particular fin-de-siècle ideology of
authenticity. This ideology is connected to a conservative, even reac-
tionary critique of economy, anti-urbanism, and nationalism. Modest and
straightforward behavior and thinking, practicality, wholeness, and unity
are some major features of this ideology, which by definition excludes
Jews (Stögner 2012).
Closely related to the two stereotypes of the “anti-national Jew” and the
“intellectual Jew” is the antisemitic image of the “Jewish Bolshevik,”
which has its origins in the Russian civil war. Opponents of the revolution,
for example, accused Jews of being responsible for the murder of the
tsarist family. These accusations were the onset of horrible pogroms with
more than a hundred thousand Jewish victims (Pipes 1997). After the First
World War, this stereotype spread to the West, including Germany, Great
Britain, and the United States, and it became an important component of
ideologies concerning an alleged “Jewish world conspiracy.”
The stereotype of the “Jewish Bolshevik” was important in National So-
cialist ideology (Musolff 2010), where it was paradoxically combined with
anti-liberalism and ostensibly anti-capitalist rhetoric. While this might
seem contradictory at first glance, it turns out to be another manifestation
of antisemitism as an ideological syndrome, as a worldview characterized
by a combination of contradictory elements—syncretic antisemitism. In
this form of antisemitism, Jews are viewed as evil (finance) capitalists and

108
as representing Bolshevism—and these motives do not so much compete
against each other as combine (Stögner and Wodak 2014, 2015). This
trope was massively employed during the financial crisis of 2008: Jews are
thus portrayed as guilty of all common woes (Wodak 2015a, 2016).
Denial of the Holocaust is the most extreme form of secondary anti-
semitism (Gliszczynska-Grabias 2013; Iganski 1999; Richardson 2013a,
2013b). If the Holocaust is, however, perceived as “myth,” then this anti-
semitic belief also has severe implications for Israel’s right to exist, be-
cause the Holocaust played a central role when Israel was founded 1948
and its commemoration is part and parcel of Israeli identity constructions
(Engel and Wodak 2009, 2013; Wodak 2015b). Moreover, narrowing the
term “antisemitism” to its genocidal form (with “Auschwitz” acting as a
metonym for all evil) is one strategy for obscuring contemporary, post-
Nazi forms of antisemitism that are characterized by latency (Stögner
2016). Closely related to this is what the British legal scholar David Sey-
mour labels the “dissolution of the Holocaust.” In its commodification
within European commemoration practices, the Holocaust has become in-
creasingly detached from antisemitism, instead serving as the icon par ex-
cellence for the evil of old Europe and a symbol for a modernity the new
Europe has supposedly overcome:
All that remains in post-national and post-modern Europe is the
memory of the Holocaust. But it is less the memory of the Holo-
caust itself than a memory of the modernity into which the Holo-
caust has been dissolved. Separated from the structural conditions
that made it possible, the Holocaust of the new Europe’s memory
becomes nothing more than a symbol. It is a symbol, however, not
of antisemitism, genocidal or otherwise, but of the old Europe it-
self, a Europe fragmented into nation-states along with its con-
comitants of national sovereignty, nationalism, and the genocidal
impulse that is said to inhere within it. (Seymour 2013, 24–25)

ANTISEMITISM AND RIGHT-WING POPULISM IN EUROPE:

QUANTITATIVE RESULTS

Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann (2011) and Melzer and coauthors (2016)
measured antisemitism by using four statements that represent traditional
and secondary antisemitism, covering the anti-Jewish conspiracy theory
that Jews have too much influence in the country in question and the con-
verse of victims and perpetrators contained in the accusation that Jews try

109
to take advantage of past persecution. Here there is an undertone of the an-
cient antisemitic stereotype of the “money-grubbing Jew.” Another state-
ment suggests that Jews care only for their own good (implying disloyalty
to the nation). Zick and colleagues included a positive attitude suggesting
that Jews represent cultural enrichment; this item was reverse-coded so
that higher values represent rejection of the statement. The survey also in-
cluded two statements designed to capture antisemitism communicated via
issues connected with Israel, but these were excluded from the anti-
semitism mean scale; below I include only statements related to secondary
antisemitism (Table 4.1).3
The responses to these antisemitic prejudice statements varied consider-
ably between countries. Almost half of Polish respondents and 69 percent
of Hungarian respondents believe that Jews in their countries have too
much influence, whereas at the other end of the scale only 14 percent in
Great Britain and 6 percent in the Netherlands are of this opinion. The
same is found for statements 8 and 9, which attribute avarice and egotism
to Jews. Here again the strongest agreement exists in Poland and Hungary
—although more than half of Portuguese respondents also agree with these
statements—and the least agreement is in the Netherlands and Great
Britain, where about one-fifth judge Jews to be profit-seeking and self-in-
terested. In all the surveyed countries, however, a majority agrees with the
statement that Jews enrich their culture. Regarding the additional statement
on the current policies of Israel (item 11), about half of the respondents in
Portugal, Poland, and Hungary see antisemitic sentiments as being trig-
gered by Israel’s political activities. Hence, the significantly strongest
agreement with antisemitic prejudices is found in Poland and Hungary. In
Portugal, closely followed by Germany, antisemitism is significantly more
prominent than in other Western European countries. In Italy and France,
antisemitic attitudes as a whole are less widespread than the European av-
erage, while the extent of antisemitism is least in Great Britain and the
Netherlands.
The situation described by Zick and colleagues has remained constant in
diverse European contexts, as various country studies illustrate (e.g.,
Beauzamy 2013; Blatman 1997; Byford 2002; Ellinas 2013; Kovács 2010,
2013; Krzyżanowski 2013; Mayer 2013; Mãdroane 2013; Pelinka 2013;
Richardson and Wodak 2009a, 2009b; Stögner 2016). However, the num-
ber of antisemitic hate crimes has risen, possibly—though not necessarily
—due to the growth and rhetoric of the Front National in France, Jobbik in
Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS, Law and

110
Justice) in Poland, Sweden Democrats, Freiheitliche Partei Österreich
(FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria), and Patriotische Europäer gegen die Is-
lamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Is-
lamization of the West) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative
for Germany) in Germany. It is not possible to establish any clear causal
connection between the rise of the right and antisemitic hate crimes, but
the aggressiveness of right-wing and extreme-right propaganda certainly
contributes to a more general climate that supports hate crimes against all
“others,” thus also against Jews (Wodak 2015a, 2016). Of course, the ob-
vious rise of right-wing populist parties has many reasons, which cannot
be explored in any detail in this chapter (but see, e.g., Arzheimer, Chapter
8 of this volume). Since 2008, the refugee situation, economic crises, ris-
ing unemployment, and identity crises are just a few factors driving the
move to the far right. Antisemitism accompanies this phenomenon, but not
everywhere in the same way: in countries with a fascist and National So-
cialist past, antisemitism seems to be an inherent part of right-wing pop-
ulist and extreme-right parties (hence in Greece, Austria, Germany, Hun-
gary, Portugal, Spain, Romania, and Ukraine). Meanwhile, in other coun-
tries, mostly in Western Europe, rising anti-Muslim sentiments have
caused right-wing parties to align with respective Jewish populations in
their aim to instrumentalize such anti-Muslim attitudes in their election
campaigns (Denmark, France, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands). In
the latter group of countries, the aforementioned polarized debates about
Israel dominate, whereas in Eastern, Southern, and Central Europe, mod-
ern and Christian antisemitic tropes frequently recur. Indeed, several lead-
ers of right-wing populist parties frequently travel to Israel to emphasize
their sympathies; however, in Israel, they prefer to meet with Israeli ex-
treme right-wing parties, with whom they share their exclusionary rhetoric
and form anti-Muslim alliances (e.g., Betz 2013).
Table 4.1 Summary: Results from Cross-Country Survey on Antise-
mitic Attitudes
Por-
Ger- Great Nether- tu- Hun-
No. Item many Britain France lands Italy gal Poland gary
7 Jews 19.7 13.9 27.7 5.6 21.2 19.9 49.9 69.2
have
too
much

111
 influ-
ence
in
[coun-
try].
8 Jews 48.9 21.8 32.3 17.2 40.2 52.2 72.2 68.1
try to
take
ad-
van-
tage
of
hav-
ing
been
vic-
tims
during
the
Nazi
era.
9 Jews 29.4 22.5 25.8 20.4 26.9 54.2 56.9 50.9
in
gen-
eral
do not
care
about
any-
thing
or
any-
one
but
their
own
kind.
10 Jews 68.9 71.5 60.6 71.8 49.7 51.9 51.2 57.3
enrich

112
 our
cul-
ture.
Addi-
tional
state-
ments
11 Con- 35.6 35.9 - 41.1 25.1 48.8 55.2 45.6
sider-
ing Is-
rael's
pol-
icy, I
can
under-
stand
why
peo-
ple do
not
like
Jews.
(Adapted from Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann 2011, 57)
Accordingly, Bachner (2013, 6) summarizes the radical right-wing
Swedish situation with respect to antisemitic beliefs being mainly trig-
gered by secondary antisemitism (and this applies more or less to other
countries in Western Europe):
Notions of Jewish power, manipulation and conspiracies continue
to play a key role in antisemitic thinking and propaganda in Swe-
den. They appear in extreme and explicit forms, and form a crucial
part of ideology and propaganda within parts of the far right and
the radical Islamist milieu. But they also figure in more subtle and
coded forms within mainstream political discourse. As shown by
survey studies, these notions, specifically when applied to the
global scene, also seem to have support from a not insignificant mi-
nority of the Swedish population.
In contrast, Kovács and Szilágyi (2013, 218) interpret the Hungarian

113
reemergence of antisemitism in the far right as related to identity politics
(this could apply to Ukraine and Romania as well):
However, present-day antisemitism does not represent anti-moder-
nity, but is rather a code for a political identity. The argumentation
strategies created to legitimize this antisemitic discourse—the ap-
plication of such topoi as equal rights, justice and humanitarianism
—are designed to express the difference from the “old” discourse
and to achieve legitimacy within the current dominant paradigm.
The new antisemitic discourse represents a reformist version of the
old antisemitic myth.
Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann (2011) combined six dimensions of preju-
dice to create a GFE (group-focused enmity) index. Calculated as the mean
value of six individual GFE elements, it expresses the overall intensity of
group-focused enmity. The internal consistency (reliability) of this index,
composed of anti-immigrant attitudes, antisemitism, racism, anti-Muslim
attitudes, sexism, and homophobia, is confirmed empirically for Europe as
a whole, and at the country level. In all countries, all six prejudices are so
closely related that they can be treated as a single dimension. Group-fo-
cused enmity is most prevalent in Hungary and Poland, where it is identifi-
able among nearly two-thirds of respondents.
In a next step, Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann (2011, 77) investigated the
correlation of the GFE with party affiliation and the endorsement of au-
thoritarianism and law-and-order politics. Taking the European countries
together, they found significant relationships between group-focused en-
mity and authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and a negative at-
titude toward diversity. This implies that respondents who exhibit preju-
dice against weak groups are also likely to espouse ideological convictions
that oppose equality for different groups. In this way, we actually find em-
pirical evidence for Adorno and colleagues’ (1967) theory of the authori-
tarian syndrome (see above). These results also imply that right-wing pop-
ulist parties that endorse anti-Muslim beliefs and ultra-nationalism are
highly susceptible to antisemitism, homophobia, and sexism (Zick,
Küpper, and Hövermann 2011, 102):
The further [to the] right respondents place themselves in the politi-
cal spectrum, the more likely they are to hold prejudices against the
target groups under consideration. . . . The relationship between po-
litical orientation and extent of prejudices is found in all the coun-
tries, but is particularly close in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy

114
 and France. The same applies to the relationship between a nega-
tive image of the EU and group-focused enmity, although the effect
is considerably weaker overall and especially in Portugal, Poland
and Hungary. We also found a clear relationship between the feel-
ing of political powerlessness and the tendency to target weak
groups: the stronger the feeling of political powerlessness the
greater the extent of group-focused enmity. This tendency is partic-
ularly clear in the Netherlands and Portugal. Support for the death
penalty is also associated with stronger prejudice; this relationship
is found in all the countries, but is especially strong in Great
Britain and France. Furthermore, we found that a desire for a
strong leader clearly correlates with the extent of group-focused
enmity in all the countries.

DEFINING ANTISEMITIC RHETORIC: THE “JUDEUS EX

MACHINA” STRATEGY

Syncretic Antisemitism
It is important to emphasize that “antisemitic language behavior” may
imply explicitly held and/or articulated hostility toward Jews, but it neces-
sarily implies the presence of prejudicial assumptions about “the Jews” as
a group. For example, the slogan “Kill Jews” painted on the Sigmund
Freud monument in Vienna in 1988 clearly does contain an explicit, albeit
anonymous, imperative call for the most hostile of actions against Jews.
On the other hand, a Jewish joke, which can have various meanings de-
pending on the setting, the participants, and the function of the utterance,
also forms part of what we term “antisemitic language behavior,” but only
in circumstances where the joke expresses anti-Jewish prejudices (Wodak
et al. 1990). Thus, analyzing the context of an utterance is indispensable in
determining whether an utterance expresses antisemitic prejudice or not.
Which antisemitic content is expressed depends, among other things, on
the setting (public, private, or media), the formality of the situation, the
participants, the topic, and the presence or absence of Jews. Antisemitic
language behavior, moreover, covers a wide range of speech acts, ranging
from explicit remarks or appeals for action to mere allusions. Antisemitic
language behavior includes all levels of language, from text or discourse to
the individual word or even sounds (for example, the Yiddish intonation of
certain words or phrases), when used in derogatory ways.

115
 Ideally, systematic in-depth linguistic analysis of hate speech and antise-
mitic utterances of Holocaust denial should draw on:
• Historical analysis of antisemitism and its verbal expressions (i.e.,
“coded language”)
• Sociocognitive analysis of collective memories and frames guiding
the acquisition of specific knowledge so as to be able to understand
“coded language”
• Sociopolitical analysis of ongoing debates and the political parties
taking part in them (these two dimensions form the broad context)
• Genre theory, considering, for example, the functions of TV inter-
views and TV discussions (persuasive strategies, positive self-presen-
tation and negative other-presentation, populist rhetoric, etc.)
• The setting, speakers, and other elements of specific utterances, that
is, the narrow context
• The co-text of each utterance
• Linguistic (i.e., pragmatic and/or grammatical) approaches, such as
presuppositions, insinuations, implications, et cetera, as characteristics
of specific “coded antisemitism.”
As Jews are perceived as the universal and ultimate evil in such antisemitic
rhetoric, contradicting moments can be combined within one argument, in
the sense of the “Judeus ex machina” strategy (see above). Nowadays, the
various roots of antisemitism (drawing on nationalist, religious, and racist
ideologies) are usually merged into what I label syncretic antisemitism.
This implies that any traditional stereotype can be employed when it is
useful for political debate.

Strategies of Blaming and Denying

Teun van Dijk has described strategies for denying racism in great detail
(1992, 89ff.). He claims that
one of the crucial properties of contemporary racism is its denial,
typically illustrated in such well-known disclaimers as “I have
nothing against blacks, but . . .” . . . The guiding idea behind this
research is that ethnic and racial prejudices are prominently ac-
quired and shared within the white dominant group through every-
day conversation and institutional text and talk. Such discourse

116
 serves to express, convey, legitimate or indeed conceal or deny
such negative ethnic attitudes. (van Dijk 1992, 87–88)
Theodor W. Adorno in his seminal 1963 lecture “Was bedeutet Aufar-
beitung der Vergangenheit?” maintained that in German (and also Aus-
trian) discourse about the Nazi past and the Shoah, roles were reversed.
Thus, Jews were causally linked to the Shoah and victims were turned into
quasi-perpetrators—that is, the Jews themselves were blamed for their suf-
fering. Subsequently, a “justification discourse” evolved that projected
guilt onto aggression via what Anna Freud labeled “identification with the
aggressor.” Frequently, these justificatory strategies led to “secondary anti-
semitism,” as previously mentioned. In short, a no-win situation was cre-
ated whereby Jews were constructed either as guilty of the Shoah in the
first place or as subsequently exploiting history for their own interests
whenever the terrible past was mentioned. Below I summarize the most
important strategies and patterns that occur in the antisemitic justification
discourse mentioned above (e.g., Angouri and Wodak 2014):
The first major strategy negates the very context of the occurrence of
antisemitism, at least at the explicit level (i.e., act denial), via three possi-
ble means: (1) “This occurs everywhere” (equation), or “All countries, all
wars are the same” (fallacious generalization; tu quoque); (2) a claim of ig-
norance combined with a refusal to take a stance; (3) individuals claim vic-
timhood for themselves or for the entire country, thus shifting the blame
onto others.
The second major strategy raises the discussion to a more general level.
Using the strategy of scientific rationalization, some people launch into ex-
tensive analyses of prewar Germany, discussions about the past, debates
about Israel, and so forth. Many utterances make use of arguments embed-
ded in a topos of history, drawing on collective memories and fallaciously
equating the context of the Second World War and war crimes with current
contexts. Such narratives, for example, might serve as justification for the
reemergence of Golden Dawn as a necessary consequence of Greek history
and a predictable (thus justifiable) response to crisis management (Angouri
and Wodak 2014).
The third macro strategy consists of positive self-presentation: the
speaker narrates stories that portray him/her as having performed “good
and praiseworthy deeds,” of helping those in need whenever possible.
Speakers claim to have acted responsibly so that they are morally without
blame. This strategy can be further developed as (1) trying to understand

117
what happened or (2) trying to justify and/or deny the existence of “prob-
lems” triggered by the rise of the right wing, and so forth.
The fourth macro strategy serves to relativize the facts. People using this
strategy will (1) start to enumerate similar problems and occurrences in
other nations (balancing, equating); (2) adopt further strategies seeking to
provide a (pseudo-)rational causal explanation for a specific incident (e.g.,
fallaciously blaming the victims); (3) employ the “Not we, but them” strat-
egy, which attributes the specific utterance to somebody else, another typi-
cal fallacy of shifting blame; or (4) simply deny the fact that the Shoah
happened at all (act denial) and attribute such “narratives or reports” to
some kind of international (frequently Jewish) conspiracy. This fourth
technique constitutes Holocaust denial.

EXAMPLES

In the following, I briefly discuss two examples of antisemitic occurrences

that illustrate an instance of traditional antisemitism (Example 1) and an
instance of secondary antisemitism (Example 2). Of course, the boundaries
are blurred, as in both cases a range of stereotypes are expressed that draw
on the huge reservoir of syncretic antisemitic tropes, thus manifesting the
“Judeus ex machina” strategy.
In the first example, the stereotypes of the “wealthy and greedy Jew”
and a “Jewish world conspiracy” are insinuated, and Jews are blamed for
the financial crisis—thus an old prejudice is revived. In the second case,
we are dealing with the strategy of victim-perpetrator reversal: Jews are
blamed for the problems of current Hungarian politics, and the plight and
suffering of Jews during the Second World War and the Shoah are eu-
phemized and even denied. Such strategies are frequently used to deflect
guilt, on the one hand (guilt for the collaboration of many Hungarians with
the Nazi extermination machinery); on the other hand, excluding the “Jew-
ish other” serves to strengthen nationalist identity politics.
Such expressions of antisemitic prejudice are indeed typical. In the first
case, we are dealing with a politics of denial, with a range of disclaimers
and coded exclusionary rhetoric (and images), and with a subsequent vehe-
ment and polarized public debate, indicating a breach of taboos that exist
in postwar Western Europe. Nevertheless, by instrumentalizing antisemitic
tropes, such provocations support the agenda of right-wing populist par-
ties: they immediately dominate the media for a period of time, triggering

118
what I have labeled the “right-wing populist perpetuum mobile” (see
Wodak 2015a, 2016). In the second case, no sanctions occur. Such explicit
antisemitic prejudices can be encountered in East European countries with
high percentages of antisemitic beliefs and a virulent antisemitic tradition.
In any case, it becomes apparent how right-wing populist parties success-
fully attempt to mobilize public opinion and their electorate by addressing
antisemitic beliefs.

FIGURE 4.1 Caricature posted by H. C. Strache on Facebook on August

18, 2012

Example 1: Caricatures, secondary antisemitism, and the FPÖ’s

strategy of provocation
On August 18, 2012, the leader of the FPÖ, H. C. Strache, posted a carica-
ture on Facebook (Figure 4.1, below) that recontextualized a U.S. carica-
ture from 1962 (Figure 4.2) into a caricature that—as many readers and
viewers immediately observed—alludes to antisemitic caricatures from
Nazi times that were published daily in the 1930s in the infamous German
newspaper Der Stürmer. After a predictable scandal had erupted over the
explicit antisemitic features of the caricature, most newspapers in Austria
and Germany published editorials and news reports about this incident.
Strache was also interviewed on television on August 20, 2012.4 He first
denied having altered the original caricature; he then denied that the stars
visible on the cufflinks of the banker were stars of David; and finally he
categorically denied any resemblance to antisemitic caricature.
The explicit differences between Figures 4.1 and 4.2 are easy to detect:
the nose of the sweating and greedily eating banker has been changed to a
crooked, so-called Jewish nose, and each cufflink has been decorated with

119
a star of David. These two changes both insinuate and resonate with im-
ages of the Nazi past: the stereotypical image of “the ugly Jewish banker”
who exploits the poor (metonymically embodied by the image of a poor
worker from the 1960s) and patronizes the government, which tries to in-
gratiate itself with the powerful and rich Jew by serving him an opulent
meal and pouring wine. In Figure 4.3, the relevant segments have been en-
larged.
By making these changes and posting the altered caricature with an ex-
tended comment (see Figure 4.1), Strache utilized the theme of the finan-
cial crisis in at least three ways: to accuse the government of wrong poli-
cies and of submitting to the EU, to create a scapegoat that can be blamed
for current woes by triggering traditional antisemitic stereotypes of a world
conspiracy and powerful Jewish bankers and capitalists, and to provoke a
scandal and thus attract media attention and set the news agenda. The cari-
cature is accompanied by a text box on the left that explains the caricature
in some detail and accuses the government of selling out to EU policies
and foreign “punters.” This insinuates some other well-known anti-Jewish
stereotypes: a world conspiracy and the Jewish capitalist. Text 1, below,
taken from the beginning of a TV interview on ORF II’s nightly news pro-
gram on ZIB 2 on August 22, 2012 (four days after the caricature was
posted), illustrates the politics of denial propagated by Strache (“AW” is
Armin Wolf, anchorman; “HCS” is Strache):5

FIGURE 4.2 The original American caricature from 1962

120
FIGURE 4.3 The “greedy banker,” enlarged section (http://derstandard.at/
1345164507078/Streit-um-antisemitisches-Bild-auf-Strache-Seite, ac-
cessed May 4, 2013)
Text 1

121
 After being asked whether he is now “proud” of being discussed in so
many serious newspapers and on radio stations across Europe, Strache ut-
ters his first denial (lines 7–8): “No, this is absolute nonsense, I got this
caricature shared by a user.” Wolf immediately falsifies this claim and
shows that Strache actually posted this caricature himself by pointing to a
printout of the relevant Facebook page (line 9). Strache then concedes that
he first said something wrong and starts—by way of justification—to ex-
plain the caricature as illustrating the unfair and unjust redistribution of
money taken away from the Austrian people. Here, Wolf interrupts (line
16) and qualifies the bankers as Jews (“who are Jews in your caricature”).
At this point, the second round of denials starts and Strache says (lines 16–
19):
Text 2

122
 Via a well-known disclaimer (“I have many Israeli . . . Jewish friends”),
Strache denies that the caricature should or even could be read as antise-
mitic, a typical intention denial: the fallacious argument (post hoc, ergo
propter hoc fallacy) is obvious—if his many Jewish friends do not classify
the caricature as antisemitic, then it cannot be antisemitic. Such dis-
claimers are widely used to prove that an utterance cannot be categorized
as racist, sexist, or antisemitic because Turkish (or Arabic, or female, or
Jewish) friends share the speaker’s or writer’s opinion. Moreover, the jus-
tification implies that if one has Jewish friends, then one is incapable of
saying anything antisemitic (see Wodak 2015a for an extensive analysis).
After this unsuccessful denial, Wolf points to the stars of David on the
cufflinks and asks who might have put them there, if not Strache himself.
In his third attempt to deny wrongdoing and antisemitic stereotypes, Stra-
che refuses to recognize the stars of David on the cufflinks (lines 23, 24)
and starts a counterattack with an ad hominem argument: he claims that
Wolf obviously cannot see well, his glasses are probably not strong
enough. Even if one magnified the cufflinks, Strache further claims, no
stars of David would be visible. Wolf then shows a star of David he has
brought with him to the studio and asks Strache if he can spot any similar-
ity (line 32); Strache again makes a denial and states that the picture on the
cufflinks is blurred and that there is no star but actually something like a
diamond. After this fifth (act of) denial, he refers to his “Jewish friends”
again, who, Strache claims, believe that somebody is intentionally conspir-
ing against him. In this way, Strache accuses the media and the public of
conspiring against him, by quoting his “Jewish friends”—another typical
justification strategy, claiming victimhood via victim-perpetrator reversal.
Wolf continues his line of questioning and asks Strache why he apparently
finds it impossible to simply apologize for posting such a caricature and
why he would rather use a strategy of victim-perpetrator reversal instead
of an apology. Strache answers by repeating his denials: there are no stars

123
of David; the caricature is not antisemitic (this staccato question-answer
sequence continues for several minutes).
Text 3

124
125
 In line 74, Wolf shifts to the meta-level and frames the entire discussion
as a provocation strategy intentionally triggered by Strache to attract media
attention. This interpretation is—not surprisingly—again denied by Stra-
che (a goal denial). The interview continues with other questions about
Strache’s program for autumn 2012.

Example 2: Jobbik—identity construction, antisemitism, and victim-

perpetrator reversal
In a recent study about racism and antisemitism as manifested in the pro-
paganda of the Hungarian Jobbik since 2000, Kovács and Szilágyi (2013,
221–223) argue that the strategy of victim-victimizer reversal has become
a recurring element of explicit antisemitic discourse in present-day Hun-
gary, different in some aspects from the virulent antisemitism of the 1940s.
This traditional and quite ubiquitous strategy turns the tables: the victims
are transformed into powerful perpetrators, and the perpetrators into vic-
tims. A variation of this posits that the victims are themselves to blame for
their terrible and dangerous fate, inviting it, acting irresponsibly, or de-
serving some form of “poetic justice.” Furthermore, the authors illustrate
that the topoi of danger and threat are necessarily integrated with the strat-
egy of victim-victimizer reversal. Let us look at two examples (see Kovács
and Szilágyi 2013, 221, for an extensive analysis):
Text 4
Decisions made by your kind [of people] are always dictated by
whatever happens to “pay off” at a particular point in time, what-
ever is profitable for you, that is, whatever results in money or
power. Common values are replaced by anti-fascist slogans and
anti-Hungarian sentiment, and other ways of bringing “our kind”
[of people] under control. (“Morvai Krisztina: Két emberkép között
folyik a harc,” Alfahír, August 27, 2008)
Your kind (intend us to be) obedient subjects, servants and domes-
tics, in an impoverished and maimed Hungary that has been turned
into a third-world colony. (“A Népszava megint Morvai Krisztinát
gyalázza—Krisztina nyílt válaszlevele Várkonyi Tibornak,”
Alfahír, December 5, 2008)
The discourse leaves little doubt as to the identity of the “other.” Formu-
lated in economic terms, and thus referring to the traditional stereotype of
the “rich and greedy Jew,” Krisztina Morvai, representative of Jobbik in
the European Parliament, accuses Jews (“your kind of people”) of trying to

126
dominate Hungary and the Hungarian people; moreover, apart from seek-
ing domination, Jews are, she argues, per se disloyal (anti-Hungarian), thus
evoking the stereotype of the “disloyal Jew” (an old religious antisemitic
stereotype insinuating Judas’s betrayal of Jesus Christ). She continues by
arguing that Jews would also strive to turn Hungary into a poor country,
thus taking everything away from Hungarians and turning the latter into
servants, implying that Jews actually possess the power to do so (stereo-
type of the “mighty, powerful Jew”).
Text 5 combines positive self-presentation and negative other-presenta-
tion (thus group construction) with the defamation of Jews (argumentum
ad hominem) and the attribution of various traditional negative stereotypes
to them. Furthermore, the text suggests that Jews are dangerous and pow-
erful and would thus intentionally damage Hungary and the Hungarians.
Text 5
If, after the fifty years of your communism, there had remained in
us even a speck of the ancient Hungarian prowess, then after the
so-called change of regime your kind would not have unpacked
your legendary suitcases, which were supposedly on standby. No.
You would have left promptly with your suitcases! You would
have voluntarily moved out of your stolen . . . villas, and . . . you
would not have been able to put your grubby hands on the Hungar-
ian people’s property, our factories, our industrial plants, our hospi-
tals. . . . We shall take back our homeland from those who have
taken it hostage! (“A Magukfajták ideje lejárt: Morvai Krisztina
reagál az Élet és Irodalom cikkére in Barikad,” Alfahír, November
12, 2008)
Text 5 accuses Jews of having been part of, and collaborated with, com-
munist Hungary by referring to it as “your communism,” hence rewriting
history (topos of history). By claiming sarcastically that Jews would have
left voluntarily (or stayed voluntarily) with their “legendary suitcases,”
thus alluding in an extraordinarily euphemistic way to the forced deporta-
tion of Jews to Nazi extermination camps, where they were only allowed
to carry one suitcase with their belongings, the author relativizes or even
denies the Holocaust in order to avoid responsibility for the bad economic
situation currently faced by Hungary. Moreover, Jews are accused of hav-
ing stolen the Hungarians’ property, thus of never having owned any legit-
imate property in Hungary; here, the fallacy of shifting the blame is used.
This fallacious accusation implies that Jews are not Hungarians; they are

127
construed as an out-group, as strangers “at hand” (Kovács 2010), not part
of the Hungarian Volk. In this way, the tables are turned and victims are
transformed into perpetrators, despite the well-established fact that Jewish
property was stolen (“Aryanized”) by the Nazis and their Hungarian col-
laborators, not vice versa. In short, Jews are blamed for all of Hungary’s
problems and economic disasters, a typical fallacious argument (straw man
fallacy, combined with the fallacies of shifting the blame and hasty gener-
alization). Kovács and Szilágy suggest that these rhetorical elements are
“means, in the current antisemitic discourse, for constructing a narcissistic
national self-image and self-identity” (2013, 222). In other words, anti-
semitism functions as a code for a “real” Hungarian political identity, part
of a nativist body politics.

CONCLUSION

While listing general characteristics of the radical right (including right-

wing populist parties), Skenderovic (2009, 22) argues that
after the Second World War, overt statements of modern anti-
semitism, making use of blunt categorisations, have largely van-
ished from the public sphere and have become confined to mar-
ginal extreme right groups. . . . However, what some have termed
“post-Holocaust” or “post-fascist” antisemitism has remained a po-
tent force of anti-Jewish hostility in contemporary societies and is
most commonly found among political and intellectual actors asso-
ciated with the radical right.
Skenderovic maintains that this form of antisemitism implies that a coher-
ent antisemitic ideology has vanished. However, the manifold occurrences
and examples across all right-wing populist parties combined with the
forms of denial provide evidence that antisemitic rhetoric continues to be
part and parcel of right-wing populism in almost all of its variants, more or
less explicitly and more or less coded.
Research to date seems to have neglected the different histories of East-
ern, Central, and Western Europe as well as the various antisemitic stereo-
types and tropes that are functionalized time and again for political ends.
Anti-Muslim sentiments have not been substituted for antisemitic beliefs;
quite the contrary, in fact, as they frequently occur together. Moreover,
new forms of antisemitism have emerged in attempts to cope with alleged
or real accusations about war crimes and the Shoah. It has also become ob-

128
vious that a gap in the literature exists: much more quantitative and quali-
tative research is needed to investigate in detail the relationship between
party affiliation and antisemitic beliefs as part of the authoritarian syn-
drome.

129
NOTES

I am very grateful to the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence, for inviting me

as Distinguished Schuman Fellow, Spring 2016—where I was able to
write this chapter.
1. This definition has triggered vehement debates, specifically statements
added with respect to criticizing Israel in ways that could be regarded
as antisemitic, such as “Denying the Jewish people the right to self-de-
termination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a
racist endeavor; applying double standards by requiring of Israel a be-
havior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;
drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the
Nazis; and holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the
State of Israel” European Parliament, Working Group on Anti-
semitism. Available online at http://www.antisem.eu/eumc-arbeitsdefi
nition-antisemitismus
2. Accordingly, Fine (2009) provides an extensive summary of the de-
bate between “alarmists” and “deniers.” Alarmists, he maintains, view
antisemitism as an immutable element of European history; the de-
niers, however, challenge the salience of any current antisemitic mani-
festations. Of course, criticism of Israel and Israeli actions can be ut-
tered in an antisemitic way, but need not. At the same time, however,
it is equally fallacious to assume that Israel or all Israelis would en-
dorse the same opinion—that is, to presuppose that Israel is a homoge-
neous nation and not divided into many political parties or other politi-
cal movements and groups endorsing many different views.
3. I have to neglect the most recent ADL survey, as this does not distin-
guish between political affiliations or political positionings with re-
spect to antisemitic beliefs (see ADL 2015). Indeed, I believe there ex-
ists a huge gap in survey research on the relationship between anti-
semitism and right-wing populist parties.
4. For more details, see “Streit um antisemitisches Bild auf Strache-
Seite,” Der Standard, August 19, 2012; and “Strache-Karikatur: SPÖ
empört über ÖVP,” ORF, April 5, 2013.
5. The transcript here follows rudimentary transcription rules developed
for conversations. Such a transcript allows following the dynamic of
the conversation and presents all voices as they interact, overlap, and

130
 interrupt each other. This is a simplified presentation of the full tran-
script, which follows the HIAT rules for transcription.
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CHAPTER 5

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT AND POPULISM

HANS-GEORG BETZ
THE contemporary radical right is, in its majority, a populist radical right.
Radical right-wing parties in Europe and elsewhere owe their electoral
success to a significant extent to strategic and programmatic decisions that
constitute a decisive break with the past. A prominent example is Marine
Le Pen’s strategy of dédiabolisation, designed to reinvent the Front Na-
tional (FN) as a modern, presentable party by jettisoning the FN’s heritage
of virulent anti-Semitism, Catholic fundamentalism, Pétainism, and its
nostalgia for l’Algérie française. In support of this strategy, Marine Le Pen
surrounded herself with a new generation of technocrats charged with re-
furbishing the party’s discourse and image. The rebranding campaign
proved highly successful electorally. Yet it infuriated the party’s old guard,
above all Jean-Marie Le Pen, who did everything he could to derail it.
After several provocations, Marine Le Pen finally pulled the plug on her
father, expelling him from the party he had dominated for four decades.
Dédiabolisation was a logical strategy, given the direction right-wing
radical parties in Western Europe had taken in recent decades (Mudde
2007). In the process, the Front National, once the doyen of the Western
European radical right, found itself increasingly eclipsed by its counter-
parts in Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland, all of which pursued
a populist course. For the Front National, abandoning the party’s ideologi-
cal heritage represented a major turning point, because populism, at least
in the context of a democratic system, derives its persuasive power and le-
gitimacy from sources that are fundamentally different from those invoked
by the traditional extreme right.
Populism, it is often claimed, is “one of the most contested concepts in
the social sciences,” notoriously difficult, if not outright impossible, to de-
fine (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013, 493). The association of pop-
ulism with the radical right has further muddied the waters. Particularly in
the popular media, populism has increasingly been conflated with dema-
goguery, political manipulation, the provision of simple solutions to com-
plex problems, and the promotion of a black-and-white view of politics
and the world in general. As a result, populism has come to acquire a thor-
oughly negative connotation. More often than not, however, the associa-
tion between the radical right and populism is taken as a foregone conclu-
sion rather than critically probed and interrogated. The analysis that fol-

139
lows is a brief attempt at a corrective. The argument proceeds in three
steps. In the first step I discuss the nature of populism, its core narratives
and mechanisms. In a second step I explore to what extent the radical right
can be said to have adopted populism and what explains the radical right’s
populist turn. In the final step, I analyze what has been the impact of the
populist turn on the radical right’s ideology and electoral appeal.

POPULISM

Despite growing academic attention to populism in recent years, there is

little agreement as to its nature. For some analysts it represents little more
than a political style; for others it is a type of political rhetoric. Most ana-
lysts concur that populism falls short of being a full-fledged ideology, al-
though they might concede that it represents a form of political discourse.
None of these notions, however, necessarily excludes any of the others.
Rather, if underpinned by a larger conceptual framework, they are essen-
tial building blocks for a cohesive theory of populism.
One such conceptual framework is Robert Jansen’s influential sociologi-
cal approach, which conceives of populism as a “mode of political prac-
tice” aimed at mobilizing “ordinarily marginalized sectors into publicly
visible and contentious political action” (Jansen 2011, 82, italics omitted).
Populism represents a “sustained political project” that combines “popular
mobilization with populist rhetoric” (Jansen 2011: 82). Only where both
are present and mutually reinforce each other can we speak of genuine
populist mobilization.
On this view, populist mobilization crucially depends on the infusion of
a particular political narrative that picks up and responds to the concerns,
grievances, and aspirations of ordinary people and turns them into a pro-
ject of political contestation (Ost 2004). Political narratives are discursive
constructs that respond to three key questions: what went wrong, who is to
blame, and what is to be done to resolve the situation. They provide mean-
ing to diffuse grievances, explain their causes, and thus allow ordinary
people to become aware of their interests (Ost 2004, 238).
Historically, populist mobilizations derived their rhetorical edge from
their ability to tap into a profound sense of social and political injustice.
Late nineteenth-century American agrarian populism is a case in point.
Starting as a self-help movement of southern and midwestern farmers in
the 1870s, it quickly turned into a comprehensive revolt against Gilded

140
Age monopoly capitalism and its boosters in Congress. As the prominent
Kansas populist speaker Mary Lease famously put it in 1891, this was “no
longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a
government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street” (Lease
1984, 106). In the process, the Omaha Platform of 1892 charged, millions
saw the fruits of their labor “boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for
a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.” As a result, the country
was increasingly divided into “two great classes—tramps and million-
aires.”
Moral outrage in the face of profound social injustice also informed
populist mobilizations elsewhere. In Russia, as Isaiah Berlin once pointed
out, achieving social justice and equality were the “central goals” of the
narodniki movement of the 1870s (Berlin 1960, viii). In Colombia, Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán owed his appeal to the masses of ordinary citizens who lis-
tened to his speeches in the 1940s largely because of his stand for social
justice and dignity (Green 1996, 305). And in Argentina, Juan Perón’s ini-
tial success with the lower classes lay in his ability to recast the question of
democratic citizenship in terms of economic and social justice (James
1988b, 16).
Historically, populism posed a serious challenge to the prevailing so-
cioeconomic order and the established political structure, arguing that so-
cioeconomic reform was contingent on a thorough overhaul of the political
system. As the preamble to the Omaha Platform put it, the populists’ ulti-
mate goal was “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of
the ‘plain people,’ with which class it originated.” The solution to social
injustice and inequality lay in the revival of genuine democracy. This ex-
plains why leading American populists such as Tom Watson from Georgia
and James H. “Cyclone” Davis from Texas championed Jeffersonian
democracy. For, as Davis maintained, Jeffersonian democracy was based
on the notion “that the people can be trusted with self-government”
(quoted in Cantrell 2010, 57). Unfortunately, in the course of American
history, Tom Watson charged, Jeffersonian democracy had lost out to
Hamiltonianism, which entailed the expansion of government at the ex-
pense of the people. Leading populists saw their movement as the last
chance to reverse these developments.
That social justice could only be attained through genuine democracy
was also at the center of Gaitán’s populist doctrine (Green 1996, 305). At
the same time, Gaitán maintained, genuine democracy was impossible
without a measure of economic democracy. As long as the people lacked

141
basic economic power, they lacked the fundamental capabilities that would
allow them to participate in the democratic process (Sharpless 1978, 131).
In short, for early populists, the struggle for genuine democratic rights al-
ways also implied a struggle for profound social change (James 1988b,
16).
Originally, thus, populism was very much on the side of emancipation
and progress, speaking on behalf of people who considered themselves
powerless and offering them a chance to gain control over their own future
(McMath 2003). American populism, for instance, offered a genuine “hu-
mane alternative to either corporate capitalism or bureaucratic socialism; it
envisioned a popularly led, truly democratic, cooperative commonwealth”
(Parsons et al. 1983, 867). Yet, more often than not, populists were
ridiculed as cranks and fanatics and vilified as anarchists and communists,
their ideas denigrated and disparaged as “unworthy of serious considera-
tion,” their vision dismissed as romantic, irrational nostalgia for an ideal-
ized past (Watson 1905, 259). In the confrontation with the populists, no
invective seemed beyond the pale. One newspaper editor went so far as to
characterize Mary Lease as a “miserable caricature upon womanhood,” a
“lantern-jawed, goggle-eyed nightmare” who sold her “venomous tongue”
to whoever paid “the highest market price” (quoted in Lovett 2007, 33).
At least in part, this vilification of populism had something to do with
the fact that populist mobilization relies to a significant extent on the ap-
peal to emotions, such as anger, indignation, and particularly resentment
(de la Torre 2010, 4). The Canadian cultural theorist Marc Angenot was
hardly alone in ranking populism prominently among “les idéologies du
ressentiment,” a negative, thoroughly pernicious emotion (Angenot 1996,
51–52). This assessment of an essential emotion fits well into a long line
of thought maintaining that emotions should be “constrained and mini-
mized” in politics “so that reason dictates judgment with minimal distrac-
tion” and that democracy is only “sustained when reason beats passion”
(Marcus 2000, 221; Demertzis 2014, 224).
In recent years there has been a reappraisal of the place of emotions in
social life. This has also led to a reexamination and reevaluation of the na-
ture of resentment and its role in political mobilization (Goodwin, Jasper,
and Polletta 2000). It is generally acknowledged that it is useful to distin-
guish between ressentiment (derived from Nietzsche) and resentment (de-
rived from Scottish Enlightenment philosophy) (Ure 2015). Whereas
ressentiment connotes a pathological disposition, the rancorous, vindictive
envy of the weak confronted with their powerlessness, resentment implies

142
“a legitimate and valuable form of anger responding to perceived moral
wrongs” (Brudholm 2006, 12).
On this view, resentment stands for a “cognitive sharpening of anger”
(D’Arms and Jacobson 2003, 137), which derives its legitimacy from the
reference it makes “to perceived injustice, injury, or violation” (Brudholm
2006: 15). What distinguishes resentment from related affects such as
anger and outrage is that resentment “always claims to rest on moral prin-
ciple” for justification (Neu 2008, 34). This explains why John Rawls
ranks resentment and its close cousin, indignation (a response to wrongs
done to others), among the “moral emotions,” since both “invoke the con-
cept of right” (Rawls 1999, 423). From this perspective, resentment is the
fruit of a profound sense of injustice provoked by the recognition that
“claims of rights, benefits, or privileges” are “unfairly distributed” and that
this is the result of “intentional malevolence and collusive intrigue” (Ok-
senberg Rorty 2000, 92–93). Resentment thus not only involves a sense of
having been wronged but also an urge to attribute responsibility and blame
for the wrongdoing (Hampton 1988, 55). At the same time, however, it al-
ways also involves “an expectation, even in the face of the violation itself,
that justice can still be sought out and realized” (Throop 2013, 264).
This is what differentiates resentment from ressentiment. Ressentiment
is an affect grounded in a sense of immutable powerlessness and inferior-
ity; it wallows in repressed vindictiveness and passive victimhood. It tends
to turn legitimate grievances into “radical envy” or “envious hatred.”
These “can become politically toxic,” particularly when suppressed desire
for revenge gets displaced upon “vulnerable constituencies” blamed for the
displacement mechanisms, uncertainties, and anxieties engendered and
provoked by processes (such as globalization) beyond the individual’s
control (Ure 2015; Connolly 2002, 147–148). The mobilization of resent-
ment has always featured prominently in populism. So has the danger that
resentment degenerates into mere ressentiment, reflecting the rancor of so-
cial strata left behind by modernization (Rydgren 2004, 39–49). Prominent
examples were small shopkeepers and artisans whose anger fueled the
Poujadist mobilization in 1950s France and “angry white men” accounting
for much of the brief upsurge of the right-wing extremist British National
Party (BNP) in the first years of the new century (Ford and Goodwin
2010).1
The attribution of blame and the identification of who to be blamed (and
thus the construction of the enemy in the sense proposed by Carl Schmitt)

143
have been central and enduring features of populist discourse. They form
the foundation of a vision of politics informed by the notion that society is
divided into two mutually antagonistic camps—on one side the vast major-
ity of ordinary people, on the other side a relatively small group of people
who control much of society’s economic, political, social, and cultural re-
sources. Historically, the targets of populist mobilization were diverse, yet
similar: in the United States, robber barons, plutocrats, and machine politi-
cians; in France, financiers and the exclusive circle of a small number of
families suspected of controlling the destiny of the nation (Birnbaum
2012); in Latin America, the “oligarchy.”
Ideationally, the populist dichotomization derives from what in the
American context is known as “producerism,” which had its origins in Jef-
fersonian republicanism (Kazin 1995, 13). In this narrative, society is di-
vided into two groups, one whose labor is directly involved in the produc-
tion of things, the other consisting of those who profit from the work of
others. Its programmatic significance lay in the fact that it allowed for
broad coalitions, transcending class and occupational lines and—within
very narrow limits—even racial divides (Gerteis 2007; Ali 2010). This al-
lowed Gilded Age populists to evoke “the ties between farmers and work-
ers, underscoring their common attachment to ‘many’ ideals of economic
independence and identifying their common enemies as bankers, specula-
tors, and loan-sharking merchants—parasites who produced nothing but
made money by manipulating it, sucking the lifeblood from the honest
labor of farmers, mechanics and small proprietors” (Lears 2010, 156).
In response, populists and kindred movements (such as the Knights of
Labor) called for a thorough reconstitution of the economic and political
system in the interest of the producing classes (Gerteis 2007, 15). Yet pop-
ulist doctrine never fundamentally questioned private property. What it
sought to protect instead was individual enterprise, threatened by monop-
oly. Its critique of capitalism never went beyond demands that the state
rein in excesses, reestablish a level playing field allowing all productive
forces to compete on an equal footing, and in this way guarantee a more
broad-based distribution of prosperity. Populist doctrine, in the United
States and elsewhere, was both radical and, by and large, reformist.
The rhetorical confrontation, however, was often highly acerbic and
emotionally charged. Gaitán, for instance, repeatedly expressed his hatred
“for these oligarchies who ignore us” and for “these people who hate the
people [esta gente que odia al pueblo]” (Gaitán 1946) and who, full of
contempt for ordinary people, dismissed them as “lowlife” (chusma).

144
Gaitán, by contrast, claimed he was proud of the chusma, a statement de-
signed to restore dignity and self-esteem to ordinary people (Braun 1985,
102; Palacios 2011, 75).
This is part of what Francisco Panizza has called populism’s “politics of
recognition”—the conscious attempt on the part of populist leaders to
identify with the mass of ordinary people by, among other things, adopting
“cultural elements” such as the coarse language of the popular classes and
their garb, “considered marks of inferiority by the dominant culture”
(Panizza 2013, 92–93). The resulting revalorization of plebeian norms, as
Narendra Submaranian has shown in the case of Dravidian populism in
Tamil Nadu, promoted the establishment of a sense of identity and com-
munity in sharp contradistinction to the dominant culture (Subramanian
1999, 231; 2002, 128). Accounts of populist mobilization in the early
stages of Peronism reveal the central significance of the radical contesta-
tion of the institutions and symbols marking and transmitting social exclu-
sion and subordination: workers demonstrating for Perón’s release after his
arrest in October 1945 attacked the cafés and bars of the elite as well as
universities, and young men “made obscene gestures and dropped their
pants in front of upper-class ladies”—actions constituting a “form of secu-
lar iconoclasm” via “a kind of countertheater through which they mocked
and abused the symbols of elite pretensions and authority, as well as af-
firming their own pride in being workers” (James 1988a, 451; de la Torre
2010, 25). Populism thus offered ordinary people a way to express their re-
sentment and indignation and, via the revalorization of plebeian norms,
gain a measure of dignity and self-esteem, a first step toward their full in-
corporation and participation in the social and political life of the nation.
There is, however, also a dark side to the politics of resentment, when
populism turns into the mobilization of resentment and hatred against mi-
norities and outsiders. The archetypal case was antebellum nativism,
which represented one of the most extensive populist mobilizations in
American history (Formisano 2008, 198). Nativism originated as a social
movement inspired by Protestant revivalism, which advanced a far-reach-
ing reform agenda including temperance and the abolition of slavery (Holt
1992; Formisano 2008). In response to a wave of mass immigration of
Irish and German Catholics beginning in the late 1830s, however, the
movement quickly refashioned itself as the defender of American democ-
racy and the American way of life against the newcomers (Billington
1938). The ensuing anti-Catholic mobilization was informed by the notion
that the newcomers’ cultural background and values were fundamentally

145
incompatible with the basic tenets of American society, such as individual
liberty and independence of mind. Immigration was portrayed as being
part of a “popish” plot to subvert the United States, a conspiracy “bent on
capturing control of America, enslaving its citizens, crushing republican-
ism, and preventing the realization of America’s millennial glory” (Davis
1986, 164). The perceived threat of internal subversion turned an origi-
nally progressive social movement into a potent “movement of counter-
subversion” that enjoyed significant public support (Davis 1960). Orga-
nized into a political party (the American Party, aka the Know-Nothings),
the nativist movement briefly posed a serious threat to the political estab-
lishment. Once it got eclipsed by the anti-slavery cause, it quickly disinte-
grated, leading a significant number of nativists to join the emerging Re-
publican Party.
Postbellum agrarian populism, albeit generally more tolerant, also dis-
played traces of nativism. The targets, however, were not Catholics (de-
spite a strong revival of anti-Catholic sentiments during that period) but
“English or Anglo-Jewish financiers,” land speculators, and particularly
“English or Anglo-Irish landlords,” held in part accountable for the finan-
cial plight of the farmers (caused by tight money) and attacked as alien
landholders (Nugent 1963, 234–235). For the populists, the alien land
issue became central to their “multi-issue campaign against Great Britain”
aimed at liberating the country from the yoke of oppressive financial and
economic power (Crapol 1973, 113). For, as populist editorials put it, alien
land ownership represented nothing less than an invasion and conquest of
the United States, and the “title-deeds held by alien aristocrats to American
lands” amounted to nothing less than “the transfers of the liberty of Ameri-
can citizens and evidences of their thralldom” (quoted in Gerteis and
Goolsby 2005, 197, 214).
Similar sentiments were even more prominent and prevalent among
populist circles in western Canada in the 1930s. In particular, the Social
Credit Party of Alberta, which dominated provincial politics until the early
1970s, initially espoused a virulent anti-Semitism, “based on a conspiracy
theory that blamed the ‘international Jewish financier’ for the world’s,
Canada’s, and Alberta’s economic and political ills” (Stingel 2000, 3–4).
Its leader, the popular radio preacher William Aberhart, while rejecting ac-
cusations of anti-Semitism against his party, went on “to point to Anglo-
Saxon and Jewish bankers as the root of the world tyranny which kept peo-
ple enslaved” (Palmer 1985, 157). With Aberhart, who for eight years
(1935–1943) served as premier of Alberta, anti-Semitism became a useful

146
tool for a populist politics of resentment, which fed on “western distrust of
the remote federal government in Ottawa, the ally of the rapacious interna-
tional bankers who liked to bully poor farmers” (Davies 1992, 237).
The infusion of nativist elements into populist rhetoric was particularly
prevalent in France, starting with Boulangism in the late 1880s. The
Boulangist movement brought together a number of politically diverse
groups, united only in their hostility to the parliamentary regime (Pass-
more 2013). Boulangist propaganda dismissed parliamentarism as a sham
in the service of a corrupt oligarchy of political hacks who were irresponsi-
ble, ineffective, and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people and who
were leading the country to ruin. What the country needed instead was a
strong leader who derived his legitimacy directly from the people and who
defended them (Passmore 2013, 67). While General Boulanger himself es-
chewed nativist temptations, other leading Boulangist figures did not. On
the contrary, the Boulangist movement proved fertile ground for the emer-
gence of a new radical populist right, which after the ignominious end of
the movement promoted a nativist agenda aimed at mobilizing popular ha-
tred against the “alien elements” alleged to be inimical and ruinous to the
French nation: Jews, Protestants, and foreign workers (Birnbaum 2012;
Sternhell 1973; Hause 1989). Particularly anti-Semitism, largely borrowed
from the radical left, became central to the radical right’s reorientation of
populism, which sought to reconcile the disenchanted lower classes with
the nation by offering them protection from competition of foreign work-
ers (Sternhell 1973, 53). Thus the prominent Boulangist theoretician and
deputy Maurice Barrès called for strict measures to halt the “invasion of
foreign workers” charged with taking away jobs from native workers,
putting downward pressure on the wage level, and burdening public assis-
tance (Barrès 1893). Under the banner of “France for the French,” he
sought to mobilize the lower classes for his cause.
The Boulangist radical right’s ideological amalgam of populism, na-
tivism, and authoritarianism was intended to rally the lower classes around
the defense of the nation, recreate a national community transcending class
divisions, and reestablish a sense of national identity. Yet despite its ideo-
logical coherence, the Boulangist radical right largely failed politically. In
the long run, however, it proved highly influential. The rise of the Front
National to political prominence starting in the 1980s under its leader,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, was to a significant extent owed to the adoption of the
Boulangists’ rhetoric, strategy, and program (Goodliffe 2012). From
France, it spread via a process of “cross-national diffusion” among emerg-

147
ing right-wing radical parties and thus contributed to the establishment of
the contemporary populist radical right (Rydgren 2005).

THE POPULISM OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

Central to contemporary radical right-wing populist contestation is the

charge that in today’s democracies, “politics has escaped popular control”
(Canovan 2002, 27). On this view, politics has been usurped by a self-
serving class of professional politicians indifferent to the concerns and in-
terests of ordinary people. In the process, as the Front National’s program
of 1985 put it, democracy has been “confiscated” by a closed cartel of par-
ties, power monopolized by a “new class,” and the gap between the people
and their representatives fatally widened (Front National 1985, 17, 35).
In response, Jean-Marie Le Pen promoted himself as a modern-day tri-
bunus plebis who would give the floor back to the people. In other coun-
tries, too, radical right-wing populist parties marketed themselves as effec-
tive advocates of ordinary people capable of giving them the means to de-
cide for themselves (Betz 2004, 88–89). In Austria, Jörg Haider vowed to
take down the consociational Parteienstaat dominated by two major par-
ties and replace it with a citizens’ democracy (Bürgerdemokratie) (FPÖ
n.d.). Under Haider, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom
Party of Austria) claimed it promoted a radical system change supposed to
put an end to the existing system of privilege and corruption and liberate
citizens from the established parties. What the FPÖ envisioned was an
“Austrian cultural revolution with democratic means” in order to “over-
throw the ruling political class and the intellectual caste” and thus bring
about the “political regeneration” of the country (Haider 1993, 200–201).
Quite similar rhetoric was employed by Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord.
The Lega started out as a protest movement mobilizing northern Italian re-
sentment against the partitocratic regime in Rome and its clientilism and
corruption, which Bossi charged had ruined the country. Like Haider,
Bossi created the image of a lone fighter against tyranny, intent on funda-
mentally revolutionizing the system as a precondition for the establishment
of a modern, liberal democracy (Bossi 1993). His strategy and rhetoric
were quintessentially populist. In sharp contrast to mainstream politicians
and in order to establish his credentials as a man of the people, Bossi used
a coarse, incendiary plebeian language interlaced with vulgarities and in-
sults and prone to exaggerations and provocations. In his speeches and in-
terventions he pitted “honest, hard-working and simple-living northern

148
Italians attached to their local traditions” against political, economic, and
financial elites in collusion to victimize ordinary people. In this way, Bossi
not only designated the enemy but also gave ordinary people a new sense
of self-esteem (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2015, 43).
The initial success of parties such as the Front National, the FPÖ, the
Lega Nord, and the Progress Parties in Denmark and Norway was to a
large degree owed to their leaders’ ability to mobilize widespread resent-
ment against the political establishment, widely seen as having lost touch
with ordinary people. Profiting from widespread disaffection with tradi-
tional political parties, established politicians, and politics in general (in
1992, the term Politikverdrossenheit, meaning “indifference to politics,”
was voted “word of the year” in Germany), they projected themselves as
the champions of “genuine” democracy. At the same time, they promoted
themselves as the patrons of the hardworking majority, which produced
society’s wealth only to see themselves robbed of its fruits by a confisca-
tory state and its cronies. The goal was, as the Lega Nord put it in 1993, to
“restore dignity to the productive world and to beat that unproductive and
parasitic economy, which is favored by this system and lives on the backs
of those who work, produce and take risks” (quoted in Gold 2003, 94).
With this program, the Lega Nord and its counterparts elsewhere appealed
to producer-oriented values such as individualism, initiative, merit, and en-
trepreneurship, while at the same time fanning popular resentment in the
face of high taxes and mounting public debt (Bonomi 2008, 36–38). One
of the main targets of this resentment was the privileged position of large
corporations receiving subsidies from the state while small firms and busi-
nesses, though consistently touted as the backbone of the economy, were
largely left to fend for themselves. This explains why in the initial phase of
mobilization, the populist radical right adopted the “enterprise culture”
rhetoric of Thatcherism, which promoted the idea that it should be left to
the market to reward the productive and weed out the uncompetitive (Betz
1994, 141).
A second main target was migrants, particularly those originating from
developing countries. A number of radical right-wing parties, such as the
German Republikaner, the Vlaams Blok (later Vlaams Belang) in the
Flemish region of Belgium, and the Swiss Autopartei, owed their electoral
breakthrough primarily to their ability to combine anti-establishment
rhetoric with xenophobic appeals (Mudde 2000). Others, like the FPÖ and
the Lega Nord, were quick to transform latent xenophobic sentiments
(which in the case of the Lega Nord were directed particularly against in-

149
ternal migrants from the southern regions, widely perceived as “foreign-
ers”) into explicit anti-immigrant rhetoric (Bonomi 2008, 39). The basic
charge was that the political establishment lacked the political will to pro-
tect the national interest by stemming the tide of migrants who were flood-
ing the country attracted by generous welfare provisions. If radical right-
wing parties adopted neoliberal positions, it was primarily to reduce the
political establishment’s ability to lavish resources on those they consid-
ered undeserving.
The adoption of populist rhetoric and a distinctly populist communica-
tion style proved to be a winning formula not only for some political new-
comers, such as the Lega Nord, but also for a number of parties with a
long tradition in their respective party systems, such as the FPÖ under Jörg
Haider and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party)
under Christoph Blocher. In some cases, however, party-internal conflicts
pitting strategic considerations against ideological considerations and par-
ticularly organizational problems such as factionalism and infighting over
the party leadership hampered these parties’ ability to present a coherent
message to potential voters, resulting in their fading into political irrele-
vance (Rydgren 2005, 431–432). Prominent examples are the German Re-
publikaner and, more recently, the British National Party (Ford and Good-
win 2014, 84, 89). In other cases, radical right-wing populist parties saw
their support base being siphoned off by right-wing competitors, populist
or not. This happened to the Autopartei, which lost out to the SVP and, to
an extent, to the Vlaams Belang, which has lost a considerable portion of
its electoral support to the nationalist Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA,
New Flemish Alliance) as the new political voice of Flemish ressentiment.

THE NATIVISM OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

With the diffusion of neoliberalism among the major mainstream parties,

even successful radical right-wing populist parties lost some of their com-
petitive edge. The gradual abandonment on the part of the traditional left
of the Keynesian interventionist policies of the past in favor of monetary
stability and financial deregulation, epitomized by François Mitterrand’s
U-turn of 1983, offered the opportunity to appeal to disenchanted lower-
class voters (Lavelle 2008). In response, the radical right put the question
of immigration even more so than before at the center of its populist mobi-
lization, fueled by a broad-based nativist agenda designed to appeal to dif-
fuse anxieties, disaffection, and resentment.

150
 Nativism is inherently an ideology of exclusion bolstered by a narrative
of justification. Over the past few decades, the populist radical right has
advanced a number of reasons migration poses a fundamental threat to so-
ciety, ranging from relatively simple economic ones to relatively complex
cultural justifications. In the process, the populist radical right has repeat-
edly reinvented itself in terms of both its doctrine and its program. These
developments have come partly in response to changes in the nature of mi-
gration (from “guest workers” to refugees seeking asylum) and partly to
changes in the ideological orientation of the established parties, particu-
larly those on the left. Initially, the focus of radical right-wing populist
mobilization against migrants was primarily economic: given mass unem-
ployment, migrants would exacerbate the problems of the labor market;
given the relative generosity of the welfare state, migrants would put an
additional burden on already severely strained public services. Under the
circumstances, the radical populist right demanded that governments put
the interests and concerns of the native population first. Thus in 1993, the
FPÖ launched a signature drive for a popular initiative (in response to the
influx of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe) under the banner of
“Austria First”—reminiscent of the well-known FN slogan “Les français
d’abord.”
The mobilization of economically motivated lower-class anxieties and
resentment reached its limits once governments throughout the developed
world started to clamp down on migration. In response, the radical populist
right’s focus shifted away from migration toward the question of integra-
tion of those migrant populations already in the country. This shift opened
up a large, complex, and emotionally highly charged issue, which offered
great potential for populist mobilization. The populist radical right also
benefited from new sociocultural and sociopolitical developments—partic-
ularly the move from an emphasis on “egalitarian redistribution” to a new
emphasis on “recognition” as a basis for political contestation (Fraser
2000). This shift was particularly pronounced on the social democratic left.
In order to appeal to its growing new-middle-class constituencies, the so-
cial democratic left increasingly focused on questions of gender, minority
rights, diversity, and especially multiculturalism at the expense of tradi-
tional distributional issues—and this at a time when globalization and “an
aggressively expanding capitalism” were “radically exacerbating economic
inequality” (Fraser 2000, 108). This opened up new opportunities for the
populist radical right to reinforce its credentials among the lower classes,
alienated by the “strategic movement of social democracy toward eco-
nomic centrism and socio-cultural libertarianism” (Kitschelt 2004, 9).

151
 In response, the populist radical right repositioned itself as the voice and
champion of the “invisible” and “forgotten,” as Marine Le Pen put it dur-
ing the presidential campaign of 2012. In the process, radical right-wing
populist parties advanced a new nativist narrative that represented a signif-
icant departure from the relatively simplistic xenophobic sloganeering of
the past. In an ironic twist, the new narrative deemphasized socioeconomic
justifications for the radical right’s anti-immigrant positions. Instead, in a
conscious recourse to the new “common grammar” of the “recognition of
difference” (Fraser 2000, 107), it put questions of culture, values, and par-
ticularly identity at the center of the new politics of exclusion.
Couched in terms of the “right to identity” and respect for cultural dis-
tinctiveness and diversity, the radical right’s new nativist discourse also
served as a rhetorical tool to counter charges of xenophobia, racism, and
extremism. As one radical right-wing leader explained, racism implied that
“racial features” made some groups superior to others. Against that, he as-
serted, the new narrative held that everyone was equal, but not all the same
(Filip Dewinter quoted in Betz and Johnson 2004, 316). Genealogically,
this line of argument is derived from the ethnopluralist conceptions devel-
oped by the French nouvelle droite in the 1970s (Rydgren 2005), which
“endeavored to legitimate European racial identity in the name of cultural
heterogeneity” and thus “defend the racial/cultural integrity of European
peoples” (O’Meara n.d.).
In contemporary nativism, the ethnopluralist claim to recognition of “the
right to difference” has served as the major justification for exclusion on
cultural grounds. As a prominent Vlaams Belang politician put it in a book
on the role of women in Islam, “cultures and religions are neither equal nor
of equal value” (Van dermeersch 2012, 12). The ethnopluralist claim has
allowed the radical right to redefine the enemy and redraw the antagonistic
field of contestation central to populist discourse. For the radical right, the
traditional left-right conflict has largely become obsolete, having been re-
placed by a new front line pitting the defenders of identity against the ad-
vocates of multiculturalism. The ensuing struggle has been presented in
quasi-apocalyptic terms. What is at stake is nothing less than the very sur-
vival of Western civilization, “the most advanced and superior civilization
the world has ever known” (Wilders 2011). If Western civilization is
threatened, it is because its will to resistance has been undermined and
sapped by multiculturalism, an “ideology of cultural relativism,” based on
the false premise that all cultures are equal (Wilders 2011). Under the per-
nicious influence of multiculturalism, migrants are no longer asked to as-

152
similate to the majority culture; instead the native population is “increas-
ingly compelled to fit in with them” (Dewinter 2012, 128). Those who
dare challenge the multicultural ideology are silenced by the partisans of
political correctness, their concerns dismissed by the mainstream media as
reactionary if not racist (Brückner and Ulfkotte 2013).
In this situation, radical right-wing populist parties promote themselves
as the lone voice of ordinary citizens, a voice that dares to say out loud
what the man on the street only dares to think; as indefatigable advocates
of the silent majority, victimized by multiculturalism and political correct-
ness; and as fearless defenders of the freedom of speech, unrelenting in
their effort to disclose the lies and half-truths disseminated by the multi-
cultural elites and their “verbal manipulation” designed to shape public
opinion (Dewinter 2012, 151).
These and related charges are part of a new “genre of discourse,” which
in recent years has gained considerable influence throughout Western Eu-
rope—the genre of “new realism” (Prins and Saharso 2010, 72). New real-
ism encompasses, among other things, confronting reality “as it really is”
rather than as it is being constructed by the elite; breaking taboos, and
speaking out frankly about societal ills; standing up for ordinary people
and their common sense; and, last but not least, affirming the positive sides
of the Western value system and of national identity (Prins and Saharso
2010, 74–75). Among its main promoters are not only radical right-wing
populist parties but also a wide-ranging network of protest movements
(e.g., Pegida), ideological groupuscules (e.g., bloc identitaire), bloggers
(e.g., “Fjordman”), and noted intellectuals (e.g., Eric Zemmour), either
loosely affiliated with radical right-wing populist parties or, at least offi-
cially, keeping their distance. Here the Internet has played a particularly
important role. Prominent websites such as Gates of Vienna, Politically In-
correct, and France de Souche have provided a platform for bloggers to
diffuse and popularize “theories” and concepts such as Bat Ye’Or’s “Eura-
bia” or Robert Camus’s “great replacement,” which have had a significant
influence on the radical right’s identitarian discourse. The new social
media have allowed virtual communities to share their take on events and
developments independent of the mainstream media, which these commu-
nities often dismiss as biased and untrustworthy (in 2014, the term Lügen-
presse, or “lying press,” was voted “un-word of the year” in Germany). In
this way, the Internet has been instrumental in creating the space for an al-
ternative reality where conspiracy theories abound and ordinary people,
often under the cover of anonymity, are given the opportunity (for in-

153
stance, in the commentary section of the online edition of major newspa-
pers and newsmagazines) to give vent to their anger and thus provide oth-
ers the reassurance that they are not alone with their resentment.
The radical right’s new realist discourse is directed against a panoply of
adversaries, ranging from the established political class to the media, parts
of big business, academia, and even churches—in short, anyone and any
institution suspected of promoting and sustaining multiculturalism. Its
avowed goal is to break the multicultural elite’s ability to define the terms
of the debate on migration and thus weaken its cultural hegemony.
The impressive electoral success of radical right-wing populist parties at
the beginning of the twenty-first century is to a large extent owed to their
ability to adapt their nativist discourse to new sociocultural realities. Ar-
guably the most important new reality is the emergence of Islam as a cen-
tral sociocultural and sociopolitical issue of domestic debate. In the face of
the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and its association with violence, the
place of Islam in Western societies has become a highly contentious issue,
the subject of heated and emotionally highly charged debates. The difficul-
ties of Western democracies in striking a balance between accommodating
increasingly assertive Muslim minority communities and upholding funda-
mental Western values have offered the populist radical right a perfect op-
portunity to insert their nativist interpretations and diagnoses into the pub-
lic debate. The core tropes of this discourse are the notion that Islam repre-
sents a totalitarian ideology and is therefore incommensurate with liberal
democratic values; that the growing visibility of Muslim minorities marks
the first step toward the “Islamization” of Western societies; and that the
national elites, in the name of multiculturalism and the politically correct,
systematically ignore, downplay, and deny the essential threat posed by an
expansionist, conquering Islam (Betz 2013; Betz and Meret 2009). Con-
structing Islam in this way has allowed right-wing populist parties to trans-
form themselves into movements of counterinsurgency reminiscent of the
antebellum American nativists. Like them, they promote themselves, if
only in rhetoric, as defenders of the pillars of liberal democracy, such as
freedom of speech, the separation between religion and the secular, and, in
accord with the zeitgeist, gender equality and in some cases even gay
rights (Akkerman 2015).
The radical right’s nativist discourse on Islam has all the ingredients of a
moral panic, designed to evoke anxieties and fears and thus reinforce al-
ready existing sentiments of cultural and symbolic insecurity and disorien-
tation among the general public, reflected in the notion that one no longer

154
feels at home in one’s own community and country (Bouvet 2015; Gold-
man 2015).2 Moral panics typically occur “when society is unsure of itself
or is in the process of relocating its boundaries.” This offers opportunities
to populist entrepreneurs to construct a specific issue or phenomenon in
such a fashion as to “produce generalized and exaggerated public anxiety”
(Testa and Armstrong 2012, 5). Given the confluence of economic pres-
sures, social disruptions, and cultural challenges confronting contemporary
liberal democracies, the appeal of the populist radical right’s nativist narra-
tive is hardly surprising. Its central feature is the assertion of the right to
the protection of cultural difference as a first step toward the reestablish-
ment and reaffirmation of a strong sense of national identity. For only a
strong sense of national identity allows a nation to assert its sovereignty.
The result has been a coherent program for populist mobilization, which
combines trenchant anti-elite rhetoric with an ethnocratic doctrine that
calls for the introduction of a strict policy of “national preference” and a
comprehensive program of social and economic protection (Betz and
Meret 2013).

THE APPEAL OF RADICAL RIGHT-WING POPULISM

This program is designed to consolidate and further extend the radical pop-
ulist right’s appeal among the lower classes, which already constitute the
predominant segment of its electoral base—to the detriment of the tradi-
tional left. In fact, in a number of liberal democracies—prominent among
them Austria, France, and Switzerland—the radical populist right has to a
large extent replaced socialists and social democrats as the privileged po-
litical representative of blue- and white-collar workers. Several reasons
have been offered to explain this development. For one, empirical studies
show that in recent decades, questions of community and identity have in-
creasingly come to rival economic concerns among lower-class voters
(Oesch 2008). The result has been the emergence of a new axis of political
contestation, pitting claims for the protection and preservation of “tradi-
tional communities in which common moral understandings have devel-
oped” against support for “universalistic conceptions of community” re-
flected in the notion of multiculturalism (Bornschier 2010, 2; Kriesi et al.
2008). Politically, this has led to a growing demand for cultural protection-
ism, which was met by the identitarian populist positions of the radical
right (Betz and Johnson 2004; Taguieff 2015).
A second explanation focuses on the supply side of politics: if the lower

155
classes have largely abandoned the traditional left, it is because the left has
not only to a large extent ignored their concerns and worries but repudiated
them altogether. On this view, the left lost the popular vote once it started,
in the wake of growing public opposition to immigration, to adopt the con-
descending, disdainful, and contemptuous attitudes that traditionally char-
acterized the elite’s sanctimonious view of the lower classes (Dupuy 2002;
D’Eramo 2013; Delsol 2015). The success of radical right-wing populist
parties only confirmed the suspicion that “the people” were easily swayed
by prejudices, duped by demagoguery, and thus not to be relied on to opt
for the sensible and reasonable choice (Bouvet 2012; Dion 2015). The re-
sulting diabolization of the populist right proved counterproductive, for it
gave the radical populist right the opportunity to assume the role of a vic-
tim, “victimized by a cynical, condescending cultural elite that loathe their
own people’s supposed illiberalism, intolerance, lack of sophistication, and
inexplicable attachment to their traditional values” (Wilders 2012, 180).
It is for that reason that even renowned intellectuals such as Pierre-
André Taguieff, whose anti-racist credentials are beyond reproach, have
called the strategy of diabolization into question. What is needed instead is
a careful, dispassionate analysis of the radical populist right’s programs
and proposals as well as the results of their work when they are in posi-
tions of power on the local, regional, and national levels (Taguieff 2014).
There is much to commend Taguieff’s point. Even a superficial analysis of
radical right-wing populist parties’ socioeconomic programs, for instance,
would reveal the complete lack of viable people-oriented propositions to
confront the main challenges facing contemporary liberal democracies—
dramatically rising inequality, the tyranny of financial markets, the future
viability of pension systems, and the environmental crisis, to name but a
few. Yet these are exactly the problems that have given rise to the climate
of insecurity and malaise that has proven propitious for the radical populist
right. Historically, as we have seen, the populist response to such chal-
lenges was a call for more social and economic justice in the name of ordi-
nary people—a far cry from the shallow rhetoric of the contemporary pop-
ulist right. Yet the poverty of the radical populist right’s socioeconomic
agenda is rarely ever seriously thematized. The reason might be, as some
critics have charged, that for the established parties, the unrelenting diabo-
lization of radical right-wing populism has served as a welcome distraction
from their inability (or lack of will) to rein in the excesses of economic and
financial globalization (Dion 2015).

156
NOTES

1. Here, ressentiment was less a response to specific injustices than to a

profound sense of being “marginalised in a political debate where
their voice was once one the loudest and most respected” (Ford and
Goodwin 2014, 176). A classic example of the appeal to victimization
and ressentiment in populist discourse was the claim made by Pauline
Hanson, the leader of Australia’s One Nation party in 1996, that “the
white Ango-Saxon male” was the “most downtrodden person” in the
country (quoted in Lester 1996).
2. In early 2016, almost half of French respondents agreed with that
statement. TNS Sofres, “Baromètre d’image du Front national,” Feb-
ruary 2016. One year earlier, about the same number of respondents
agreed with the statement that Islam represented a threat to French na-
tional identity. IFOP, “Les Français et leur perception de l’islam,” July
2015.
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CHAPTER 6

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT AND FASCISM

NIGEL COPSEY
DURING her world tour in 2012 global pop icon Madonna screened a
video clip of Marine Le Pen’s face in her live show. Superimposed on Le
Pen’s forehead was a swastika. Not surprisingly, the leader of the Front
National was less than thrilled. Responding with derision that “it’s under-
standable when aging singers who need publicity go to such extremes,” Le
Pen threatened Madonna with legal action if her image was depicted in this
way in France. After Madonna screened the image during a live show in
Paris, Le Pen made good on her promise and filed a lawsuit for “public in-
sult.” In order to avoid litigation, Madonna demurred; the swastika was re-
placed with a question mark. This seems to me to be an entirely fitting
place to open this discussion. Let’s be bold and try to answer Madonna’s
question if we can: what, if anything, separates the “fascist” from the
“right-wing radical”?
There are, of course, many people—the politically engaged who sit on
the (far) left of the spectrum, self-proclaimed “anti-fascist” groups for sure
—who would not recognize any such distinction. Especially when engag-
ing in their polemical name-calling, anti-fascists are not inclined to enter-
tain “semantic niceties.” “As a word in usage today,” the historical sociol-
ogist Michael Mann (2004, 365) has written, the F-word “appears largely
as the exclamation ‘Fascist!’—a term of imprecise abuse hurled at people
we do not like.” In early 2015, for example, on hearing news that the Ox-
ford Union had invited Le Pen to speak, Britain’s leading anti-fascist
group, Unite Against Fascism, sloganized, “No to Fascist Marine Le Pen at
the Oxford Union! Oxford Union—rescind the invitation!” Today, as
Mann (2004, 365) puts it, “only a few crackpots and thugs call themselves
fascists or Nazis.” Whatever one’s opinion of Le Pen may be, she is no
“crackpot,” let alone a “thug.”
Far less shrill in tone was some select British press opinion. One jour-
nalist observed that in spite of Le Pen’s attempts to detoxify the party
founded by her father, her blend of “nationalism” (anti-immigrant, anti-
EU) and “socialism” (protectionist trade barriers, reduction of the retire-
ment age to sixty, higher minimum wage) was just as toxic, if not more so,
since it was being repackaged in softer form—“modern” and “sweetly per-
suasive.” The journalist then explained, “ ‘Nationalism’ and ‘socialism’
combined have a dark history, whatever Ms. Le Pen may say. To that ex-

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tent, the ‘Mariniste’ FN is more authentically fascist—even if ‘fascist
lite’—than her father’s party was” (Lichfield 2015). So is today’s radical
right a case of “fascism lite”—modernized, normalized, watered-down, but
nonetheless just as sinister as the original?
Even though U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump was also dubbed
“fascist lite” by his journalist detractors, this neologism is not without
some scholarly credentials. In his 2013 book Putinism: The Slow Rise of a
Radical Right Regime in Russia, Marcel van Herpen applied “fascism lite”
to Putin’s Russia. For van Herpen (2013, 8), “fascism lite” denotes an un-
stable hybrid of “proto-fascism, fascism and post-fascism,” which contains
a “hard core of ultra-nationalism, militarism and neo-imperialism.” Yet if
truth be told, the notion of “fascism lite” draws upon an older concept—
the concept of “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism,” popularized in the
1990s by the late Italian novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco.
For Eco (1995, 12–15), “fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a
fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political
ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” According to Eco, Ur-Fascism or Eter-
nal Fascism can be found in no fewer than fourteen (potentially contradic-
tory) features, but only one of them needs to be present for a fascism to co-
alesce around it. When we think about today’s populist radical right, re-
flect upon Eco’s thirteenth feature:
Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative pop-
ulism, one might say. . . . Because of its qualitative populism Ur-
Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. . . .
Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament
because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can
smell Ur-Fascism. . . . Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in
plainclothes.
Jackboots have been traded for suits. This “designer fascism” even appears
on something as innocuous as a bottle of Marine Le Pen–brand cham-
pagne, featuring a photograph of the smiling, relaxed, blond-haired, blue-
eyed Le Pen on the label (far less disturbing than the “Hitler wine” pro-
duced by an Italian winemaker that would draw the wrath of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in 2013).
“Fascism lite,” “Eternal Fascism”—is there another way of conceptual-
izing this fascism of the contemporary radical right? In 2012 Swedish-
based researcher Rasmus Fleischer (2014, 53–70) proposed tentatively that
Europe’s radical right had undergone an ideological separation into two

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main currents and it was now possible to distinguish two fascisms in con-
temporary Europe: “mono-fascism” and “multi-fascism.” The former “is
quite explicit in its aim: to purge Europe of Muslims,” and this means that
‘ “Western civilization’ must consolidate itself as a new imperium and en-
gage in counter-jihad” (Fleischer 2014, 57). Accordingly, mono-fascism
could be understood as “imperialist” even if it views itself as less aggres-
sive and less imperialist than Islam. Multi-fascism, on the other hand, re-
jects hierarchical racism, is ethnopluralist (ethnicities or races are not nec-
essarily superior or inferior but different and incompatible), is more open
to alliances with non-Western countries, and is anti-Zionist. This
mono/multi divide, Fleischer argued, was personified in ideological differ-
ences between Marine Le Pen and her father, with the “mono-fascist” Ma-
rine “tending more towards a counter-jihadist position” (Fleischer 2014,
66).
Yet in a curious 2014 addendum, which underscores the challenges pre-
sented by conceptualization, Fleischer then expressed some serious doubts
as to whether his distinction between mono-fascism and multi-fascism ac-
tually worked. The radical right, he (correctly) pointed out, was “a moving
target” and Europe, inspired by the example of Golden Dawn in Greece,
was now “witnessing a revival of openly neo-Nazi organizations” (Fleis-
cher 2014, 69–70). He insisted, however, that his general point remained
valid: “political splits within Europe’s radical right should neither be re-
duced to a difference in the degree of radicalism, nor to any distinction be-
tween older and newer varieties of fascism” (Fleischer 2014, 70). Fas-
cism(s), in his mind, still remained synonymous with the radical right.

“FIGHTING NEW AND DIFFERENT BATTLES”

Yet surely there is an essential difference between today’s populist radical

right and fascism? Consider the case for historical specificity (that is to
say, how something comes to be configured at a specific point in time).
For historians, greater sensitivity to historical and contextual difference
goes without saying. “The worst consequence of the ahistorical mode of
analysis,” Hebert Kitschelt wrote in his award-winning book The Radical
Right in Western Europe (1995, 45), “is to lump all forms of authoritarian
extremism under the label of fascism and thus create more confusion than
enlightenment about the nature of the contemporary extreme Right.” While
Kitschelt, a political science scholar, did not necessarily subscribe to the
view that fascism was a historical phenomenon confined to a particular

168
epoch—that fascism began in 1919 and simply ended in 1945—he did be-
lieve that the dynamics of political mobilization behind historical fascist
movements were very different from those driving the radical right in the
1990s. Interwar fascism “was fueled by different ideological appeals,
brought together a different support coalition, and was propelled by differ-
ent social, economic, and political conditions than the contemporary ex-
treme Right in Western Europe” (Kitschelt 1995, 42–43). If some political
scientists subsequently took issue with Kitschelt’s thesis, their disagree-
ments centered not on the historical specificity of fascism but on
Kitschelt’s contention that one of the key factors behind the radical right’s
“winning formula” was its adoption of economic neoliberalism (see
Mudde 2007).
Just before Kitschelt’s book appeared, historian Diethelm Prowe had
crafted an influential journal article comparing “classic” fascism with the
“new radical right” in Western Europe. This article is a key point of refer-
ence because it forces us to think about “critical changes in the historical
context that set these two phenomena apart in essential ways” (Prowe
1994, 312). According to Prowe, the “most obvious” and “critical differ-
ences” were that (1) the present radical right was being fueled by the cul-
tural fissures of multicultural society rather than those engendered by class
conflict and the fear of communism; (2) that the radical right has emerged
in a period of decolonization and its violent reverberations, whereas fas-
cism was born in societies built on colonial domination; (3) that the con-
temporary radical right has emerged from a long period of peace, whereas
fascism was shaped by the dislocating experience of the First World War;
(4) that today’s radical right has developed in the fissures of stable, pros-
perous consumer societies, whereas classic fascism grew from material de-
spair; (5) that the radical right has cultivated its appeal in societies (unlike
interwar Europe) where democratic norms are widely taken for granted;
and (6) that the support base for the contemporary radical right is more
urban than was the base for historical fascism.
Fundamentally different historical contexts will occasion real-world ef-
fects; practical configurations of political phenomena do reflect their tem-
poral context. For Prowe, one major practical effect has been the “concrete
physical racism” of the contemporary radical right, by which he meant a
“racist hatred” that is “not directed against all foreigners or even all immi-
grants but is a concrete racism against people of different skin colour or
visibly different dress, customs or religion” (Prowe 1994, 310). This, ac-
cording to Prowe, has eclipsed the “traditional hallmarks of classic fascism

169
—anti-communism and (in most cases) anti-Semitism” (Prowe 1994, 310).
Post-9/11, we might add that this trend has been an accelerating one. “In
the wake of 11 September 2001, virtually all parties and formations on the
radical right,” Hans-Georg Betz has written, “made the confrontation with
Islam a central political issue” (Betz 2007, 42). Some radical-right parties
have shifted to pro-Israeli positions (although some with rather more sin-
cerity than others). There is also a new spatial orientation to the contempo-
rary radical right—it no longer aspires to aggressive foreign conquest. It is
more a case of understanding “living space” as “defence of place and man-
ner of existence.” Accordingly, even if related “spiritually to interwar fas-
cism, the new movements represent a new era and are fighting new and
different battles in Western Europe” (Prowe 1994, 312).
If fascism is a product of a historically specific set of circumstances—“a
fascism-producing crisis”—and if these circumstances no longer exist,
then fascism, if not dead and buried, survives as a sickly growth that rarely
emerges from the dark recesses. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that, ac-
cording to political scientist A. James Gregor, “one finds so little serious
neofascist political activity in the industrially advanced West simply be-
cause the prerequisites for the emergence of fascism no longer obtain”
(Gregor 2006: 78). The essential difference, according to this view, is that
classic fascism was an evanescent phenomenon in history that emerged as
consequence of a “specific type of relative deprivation caused by disorder,
economic calamity and national humiliation,” and fascists “won power be-
cause of the direct or indirect support of all those who were afraid of ex-
propriation in the event of a Communist or Socialist victory” (Krejčí 1995,
1). Historian David Roberts (2006, 204) calls our attention to the fact that
after the First World War “fascists created fascism, brought it into the
world in light of a historically specific sense of the need and scope for a
radical departure.” Fascism was thus a radically novel phenomenon, so
much so that this historically specific novelty becomes essential to its defi-
nition. Radical right-wing populism is something entirely different; it has
emerged in a fundamentally changed historical epoch, as a consequence of
the conflicts of postindustrial society (see Betz 1994), where the far-left
threat is negligible. Radical right-wing populism is thus essentially alien to
the fascist tradition (in Piero Ignazi’s terminology, a “post-industrial ex-
treme right”; see Ignazi 2003).
Straightforward enough; configurations in historical time and geo-
graphic space are obviously subject to change. Yet the same must surely
hold true for fascism, for it too evolves. Jeffrey Bale made an obvious

170
point, but it is worth repeating here: to expect postwar fascists “to continue
to assume the exact same form that their forebears assumed in the interwar
period would be absurdly ahistorical” (Bale 2006, 294). “It would be so
much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying,
‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the
Italian squares,’ ” Umberto Eco (1995, 15) wrote, but “life is not that sim-
ple.” To borrow the words of historian Andrea Mammone (2015, 13): “If
someone thinks that modern fascism means exact copies of the interwar
blackshirt militias, then one is probably looking in the wrong direction.
Precise clones and bio-robotic replicants exist in fiction novels.” In other
words, let’s return the charge: those who insist on fascism’s epoch-speci-
ficity lack historical perspective. Fascism is not dead and gone. As Matteo
Albanese and Pablo del Hierro (2016, 2) remind us:
Fascism is an alive ideology which has existed throughout almost a
century of history and travelled across many countries; in order to
survive, fascism has had to change and adapt itself to the interna-
tional context; accordingly, the understanding of structural condi-
tions cannot be separated from the cultural turn.

RADICAL RIGHT: THEN AND NOW

If true for fascism, then the same must also hold for the radical right. It too
has adopted new forms as a consequence of changing historical circum-
stances. What historians understand by the radical right in the interwar pe-
riod is quite different from what political scientists would understand by
the radical right today. “The radical right . . . often differed from fascism
not by being more moderate, but simply by being more rightist” (Payne
1995, 19). These words, penned in the mid-1990s by historian Stanley
Payne, would strike contemporary political scientists as odd. Payne, of
course, was speaking not about today’s radical right but about an aggres-
sive interwar, romantic radical right. This was the “radical right” associ-
ated with “conservative revolutionaries” in Germany (Ernst Jünger,
Moeller van den Bruck, and so on). Elitist, not populist, it was at the same
time deeply hostile to both Weimar democracy and the old Kaiserreich.
So what was it that separated the interwar right-wing radical from the
fascist? This classic radical right, like fascism, still “wished to destroy the
existing political system of liberalism root and branch” (Payne 1995, 17).
But the radical right in interwar Germany was more middle-class, less anti-
Semitic, more intellectual (see Eatwell 1989). Classic fascism was an in-

171
surgent phenomenon that would emerge from outside the political estab-
lishment; it was populist, mobilizing cross-class support. Even so, Payne
suggests, the historical radical right, “with regard to violence, militarism,
and imperialism,” was “almost as extreme as were the fascists (and some-
times, with regard to individual aspects, even more so)” (1995, 19).
If the radical right in the interwar period might be conceptualized as
such, the leitmotif of today’s reconfigured radical right is not elitism but
anti-establishment populism. Moreover, we are told, today’s right-wing
radicals, unlike their predecessors, do not fundamentally oppose democra-
tic sovereignty; in that sense they are more moderate. Roger Griffin (2006:
53) writes:
Whereas Fascism would once have been the natural outlet for pop-
ulist resentment about the inability of mainstream democratic par-
ties to address issues of identity, deep-seated fears of being
swamped by immigrants and their alien culture and a general sense
of the inability of the modern world, they now have to be articu-
lated not “extra-systemically” but “democratically.”
Thus, for political scientist Cas Mudde, “the term radical right is best used
for right-wing ideologies that accept democracy, i.e. popular sovereignty
and majority rule, but oppose some fundamental values of liberal democ-
racy, notably minority rights and pluralism” (2016, 6). Fascists, if we ac-
cept that they still exist, are further to the extreme. But more than that,
since fascists are fundamentally opposed to democracy, they are essen-
tially different from right-wing radicals. There is (or so it seems) a funda-
mental dividing line between the two. “Most importantly,” writes Mudde,
“the radical right is (nominally) democratic . . . whereas the extreme right
is in essence antidemocratic, opposing the fundamental principle of sover-
eignty of the people” (Mudde 2007, 31).
What follows, according to Mudde, is that the “radical right” forms a
subtype of the “far right.” Mudde’s other subtype is the “extreme right”
(where fascism is located) (see Mudde 2016). This makes sense until we
begin to work through the (incoherent?) implications. The key problem is
that Mudde’s radical right belongs to the far right but not the extreme
right, and yet both the radical right and the extreme right, despite their pro-
found differences, belong to the very same far right. Might there be an al-
ternative way of conceptualizing the radical right that captures right-wing
extremism in terms of a longer historical process?

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 NEOFASCISM: CONTEMPORIZING POST-1945 FASCISM

One alternative is to apply the concept of “neofascism” and see where that
takes us. Not especially far, thought Walter Laqueur, former director of
London’s Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library, who
asked in the introduction to his Fascism: Past, Present and Future (1996,
9): “Why use the term neofascism in the first place if the neofascists ob-
serve the democratic rules of the game?” Likewise, Hans-Georg Betz de-
clared that “the notion of right-wing extremism—or worse, neo-fascism—
is hardly apt to capture the nature of the contemporary right in established
Western democracies” (1998, 3).
By the mid-1990s, that political scientists were inclined to cast the term
“neofascism” to one side was eminently understandable. In the first place,
the prefix “neo-” was still being applied (lazily) to simply distinguish the
fascism of the interwar years from postwar fascisms (and often as a way of
highlighting the youthfulness of postwar fascists despite some important
continuities). Second, there had been little to no conceptualization of the
term, so working definitions of neofascism were few and far between.
Third, there were those who doubted the applicability of a right-wing cate-
gorization for neofascism (why would more than 35 percent of middle-
ranking Movimento Sociale Italiano activists self-locate on the left, for ex-
ample?). Fourth, the term “neofascism” was invoked by the European left
in the wake of the FN’s 1984 electoral breakthrough, and it was regularly
invoked, one suspects, for political reasons (to deny the FN respectability,
or to warn about fascism’s “return”). Several books appeared on the rise of
the contemporary far right and spoke alarmingly of “fascist Europe,” the
“dark side of Europe,” or “neofascism in Europe.”
The last of these volumes, which tellingly chose not to use that phrase in
its 1995 edition title and instead went with The Far Right in Western and
Eastern Europe, featured an introductory essay on neofascism by Czech
historian Jaroslav Krejčí. For Krejčí, neofascism (like classic fascism) was
a form of “militant” nationalism, a “phenomenon that has become politi-
cally and sociologically significant in the 1980s and 1990s” (1995, 1). This
“militant nationalism” was characterized by policies of ethnonational dom-
inance and discrimination, irredentism, exaggerated patriotism, and author-
itarian leadership. For Krejčí, organizations such as the Alleanza Nationale
(successor to the MSI) were disguising their neofascism behind the re-
spectable veneer of democratic participation.
This brings me to the fifth and most important point: blanket application

173
of the term “neofascism” (Krejčí was guilty of this) was obfuscating what
seemed like fundamental differences between fascism and more contempo-
rary forms of the far/extreme right. As a result, as A. James Gregor polem-
ically put it,
by the mid-1990s, the entry criteria for admission into the class of
neo-fascists had become increasingly slack. Any opposition to free
immigration from anywhere and under any circumstances afforded
immediate entry—as a “racist”—into the class of neofascists. (Gre-
gor 2006, 26)
Gregor did have a point, but he overstated it. Let’s not dispense with the
term “neofascism” just yet, although clearly there is a need to proceed with
some caution.
My conceptual starting point is historian Roger Griffin’s The Nature of
Fascism, first published in 1991. In this hugely influential book Griffin
proposed one of the first schematic accounts of postwar fascism. For Grif-
fin, the fascist “minimum” takes the form of a mobilizing mythic core of
revolutionary ultra-nationalist rebirth (palingenesis). This revolutionary ul-
tra-nationalist myth was also populist in the sense that it was directed to-
ward mobilizing all authentic members of the national community. The
“fascist era” did not “conveniently” end in 1945, Griffin insisted, and he
stressed fascism’s protean quality, its “almost Darwinian capacity for
adaption to its environment” (1991, 146).
Griffin would divide postwar fascism into three schematic categories:
(1) “Nostalgic Fascism/Neo-Nazism” (basic worldview of interwar move-
ments with some adaptations), (2) “Mimetic Fascism/Neo-Nazism” (non-
cosmetic Nazism), and (3) “Neo-Fascism.” Griffin argued that his category
of neofascism captured those organizations that either introduced original
themes into major interwar permutations or rejected interwar permutations
altogether. For Griffin, the prefix “neo-” meant “offering something new
with respect to interwar phenomena”; in other words, “neofascism” was a
designation of novelty with respect to “classic” fascism (1991, 167).
Nonetheless, neofascists still retained their essential continuity with inter-
war fascism. Significantly, the (ineliminable) core of revolutionary na-
tional rebirth remained even though fascism was constantly evolving, not
only in terms of ideological content but also in terms of its multifarious or-
ganizational forms.
Griffin originally identified four neofascist subtypes: revolutionary na-
tionalism, cryptofascism, Holocaust revisionism, and “conservative revo-

174
lution” (e.g., the French nouvelle droite/European New Right). This con-
ceptualization appeared before the field of “radical right populism” was
defined by political scientists in the mid-1990s, and Griffin would only
later wrestle with the concept of “radical right-wing populism.” Come
2000, Griffin (2000, 163–178) was insisting that the term “radical right-
wing populism” was “misleading.” He opted instead for the paradoxical
term “ethnocratic liberalism”:
Another type of radical right has crept up on European society, one
which is of considerable virulence, not in its ability to destroy lib-
eralism from without, but to contaminate it from within. Some-
times called “radical right populism,” or simply “the radical right,”
its paradoxical qualities perhaps emerge more clearly in the the
term “ethnocratic liberalism.” It is a type of party politics which is
not technically a form of fascism, or even a disguised form, for it
lacks the core palingenetic vision of a “new order” totally replacing
the liberal system.
For Griffin, this “ethnocratic liberalism” constituted a “hybrid of radical
right and centre” (hence the term “radical right populism” was mislead-
ing), and it was “perfectly attuned to a post-war world hostile to unadulter-
ated fascism.” But Griffin’s take on radical right populism (unlike his con-
ceptualization of fascism) did not catch on among scholars, and “ethno-
cratic liberalism” quickly disappeared into the academic ether.
Returning to The Nature of Fascism: Griffin had been clear that his ideal
type of (neo)fascism precluded “extreme right-wing political parties whose
illiberalism on issues of race, immigration and nationalism is ‘reformist’
rather than ‘revolutionary,’ criteria which disqualify [Jean-Marie] Le Pen’s
Front National, though they may well accommodate neo-fascist elements
in both policies and support” (Griffin 1991, 161; emphasis added). This is
a very important analytical point, because while there are some obvious
limitations with Griffin’s original conceptualization—for example, he in-
cluded the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria)
and the Progress Parties in Denmark and Norway in his list of “cryptofas-
cist” parties—it allows us to tease out the interconnection between the
contemporary radical right and (neo)fascism.

THE EUROPEAN NEW RIGHT: THE MISSING LINK

Let me begin exploring this interconnection by first calling attention to Eu-

175
ropean New Right (ENR) differentialism as the missing link between radi-
cal-right wing populism and neofascism. This is not say that this link has
passed scholars by; my point is that it has not been made sufficiently ex-
plicit. My argument here does, of course, hinge on whether “neofascist” is
the most appropriate classification for the nouvelle droite (ND) (now
known as the European New Right on account of its transnational impact)
and this remains subject to considerable debate.
In his impressive work Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, Mexican-
based scholar Tamir Bar-On suggests that academic responses to the ENR
can be grouped into four categories:
(1) The ENR ideologues represent a new form of cultivated and
sinister cultural-intellectual fascism; (2) The ENR theorists have
fashioned a new political paradigm transcending the traditional
right-left dichotomy; (3) The ENR thinkers have created a unique
post-modern synthesis of an older, right-wing ideological legacy
combined with more recent and left-wing themes; and (4) The ENR
theorists have created a pervasive sense of ambiguity and confu-
sion within the scholarly community. (Bar-On 2007, 119)
Bar-On initially cautioned against any reductionist or categorical reading
of ENR intellectuals. But I would place myself squarely in the first camp.
As Bar-On (2007, 120) observed, “For this intellectual camp, the ENR’s
sophisticated metapolitical acumen paved the road towards a greater ac-
ceptance of ‘differential racism’ used so effectively by contemporary ex-
treme right-wing political parties such as France’s Front National.” In a
later study Bar-On (2013, 226) acknowledged that “these radical right par-
ties could draw on ready-made themes, discourse changes, and rhetorical
strategies crafted by ND theoreticians.” What is more, by 2015 Bar-On
had been swayed by the likes of Griffin, Mammone, and myself and con-
ceded that the nouvelle droite did represent a form of cultural or intellec-
tual neofascism (see Bar-On 2015).
The origins of the nouvelle droite/ENR reach back to the 1960s, when a
narrow circle of French neofascists, in response to their acute marginaliza-
tion, gradually adopted pan-national Europeanism, ethnic differentialist
positions, and a Gramscian-style meta-political struggle aimed at capturing
cultural power from France’s liberal-left intelligentsia. They abandoned
political struggle for cultural stuggle—in a post-Auschwitz political habit
so disadvantageous to fascist mobilization, they now saw culture as the
most effective carrier of (fascist) ideas. Encouraged by their doyen, Alain

176
de Benoist, intellectual successor to French neofascist Maurice Bardèche,
“the solution they adopted,” Roger Griffin (2006, 50) has written, “was the
deliberate creation of a new discourse which perpetuated core elements of
the fascist world view while radically dissociating them from the horrors
of World War II.” Critically, the core fascist element they now propagated
was the cultural rebirth (palingenesis) of Europe, envisaged as a post-lib-
eral, post-democratic continent comprising a federation of European ethnic
groups (“L’Europe aux Cent Drapeaux”). In many respects this quest for a
pan-European empire had its roots in the pan-European fascism of the Ital-
ian Social Republic, if not earlier in the “universal fascism” of the 1930s.
Moreover, the ENR’s vision of democracy is not modern, representative
democracy but “organic,” self-governing ethnic communities. Like classic
fascism, the ENR is fundamentally anti-liberal. Key ideological reference
points are in the German conservative revolution, that is to say, in nation-
alist writers and intellectuals of the German interwar radical right, as well
as postwar traditionalist intellectuals such as Julius Evola. In fact, since the
ENR believes “that the protagonists of history are ethnically homogeneous
communities” and a “harmonious society is one in which men define
themselves as aggressive, hierarchical and territorial—the very antithesis
of the Enlightenment conception in which human beings are born free,
equal and rational,” one scholar believes that there is very little separating
the ENR from classic fascism (Antón-Mellón 2013, 63).
Although the nouvelle droite’s pan-Europeanist vision would lack pur-
chase over more insular French ultra-nationalists, its sophisticated inver-
sion of left-wing political discourse and in particular the “right to differ-
ence” was soon absorbed by the FN. The claim that every people has a
“droit à la différence” turned the discourse of the French left on its head
by insisting that all people (including indigenous French people) had a
right to preserve their own ethnocultural identity and that to deny them
such a right was “racist” (“anti-white” racism; “anti-French” racism). This
became a central theme in FN rhetoric, used to circumvent the stigma of
racism.
It is surely mistaken to approach radical right-wing populist parties—
FN, Sweden Democrats, Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom)
in the Netherlands, FPÖ, et cetera—in isolation, as Jens Rydgren (2005)
quite rightly insisted. They are not discrete entities that emerged indepen-
dently of one another. Rather, their emergence should be understood in
terms of a series of interdependent events. For Rydgren, the critical factor
was the arrival of a potent new “master frame” that combined “cultural

177
racism” (or ethnopluralism) with populist (but not anti-democratic), anti-
establishment rhetoric. This meant that the “old,” “traditional” extreme
right could free itself from the stigma of biological racism, and also incor-
porate populist rhetoric without being stigmatized as anti-democratic. Ac-
cording to Rydgren, the “evident success of this master frame came in
1984 when the Front National got its electoral breakthrough” (2005, 428).
For Rydgren, the FN’s breakthrough (an unexpected event) set in mo-
tion a process of paradigmatic cross-national diffusion whereby other ex-
treme-right parties drew (selectively) from Le Pen’s repertoire. This devel-
opment was, as Rydgren points out, “a long process, in many ways going
back to the neo-fascist international meeting in Rome in 1950”—a
preparatory conference that would pave the way for the formation of the
European Social Movement, the first postwar neofascist “International.”
According to Rydgren (2005, 416), however, “it did not reach its refined
form until the late 1970s and 1980s under the influence of the French Nou-
velle Droite.”
French neofascist intellectual Maurice Bardèche—a founder of the Eu-
ropean Social Movement—complained that “for the majority of Fascists,
nationalism is still the mainspring of their doctrine and feelings” (quoted
in del Boca and Giovana 1970, 83). As a French-first nationalist—Les
Français d’abord being the title of his 1984 book—Jean-Marie Le Pen had
no truck with the nouvelle droite’s pan-Europeanism. Le Pen was also an
out-and-out populist who looked to the 1950s Poujadist movement for in-
spiration (in 2016, impressed by Donald Trump as the “international leader
of the populist revolt,” he would tweet: “Si j’étais américain, je voterais
Donald TRUMP”).
Le Pen’s combination of nationalism and populism would attract the
scholarly designation “national populism,” which subsequently became
pervasive among French academics as it emphasized French “exceptional-
ity” (the FN as heirs to Bonapartism, Boulangism, and Poujadism, but not
Vichy). What happened in France was that, as Mammone (2015, 7) points
out, “by playing down the importance and presence of a French fascism
and by failing to consider fascism as a wider European and transnational
phenomenon, the terms populism and national populism replace fas-
cism/neofascism as the used terminology.”
This development would have wider repercussions. The term “national
populism” was later picked up by non-French scholars and was applied to
the contemporary extreme right more generally. Historian Kevin Pass-

178
more, for instance, argued that the Europe’s “national-populist right” was
“the product of a conscious effort to update fascism, and render it viable to
changed conditions” (2002, 107). Nonetheless, this national populism was
not a modern form of fascism, a fascism lite, or a “fascism with a human
face,” because fascism’s essential totalitarian character had been removed.
Take out the totalitarian aspirations and there is no longer any fascism. For
Passmore (2002, 107), the crucial difference was that national populists
“seek to exploit the racist potential of democracy rather than overthrow it.”
Be that as it may, this should not detract us from my essential point:
alongside this national populism, Jean-Marie Le Pen appropriated the doc-
trine of ethnopluralism from the French nouvelle droite—a neofascist,
meta-political revision of fascism. Despite Alain de Benoist’s claim that he
never voted for the FN and was critical of Jean-Marie Le Pen, this appro-
priation supplied potent ideological ammunition to the FN, and then
through an ongoing process of cross-national diffusion, it had an impact
across the spectrum of the contemporary European radical right. So much
so that for Jens Rydgren, ethnopluralist doctrine became “the most distin-
guishing ideological feature of the new radical right party family” (2013,
3; emphasis added). When we accept the ENR as neofascist, this becomes
one place where neofascism—in the form of New Right differentialism—
shades into radical right-wing populism. There are, of course, other places
where this happens too.

ACTIVIST CULTURES AND ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORIES

In the final chapter to The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Anna Cento Bull
offered some reflections on neofascism. Her primary focus was the period
of the Cold War, but she did consider the nature of the extreme right today.
The question she asked was whether the extreme right constitutes a “new
beast or neo-fascism in a new guise” (Bull 2009, 601). After making the
important point that the problem with taxonomies is that they tend “to cap-
ture the nature of these parties at a particular moment but do not take into
account their development, as they can be highly opportunitistic and feely
change their policies,” she was unwilling to commit, pointing to examples
such as the Lega Nord, which did not have obvious fascist roots but
adopted ENR ideas, while others, such as the Alleanza Nazionale, with
roots in the neofascist MSI, moved beyond fascism.
The reality is that it is not a simple either/or question. Radical-right
wing populism is not neofascism (unless it is quite obviously used a cloak,

179
as in the British National Party; see Copsey 2008), yet at the same time
there is a close relationship between radical right-wing populism and neo-
fascism, which makes demarcating the difference really quite problematic.
We confront this problem in particular when it comes to activist cultures
and organizational histories. It is an undeniable fact that within the activist
cultures, there is a history of interaction between so-called radical-right ac-
tors and (neo)fascists. This interaction reveals itself through myriad forms,
through such things as multiple membership and affiliations, joint mobi-
lizations, transnational networks, social media, voicing support for particu-
lar election candidates, personal friendships, and so on.
In the case of France, the journalist Anne Tristan, who joined a local
section of the FN in Marseille, found that what united FN acivists was
“hating together” (see Tristan 1987). A landmark study of West European
extreme right-wing activists from 2006 revealed that far-right “collective
identity” was also often reinforced by the experience of encountering
stigmatization from opponents, that is to say, “being hated together makes
them love each other all the more” (Klandermans and Mayer 2006, 273).
Many clearly do think of themselves more as partners than as rivals. That
said, of course, many do not. Rival conflicts between parties and within
parties can become more significant as sources of “sub-identity.” Reading
the book Enemy of the State, by a former leader of the English Defence
League (EDL), we find an indignant Tommy Robinson (a pseudonym) in-
sisting that the anti-Islamic EDL was “never intended to be racist” and that
“we despised the BNP and other far-right groups every bit as much”
(Robinson 2015, 179).
Even so, the organizational history of the contemporary far right reveals
many instances where the new radical right and more extremist groups
cross paths. In the case of Italy, Franco Ferraresi spoke of how the two
components of the “radical” and “extreme” right had “been welded to-
gether by close tractical and strategic links, reinforced by the frequent
commuting of militants between the two.”1 In practice, therefore, “draw-
ing a neat border between the two is frequently impossible” (1996, 11).
Across the Alps in Switzerland, “public controversies have erupted at reg-
ular intervals over the relationship between right-wing populist parties to
the extreme right” (Skenderovic and Sperisen 2009, 469). In Denmark, in
2006, one newspaper claimed that four out of seven local Danish People’s
Party leaders would not stop a member of the Danish National Socialist
Movement from becoming a member of their party. Extremist elements
will sometimes locate in a party’s youth organization (e.g., Vlams Blok

180
Jongeren); even at the more moderate end of the continuum, an organiza-
tion such as the Norwegian Progress Party can attract racist and neo-Nazi
elements. In Norway during the 1990s, links were deliberately cultivated
with more hard-line groups (see Jupskås 2016). In 1996 a neo-Nazi group
infiltrated the Progress Party’s youth movement. That the terrorist Anders
Breivik had been a former member of the Progress Party further muddies
the waters. In Sweden, more extreme elements, such as the Nationalsocial-
istisk (National Socialist Front), which changed its name to the Svenskar-
nas Parti (Party for the Swedes), secured several defections of radical
right-wing Sweden Democrat councilors. If the antagonism of more ex-
treme elements is not always directed back into the liberal-democratic sys-
tem by radical right populists, how often do radical right narratives have
the opposite, radicalizing effect? How many right-wing extremists “cut
their political teeth” in radical right-wing populist parties? What role does
the non-fascist populist right play in “legitimizing and sustaining a fascist
politics in spite of their official pronouncements otherwise disassociating
themselves from fascism” (Saull 2015, 143)?
Rather than becoming overly preoccupied with “fundamental” or “es-
sential” ideological differences, should we not consider the distinction be-
tween the radical right and these more “extreme” elements as a distinction
within the extreme/far right based on divisions of labor? Such divisions do
not neccesarily require some strategic leader directing it—the puppet mas-
ter pulling the strings—but there must be a common vision, or some com-
mon belief system or orientation shared by all those on the far right. For
Tamir Bar-On (2011, 213), it was “no accident that some ND figures like
Pierre Vial moved to the FN in the early 1980s” because although they dif-
fered on tactics and specifics, they shared a fundamental ideological kin-
ship in their “antipathy for liberalism, immigration, multiculturalism and
the United States, thus making co-operation possible.” As one French far-
right activist remarked, if the nouvelle droite “explore[s] the desirable,”
then “we work in the sphere of the possible” (von Beyme 1988, 11). Far-
right activists, whether neofascist or radical right populist, do inhabit the
same attitudinal domains—domains characterized by nationalism, racism,
authoritarianism, and anti-system attitudes. For historian Geoff Eley
(2015, 109), there is “one continuity with the 1920s and 1930s that seems
powerfully secured—namely, the integral nationalism of the Volksgemein-
schaft.” And yet, nothwithstanding a few exceptions, as Bert Klandermans
and Nonna Mayer point out, far-right activists “are not admirers of Hitler
or nostalgic for the Third Reich.” What futher complicates matters is that
most will reject the “extreme” or “radical right” label altogether; the “ma-

181
jority of them do not even consider themselves as ‘extreme right’ at all”
(2006, 269).

CONCLUSION

Let us finally return to the question that was posed at the outset. It would
be wrong to simply draw a swastika on Marine Le Pen’s forehead, just as
it would be wrong to draw one on Putin’s forehead, or for that matter, one
on the forehead of Donald Trump.2 However, the term “fascism lite” is not
particularly useful, and neither is “Ur-Fascism.” We can appreciate that
these terms are well-meaning—when it comes to the F-word, “our duty is
to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances,” Eco said
in 1995—and we do need to confront the radical right as a threat to liberal
democracy. The problem is that by bandying about the F-word, we end up
with little more than a “boo-word,” expedient when it comes to polemical
name-calling but of little to no use when it comes to formulating precise
categorizations.
“Scholars focused on the study of contemporary far right parties in
Western Europe,” Leonard Weinberg noted, “have achieved something ap-
proaching a consensus on this question. They agree that whatever else they
are the parties are not fascist.” Weinberg suggests that these far-right par-
ties have opened a new chapter in the history of right-wing politics in Eu-
rope and “perhaps it is time for historians to do the same” (2006, 405). But
let us resist this temptation as well, because in opening up a new chapter,
we close our eyes to the historical significance of neofascism’s impact on
radical right populism.
Radical right-wing populism has grown in sophistication largely due to
the influence of neofascist theorists, particularly with regard to the adop-
tion of ethnopluralist discourse. Absolutely central to this development has
been the cross-national diffusion of the FN’s “master frame”—an interde-
pendent process that encouraged similar parties elsewhere. When we ac-
cept the singular contribution of neofascism (the nouvelle droite) to this
process, it surely is wrong to argue that neofascism plays a minimal role in
defining the ideological and discursive praxis of the populist radical right.
Moreover, the fact that right-wing populists feel it necessary to repeatedly
draw a clear line (in public) between themselves and the “extreme right”
also tells us much about the extent to which activists from both the pop-
ulist radical right and the (fascist) extreme right occupy shared attitudinal
domains.

182
 The point that needs to be made is that (neo)fascism shades into radical
right populism: they are not identical, but neither are they so “essentially”
or “utterly” different that imposing a break on the historical lines of conti-
nuity between “classic” fascism and the contemporary radical right is justi-
fied. That this chapter, which reinstates the link between the radical right
and fascism, should appear in a volume devoted to the radical right might
prompt political scientists (and some historians) to rethink their views on
the thorny relationship between fascism and radical-right populism. At the
very least I hope to open up a more productive dialogue where this ques-
tion is considered worthy of far more serious debate and is not so freely
dismissed.

183
NOTES

1. In his Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy After the War
(1996), Franco Ferraresi opted to restrict the use of the term “radical
right” to groups accepting the use of illegal political means, including
violence, and so ran contrary to what became the dominant orthodoxy.
2. Historian Robert Paxton comments that Trump “is playing in a disas-
trous way with a lot of rhetoric and a lot of prejudices that definitely
belong to fascist rhetoric and fascist violence.” Quoted in Chotiner
2016.
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———. 2013. “Introduction: Class Politics and the Radical Right.” In
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Saull, R. 2015. “Capitalism and the Politics of the Far Right.” In The Poli-
tics of the Right, ed. L. Panitch and G. Albo, 136–153. London: Merlin
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Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, 463–530.
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406. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag.

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CHAPTER 7

188
 THE RADICAL RIGHT AND EUROSKEPTICISM

SOFIA VASILOPOULOU
OVER the years, the European Union (EU) has evolved into a major pro-
ject of European cooperation that involves high levels of political and eco-
nomic integration among its member states. The radical right party family
has been one of the main opponents of European unification, with some of
its members openly calling for their country’s exit from the EU.1 Given
that nationalism lies at the core of the radical right’s ideology (Mudde
2007; Hainsworth 2008; Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012),
its Euroskepticism is not a terribly surprising finding. Cultural diversity
and supranational decision-making promoted by the EU run counter to the
radical right’s mission of defending the nation.
More interesting, however, are the ways in which radical right parties
have mobilized the issue of Europe with a view to improving their elec-
toral fortunes. Theories of issue competition suggest that “political
losers”—that is, parties that tend not to participate in government—have
increased incentives to change the policy agenda by introducing conflict
over a new issue dimension (Riker 1982; De Vries and Hobolt 2012). Issue
entrepreneurial strategies may include spending more time discussing a
new issue in order to signal to voters that it is core to their programmatic
agenda. They also consist of adopting a polarizing stance on the same
issue so that voters become aware of the different policy options on offer
in the political market. Such strategies allow parties to ultimately claim
ownership of this specific issue in the eyes of the voters (Petrocik 1996)
and potentially attract new voters (van de Wardt et al. 2014), especially
given the rise in electoral volatility across Europe, the declining political
significance of social class, and the increasing relevance of issue voting.
The question of Europe may be seen as central to such entrepreneurial
strategies, especially because mainstream parties of both the right and the
left have long refrained from politicizing the EU in order to avoid potential
reputational costs (Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson 2002; Whitefield and
Rohrschneider 2015). This has created a vacuum on the supply side of the
political spectrum, especially for those Euroskeptic citizens who perceive
mainstream parties as failing to address their EU-related concerns. Radical
right parties, which tend to enjoy a relatively low vote share, have strong
incentives to try to “rock the boat” by emphasizing extreme positions
(Wagner 2012) on the EU issue, responding to rising citizen demand for

189
Euroskeptic ideas.
Against this background, this chapter seeks to examine the role that the
EU issue plays in radical right party agendas by investigating issue posi-
tion and salience across time. How does the EU issue feature in the radical
right’s programmatic agenda? Do these parties follow similar EU issue en-
trepreneurial strategies or do we observe variation in their attitudes toward
the EU? Understanding the evolution of the EU issue within the radical
right is important given that these parties are increasingly becoming suc-
cessful in both national and European elections. The fact that the EU is
under serious stress (Cramme and Hobolt 2015) also provides them with
additional opportunities to further exploit the EU issue for electoral pur-
poses.
The first section of the chapter provides a short overview of the radical
right’s anti-EU argumentation, pointing to the primacy of the sovereignty
frame. Employing longitudinal data from the Chapel Hill Expert survey
(Bakker et al. 2015), I continue with an analysis of the evolution of radical
right positions on European integration, demonstrating the different policy
alternatives that these parties put forward. I proceed with an evaluation of
the extent to which such parties emphasize the EU, illustrating the chang-
ing trends of EU issue salience within the radical right party family.

A EUROPE OF NATIONS RATHER THAN A UNITED STATES OF

EUROPE

The term “Euroskepticism” is employed to denote opposition to the EU.

Taggart (1998, 366) was the first to define Euroskepticism as the “idea of
contingent or qualified opposition, as well as incorporating outright and
unqualified opposition to the process of European integration.” Taggart
and Szczerbiak in further publications (2004, 2008) refined this definition
and distinguished between hard and soft Euroskepticism. Hard Euroskepti-
cism refers to principled opposition to the EU and European integration,
and tends to be associated with support for a country’s withdrawal from
the EU. Soft Euroskepticism relates to concerns over one or more EU pol-
icy areas, which lead to contingent or qualified opposition to the EU. Soft
Euroskepticism is also identified where there is “a sense that ‘national in-
terest’ is currently at odds with the EU’s trajectory” (Taggart and Szczer-
biak 2008, 2). Although this hard-soft distinction has been applied exten-
sively in the literature on party-based Euroskepticism, it has also been the
subject of debate. Kopecky and Mudde (2002) have criticized it on the

190
grounds that it lacks specificity and can be overly inclusive. The authors
provide an alternative categorization distinguishing between diffuse and
specific support for European integration. “Euroskeptics” tend to be in
favor of the ideas underlying European integration but are pessimistic
about the EU project, whereas “Eurorejects” tend to oppose both.
Whether soft or hard, Euroskeptic or Euroreject, radical right parties
tend to articulate their anti-EU argument primarily from a sovereignty per-
spective (Vasilopoulou 2011, 234). This is because the multinational na-
ture and multilevel institutional structure of the EU go against the very
premise of radical right ideology, nationalism, which is tightly intertwined
with the principle of sovereignty. “Nationalism is typically equated with a
nation achieving independence,” that is, the ability of a nation to form an
independent and sovereign state free to govern its clearly demarcated terri-
tory (Ichijo 2009, 156). Furthermore, the EU’s supranational institutions
and decision-making structures as well as the abolition of internal border
controls among the majority of EU member states go against this principle
of a sovereign state. As a result, radical right parties view the EU as an
enemy to nation-state sovereignty: a faceless superstate that intervenes in
domestic affairs and takes power away from European states and their na-
tions. They argue that instead of constructing a “Europe of nations,” bu-
reaucrats in Brussels plan to build a “United States of Europe,” a European
superstate with excessive central governance run by unelected and unac-
countable technocrats (National Front 2012; PVV 2012; True Finns 2015;
UKIP 2015; Jobbik 2016). Some radical right parties insist on the full
renegotiation of European treaties in order to scale back EU powers and
reestablish the primacy of domestic law over European law.
Radical right parties tend to define Europe in cultural terms. They view
the continent as standing on a “tripod composed by ancient Greek democ-
racy, Roman legal tradition and Christianity” (Vasilopoulou 2010, 72–73).
This justifies a frequent radical right claim that “we are Europeans, but we
oppose the EU.” Despite these similarities, each European state has unique
norms, values, customs, practices, and beliefs that the radical right seeks to
maintain at all costs. The EU is seen as not taking these national specifici-
ties into consideration, posing a threat to each member state’s cultural ho-
mogeneity. This argument is further linked to the radical right claim that
the EU seeks to create a cultural melting pot by promoting uncontrollable
immigration from other parts of the world. The EU is deemed responsible
for the changing ethnic and demographic makeup of Europe, and ulti-
mately the continent’s “Islamization” (Vasilopoulou 2014). This is demon-

191
strated, for example, in the radical right’s opposition to the EU’s enlarge-
ment policy toward Turkey. The increase of migrants and refugees of dif-
ferent cultural backgrounds in the 2010s has allowed the radical right to
further sharpen its argument. The lack of internal border controls in the EU
is deemed responsible for what radical right parties see as the cultural, po-
litical, and ethnic elimination of European peoples by a religion considered
incompatible with Western European values and modern secular democ-
racy.
There are, however, differences in the specifics of radical right anti-EU
argumentation and the extent to which these parties choose to defend na-
tional sovereignty. Some parties, such as the British National Party, UKIP,
and the French National Front, have consistently called for a referendum
on their country’s EU membership, which gives a clear signal regarding
their wish for withdrawal. Despite the fact that Golden Dawn’s fascist ide-
ology does not sit comfortably with the principle of multilateral coopera-
tion (Vasilopoulou and Halikiopoulou 2015), the party has not actively
campaigned on the question of Greece’s EU membership; rather, the party
supports a referendum on the country’s Eurozone membership (Golden
Dawn 2016b). Eastern European radical right parties have focused their
anti-EU criticism primarily on the terms and conditions of EU accession,
arguing that it was negotiated on unfavorable terms, creating a “compara-
tive disadvantage vis-à-vis former EU member states” (Pirro 2014, 259;
see also Sygkelos 2015). Parties such as the Hungarian Jobbik, the Slovak
National Party, and the Bulgarian National Union Attack view the EU as a
vehicle for Western power domination. Jobbik (2016), for example, rec-
ommends a policy of “opening to the East,” building closer links with “the
Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East, Iran as well as the eco-
nomically emerging countries of Africa.”
The European debt crisis has contributed to further differences in radical
right Euroskeptic argumentation, as each member state has had a different
involvement in the crisis and its resolution. Parties in comparatively richer
Western European countries, such as France, the United Kingdom, and
Scandinavia, have broadened their discourse to criticize the EU not only
on sovereignty but also on utilitarian grounds. They argue that the EU no
longer offers good value for the money member states must contribute. Eu-
ropean nation-states should save by terminating their net contribution to
the EU budget and invest instead in the national welfare state, including
health and education. They should also improve the employment prospects
of national workers by terminating EU freedom of movement. Such poli-

192
cies would restore the national economy and enhance the well-being of the
nation-state’s citizens. For example, the National Front (2012) argues that
despite the fact that France is the second-highest contributor to the EU
budget, the country does not benefit as much from its access to the single
market and its Eurozone membership. The Sweden Democrats (2014) sug-
gest—similarly to UKIP (2015)—that the Swedish contribution to the EU
should instead be spent on national welfare. On the other hand, parties in
debtor countries, such as Greece, tend to portray the EU in power terms.
Especially since the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis, they see it as a vehi-
cle for German hegemony imposing austerity measures that are detrimen-
tal to the national economy (Golden Dawn 2016a; Kozan 2014). Like par-
ties in Central and Eastern Europe, they also recommend the improvement
of diplomatic and economic ties with other non-EU-member states, such as
Russia and China (LAOS 2012; Golden Dawn 2016a).
In sum, radical right Euroskepticism is primarily framed in terms of sov-
ereignty. The EU is portrayed as encouraging globalization and multicul-
turalism, which poses a threat to national sovereignty as well as the cul-
tural homogeneity of European nation-states. Beyond this common thread,
there is variation in the specificities of Euroskeptic argumentation depend-
ing on geography and, more recently, depending on a country’s experience
of the Eurozone debt crisis. It is noteworthy that the 2016 UK Brexit refer-
endum outcome has encouraged some radical right parties, such as the Ital-
ian Northern League, the Danish People’s Party, the Sweden Democrats,
and the Dutch Freedom Party, to call for EU referendums in their respec-
tive countries. This suggests that parties are taking a tougher EU stance
and that the question of EU membership is becoming more prominent in
their programmatic agenda, which I explore in the following section
through the framework of issue ownership.

EUROSKEPTICISM AND ISSUE OWNERSHIP

Theories of issue competition postulate two faces of party competition:

issue conflict and issue salience (Guinaudeau and Persico 2014). A key
tenet of such theories is that niche parties (that is, non-mainstream parties)
are likely to emphasize extreme positions in order to achieve ideological
distinctiveness (Wagner 2012; see also Adams et al. 2006). European inte-
gration is a relatively new issue in European politics, allowing for such
policy differentiation. Issues arising from European integration have not
been easily assimilated into existing dimensions of political contestation.

193
Mainstream parties, which tend to regularly participate in government, pri-
marily compete on the left-right dimension. They have few incentives to
politicize the EU (Hix and Lord 1997; Hix 1999; Hooghe, Marks, and Wil-
son 2002), not least because they may face reputational costs by stressing
their positions on a new issue (Whitefield and Rohrschneider 2015).
Niche parties, such as those belonging to the radical right party family,
on the other hand, have strong incentives to emphasize extreme positions
on the EU issue, calculating that this may result in an electoral advantage
(Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson 2002; Marks, Wilson, and Ray 2002). The
lack of mainstream party politicization of the EU has left a political void to
be exploited by such “issue entrepreneurs” (De Vries and Hobolt 2012). At
the same time, policies deriving from European integration sit uncomfort-
ably with the radical right’s quest for defending national culture and state
sovereignty (Vasilopoulou 2011). In other words, Euroskepticism comes at
no ideological cost for these parties while at the same time promising high
electoral returns.
But given that immigration is the core radical right issue (van der Brug
and Fennema 2007), do these parties seek to also “own” the EU issue? If
they did, we would expect them not only to adopt a polarizing position on
the EU but also to emphasize such an extreme stance. We would also ex-
pect that such a strategy would intensify over time. This is because there is
more to gain from such a mobilization in a context of “constraining dis-
sensus”—that is, in times when citizens have developed preferences over
EU integration but mainstream parties have not necessarily caught up with
them (Hooghe and Marks 2009). Developments from the mid-2000s on-
ward, such as the failed ratification of the treaty establishing the European
Constitution and the debates surrounding the Lisbon Treaty, increased the
salience of the EU. The Eurozone crisis and the discussions around its res-
olution provided EU issue entrepreneurs with additional opportunities.
Against this background, I employ data from the Chapel Hill Expert
Survey (Bakker et al. 2015) in order to examine the role that the EU issue
plays in radical right party agendas by investigating issue position and
salience across time. In this survey, country experts on political parties are
invited to place the overall orientation of party leadership toward European
integration on a 7-point scale, where 1 indicates strong opposition to the
EU and 7 strong support; a 4 denotes the neutral position on this dimen-
sion. Experts are also invited to mark the relative salience of European in-
tegration in the party’s public stance on an 11-point scale, where 0 denotes
that European integration is of no importance (that is, it is never men-

194
tioned) and 10 that European integration is the most important issue. This
survey has been conducted five times (1999, 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014),
thus providing longitudinal data that allow the examination of changes
over time in EU positions and salience. Not all parties are included in
every year of the expert survey.

Radical Right EU Positions over Time

The first face of issue competition relates to issue position and conflict
(Guinaudeau and Persico 2014). In a context of a pro-EU mainstream party
status quo, if a party perceives the EU as an issue worth competing on, it is
likely to adopt a Euroskeptic position. Figure 7.1 depicts radical right party
positions on the EU and left-right dimensions. Each image in the figure
shows radical right positions per survey year. Somewhat unsurprisingly,
all parties are situated on the right end of the left-right dimension, so the x-
axis of Figure 7.1 commences at value 5. Parties such as the French Na-
tional Front, the British National Party, the Belgian Flemish Interest, the
Hungarian Jobbik, the League of Polish Families, and the Greek Golden
Dawn as well as the German parties (Republikaner, German People’s
Union, and National Democratic Party of Germany) score particularly high
on this dimension. The Danish People’s Party appears to have moved
slightly toward the center of the dimension, from 8.85 in 1999 and 2002 to
6.9 in 2014. Similarly, the Greater Romania Party has moved from 8.55 in
1999 to 5.63 in 2010. The opposite is true for UKIP, which has moved to
the right, from 7.24 in 1999 to 9.14 in 2014. The True Finns and the Bul-
garian National Union Attack appear to be comparatively more centrist,
scoring very close to the middle of the dimension.
Somewhat contrary to expectations, not all radical right parties put for-
ward extreme Euroskeptic positions. Whereas in 1999 all radical right par-
ties included in the sample scored below the neutral point of the EU di-
mension (4), in the following years some parties scored above the neutral
point, expressing support for the EU. Radical right parties with favorable
EU positions include the Italian National Alliance and the Latvian For Fa-
therland and Freedom/National Alliance2 in all survey years, as well as the
Polish Law and Justice in 2002 and the Romanian Freedom Party in
2006.3 The most Euroskeptic parties are the Greek Golden Dawn, the
French National Front, the League of Polish Families, the True Finns,
UKIP, the Dutch Freedom Party, and the German parties, scoring consis-
tently between 1 and 2 on the EU dimension. Some radical right parties

195
maintain a Euroskeptic position but are not positioned at the extreme end
of the EU dimension. For example, the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally, the
Flemish Interest, the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List, the Slovak National Party,
and the Polish Law and Justice score between 2 and 3.5 on the EU dimen-
sion.

FIGURE 7.1 Far Right Party Positions on European Integration and Left-
Right Dimensions of Competition (1999–2014).
Source: Chapel Hill Expert Survey 1999–2014 trend file (Baker et al.
2015).
Note: EU position is measured as the overall orientation of party lead-

196
 ership in each survey year, where 1 denotes strongly opposed to and 7
strongly in favor of European integration. Position on the left-right di-
mension is measured as the party’s overall ideological stance in each
survey year, where 0 indicates extreme left and 10 extreme right.
Given that all parties depicted are situated on the right end of the left-
right dimension, the x-axis commences at value 5.
Vasilopoulou (2011) has provided a typology allowing the categoriza-
tion of such different positions on the EU. “Rejectionist” Euroskeptics de-
nounce the principle of multilateral cooperation in the context of the EU
project; they also criticize EU policy and are vehemently opposed to any
future European integration. Parties in this category include the French
National Front, the British National Party, and UKIP. “Conditional” Eu-
roskeptics are in favor of the principle of European cooperation but oppose
EU policy and institutional practice, and are against the making of an EU
polity. Such parties include the Austrian Freedom Party, the Danish Peo-
ple’s Party, and the Bulgarian National Union Attack. “Compromising”
Euroskeptics accept the principle and practice of EU cooperation but op-
pose future integration. These are the Italian National Alliance and the Lat-
vian For Fatherland and Freedom/National Alliance.4
If we accept that positions between 1 and 2 denote strong opposition to
the EU, then it is clear that the number of parties included in the survey
with such positions has increased over time. In 1999, six radical right par-
ties scored between 1 and 2; four did so in 2002, seven in 2006, and eight
in 2010. In 2014, the number of radical right parties that strongly opposed
European integration rose to twelve. This partly reflects the increasing rel-
evance of such actors. For example, the German National Democratic
Party and the Greek Golden Dawn were included in the survey for the first
time in 2014. It is also representative of the fact that—despite variations—
radical right parties have hardened their EU positions over time. The aver-
age score of radical right parties on the EU dimension was 2.01 in 1999; it
rose to 2.83 in 2002, with radical right parties becoming on average
slightly more pro-EU, but then declined to 2.49 in both 2006 and 2010,
and dropped further to 2.07 in 2014.5
But how extreme are these radical right positions? To answer this ques-
tion, I have estimated the difference of each radical right party’s position
from the party system mean on the EU dimension. This was calculated ex-
cluding the radical right party or parties from the country mean estimate. A
negative sign indicates that the country mean is more pro-EU compared to

197
the radical right party. Table 7.1 shows the difference from the country
mean in two survey years, 2006 and 2014, which have been chosen in
order to capture potential change in polarization before and after the Euro-
zone crisis. In 2006, the smallest difference from the party system mean is
observed in the case of the Italian National Alliance at -0.59, followed by
For Fatherland and Freedom/National Alliance at -0.94. This is expected
given that, as mentioned above, these two parties tend to consistently hold
pro-EU attitudes. The largest difference from the country average is ob-
served in the case of the Bulgarian National Union Attack at -3.97, fol-
lowed by the True Finns at -3.94 and the French National Front at -3.87.
The pattern slightly changes in 2014, but note that this is also because
more parties are included in the sample. One very interesting finding is
that the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom/National Alliance has be-
come more pro-EU in comparison to the party system mean by about one
point. The party with the largest difference from the party mean in 2014 is
UKIP at -4.34, followed by Jobbik at -4.27. In 2006, a total of ten parties
had a distance from their party system mean of more than three points.
This number rose to twelve parties in 2014. This illustrates that party sys-
tem polarization on the EU dimension has become more pronounced
across EU member states. Some parties, such as the Danish People’s Party,
the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally, and the Slovak National Party, have
maintained a relatively small distance from the party system mean (about
two points) in both years.
Table 7.1 EU Position Distance from the Party System Mean per
Radical Right Party, 2006 and 2014
Dis- Dis- Com-
Coun- Abbrevia- tance tance pari-
try tion Party 2006 2014 son
Austria FPÖ Austrian Freedom Party −3.80 −3.78 −0.02
BZO Alliance for the Future −3.05 −2.98 −0.07
of Austria
Bel- VB Flemish Interest −3.39 −3.05 −0.34
gium
Bul- NOA National Union Attack −3.97 −3.95 −0.01
garia
Den- DF Danish People’s Party −1.80 −2.55 0.75
mark

198
Finland PS True Finns −3.94 −3.71 −0.23
France FN National Front −3.87 −3.94 0.07
Ger- NPD National Democratic n/a −3.10 n/a
many Party of Germany
Greece LAOS Popular Orthodox Rally −1.61 −1.66 0.05
GD Golden Dawn n/a −3.80 n/a
ANEL Independent Greeks n/a −2.69 n/a
Hun- Jobbik Jobbik n/a −4.27 n/a
gary
Italy AN National Alliance −0.59 n/a n/a
LN Northern League −3.84 −3.18 −0.66
Latvia TB- For Fatherland and Free- −0.94 0.99 −1.93
LNNK/NA dom/National Alliance
Nether- PVV Party for Freedom −3.14 −3.53 0.39
lands
Poland PiS Law and Justice Party −1.36 −0.94 −0.42
LPR League of Polish Fami- −3.48 n/a n/a
lies
Roma- PRM Greater Romania Party −2.24 n/a n/a
nia
Slova- SNS Slovak National Party −1.73 −2.76 1.03
kia
Swe- SD Sweden Democrats n/a −3.53 n/a
den
UK UKIP United Kingdom Inde- −3.73 −4.34 0.60
pendence Party
Note: Negative signs in the “distance” columns indicate that the country
mean is more pro-EU compared to the domestic radical right party or
parties. Negative signs in the “comparison” column indicate that the dis-
tance from the party system mean decreased in 2014 compared to 2006.
Source: Bakker et al. 2015.

199
 The last column of Table 7.1 reports the change of this difference. A
positive value denotes an increase in the difference between the party’s
Euroskeptic score and the party system mean in 2014 compared to 2006,
that is, larger polarization on the EU dimension. A negative value signifies
a decrease in this difference. The comparison illustrates that polarization
has decreased in seven countries, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria,
Finland, Italy, Latvia, and Poland. EU polarization has increased in six
countries: Denmark, France, Greece, Netherlands, Slovakia, and the
United Kingdom. The most pronounced decrease is observed in Latvia at
-1.93 and Italy at -0.66, whereas the most noticeable increase is seen in
Slovakia, Denmark, and the United Kingdom at 1.03, 0.75, and 0.6, re-
spectively. Note that I am unable to provide such calculations for new par-
ties included for the first time in the 2014 sample, such as the Greek
Golden Dawn and the Independent Greeks, the Sweden Democrats, the
German National Democratic Party, and Jobbik. Yet the electoral success
of these radical right actors entails that polarization on the EU dimension
has increased in Greece, Sweden, Germany, and Hungary.
Overall, the radical right stance on European integration displays great
variation, with some parties strongly opposing the EU and others present-
ing relatively centrist or even pro-EU positions. The average score of radi-
cal right parties on the EU dimension tends to decrease over time, which
illustrates that these parties have hardened their stance. Radical right party
positions tend to be quite distant from the party system mean and—despite
noticeable exceptions—this distance tends to increase over time. These
findings support the assumption that radical right parties engage in EU
issue competition by adopting extreme positions, albeit to differing ex-
tents.

EU Issue Salience on Radical Right Agendas

The second face of issue competition relates to salience (Guinaudeau and
Persico 2014). Beyond adopting an extreme position on a specific issue in
order to signal disagreement over policy alternatives, an issue entrepreneur
should also indicate that this issue is important and that citizens should
take it into consideration when voting. In other words, conflict over an
issue is unlikely to be electorally fruitful unless an issue is salient. As ar-
gued above, mainstream parties have avoided the politicization of Euro-
pean integration (Hooghe et al. 2002; Whitefield and Rohrschneider 2015).
In an environment of low EU politicization, an EU issue entrepreneur is
likely to put strong emphasis on this issue during electoral campaigns so

200
that voters associate the EU with this actor. To what extent, then, is the EU
issue salient in radical right parties’ programmatic agendas?
Table 7.2 shows the relative salience of the issue of European integra-
tion among radical right parties. Scores can range between 0, which indi-
cates that European integration is of no importance to the party, and 10,
which suggests that European integration is the most important issue. One
key observation from Table 7.2 is that the salience of the EU issue in these
parties’ programmatic agendas has been steadily increasing over time,
which clearly suggests that the radical right is to some extent responsible
for the rising levels of public Euroskepticism across the EU (Gómez-Reino
and Llamazares 2013). The EU was very important for only a few radical
right parties in 1999. The Danish People’s Party, UKIP, and the French
National Front exhibited the highest EU salience scores at 6.43, 6.25, and
6.07, respectively. The lowest EU salience scores are observed among Ital-
ian and Belgian radical right parties. In 2002, the highest scores of EU
salience jumped to 8.47 and 8.10 for the French National Front and the
League of Polish Families, respectively. In fact, from 2002 onward no
party scores below 2, and those parties that score close to 2 include the
Belgian National Front and Flemish Interest.
Table 7.2 Radical Right Party Scores on EU Salience, 1999–2014
EU Issue Salience—Chapel
Hill Expert Survey Year
Coun- Abbrevia-
try tion Party 1999 2002 2006 2010 2014
Austria FPÖ Austrian Free- 5.00 7.93 6.27 7.38 6.70
dom Party
BZO Alliance for the 5.83 5.64 4.78
Future of Aus-
tria
Bel- VB Flemish Interest 1.94 2.43 3.67 4.22 4.60
gium
FN-BEL National Front 1.56 2.82
Bul- NOA National Union 5.47 4.85 4.59
garia Attack
Den- DF Danish People’s 6.43 6.67 5.20 6.67 7.27
mark Party

201
Finland PS True Finns 8.80 8.67 8.20
France FN National Front 6.07 8.47 7.40 7.41 8.46
MN National Re- 5.71
publican Move-
ment
Ger- REP Republikaner 3.54
many
DVU German Peo- 3.75
ple’s Union
NPD National Demo- 5.10
cratic Party of
Germany
Greece LAOS Popular Ortho- 6.20 7.58 5.38
dox Rally
GD Golden Dawn 4.44
ANEL Independent 4.88
Greeks
Hun- Jobbik Jobbik 5.69 6.79
gary
MIEP Hungarian Jus- 7.17
tice and Life
Party
Italy AN National Al- 2.50 5.23 4.17 5.00
liance
MS Tricolor Flame 1.25
Social Move-
ment
LN Northern 2.08 5.47 6.67 5.93 8.86
League
Latvia TB- For Fatherland 5.83 4.17 5.19 6.80
LNNK/NA and Free-
dom/National
Alliance

202
 Nether- PVV Party for Free- 7.33 8.10 8.36
lands dom
LPF Pim Fortuyn 5.57
List
Poland PiS Law and Justice 5.43 6.27 7.33 5.65
Party
LPR League of Pol- 8.10 7.10 6.67
ish Families
Roma- PRM Greater Roma- 4.23 5.67 3.68
nia nia Party
Slova- SNS Slovak National 3.60 3.80 4.00 5.43
kia Party
Swe- SD Sweden De- 6.15 6.14
den mocrats
UK BNP British National 7.56
Party
UKIP United King- 6.25 10.00 10.00 9.14
dom Indepen-
dence Party
Note: The relative salience of European integration in the party’s public
stance is measured on an 11-point scale, where 0 denotes that European
integration is of no importance (i.e., never mentioned) and 10 that Euro-
pean integration is the most important issue.
Source: Bakker et al. 2015.
If we assume that a score higher than 7 denotes strong emphasis on the
EU issue, then we see that the number of parties that focus on the EU rela-
tive to other issues has increased over time. In 2002 four parties scored
over 7; in 2006 the number of such parties rose to five and in 2010 to
eight, and in 2014 it dropped to six. It must be noted that the lowest
salience score per survey year is increasing, indicating that radical right
parties increasingly think that the EU is of more importance. The lowest
EU salience scores were 1.94 in 1999, 2.43 in 2002, 3.67 in 2006, 2.82 in
2010, and 4.44 in 2014. Radical right parties that have consistently in-
creased their emphasis on the EU include the Northern League, the Party
for Freedom, the Flemish Interest, and the Slovak National Party (although

203
the last two attach less significance to the EU compared to other radical
right parties). The Danish People’s Party, the True Finns, the French Na-
tional Front, the Northern League, the Party for Freedom, and UKIP politi-
cize the EU the most.
So far I have established that the EU issue is highly salient within the
radical right’s programmatic agenda. But how does the importance of the
EU fare against other policy issues? To answer this question, I compare
the emphasis that radical right parties place on the EU to issues pertaining
to the GAL-TAN dimension in 2014, where “GAL” stands for “Green, al-
ternative, and libertarian” and “TAN” stands for “traditional, authoritarian,
and nationalist” (see Table 7.3). I do so because radical right parties pri-
marily politicize sociocultural issues related to national identity, which are
captured by this GAL-TAN dimension (Hooghe et al. 2002; Rydgren
2007). Table 7.3 shows that both dimensions are highly salient within the
radical right. The last column of Table 7.3 reports the difference in
salience between the EU and GAL-TAN dimensions. Positive values indi-
cate that the EU dimension is more important to the party compared to the
GAL-TAN dimension. The comparison shows that six out of nineteen par-
ties focus more on the EU than on identity politics. These include the Dan-
ish People’s Party, the French National Front, the Northern League, For
Fatherland and Freedom/National Alliance, the Party for Freedom, and
UKIP. In fact, the Dutch Freedom Party emphasizes the EU almost twice
as much as it focuses on the GAL-TAN dimension. Interestingly, despite
the fact that the Greek Golden Dawn’s EU position is quite extreme at 1.1,
its salience score is the lowest compared to other radical right parties, at
4.44. The party scores the highest negative difference compared to its em-
phasis of the GAL-TAN dimension, at -3.78.
In sum, EU salience has increased over time, with some radical right
parties emphasizing the EU more compared to the GAL-TAN dimension.
This suggests that radical right parties engage in EU issue competition not
just by adopting extreme positions but also by increasingly emphasizing
these positions over time.
Table 7.3 EU Salience Compared to the Salience of the GAL-TAN
Dimension, 2014
GAL-
EU TAN Dif-
Coun- Abbrevia- Salience Salience fer-
try tion Party 2014 2014 ence

204
Austria FPÖ Austrian Freedom 6.70 7.00 −0.30
Party
BZO Alliance for the Fu- 4.78 5.70 −0.92
ture of Austria
Bel- VB Flemish Interest 4.60 6.00 −1.40
gium
Bul- NOA National Union At- 4.59 7.50 −2.91
garia tack
Den- DF Danish People’s 7.27 7.22 0.05
mark Party
Finland PS True Finns 8.20 8.56 −0.36
France FN Front National 8.46 7.83 0.63
Ger- NPD National Democra- 5.10 7.50 −2.40
many tic Party of Ger-
many
Greece LAOS Popular Orthodox 5.38 6.78 −1.40
Rally
GD Golden Dawn 4.44 8.22 −3.78
ANEL Independent Greeks 4.88 6.78 −1.90
Hun- Jobbik Jobbik 6.79 7.38 −0.60
gary
Italy LN Northern League 8.86 7.17 1.69
Latvia TB- For Fatherland and 6.80 6.67 0.13
LNNK/NA Freedom/National
Alliance
Nether- PVV Party for Freedom 8.36 4.89 3.47
lands
Poland PiS Law and Justice 5.65 8.35 −2.71
Party
Slova- SNS Slovak National 5.43 7.79 −2.36
kia Party
Swe- SD Sweden Democrats 6.14 8.38 −2.24
den

205
 UK UKIP United Kingdom 9.14 8.14 1.00
Independence Party
Note: The GAL-TAN dimension ranges from Green/alternative/libertar-
ian (GAL) to traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (TAN) values. The
salience of this dimension is measured on a 10-point scale, where 1 de-
notes no importance and 10 denotes great importance. Positive values
on the “difference” column denote higher salience of the EU dimension.
Source: Bakker et al. 2015.

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, I have analyzed Euroskepticism within the radical right

party family using the framework of issue ownership. The intention was to
examine the ways in which the radical right employs the EU in the two
faces of party competition, issue conflict and issue salience (Guinaudeau
and Persico 2014). I have shown that despite the fact that radical right par-
ties tend to adopt dissimilar positions on the principle, practice, and future
of European integration, they all tend to criticize the EU through a pre-
dominantly sovereignty-based perspective justified on ethnocultural
grounds. The EU is portrayed as posing a threat to national sovereignty, its
policies dismantling the state and its territory as well as being responsible
for the cultural disintegration of Europe and its nation-states. Overall, there
is a great degree of variation in radical right party positions on European
integration. Crucially, however, these positions are increasingly becoming
harder and more extreme. This is also true with regard to EU salience: rad-
ical right parties have been strengthening their emphasis on the EU issue
over time. These findings support the assumption that radical right parties
engage in EU issue competition not only by adopting extreme positions
but also by increasing the emphasis they attach to these positions (Wagner
2012).
These findings have important implications related to the increasing
success of the radical right and the future of the EU. First, in a context of
rising public Euroskepticism and disillusionment with economic crisis and
EU politics, EU issue entrepreneurs are likely to benefit substantially. Sov-
ereignty frames of Euroskepticism are likely to be successful, especially in
a political context of deteriorating economic conditions across the EU and
increased competition with EU migrants for jobs and social welfare. Spe-
cific questions that arise in this regard relate to whether radical right par-

206
ties respond to or shape citizen views (Steenbergen et al. 2007) and
whether there is a relationship between toughening a party’s EU position
and increasing EU salience. At the same time, if we accept that emphasiz-
ing extreme positions contributes to electoral success, why have some rad-
ical right parties chosen not to put forward an extreme Euroskeptic posi-
tion? Research has shown that the Italian National Alliance’s EU attitude
is intertwined with the party’s modernization (Vasilopoulou 2010). Espe-
cially interesting would be an analysis of the Latvian For Fatherland and
Freedom/National Alliance, which is one of the most pro-EU radical right
parties despite being loyal to its right-wing populist ideology. From a party
competition perspective, it would also be useful to examine the impact of
radical right parties on the other parties’ EU stances across Europe. In
what ways do parties respond to radical right Euroskepticism? Does this
response depend on factors such as party type, size, and government sta-
tus?
Second, radical right parties tend to primarily criticize the constitutional
framework of the EU rather than specific policies. The polity-policy dis-
tinction (Mair 2007) is crucial here: emphasizing extreme EU positions en-
tails that these parties criticize the EU as a whole, that is, attack the EU
polity. In other words, the focus of discussion lies not on the kind of EU
that is desirable but on whether European integration is an attractive option
in the first place. Even when radical right parties criticize EU freedom of
movement, which arguably pertains to specific policies (such as access to
European labor markets, employment, and welfare), they do so by focus-
ing on the constitutional framework of the EU polity, that is, how much
decision-making authority is acceptable to be given to the EU. To address
such criticisms, it does not suffice to change policy direction. Rather, it is
essential to make institutional changes with substantial consequences on
the balance of power between the EU and its member states. This points to
the possibility of differentiated integration (Leruth and Lord 2015) becom-
ing the norm in EU politics, as a response to the radical right Euroskeptic
challenge.

207
NOTES

1. Although the main focus of this contribution is on the radical right, I

also include references to more extreme variants of the far right party
family, including the Greek Golden Dawn and the Hungarian Jobbik.
2. For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK dissolved in 2011 and merged
into the National Alliance. From 2010 onward, it features as National
Alliance in the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys (Bakker et al. 2015). In
this contribution, I refer to it as For Fatherland and Freedom/National
Alliance.
3. I have included the Italian National Alliance and Polish Law and Jus-
tice in this contribution. Despite the fact that the National Alliance un-
derwent change during the 2000s under the leadership of Gianfranco
Fini, the party has fascist roots (Caiani and Conti 2014; Ignazi 2005).
Law and Justice’s national-conservative populist ideology entails that
the party has made frequent appeals to illiberal democracy (Pankowski
and Kormak 2013).
4. In Italy we observe an interesting phenomenon: while the Italian Na-
tional Alliance became more pro-EU over time, from 3.66 in 1999,
4.31 in 2002, and 4.75 in 2006 to 5.75 in 2010, the Italian Northern
League hardened its opposition during the same period, from 3.16 in
1999, 2.31 in 2002, 1.5 in 2006, and 2.66 in 2010 to 1.14 in 2014.
This indicates that the Northern League progressively occupied the
right-wing Euroskeptic space, whereas the post-fascist National Al-
liance moved to the center (Caiani and Conti 2014).
5. Note that the number of parties in each survey year varies. For the full
list of parties included in the estimates, see Table 7.2.
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P A R T II

213
ISSUES

214
CHAPTER 8

215
 EXPLAINING ELECTORAL SUPPORT FOR THE RADICAL RIGHT

KAI ARZHEIMER
WITHIN the larger field of radical right studies, the question of why peo-
ple vote for radical right parties (RRPs) has attracted a large (perhaps dis-
proportionately so) chunk of scholarly attention. There are at least three
reasons for this. First, the early and rather humble electoral successes of
the radical right in Western Europe during the early 1980s stirred memo-
ries of the 1920 and 1930s, when parties such as the Italian Fascists or the
German Nazis rose from obscurity to overturn democracy (Prowe 1994).
Given these traumatic experiences, scholars were understandably eager to
analyze the motives behind such potentially fatal electoral choices.
Second, when it became increasingly clear that the most electorally suc-
cessful of these RRPs were not just clones of the old fascist right of the in-
terwar years but rather belonged to a new party family (Mudde 1996), re-
searchers wanted to understand the social forces that brought about the rise
of this largely unexpected phenomenon. After all, even non-extremist
RRPs are still widely seen as problematic, because they promote a political
ideal that has been dubbed “illiberal democracy” (Mudde 2007), and they
often disrupt the political process.
Third, support for the radical right displays an unusual degree of varia-
tion across time and space. In Southern Europe, Cyprus (until 2016),
Malta, Portugal, and Spain never had relevant RRPs, whereas RRPs have
been more or less consistently successful in Austria, Denmark, France,
Italy, Norway, and Switzerland. Electoral support for the radical right has
been volatile in Germany, Greece, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In
the Netherlands, which featured extremist but tiny right-wing parties in the
1980s and 1990s, modern RRPs emerged only in the early 2000s. As of
2016, the radical right Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom) is
the country’s largest political party in terms of voting intentions. Belgium
provides perhaps the most striking example of variability: while the Wal-
loon National Front always remained at the margins in Wallonia, the
Vlaams Blok (later Vlaams Belang) went from strength to strength in the
Flemish part of the country during the 1990s and early 2000s, but lost
roughly three-quarters of its support between 2004 and 2014. To summa-
rize, there is ample reason for treating support for the radical right as an
unusual and potentially even dangerous phenomenon.
The most obvious way to study radical right voting would be to apply

216
the standard tools of electoral research. Modern election studies usually
rely on an eclectic blend of variables and alleged mechanisms, but at the
core there is usually the assumption that voters respond to both short-term
factors (candidates and political issues) and long- to medium-term forces
(party loyalties, value orientations, ideological convictions, and group
memberships). Almost sixty years ago, Angus Campbell and his associates
(Campbell et al. 1960) proposed a conceptual framework that encompasses
these and other variables: in their “funnel of causality” metaphor, the prox-
imate determinants of a given electoral choice are causally linked to more
distant antecedents, forming a “funnel” that gets wider as more-stable atti-
tudes and earlier events are considered. Decades of criticism notwithstand-
ing, this framework still explicitly or implicitly undergirds most empirical
research into voting behavior.
In the subfield of radical right voting, however, researchers habitually
seem to ignore most of what constitutes the “normal science” (Kuhn 1962)
of electoral research, either because they are unaware of it or because they
are chiefly interested in “deeper” explanations that are located toward the
far side of the funnel. Nonetheless, the funnel metaphor still provides a
useful template for organizing and comparing competing and complemen-
tary explanations for radical right electoral support.
However, the distinction between “supply-side” and “demand-side” fac-
tors, which can be traced back to an early article by Klaus von Beyme
(1988), proved to be a much more popular schema for structuring potential
explanations. Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear what is meant by “sup-
ply” and “demand” in this context and whether these two exhaust the full
set of relevant factors, although the dichotomy has a certain heuristic
value. The notion of a “supply side” usually refers to all variables pertain-
ing to the RRP itself. This includes, but is not limited to, the stylistic and
substantive content of the party manifesto and other texts, speeches, or
statements produced by the party; the party’s organizational structure and
resources; and the presence or absence of a “charismatic leader.” The “de-
mand side,” on the other hand, encompasses traits, experiences, and atti-
tudes that may predispose voters to support an RRP.
A number of other relevant factors, however, do not sit easily within the
confines of this dichotomy. The ideological positions of mainstream right
parties, for instance, could be considered part of the “supply” in a wider
sense, but the same is not true for institutional variables such as the elec-
toral system or the degree of decentralization. These features of the wider
political system may explain why would-be political entrepreneurs decide

217
to enter the political arena to provide a RRP supply, or why a given de-
mand for RRP policies may help or hurt the mainstream right parties. Put
differently, many institutional factors should be seen as mediators of both
supply and demand rather than as members of either category. Other sys-
tem-level variables—most prominently unemployment and immigration—
are best understood as distal causes of demand, or as an incentives to pro-
vide supply.
Therefore, it seems more fruitful to distinguish between variables on the
micro, meso, and macro levels, and the remainder of this chapter will pro-
ceed accordingly. Most approaches, however, more or less explicitly fol-
low the logic of a multilevel explanation (Coleman 1994), requiring occa-
sional cross-references between the sections.
The literature on this topic is already vast and keeps on growing
quickly. My self-consciously eclectic bibliography on the radical right in
Europe (http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/extreme-right-western-europe-
bibliography), which is nowhere near complete, currently stands at more
than six hundred titles. The literature review in this chapter is therefore by
necessity highly selective and idiosyncratic: I will focus on (Western) Eu-
rope, and on a small number of contributions that I consider landmarks.
Although comparative multilevel analyses are now something like the gold
standard in the field, I will also consider single-country case studies pre-
senting results that (probably) generalize beyond the polity in question, or
designs that are of a more general interest. Moreover, while there is always
the danger of aggregation bias lurking in the background, I will frequently
discuss findings from field-defining aggregate studies, without reiterating
the usual warnings about the ecological fallacy (Robinson 1950) time and
again.

MICRO-LEVEL FACTORS

Party Identification
Party identification is arguably the most important factor when it comes to
explaining voting decisions, but it is conspicuously underrepresented in the
literature on the radical right. One possible explanation for this is the fact
that party identification is supposed to be acquired over years, if not
decades, of political socialization. As many RRPs rose to prominence only
in the 1980s and 1990s, identification with them could hardly be a major
factor behind their ascendancy. As a consequence, most early studies com-

218
pletely ignored party identification, and one of the few assessing its effect
(based on data from the mid-1990s) concluded that “the identification mo-
tive is clearly significantly under-represented among VB [Vlaams Blok]
voters” (Swyngedouw 2001, 228).
A more modern approach highlights the negative effect of identifica-
tions with other parties. Building on the notion (derived from the older lit-
erature, e.g., Kitschelt 1995 and Ignazi 2003) that the rise of the radical
right became possible only once there was a sufficiently large pool of vot-
ers who were no longer attached to any of the established parties,
Arzheimer and Carter (2009a) focus on (the lack of) identifications with
mainstream right-wing parties. Using data from the 2002–2003 wave of
the European Social Survey, they demonstrate that voters who are still at-
tached to a Christian Democratic or conservative party almost never vote
for a radical right party. Put differently, they see the absence of other iden-
tifications as a necessary (if insufficient) precondition for voting for a radi-
cal right party. However, some of the most successful RRPs (e.g., the
French National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Danish People’s
Party, or the Norwegian Progress Party) have been electorally relevant for
two decades or more now, so the impact of identifying with the RRP
should be modeled, too, but very few studies (e.g., Arzheimer 2009b) ac-
count for this potential positive effect of party identification.

Candidates: The (Ir)relevance of Charismatic Leaders

While party identifications have been more or less neglected as a key ex-
planatory variable for RRP support, candidates and more specifically
“charismatic” party leaders have attracted a great deal of attention (e.g.,
Taggart 1995). There are two reasons for this. First, many observers mis-
took the rise of the RRPs in the 1980s for a “return of the Führers” of the
1920s (Prowe 1994). Second, many RRPs appeared to be personal parties,
especially during the breakthrough phase (Eatwell 2005, 106). Third,
agency is always more attractive than structure.
However, what is meant by “charisma” is not usually clear. There are
serious doubts that Weberian “charisma”—a personal bond between the
(party) leader and his followers—was in any way relevant for the rise of
the radical right (Eatwell 2005), and even those two parties most com-
monly associated with their “charismatic” leaders—Jörg Haider’s Austrian
Freedom Party and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s French National Front—under-
went a process of “institutionalization” (Pedahzur and Brichta 2002). Even

219
more important for the question of electoral behavior, van der Brug and
Mughan (2007) demonstrate that RRPs benefit from candidate effects in
exactly the same way as established parties: while having an appealing
candidate is certainly linked to greater electoral support, the magnitude of
this effect is not larger for RRPs than it is for other parties.

Issues, Ideology, and Value Orientations

Pure Protest Voting, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment, and Unemployment

(Threat)
When it comes to explaining support for the radical right, the notion of a
“pure protest vote” is still prominent. In its most extreme guise, the pure-
protest thesis claims that radical right support is driven by feelings of
alienation from the political elites and the political system that are com-
pletely unrelated to policies or values and hence have nothing to do with
the radical right’s political agenda (Eatwell 2000). A more realistic variety
of the protest thesis suggests that voters do indeed care about policies but
hold less extreme preferences than the radical right manifestos would sug-
gest. In this scenario, voters instrumentally support the radical right in the
hope that mainstream right parties will reconsider their position and move
somewhat closer to the radical right without copying all of their policies.
Once the mainstream right has made this adjustment, radical right support
would collapse. This logic is akin to directional voting (Merrill and Grof-
man 1999) but puts more emphasis on emotions.
Empirically, pure protest voting remains elusive. Starting with Billiet
and Witte’s (1995) study of Vlaams Blok support in the 1991 general elec-
tion in Belgium, a host of single-country and comparative studies have
demonstrated time and again that anti-immigrant sentiment is the single
most important driver of the radical right vote (Mayer and Perrineau 1992;
van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2000; van der Brug and Fennema 2003;
Norris 2005; Mughan and Paxton 2006; Arzheimer 2009b; Ford, Goodwin,
and Cutts 2011). That does not mean that the prototypical voter of the radi-
cal right is not alienated from the political elites and susceptible to the
populist rhetoric of many RRPs. But the vast majority of their voters sup-
port the radical right because of the parties’ anti-immigrant claims and de-
mands, and their sense of frustration and distrust may very well result from
their political preferences on immigration not being heeded by the main-
stream parties.
“Anti-immigrant sentiment” is a handy but slightly awkward catchall

220
term for negative attitudes toward immigrants, immigration, and immigra-
tion policies. In a seminal contribution, Rydgren (2008) distinguishes be-
tween “immigration skeptics,” “xenophobes,” and “racists.” For Rydgren
(2008, 741–744), xenophobes have a latent disposition to react with fear
and aversion to outsiders, but this becomes an issue only if the number of
outsiders is too high by some subjective standard, or if the outsiders other-
wise seem to pose a threat to the in-group. Racists always hold outsiders in
contempt irrespective of any exposure to “strangers,” with “classic” racism
being based on notions of biological hierarchies, whereas “modern” or
“cultural” racism subscribes to the idea of incompatible but (nominally)
coequal cultures.1 Finally, immigration skeptics want to reduce the num-
ber of immigrants in their native country (Rydgren 2008, 738), but not
necessarily because they hold racist or xenophobic attitudes. As Rydgren
(2008, 740) suggests, the most plausible structure for these attitudes is a
nested one, where xenophobes form a subgroup of the immigration skep-
tics, and racists form a subgroup of the xenophobes.
The distinction between immigration skeptics, xenophobes, and racists
is particularly useful because not all radical right voters are full-blown
racists. Moreover, many of the approaches that are discussed in the litera-
ture may help to explain deep-seated, stable racism but not necessarily a
more specific and volatile skepticism regarding current immigration poli-
cies.
“Deep” explanations for radical right support have been developed since
at least the 1930s. The monographs and articles on the roots of rightist po-
litical views fill several libraries by now and any attempt to classify them
is crude by necessity. Nonetheless, it makes sense to distinguish between
three very broad groups.
A first class of explanations focuses on personality traits, with authori-
tarianism being the most prominent among them.2 Authoritarianism as a
concept is most closely associated with the (controversial) Berkeley Study
(Adorno et al. 1950) but has more recently been modernized and promoted
by Bob Altemeyer (1981, 1996). For Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarian-
ism consists of three key elements: a desire to submit to established and le-
gitimate authorities (authoritarian submission), a hostility toward deviants
and other out-groups (authoritarian aggression), and an exaggerated re-
spect for traditions and social norms (conventionalism).
Authoritarianism and similar concepts such as dogmatism (Rokeach
1960) and tough-mindedness (Eysenck 1954) go a long way toward ex-

221
plaining the relevance of xenophobia and the appeal of other right-wing
ideas and movements to some voters, but there are a few important
caveats. First, compared to classic right-wing extremist groups, authoritari-
anism is much less important for the ideology of the modern populist radi-
cal right (Mudde 2007). Unlike the fascists or the Nazis of the interwar pe-
riod, the most successful of these parties do not seek to replace democracy
by some authoritarian type of regime but rather promote a narrow, “illib-
eral” concept of democracy. Second, support for the radical right has
surged (and sometimes declined) over relatively short periods, whereas
personality traits are by definition stable. They may thus help us to explain
why there is potential for authoritarian parties in the first place. The ex-
ploitation of this potential by political entrepreneurs and the channeling of
this general hostility toward out-groups into a more specific anti-immi-
grant sentiment, however, are political processes that must be understood
by means of different concepts.
Theories of group conflict and deprivation form a second and more im-
mediately relevant cluster of explanations. This cluster can be subdivided
into four broad categories:
1. Theories of “realistic group conflict” (RGCT) and “ethnic competi-
tion” (EC)
2. Theories of “status politics” and “symbolic racism”
3. Theories of “social identity”
4. Theories of “scapegoating”
The ordering is deliberate: from top to bottom, these approaches put less
and less emphasis on material conflicts and conscious mental processes
and instead focus on the importance of visceral hostility (which might still
be induced by political entrepreneurs) toward members of the out-group.
Both for proponents of RGCT (see Jackson 1993 for a review) and EC
(e.g., Bélanger and Pinard 1991), tensions between (ethnic) groups are
rooted in conflicts over the distribution of material resources in a society,
which is often perceived as unfair. The main difference between both ap-
proaches is that RGCT is more interested in the microdynamics of group
psychology, whereas EC is primarily concerned with the societal level. Ei-
ther way, the distributional conflict is couched in collective terms, even if
the resource in question is a personal good (e.g., a secure job). Both
strands of the literature as well as the other approaches discussed in this
section are therefore closely related to classic theories of collective relative

222
deprivation (Runciman 1966, 33–34; see also Ellemers 2002 and Taylor
2002). While students of electoral behavior rarely investigate the lengthy
and complex causal chains that link social change, group dynamics, and
interethnic contacts to psychological processes, feelings of a material
threat that is allegedly posed by immigrants have become a staple explana-
tory variable for analyzing anti-immigrant sentiment, and by implication
the radical right’s electoral support. On the contextual level, (potential) ex-
posure to material threats is often captured by incorporating macroeco-
nomic variables in statistical models of radical right voting (see below).
Similarly, proponents of the “status politics” approach (e.g., Hofstadter
2002b) argue that (recent) immigrants are perceived as a collective threat
by members of the in-group. Here, the collective good in question is not a
material one but rather the collective social status of the in-group, or the
cultural hegemony of their values, norms, and social practices (Hofstadter
2002a)—ideas that in turn bear some resemblance to the notion of “sym-
bolic racism” (Kinder and Sears 1981; see Walker 2001 for a critical re-
view of this and some related concepts). Again, psephologists usually take
the alleged causal mechanisms for granted and focus on the effect of per-
ceived cultural threats on anti-immigrant sentiment and the radical right
vote.
(Modern) theories of social identity provide another approach for ex-
plaining anti-immigrant sentiment. Social identity theory (SIT) and its suc-
cessor, self-categorization theory (SCT), were developed in response to an
empirical puzzle: even in a “minimal effects” experimental setting where
subjects were randomly assigned to socially meaningless groups and there
was no interaction whatsoever between subjects and no material incentive
to put members of the out-group at a disadvantage, a large proportion of
subjects were willing to discriminate against the outsiders. Tajfel and
Turner (1986) interpret this unexpected finding as the result of a cognitive
process during which one’s social identity becomes the yardstick for as-
sessing a given situation, whereas the importance of one’s personal iden-
tity declines. As a corollary, members of the out-group are subject to a
process of stereotyping. In combination with an innate desire for positive
distinctiveness, stereotyping and self-stereotyping can bring about discrim-
ination and prejudice against out-group members, because they represent
one avenue toward a more positive self-image. However, whether discrim-
ination actually occurs depends on a number of conditions (Reynolds and
Turner 2001, 166). Crucially, these mechanisms are independent of any
material or cultural threat that the out-group may seem to pose to the mem-

223
bers of the in-group.
Once more, psephologists have mostly ignored the details and instead
focused on the impact of a single variable, identity, on radical right voting
intentions, and even this alleged mechanism is often problematic, because
most items available in representative surveys do not capture the complex-
ity of the concept. Nonetheless, SIT/SCT has the potential to make a cru-
cial contribution to a fuller explanation of the radical right vote: while
most group dynamic processes must remain under the radar of mass sur-
veys, SIT/SCT informs experimental and observational research on the
conditions under which stereotypes and prejudices that may result in anti-
immigrant sentiment become activated. It also provides a useful frame-
work for the analysis of party documents and social and mass media con-
tent, which play an ever more important role in the study of radical right
electoral support.
Finally, theories of “scapegoating” need to be addressed. These hark
back to the late 1930s (Dollard et al. 1939) and have even older roots in
Sumner’s early work on ethnocentrism (Sumner 1906). They maintain that
members of the ethnic majority who experience feelings of frustration and
deprivation that are objectively unrelated to the presence of other ethnic
groups nonetheless turn toward immigrants simply because those provide a
conveniently defenseless target for the in-group members’ aggression. Due
to the cognitive turn in social psychology, theories of scapegoating have
somewhat fallen out of fashion, and for the applied psephologist relying on
secondary data analysis, the result of simple scapegoating will often be in-
distinguishable from the more complex stereotyping processes.
All theories of group conflict are complemented by the “contact hypoth-
esis,” which maintains that under certain favorable conditions, interethnic
contacts (which often presuppose immigration) can reduce prejudice (Pet-
tigrew and Tropp 2008) and hence anti-immigrant sentiment. Some of the
newer research aims at incorporating the contact hypothesis either by using
micro-level information on interethnic contact or by deriving the probabil-
ity of such contacts from small-area data on the spatial distribution of eth-
nic groups. Unfortunately, both approaches are subject to endogeneity
bias, because voters who are less prejudiced are more likely to seek in-
terethnic contacts.

Anti-Postmaterialism and Other Social Attitudes

A Silent Counterrevolution? Immigration emerged as the core issue of

224
the radical right in Western Europe and Australia in the mid-1980s, mak-
ing anti-immigrant sentiment the single most important attitudinal driver
of radical right support. In Central and Eastern Europe, hostility toward
ethnic minorities seems to act as the functional equivalent. But very few
RRPs have ever been single-issue parties (Mudde 1999). Many of them
have a broader right-wing agenda, and radical right support has been
linked to a host of other attitudes besides anti-immigrant sentiment.
The rise of the RRP family in the 1980s and early 1990s has therefore
been interpreted as a reaction to large-scale social change.3 In a seminal
article, Ignazi (1992) claims that these new right-wing parties embody the
backlash against postmaterialism and the New Left politics it has inspired:
a “silent counterrevolution.” Similarly, Kitschelt (1995) has argued that
globalization has created a new class of authoritarian private-sector work-
ers who combine market-liberal preferences with an authoritarian outlook
on society and find their political representation in the radical right. While
the market liberalism of the radical right’s electorate remains elusive
(Kitschelt and McGann 2003; Arzheimer 2009b; Mayer 2013), it has be-
come ever more evident that nontraditional working-class voters form the
radical right’s core electoral base (see Rydgren 2013).
Moral conservatism, homophobia, and more generally anti-postmaterial-
ism may have played a role, too (and probably are still relevant for party
members and activists), but they seem to be much less important than they
were for the classic extreme right, at least in some countries. As early as
1988, the French FN voters were slightly “more permissive in sexual mat-
ters” than the voters of the mainstream right (Mayer and Perrineau 1992,
130). Twenty-five years later, the FN is led by a single mother of three,
twice divorced (Mayer 2013, 175), whose attendance at homophobic ral-
lies seems to be more a matter of strategy than of conviction. Even more
strikingly, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, the Netherland’s first successful RRP,
was founded and led by an openly gay libertine (Akkerman 2005), and its
de facto successor, the PVV, claims that defending the freedom of the
LGBT community is part of its commitment to Dutch values. But even in
the Netherlands, culturally progressive values are not an important driver
of the RRP vote, at least not when anti-immigrant sentiment is controlled
for (De Koster et al. 2014). One way or the other, for many RRP voters in
Western Europe, homophobia and social conservatism do not seem to mat-
ter too much anymore.
Religion. The extreme right of the interwar years could be roughly di-

225
vided in two groups (Camus 2007): in some cases (most prominently Por-
tugal and Spain), they aligned themselves with the most authoritarian and
reactionary elements of the (Catholic) church, while in other instances
(e.g., Germany and Austria after the Anschluss), the extreme right dis-
tanced itself from Christianity and/or relied on the traditional loyalty of the
(Protestant) church to the political leadership.
Today’s RRPs have inherited some of this historical baggage. While re-
ligious conservatism may inspire some of their members and voters (see
the previous section), church leaders have often spoken out against the rad-
ical right’s anti-immigrant policies. To complicate matters further, the rad-
ical right is now often couching their anti-immigrant message in terms of a
clash between “Western values” and “Islam.” In a sense, criticizing Islam
abroad and at home has become the socially acceptable alternative to more
openly xenophobic statements (Zúquete 2008).
In a bid to disentangle this relationship, Arzheimer and Carter (2009a)
estimate a structural equation model of religiosity, anti-immigrant senti-
ment, party identification with mainstream right parties, and radical right
voting intentions in seven West European countries. Their results show
that in the early 2000s, religiosity had no significantly positive or negative
effect on either anti-immigrant sentiment or RRP voting intentions. Reli-
gious people are, however, much more likely to identify with a mainstream
right party, which in turn massively reduces the likelihood of an RRP vote.
Using a slightly different model and data collected in 2008, Immerzeel,
Jaspers, and Lubbers (2013) arrive at very similar conclusions.
Crime. Law-and-order politics is traditionally the domain of both the
mainstream right and the radical right (Bale 2003), with some authors
going as far as saying that the radical right “owns” the crime issue (Smith
2010). At any rate, talking about crime and immigration is a core frame of
radical right discourses (Rydgren 2008). Data from the European Social
Survey clearly show that many West Europeans associate immigration
with crime, and panel data from Germany suggest that that worries about
crime have a substantial effect on anti-immigrant sentiment (Fitzgerald,
Curtis, and Corliss 2012). Many authors subsume such immigration-re-
lated crime fears into the larger complex of subjective threat that immigra-
tion poses to susceptible voters. Others model the effect of objective crime
figures on the radical right vote (see below).
Euroskepticism. Mudde (2007) has convincingly argued that nativism
—that is, the desire for an ethnically homogeneous nation-state—forms the

226
core of the radical right’s ideology. Accordingly, RRPs reject the Euro-
pean Union as a general rule, although Vasilopoulou (2011) has demon-
strated that opposition to the European projects is by no means uniform
within the radical right camp. Unsurprisingly, individual Euroskeptic atti-
tudes come up as predictors of radical right voting intentions in some stud-
ies (e.g., Arzheimer 2009a; van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005), al-
though anti-immigrant sentiment and even general dissatisfaction with the
elites exert a stronger effect (Werts, Scheepers, and Lubbers 2013). Given
that at least some countries feature leftist Euroskeptic parties whose voters
hold opinions that differ markedly from those of the RRP voters (Evans
2000; van Elsas and van der Brug 2015), it seems safe to assume that Eu-
roskepticism per se does not predispose voters to support the radical right
but needs to be linked to more general nativist beliefs.

MESO-LEVEL FACTORS

Party Strength
It is more than plausible that organizational assets and other party re-
sources including leadership should be important preconditions for RRP
success, but in applied research they are often overlooked, because they
are difficult to measure and tend not to vary too much over time. Carter’s
is one of the very few studies that systematically incorporates party
strength into a quantitative model of radical right support. Distinguishing
between “(1) weakly organised, poorly led and divided parties, (2) weakly
organised, poorly led but united parties, and (3) strongly organised, well-
led but factionalised parties,” she finds that the last group performs sub-
stantially better than the first two (Carter 2005, 98–99).
David Art’s qualitative study of radical right party organizations in
twelve West European countries (Art 2011) provides an important comple-
ment to this finding. Taking a longitudinal perspective, Art shows that
prospective RRPs need to attract ideologically moderate, high-status ac-
tivists early in the process to build sustainable party structures and become
electorally viable. Otherwise, there is a high probability that they will be
subject to factionalism and extremism, which renders them unattractive for
most voters.
While Art and Carter compare parties and countries, it is also possible to
incorporate information on organizational strength in a within-country
model of radical right voting. Erlingsson, Loxbo, and Öhrvall (2012) iden-

227
tify a positive effect of “local organizational presence” on the vote of the
Sweden Democrats in the 2006 and 2010 elections. On one hand, this
modeling strategy is advantageous, because it maximizes the number of
cases and can avoid aggregation bias. On the other hand, the validity of Er-
lingsson, Loxbo, and Öhrvall’s findings is threatened by endogeneity: par-
ties will be more inclined to invest resources and prospective activists will
be more inclined to create and join a local organization if there is a
prospect of success in the first place.

Party Ideology
As a general rule, RRPs take political positions that are in some ways more
radical than what the mainstream right is offering, but the ideological het-
erogeneity of the RRPs is sometimes baffling. It therefore took more than
a decade to establish some sort of consensus that these parties do indeed
form a party family (Mudde 1996), and twenty years down the line, schol-
ars still find it difficult to agree on a name for this family, although “radi-
cal right” is arguably the most popular label at the moment. There are vari-
ous attempts to distinguish subgroups within this large cluster. Mudde
(2007) identifies a small number of parties that he classifies as “extreme
right,” that is, aiming at replacing democracy with some authoritarian sys-
tem. Similarly, Golder (2003b) draws a line between “populist” and “neo-
fascist” parties. Summarizing electoral data from Western Europe for the
1970–2000 period, Golder (2003b, 444) notes that support for the neofas-
cist group was very limited in the first place and further declined over
time, whereas the appeal of the populist parties has grown enormously
since they emerged in the 1980s. By and large, this finding still holds
today: in Western Europe, where democracy has become “the only game
in town,” the vast majority of voters deems openly non-democratic parties
unelectable.4 In other European countries where democracy is newer,
however, even overtly extremist parties may be electorally successful (see
Ellinas 2013; Ellinas 2015 for Greece; Mudde 2005 and Mareš and Havlík
2016 for Central and Eastern Europe after 1990; and Stojarová 2012 for
former Yugoslavia).
A different classification, one based not on the fundamental question of
support for democracy but rather on policy positions, was developed by
Herbert Kitschelt in his seminal monograph (1995). Kitschelt aims at lo-
cating RRPs in a policy space that is spanned by two dimensions: a purely
economic left-right axis (state vs. market) and a more complex dimension

228
that encompasses both issues of citizenhood (“group”; see Kitschelt 2013)
and individual and collective decision-making (“grid”). Originally,
Kitschelt claimed that the then unusual blend of market liberalism and au-
thoritarian social conservatism represented an “electoral winning formula.”
While this may still hold in the United States, RRP voters in Western Eu-
rope are no longer interested in market liberalism (de Lange 2007;
Arzheimer 2009b), if they ever were. Moreover, electorally successful
RRPs have recently deemphasized their positions on the “grid” (authoritar-
ian) dimension (Kitschelt 2013).

Party System Factors

RRPs do not operate in a vacuum. While they may have a degree of con-
trol over their leadership, candidates, organizational structure, and ideol-
ogy, they are but one element of the larger party system, and the words and
actions of other parties may have as big an impact on the radical right’s
electoral fortunes as anything that the RRPs themselves do. From a Down-
sian logic, it follows that a successful RRP will eventually emerge if there
is a demand for more restrictive (immigration) policies that is not satisfied
by the existing parties in general and the mainstream right in particular. In
this view, a mainstream right party that is soft on immigration and/or the
existence of a formal “grand coalition” between center-left and center-
right parties will have a positive impact on the radical right vote.
The psychological counterargument is that political demands are rarely
fixed, and that an elite consensus to deemphasize immigration as a politi-
cal issue (Zaller 1992) and to impose a cordon sanitaire might rob the rad-
ical right of its potential support. Whether this latter strategy is politically
feasible is quite a different question. Center-right parties may have strong
incentives to shore up the radical right in a bid to strengthen the rightist
bloc (Bale 2003). Center-left parties may want to split the right-wing vote:
Mitterrand’s decision to hold the 1986 French legislative election under
the system of proportional representation and Austrian Social Democratic
politician Bruno Kreisky’s kind words for Jörg Haider are cases in point.
The empirical evidence is somewhat mixed. Arzheimer and Carter
(2006) find no statistical effect of the mainstream right’s ideological posi-
tion or of ideological convergence between the center-left and center-right,
but they do note a substantial positive impact of grand coalitions. This re-
sult, however, may be shaped by the inclusion of respondents from Aus-
tria, which features a long and almost unique history of grand coalitions

229
and a consistently strong RRP. On the other hand, Lubbers, Gijsberts, and
Scheepers (2002) report that a restrictive “immigration climate” (opera-
tionalized as the vote-share weighted average of the other parties’ posi-
tions on immigration) increases the likelihood of a radical right vote.
Using a slightly different approach that is derived from Zaller’s work,
Arzheimer (2009a) notes that the radical right benefits from an increasing
salience of their issue, regardless of the direction of the statements, and
Dahlstroem and Sundell (2012) find a positive effect of anti-immigrant po-
sitions held by local politicians from other parties. Again, endogeneity
could potentially be a problem in these studies, although this seems less
likely in the case of data based on an expert survey (Lubbers, Gijsberts,
and Scheepers 2002) or party manifestos (Arzheimer and Carter 2006;
Arzheimer 2009a).

Social Capital
In line with classic theories of the “mass society” (Kornhauser 1960; Bell
2002), the rise of the radical right has sometimes been linked to wide-
spread feelings of isolation and anomie. If this relationship holds, higher
levels of social capital (Putnam 1993) should curb support for the radical
right.
Once more, the empirical evidence is limited and contradictory. In a se-
ries of case studies in Western and Eastern Europe, Rydgren (2009, 2011)
finds that membership in civic organizations does not reduce the probabil-
ity of casting a vote for the radical right. But this does not necessarily dis-
confirm the social capital hypothesis, because social capital is not an indi-
vidual-level concept but rather a meso-level one. Coffé, Heyndels, and
Vermeir (2007), on the other hand, demonstrate in their model of RRP vot-
ing in Flanders that the Vlaams Blok performs significantly worse in mu-
nicipalities with higher levels of associational life, ceteris paribus, but this
finding might be the result of aggregation bias, as the authors rely exclu-
sively on census data and electoral counts. Finally, Fitzgerald and
Lawrence (2011) combine micro and meso data to estimate a multilevel
model of support for the Swiss People’s Party. Even after controlling for a
host of variables at the level of the person and of the commune, they find
that a municipality’s “social cohesion index” has a substantial positive ef-
fect on the probability of a vote for the radical right. But while their re-
search design and statistical model are close to ideal, it is not quite clear
what they actually measure. Their index includes the proportion of the
working population who are not commuters, the proportion of residents

230
who speak the most common language in a given municipality, and the
percentage of residences inhabited by their owners. These variables may
relate to “bonding” social capital, which could explain the positive effect
on the RRP vote, but further research is clearly needed.

MACRO-LEVEL FACTORS

Institutional Factors
The impact of institutional factors—most prominently, features of the elec-
toral system, decentralization, and welfare state protection—are very diffi-
cult to assess, because they change very slowly or not at all over time and
are hence highly correlated with any idiosyncratic unit (= country) effects.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, empirical findings are mostly contradictory and
inconclusive. As regards electoral systems, Jackman and Volpert (1996)
claim that the radical right benefits from lower electoral thresholds, but
Golder (2003a) argues that this conclusion is based on an erroneous inter-
pretation of an interaction effect and a somewhat idiosyncratic data collec-
tion effort. In the same vein, Carter (2002) reports that electoral support
for the radical right is unrelated to the type of electoral system that is in
place in a given election, whereas Arzheimer and Carter (2006) find a pos-
itive effect of more disproportional systems but maintain that this might be
an artifact.
As regards features of the welfare state, Swank and Betz (2003) find
that higher level of welfare state protection seem to reduce the appeal of
the radical right. However, their analysis is based exclusively on macro
data. Using a more specific indicator (generosity of unemployment bene-
fits) and micro data, Arzheimer (2009a) finds that more generous benefits,
which may cause “welfare chauvinism,” are linked to higher levels of sup-
port, but only if levels of immigration are below average (see also next
section).

Immigration and Unemployment

For obvious reasons, the two macro-level variables whose effects have
been most extensively studied are immigration, unemployment, and their
interaction: a situation of high immigration plus high unemployment repre-
sents perhaps the most clear-cut scenario for ethnic competition for scarce
jobs. Nonetheless, the findings are far from conclusive, as can be seen by

231
looking at two of the first comprehensive comparative studies. While Jack-
man and Volpert (1996) find a substantial positive effect of aggregate un-
employment on the radical right vote, Knigge (1998), who uses a design
that is quite similar, reports a negative effect. So do Arzheimer and Carter
(2006). Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers (2002), in their first multilevel
model of radical right voting in Western Europe, find no significant rela-
tionship between the unemployment rate and radical right voting inten-
tions, whereas Golder (2003b), whose analysis is once more based on ag-
gregate data, reports a positive (main) effect as well as a positive interac-
tion between unemployment and immigration. Finally, Arzheimer’s
(2009a) results from a rather complex multilevel model of radical right
voting suggest that unemployment may have a positive effect under some
scenarios when unemployment benefits are minimal and contributing fac-
tors (both individual and contextual) are already favorable.
Although measures for immigration are hardly ideal and differ across
studies, results for the effect of immigration are less equivocal: Knigge
(1998), Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers (2002), Golder (2003b), Swank
and Betz (2003), and Arzheimer and Carter (2006) all find a positive effect
of (national) immigration figures on the likelihood of a radical right vote.
Arzheimer (2009a) by and large confirms this, although with an important
qualification: in his study, the interaction between unemployment and im-
migration is negative, so with high levels of both variables, their effects do
not further reinforce each other but rather hit a ceiling. Moreover, gener-
ous unemployment benefits reduce the effect of immigration.

Crime
Like immigration and unemployment, high crime rates are supposed to
benefit the radical right, but there is not much empirical evidence to back
up this claim. Coffé, Heyndels, and Vermeir (2007) conducted one of the
first studies that test the alleged relationship. In an aggregate model of
Vlaams Blok support in Flemish municipalities, they find that high crime
rates increase the likelihood of the Vlaams Blok contesting an election,
presumably because the party anticipates higher levels of support. How-
ever, once this selection mechanism is accounted for, crime has no positive
effect on the Vlaams Blok’s result.
The study by Coffé, Heyndels, and Vermeir has three distinct advan-
tages: it models the decision to compete in an election and the results of
that decision separately, it is built on a large number of cases, and the level

232
of aggregation is low. But unfortunately, their design does not allow for
comparisons across time or political systems. In a sense, an article by
Smith (2010) provides the complement to their work: Smith studies the re-
lationship between support for the radical right and crime rates at the high-
est possible level of aggregation by analyzing 182 national parliamentary
elections that were held in nineteen Western European countries between
1970 and 2005. Controlling for unemployment, inflation, immigration, and
various interactions, he finds that higher crime rates are associated with
stronger support for the radical right. This relationship becomes stronger if
immigration rates are higher.
Finally, the contribution by Dinas and Spanje (2011) specifies a multi-
level model of radical right voting in the Netherlands in 2002. As in the
work of Coffé, Heyndels, and Vermeir (2007), their results are confined to
one election in a single country. As they combine individual and contex-
tual data, there is no aggregation bias, and they can even tease apart the ef-
fects of objective crime rates and subjective attitudes toward crime. Their
results suggest that the effects of crime and immigration do not operate
across the board but rather affect only those citizens who perceive a link
between the two.

Media
One final variable at the macro level that attracts considerable interest is
the media coverage of the radical right’s issues. While voters will be ex-
posed to crime, immigration, and unemployment to one degree or another,
media reports may have a stronger effect than personal experiences or non-
experiences via two alleged mechanisms: agenda-setting and priming.
Theories of agenda-setting claim that the media, by focusing on certain
topics, select a handful of politically relevant issues from a much larger
pool of problems. Those issues on the agenda then serve as yardsticks for
evaluating parties, an effect known as priming (Scheufele and Tewksbury
2007). In extreme cases, an issue may become so closely associated with a
party that this party “owns” the issue (Petrocik 1996) and will almost auto-
matically benefit whenever the issue achieves a high rank on the agenda.
Green parties and the environment are an oft-cited example, but the radical
right and immigration have become a close second in the eyes of many ob-
servers (Meguid 2005).
Notwithstanding the importance of the alleged nexus between media
coverage and radical right support, the evidence is limited once more. The

233
main reason for this is that data on media content are difficult to come by
and expensive to produce in the first place. This is slowly changing now,
with automated coding methods and open databases such as GDELT pro-
viding new avenues for research, but even so, matching media with micro-
level data is next to impossible, because mass opinion surveys do not nor-
mally collect detailed (i.e., per item) information on media consumption.
Most of the existing research is therefore based on aggregated (i.e., time-
series) data.
In their pioneering study, Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart (2007) find a
positive relationship between salience of immigration in Dutch media and
aggregate support for radical right parties during the 1990–2002 period,
net of any changes that can be ascribed to the unemployment and immigra-
tion rates and their interaction. This article is complemented by the work
of Koopmans and Muis (2009), who focus on the end of that period (Pim
Fortuyn’s 2002 campaign) and aim to identify a number of “discursive op-
portunities” that facilitated Fortuyn’s breakthrough. In another study that
resembles their 2007 piece, Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart (2009) can fur-
ther demonstrate a link between news content and anti-immigrant senti-
ment in Germany for the 1993–2005 period.
Finally, in a bid to overcome the dearth of micro-level data on media
consumption from mass surveys as well as the limits of the ex post facto
design, interest in experimental studies has grown considerably over the
last decade. One such study is that by Sheets, Bos, and Boomgaarden
(2015), who exposed members of an online-access panel to a synthetic
news article. Some small parts of this article were systematically varied to
provide “cues” that would prime the issues of immigration, anti-politics,
and the RRP itself. While Sheets, Bos, and Boomgaarden can demonstrate
some effects of these cues on anti-immigrant attitudes, on political cyni-
cism, and ultimately on PVV support, some question marks remain. First,
the effects on anti-immigrant attitudes are weak compared to those on po-
litical cynicism. Second, as with any experimental intervention, it is not
clear if effects of a similar magnitude occur “in the wild,” and if so, how
long they persist. Third, the experiment was designed in a way that means
that the immigration and anti-politics cues were always combined with an
RRP cue, which will in all likelihood bias the estimates for their respective
effects either upward or downward. Clearly, further (cross-national) re-
search is needed.

SMALL AREA STUDIES

234
By now it should be clear that nearly all authors in the field treat support
for the radical right as a multifaceted phenomenon that must be explained
at multiple levels, with unemployment, immigration, political factors, and
media cues being the most prominent contextual variables. Most studies
measure these variables at the national level, but living conditions in Euro-
pean states vary considerably across regions, so designs that compare
provinces, districts, or even neighborhoods within countries are becoming
more and more prominent. One of the first of these studies was conducted
by Bowyer (2008), who looks at electoral returns for the British National
Party (BNP) in several thousand electoral wards in the 2002–2003 local
elections in England. He finds that the BNP was strongest in predomi-
nantly white neighborhoods that are embedded within districts character-
ized by the presence of large ethnic minorities, a pattern that has been de-
scribed as the “halo effect” (Perrineau 1985). Economic deprivation
(though not necessarily unemployment) also played a role. Similarly, Ryd-
gren and Ruth (2011), who analyze support for the Sweden Democrats in
the 2010 election across the country’s 5,668 voting districts, show that the
party did better in poorer districts with bigger social problems. Once these
factors are controlled for, there is also some evidence for the existence of a
“halo effect.”
Other studies have focused on units that are larger but politically more
meaningful than census districts or electoral wards, such as departments,
provinces, or subnational states (Kestilä and Söderlund 2007; Jesuit,
Paradowski, and Mahler 2009), accepting possible aggregation bias in ex-
change for the ability to include political and/or media variables in the
model. The former study reports positive effects of unemployment and
some institutional variables but no effect of immigration, whereas the lat-
ter identifies some complex interactions that link immigration and unem-
ployment to radical right support via an increase in inequality and a lack of
social capital.
Studies in small(ish) areas are currently one of the most promising av-
enues of research into the radical right vote, be it on the level of subna-
tional political units or in even smaller tracts. Either way, researchers need
to account for the fact that an increasing number of voters are either immi-
grants or the offspring of immigrants, who will be disinclined to support
the radical right. Estimates from small area studies that are based on aggre-
gate data will therefore be biased downward (Arzheimer and Carter
2009b). Hence, multilevel analyses that combine micro data with informa-

235
tion on local living conditions are the way forward in this particular branch
of research.

CONCLUSIONS

Over the last three decades, radical right parties have become a permanent
feature of most European polities. Their rise, persistence, and decline can
be quite well explained by the usual apparatus of electoral studies. On the
micro level, the most important factors are value orientations, attitudes to-
ward social groups, candidates, and political issues as well as (the lack of)
party identification. At the macro level, social change (broadly defined)
undoubtedly plays an important role, while parties, the media, and all other
sorts of collective actors operate at the meso level in between.
Because RRPs are often perceived as divisive, disruptive, or outright
dangerous, a great deal of intellectual energy has been spent looking for
“deeper” explanations. Indeed, there can be very little doubt that the pres-
ence or absence of immigrants and immigration, the frequency and nature
of contacts between immigrants and the native population, and the way im-
migration is framed by other political actors and the media are major fac-
tors contributing to radical right support. However, given that immigration,
ethnic tensions, and RRP actors are almost ubiquitous in Western societies,
their success is not a major surprise. Ultimately, trying to understand why
they are not successful in some cases might be more rewarding, both polit-
ically and intellectually.

236
NOTES

1. At least at the attitudinal level, old and modern racism seem to be

closely related (Walker 2001).
2. Although value orientations are sometimes grouped together with per-
sonality traits, they will be discussed in a separate section below.
3. Similar arguments have been made about the rise of the right-wing ex-
tremist movements in the 1920s as well as about their resurgence in
the postwar years (e.g., Scheuch and Klingemann 1967).
4. Marine Le Pen’s attempts to soften the image of the Front National
(Mayer 2013) and her public clashes with her father over his unre-
formed anti-Semitism are a case in point.
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CHAPTER 9

247
 PARTY SYSTEMS AND RADICAL RIGHT-WING PARTIES

HERBERT KITSCHELT
EARLY research on the emergence of radical right-wing parties focused
on bottom-up preference change in advanced postindustrial democracies:
New popular preferences generate new party alternatives. Supply-side ex-
planations became more prominent in the 1990s. They ask how the com-
petitive strategies of established parties made it possible for radical right
political entrepreneurs to exploit new preferences in order to establish new
parties. Demand-side and supply-side explanations may well work to-
gether. The demand side focuses on economic grievances (structural un-
employment due to technological change, trade, or immigrant competition)
as well as cultural misgivings (multicultural diversity, changing gender
power relations in the home) to account for a growing reservoir of citizens
receptive to radical right-wing partisan appeals. But voters abandon con-
ventional party choices only if these parties cannot demonstrate that they
supply distinctive policies valuable to voters ready to otherwise defect,
and/or that the conventional parties ignore or dismiss novel economic or
cultural grievances.
This article focuses on supply-side hypotheses of radical right partisan
politics. What kinds of voter appeals and strategic moves by politicians in
established and new parties made possible the rise and persistence of radi-
cal right parties? What configurations of interparty competition have pre-
vented, dampened, or delayed the rise of such parties or actually precipi-
tated their decline once they achieved initial electoral success? The inter-
action of parties unfolds in party systems as the critical unit of analysis. A
system consists of a number of parties with distinctive positions in an N-
dimensional space of policy appeals with different salience weights and
distributions of voter preferences. The electoral payoff of each party de-
pends on the electoral appeal of all parties, conditioned by their past ap-
peals and conduct in a given institutional setting. Institutions (such as elec-
toral laws, executive-legislative relations, and federalism) and political
economy (levels of postindustrialization, risk hedging and redistribution
through the welfare state) shape the political alignments that map onto
party systems.
No effort will be made to incorporate the entirety of the supply-side lit-
erature on the radical right. This chapter reads more like a stylized intro-
duction into different theories of party competition, as exemplified by the

248
substantive puzzle of radical right-wing partisan rise. The first section con-
cerns how to conceptualize radical right party fortunes within the context
of competitive party systems. The next three sections discuss the initial
rise radical right parties through three lenses: spatial theories of party com-
petition, institutional and historical mediators of current competitive op-
portunities for radical right entry, and alternative non-spatial theories of
party competition based on valence and issue ownership. It is followed by
a report on research about the ongoing strategic interaction between radical
right parties and their competitors after the former’s initial rise to electoral
prowess. The chapter concludes with several general synthesizing hy-
potheses about the life cycle of political parties, with the radical right’s
rise and possible future demise being a particular application.
The chapter refrains from examining further complications that surely
affect the competitive game in which radical right parties are involved.
First of all, treating parties as unitary actors is an idealization that disre-
gards the role of parties’ internal politics of organization, a subject clearly
important for the radical right (Art 2011). Net of systemic incentives, the
modes of interest aggregation and bundling inside a party are likely to in-
fluence its external strategy. Likewise, a party’s political strategies involve
a whole host of non-policy factors that include the symbolic management
of voters’ affective associations with parties (party identity) and party
brand, the role of leadership personalities, and parties’ abilities to use ex-
ogenous shocks—such as natural catastrophes, scandals, and economic
crises—to their advantage.1 Finally, I focus on parties’ deliberative choice
of policy messages at the expense of dealing with targeted material induce-
ments to voters (clientelism), a technique of linkage building with rather
limited relevance in postindustrial democracies.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE RADICAL RIGHT IN PARTY

COMPETITION

The object of interest—radical right parties—requires conceptualization in

terms of (1) substantive appeal (which party is radical right?), (2) the de-
velopmental stage of new parties’ assertion relative to established competi-
tors, and (3) performance attributes to be measured. Only the first of these
questions has been debated at length in the literature.

Substantive Radical Right Appeal.

249
Other chapters in this volume deal with the conceptual refinement of the
notion of radical right or radical populist right as it appears in advanced
postindustrial democracies. Appeal to an exclusionary conception of na-
tional citizenship that privileges an ethnic and cultural notion of parochial
collective identity and nationhood and rejects immigration and multicul-
tural diversity appears to be now constitutive of radical right parties. This
position is frequently, but no longer invariably, associated with authoritar-
ian appeals on political and cultural governance, whether they concern law
and order, free speech and civil liberties, gender and sexuality, religion, or
a more general collective moral conformism. The position of radical right
parties on economic distributive questions is contingent and variable and
will be addressed briefly below, when turning to the parties’ strategic
“bundling” of issue dimensions in the pursuit of electoral coalitions.

Developmental Stage of Party.

Some entrepreneur registers a new political party and seeks its recognition
as competitor on the ballot. Then the new party engages in initial rounds of
competition to make its label known to citizens and to develop “brand
recognition” for some commitment to voters that the new competitor
claims other parties do not provide. If this initial struggle turns out to be
electorally successful and the new contender achieves legislative represen-
tation, the ongoing interaction with its competitors, voters, and media will
put new challenges on the agenda. The party will react to strategic counter-
moves by its competitors, consider broadening the scope and adjusting the
calibration of its policy appeals, and may be tempted to support or even
participate in cabinet governments.
I thus distinguish a phase of initial party “takeoff”—a novel party’s run
through several initial rounds of competition in national and subnational
elections, accumulating a signature track record of appeals and a stock of
electoral support—from its subsequent sustained interaction with its com-
petitors.2 I do not offer a hard-and-fast operational criterion to distinguish
the two phases, but the first decade of electoral competition is a rough cut-
off criterion. After a new challenger party has gained notoriety and even
served for a term or two in legislatures, it enters the phase of sustained
competition when it develops a history of past decision-making that begins
to raise questions of consistency and continuity, including the exigency to
reveal positions on issue dimensions that may have been irrelevant for the
party’s initial takeoff. In this phase, parties begin to modify their positions

250
in strategic interaction, something that rarely takes place in the initial take-
off stage.
This raises one further consideration: what is to be done with parties
that, broadly speaking, adopt a radical right appeal, but carry the labels of
older parties even though their appeal has been transformed by a new gen-
eration of radical right leaders and activists? The obvious reference cases
are the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria)
and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party). De facto,
the radical right party literature adopts the convention of treating these par-
ties as equivalent to new entrants, as they shed their old appeals and often
also the electorates that came with them.

Performance Attributes of Radical Right Parties.

Scholars have latched onto radical right parties’ electoral success as the
obvious performance measure in the phases of takeoff and sustained com-
petition. Activists and members, as a ratio of party voters or of the elec-
torate as a whole, could be complementary measures. A critical disagree-
ment concerns the operational conceptualization of the temporal window
over which electoral success is measured. Most scholars opt for party
strength in individual elections (e.g., Arzheimer 2009; Spiess and Franz-
mann 2011). But a few construct a moving average of radical right support
over three elections (van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005) or average
party strength over a decade-long time period (Kitschelt 1995).
The short-term single-election measure directs attention to intertemporal
variance within each given geographical unit and makes possible pooled
time-series cross-sectional analysis when many radical right parties have
already participated in five to ten consecutive national legislative elections,
as is the case after 2000 in some countries, such as Austria, Denmark,
France, Norway, and Switzerland. While this cut of analysis may make it
possible to highlight the fine-grained process of strategic interaction
among parties as a determinant of each party’s electoral payoff, it also
generates massive measurement noise, because each election involves
idiosyncratic conditions; this noise might be “mined” in ad hoc ways by
extracting coincidental empirical regularities not replicable with other
datasets. Moreover, for short-term electoral changes to be meaningful indi-
cators of party strategy and voter responses, one may attribute to voters ca-
pacities for cognitive information processing that are too taxing.
A good dose of skepticism about the theoretical interpretability of short-

251
term movements of party strategy and electoral payoffs is therefore in
order. Focusing on long-term developments (moving averages, electoral
performance by decade) yields fewer data points but overcomes the noisi-
ness of short-term electoral volatility as the benchmark of electoral party
success.

EXPLAINING THE RISE OF RADICAL RIGHT PARTIES

THROUGH SPATIAL PARTY COMPETITION

Spatial competition theories posit that the distance of parties’ policy posi-
tions from voters’ ideal points influences citizens’ partisan choice. Euclid-
ean proximity between voter and favored party is the most straightforward
specification, but other spatial formulations—directional and discounting
models come to mind—are minor variants of spatial reasoning offering
mostly the same empirical predictions as the simple proximity theory.3
The holy grail of spatial competition theory is an equilibrium model that
derives optimal positions for parties, given voter distributions in policy
space. But even for the simple two-party competition explored by Downs
(1957), the median voter strategic equilibrium prediction requires a host of
often unrealistic assumptions (Grofman 2004). In light of these obstacles,
formal theorists have conceded the limited intellectual returns on equilib-
rium models of party competition for the study of empirical multiparty
competition (Ordeshook 1997). Others have outright abandoned this track
of theorizing (Laver 2005). Nevertheless, some holdouts have tried to re-
suscitate the paradigm, albeit with constraining, and again arguably im-
plausible, modeling assumptions.4
Spatial theorizing about the rise of radical right parties is an example of
what might be called “spatial behavioral party competition theory.” This
family of theories acknowledges the limited computational powers of vot-
ers and party operatives to calculate optimal strategies, but accepts that
spatial relations between politicians’ appeals and citizens’ preferences
matter for voters’ choices. It derives predictions about observable behavior
based on the premise of simple behavioral mechanisms of information ac-
quisition and processing through rule-of-thumb cognitive shortcuts and
benchmarks, given a status quo ante of competitive party configurations.
By observing each other, parties and voters update their strategies round
after round, but without ever reaching equilibria in the technical game-the-
oretic sense.5

252
 Spatial behavioral theorizing about radical right party entry comes with
at least four premises. First, spatial distance between parties and voters
matters for voters’ electoral choice, with proximity in a multidimensional
space as the most parsimonious representation. Second, new parties can fill
a void in situations where voters are located far from existing parties.
Third, existing parties cannot costlessly fill the void. Moving is expensive
and slow. They cannot relocate instantly across the space because voters
update their perception of parties only gradually and parties become credi-
ble for new positions only with time lags, once observers can match new
words and deeds. Moving also involves trade-offs, as parties distance
themselves from electorates that supported them in the past. Fourth, in a
multidimensional space, distance between voters and parties is weighted
by salience. Salience concerns, in turn, may be in part endogenous to dis-
tance: parties embrace radical positions in order to highlight and manipu-
late the salience of an issue dimension. Dimensions on which all credible
parties are close to each other tend to reduce their salience in voters’ per-
ception, as any vote distribution is likely to produce roughly similar policy
outcomes. Dimensions on which parties disperse their issue position tend
to become more salient, as voters anticipate that alternative coalitions
could change policy dramatically from the status quo or from a voter’s
ideal point.6
Empirically, even for established democracies, the study of spatial and
salience position taking by parties and their interaction in competitive sys-
tems has become possible only recently, as longer time series of national
survey election studies have enabled researchers to map actual voter pref-
erences and party stances over time. The key empirical sources for party
salience weights on issues is the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP or
MARPOR) dataset. More arguably, the CMP also claims to measure par-
ties’ issue positions (see Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006). The
latter is clearly the domain of expert surveys based on observers’ assess-
ments of parties’ policy appeals—for example, by the Chapel Hill Expert
Survey team (see Bakker et al 2015).7
We assume here that spatial competition takes place within the parame-
ters of postindustrial societies. These generate a particular demand side of
preferences that may be favorable to radical right parties. Pure demand-
side models of radical right party emergence may put forth variables such
as levels of economic development (per capita GDP); levels of immigra-
tion, foreign residents, or asylum seekers and their change over time; and

253
levels of unemployment, deindustrialization, or inequality. Some of these
measures sometimes reveal direct effects on radical right party electoral
success. 8 But the small substantive size of these effects suggests that it is
necessary to explore supply-side models of radical right entry and sus-
tained success to shed light on the variability of such new parties’ success.

Established Political Parties Converge on the First Economic

Dimension
In the spatial framework, convergence of parties or proximity of all parties
in an issue space makes voters indifferent between the alternatives, as
there is little downside regret if the closest party loses. Hence, where the
policy appeals and/or government record of existing parties is very similar,
space opens up for the entry of a new party.9 If a novel competitor politi-
cizes a second dimension with radical policy stances and this second di-
mension resonates with demand-side preferences, new parties are likely to
become electorally successful.
Citizen-entrepreneurs can enter the competitive fray, because estab-
lished parties are often afraid of dividing their own existing electoral coali-
tion with a novel second-dimension stance. Why, then, do they not undo
issue convergence and polarize on the established dimension of party com-
petition? As argued below, path dependency of strategic appeals may
make it impossible for many parties to revert to radical stances on an es-
tablished dimension. Conversely, radical entrepreneurs may find it easier
to politicize a new dimension of politics than to reclaim radical preference
pockets on the dimension on which established parties converged. By as-
suming polarizing, extreme positions on the second dimension, these par-
ties may raise the salience of second-dimension issues for voters and high-
light the prominence of the new partisan alternatives (see also Rovny and
Edwards 2012; Wagner 2012).
Political entrepreneurs who can spot the opportunity of second-dimen-
sion politics enter the competition with new partisan labels. Political out-
siders highlight a second dimension of competition by creating new par-
ties. Yet unlike in Riker’s (1982) rendering of the rise of the U.S. Republi-
cans in the 1850s and 1860s, it is not just the supply-side trial-and-error in-
ventiveness of ambitious outsiders that accounts for the rise of a new di-
mension. As Weingast’s (1998) critique of Riker has shown for the U.S.
Civil War partisan realignment, it takes exogenous political-economic and
endogenous institutional conditions to make political entrepreneurs with

254
new programmatic appeals achieve electoral success. After all, by 1860
America had run out of colonial domains with slavery that could be turned
into slave states in order to preserve a pro-slavery blocking quorum of
Southern Democrats in the U.S. Senate whenever a non-slave territory was
edging toward statehood.
There is a considerable literature on the strategic policy proximity of es-
tablished parties and the rise of radical right parties. But different empiri-
cal setups yield either confirmation or rejection of the general hypothesis
that “convergence” of established parties facilitated the rise of radical right
parties (e.g., Abedi 2002; Alonso and de Fonseca 2012; Arzheimer and
Carter 2006; Arzheimer 2009; Kitschelt 1995; Hino 2012; van der Brug,
Fennema, and Tillie 2005).
The diversity of results is certainly a function of different sets of empiri-
cal observations (countries, years of elections) and statistical models ap-
plied. But, as Carter (2005) has elaborated, different ways to conceive of
established party convergence plays its role as well. First of all, does prox-
imity concern parties’ positions on a generalized left-right ideology scale,
or specifically on questions of economic redistribution? Second, does
proximity refer to a comparative-static alignment, where parties have a
long-standing reputation for their close positions on a competitive dimen-
sion, or to a dynamic intertemporal process of convergence, where parties
may have subscribed to rather different positions early on but over time
adopt increasingly similar positions? Third, in a convergent party system,
is the distance between the most extreme existing party on an issue dimen-
sion and the new challenger party the predictor of the latter’s successful
party entry, or is it the distance to the entire field of established parties?
While special party configurations appear to matter for the entry and
success of new parties, there is no conclusive statistical evidence at hand
to decide unambiguously between different specific proximity/conver-
gence models of new radical right party success. It may take a refinement
of the argument, offered in the subsequent proposals of this section, to un-
derstand the success of new parties. It may also require a consideration of
mediating conditions (institutions, legacies of party competition), dis-
cussed later, to specify the circumstances under which convergence/prox-
imity of established parties begins to matter for the rise of a new chal-
lenger alternative.
In terms of options to conceptualize convergence I would put my wager
on the following specification. First, the partisan positions of interest con-

255
cern specifically the economic-distributive dimension, not some general-
ized left-right party placement that often maps parties’ positions on other
dimensions. Second, what matters most is a recently achieved but some-
times prolonged state of proximity on the (re)distributive-economic policy
dimension between the main partisan alternatives. It is a state of program-
matic partisan appeals—not necessarily a process of strategic movement—
that creates strategic opportunities for the radical right, as demand-side
preferences for second-dimension politics build up. Third, what counts for
convergence is not so much any one individual center-left or center-right
party’s stance on the distributive dimension but the programmatic center of
gravity of realized and/or potential prospective government coalitions that
voters may take into account in their choices (cf. Kedar 2009; Duch, May,
and Armstrong 2010).

Established Parties Diverge on the Second Dimension, Version I:

Attract New Voters with National Identity Appeal
Contrary to the spatial proximity argument just sketched, it may not be po-
litical entrepreneurs of new parties that create a new dimension of political
competition, but rather office-seeking incumbents, locked into a fierce bat-
tle for electoral support and constantly looking for new angles to win over
voters from their competitors. So there are, in fact, conditions under which
established politicians throw to the wind any worries that invoking a new
dimension will divide their own electorate, and instead rush headlong into
conjuring up a new dimension of competition. With second-dimension ap-
peals, they expect to attract indifferent or undecided swing voters sitting
on the fence or mildly leaning toward another partisan alternative on the
established first competitive dimension.
In the radical right context, Ignazi (1992; 2003) was the first to argue
that it was conventional parties in the 1980s that experimented with polar-
izing right-wing appeals on economics, but also anti-immigration stances
in order to expand their electoral base, particularly as they saw declining
economic growth creating a general political climate of disenchantment fa-
voring new policy proposals. As a comparative media content analysis
shows, radical right parties may not have even been more than minor con-
tributors to politicizing the immigration issue (Meyer and Rosenberger
2015).
By concocting and polarizing policy appeals on a new issue dimension,
however, conventional parties may have let a genie escape from the bottle

256
that subsequently they became unable to control. Their past track record on
new issues, such as immigration, often did not exactly make them appear
credible and sincere. Boosting the salience of new issue dimensions may
therefore pave the way for new party political entrepreneurs who may con-
figure their message entirely around that new dimension and exude more
credibility and freshness of appeal.
Radical right parties then may emerge from the miscalculations of estab-
lished politicians who overestimated their “issue yield” of politicizing a
new dimension such as citizenship (immigration) and national identity. I
adopt the notion of issue yield from De Sio and Weber (2014). It calculates
the ratio of preference divisions over an issue among voters supporting
party A compared to the preference divisions over the same issue among
voters in other parties B, C, . . . N. Favorable ratios make parties empha-
size an issue dimension in the expectation that the party will win more
votes than it loses among voters for whom the issue is salient. But while
politicians in center-right parties may had correctly figured that their sup-
porters were more united on issues such as immigration and multicultural-
ism than those of their existing partisan opponents, particularly social de-
mocratic parties, they did not anticipate that they might be threatened by a
new partisan alternative fully cohesive and single-mindedly committed on
the new issue dimension. Hence, polarization on second dimensions by es-
tablished parties may yield successful new party entry.10

Established Parties Diverge on the Second Dimension, Version II:

Divide an Opponents’ Electorate with a Multicultural Appeal
Parties may highlight second-dimension politics not to attract new voters
but to divide their opponents and drive a segment of their supporters into
the arms of a new party. By highlighting a clear and radical position on
one side of a new dimension, politicians may compel their existing oppo-
nents to take the opposite side, but then discover that their supporters are
divided over the subject. This is a classical wedge issue move (Hillygus
and Shields 2009). Meguid (2005, 2008) applied this logic, taken from
William Riker (1982), to the rise of the radical right: A conventional party
positioned on the left of the distributive-economic policy dimension may
emphasize a second-dimension stance resolutely embracing multicultural-
ism and openness to immigration. But its center-right competitors cannot
coordinate around a single anti-immigration position, as they are internally
divided, thus creating the possibility of a partisan split that ultimately may

257
yield a new radical right-wing competitor. This was essentially the French
Socialists’ bid in the mid-1980s to split the Gaullists by promoting Jean-
Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigration alternative. A related argument is that the
radical right might emerge as a backlash effect of assertive left-libertarian
parties. Indeed, the rise of left-libertarian parties often precedes and is cor-
related with the rise of the radical right, with voters splitting off from cen-
ter-right parties.11
Meguid’s argument is empirically plausible for France, because anti-im-
migrant forces on the left were concentrated in the Communist Party as a
stronghold of working-class support. Therefore, the Socialists, mostly sup-
ported by better-educated libertarian and cosmopolitan sociocultural pro-
fessionals, experienced little internal divide. By making support of multi-
culturalism salient, the French Socialists actually killed two birds with one
stone, dividing both their Communists and their Gaullist competitors into
cosmopolitan and nationalist-xenophobic factions. Social democratic par-
ties elsewhere in Europe could not follow this strategy because a second-
dimension position on immigration also divided their own electorates
along educational and occupational lines, setting working-class support
against sociocultural professionals.12 Furthermore, in France the Socialists
had just dropped the Communists as coalition partners and converged on
macroeconomic austerity policies advocated by the center right. Whether
Meguid’s Rikerian argument has a great deal of empirical purchase de-
pends on two untested conditions: (1) whether left parties politicize citi-
zenship, once the French case is dropped, and (2) whether convergence of
the established parties on the economic dimension of competition is the
more powerful predictor of radical right party emergence.

Interaction: Established Parties Converge on Economic Distribution,

but Diverge on Political Governance and National Identity
It is quite possible that both convergence of established parties on first-di-
mension politics and efforts to diverge on a new anti-immigration and au-
thoritarian second dimension—either to attract new voters or to divide a
conventional contender by splitting its support on the second dimension
and driving some into a new radical right camp—work in tandem. The rise
of radical right parties may emerge from an interaction effect in which
both processes mutually reinforce each other. Voters no longer believe that
policy differences between conventional parties on economic and social
policy issues of (re)distribution are sufficiently meaningful to merit careful

258
consideration in their vote choice. Simultaneously, they see that conven-
tional parties prime them to consider a second dimension on which a new
entrant has an easier time establishing competence and credibility with a
radical policy position.
Spiess and Franzmann (2011) have empirically tested this argument
with some measure of explanatory success. Proximity of policy positions
among established parties on economic and social policy may be a neces-
sary but insufficient condition for the rise of radical right parties. Only in
those instances where politicians in existing parties also emphasize the
new immigration dimension of competition with polarizing positions will
radical right parties successfully emerge.
But the support of the new parties, then, is not just coming from former
center-right party supporters, as implied in Meguid’s (2008) original sce-
nario. In particular, blue-collar workers previously aligned with parties of
the center-left may then support a new anti-immigrant and authoritarian
right-wing party. This is prompted by the relative convergence of center-
left parties on economic and social policy positions rather close to those of
center-right parties. This strategic configuration gives little prominence to
the distinctive distributive demands of the working class and facilitates the
defection of its members to other parties, including the radical right
(Spiess 2013, 314; Evans and Tilley 2012, 2016).
Because of hard-to-compare statistical model specifications and use of
different datasets and measures of variables, it is still difficult to determine
which, if any, of the four spatial theories of two-dimensional multiparty
competition is empirically most adequate to account for the rise of radical
right parties. From the perspective of voters’ limited information-process-
ing capabilities, the fourth alternative is probably most satisfactory, as it
specifies two mutually reinforcing mechanisms that nudge some subset of
voters toward radical right parties. Conventional party convergence on the
social-economic dimension makes voters indifferent between established
alternatives and diminishes their motivation to screen party positions on
that dimension. And parties’ polarization on a second-dimension issue
(such as immigration) lowers their search costs to find policy distinctions
among parties that could justify support of novel partisan alternative.

INSTITUTIONAL CONDITIONS OF RADICAL RIGHT PARTY

COMPETITIVENESS

259
While the positioning of established parties may be the proximate cause of
radical right party emergence, these developments occur against a back-
drop of distal causal enablers. One of them has been important in the liter-
ature but is often conceptualized in a flawed fashion: the role of electoral
laws. The other concerns the path dependency of parties’ strategic position
taking: if rational politicians realize that convergence on economic-distrib-
utive issues, particularly in interaction with divergence or polarization on
second-dimension issues of political governance and immigration, might
risk the successful entry of new radical right competitors, why would they
ever engage in such strategic rapprochement?

Electoral Laws as Enablers of Radical Right Parties

In general, high electoral thresholds are likely to impede the successful
entry of challengers into party systems (e.g., Tavits 2006). But the diffi-
culty is in calibrating and theoretically conceptualizing the precise nature
of institutions that bring about such effects. Furthermore, due to the sticki-
ness of institutions and little variance over time, there are de facto few de-
grees of freedom to test institutional effects. And there may be institutional
barriers to entry other than electoral laws—such as campaign finance laws,
referendum opportunities, or modalities of mass media access—that also
shape the fortunes of a struggling new partisan bid.
One way studies of radical right party emergence have conceptualized
electoral laws is to examine the disproportionality of representation, mea-
sured as the difference between the parties’ electoral vote shares and their
legislative seat shares. This strategy measures institutions indirectly, by
their behavioral outcomes (disproportionality), and treats the institutional
electoral systems variable as a linear, continuous variable. Both of these
choices may lead to underestimating the role of electoral system con-
straints on the entry of radical right parties. Not surprisingly, studies using
behavioral tracers of institutional rules rarely find that electoral rules affect
radical right party growth (cf. Arzheimer and Carter 2006 Carter 2005;
Arzheimer 2009; Spiess and Franzmann 2011).
Disproportionality of representation is affected by behavioral elements,
not just institutional rules. It depends on the actual distribution of public
opinion and partisan support, not the institutional constraint alone and ex
ante. This measure picks up much more than institutions. One way to ad-
dress this problem is to calculate the effective threshold of legislative party
representation resulting from the combination of average electoral district

260
size and thresholds of representation, as codified in the institutional de-
scription of electoral laws.13 Even with a direct institutional measure,
however, investigations of radical right-wing party success generate incon-
sistent findings (e.g., Carter 2005; Golder 2003; Veugelers and Magnan
2005). In part these inconsistencies may be a function of the differing in-
clusion of observations (countries, time periods) and control variables. In
part, however, these inconsistent findings may be a consequence of the lin-
ear conceptualization of the institutional constraint.
The additional institutional constraint on party entry imposed by going
from an electoral system with effectively four- or five-member electoral
districts to a system with two or three members may be much milder than
moving from a two-member district system to a single-member district
system. Moreover, the electoral formula in the single-member district sys-
tem—plurality or majority—makes a huge difference that led Duverger
(1954) to confine his “law” that single-member district systems generate
two-party competition to the presence of plurality electoral formulae.
I would therefore reiterate my position (Kitschelt 2007a, 1190–1193)
that the force of electoral laws restraining the rise of radical right parties
can be adequately gauged only if single-member-district plurality (or “first
past the post”) electoral systems are singled out as a decisive barrier to the
entry of radical right parties. Only Jackman and Volpert’s (1996) early
study of radical right parties comes close to modeling the interaction of
district size and electoral formula, but unfortunately it measures district
size behaviorally rather than institutionally and has it interact with elec-
toral threshold instead of electoral formula.
In the current research literature, an adequate empirical test of the
toughest conceptualization of the institutional barrier to new party entry
erected by electoral systems—through a dummy variable for single-mem-
ber-district plurality systems such as the Canadian, U.S., and British sys-
tems—is still missing. I would expect that it would determine that such
electoral systems are relatively inhospitable to the rise of radical right par-
ties. Of course, even in single-member district plurality systems, entry of
radical right parties may not be impossible. For one thing, on the demand
side, the exogenous pressure of grievances unrepresented by the two estab-
lished parties may be so high to make many citizens disregard electoral
system obstacles to party entry (perceived immigration threats, crisis of the
European Union, etc.). For another thing, for reasons unrelated to the rise
of radical right parties, party systems may already be in a non-Duvergerian

261
equilibrium (Cox 1997), where party fragmentation has sufficiently prolif-
erated that it is no longer possible for strategic voters in many districts to
identify ex ante which two candidates are in the lead and runner-up posi-
tions and which candidates are destined to lose. When strategic coordina-
tion of voters around two candidates becomes impossible, then entry of
and vote for a radical right party alternative is entirely rational from an in-
strumental vote- and office-seeking perspective.14

Salience, Convergence and Polarization: Endogeneity of Proximate

Causes?
If the convergence/competition argument fielded above is correct, conven-
tional parties could stave off the rise of radical right-wing parties by polar-
izing distributive conflict. So there must be distal causes for the estab-
lished parties’ relative convergence and proximity of positions on the eco-
nomic and social policy dimension that then activate the proximate mecha-
nisms facilitating radical right-wing electoral success when political de-
mand conditions are ripe.
The explanatory problem is similar to one encountered by Riker’s
(1982) famous argument that in the United States the losing Whig politi-
cians eventually invented slavery as a wedge issue to divide the dominant
Democrats in the run-up to the Civil War. But slavery had been around for
a long time and was already intensely unpopular in New England at the
time of the U.S. constitutional convention. It could not have just been the
“issue entrepreneurship” of politicians that made the slavery issue the
proximate cause of party realignment in the 1850s. Weingast (1998) an-
swers this question in his critique of Riker by spelling out an interaction of
political-economic and institutional causes: when North America ran out
of colonies that could be converted into slave states to uphold the blocking
quorum of the slave South in the U.S. Senate, an all-out political fight over
the “peculiar institution” could no longer be prevented. In a similar vein,
let us consider distal causes that made contemporary late twentieth-century
party systems particularly liable to convergence on established competitive
dimensions and invited the rise of radical right parties.
To endogenize parties’ recalcitrance to diverge on economic and social
policy issue in order to stave off the rise of radical right parties, I rely on a
set of recent papers that account for the differential “dominance” of di-
mensions of party competition in advanced capitalist democracies, even
though they are not intended to explain just the trajectory of radical right

262
parties.15 The dimension of economic distribution is “dominant” in a party
system if (1) it is the best explanation for the programmatic distinctiveness
between parties and (2) economic policy considerations have a stronger
impact on citizens’ party choices than other issue dimensions. In Western
party systems, there are at least two basic distal conditions, each with two
subvariants, that set the stage for different proximate strategies of party
competition: the configuration of party alignments emerging in the early
twentieth century (and particularly the role of class politics in that divi-
sion) and the institutions of the welfare state that emerged from these con-
figurations after World War II. When those interacted with the societal
shocks of postindustrialization and multiculturalization recently, they
shaped conventional party strategies of economic policy convergence or
divergence that affected the rise of radical right parties.
In the first configuration, the class conflict was tempered by the pres-
ence of large cross-class parties with Christian confessional or national
rally appeal. They took center stage against a bilateral opposition with so-
cialists (and in some instances communists) on the left and with small sec-
ular market-liberal conservative parties on the right. In one northwest Eu-
ropean continental variant, the cross-class centrist parties organized the
welfare state as a political class compromise around conservative social
policies with encompassing, compulsory insurance systems hedging
against most existential risks (old age, sickness, unemployment), but engi-
neering relatively modest redistribution toward the poor (Esping-Andersen
1990). In a second, Mediterranean variant, welfare states remained less
comprehensive and highly fragmented insurance agencies, yet were com-
plemented by clientelistic exchange mechanisms through which benefits
accrued to poor electoral constituencies (cf. Kitschelt 2007b).
In both of these two variants of the first party system configuration, the
working class never had to fear a conservative party camp that would im-
pose a market-liberal agenda, and often center-left and center-right parties
could work together in coalition governments. The major parties clearly
did not have the reputation and electoral coalitions to polarize economic
and social policies between market-liberal and socialist alternatives and in-
stead crystallized around a secondary religious cultural dimension of tradi-
tionalism versus modernism. More recently, however, aided by the social
decay of this older second-dimension partisan divide around religion, the
basic centripetal politics around the economic-distributive dimension facil-
itated the rise of radical right parties in Austria, Belgium, France, Italy,

263
and Switzerland, as well as with some lag in the Netherlands.16 In this set
of countries, until recently Germany remained the outlier without an elec-
torally successful radical right party despite its centripetal economic and
social policy across government coalitions with different complexions, be-
cause the historical shadow of National Socialism subverted efforts to
build an effective radical right-wing party with broader popular appeal.17
In the second party system configuration of Western democracies, dis-
tributive economic partisan conflicts have always trumped cultural partisan
conflicts in the twentieth century, thus dividing parties essentially into a
center-left social democratic and a center-right bourgeois camp. In its An-
glo-Saxon variant, electoral system obstacles to party entry remain severe.
The bourgeois parties had no incentive to advocate substituting a single-
member-district plurality system by proportional representation because
socialist parties were reformist and committed to democracy, thus never
worrying non-socialist competitors that a left government would imple-
ment socialism and end capitalism (Ahmed 2013). When in government
office, the parties of the Left build limited welfare states, albeit with a
modicum of progressive redistribution toward the worst-off constituencies
that kept the issue dimension controversial. Here only with great delay
compared to the other sets of countries did radical right parties emerge,
when social-structural change eventually in the 1990s led to a rightward
shift of center-left parties, such as in the United States and the United
Kingdom, and eventually promoted quasi-radical-right parties in the guise
of an anti–European Union mobilization (as in Britain) or a populist-right-
ist candidate hijacking the nomination of the Republican Party (as Donald
Trump did in 2016).
In the other Scandinavian variant of the second configuration, initially
militant social democrats became dominant government parties for ex-
tended stretches of time under systems of proportional representation and
built comprehensive risk-hedging and progressive-redistributive welfare
states. As in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian types of party systems,
this kept economic-distributive issue conflict alive. But proportional repre-
sentation and a far advanced postindustrialization with very encompassing
social and cultural services allowed for the entry of left-libertarian and
rightist-populist parties earlier than in the Anglo-Saxon democracies, al-
beit first with a distributive-economic appeal. In fact, in Denmark and
Norway in the 1970s the first entry of parties that later morphed into radi-
cal right parties was on the extreme right of the conventional economic di-

264
mension, staged as revolts against high income and payroll taxes by self-
employed businesspeople and professionals.
In Scandinavia, when the existing market-liberal parties asserted their
credibility as defenders of free market pleas, the radical right parties had to
reinvent themselves as advocates of immigration restrictions and oppo-
nents of left-libertarian policy agendas. Also, advanced postindustrializa-
tion of employment and occupational structure in Scandinavia made cen-
ter-left parties increasingly appeal to highly educated sociocultural profes-
sionals, to the detriment of their working-class supporters, and induced a
gradual convergence of center-left and center-right economic and social
policies. Different from the other Scandinavian polities, the economic pol-
icy polarization began to wane in Sweden only in the new millennium and
the rise of a radical right party had to await this strategically more hos-
pitable environment.18 But also here ultimately incumbents could not pre-
vent the rise of new partisan players.
While the big political-economic drivers of radical right politics—
postindustrialization and new challenges to the welfare state (occupational
polarization, demographic transition)—ultimately promote the emergence
of radical right parties almost everywhere, a complex combination of distal
and proximate causal mechanisms, rooted in the long-run development of
party systems and welfare states, appears to account for the timing and rel-
ative strength of emerging radical right parties.19

FROM SPATIAL TO ISSUE COMPETITION THEORY: VALENCE

AND ISSUE OWNERSHIP

Building on the work of Stokes (1963), Budge and Farlie (1983) offer a
valence theory of party competition that fundamentally questions the be-
haviorally diluted spatial perspective on party competition offered in this
chapter.20 Valence means that all citizens agree on a desirable policy ob-
jective. Partisan politicians then compete over which party is best at deliv-
ering the universally preferred outcome. If parties permanently gain a rep-
utation for competence in achieving a policy objective, they “own” the
issue. Parties, therefore, like to steer campaign debates toward the issues
they own and remain silent on issues that competitors own or that are con-
tested in valence or spatial terms. In the valence framework, entry of new
partisan competitors occurs because existing parties do not stake out posi-
tions on desirable issues. By contrast, entry in the spatial framework oc-

265
curs when a configuration of policy positions that is popular on the elec-
toral demand side has not been adopted by any of the partisan policy sup-
pliers, thus opening the door to issue entrepreneurs (see Hobolt and de
Vries 2015).
To be sure, partisan claims to policy competence are critical also within
a behavioral spatial framework.21 Parties gain a reputation through past
policy actions, rendering credible their current positional commitments in
the spatial contest to deliver policy in the future. In a spatial framework,
however, voters value competence only when a party’s position suits them:
a voter finds the competent advocate of a disliked issue position much
more dangerous and reprehensible than her incompetent substitute.
Altogether, at least three premises set the issue ownership framework
against the spatial framework in party competition theory. First, issues at
stake in party competition have mostly valence, not positional character.
Parties are most successful if they own salient issues in valence competi-
tion, while they gain reputations for distinctive popular issue positions in
spatial competition theory. Second, there is a large number of separate va-
lence issues at stake, not a small, parsimonious set of a few issue dimen-
sions on each of which politicians map multiple issue positions and then
bundle them into packages. Third, in valence competition parties empha-
size issues they own and ignore issues owned by competitors. In spatial
competition, parties choose differential positions on shared issue dimen-
sions and compete head-on.
How applicable is the valence frame for understanding the politics of
radical right wing party ascent? While some contributors to the radical
right literature have invoked issue ownership, I am unaware of a complete,
stringent account of the radical right’s development from a valance and
issue ownership perspective. As a foil, consider a simple stylized ideal-
typical narrative of how valence competition theory might account for the
rise of the radical right. Existing literature can then assist us to check how
plausible the different steps of the argument are.
In the valence account, radical right politicians would first seize on one
or several issues that are not owned by existing parties. The most likely
suspects are immigration, law and order, traditional family norms, and EU
skepticism. If they become notorious for making any of these issues
salient, they can hope to acquire issue ownership. Other parties then avoid
these issues and attempt to focus competition on issues they own (e.g., so-
cial policy, efficient markets, fighting unemployment, fiscal balance, envi-

266
ronmental protection). Conversely, radical right parties take great care not
to touch their rivals’ issues.
The first obstacle to applying the issue ownership framework to the rise
of radical right-wing parties concerns whether immigration or any of the
other issues mentioned above is a valence issue. They all appear to be spa-
tially contested issues with multiple partisan positions, whether the issue is
law and order, family norms, or EU skepticism. Most indications are that
even immigration is a contested issue, subject to spatial competition, even
though the distribution of support might be slightly skewed in favor of op-
ponents. In the United States, Egan (2013, 28–29) finds a pretty symmetri-
cal distribution of opinions on immigration. Also in European politics, po-
sitional partisan competition over immigration is fierce (Abou-Chabi
2016). As De Sio and Weber’s (2014, 874) data example for Spain sug-
gests, the moderate skewedness of public support in favor of restrictions
on immigration and the lesser division within center-right parties over the
issue may give the latter a mild incentive to emphasize a restrictive immi-
gration position, but the lopsidedness of the balance is not very pro-
nounced.
Furthermore, positions on the various issues on which right-wing parties
have seized since the 1980s appear to cluster on one or two underlying
spatial dimensions of political preference distribution, a dimension of lib-
ertarian-authoritarian governance (with civil liberties, law and order, gen-
der/sexuality, and family norms as typical policy considerations) and an
inclusionary versus exclusionary conception of citizenship (with tolerance
for multiculturalism, nationalism, and immigration as typical issues). It is
easy for right-wing politicians to spin out new issues, as long as they can
be mapped on these spatial dimensions. Just consider recent positions on
gay rights, transgendered individuals, or terrorism. Conversely, the diffi-
culties conventional parties have with the issue dimension new radical
right parties highlight are of a spatial kind: preferences over political gov-
ernance and citizenship tend to cross-cut the constituencies that have con-
figured around conventional center-left and center-right parties on the eco-
nomic-distributive divide. Compared to radical right parties, the “issue
yield” (De Sio and Weber 2014) of conventional parties on immigration or
political governance is negative: by taking unambiguous positions, con-
ventional parties are likely to lose more voters to competitors than they
gain.
To generalize beyond the experience of radical right parties, it appears
to be pretty difficult to identify instances of valence issues that could give

267
rise to new political parties. Even seeming valence issues—such as envi-
ronmental protection or fighting crime—turn out to involve spatial divides,
when politicians spell out how operational policies affect resource distrib-
ution, jobs, or rule of law.
It is therefore not surprising that the standard question to tap issue own-
ership, asking respondents which party would “handle” an issue more
competently, reveals positional politics in a subterranean fashion. Respon-
dents’ party identification and ideology explain the bulk of the variance in
voters’ competence attributions to parties (Stubager and Slothuus 2013;
see also Therriault 2015). Very little remains for pure valence considera-
tions that is not tainted by a partisan-spatial judgment of the competi-
tors.22 Egan’s (2013) in-depth analysis of American mass publics demon-
strates that voters attribute issue “ownership” not to award a party particu-
lar competence in getting things done on a (valence) issue, or even to sig-
nal particular agreement with a party’s position on an issue (see Egan
2013, 36–39), but merely to indicate that a party devotes extraordinary re-
sources to (gives priority to) an issue. Issue ownership theory may there-
fore be an implausible framework not just for explaining emerging radical
right support but also for explaining most party competition in democratic
frameworks around the world.
If parties need to contest policy subjects they cannot turn from posi-
tional issues into valence issues they own, the third premise of valence
competition theory—namely, that parties concentrate on their own issues
while neglecting those embraced by their competitors—also becomes
questionable. There is little doubt that immigration and multiculturaliza-
tion have been catalysts and crystallizing markers of radical right parties
since their inception. At the same time, tracking the history of these parties
shows that they have subsequently gone through careers of adding on a
proliferation of issues. But can they stay away from the issue domains his-
torically occupied by the established parties? Let me take up this question
in the final section, on features of the ongoing competition of new right-
wing parties after the parties’ initial phase of take-off.

RADICAL RIGHT PARTIES AS “ESTABLISHED” PARTIES: THE

ONGOING COMPETITIVE STRUGGLE FOR VOTES, OFFICE,
AND POLICY INFLUENCE

Following a run of inaugural electoral successes, new parties begin to

build a record of political actions that encompasses a history of publicly

268
taking policy positions, but also of voting in legislatures on a host of issues
(including budgets) the agenda of which cannot be controlled by any sin-
gle party. Parties may have to consider taking new stances on issues that
were not on the activists’ minds at the inception of the party. Established
parties and voters will likely adjust their appeals to the entry of the new
competitors. Conversely, new parties may adapt their strategies in the on-
going dynamic of party competition and shifting voter preferences.

Calibrating the Salience and Domain of Radical Right Issue Appeals

in Party Competition
New parties may prefer to stay focused on the issue “niches” that gave
them a successful start and not enter the “sweatshop” of protracted debates
about how to devise a more complete catalogue of policy positions on a
large variety of issues that are already or may become salient in the leg-
islative arena. A programmatic “niche” party was initially defined in terms
of party size (Meguid 2005; Adams et al. 2006) or as a party that was dis-
tinctly competing less on economic-distributive policies (Wagner 2012).
Using this latter, improved conception, Meyer and Wagner (2013) find that
when parties that grow and interact with competitors, they often move
from niche to “mainstream” party status, but the reverse movement can
never be observed. Party electoral size, age, and party resources are predic-
tors of issue “mainstreaming,” as is government participation (Wagner and
Meyer 2014).
One wonders whether this analysis still holds with an even more ad-
vanced conception of nicheness, namely, the difference between the
salience that a party attributes to each issue in the universe of political
competition and the average salience attributed to each issue by all the
competitors (Meyer and Miller 2015). In a large-scale descriptive study of
radical right, center-right, and center-left parties’ issue emphasis and posi-
tion in seventeen countries from 1980 to 2008, based on (re)coding the
Comparative Manifesto Dataset and not using this advanced conception of
nicheness, Wagner and Meyer (2016) find that the relative emphasis and
concentration of radical right parties on libertarian-authoritarian issues, in-
cluding immigration, increases over time as a share of their party mani-
festos both absolutely and relatively when compared to socioeconomic is-
sues. Among center-right and center-left parties the share of both dimen-
sions gradually increases at the expense of residual topics. Is this evidence
in favor of the valence theory of competition? We have to keep in mind
that the non-economic issues have a spatial profile of preference distribu-

269
tions. Moreover, what may be more striking than the slight trend changes
toward concentration on favorite issues among radical right parties are the
absolute levels of parties’ attention to different subject areas. In fact, even
when reaching the extreme of devoting 45 percent of manifestos to liber-
tarian-authoritarian issues, radical right parties still also devote about 30
percent to economic issues. Conversely, the center-left and center-right
parties target about 30 percent to the former and up to 45 percent to the lat-
ter. Overall, then, there are discrepancies in the salience different parties
devote to issue dimensions, but they are surprisingly restrained. No serious
competitor gets away with declining to take positions on any of the rele-
vant issue dimensions.23
More generally, the comparative literature on issue politics in party
competition has not been able to confirm that parties pursue systematically
diverging agendas predicated on their favorite issues (Green-Pedersen and
Walgrave 2014). If parties do not address generally salient issues, their
competitors will force them to do so. Direct confrontation is hence more
important than selective emphasis (Dolezal et al. 2014, 59).24 Of course,
very small parties have a greater chance to protect a niche status (Dolezal
et al. 2014, 67; Meyer and Wagner 2013).
If thematic specialization runs into restraints, parties have to address
issue dimensions on which any position they take might divide their elec-
torate. Hence, from a standpoint of spatial party competition it might be
easiest for radical right parties to claim fuzzy, blurry, centrist positions,
particularly on the economic-distributive issue dimension (Rovny 2012),
that allow supporters to project their own preferred positions on those of
the parties (Somer-Topcu 2015). While this is a plausible tactic and cer-
tainly is practiced in the early takeoff phase of such parties, some evidence
suggests that radical right parties do not confine themselves to strategic
blurriness on economic issues. At this point, for once we have to bring up
demand-side considerations to throw light on the position-taking of radical
right parties.
The core radical right authoritarian and anti-immigrant, exclusionary ap-
peals tend to resonate most commonly among less educated voters and
males (Ivarsflaten and Stubager 2013), but not necessarily with low-in-
come voters. Indeed, in the early phase of radical right takeoff, better-earn-
ing small-business owners and other self-employed crafts were just as im-
portant an electoral constituency as lower-earning blue-collar and clerical
wage earners. The former often militantly called for market liberalizing re-

270
forms, while the latter remained indifferent on economic issue positions as
long as radical right parties emphasized anti-immigration stances and
mainline parties were sufficiently close to each other on economic issues
to rule out a sharp reduction of the welfare state. Blue-collar workers sup-
porting the radical right never embraced market liberalism, but tolerated a
market-liberal distributive economic position that attracted other voters to
the radical right.25
As a consequence, many early radical right parties bundled issues into a
“winning formula” of authoritarian and exclusionary stands on political
governance and citizenship, supplemented by a right-wing stance on mar-
ket liberalism and against taxation (Kitschelt 1995). But with the accelera-
tion of deindustrialization in the 1990s and 2000s, the growing income
gaps based on escalating skill rents for the top quintile of the postindustrial
labor force and partisan-politics-induced regressive tax windfalls for the
top 1 percent (Huber and Stephens 2014; Huber, Huo, and Stephens 2016),
and the relative convergence/proximity of center-left and center right par-
ties on economic issues, the disaffected, aggrieved, marginalized blue-col-
lar electorate available to radical right appeals has clearly swollen com-
pared to the size of the petty bourgeoisie. This is likely to have nudged
radical right parties away from the market-liberal pole (De Lange 2007).26
In fact, as radical right parties moved incrementally toward the economic
center-left, their voting “class gap” in favor of blue-collar workers became
significantly larger (Arzheimer 2013; Harteveld 2016).27 These radical
right parties indeed responded to the electoral prospects of attracting blue-
collar workers from established parties by modifying their economic pol-
icy appeals. Conversely, blue-collar voters got the message and started
moving toward radical right parties. Economic policy blurriness may have
been a transitional stance of radical right parties that gives way to crisper
positions on bread-and-butter issues of their nativist electorates, such as
social security and health care, as well as trade liberalization and immigra-
tion, where the link between economic and political-cultural dimensions is
particularly obvious.
A further strategic shift of radical right parties’ programmatic bundling
may be in store in the near future. So far, authoritarian appeals concerning
domestic political and cultural governance (concerning authority, civil lib-
erties, gender relations, family) have gone hand in hand with exclusionary
appeals to preserve national-parochial purity against immigration, cos-
mopolitanism, and multiculturalism. But in terms of attitudinal preference

271
clusters, the two dimensions have always been somewhat distinct.28 Start-
ing with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands in 2002, however, political-cul-
tural authoritarianism and exclusionary, xenophobic nationalism have been
unbundled. Fortuyn embraced a libertarian agenda on family, sexuality,
and civil liberties with an exclusionary parochial position on citizenship
(Akkerman 2005; Rydgren and Van Holsteyn 2005). This strand of the
radical right advances the novel argument that Western individualism, per-
sonal autonomy, tolerance for disagreement, and gender equality can be
preserved only by rejecting immigration of individuals originating in col-
lectivist-authoritarian political cultures.
Indeed, collectivist-authoritarian positions on gender and the family
may lose ground in radical right parties and give way to more libertarian
individualism and gender neutrality, albeit not in a clean and unambiguous
break with the past (cf. Akkerman 2015a; Pettersson 2017). Radical right
leaders such as Marine Le Pen in France and Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark
appear to have changed their parties’ rhetoric so that an exclusionary con-
ception of national citizenship is viewed as protecting Western individual-
ist, tolerant, and gender-neutral lifestyles against what they perceive as the
influx of Islamic immigrants from authoritarian cultures.
It remains to be seen whether the emerging three-dimensional revision,
unbundling, and repackaging of radical right programmatic appeals will
pay off in terms of expanding the parties’ electoral support coalitions. Will
the new appeal eradicate the deficit of women’s and highly educated citi-
zens’ support for radical right parties? And will this shift enable the parties
to hold on to those voters with whom an authoritarian law-and-order and
family agenda resonates, while simultaneously attracting more libertarian,
albeit xenophobic, contributors?

Adjusting Positions to Voters and Competitors?

Party positions may respond not only to core voters’ changing issue agen-
das or newly available swing voters in the electoral marketplace but also to
the strategic repositioning of established parties. It goes without saying
that studying these dynamic interactions is a complex and methodologi-
cally tricky undertaking (Adams 2012). It requires linking time series of
public opinion polls (preferably panel data) to data on parties’ positional
appeals, as measured by expert judgments, party manifesto content, or the
analysis of news reports.29 Or it involves survey or lab experiments, often
with heroic assumptions about lag times of response and resilience of mea-

272
sured effects in real-world processes.
Evidence suggests that parties do react to each other and to voter move-
ments (e.g., Adams et al. 2004). But voters are less likely to register party
movements in the short run, requiring a capacity of information processing
and accepting limited to a small minority of voters (Zaller and Feldman
1992). Voter informational updating about parties tends to be glacially
slow.30 All this limits the dynamic adjustment among parties and between
parties and voters.
One of the most-cited studies of behavioral party competition argues
that only large mainstream parties (identified as party families), not
smaller “niche” parties with extreme appeals, can gain votes by modifying
their positions in line with the median left-right voter position (Adams et
al. 2006). Ezrow and colleagues (2011) and Han (2016) qualify the claim,
finding that parties heavily invested in sociocultural politics may improve
their electoral support if they follow the changing preferences of their own
voters. In multiparty systems with at least two dimensions, spatial and
salience considerations mean that we should not be surprised that extreme
parties do not use an overall left-right median voter as their benchmark to
improve their vote share. For one thing, taking an extreme position—say,
against immigration—enhances the salience of the issue dimension that is
most profitable for radical right parties (Ezrow 2008). For another thing,
with reasonable behavioral assumptions a multiparty competitive situation
may not make it profitable for extreme parties to practice moderation even
in a unidimensional competitive space.31
Can mainstream parties compete with radical right parties in a spatial
fashion on their core issues? A recent sophisticated study provides a condi-
tionally affirmative answer. If established center-right parties manage to
frame the immigration issue on the economic-distributive issue dimension
—that is, if they reduce the spatial complexity of the competitive arena—
they have a very good chance to dampen the strength of radical right par-
ties (Pardos-Prado 2015). Also, a study of welfare chauvinism finds that
mainstream parties sometimes do follow radical right parties’ positions, al-
beit in nationally idiosyncratic ways that are descriptively registered but
not theoretically fully understood (Schumacher and Van Kersbergen
2014). Overall, the evidence on mainstream party programmatic-strategic
modifications is quite mixed (cf. Akkerman 2015b; Bale et al. 2013; Han
2015).

273
The Temptations of Political Power: Consequences of Government
Participation?
The study of dynamic interaction between radical right and all other par-
ties in postindustrial party systems is still at the beginning. This applies
even more so to the analysis of the causes and consequences of radical
right government participation—whether indirectly through legislative
votes or directly through cabinet seats. There are by now examples of both
strategies, and with rather mixed electoral results for the participating radi-
cal right parties.32
Does the prospect of government entry moderate and broaden a radical
right party’s policy positions? And how does government participation in-
fluence a radical right party’s electoral payoffs? With regard to other par-
ties entering on the fringe of a new political issue dimension, such as ecol-
ogy parties, there is some evidence that prospects of cabinet participation
in coalition government promote an influx and assertion of more moderate
party activists and shift party positions toward more accommodation with
prospective coalition partners.33 But for radical right parties, based on a
small number of available observations, there is hitherto no confirmation
of such tendencies. Whether cabinet prospects for such parties exist or
whether cordon sanitaire agreements among established parties to keep
them out of executive cabinet consideration appears not to affect their pol-
icy agendas (Akkerman and Rooduijn 2015). There is also no evidence
that radical right-wing parties become more moderate on immigration, Eu-
ropean integration, or law-and-order issues as a consequence of govern-
ment participation (see Akkerman, de Lange, and Rooduijn 2016). Further,
the parties have done little to broaden their programmatic scope while in
office, except that when in government or supporting governments, radical
right-wing parties have been able to promote “welfare chauvinist” social
policies, protecting social programs catering to the native population while
cutting those more likely to benefit immigrants (Arndt 2016).
It is fairly clear, however, that—on average—radical right parties pay a
steep electoral price for government participation, although the variance of
government involvement is tremendous (Akkerman and de Lange 2012).
These outcomes depend both on radical right parties’ abilities to push for
some of their policies as well as on their widely varying capacity to attract
professionally and managerially competent politicians (Art 2011). Ques-
tions of intraparty organization and cohesion—bracketed in this review—
loom large when considering how radical right parties cope with the inter-

274
nal strains of coalition government participation.
Overall, the record of radical right wing government participation is still
too thin to draw firm conclusions. Parties have been involved in a single
round or maybe a second round of government participation only, and typ-
ically as junior partners, often left to free-ride on the obligations of the
larger coalition members to deal with the unpopular bits of fiscal policy.
Only more experience—and more research covering this experience—will
tell how government participation reshapes radical right parties. If the ex-
perience of ecology and left-libertarian parties more generally is any yard-
stick, to register a more profound impact of government participation on
party strategy presupposes the completion of multiple rounds of competi-
tive play and government involvement.
More generally, behavioral competition theory within a spatial frame-
work has some potential to understand the changing positions and electoral
payoffs radical right parties have obtained in advanced postindustrial
democracies. Nevertheless, testing propositions about the dynamic interac-
tion between party positions, government status, voter preferences, and
radical right parties’ electoral payoffs over relatively short time periods re-
quires extremely precise measures and long runs of observations. One
would be hard pressed to attribute to data obtained from party manifesto
content analysis, expert judgments, or voter surveys a measurement quality
sufficiently high to satisfy these measurement requirements. As a conse-
quence, for the time being, observed regularities may be idiosyncratic to
the particular data and measurement strategy rather than reflect robust real
world patterns of party competition.

CONCLUSION: A THEORETICAL SYNTHESIS?

Let me conclude by laying out a life cycle model of parties, applied here to
the radical right, but more generally valid for other parties as well. It dis-
tinguishes an early stage of party takeoff and initial success, a stage of sus-
tained growth as an oppositional “challenger” party, maturity as a phase of
oscillation between government and opposition status, and finally decline
as the phase in which new issue dimensions take precedence over those
that favor the contemporary radical right. Consider my statements about
each phase of radical right articulation as a string of propositions that
could conceivably be empirically tested but have not yet been subjected to
empirical scrutiny in rigorous fashion.

275
 In the first phase, the presence of demand-side conditions (postindustri-
alization, multiculturalization, severe strains on low-skill employment, and
increased immigration) in interaction with the supply-side strategic con-
vergence of established parties on the economic-distributive dimension
and a partisan diversification on the issue dimensions of political gover-
nance (libertarian or authoritarian?) and/or citizenship (inclusionary or ex-
clusionary?) create the conditions for the successful takeoff of radical right
parties. Electoral institutions represent a serious barrier to entry. The par-
ties’ appeal will be heavily concentrated on a few core issues, supporting a
radicalized stance that energizes core supporters and puts the party on the
cognitive horizon of rational political information misers. The new parties
will have little organizational institutionalization and apparatus. Instead,
they rely on highly personalist networks of charismatic leaders, core sup-
porters, and external benefactors.
In the second phase, electoral-legislative sustained or intermittent ex-
pansion, the radical right parties gain greater leverage to disseminate their
core stances and catch the attention of a wider audience. As a consequence
of multiple rounds of legislative presence, they will be drawn into ever
more positional conflicts and experience pressure to broaden the scope of
their issue positions to cope with their lack of control over a political
agenda not restricted to issues on which radical right parties are internally
united. At the same time, internal disagreements about legislative and par-
tisan issue stances nudge the parties toward developing tighter manage-
ment structures to regularize and institutionalize the process of internal in-
terest aggregation and coordination among legislative actors. Together
with organizational development, factions may emerge inside the parties.
Ultimately, the survival and success of parties will depend on the internal
organizational capacities for integration that rely on professional capabili-
ties of their leadership (cf. Art 2011; more generally Tavits 2013, chapter
6).
In the third phase, the strategic relevance of the party rises for legisla-
tive majority and executive coalition cabinet building. The promise of gov-
ernment participation may lead to the entry and organizational assertion of
pragmatic party activists and wings, intensifying internal divisions and po-
tentials for splits. Government support and participation is likely to be a
mixed blessing for the parties, as circumstances that may boost or depress
their opportunities to take credit for policies and outcomes that resonate fa-
vorably with their electorate are variable and unpredictable. There will be
no simple linear relationship between government support/participation,

276
electoral party performance, and strategic moderation of radical right wing
parties.
Over the long run, the nationally and temporally specific conditions that
furthered or retarded the growth of radical right parties in the start-up
phase and the early phase of sustained growth will leave a progressively
less sharply contoured imprint on the actual performance of the parties.
Averaged over decades, the electoral performance of radical right parties
may begin to reflect underlying political-economic conditions (postindus-
trialization of the occupational structure, nature of social policy and eco-
nomic redistribution, multiculturalism, general economic performance)
more so than the short-term strategic interaction among parties in the first
or second phase of their life cycles.
The interplay between short- or medium-term political conditions and
long-term political-economic and structural conditions may also apply in
accounting for radical right parties in an eventual future fourth phase of
political decline. Like peasant, Christian, and social democratic parties be-
fore them, radical right parties may eventually face the transformation or
disappearance of their core electoral constituencies. The strategic maneu-
vering of skilled partisan leaders with new programmatic appeals and fa-
vorable strategic configurations in the system of party competition created
by the moves of their competitors may postpone the decline of radical right
parties at that point. But ultimately, structural factors will assert them-
selves, and radical right parties will be displaced by other parties not antic-
ipated at this time, or maybe by entirely different modes and mechanisms
of political interest articulation and aggregation beyond the form of the
party altogether. As things stand, radical right parties in current postindus-
trial democracies still appear to be going through the first or second phase
and barely entering phase three of their political articulation, with many of
their established competitors situated already in the less favorable third or
fourth phase of their life cycles.

277
NOTES

I would like to thank Philipp Rehm for detailed comments of a previous

draft. Likewise, I am grateful to a panel of Duke graduate students—Brian
Guay, Ida Hjermitslev, and Gabe Madson—for having dissected a first
draft, both in writing and at a lunch seminar. Of course, I did not accom-
modate all criticisms, and the final product is entirely my responsibility.
1. This claim would have to be qualified for financial scandals that can
be the systemic outflow of a systematic practice of governance, asso-
ciated with weak states and patronage regimes, often associated with
clientelistic practices of citizen-politician transactions.
2. This is different from Hug’s (2001) proposal to separate the registra-
tion and ballot inclusion stage from the electoral takeoff. First, be-
cause of the abundance of political entrepreneurs and political crack-
pots, it is difficult to determine what theoretical significance the regis-
tration of party labels has, and Hug’s study gains little theoretical
leverage on this question. Second, it is difficult to identify an exhaus-
tive registry of parties net of the electoral records of their ballot per-
formance.
3. In directional theory voters choose a party positioned on the same
“side” of an issue dimension as the voter, even if it is spatially further
from the voter’s ideal point than a party on the opposite side (cf. Mer-
rill and Grofman 1999). In discounting models voters discount the ex-
tremism or distance of a party’s announced position from the status
quo and the voter’s own position (cf. Adams et al. 2005; Tomz and
Van Houweling 2008). Weber (2015) shows that proximity, direc-
tional, and discounting models predict the vote best in instances,
where they all make the same prediction.
4. In this regard, John Roemer’s (2001) work is most sophisticated, espe-
cially as he applied it to the role of xenophobic, anti-immigrant voting
by poor people who otherwise might have an incentive to support a
party with a redistributive program (see Roemer, Lee, and Van Der
Straeten 2007). Because of the theoretical framework’s idiosyncratic
assumptions, the book has been all but ignored. For a critical review,
see Brady 2008.
5. To a considerable extent, this new literature received innovative im-
pulses especially from James Adams’s work (Adams 2001; Adams,

278
 Merrill, and Grofman 2005; Adams 2012 as overview), even though
some of his investigations are still oriented toward the regulative idea
of equilibria, albeit such that the equilibria are derived based on be-
havioral constraints under which the actors operate.
6. For parties to take radical positions implies they consider a dimension
as salient. But the reverse does not always apply. On economics, for
example, parties may find the issue dimension salient, yet support
moderate positions.
7. On the methodological trade-offs and hazards of using either tech-
nique to determine the positional appeal of parties, see the special
issue of Electoral Studies 16, no. 1 (2007), especially the articles by
Benoit and Laver (2007) and by Volkens (2007).
8. Among commonly cited studies, see especially Arzheimer 2009;
Golder 2003; Norris 2005; van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005.
9. For a generalized test of the relationship between convergence of ex-
isting parties and new party entry, see Zons 2015.
10. It appears that De Sio and Weber (2014) do not endogenize the num-
ber of parties. Their model apparently does not incorporate entry of
new parties disrupting the issue yield calculations among established
parties.
11. For statistical estimates of this effect, see Hino (2012, 150–152).
Buštíková (2014) developed a variant of the backlash argument for
post-Communist Eastern Europe.
12. On the varying capacity and propensity of the left to invoke the multi-
culturalism divide, see also Bornschier 2010, 2012.
13. I ignore here the complexities of calculating effective district size in
multitier hybrid electoral systems with lower- and upper-tier electoral
districts.
14. This complexity may apply to Britain at the time of the rise of the
United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP), when the party system
was already divided three ways between Conservatives, Labour, and
Liberal Democrats, only to be further complicated by ethnoregional
parties in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. When Labour and
Conservatives converged on economic policy programs, here blue-col-
lar workers first augmented the pool of abstainers and only then, when
the UKIP gained critical mass, threw in their lot with that party (cf.

279
 Evans and Tilley 2016, ch. 6).
15. These are Kitschelt and Rehm 2015a, Polk and Rovny 2015, and
Rovny and Polk 2014. The papers reference a body of research trying
to endogenize dimensional dominance and coming into focus since
2000. For a distinction of the four configurations of party systems, see
also Kitschelt and Rehm 2015b and more generally Beramendi et al.
2015.
16. The French and Italian Communists were, of course, outside this
broad “social market” consensus in the 1950s and 1960s, but shed this
status of isolation in the 1970s (Italy) or became irrelevant with the
end of the Cold War in the 1980s (France).
17. As Art (2005, 2011) elaborates, against the backdrop of fascist legacy
radical right wing parties attracted sectarian, quarrelsome political ac-
tivists unable to realize that a successful party organization and mobi-
lization in the early twenty-first century require a rather different ap-
peal than in the historical time of National Socialism.
18. Working-class defection from the Labour Party—and availability of
such voters to UKIP in 2010 (Goodwin and Cutts 2013)—was to a
large extent a function of the party’s diminishing strategic appeal to its
former core constituencies (Evans and Tilley 2012). In Sweden, the
social democratic and bourgeois party camps were deeply divided
over economic and social policy issues throughout the 1990s and early
2000s, during which time radical right entrepreneurs could not find an
effective appeal to sustain a successful party (cf. Rydgren 2006, ch. 5).
Only with the move of social democrats to more neoliberal reforms
and the moderates toward acceptance of much of the welfare state and
tax status quo improved the chances of the new radical right Sweden
Democrats to attract substantial tiers of voters (Oskarson and Demker
2013, 180–183).
19. This genealogy of the radical right may have prompted Mudde (2014)
to claim that the advent of such parties has not yet changed the funda-
mental competitive dynamic of European party systems.
20. As previously indicated, I have treated spatial theories as a broad field,
ignoring what I consider minor amendments of its basic perspective:
directional and discounting models of party competition. See Adams
et al. 2005, Merrill and Grofman 1999, Tomz and Van Houweling
2008, and, as an elegant way to show the complementarity and even

280
 mutual reinforcement of the three spatial variants, Weber 2015, who
shows that spatial arguments predict vote choices best when posi-
tional, directional and discounting predictions reinforce each other.
21. As Pardos-Prado (2012) emphasizes, valence as competence attribu-
tion to a party does not necessarily coincide with valence as consen-
sus.
22. Even what Stubager and Slothuus call “group representation” as a pre-
dictor of issue ownership attribution may have a subtle partisan shad-
ing.
23. Likewise, in the regressions Wagner and Meyer (2016) deploy to esti-
mate the effect of the lapse of time, the substantive size of shifts in
emphasis and position is very small.
24. As a further modifier, consider internal dissent and debate in parties.
As Van de Waardt (2014) shows for the question of European integra-
tion, in general parties with internal divisions try to downplay this
issue. But internal debates among activists over this issue partially
counteract this strategy.
25. More than I would like to recount, my original thesis has been misrep-
resented as painting blue-collar workers as market liberals. To see that
this is not the case, just consider the scheme of preference distribution
in Kitschelt 1998, 15, as well as the explicit finding that workers sup-
porting the French National Front were not on the right in terms of
economic distribution (112). See also Kitschelt 2013, 242. Neverthe-
less, on average and net of occupational experiences, there appears to
be a persistent anti-egalitarianism fueling the vote of radical right par-
ties (see Cornelis and van Hiel 2014). Even where there is support
among right-wing voters for egalitarianism, it follows a “welfare pop-
ulism” very much biased against institutions of the welfare state
(Derks 2006; de Koster, Achterberg, and van der Wael 2013).
26. For an exploration of radical right parties’ search of winning formula
in a two-dimensional space, see the agent-based modeling approach
by Muis and Scholte (2013).
27. Nevertheless, time and again empirical studies of radical right pro-
grammatic appeals still locate the parties on the economic dimension
of redistributive politics closer to market-liberal conservatism than to
parties with redistributive intent. See Immerzeel, Lubbers, and Coffé
2015.

281
28. This applies to my own work with 1990 World Values Survey data
(Kitschelt 1995). See the evidence on Denmark, Norway, and Italy
(140–141, 180) with a cosmopolitan-parochial identity dimension sep-
arated from a libertarian-authoritarian sociopolitical and cultural gov-
ernance dimension. For a three-dimensional rendering of public opin-
ion, see also Bartels 2008.
29. For the best examples of such dynamic interaction of parties and elec-
torates, see Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002 and Soroka and
Wlezien 2010.
30. What Achen and Bartels (2016) call “group”-oriented voting may not
be the opposite of “folk” partisan responsibility chains, but indicate
the slow realignment of voters with parties, as voters gradually digest
new partisan appeals and strategic configurations.
31. Moderating radical parties simply may provoke the entry of new, more
radical competitors.
32. Instances of government participation include the Austrian Freedom
Party, which lost more than half of its voters and split up after its first
stint in government (1998–2002), but then recovered by asserting its
radical anti-immigration agenda and shedding its market-liberal aus-
terity policy, as well as the Italian Lega Nord. External support of con-
servative governments occurs in Scandinavia.
33. See the analysis of intraparty politics across German states and Bel-
gian regions in Green parties in the 1980s in Kitschelt 1989, ch. 9.
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CHAPTER 10

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 GENDER AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

HILDE COFFÉ
RADICAL right parties are often introduced as Männerparteien, parties
typically led and supported by men. The aim of this chapter is to discuss
this claim and to explore various aspects of gender bias as they relate to
radical right parties and support for these parties. The first section consid-
ers the so-called gender gap in radical right voting, with women being sig-
nificantly underrepresented among the radical right electorate compared
with men. The section provides an overview of suggested explanations for
this gap and discusses how some of these explanations have been chal-
lenged and how a significant part of the gender gap remains unexplained in
most research. In the second section, I explore how explanations for radi-
cal right voting behavior may differ between women and men. Whereas
the majority of the research on radical right voting has taken for granted
that women and men behave similarly, the section shows that the limited
available research does indicate some gender differences in the explana-
tions for supporting a radical right party. This is important, as it suggests
that there is no single explanatory pattern that holds equally well for both
women and men. While most available research points to a gender gap in
radical right voting, cross-national differences in the size of the gap have
been found. These cross-national differences, and possible explanations for
these differences, are described in the third section. In the fourth section, I
move away from the topic of radical right voting behavior and describe the
role of women in radical right party organizations as leaders and members.
The final section outlines some ideas for further research and challenges
that lie ahead for scholarship on gender and the radical right.

THE GENDER GAP IN RADICAL RIGHT VOTING

One of the most consistent findings in the research on radical right voting
has been the gender-specific profile of the radical right electorate. While
cross-national differences do exist in the size of the gender gap (Im-
merzeel, Coffé, and vander Lippe, 2015), women tend to be significantly
underrepresented among radical right voters compared with men (Coffé
Forthcoming; Givens 2004; Gidengil et al. 2005; Fontana, Sidler, and
Hardmeier 2006; Harteveld et al. 2015; Rippeyoung 2007; Spierings and
Zaslove 2015).

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 Various (related) explanations have been suggested for this gender dif-
ference in radical right voting. One involves gender differences in occupa-
tional status and related attitudes toward immigrants. The argument goes
that in Western societies men are overrepresented in manual jobs in blue-
collar sectors, the type of jobs that are most threatened by modernization
and globalization, and are thus more likely to lose their jobs or to be forced
into lower-paying jobs in the new global economy (Givens 2004). As what
Betz calls “losers of modernisation” (1994), they develop a sense of inse-
curity and resentment that leads to positive attitudes toward nativist poli-
cies (Studlar, McAllister, and Hayes 1998). Furthermore, it has been sug-
gested that manual workers in blue-collar sectors face the most “competi-
tion” from immigrants over not just jobs but also other scarce resources
such as housing, and that this triggers exclusionary reactions because
workers experience feelings of threat (Fennema 2005). Since radical right
parties want to reduce competition from immigrants by rejecting equal ac-
cess to resources for immigrants (Olzak 1992), feelings of threat may re-
sult in support for radical right parties. In comparison to men, women tend
to be more likely to work in the social service and health sector, which is
expanding and which tends to employ fewer immigrants (Givens 2004). If
women, even those in lower classes, do not feel that they are in direct com-
petition with immigrants over a limited (or decreasing) number of jobs, not
only might women have a more positive attitude toward immigrants, but
immigration might also be less of a salient issue for them (Givens 2004).
Second, gender differences in authoritarian attitudes have been intro-
duced as a possible explanation for the gender difference in radical right
voting. Gilligan maintains that men emphasize the strictness of law and
focus on individual responsibility. Women, by contrast, are more likely to
consider collective solutions in a world where people care for each other,
and they tend to hold less strict law-and-order attitudes than men (Gilligan
1982). Women are, for example, known to be more strongly opposed to
the use of force and more supportive of compassionate policies compared
with men (Gilens 1988). Investigating the gender gap in voting for the
Canadian Alliance Party, Gidengil and colleagues (2005) confirm that men
have stricter attitudes toward law-and-order issues compared with women,
and show that these gender differences help to close the gender gap in vot-
ing for the Canadian radical right party.
A third explanation that has been suggested for the gender gap in radical
right voting is women’s greater involvement in the church (Mayer 2002).
Churches in Europe have traditionally condemned the anti-immigrant dis-

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course of the radical right (Mayer 2015), and research has indicated that
regular churchgoers are significantly more positive toward immigrants and
less likely to support radical right parties compared with those who do not
regularly attend church (Billiet 1995; Immerzeel, Jaspers, and Lubbers
2013). Since women are more likely to be religiously involved, they are—
so the argument goes—less likely to vote for radical right parties. This
lower likelihood of voting for the radical right among religiously active
citizens also relates to the fact that these citizens tend to vote for religious
(Christian) parties (Immerzeel, Jaspers, and Lubbers 2013).
A fourth explanation for the gender difference in radical right voting has
been radical right parties’ ideology related to gender roles and women’s
position in society, mainly reducing their role to being a spouse and
mother (Mayer 2015). Mudde (2007) concludes that radical right parties
tend to defend the “natural differences” between women and men, and
since women are the only sex that can give birth and since offspring are
vital to the survival of the nation, women should be “protected.” Over the
last few decades, together with their rising levels of education and partici-
pation in the labor market and the emancipating influence of feminist
movements, women have become more liberal and more supportive of
feminist ideas (Inglehart and Norris 2003). These attitudes and ideas con-
tradict radical right parties’ traditional views toward women’s role in soci-
ety and may thus reduce women’s support for radical right parties.
Finally, some have linked women’s lower levels of political interest and
participation to the gender difference in radical right voting. Immerzeel,
Coffé, and vander Lippe (2015; see also Mudde 2007) argue that less polit-
ically interested and active people are likely to become aware of new polit-
ical developments later than are politically interested and active citizens.
This makes citizens who are less politically interested and active less
likely to vote for new “extreme” parties and more likely to follow the
widespread norm to vote for a mainstream, established party. Given that
women are generally less politically interested and active, they are ex-
pected to be more likely to vote for established parties rather than political
outsiders with an “extremist” image such as radical right parties (Kitschelt
1995; Mayer 2002).
Despite this variety of suggested socioeconomic and attitudinal explana-
tions for the gender gap in radical right voting, most empirical research to
date has not been able to fully explain the gender gap using these factors.
Some have also argued that women do not necessarily maintain more posi-
tive attitudes toward immigrants and that women are not less favorably in-

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clined toward law and order than men (Mayer 2013; Mudde 2007), thus
eliminating these attitudes as possible explanations for the gender gap.
Mayer (2013) points out that the economic situation has changed consider-
ably since the earlier writings on the radical right gender gap: nowadays,
service sector jobs can be as uncertain and insecure as the jobs of manual
blue-collar workers, making women as vulnerable to being “losers” in
globalization as men are. In addition, Mayer (2013) shows that the nega-
tive link between religiosity and attitudes toward immigrants—supposedly
explaining part of the gender difference in radical right voting—is chang-
ing, as Catholics, at least in France, have become more ethnocentric than
non-Catholics, and the most observant Catholics are the most ethnocentric.
Moreover, while radical right parties are mainly secular movements, they
have started to emphasize the religious divide and present themselves as
the safeguards of the “Judeo-Christian societies” against the Islamic threat
(Immerzeel, Jaspers, and Lubbers 2013). As such, the negative link be-
tween a Christian denomination and engagement and radical right voting
may not be as straightforward as once suggested, which also challenges the
suggestion of religiosity being an explanation for gender differences in
radical right voting. Finally, the idea that women’s liberal and feminist at-
titudes account for the gender difference in radical right voting has been
questioned, in particular because there is wide variation in radical right
parties’ gender ideologies, with some parties adhering to a modern-tradi-
tional view (de Lange and Mügge 2015; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2015). In
France, for example, Marine Le Pen supports women’s economic indepen-
dence and their right to a professional career (Mayer 2015). Similarly, the
Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party of Freedom) defends women’s
equality and same-sex partnerships (Akkerman 2015). Some radical right
parties, including the PVV, the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), the
Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party), and the Norwegian Fremskritss-
partiet (Progress Party), have also started to link gender and family to their
anti-Islam position, presenting women’s rights and gay and lesbian rights
as core values of the West and contrasting those with Islamic practices that
discriminate against women and include risks to the security of women,
such as forced marriages and honor killings (Akkerman 2015; de Lange
and Mügge 2015; Mayer 2013; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2015). Mudde and
Kaltwasser (2015, 28) conclude that both the PVV and the Dansk
Folkeparti have embraced gender equality as “a weapon against the alleged
‘Islamization’ of Europe.” As a consequence of this support for gender
equality, women may not be as reluctant to vote for radical right parties
because of the parties’ conservative ideologies as has been suggested.

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Moreover, the gender issue is of only secondary importance to radical right
parties, and thus it is not an issue that is likely to strongly influence voters’
likelihood of supporting such parties (de Lange and Mügge 2015; Mayer
2015; Mudde 2015).
Yet despite these counterarguments for suggested explanations for the
gender differences in radical right voting, women still tend to be underrep-
resented among the radical right electorate in most countries. Thus even if,
for example, women do not have significantly more positive attitudes to-
ward immigrants than men do, they seem to be less likely to translate these
attitudes into electoral support for radical right parties than men are. This
has been explained by Mudde (2007) as resulting from different levels of
political efficacy among men and women. In particular, lower levels of in-
ternally perceived political competence and feelings of political powerless-
ness among women have been said to discourage them from voting for
nontraditional, more radical parties and lead them to prefer long-estab-
lished mainstream parties (Immerzeel, Coffé, and vander Lippe 2015;
Mudde 2007).
Furthermore, it is possible that while women and men may have similar
attitudes toward immigrants, women may still be less likely than men to be
supportive of the strict immigration policies typically presented by radical
right parties. As a result of their roles as mothers and their socialization
into nurturing and caring tasks, women may have a stronger aversion to
policies excluding certain groups, may be more supportive of compassion-
ate policies (Gilens 1988; Immerzeel, Coffé, and vander Lippe 2015;
Rippeyoung 2007), and consequently may be less likely to agree with the
restrictive immigration policies typical of the radical right parties. How-
ever, the majority of the empirical studies explaining radical right voting in
general, and gender and radical right voting in particular, typically include
only a general measure of attitudes related to immigration and the presence
of immigrants (e.g., “[country]’s cultural life is undermined by immi-
grants”; “[country] should admit fewer immigrants”), leaving aside actual
support for particular policies as presented by radical right parties as a pos-
sible explanation for radical right voting. This is surprising, as the most
basic of voting behavior truisms is that policy preferences have a major in-
fluence on party choice and on differences in party preference between
women and men (e.g., Manza and Brooks 1998). It is the basic assumption
of the traditional proximity voting theory (Downs 1957) that voters will
choose the party that endorses the policies they prefer. Therefore, it would
be interesting if future research would pay greater attention to support for

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actual radical right policies and investigate how possible gender gaps
therein may explain the gender gap in radical right voting.
Finally, research by Harteveld et al. (2015) has shown that while women
and men hold similar attitudes towards immigrants, women do tend to find
issues such as immigration less salient than men. As a consequence,
women are less likely to translate negative attitudes towards immigrants in
support for the radical right than men.

GENDER-SPECIFIC EXPLANATIONS FOR RADICAL RIGHT

VOTING

Most of the existing research on radical right voting has taken for granted
that men and women support the radical right for the same reasons, and lit-
tle is known about how socioeconomic and attitudinal characteristics may
lead to differences in women’s and men’s radical right preference. Yet the
limited available research does reveal some gender-specific patterns for
radical right voting. Gidengil and colleagues (2005), for example, show
not only that men tend to take a more hard-nosed approach to law and
order than women, but also that strict attitudes toward law and order influ-
ence men’s support for the Canadian Alliance party more than it does
women’s. Similarly, Canadian men were found to have higher levels of
frustration about the treatment of their province than Canadian women,
and these feelings had a significant positive effect on men’s likelihood to
vote for the Canadian Alliance, whereas it did not affect women’s support.
While Harteveld and colleagues (2015) did not find any gender differences
in political attitudes such as nativism, authoritarianism, and discontent
with democracy, these attitudes tended to have a stronger effect on radical
right voting among men compared with women.
Focusing on gender, class, and radical right voting, Coffé (2012) looked
into the influence class has on women’s and men’s likelihood to support
the radical right. Her argument started from the idea that although women
have made great progress during the last decades in their participation in
the labor market, they are often assumed to have less strong ideas about
class and to have looser attachments to the labor market given their rela-
tively recent arrival in the workforce and the tradition of basing a woman’s
class position on her husband’s position. As a consequence, class was ex-
pected to play a more important role for radical right support among men
than among women. The empirical study did reveal some indication of
gender-specific explanatory pattern for radical right voting, with class in-

300
deed being a more salient driving force among men compared with
women.
Overall, these gender differences in explanations for radical right voting
emphasize the need for scholars to recognize differences between
women’s and men’s radical right voting patterns. So far, the limited re-
search does seem to show that the commonly suggested determinants for
radical right voting predicted men’s behavior better than women’s
(Fontana, Sidler, and Hardmeier 2006; Harteveld et al. 2015).
In sum, the research indicates that we should not take it for granted that
characteristics and attitudes explaining the radical right voting behavior of
one gender group automatically hold for the other gender group.

CROSS-NATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN THE GENDER GAP IN

RADICAL RIGHT VOTING

As previously noted, the gender gap has been recognized in most studies.
Yet the limited number of studies taking a cross-national perspective have
revealed that differences in the size of the gender gap do exist. For exam-
ple, studying the gender gap in radical right voting in France, Denmark,
and Austria, Givens (2004) finds that the effect of being a woman is not
significant in Denmark but is substantial and similar in France and Austria.
In their study using the 2010 European Values Survey, Immerzeel, Coffé,
and vander Lippe (2015) confirm a significant gender gap in radical right
voting in Austria and only a minor one in Denmark. In contrast to Givens’s
study, they did not find a significant gender gap in France.
While the divergent results regarding the gender gap in radical right vot-
ing in France will be discussed in greater detail below, the available re-
search does indicate significant cross-national differences in the size of the
gender gap. In an effort to explain some of those cross-national differ-
ences, Givens (2004, 50) suggests that “social development in Denmark
and egalitarian gender roles are having an impact on women’s political be-
haviour as compared to France and Austria.” Immerzeel, Coffé, and van-
der Lippe (2015) do, however, find a significant gender gap in radical right
voting in Norway, a Scandinavian country known for its high level of so-
cial development and egalitarian gender roles. Their study also revealed
large gender gaps in Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and no signifi-
cant gaps in Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Finland, and France. Im-
merzeel, Coffé, and vander Lippe (2015) assess these cross-national gen-

301
der differences in greater detail and examine the extent to which these dif-
ferences arise from differences between radical right parties in terms of
their image as political outsiders and the degree to which they use a pop-
ulist discourse. In particular, the researchers suggest that because women
are more hesitant to embrace new political developments than men are, the
gender gap would be larger in countries where the radical right party is a
newcomer with an outspoken outsider image and has not yet gained a sta-
ble position in the political arena. As parties become more electorally suc-
cessful, possibly supporting a minority government or being part of a gov-
ernment, and as general perceptions about voting for the radical right
change and a radical right party choice becomes more “normal,” the gen-
der gap is expected to become smaller. Furthermore, Immerzeel, Coffé,
and vander Lippe (2015) argue that since mainly men are attracted by mas-
culine-style verbal violence and since the sort of polarizing and simplify-
ing discourse that is typical of radical right parties stands in opposition to
the more compromise-oriented feminine discourse style, the gender gap in
radical right voting will be smaller in countries where radical right parties
have a less populist and polarizing style of discourse. However, the re-
searchers’ empirical analysis did not confirm any link between a gender
gap in the electoral success of a radical right party and the extent of that
party’s populist outsider image and populist style of discourse (measured
using expert data). Nevertheless, conducting additional empirical research
on how various party characteristics may account for the gender gap in
radical right voting behavior seems important if we want to extend our
knowledge about the gap and cross-national differences therein.
One party characteristic that seems particularly worthwhile exploring as
an explanation for cross-national differences in the gender gap is party
leadership. In particular, while radical right parties are traditionally seen as
Männerparteien, led by charismatic male leaders, various radical right par-
ties, including the French Front National, the Norwegian Fremskrittspar-
tiet, and the Danish Folkeparti, have or have recently had female leaders.
This may potentially decrease the gender gap in radical right voting over
time. Indeed, Mayer shows how the gender difference in support for the
Front National narrowed as Marine Le Pen took a leading role within the
party. According to Mayer (2013), Le Pen has given the party a softer,
more modern image and the party’s platform a more social tone, including
demands for a more protective state and more public services, than it had
during her father’s era. These changes in the party’s policy ideas are more
in line with women’s attitudes and so may make it easier for women to
support the party. This change over time also explains the divergent results

302
of various studies of the gender gap in radical right voting in France.
Whereas earlier studies (e.g., Givens 2004; Mayer 2002) revealed a signif-
icant gender gap in voting for the Front National, more recent studies (e.g.,
Immerzeel, Coffé, and vander Lippe 2015; Mayer 2013, 2015) do not find
a significant gender gap in radical right voting in France.

WOMEN’S ROLE IN RADICAL RIGHT PARTY

ORGANIZATIONS

I have already briefly mentioned that while radical right parties are often
presented as typically led by men, a few successful radical right parties
have recently been led by women. For example, Pia Kjærsgaard launched
the Danish Dansk Folkeparti in 1995 and was the first woman in Western
Europe to lead a populist party from its foundation (Meret 2015). She led
the party, which gained more than 10 percent of the Danish votes from its
second participation in the Danish parliamentary elections onward and
provided parliamentary support to various governments, until 2012, when
she stepped down and was replaced by a man from the younger generation
of party members, Kristian Thulesen Dahl (Meret 2015). Another example
is Siv Jensen, who smoothly succeeded longtime chairman Carl I. Hagen
of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet in 2006. In coalition with the Conser-
vative Party, she led the party, despite its having lost seats, to its first gov-
ernmental experience after the 2013 parliamentary Norwegian elections.
Yet another example of a female leader of a radical right party is Marine
Le Pen, who succeeded her father, the founder and long-term leader of the
Front National, in 2011. Marine Len Pen’s “normalization strategy,” in-
cluding condemning anti-Semitism and referring to the Holocaust as “the
summit of human barbarism,” has offered the party a less extreme image.
It also resulted in a nearly 18 percent share of the vote in the first round of
the 2012 presidential elections, slightly higher than her father’s greatest
presidential election success (nearly 17 percent in the first round of 2002).
The Front National also took 25 percent of the vote in the 2014 European
Parliament elections and the first round of the 2015 local elections (Mayer
2015). Her leadership has, as suggested above, been proposed as an expla-
nation for the decrease of the size of the gender gap in radical right voting
in France (Mayer 2013, 2015).
Women have thus played a major leading role in various radical right
parties, despite these parties’ reputation as Männerparteien and the overall
underrepresentation of women at all levels within radical right parties

303
(Mudde 2007). Both in their national parliaments and in the European Par-
liament, women have been a minority among the radical right parties’ rep-
resentatives (Mudde 2007). For example, Europe of Nations and Freedom,
a political group in the European Parliament that was launched on June 15,
2015, by Marine Le Pen and includes various radical right parties with the
Front National being the largest, has thirteen female representatives out of
thirty-eight, or 34 percent, as of February 2016. While this is far below 50
percent, women’s political underrepresentation is a common pattern in
most parties, and the percentage of female representatives in the Europe of
Nations and Freedom’s European Parliament group is close to the overall
37 percent of women in the European Parliament. Mudde (2007) also con-
cludes that the gender bias in leadership within radical right parties does
not seem to differ significantly from other right-wing parties, in particular
conservative parties. What is striking, however, according to Mudde
(2007), is the number of leading female politicians within radical right par-
ties who are directly related to their parties’ male leaders; Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s daughter Marine being his successor is a well-known example. In
the 1999 European Parliament elections, Le Pen was replaced by his sec-
ond wife. Filling up party lists with the names of partners and siblings of
male candidates has also been a common practice within radical right par-
ties (Mudde 2007). Similar family affiliations have been confirmed in re-
search on radical right party membership. In their cross-national compara-
tive research on members of radical right parties, Klandermans and Mayer
(2006) indeed confirmed that women tend to join radical right parties be-
cause of their male partners. Overall, however, relatively little is known
about gender and membership in radical right parties. Looking at member-
ship in the British National Party (BNP), Goodwin (2010) concludes that
the vast majority of activists are working-class men. Yet Goodwin also
suggests that some women occupy senior positions within the BNP. Most
of the radical right parties have specific sub-organizations for women,
though some of these organizations are weak and not particularly dynamic
(Félix 2015; Mudde 2007). Yet, looking at the Hungarian Jobbik and
Greek Golden Dawn, Félix (2015) suggests that the activities of the
women’s sub-organizations may bring new female supporters to the par-
ties.
While relatively little is known about gender and membership in radical
right parties, even less is known about the gender composition of radical
right movements. Research on Patriotische Europäer gegen die Is-
lamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Is-
lamization of the West) demonstrators at the Berlin Social Science Center

304
(Daphi et al. 2015) confirms the gender pattern found among radical right
parties. It concluded that women were significantly underrepresented
among the demonstrators, who were about 20 percent female. Yet some
women have come to the front within the organization, including Kathrin
Oertel, who was treasurer and later spokesperson of the organization until
she resigned at the beginning of 2015.

CONCLUSION

Reviewing the literature and empirical studies on women’s roles and in-
volvement in radical right parties, and the link between gender and radical
right voting behavior, it is fair to conclude that women are underrepre-
sented within radical right party organizations. But this is not a phenome-
non unique to the radical right. Women are politically underrepresented in
most parties, and in particular those on the right side of the political spec-
trum. Similarly, the gender gap in radical right voting is not exclusively a
radical right phenomenon, nor is it new to politics. As early as the mid-
1960s, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) viewed gender differences as one of the
factors influencing party choice, and the emergent gender gap has only
grown since then (Knutsen 2001). In Western industrialized democracies
today, men are more likely to support mainstream right-wing parties,
whereas women offer disproportionate support for mainstream left-wing
parties (Giger 2009; Inglehart and Norris 2000; Manza and Brooks 1998).
Women are in turn known to be overrepresented among the electorate of
Green parties, parties that are positioned at the other end of the libertarian-
authoritarian political dimension from the radical right parties (Knutsen
2001). Yet while this specific gender profile of voters is not unique to radi-
cal right parties, scholars have generally had a harder time explaining the
gender gap in radical right voting than in voting for any other party.
Whereas most research has been able to understand these gender patterns
in voting by looking at gender differences in various socioeconomic char-
acteristics, including labor force participation and sector of employment
(e.g., Knutsen 2001; Manza and Brooks 1998), many empirical studies
looking into the gender gap in radical right voting were not able to fully
explain that gap, even when various socioeconomic characteristics and at-
titudes were controlled for (see, e.g., Coffé Forthcoming; Givens 2004;
Fontana, Sidler, and Hardmeier 2006; Harteveld et al. 2015; Immerzeel,
Coffé, and vander Lippe 2015; Rippeyoung 2007; Spierings and Zaslove
2015). Hence, despite the available empirical studies focusing on gender
and radical right voting, an encompassing theory for the radical right gen-

305
der gap is still missing. One issue that seems worth further exploration is
support for actual radical right policies, and how gender differences
therein (rather than in more general attitudes) may potentially explain the
gender gap in radical right voting.
Future research could also usefully explore in greater detail why certain
women vote for radical right parties. In the end, although women are un-
derrepresented in the electorate of most radical right parties, a significant
number of women do support radical right parties. A better understanding
of who female radical right voters are seems an interesting avenue for fu-
ture research. This is particularly relevant since the (limited) available lit-
erature indicates that female radical right supporters’ motivations to sup-
port such parties tend to differ from the motivations of their male counter-
parts.
Future research could also usefully explore the cross-national differ-
ences in the size of the radical right voting gender gap in greater detail.
Recent work on the radical right gender gap in France (Mayer 2013, 2015)
suggests that female leadership and, related to that, a softer party image
and less extreme ideology may explain differences in the size of the gap.
Yet a significant gender gap is still found within the Norwegian Progress
Party (Immerzeel, Coffé, and vander Lippe 2015), a party led by a woman
since 2006. Hence, more systematic cross-national studies are needed to
investigate how and to what extent a female leader may influence the gen-
der composition of the party’s electorate. The mere fact of having a female
party leader is unlikely to fully explain cross-national differences in the
size of the gender gap; her leadership style and the extent to which female
voters can relate to the female leader and her ideas are likely to be crucial.
Further research could usefully try to disentangle these different mecha-
nisms and assess which aspects of radical right female leadership relate to
a possible increase in women’s vote for a radical right party.
As radical right parties have grown and have become electorally suc-
cessful during the last few decades in various European countries, radical
right party organizations and their electorates have received considerable
scholarly attention, including the issue of gender biases within these par-
ties and their electorates. While this has led to many valuable insights, nu-
merous questions still remain. These parties now play an important role in
many countries—in some countries they are even in office or support a mi-
nority government—so understanding gender differences in radical right
parties, their electorate, and their supporters is of great social and scientific
importance and deserves continuous scholarly attention.

306
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CHAPTER 11

310
 GLOBALIZATION, CLEAVAGES, AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

SIMON BORNSCHIER
IN a cleavage perspective, political conflicts and the rise and decline of
political parties are shaped by structural political potentials that arise from
the gradual evolution of social structure. Consequently, this chapter starts
out by examining the social transformations to which the emergence of the
radical right party family has been linked. Each perspective that has se-
quentially been put forward to explain the growth of the radical right—em-
phasizing the growth of higher education (often characterized as an “edu-
cational revolution”), the processes of economic and cultural moderniza-
tion, and the multifaceted process of globalization—extends the prior one.
Each one of them either adds new policy issues or singles out different
groups as the winners and losers of socioeconomic transformations of the
past decades, and thereby generates specific, testable hypotheses concern-
ing the radical right’s support base.
There is much to suggest that the potential the radical right thrives upon
exists throughout the advanced postindustrial world. To account for the
country-specific timing of the breakthrough of these parties, the persistent
differences in their success, and the makeup of their electoral support
coalitions, I focus on the literature emphasizing political agency in shaping
the articulation of latent structural potentials. The strategies employed by
mainstream parties with respect to their radical right-wing challengers can
both constrain and enable the latter’s success. Building on the finding that
the political space in Western Europe is at least two-dimensional, some of
the most exciting research in the past years has begun to focus on the inter-
play between the economic and cultural dimensions of competition in
shaping the fortunes of the radical right.
Two avenues for future research appear particularly promising. The first
is to combine the literature on the long-term evolution of political cleav-
ages with the more short-term strategic perspectives prevalent in the more
specialized literature on the radical right. Second, while a first wave of
scholarship provided general explanations for the emergence of the radical
right, producing some now-classic monographs (e.g., Betz 1994; Kitschelt
1995; Ignazi 2003), more recently scholars have asked more specific re-
search questions that address how processes of dealignment and realign-
ment within certain social groups are shaped by political actors and their
conflictual relationships. This promises insights into the reasons why cer-

311
tain social groups are more likely than others to support the radical right.
Namely, the tendency of the manual working class to exhibit dispropor-
tionate support for these parties is still to some degree puzzling, and look-
ing at processes of dealignment and realignment in this group compared to
others may help us build an explanation.
In keeping with the terminology used in this book, I label the parties sit-
uated at the pole of the new cultural divide in Western Europe as radical
right. This divide evolves around political issues that are non-economic in
nature, and pertain to the rules according to which society should be orga-
nized, how community is defined, and whether national politics should
prevail over or instead be subject to international or supranational gover-
nance and the rulings of international courts. Both because the nature of
this policy dimension is specific to Western Europe (and perhaps other
older democracies) and since the radical right, according to the structural-
ist literature I build upon, is inherently rooted in the transformations of ad-
vanced postindustrial society, the focus of my review is restricted to the
radical right in this context.

BRINGING A CLEAVAGE APPROACH TO BEAR ON THE

RADICAL RIGHT

The cleavage approach focuses on a distinctive type of alignment between

parties and voters that is built upon long-term alliances between social
groups and political parties. It is distinguished from interpretations of party
competition as based on governments’ performance and valence competi-
tion by a particular interest in those issues that divide (or cleave) society
and are thus inherently conflictive. Conflict is capable of forging strong
collective and partisan identities, which, in turn, account for the “sticki-
ness” of the resulting partisan alignments (see Tóka 1998). Due to this
focus, in a cleavage perspective the specificities of campaigns, candidate
traits, and unforeseen events that influence the policy agenda are merely
temporary deviations from party competition centered on fundamental ide-
ological divisions that are not time invariant but relatively slow-moving.
That said, the very durability of the cleavage dimensions identified by
Lipset and Rokkan (1967; Rokkan 1999), a result of what the authors have
referred to as the “freezing of the major party alternatives” from the early
phase of mass politics, has given the cleavage concept a static touch (see
Mair 2001). The study of the evolution of cleavages has therefore often re-
mained limited to assessments as to whether those divisions identified in

312
Lipset and Rokkan’s original account remain dominant (or “frozen”) or
whether the alignments between social groups and parties that have given
rise to these cleavages have eroded (e.g., Franklin 1992; Knutsen 2004,
2006). Yet in a line of thought that goes back to Sartori (1968), Zuckerman
(1975), and Mair (1997), and more recently revived by Enyedi (2005,
2008) and Deegan-Krause (2006; Deegan-Krause and Enyedi 2010), there
have always been currents that emphasize the role of political actors in ei-
ther perpetuating existing alignments, transforming them, or forming alto-
gether new ones (see also Bornschier 2010a, ch. 3).
Social structure has evidently evolved a great deal since the 1960s,
when the classical cleavage account was developed. The rise of the radical
right in particular has often been interpreted in terms of the emergence of
new social divisions that have been politicized by political parties.
Whether these divisions are anchored in social structure to a similar degree
as the traditional cleavages, and thus conform to the canonical definition of
cleavages developed by Bartolini and Mair (1990), remains disputed (see
also Deegan-Krause 2009). Consequently, a cleavage perspective can fruit-
fully be brought to bear on the radical right by illuminating two issues that
are at the heart of research concerning this party family. First is assessing
theoretically and empirically the degree to which the radical right forms
part of an encompassing and possibly structurally rooted division in Euro-
pean party systems—rather than simply constituting anti-immigration par-
ties, as some would have it (but see Mudde 1999). Second, to the degree
that this is the case, it does not make sense to look at the radical right and
its political issues in isolation. Instead, we need to adopt a party system
perspective and look both at the structuring power of older divisions as
well as at the strategies that established parties employ with respect to the
new cultural dimension the radical right mobilizes on. Although this is
often not recognized, the classical cleavage perspective is quite helpful in
understanding multidimensional political competition: The cleavages iden-
tified by Rokkan (1999) potentially created a more-dimensional policy
space in the early years of mass politics, depending on how cross-cutting
or mutually reinforcing they were. To exploit this potential, it is necessary
to bridge the cleavage account and strategic, actor-centered perspectives.
Before doing so, I review the potential new cleavages scholars situating
themselves in the Rokkanian tradition of political sociology have postu-
lated: education, modernization, and globalization.

NEW CLEAVAGES

313
The Education Cleavage
In the classical Lipset-Rokkan world, the dominant cleavages across West-
ern Europe since the 1920s had involved religion and class. But even in the
late 1960s, when Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) classic essay was written,
Allardt (1968) suggested that the expansion of higher education could be
considered a revolution similar to the national and industrial revolutions
that were at the center of Lipset and Rokkan’s model. This idea was re-
vived by scholars trying to identify the bases of the “New Politics” divide.
Across the advanced industrial democracies, the original structure of con-
flict had been transformed by the issues put on the political agenda by the
new social movements that mushroomed after 1968 and were taken up to a
significant degree by parties of the so-called New Left (Dalton, Flanagan,
and Beck 1984; Inglehart 1984). This group encompasses not only Green
and other newly founded parties but also to differing degrees, as
Kitschelt’s (1994) seminal work has shown, social democratic and socialist
parties that underwent a New Left transformation. These established left-
wing parties strived both to broaden their electoral appeal and to confront
the challenge by Green and other New Left parties by rallying middle-
class citizens with culturally liberal preferences. This first transformation
of the dimensionality of political space resulted in the formation of what
Kitschelt (1994, 1995) along with others labeled a libertarian-authoritarian
dimension in West European party systems. This new conflict at the party
system level reflected a similar divide at the mass level (Sacchi 1998;
Flanagan and Lee 2003). But although a counterpotential to the New Left
existed already in the 1970s and 1980s, right-wing parties were slow to ex-
ploit it.
A number of authors have underlined the association between educa-
tional level and the universalistic values that underpin the new cultural di-
vide (Kriesi 1999; Stubager 2008, 2009). Indeed, preferences along the
cultural dimension are most strongly shaped by educational level in the six
countries studied by Kriesi and colleagues (2008) throughout the period
between the 1970s and the 2000s. In a similar vein, education has a strong
effect on voting behavior (Knutsen 2004), particularly with respect to the
radical right (Ivarsflaten and Stubager 2013). In fact, van der Waal,
Achterberg, and Houtman (2007) show that much of the decline in class
voting in the past decades can be accounted for by an increase in cultural
voting triggered by educational differences.
There is a long tradition of explaining the association between education
and cultural value preferences, focusing on openness to change and toler-

314
ance. According to this literature, individuals with low levels of education
do not have the resources to communicate with foreigners or to “under-
stand” other cultures (Lipset 1960; Grunberg and Schweisguth 1990, 54;
Grunberg and Schweisguth 1997, 155–159; Quillian 1995; Sniderman et
al. 2000, 84; Kriesi et al. 2008, 13). The most sophisticated work account-
ing for the origins and the mechanisms underlying these education effects
comes from Stubager (2008), who shows that higher education instills uni-
versalistic values. According to him, “the authoritarian-libertarian value
differences existing between high and low education groups reflect deep-
seated differences in socializing experiences of the members of the two
groups rather than differences in labor market experiences and associated
allocative outcomes” (344). Furthermore, Stubager (2009) reveals that, at
least in Denmark, educational groups exhibit collective identities and to
some degree also perceive an antagonism with each other in terms of inter-
ests. To the degree that these results are generalizable, this suggests that at
least in Western Europe, education possesses the three distinctive elements
that Bartolini and Mair (1990) have postulated as constitutive of full-
fledged cleavages.
While education-based differences in political preferences are thus
likely to have existed for a long time, the expansion of higher education
has broadened the corresponding political potential, and the mobilization
of the New Left has brought it to the fore. In conjuncture with the rising
salience of the new cultural divide, not only do individuals with higher ed-
ucation have a propensity to vote for the New Left, but those with lower
education provide disproportionate support for the radical right (Knutsen
2002; Bornschier 2010a; Stubager 2010).

Economic and Cultural Modernization

Contrary to the proponents of an educational cleavage, those analyzing the
rise of the radical right in terms of the winners and loser of modernization
tend to retain the notion that occupation-shaped worldviews remain the
bread and butter of politics. Even where they focus on cultural political po-
tentials within the two-dimensional political space, rather than economic
ones, Herbert Kitschelt and his coauthors (Kitschelt 1994, 1995, 2013;
Kitschelt and Rehm 2014), as well as Hanspeter Kriesi and his associates
(Kriesi 1998, 1999; Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012) continue to regard individu-
als’ work situations and structural economic change as central in shaping
voter preferences. Likewise, Betz (1994; 2004, ch. 4) early on identified
the losers in economic modernization as the backbone of radical right sup-

315
port. In this reading, those left behind by economic modernization vote for
the radical right to voice their discontent, and to exclude immigrants, who
are made responsible for difficulties on the labor market (Lubbers, Gijs-
berts, and Scheepers 2002). Similar arguments have been advanced with
respect to East-Central Europe, where the transition from state socialism to
capitalist democracy also created winners and losers (Mudde 2007, 203).
What exactly constitutes the new structural potentials created by the
multifaceted process of modernization? To overcome the theoretical
vagueness of the concept criticized by Mudde (2007, 202–205), it makes
sense to distinguish economic and cultural modernization and the losers
that each of these processes generates, even if they interactively create new
political potentials. Furthermore, thinking in terms of cleavages and politi-
cal dimensions invites us to look not only at the losers but also at the win-
ners in these processes, and to reflect on how winners and losers may be
antagonistically related. Strands of the globalization literature then identify
additional potentials, which I discuss in the next section.
Economic modernization. Apart from educational expansion, two trends
characterize the process of socioeconomic modernization in advanced cap-
italist democracies since the 1960s, according to Oesch (2013a, 33) and
Esping-Andersen (1999): deindustrialization and service sector growth, on
one hand, and occupational upgrading, on the other. While new jobs were
created in the service sector, particularly in the public sector, due to the ex-
pansion of the welfare state, a large number of less qualified jobs in manu-
facturing were lost. Those situated in the segment of the service sector re-
quiring specialized skills and education are clearly the winners in eco-
nomic modernization, but as we shall see below, they do not create a ho-
mogeneous political potential due to internal divisions concerning cultural
values. Those working in the low-skilled service sector, which has also ex-
panded significantly, clearly constitute the most disadvantaged class in
terms of income and promotion chances (Oesch 2006, 95–106). But this is
not the group that most research has identified as a potential base for the
radical right, mainly due to its members’ propensity to abstain from vot-
ing. The same seems to apply for the unskilled working class, also labeled
“routine operatives,” arguably those whose jobs are most strongly endan-
gered by international competition and automation (Bornschier and Kriesi
2013). In fact, in line with the early observation of the “proletarianization”
of the radical right’s support base (Perrineau 1997; Swyngedouw 1998;
Plasser and Ulram 2000; Bjørklund and Andersen 2002; Mayer 2002; Betz
2004; Ignazi 2003; Minkenberg and Perrineau 2007), the manual working

316
class increasingly constitutes the core constituency of the radical right,
while the importance of the petty bourgeoisie, one of this party family’s
traditional support bases, has declined (for an analysis over time, see
Arzheimer 2013, 82–83).1 Somewhat paradoxically at first sight, the high-
est level of support comes from those members of the working class with
relatively specialized skills and intermediate levels of education (Oesch
2008a, 2008b; Bornschier and Kriesi 2013; Mayer 2014). A recent analysis
by Kurer (2017) employing panel data shows that within the working
class, it is those who manage to hold on to their jobs that vote for the radi-
cal right, while those who lose their jobs or are forced to move to other oc-
cupations shift to the left.
The driving forces of the working class alignment with the radical right
are difficult to explain in strictly economic terms. Kitschelt (1994, 15–18;
1995, 4–13) argued that as global competition accelerates and national
market barriers break down, the degree to which the sector an individual
works in is exposed to international competition comes to play an impor-
tant role in shaping political preferences (together with his or her work sit-
uation, as discussed below). If workers in internationally competitive sec-
tors voted for the radical right because the latter challenged the state inter-
ventionist consensus of the mainstream parties, this would in fact explain
why skilled workers are overrepresented among radical right voters.2 But
the hypothesis concerning the sector divide has become less compelling,
since most radical right parties have abandoned their market-liberal cre-
dentials (Perrineau 1997; de Lange 2007; Mudde 2007, ch. 5; Betz and
Meret 2013) or deliberately “blur” their positions along the economic di-
mension (see Rovny 2012; 2013). Furthermore, it was shown that neither
the electorate of the radical right in general nor its working-class con-
stituency in particular stands out for its market-liberal position (Chiche et
al. 2000; Swyngedouw 2001; Ivarsflaten 2005; Bornschier 2010a, 39–45,
111, 151; see also McGann and Kitschelt 2005 and Kitschelt 2007, 1181–
1184, for an amendment of their original proposition).
Cultural modernization. There is robust evidence that libertarian-authori-
tarian value preferences covary with occupation, in particular with a hori-
zontal distinction based on differing work logics that cross-cuts the vertical
social class dimension (Kriesi 1989, 1998; Kitschelt 1994; Müller 1999;
Oesch 2008b; Kitschelt and Rehm 2014). The authors who analyzed the
political significance of new class differences initially sought to explain
the social basis of the mobilization of the new social movements and the

317
New Left turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, they focused
strongly on the expanding middle class. Kriesi (1998) and Müller (1999)
draw a distinction between sociocultural specialists, technical specialists,
and managers within the middle class. These occupations are characterized
by differing work logics and are situated in settings with different degrees
of hierarchy or autonomy. The so-called social-cultural specialists work in
client-interactive settings, where they encounter human diversity, which in
turn leads them to endorse universalistic values and support redistribution
(Kitschelt 1994; Kitschelt and Rehm 2014). The opposite pole is occupied
by those situated in organizational work logics characterized by strong hi-
erarchies, with the technical specialists lying in between. These groups dif-
fer in terms of their preferences along the libertarian-authoritarian dimen-
sion.
The new social movements as well as the electorate of the New Left are
drawn disproportionately from the so-called sociocultural specialists. The
cultural agenda of the New Left centers on political issues that are con-
cerned with safeguarding or establishing equality beyond the economic do-
main by advancing women’s and gay rights and the rights of minorities
more generally, recognizing difference. This also creates an affinity to-
ward multiculturalism, which became an issue that was difficult to avoid
once the mobilization of the radical right gained momentum. These values
—which also correlate strongly, as discussed in the preceding section, with
educational achievement—may be labeled as universalistic, because they
imply a strong equality principle (Schweisguth 2000; Grunberg and
Schweisguth 2003; Bornschier 2010a). The New Left has been immensely
successful in implementing its political agenda throughout much of West-
ern Europe, with the Southern European countries lagging somewhat be-
hind. Clearly, then, those holding universalistic values are the winners in
the process of cultural modernization that occurred beginning in the 1960s.
The losers, on the other hand, are those who disapprove of these univer-
salistic principles and defend authoritarian values and traditional, mono-
cultural conceptions of community. According to Ignazi’s (1992, 2003)
renowned “reverse new politics thesis,” further developed by Minkenberg
(2000) and Bornschier (2010a, 2010b), the radical right thus spearheads a
counterrevolution against the social changes brought about by the New
Left, rallying the losers of cultural modernization. Indeed, the new cultural
value divide is related to both tolerance and hierarchy, and in a tradition
that goes back to Adorno and colleagues (1950), those who consider hier-
archies as natural and justified and who lack tolerance for difference are

318
often labeled authoritarian (Stubager 2008, 328–329; see also Kitschelt
1994, 10; Kitschelt 1995; Flanagan and Lee 2003). Inspired by the French
nouvelle droite, the radical right has opposed the New Left by developing
its own counterideal of cultural differentialism, implying the right of polit-
ical communities to defend what they consider their organically grown
community and traditions against multiculturalism (Antonio 2000;
Minkenberg 2000; Betz 2004; Rydgren 2005).
Each of the two party families driving the mobilization of the new cul-
tural dimension put its own issues on the political agenda: the New Left
those related to universalistic values and the radical right the issues of im-
migration and nativism, the latter constituting its ideological core (see Part
I of this volume, as well as Mudde 2000, 2007). Interestingly, while the
mobilization of the New Left began in the social movement arena and only
later spilled over into institutionalized politics, the radical right’s counter-
mobilization was channeled into the electoral arena from the very start by
political entrepreneurs seeking to benefit from its anti-universalistic poten-
tial (Hutter 2014). As will be discussed in the next section, the radical right
later on expanded the range of issues it emphasizes by increasingly criti-
cizing globalization and European integration. Beyond the respective is-
sues that the New Left and the radical right “own,” each of them also ex-
hibits an antagonistic posture with regard to the issues of the other, sug-
gesting that their sequential rise is indeed related. Both at the party level as
well as at the level of voter preferences, positions with regard to the issues
of the New Left and the radical right are inversely correlated (e.g., Born-
schier 2010a, 2010b). In theory, anti-immigration postures need not be
married with anti-universalism more generally, as emphasized by Kitschelt
and Rehm (2014), who suggest that the “group” (identity) and “grid” (so-
cial norm) dimensions are conceptually independent. But with the notable
exceptions epitomized by Pim Fortuyn and to some extent by Geert
Wilders, for the radical right cultural liberalism and restrictive immigration
positions do not go together—instead, they defend cultural traditionalism
and anti-immigration postures.3
The differentiation based on work logic discussed for the new middle
class can also be used to distinguish between service workers, production
workers, and office clerks within the lower classes (Oesch 2006). A host of
evidence now shows that production workers constitute the radical right’s
core support base, as already mentioned. Why is this so? Oesch (2008a)
shows that this group is clearly mobilized by the radical right in terms of
its cultural preferences rather than its economic anxieties. More generally,

319
Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior (2004) reveal that perceived cultural
threats are more important than the economic threats emphasized in the
ethnic competition argument (e.g., Quillian 1995), which often features
prominently in journalistic accounts. Furthermore, Ivarsflaten and
Stubager (2013, 130–135) add evidence that although respondents often
emphasize ethnic competition, the causal direction of this association is
open to question. In their analysis, perceived ethnic competition is related
much more closely to immigration preferences than to economic vulnera-
bility. Likewise, Rydgren (2008) finds little support for ethnic competition
in an analysis of radical right voting determinants.
The relationship between class positions and cultural values may, of
course, be an education effect, stemming from the way that education allo-
cates the workforce into different class positions (Bengtsson, Berglund,
and Oskarson 2013). But while some find that class effects vanish when
taking into account education-induced cultural value preferences (Gougou
and Mayer 2013), others find that the effect persists (Bengtsson, Berglund,
and Oskarson 2013; Bornschier and Kriesi 2013). The question thus re-
mains why skilled production workers are especially likely to feel resent-
ment against the process of cultural modernization of the past decades in
general, and against multiculturalism more specifically. Here, it seems
necessary to move beyond objective class position and to take into account
the long-term processes of the rise and decline of social classes or groups
(cf. Vester 2001). Indeed, Elchardus and Spruyt (2012) show that feelings
of relative deprivation—the feeling of being worse off than others and of
deserving more than one actually receives—explain cultural value prefer-
ences.
These are important findings. The mechanism is that by demarcating
themselves from foreigners, individuals gain self-respect—itself a well-es-
tablished finding from social psychology (see also Rydgren 2013, 5–9). In-
deed, the typical male blue-collar worker has lost most dramatically in
terms of social prestige with the advent of the service economy and the
massive influx of women into the low-skilled and skilled service sectors.
This seems to be reflected in the propensity to support the radical right,
even when controlling for value preferences and objective economic fac-
tors (Bornschier and Kriesi 2013, 20). An alternative explanation would
focus on work experiences that exert an influence on cultural values even
when controlling for formal education (Kitschelt and Rehm 2014, 1685–
1686). The difficulty here, as highlighted by the authors, lies in empirically
establishing that individuals’ workplace characteristics are independent of

320
occupational choice, which in turn is based on some antecedent variable
such as personality, value orientations, or working-class family back-
ground.
In sum, the New Left and the radical right are situated at the poles of the
new cultural divide, which varies in salience but is present throughout
Western Europe (and in somewhat different form also in East-Central Eu-
rope; see Buštíková 2014). Beyond this ideological antagonism, in social
structural terms, the electorate of the radical right is also the mirror image
of that of the New Left with respect to the gender differences in vote
choice, education levels, and class, where the core constituency of each of
the two party families situated at the poles of the cultural divide is under-
represented in the other party’s electorate. For this reason, in class terms,
Oesch and Rennwald (2010) and Oesch (2013b) argue that the antagonism
between the New Left and the radical right has developed into a full-blown
cleavage. The strength of this cleavage and its importance for partisan
alignments relative to the traditional economic cleavage varies depending
on the short-term and long-term strategies of the established political ac-
tors. Before turning to dynamic cleavage models, I discuss a final struc-
tural explanation for radical right support, namely, the impact of the
process of globalization on national politics. This process affects the rela-
tive salience of the cultural as opposed to the economic dimension of con-
flict, but it can also be seen as introducing new divisions of its own.

Globalization
Although there is a large degree of overlap between the implications of the
processes of modernization and those stemming from globalization, the
latter concept is potentially broader. Some authors use the term to add a
political dimension to the economic and cultural implications of modern-
ization, and there are also some differences in the social groups that are ar-
guably most challenged by the economic, cultural, and political transfor-
mations in Western societies. At the same time, the globalization thesis’s
focus on political constraints generates some tangible hypotheses concern-
ing the relative salience of competitive dimensions.
But to start out, let us look at accounts that understand globalization nar-
rowly as an economic process that affects individuals’ well-being, while
reducing governments’ capacity to govern the economy and respond to
voters’ policy preferences. As with modernization, globalization can be
seen as creating social groups that profit from the process and others that

321
lose out. Following the narrow account, we would expect globalization to
create a potential in favor of economic protectionism, as globalization
losers seek remedy against increasing economic competition and employ-
ers’ capacity to shift production to other countries (cf. Scheve and Slaugh-
ter 2004). At the individual level, Walter (2010) shows that economic
globalization losers—that is, those employed in “offshorable” sectors—
favor an expansion of welfare provisions by the state. In terms of the polit-
ical manifestation of this potential, the key question then is whether these
voters find a political offer by a party that credibly promises to implement
such a policy.
To the degree that parties converge in their economic policy proposi-
tions in favor of a neoliberal free trade consensus, this may no longer be
the case. Bartolini (2005) argued that because national boundary building
constituted a precondition for the formation of historical cleavages, the
lowering of these boundaries that results from European integration leads
to the destructuring of functional cleavages prevalent at the national level.
This argument is of course equally applicable to globalization. Empiri-
cally, Hellwig and Samuels (2007) show that globalization indeed weakens
the role of economic factors for voters’ evaluations of political incum-
bents. Most relevant in our context is the ample evidence that testifies to
the role of economic globalization in increasing the salience of the cultural
at the expense of the economic dimension. As economic integration in-
creases, parties tend to emphasize non-economic issues more (Ward et al.
2015). And voters appear to follow suit: in a comprehensive analysis, Hell-
wig (2014) shows that if voters fail to perceive meaningful differences be-
tween parties in terms of economic policy propositions, the salience of
non-economic issues for their vote decisions rises. Voters may then be in-
clined to vote for entrepreneurial niche parties that differ in their policy
emphasis (e.g., Meguid 2005; Bischof 2015; Hobolt and de Vries 2015).
Alternatively, the perception of diminished room to maneuver by national
governments may dampen turnout (Wessels and Schmitt 2008; Steiner
2016; Evans and Tilley 2017). Group differences in turnout can thus be-
come a salient manifestation of class politics, as Goldthorpe (2002) had
hypothesized.
The most straightforward response to mainstream party convergence
would of course be a shift in voter preferences toward those radical left
parties that favor economic protectionism and continue to occupy
staunchly leftist positions along the overall economic dimension. The fact
that voters are presented with both radical left and radical right options in

322
several West European party systems—France, the Netherlands, and Den-
mark are the most obvious examples—and that the radical right nonethe-
less flourishes suggests that the radical right does not attract economic
globalization losers.4 Put differently, economic and cultural potentials
seem clearly distinct. This is also in line with the findings discussed in the
previous section that showed that those supporting the radical right are not
the most marginalized groups in economic terms, and not particularly con-
cerned about losing their jobs either (see also Mayer 2014; Mols and Jetten
2016). Furthermore, the exposure of working-class respondents’ sector of
employment to international trade plays no role in shaping support for the
radical right (Bornschier and Kriesi 2013, 23). The simple hypothesis sug-
gesting that the radical right rallies economic globalization losers has thus
not found much empirical support.
More generally, Margalit (2012) finds attitudes toward economic open-
ness to go well beyond material aspects; in fact, sociocultural and identity-
based threats are more important in shaping trade preferences than is any
perception of economic threat. While van der Waal and de Koster (2015)
—similarly to Margalit—find economic protectionism to matter for some
respondents, these authors construct a careful sociological argument and
employ a sophisticated empirical analysis to show that the well-known ed-
ucation effect in trade preferences is much more strongly explained by an
aversion to cultural diversity rather than by objective economic risk or
preferences for economic egalitarianism. These findings are more in line
with the explanation discussed earlier that links the rise of the radical right
to a new dividing line triggered by education. But the mobilization of the
New Left and new political issues related to globalization may have jointly
made individuals’ openness toward other cultures more salient in shaping
party preferences. What is more, by constraining the range of available
policy options along the economic dimension, economic globalization in-
teracts with the rising salience of new cultural issues to create a cultural re-
sponse to the lowering of national boundaries, if the latter phenomenon is
conceived of as a more multifaceted process.
The discussion so far has focused on narrow economic conceptions of
globalization. In its broader variant, advocated by Kriesi and colleagues
(2006, 2008, 2012), the globalization hypothesis encompasses different
strands of change: economic (the internationalization of markets), cultural
(the globalization of culture and increasing migration flows), and political
(the growing internationalization of politics, processes of supranational in-
tegration, and the rise of transnational private governance). The main em-

323
phasis in these authors’ work is on the political and cultural aspects of
globalization, because it is here that the dimensions of political competi-
tion at the national level are redefined. The political debate evolving
around economic liberalism, on the other hand, has not been fundamen-
tally transformed by international pressures (Höglinger, Wüest, and Hel-
bling 2012; Wüest 2018). In terms of the political dimension of globaliza-
tion, the political potential is constituted by those who are attached to the
national polity and who see European integration not as a remedy against
the loss of sovereignty and control by national governments but rather as
an additional menace to national autonomy. Because the established par-
ties avoid taking clear positions regarding Europe, as most studies posit
(e.g., Franklin, van der Eijk, and Marsh 1996; Bartolini 2005; Kriesi et al.
2006; Höglinger 2016), it is left to the radical right—and increasingly to
the radical left—to successfully combine a critique of the integration pro-
ject with an anti-political-establishment logic of mobilization. Just like
globalization, European integration is a multifaceted process, and political
actors can frame their stance toward this process in different ways (Hel-
bling, Höglinger, and Wüest 2010; Höglinger 2016; Hutter, Grande, and
Kriesi 2016). Again, however, the analyses by these authors reveal that the
radical right’s mobilization logic is cultural rather than economic (see also
Vasipoulou, this volume). Thus, while following Bartolini’s (2005) logic
that globalization dilutes the state-market cleavage by abolishing the na-
tional boundaries upon which the traditional cleavages depended, we can
see that the radical rights spearheads the politicization of the issue of
boundaries themselves.
The cultural potential in this line of research results from immigration
flows, as well as from rising global communication and the emergence of a
global culture, sometimes characterized simply as the “Americanization of
culture” (Mudde 2007, 190–192). The link between immigration and cul-
tural globalization is not obvious, but in New Right thinking, which has
provided important inspiration for the radical right, immigration is treated
as a phenomenon that creates resistances to the globalization of culture and
to the concomitant loss of national specificities and traditions (see Antonio
2000, 57–58). As a result, globalization and the radical right-wing reaction
to it transform the cultural dimension of conflict in West European party
systems once more, shifting emphasis from the New Left’s universalistic
values to the radical right’s defense of community. This is mirrored in the
characterizations of this divide as an integration-demarcation divide or
cleavage (Bartolini 2005; Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008, 2012), or one that pits
Green-alternative-libertarian (GAL) and traditional-authoritarian-national-

324
ist (TAN) positions against each other (Marks et al. 2006), or as libertar-
ian-universalistic values being challenged by traditionalist-communitarian
conceptions of community (Bornschier 2010a, ch. 1; Bornschier 2010b). In
Kitschelt and Rehm’s (2014) most recent formulation, the “group” dimen-
sion has come to supplement the “grid” dimension of the 1970s and 1980s.
But if globalization is indeed a more-dimensional phenomenon, why is
cultural opposition so much more prominent than resistance in the eco-
nomic domain? Again, subjective deprivation seems to play a role, as it di-
vides Europeans into winners and losers over and above objective social
structural variables (Teney, Lacewell, and De Wilde 2014). In their “mobi-
lization legacy hypothesis,” Grande and Kriesi (2012, 25) present a differ-
ent explanation: the prior establishment of the radical right may undercut
support for the radical left. Once voters have come to interpret grievances
in cultural terms, they might no longer be receptive to economic mobiliza-
tion frames. While this hypothesis is plausible, whether it provides an ex-
planation for the success of the radical right in the French, Dutch, and
Danish cases (discussed earlier on) that is in line with the globalization ar-
gument is open to question. Non-mainstream left-wing parties existed prior
to the rise of the radical right in these countries; hence the latter’s rise must
have been triggered by something other than economic globalization. Pos-
sibly the globalization argument therefore needs to be at least comple-
mented by accounts that see the radical right as a reaction to the New Left.
Indeed, the fact that the radical left spearheads the anti-EU integration and
anti-globalization movement in Greece and Portugal, as shown by Teper-
oglou and Tsatsanis (2011), seems to support this hypothesis: the New Left
transformation was weak in Southern Europe, and as a consequence, eco-
nomic frames seem to prevail in the resistance against globalization. In
continental and Northern Europe, on the other hand, a shift in salience
from the economic to the cultural dimension occurred before the effects of
globalization were attenuated. Together with the convergence of the major
actors along the economic dimension, which was then reinforced by the
constraining effects of globalization, this may have triggered a very grad-
ual, long-term process of dealignment between the working class and the
left, as I discuss in the next section.
To conclude, according to the proponents of the globalization cleavage,
the radical right has transformed the cultural dimension of the 1970s. As in
the case of its forerunner, the modernization loser and economic competi-
tion thesis, much emphasis is placed on class or skill levels, even if this is
combined with a focus on education and its role in shaping cultural prefer-

325
ences (Kriesi et al. 2008). Yet in structural terms, the New Left and the
radical right are less intimately related in this reading than in the modern-
ization account. The rise of these two party families is not the result of the
same transformation but rather the product of two sequential critical junc-
tures, one shaped by education and the other by globalization, as most ex-
plicitly emphasized in Kriesi’s work (Kriesi 1999, 400–404). This is par-
tially related to the fact that the emphasis in the globalization account is on
new issues and on how these new issues have become “embedded” in the
two-dimensional space prevalent in Western Europe since the days of the
traditional class and religious cleavages (Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008; see also
Rovny and Polk 2013). Similarly to the literature emphasizing the impor-
tance of political issues rather than cleavages (e.g., Green-Pedersen 2007;
Bale et al. 2010), there is not much analysis of the antagonistic relationship
between the ideologies of the New Left and the radical right. These differ-
ences also impact how we model party strategies in seeking to explain dif-
ferences in radical right success, as I discuss in the second part of this
chapter.

CLEAVAGES AND PARTY STRATEGY: OPPORTUNITIES AND

LIMITS FOR THE RADICAL RIGHT

In this part of the chapter, I suggest that a dynamic account of cleavage

theory can help us predict the country-specific potential for the conflicts
the radical right thrives upon to gain room. Drawing on the concepts of
dealignment and realignment helps to overcome the static touch of the
original cleavage concept (Martin 2000; Bornschier 2010a, ch. 3; Kriesi et
al. 2012; Hutter 2014). Because electorates in Western Europe are fully
mobilized in the sense that all traditional social groups have linkages with
some political parties, either a weakening of these linkages or a fundamen-
tal transformation of social structure is a precondition for the emergence of
the radical right. In the language of realignment theory, this is referred to
as a process of dealignment (e.g., Dalton et al. 1984; Mayhew 2000).
While the strength of existing cleavages thus constrains the space for the
radical right, the latter’s chances of rallying dealigned voters depend on
the radical right’s strategic interaction with other parties in what realign-
ment theorists refer to as a series of “critical elections.” In other words, the
long-term evolution of the cleavage structure in a given country represents
the baseline of strategic party interaction, and it is only in a situation where
existing alignments have been substantially weakened that the vast litera-
ture on the impact of mainstream party strategy on radical right success

326
comes in.

The Baseline: The Strength of Existing Alignments

Drawing on the work of Schattschneider (1975) and Riker (1986), for
whom political competition is about defining or redefining the relevant di-
mensions of conflict, new political actors have an interest in priming new
dimensions that put them at a comparative advantage over established po-
litical actors.5 In line with realignment theory, during times of “normal
politics” party systems forged by a specific set of conflicts tend to be re-
ceptive only to those issues that correspond to and reinforce these dimen-
sions of conflict. As Schattschneider (1975, 69) puts it, they have a ten-
dency to “organize out” political issues that cut across these dimensions.
The idea that existing cleavages limit the space for new conflicts was al-
ready inherent in Rokkan’s (1999) and Bartolini’s (2000) work on the for-
mation of the classical cleavages in the early years of mass politics. Exist-
ing conflicts limit the space for new ones to the extent that the groups di-
vided by these dimensions are characterized by social closure, that is,
strong collective identities that structure and cement their party prefer-
ences (Bartolini and Mair 1990, ch. 9; Kriesi and Duyvendak 1995; Bar-
tolini 2000, 2005).
It has proven exceedingly difficult to measure social closure indepen-
dently of its outcome, the stability of alignments between social groups
and political parties. It might be promising, however, to focus on the most
important predictor of politically relevant social identities: political con-
flict between parties. Much of the literature that conceptualizes the top-
down effects of parties’ political offers on cleavages implicitly or explic-
itly recognizes that political conflict strongly shapes the collective identi-
ties and partisan alignments that underlie cleavages (e.g., Sartori 1968;
Zuckerman 1975; Enyedi 2008, 295–297; Deegan-Krause and Enyedi
2010).6 In this line of thinking, Evans and de Graaf (2013a, 3–9) suggest
that top-down processes matter because parties define the choice sets that
voters are offered: if parties offer contrasting policy packages along the
economic and religious dimensions, voters are able to express political
preferences anchored in social structure. When parties collude, on the
other hand, these differences will remain politically latent, even if they
persist at the attitudinal level. The crucial variable here is how much party
positions differ, or, expressed differently, how polarized they are.
There is now a sizable literature that provides evidence for this hypothe-

327
sis (De Graaf, Heath, and Need 2001; Elff 2002, 2007; Oskarson 2005;
van der Brug 2010; Evans and Tilley 2011; Adams, de Vries, and Leiter
2011; Karreth, Polk, and Allen 2012). The most ambitious attempt to date
at testing the role of top-down processes in the perpetuation of cleavages
are the volumes by Evans and de Graaf (2013b), Rennwald (2015), and by
Evans and Tilley (2017). Rennwald (2015), for example, combines foci on
parties’ issue positions, overall ideological polarization, and issue saliency
to explain the dealignment between the working class and the left since the
1970s in five West European countries. This line of research converges in
its conclusion that class voting is stronger when the party system is more
polarized along the economic dimension. Thus, beyond issue salience,
which is central in the globalization cleavage argument (Kriesi et al. 2008,
2012) as well as in the issue competition account (e.g., Green-Pedersen
2007; Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010), party system polarization, a
systemic feature that is produced by the aggregation of parties’ issue posi-
tions, is central in explaining the mobilization space of the radical right.7
This methodological tool kit has only recently been used explicitly to
explain differences in the timing of the breakthrough of the radical right.8
It has found support in a number of analyses explaining the fortunes of the
radical right in Sweden (Rydgren 2002; Oskarson and Demker 2013;
Loxbo 2014) and in France (Gougou and Mayer 2013). The convergence
of mainstream parties along the economic dimension in Germany since the
reforms initiated by the Red-Green government under Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder in the late 1990s did not immediately benefit the radical right, on
the other hand, but it may have in the long term, as the recent success of
the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) suggests.
Others have tested the proposition that a persistently strong economic
cleavage undercuts radical right support in comparative perspective. They
provide impressive evidence for the importance of parties’ economic pol-
icy positions on the electoral fortunes of the radical right. Following the
pioneering work by Meguid (2005, 2008), they underline the necessity of
taking into account both economic policy positions and the salience of
economic issues (as opposed to cultural issues) in the party system as a
whole, an approach sometimes referred to as systemic salience. In a cross-
national time series analysis, Spies (2013) shows that in contexts where the
economic dimension is salient and polarized, members of the working
class vote less for the radical right than in contexts where party differences
with respect to economic policy are less pronounced and where cultural is-
sues play a more important role. In a recent analysis, Grittersová and col-

328
leagues (2016) show that over the past three decades, austerity measures
tended to increase the saliency of the economic dimension and undermined
support for niche parties, including the radical right—in particular when
austerity is implemented by the right and can credibly be opposed by the
left.
These results have already offered considerable support for the baseline
prediction of the cleavage account. I now turn to research that marries this
perspective with a strategic approach focusing on the radical right’s own
issues. I start out by briefly reviewing the older literature that analyzed the
impact of mainstream party strategy on radical right success alone. For
pragmatic reasons, I leave aside for the moment a discussion of the radical
right’s own strategies in terms of ideological renewal or moderation, al-
though the radical right’s own profile is clearly important (cf. Ignazi 2002;
Golder 2003; Carter 2005; Mudde 2007, ch. 11).

Challengers and Mainstream Parties in Two-Dimensional

Competition
With respect to the impact of mainstream party strategy on radical right
success, the most widespread hypothesis is that the radical right’s potential
is contained to the degree that the established parties close the space to
their right on the cultural dimension.9 Focusing on overall left-right mea-
sures of political space, a first wave of studies measured the distinctiveness
of mainstream parties’ profiles (e.g., Abedi 2002; Lubbers, Gijsberts, and
Scheepers 2002; Arzheimer 2009), while others focused solely on whether
the established right provides political space for a newcomer (Ignazi 2003;
van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005). Carter (2005) tests both proposi-
tions.10 In general, these studies have provided support for the conver-
gence thesis, pointing to the capacity of the mainstream parties to crowd
out the radical right (but see Arzheimer and Carter 2006). Although most
of these studies seem to suggest that the thesis applies mainly to the cul-
tural domain, or even exclusively to the immigration issue, the evidence
provided is not conclusive because researchers often employ overall left-
right measures of party positions.
Much of this work has focused on the mainstream right as the radical
right’s most proximate competitor. As pointed out before, however, if the
salience of cultural issues depends on the degree of polarization they en-
tail, the behavior of the mainstream left is also crucial. Meguid (2005,
2008) has highlighted that if the left chooses an adversarial strategy

329
against the radical right by promoting a universalistic defense of multicul-
turalism, this reinforces the radical right’s issue ownership of the immigra-
tion issue. She claims that the French Socialists adopted their multicultur-
alist position strategically in order to divide the right in the 1980s, and that
this strategy is likely to have been employed by left-wing parties else-
where as well. But there is also a less opportunistic interpretation of the
behavior of the left: if we conceive of the issues of the New Left and the
radical right as polar normative ideals, as discussed earlier on, the choice
to oppose the radical right is rooted in strong ideological convictions. To
the degree that the mainstream left in a country underwent a New Left
transformation in Kitschelt’s (1994) sense, as was clearly the case for the
French Socialists, it would require a considerable watering down of its
core ideology to either ignore the immigration issue (Meguid’s dismissive
strategy) or to move toward the opposing pole of the cultural dimension
(an accommodating strategy). As Bale and colleagues (2010) show, the ad-
versarial strategy was in fact the most frequent reaction of the mainstream
left when the radical right emerged. The left started to modify its position
in a later phase, as these authors try to show, but this might no longer have
an effect on the fortunes of the radical right, as I argue toward the end of
this chapter.
If, on the other hand, the established parties jointly succeed in keeping
polarization around the issues relating to immigration, multiculturalism,
and cultural liberalism low, then this dimension will prove less divisive
and thus less salient for voters. Consequently, competition will center
more strongly on the economic dimension (or government performance
may become more important). Some of the most innovative recent re-
search combines a focus on the cultural and economic dimensions, tenta-
tively linking the long-term cleavage approach with shorter-term, more
strategic frameworks. In an analysis covering all national elections in
Western Europe from 1980 to 2003, Spies and Franzmann (2011) show
that when the polarization of the economic dimension decreases, both the
salience of cultural issues and the vote share of the radical right increase.
These authors show convincingly that we must focus on the interplay be-
tween the economic and cultural dimensions to explain radical right sup-
port. Somewhat simplified, their results reveal that while policy conver-
gence along the economic dimension alone does not have a significant ef-
fect on the fortunes of the radical right, it does so when the cultural dimen-
sion is polarized, implying that the left occupies a clearly universalistic po-
sition. When these variables are taken into account, the position of the
mainstream right along the cultural dimension no longer proves signifi-

330
cant.
While Spies and Franzmann derive expectations for the saliency of eco-
nomic as opposed to non-economic issues for voters based on party system
polarization, Rennwald and Evans (2014) measure saliency at the party
level independently from party position, with highly interesting results.
Furthermore, the focus here is not so much on the success of the radical
right as on the fate of working-class voters, formerly one of the left’s core
constituencies. In a comparison of Austria and Switzerland, Rennwald and
Evans (2014) set out to explain why the Austrian Social Democrats lost far
fewer working-class voters to the radical right than their counterparts in
Switzerland, despite the fact that the Social Democrats retained a far more
left-wing economic position in Switzerland than in Austria. Both parties
adopted universalistic positions with respect to the cultural dimension, but
given their inferior saliency in Austria, this proved far less consequential
than in Switzerland.
Taken together, the results by Spies and Franzmann (2011), Spies
(2013), and Rennwald and Evans (2014) suggest that polarization interacts
with parties’ issue emphasis to make the cultural dimension more or less
salient for voters. While the contributions so far have focused on the im-
mediate, short-term effects of party system polarization along the eco-
nomic dimension, the cleavage perspective discussed earlier suggests that
we should also be able to observe lagged long-term effects, as policy con-
vergence only gradually erodes voter loyalties. Finally, it is also worth not-
ing that it seems necessary to distinguish the impact of party strategies in
the radical right’s entry phase from their effects once the latter is en-
trenched in a party system. Ellinas (2010) and Kitschelt (2007) suggest
that once the radical right has achieved ownership of the immigration
issue, co-opting its message is exceedingly difficult. In other words, it is
doubtful whether mainstream parties are able to crowd out a radical right
party at that stage. This is all the more true since center-right parties tend
to send mixed and temporally inconsistent signals to voters with anti-uni-
versalistic and anti-immigrant world-views (Meguid 2008; Kriesi et al.
2008; Ellinas 2010; Bornschier 2010a).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has focused on two areas that are at the heart of a cleavage
perspective on the radical right. First are the social structural transforma-
tions that have generated the political potentials the radical right thrives

331
upon. The cleavage perspective invites us to look at political competition
in terms of potentially enduring overarching dimensions, rather than singu-
lar issues that come and go. From this point of view, the rise of the radical
right is intimately related to the transformation of the traditional West Eu-
ropean political space as a result of the educational revolution that took off
in the 1960s, to the processes of economic and cultural modernization, as
well as to the issue of national sovereignty posed by globalization. To
shape voting behavior, the structural potentials created by these processes
need to be articulated by political parties. Processes of political mobiliza-
tion, in turn, shape the way structural potentials become manifest. Agency
is thus crucial, in particular because the economic and cultural dimensions
prevalent across Western Europe may exert contradictory pulls on individ-
uals. Parties’ strategic behavior affects the relative saliency of the tradi-
tional economic dimension and the new cultural divide forged by the New
Left and the radical right, but it also defines the political space for the radi-
cal right. Although two-dimensional competition taking into account party
positions, systemic polarization, and issue emphasis is complex, impres-
sive advances in this direction have been made, contributing to our under-
standing of the variation in radical right support across time and space.
While a first wave of research focused on these questions, a new wave cur-
rently under way has begun to investigate more specific research puzzles,
explaining the dealignment and realignment of specific social groups as a
function of elite political agency. One of the central questions here is how
the relative saliency of the economic and cultural dimensions of conflict
for specific subgroups of the electorate is defined by political competition.
The two fields of research covered in this chapter—the social structural
basis of contemporary political alignments and the role of party strategies
in forming these alignments—are thus growing ever closer together.

332
NOTES

1. In any event, the petty bourgeoisie’s contribution to this party family’s

success is quite modest (Oesch 2008a, 2008b).
2. Likewise, Kitschelt (1995) had theorized that those proving difficul-
ties of getting into the labor market would be susceptible to voting for
the radical right.
3. Furthermore, de Koster et al.’s (2014) analysis at the voter level shows
that even in the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn’s unusual ideological mix
does not reflect an association between moral progressiveness and eth-
nocentrism. Rather, these two concepts show a rather strong and
highly significant negative association (594).
4. Given the free-market profile of many radical right parties in their first
mobilization phase in the 1980s, as correctly highlighted by Kitschelt
(1995), it is more than questionable whether they are the most credible
advocates of economic protectionism. (For a discussion of the evolv-
ing economic profile of the radical right, see Bornschier 2010a, 25–26,
39–45.)
5. For a more recent formulation, see Hobolt and de Vries 2015.
6. For a more extensive discussion of the social psychological foundation
of top-down effects of parties on partisan collective identities, see
Bornschier 2010a, 57–63.
7. Additionally, Evans and Tilley (2017) break new ground in using the
extent to which parties make explicit class appeals to explain the
dealignment of the British working class.
8. In a review of the recent literature on the radical right, Kitschelt
(2007) had suggested pursuing this line of inquiry.
9. For a more extended discussion, see Mudde 2007, ch. 10, and Born-
schier 2012.
10. The opposing effect also has plausibility: by issuing tough stances
with respect to immigration, the established right may legitimize the
extreme right’s claims and thereby foster its success, as suggested by
Ignazi (2003), Arzheimer and Carter (2006), and Spies and Franzmann
(2011).

333
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CHAPTER 12

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 PARTY ORGANIZATION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

DAVID ART
THAT organization is a critical and free-standing dimension of politics is
self-evident to nearly every politician I have met. Contacting constituents,
raising money, recruiting candidates, creating sets of selective incentives
to induce voluntary cooperation from supporters—these are the activities
that consume far more time than debating policy positions, corralling votes
from other legislators, drafting bills, or articulating an ideological vision.
With some notable exceptions, politicians are also normally enmeshed in
an organization that they have spent years working in. Theoretically,
whether one views institutions as shaping incentive structures or as chang-
ing political actors themselves, at the very least politicians are aware of the
organizational dynamics of their own parties. And, perhaps most telling,
politicians and (in the United States, at least) their donors think that orga-
nization is worth the money. Even in an era in which massive ad buys in
primary states have long been a fact of life in the United States, there is
broad consensus that a “ground game” is necessary to turn support into
votes.
Given all this, it is at the very least curious that political science has rel-
egated the study of party organization to an uncommon, albeit intellectu-
ally respected, pursuit in the field. Comparing the study of Congress to that
of political parties in American politics, Hans Noel noted that “if the study
of the party in government [Congress] is among the most theoretically and
empirically sophisticated work in political science, the study of party orga-
nization may be the opposite” (Noel 2010, 63). Party organization has, to
be sure, a much richer theoretical tradition in comparative European poli-
tics. There the study of the internal life of parties has generated concepts
that have traveled across the discipline. The iron law of oligarchy (Michels
1962), the rise of the catchall party (Kirchheimer 1966), and the cartel
party thesis (Katz and Mair 2009) are examples of what close studies of
organizational development can reveal about democratic politics. Yet
while work on party organization appears regularly in venues such as
Party Politics (founded only in 1995) and increasingly in other journals, it
is certainly less prevalent than papers on voting behavior, legislative poli-
tics, and various methodologically driven exercises that relate to political
parties. Party organization has never been a core publishing interest for ei-
ther the “big three” journals in the field in the United States (the American
Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and

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the Journal of Politics) or the “little three” in comparative politics (Com-
parative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, World Politics). Thus
while party organization is not exactly an intellectual backwater in politi-
cal science, it would be a stretch to call it a growth industry.
The same cannot be said about radical right political parties. The “insa-
tiable demand” identified several years ago shows no sign of letting up
(Bale 2012). The more work that appears on the radical right, the greater
the difficulty of finding something new to say about it. As one recent paper
notes: “Case studies and comparative contributions have taught us almost
everything we ever wanted to know about green and radical right parties”
(Beyens, Lucardie, and Deschouwer 2016, 258). The fact that the radical
right is now receiving its own handbook, in this volume, suggests that
nearly every interesting aspect of the phenomenon has been intellectually
picked over.
One exception, until very recently, was radical right party organization.
Although many scholars noted in passing that organization mattered dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s, the initial currency of the charismatic-leader hy-
pothesis combined with the assumption that radical right organization took
a hierarchical form in every case rendered it among the least studied com-
ponents of the radical right phenomenon. There was no empirical testing of
the hypothesis that organization mattered for radical right party perfor-
mance until Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers (2002) and Carter (2005)
found strong support for it. Further theoretical development followed, and
organization has become one of the trendier arguments in so-called supply-
side theories of the radical right (Mudde 2007). The last five years in par-
ticular have seen the proliferation of organizational studies of the radical
right in some of the field’s leading journals (Bolleyer and Bytzek 2013;
Bolleyer, van Spanje, and Wilson 2012; Beyens, Lucardie, and De-
schouwer 2016; Dinas and Georgiadou 2013; Goodwin, Ford, and Cutts
2013; Loxbo and Bolin 2016).
So do we now know “everything we always wanted to know” about rad-
ical right party organization? Put another way, is it time to pronounce that
the internalist perspective has reached the same limitations in terms of the-
oretical innovation that demand-side approaches have arguably done? Ours
is indeed a field in which it is pretty difficult to be both cumulative and in-
novative, and the enduring media and public interest in the radical right
does not exclude us from addressing the dreaded “So what?” question that
students of less studied parties and interest groups face as a matter of
course.

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 While I admit my own theoretical prejudice up front (Art 2008, 2011), I
want to argue in this chapter that recent work on party organization repre-
sents excellent examples of social science research. We have gone from
knowing very little to knowing quite a bit in a short period of time. In
other words, knowledge has cumulated, and while that is the point of posi-
tivist-inspired social science (as most work on the radical right is), it is not
always accomplished within subfields to such an extent. In terms of con-
cept formation and refinement, creative data collection, and mixed-meth-
ods testing, recent work on radical right party organization is exemplary.
The European financial and refugee crises—both of which constitute on-
going and monumental challenges to the European project—have only in-
creased the already insatiable demand for studies of the radical right. The
challenge for future work is to continue to engage discipline-wide empiri-
cal and theoretical debates in democratic politics beyond the subfield of
the radical right.
The first section of this chapter outlines some persistent challenges—
conceptual, methodological, and theoretical—that have characterized the
study of party organization in general, and radical right organization in
particular. The second section evaluates recent work and contends that it
has done more than establish simply that “organization matters.” The intel-
lectual challenge of demonstrating a causal relationship between organiza-
tion and dependent variables of interest should not be underestimated. But
in the social sciences, everything “matters” to some degree, so simply call-
ing attention to another dynamic of the radical right phenomenon would be
useful but perhaps not so interesting. Fortunately, recent work on radical
right party organization (including several studies that include radical right
parties in their comparative framework) offers excellent examples of cre-
ative data collection and theoretical innovation. The final section of this
chapter speculates about what lines of inquiry are worth pursuing, and
which ones might not be worth the intellectual investment.
Research Challenges
As Antonis Ellinas noted in the first significant review of the literature on
radical right party organization, a basic conceptual problem exists. Since
“most scholarly works avoid specifying what party organization actually
means,” it is a good example of a fuzzy concept (Ellinas 2009, 212). This
applies not only to scholarly analysis of radical right organization but also
to theoretical work on party organization in general. Part of this has to do
with the evolution of modern comparative politics, as neither structural
functionalism nor the modernization paradigm had much to say about par-

351
tisan politics. Even Huntington, who in Political Order in Changing Soci-
eties argued that “the stability of a modernizing political system depends
on the strength of its political parties,” did not provide much guide to mea-
suring or explaining party strength or weakness (1968, 408). Other schol-
ars have adapted some of his terms and invented others. Levitsky’s (1998)
concept of “value infusion” is one recent example. But the field in general
remains underdeveloped, and it is fair to say that the “organizational im-
perative” that Huntington identified as the key challenge for modernizing
societies has not been a research imperative for most political scientists.
Now, there certainly is a specialized literature on party organization. Yet
efforts to operationalize the concept have produced no consensus on how
to do so. Some extensive efforts at data collection, such as Katz and Mair’s
handbook of party organization, did not lead to much downstream theoriz-
ing because, in large part, it was unclear how to interpret that data in the
absence of concepts that structured the enterprise (Katz and Mair 1992).
To even use party organization as a dichotomous variable that takes the
values “strong” or “weak,” one must have an idea of what dimensions to
measure. Thus while this sort of “barefoot empiricism” is crucial (how can
one test arguments without data?), it is telling that it has not had much in-
fluence on the study of the radical right.
A second take on party organization—referred to as the “life cycle” ap-
proach—is less concerned with measurement than with constructing ideal
types of political parties and positing developmental trajectories.
Panebianco’s (1988) is the seminal work in this tradition, along with no-
table papers by Pederson (1982) and Harmel and Sväsand (1993). It was
the latter two authors who introduced the concept of the “entrepreneurial”
party that analysts of the radical right have developed further, as we will
see below. These typologies are indeed useful, but they can obscure as
much as they reveal about organizational dynamics. For whenever one
adopts a life cycle model in the social sciences, a set of obvious issues
arise: How many discrete steps in the developmental process are there—
three, five, seven, more? Is it possible to skip steps, or to move through
them in different orders? Are such models inherently deterministic? Or are
they simply post hoc descriptions masquerading as theory? Despite some
recent efforts to think through these other issues (Arter and Kestilä-Kekko-
nen 2014), they remain open questions.
Why is the literature on party organization much thinner than, for exam-
ple, that on party systems? There are at least three major reasons. The first
is empirical, methodological, and theoretical at the same time. For exam-

352
ple, the observation that party X falls somewhere along a continuum of
strong or weak, or that it qualifies as “rooted” as opposed to an “entrepre-
neurial” party type, or even that it has organized at all is possible only be-
cause some organizational threshold has already been reached. The chal-
lenge of detecting very low levels of party organization leaves open the
possibility of selection bias. While not insurmountable in itself, the prob-
lem is magnified given that party organization—despite some monumental
efforts noted above—is still data-thin as a discipline. Parties may not have
an inherent interest in providing data about their members in the first
place, or any requirement to do so. Membership figures also need to be in-
terpreted carefully. For example, just as economists do not take Chinese
economic growth rates at face value, party experts long read Italian party
membership with an enormous grain of salt. With regard to the radical
right, the data are arguably even less reliable. The Dutch Center Democ-
rats, for example, reported a membership of exactly three thousand for
years. Whether this was off by a factor of two, five, or ten is anyone’s
guess.
A second issue is the gulf between the formal and informal realms of
party organization. To what extent do the party statutes or equivalent docu-
ments (assuming they exist) actually structure individual behavior? While
Bolleyer (2012) demonstrates that formal practices can be a useful data
source, this research design has some drawbacks. There are the rules, and
then there are the implementation and interpretation of those rules. As
most academics know, some university committees end up meeting more
than others. (The best ones don’t meet at all!) Without direct observation
of power relations and standard practices, it is difficult to read off impor-
tant characteristics of party organization from rules alone.
The third challenge is theoretical. The tendency to view party organiza-
tion as the derivative of another political variable has stymied inquiry.
While this is clearly not the only field in political science in which endo-
geneity concerns are both widespread and legitimate, the knee-jerk re-
sponse by many scholars of party politics to view organizational strength
as a result of electoral success, or somewhat less commonly as a product of
the party’s ideological profile, has probably been the chief reason for the
underdevelopment of the subfield.
Turning to radical right party organization in particular, the first point to
make is that early references to it were scarce. The focus on charismatic
leadership turned radical right organization into a theoretical oxymoron for
at least a decade. For if the ability of radical right leaders to communicate

353
directly with the electorate over the mass media, and to forge loyalty
among a group of supporters, depended on their personality, then organiza-
tion seemed to be irrelevant. In addition, the fact that most radical right
parties appeared to adopt a hierarchical organizational model meant that
there was not enough variation on the independent variable to allow for
systematic testing.
Later formulations, however, changed their tune: “One of the most im-
portant determinants of success is party organisation. The most successful
radical right-wing populist parties are led by charismatic figures capable of
setting the political and programmatic direction. In addition, most parties
display a highly centralised organisational structure, with decisions being
made at the top by a relatively circumscribed circle of party activists and
transmitted to the bottom” (Betz 1998, 9). Since then, there has been a re-
jection of charisma as a useful category (though see Eatwell, Chapter 13 in
this volume) and recognition of some organizational differentiation among
radical right parties. Initial efforts to test the hypothesis that organization
mattered relied on existing case studies of radical right parties to code that
independent variable (Carter 2005). Fortunately, there were enough studies
to get a sense of general sense of which parties were organizationally
strong and which were weak, but this research design was ultimately lim-
ited by the lack of reliable data on some of the less well-known parties.
Moreover, relying on information from one or at best several studies was
problematic. Expert surveys of party organization ameliorated this prob-
lem, but we are still left with the problem of too few experts on some of
the smaller parties. And there is the additional nagging question of the ex-
tent to which these expert judgments are independent of previous scholarly
efforts. Perhaps we are simply reading one another’s work closely (a laud-
able practice), and we return to the one existing study of the True Finns,
for example, to make an “expert judgment”?
Another research strategy was to get at organization indirectly. I admit
that I eventually abandoned both the empirical and life cycle approaches to
party organization, as neither proved particularly helpful in understanding
the internal dynamics of radical right parties. Rather, I began from the
proposition that radical right parties will reflect the qualities of the ac-
tivists that work on behalf of them. To the extent that there is variation in
the human capital that the radical right recruits, those differences should be
reflected in the party’s organizational dynamics. My central hypothesis
was that the greater the pool of human capital, the greater the chances that
radical right parties would build organizations capable of winning votes

354
and surviving the challenges of incumbency (Art 2011). Several scholars
have developed and tested this claim further, as we shall see below.
Irrespective of the theoretical lens, the central challenges for research on
party organization remain the three that Ellinas has identified. Below I will
analyze how recent works have dealt with them. The first challenge, con-
ceptual clarity, is one that nearly every published paper wrestles with be-
fore moving to an empirical analysis. Fuzziness is no longer tolerated,
which represents progress in itself despite the fact that we are far from de-
veloping a unified set of concepts and measures. The second challenge,
demonstrating that organization has an independent effect on political out-
comes, has been met through careful research designs, creative data collec-
tion, and rigorous statistical and qualitative testing. In my opinion, recent
works represent such a significant advance over previous studies in this re-
gard that they should become the benchmarks for future work. Yet Elli-
nas’s third challenge—the integration of the media into studies of party or-
ganization—has been more or less ignored. In the last section of this chap-
ter, I reflect on what this omission means for our understanding of the radi-
cal right phenomenon. But first to the more sanguine story of social sci-
ence working as it should.

RESEARCH ADVANCES

One recurring concern in the study of the radical right is that the field be-
comes self-referential. More specifically, if scholarship on one type of po-
litical party becomes disconnected from broader concerns in comparative
politics, our intellectual contributions become more difficult both to dis-
seminate and to defend. The first decade of work on the radical right, for
example, was focused on the question “How was this possible in advanced
industrial democracies?” While this was an important question to ask, at
least for a while, treating the far right as a democratic “pathology” meant
that scholars were left with few tools to analyze it. It is not surprising that
work with a broader theoretical agenda had a much greater impact
(Kitschelt 1995; Meguid 2005; Rydgren 2008; Blinder, Ford, and Ivars-
flaten 2013; Spoon 2011).
One of the more fruitful moves in the recent literature has been to com-
pare organizational dynamics across parties. While radical right, Green,
and ethnoregionalist parties still receive most of the academic attention—
with the unfortunate result that the organizational practices of Social De-
mocratic and Christian Democratic parties no longer appear to be interest-

355
ing terrain—their grouping into the category “new parties” has at least ex-
tended the universe of observations in a meaningful way. One question has
been to explain their appearance in the first place (Tavits 2006). The sec-
ond question, and in my view the more important one, concerns their per-
sistence. Organization, it turns out, matters for both.
One approach, inspired by historical institutionalist and life cycle ap-
proaches, is to concentrate on party origins. Drawing a distinction between
parties that consist of preexisting organizations and those that are the con-
struction of a political entrepreneur, Bolleyer and Bytzek hypothesize that
the former are more likely to persist than the latter. Their logic is organiza-
tional. “A party’s capacity to rely on ties to social groups, which pre-date a
newcomer’s formation, so-called ‘promoter organisations,’ ” they write,
“make it more likely that a party is able to sustain support after a parlia-
mentary breakthrough” (2013, 775). Put another way, it is preexisting or-
ganization that allows parties to survive the period of vulnerability that fol-
lows an electoral breakthrough. Although versions of this argument ap-
peared in earlier work, it had not been tested quantitatively. Thus the con-
struction of an original and large data set on new parties since 1945, cou-
pled with the use of multilevel analysis, increases confidence in their find-
ings. And it also marks a cumulation of knowledge, in that both in their
initial paper and in additional work (2016) Bolleyer and Bytzek find strong
support for their “rooted” versus “entrepreneurial” hypothesis. It has also
sparked a scholarly debate about whether entrepreneurs can create strong
organizations if they are so inclined (Arter 2016).
There are political in addition to theoretical implications of this re-
search. One of the underlying questions in the literature on the radical right
is how other political parties should respond to it, particularly once it has
emerged as a potential governing party. On the basis of several case stud-
ies written shortly after radical right parties entered coalition governments
(or cooperated with government coalitions), it appeared that incumbency
was the trick to dismantling them. Give the populist insurgents a chance to
govern, so the thinking went, and they will collapse under the weight of
their unrealistic promises and political inexperience. But Bolleyer, Van
Spanje, and Wilson effectively refute this taming hypothesis using a
mixed-method research design. They conclude that “new parties—through
active party building—can effectively respond to and profit from govern-
ment participation and eventually strengthen their organisation in the
process” (2012, 988). Thus radical right parties can benefit from incum-
bency, a finding not overly shocking to students of parties in general, but

356
one that scholars of the radical right had resisted before.
Cross-national statistical analysis and case study research have thus
largely confirmed the intuition that “organization matters” for electoral
persistence. But given the propensity of academics to challenge any
emerging conventional wisdom, further empirical support is always wel-
come. Beyens, Lucardie, and Deschouwer’s (2016) research design pro-
vides two other sources of analytical leverage. First, the investigators limit
their universe of new parties to those that entered parliament in the Nether-
lands or Belgium between 1950 and 2003. Given the high proportionality
of their electoral system and the number of societal cleavages, the Low
Countries (a term the authors use themselves) offer the closest Western
Europe has to a laboratory for studying party emergence and subsequent
success and failure. Of the thirty parties that entered parliament (i.e.,
achieved a breakthrough), only fifteen have survived. Second, and partially
a result of the “medium N” sample size, the authors perform qualitative
comparative analysis and thereby add another methodological tool to the
literature on the radical right.
Given that multiple studies have come to the same conclusion, we can
say that organization matters for the survival of radical right parties. Call it
a central finding, if you will, of the last decade of research on new parties
in advanced industrial democracies. And while this conclusion might strike
nonspecialists as unsurprising (or, less charitably, as not worth the effort to
reach), I have tried to demonstrate why it matters both theoretically and
empirically. Sometimes social science does come down to confirming
common sense.
Still, one could always object that the historical sweep of these argu-
ments (survival measured over a number of years) opens them up to a dif-
ferent set of methodological objections. What if the same factors that pro-
duced “rooted” parties also allow for their survival? Several recent analy-
ses of electoral breakthroughs (or elections over a shorter period than a
decade, as in survival studies) address this endogeneity concern by short-
ening the timeline. In a study of the Sweden Democrats, Loxbo and Bolin
find that “a developed organizational base not only matters to the long-
term persistence of radical right parties, but also that it is crucial for facili-
tating electoral breakthroughs” (2016, 3). Their research design is an
analysis of four consecutive local elections from 2002 to 2014 in 290
Swedish municipalities. The authors use the same dimensions of organiza-
tion that I did in Inside the Radical Right (Art 2011). They also use the
same operationalization for the socioeconomic status of candidates for of-

357
fice by assigning International Standard Classification of Occupation
(ISCO) codes to self-reported occupation status. As an aside, this consti-
tutes a nice example of replicability irrespective of whether the initial find-
ings are confirmed. Loxbo and Bolin also include a number of control
variables and robustness checks that largely insulate them from the major
methodological challenges that Ellinas (2009) identified. Furthermore,
they collected original data, which represents a significant contribution to
knowledge in and of itself. Even in the age of big data, finding good data
to work with can be labor intensive. But the benefit is that whereas ten or
even five years ago there were not much data on radical right organization,
there are now a number of datasets for scholars to work with.
Dinas and Georgiadou (2013) provide more fine examples of creative
data collection and mixed-method research design. Part of a growing num-
ber of studies that leverage subnational variation, the authors’ work ana-
lyzes a particular municipal election: Athens 2010. This was the electoral
breakthrough for Golden Dawn (GD), and it occurred before the financial
crisis that reshaped the Greek party system. Their paper thus challenges
the conventional wisdom that GD is a direct product of economic collapse.
This leaves them with a puzzle: “How did the GD manage to convert from
a marginal activist group into the third largest party—according to all
opinion polls from the late 2012 onwards—of the Greek political system?”
(1).
Their answer is through “bonding with local communities” (2). Using a
combination of semi-structured interviews with activists and an original
survey, Dinas and Georgiadou document GD’s grassroots initiatives. They
conclude that
GD . . . succeeded in accessing the local population through resi-
dents’ initiatives and committees, mainly interested in anti-immi-
grant mobilization. It offered goods and services to Greeks and
thus managed to get identified as an organization that protects the
residents while eliminating the foreigners. It was constantly present
in certain city areas, either by taking action on its own, or by pene-
trating existing initiatives . . .
This local mobilization strategy, as the authors note, is not unique to GD:
researchers have documented similar actions by the British National Party
and the German NPD (Art 2004). In a coordinated effort to behave like
Boy Scouts toward fellow Greeks fearful of immigrant crime, members of
GD walked countless elderly women across the street and helped untold

358
numbers of retirees to carry their groceries. More substantively, members
of GD joined preexisting citizens’ initiatives and gained posts on numer-
ous committees. The lines between the GD and the local community orga-
nizations became blurred.
That these tactics worked—the key finding is that local mobilization had
a strong positive effect on voting for the radical right—hinged on another
element of the GD’s strategy: concentration of scarce resources. With few
members and zero history of electoral success, the party was hardly a
household name, and a national strategy of community mobilization was
not viable. By focusing on one particular district, which initially appeared
to be promising terrain given the preexisting degree of anti-immigrant mo-
bilization, Golden Dawn maximized its visibility. Through its own labors,
GD constructed an electoral bastion. In this sense, its trajectory is similar
to that of the Vlaams Belang, the British National Party, and arguably the
Sweden Democrats.

OPEN QUESTIONS

But what about the media? None of the articles I have analyzed above
deals with the objections that Ellinas (2009) raised about the potentially
decreasing importance of political organization in an age of media satura-
tion. This is, to be sure, not a new argument. V. O. Key noted in the late
1950s that “the door-bell ringers have lost their function of mobilizing the
vote to the public-relations experts, to the specialists in radio and televi-
sion, and to others who deal in mass communication” (1958, 376).
Panebianco similarly claimed that “changes in communication techniques
are causing an earthquake in party organizations” (1988, 273). Perhaps
“earthquake” was the wrong analogy, as it was not the reshaping of party
organizations but their gradual disappearance that many scholars pre-
dicted. If television allowed politicians to communicate directly with vot-
ers, then one of the central functions of party organization could be ren-
dered obsolete.
The strong version of this argument now seems wrong. It is not that po-
litical parties have stopped investing in their organizations because the
media allows them such great opportunities to amplify their messages (this
is not in dispute). As any voter in New Hampshire can tell you, it is possi-
ble to be politically bombarded by both the doorbell ringers and by the
local television station. Parties, not surprisingly, thus want both a media
presence and an organizational presence. At least in the United States, the

359
lack of limitation on campaign contributions means that candidates for of-
fice don’t necessarily need to think in terms of efficiency to the degree that
Epstein suggested. There is thus not a zero-sum game at work. Moreover,
that parties still invest heavily in building an organization suggests that
this money is not wasted. Personal canvassing still works remarkably well
in this media age (Gerber and Green 2000).
One of Ellinas’s most compelling points is that the media can substitute
for organization in early stages of party development. Using the French
National Front as an example, he argues that “media access limits the need
for complex organisational structures granting political newcomers the
means to make themselves known with minimum organisational effort”
(2009, 219). Students of the radical right can certainly point to other cases
of electoral breakthroughs that were at least enabled by the media. Clearly,
the media are not simply reporting existing voter preferences when, for ex-
ample, they devote breathless coverage to relatively small parties (and
nearly every radical right party started out as small) whose primary claim
to newsworthiness is their public antipathy to immigration. This clearly
amplifies the radical right’s message, irrespective of whether the media
coverage is positive or negative. Only in a few isolated instances—such as
the Swedish media’s early treatment of the Sweden Democrats—have the
media decided not to make the nativism of marginal political players into a
story. Usually, however, the draw of radical right mobilization proves irre-
sistible.
But measuring media impact on voters—to say nothing of the impact of
the media on party political organization—is tremendously difficult. The
literature on media effects was grounded in experiments, raising questions
about the external validity of the findings. And much of it was conducted
before the rise of digital media and the expansion of cable news. That the
media matter is not in dispute. How they matter and whether political sci-
entists can develop useful metrics to test specific hypotheses remain open
questions.
Returning to the concept of charisma, perhaps one of Ellinas’s observa-
tions could help resuscitate a concept that—at least in my view—has not
proved particularly fruitful in analyses of the radical right. He writes that
“market pressures compel media outlets to continuously search for politi-
cal actors that are likely to generate public interest and attract new audi-
ences. Media spotlights tend to reward good public performers, especially
those with unconventional rhetorical style like [Jörg] Haider, who can stir
controversy by breaking taboos or attacking the establishment” (Ellinas

360
2009, 220). Substitute “Donald Trump” for the name of the deceased radi-
cal right Austrian, and you have an Occam’s razor version of the 2016 Re-
publican presidential primary in the United States. While the rise of Don-
ald Trump awaits rigorous academic analysis, one can say unequivocally
that his primary victories had little to do with a sophisticated get-out-the-
vote effort and everything to do with his domination of the press cycle for
month. He faced off against candidates with national organizations and
won handily. Ted Cruz’s organizational infrastructure helped him compete
for a while, and for a time it looked like his team’s detailed knowledge of
the nomination process would help him swing delegates away from
Trump. But Cruz, like the sixteen other Republican challengers, was ulti-
mately overwhelmed by Trump’s media omnipresence.
The power of elite persuasion and the dissemination of their preferences
through party organizations either failed in this case or were not very im-
portant mechanisms to begin with. Either way, Trump’s success consti-
tutes a frontal challenge to any theory that privileges organization and ig-
nores the media. And whether or not Trump constitutes an outlier, studies
that seek to connect the media and party organization remain a worthwhile
challenge for future work on the radical right.
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CHAPTER 13

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 CHARISMA AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

ROGER EATWELL
DURING recent decades there have been frequent claims that we are wit-
nessing the rise of a new generation of “charismatic” right-wing leaders in
Western democracies. However, it has been countered that the change tak-
ing place is better termed the “personalization” of politics. This refers to
the way in which the traditional media have increasingly focused their po-
litical coverage on leaders, though it can point more specifically to the rise
of leaders who lack organizational bases, such as Silvio Berlusconi or
Donald Trump, creating new parties or using old ones to target their ap-
peals at an increasingly dealigned electorate. Moreover, some major al-
leged cases of charismatic effects, notably the dramatic increase in Mar-
garet Thatcher’s popularity during the 1982 Falklands War and George W.
Bush’s after the 9/11 terror attacks, have been seen as examples of office
rather than personal charisma, a situational tendency to rally round the flag
at times of crisis.
The significance of charismatic leadership has been central to debates
about the rise of the “populist radical right” in Europe since the 1980s
(Mudde 2007). Charisma is often seen as an important factor in explaining
the relative success of this family compared to the post-1945 neofascist
“old” right and to different electoral performances within the new family
(Ignazi 2003; van Kessel 2015; Pedahzur and Brichta 2002; Taggart 2000;
cf. Eatwell 2017). The list of charismatic leaders during the first wave of
breakthroughs includes Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French Front National
(FN), Jörg Haider of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Freedom
Party of Austria), and Umberto Bossi of the Italian Lega Nord (LN, North-
ern League). More recent leaders of parties that have achieved significant
support include Geert Wilders of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV,
Party of Freedom), Timo Soini of Perussuomalaiset (PS, Finns Party, for-
merly True Finns), and the LN’s Matteo Salvini. There have also been no-
table female leaders following Pia Kjaersgaard and Pauline Hanson, who
in the 1990s founded the Dansk Folkeparti (DF, Danish People’s Party)
and the Australian One Nation Party, respectively (Immerzeel, Coffé, and
van der Lippe 2015; Meret 2015). In 2011 Marine Le Pen succeeded her
father and sought to “detoxify” the FN in an attempt to broaden its support
—a process that in 2015 led to the expulsion of the elder Le Pen following
repeated anti-Semitic statements. Germany too has seen the rise of female
leadership in the shape of Frauke Petry, who in 2015 became the co-chair

366
of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany), which
quickly became the most successful populist party since 1945.
However, what exactly characterizes such “charismatic” leaders?
Should the confident and handsome Haider be grouped together with the
ill-kept and often garrulous Bossi, who once quipped that his party had “a
hard-on”? What links the down-to-earth, motherly style of Kjaersgaard
with the self-conscious ordinariness of Hanson, who left school at fifteen,
or with Petry, who is a successful businesswoman with a Göttingen doc-
toral degree? Is not the managerial style of Marine Le Pen, a lawyer by
profession, very different from that of her provocative father, who had
fought in Algeria and retained a macho style into old age? Predictably,
such differences have led many academics to hold that the term
“charisma” is at best vague and at worst debased to the point of meaning-
lessness—especially when applied in popular usage to, for example, media
“celebrities” such as Trump, who was best known for hosting the televi-
sion show The Apprentice before he began a serious run for the presidency
in 2015.
Moreover, many hold that it is impossible to demonstrate an empirical
link between allegedly charismatic leadership and voting (Art 2011; van
der Brug and Mughan 2007). Explanations of the sudden takeoff of the FN
most commonly focus on demand-side factors, such as socioeconomic
change and growing concerns about immigration, rather than supply-side
factors, including Le Pen’s growing access to state media in the 1980s
after an economically troubled left-wing government sought to split the
rising mainstream right (Rydgren 2002; cf. Eatwell 2002). Moreover, some
successful radical right parties do not have leaders who are seen as charis-
matic, including the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s
Party) under Christoph Blocher, the Sweden Democrats (SD) under Jim-
mie Åkesson, and Siv Jensen of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (FrP,
Progress Party), a populist party that has metamorphosed into the main-
stream right in the new millennium, thus moving in the opposite direction
to the SVP during the 1990s.
Analyzing the relationship between leader and voters raises major
methodological problems that can be only touched upon below, as the
main purpose of this chapter is to set out a post-Weberian model of
charisma. In the pioneering approach established by Max Weber during
the early twentieth century, charisma was seen as a quasi-religious phe-
nomenon in which confident, prophetic leaders affectively inspired a mass
population at times of crisis and against a background of secular modern-

367
ization (Weber 1968). This approach offers some insights into historical
manifestations of charismatic leaders, including the rise of Benito Mus-
solini and the Fascist Party in the early 1920s and of Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party during the early 1930s. However, it is inadequate as a mono-
causal explanation of these manifestations because fascism also exerted an
economic appeal and grew especially in communities where mass parties
penetrated “uncivil” society—factors that highlight the relevance to voting
of differentiated propaganda, organization, community norms, and national
traditions (Brustein 1996; Mann 2004; Riley 2010).
Nevertheless, it is important not to remove charismatic leadership from
this mix. In the pages that follow, I seek to develop two broad perspectives
about political charisma. Using mainly examples from recent decades, I
first set out a concept of the charismatic leader, highlighting four charac-
teristics: radical mission, personal presence, symbiotic hierarchy, and
Manichean demonization. Second, I consider four theoretical approaches
to support for such leaders and the radical right more generally: socioeco-
nomic change and crisis, political opportunity structures, cultural legitima-
tion, and psychological affinities. In the conclusion I highlight the impor-
tance of considering both internal party “coterie” charisma and the ability
to create an external “centripetal” appeal, which involves a greater empha-
sis on policy voting and differentiated followers than the affective Weber-
ian model does (Eatwell 2002, 2005, 2006).1

CONCEPTUALIZING THE CHARISMATIC LEADER

In this section I seek to build a synoptic characterization of the charismatic

personality. It is important to stress that a full analysis would require a
more systematic diachronic and synchronic perspective to highlight how
leaders’ appeals can change through time and how they can target appeals
at different groups at the same time. A major problem with existing analy-
ses of charisma is the tendency to homogenize leaders’ appeals and/or to
fail to realize that charismatic leadership and entrepreneurial political lead-
ership are not necessarily polar opposites, especially in an age when there
is extensive information about voters’ views on a wide range of issues (in-
formation unavailable to Hitler before coming to power, as political
polling only developed during the 1930s).

A Radical Mission

368
Charismatic leaders are characterized by radical missions, which help to
give them “issue ownership” (though mainstream parties may borrow part
of such leaders’ platforms to help defuse electoral insurgency). The mis-
sionary leader should not be confused with the iconic leader, whose face is
well known and who may even symbolize the nation. Leaders such as U.S.
president Dwight Eisenhower and German chancellor Angela Merkel ex-
hibit a pragmatic form of politics. Charismatics such as Hitler are saviors,
not fixers (although this can be tempered by more ambiguous language,
and they may mix quasi-religious with economically rational appeals).
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s mission was not always linked to detailed policies,
but most of the key issues have been clear since the early 1980s. By that
time the need to overthrow the mainstream parties and to halt immigration
and multiculturalism were his signature themes (Zúquete 2007)—though
after Marine Le Pen became leader in 2011 the mission added a stronger
“neither right nor left” economic crusade, including opposition to the Eu-
ropean Union (EU) and to U.S.-led neoliberal globalization.
Mission is often linked to a foundation myth, where leaders such as
Jean-Marie Le Pen are portrayed as the founder of the movement. The
founder of the Danish Fremskridtspartiet (FrP, Progress Party) in the early
1970s, Mogens Glistrup, provides another example of missionary politics
—though his enemy was the bloated, high-tax state rather than immigra-
tion and multiculturalism, issues that became central to the Danish FrP
under Kjaersgaard and her successor Kristian Thulesen Dahl, who strongly
supported statist welfare chauvinist policies (a reflection of the way in
which the “thin” ideology of populism can be grafted onto different ide-
ologies). Bossi is another good example of the exploitation of a foundation
myth, having led the party from its formation until 2013. Berlusconi simi-
larly portrayed his Forza Italia (FI, Forward Italy) during the 1990s as a
new movement (not a party), whose activists were often referred to as
“missionaries of truth.” In the case of Wilders, he was not only the founder
of the PVV in 2006 but remains its only member! Other leaders are more
inclined to celebrate their role at a critical turn, such as Haider, who after
becoming leader in 1986 turned an uneasy coalition of conservatives and
fascists into a populist party (though, like the FN, the FPÖ retained fascist
milieus). Charismatic leaders also frequently seek to portray elements of
their life as part of a grander narrative about their mission. Vladimir Zhiri-
novsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR),
which was formed shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, grew up
in poverty on the margins of society in Kazahkstan. He sought to restore
the borders of a Greater Russia that would pursue a form of “National Bol-

369
shevism,” rather than the mix of criminality and free markets that he
claimed characterized post-communist Russia. Such narratives open the
possibility of appealing to far more than those who just admire strong lead-
ers—in this case the poor in Russia, the military, and so on.

Personal Presence
Charismatic leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Haider, Wilders, and
Salvini have great confidence and personal presence. Whereas leaders such
as Mussolini and Hitler exhibited these skills publicly mainly at mass ral-
lies, recent studies have tended to stress a leader’s ability to create an ef-
fective appeal via the traditional media. This means that charisma should
not necessarily be equated with a “hot” rather than “cool” style. Wilders,
for example, can use humor and well-timed one-liners, which helped him
win the Dutch Press politician of the year award. The young Hungarian
Jobbik leader Gábor Vona has a university degree and is highly articulate,
using limited media opportunities to help him achieve almost film-star sta-
tus (though Vona, like most extreme and populist right leaders, also holds
rallies). Given that the mainstream media often exclude these leaders or
offer only negative publicity, such leaders have to learn how to present
themselves via other media. Hanson forcefully presented herself via local
and talk radio, which were more open to politically unpolished discussion
than the national media. Radical right leaders have also had to learn to use
new media including the Internet and Twitter, with Jean-Marie Le Pen an
early user of the former to hone his image and disseminate FN policy.
Partly as a result of these trends, some leaders, such as Le Pen senior,
have used image consultants or have at least studied political marketing.
These developments have led to the claim that the term “pseudo-charisma”
is analytically helpful, as it points to the essentially contrived nature of
many party leaders’ images. If the analytical focus is specifically on leader
qualities and views, then “pseudo-charisma” can be useful to demonstrate
the manufactured element of a mission, as it was for Bush after 9/11. How-
ever, if the focus is on audience response, there is a need to explain why
certain leaders’ discourse and image are appealing, regardless of whether
this is largely contrived. For example, Trump’s roller-coaster presidential
campaign appears to have been based more on his own instincts and views
than on those of campaign consultants. But regardless of the role of profes-
sional advisors, he won in part because he seemed to many voters to be au-
thentic, albeit inexperienced—perceptions that helped him overcome some
of his gaffes (though some of these were almost certainly designed to ob-

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tain free publicity and appeal to the political fringe).

Symbiotic Hierarchy
Although charismatic leaders seek to portray themselves as the embodi-
ment of a special mission, they can also portray themselves as an ordinary
(wo)man of the people. After coming to power, Hitler at times emanated a
godlike aura, while at others he was more the common man dressed in
simple clothes, though often sporting the Iron Cross he had won in the war
(an image that had egalitarian as well as military connotations). Charismat-
ics employ a complex discourse and imagery of both obedience and em-
powerment. One of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s most-cited aphorisms claimed
that he merely said out loud what ordinary French people thought in pri-
vate. Similarly, publicity for the current leader of the FPÖ, Heinz-Christ-
ian Strache, has stated that “he wants what we want” and “he says what
Vienna thinks.”
A common technique in attempting to create a sense of leader-follower
identity is the use of a “low” rather than “high” language. Bossi is a good
example of someone who clearly sought to break with the cant and
grandiloquence of traditional Italian political discourse. Zhirinovsky, too,
frequently used macho language, and employed sexual allusion in televi-
sion advertisements. Berlusconi often proudly spoke come la gente, “like
the people,” but he could also switch to a more businesslike style when
seeking to portray himself as a leading entrepreneur and statesman. While
major historical examples of charisma, such as Mussolini, have typically
employed a male form of narrative/symbolism associated with action and
heroics, the modern tendency to view politics in terms of economics and
welfare offers more opportunities for females. Thatcher made great play of
coming from a shopkeeper background, and initially stressed her status as
a housewife (though she later adopted a more masculine, even military air
after the successful 1982 Falklands War). Kjaersgaard, too, has courted the
image of a housewife and mother, though she combined this somewhat un-
easily with an authoritarian rule over her party, which she justified in
terms of preventing the splits that had plagued the Progress Party. Hanson
portrayed herself as a brave, pioneer critic of the establishment, someone
who was “one of us,” the common people—an identification that initially
helped her overcome recurring gaffes.

Manichean Demonization

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An important part in the rhetorical armory of charismatics is the targeting
of enemies, such as Hitler’s demonization of Marxists and Jews (though
this trait must be used cautiously in countries with consensual-liberal polit-
ical cultures). In some cases these can be internal enemies, who in recent
decades are typically nonwhite “immigrants.” The targeting of Muslims
since 9/11 highlights both terrorist threats and allegedly irreconcilable cul-
tural difference, whereas earlier anti-immigrant politics focused on issues
such as allegations of criminality and welfare abuse. In the Netherlands,
Pim Fortuyn, whose eponymous party list in 2002 included nonwhites,
specifically sought to reject charges of racism by stressing that Islam was
alien to the Dutch tradition of democracy and tolerance (Fortuyn was
openly gay). Mainstream parties have been another major target. For ex-
ample, a common theme in Bossi’s speeches was an attack on parti-
tocrazia, the corrupt linkages between parties and business interests that
had come to alienate many Italians by the turn of the 1990s. Trump’s pres-
idential campaign, in a paradoxical twist for someone running as a Repub-
lican, demonized mainstream politicians and named various businesses
that he alleged had “exported” American jobs and/or failed to pay appro-
priate taxes (whereas his failure to pay taxes was legitimate).
Foes can also be external. Anti-U.S. themes have become common in
Europe, often linked to the theme of conspiracy and hidden power. How-
ever, while anti-Semitic and anti-Roma tropes remain strong in Eastern
Europe, in Western Europe the former has become less prominent among
the radical right, partly because some parties support Israel as part of their
anti-Islamic front. This change also helps to shield them from the toxic
charge of “fascism” and to a lesser extent “racism.” The EU, too, has be-
come the object of attack, not least for undermining national sovereignty.
Salvini, who has overseen a remarkable revival of LN support following
the financial scandal that led Bossi to resign, has dubbed the euro a “crime
against humanity” and the EU a new Soviet Union based on authoritarian-
ism and corruption.

THEORIZING CHARISMATIC (AND RADICAL RIGHT)

SUPPORT

History is littered with leaders who can be fitted into this conception of
charisma but whose parties had only a handful of followers. In some cases
they disappeared into obscurity. On a few occasions, such as with Hitler
after 1929, the wilderness years were followed by sudden takeoff. More

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recently, Timo Soini led what was to become the Finns Party for more than
ten years before his appeal to the common man and criticisms of the EU
led to his being elected to the European Parliament in 2009 with the high-
est personal share of the vote. This was followed by his party making a
major breakthrough in national elections.
A model of charisma, therefore, needs to consider the relationship be-
tween leaders and voters, and to more generally assess the various de-
mand- and supply-side factors that lie behind the failure or success of the
radical right. Although in an earlier work I set out ten such theories
(Eatwell 2003), here I will highlight four partly overlapping approaches
that reflect broad schools of analysis. Together they offer many insights,
though they neglect the appeal of charismatic leaders to core activists who
engage in much of the local activity, which has often been a factor behind
the rise and continued success of the radical right. They also tend to ho-
mogenize the nature of the mass support such leaders attract, rather than
highlighting appeals built on notably different constituencies, albeit ones
in which forms of nationalism lie at their core (Zhirkov 2014).

Socioeconomic Change and Crisis

In line with the dominance of structure over agency approaches in history
and political science, many academics hold that charismatic leaders are
most likely to emerge at times of major socioeconomic change—and espe-
cially when economic crisis coincides with political crisis.
Such approaches often focus on the impact of sudden change, like the
deep depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash in a Germany
that had previously been witnessing improving living standards and which
paralyzed the parliamentary system. More recently, the radical right in
many countries, such as France, has gathered momentum following the
most recent recession—though it is important to stress that this has not
happened in some of the most severely affected countries, including Ire-
land and Spain (Kriesi and Pappas 2015).
However, there is a crucial structure-agency point relevant here. Crisis
is normally portrayed as an objective reality that unfolds according to
structural determinants. But leaders can heighten and even create a sense
of crisis by framing “objective” reality—crisis can be talked up or down.
Structural causes are often less important than the specific unfolding of a
crisis, which is in many ways a function of chance or political decisions—
like the way in which the Socialist French president François Mitterrand

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opened state television to the FN in the 1980s, giving Jean-Marie Le Pen a
powerful opportunity to set out his mission (the FN’s poll ratings rose no-
tably after his first appearance on a major talk show). More recently, So-
cialist president François Hollande appeared to vacillate and failed to set
out a clear alternative to the radical socioeconomic policies of Marine Le
Pen.
The impact of the post-2007 recession also has to be seen in terms of its
impact on earlier socioeconomic trends. A key group that has been af-
fected by change in recent decades is the less educated, working-class
male who finds himself alienated from postmaterial, feminist, Green, and
middle-class agendas (Ignazi 1992). Certainly many of Trump’s supporters
were alienated by what they saw as “political correctness” concerning is-
sues beyond just immigration and ethnicity, though those two were un-
doubtedly major issues for his supporters. This hostility tends to overlap
those whose economic prospects have declined and who have been re-
ferred to as the “losers of modernization,” though these are not necessarily
unemployed or among the poorest voters (Betz and Immerfall 1998).
These “left-behinds” have been important supporters of Trump and many
West European radical right parties, with pessimistic voters attracted to
strong leaders who offered the chance of an alternative and rosier future.
Nevertheless, the precise link between economic factors and voting is
not clear. Haider and the FPÖ rose rapidly during the 1990s at a time of
prosperity and low unemployment. Globalization posed threats about the
future, but if there was a crisis, it related more to fears about national iden-
tity than to economic interests. This was a time of growing discussion of
Überfremdung (over-foreignerization) following immigration from the
Balkans and Eastern Europe. Similarly, the rise of the AfD after 2014
owed more to fears about new waves of immigrants from the Middle East
and beyond, who were welcomed by Merkel, than to the “soft” Euroskep-
tic concerns about the Eurozone and the threats to the relatively strong
German economy that had played a major part in the party’s formation (a
change that brought more extremists into the party, posing future image
and unity problems).
A loss of identity following rapid social change was central to mass so-
ciety theory, which was a major interpretation of fascism in the 1950s and
1960s. However, this fell from favor in the face of evidence that fascism
was often strongest where community remained strong, such as rural areas
and small towns, with community leaders such as clerics or doctors fre-
quently leading others into (or against) fascist parties. A similar conclusion

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has been reached in some studies of the contemporary radical right, for ex-
ample regarding the way in which the FN built up support among pieds
noirs, returnees from colonial Algeria and their descendants (Veugelers,
Menard, and Permingeat 2015), and penetrated other networks including
Catholic fundamentalists and right-wing groupuscules. The LN also grew
partly by working through former Christian Democrat networks, though it
benefited from reverse socialization, in which dealigned young voters in-
fluenced older family and friends (Bull and Gilbert 2001).
The anomic approach has come back into favor among those who see
prewar fascism as a “political religion” in which voters suffering from a
“sense-making” crisis were attracted to secular gods. This broad argument
also features in approaches to the contemporary radical right, in particular
the claim that traditional social structures based on class and religion have
broken down. Countries such as Austria and the Netherlands exhibited
subcultures, or Lagers, that resulted in highly “pillared” forms of politics,
but in recent decades their breakdown has allowed the rise of new parties
with strong leaders who appeal across historical divisions in the name of
the nation. On the other hand, some academics have challenged the claim
that the radical right in Western Europe appeals particularly to socially iso-
lated voters—though there appears to be some national variation, with
Denmark and France, countries that have spawned charismatic leaders, far
more likely to see isolated individuals turning to the radical right than in
Belgium, Norway, and Switzerland (Rydgren 2009).

Political Opportunity Structures

A second broad theoretical set of approaches is partly linked to institution-
alism in the social sciences. These are often referred to as “political oppor-
tunity structure” approaches, and they understand institutions in a broad
way that is not confined to the formal constitutional sphere, encompassing
parties and the media too.
A common claim on this approach is that the emergence of charismatic
leaders is associated with strong presidential rather than parliamentary sys-
tems, or with weak party systems. Presidential elections inevitably focus
on individuals, though the differences between the arrogant Trump and
Hillary Clinton, who campaigned heavily on experience and judgment
rather than personality, illustrate that presidential systems do not necessar-
ily produce charismatics. Although Trump’s demonization of his opponent
owed much to his egocentric personality, such attacks are less characteris-

375
tic of proportionally based parliamentary systems, which are likely to need
some form of coalition government.
However, this type of government can encourage consensual politics,
which opens space for radical challengers who can find a powerful issue
neglected by the mainstream, such as immigration in recent decades. The
rise of Le Pen and the FN took place against a background of mainstream
parties not wanting to discuss immigration and linked issues, such as crime
and welfare. Moreover, major changes are taking place in party systems,
including the weakening of mainstream parties as a result of a complex set
of factors, such as the changes in civil society noted earlier, loss of faith in
traditional ideologies (other than nationalism), and perceptions of corrup-
tion among leaders. There has been a notable decline in partisanship,
which opens voters to new appeals (Holmberg 2007)—though this has not
always been accompanied by the rise of major new challengers, even in
systems that use proportional representation, which makes the initial
breakthrough easier. Another important factor that has helped to under-
mine mainstream parties is the tension in liberal democracy between the
promise of popular participation and the reality of electoral competition
among increasingly distant elites—an issue that can be exploited by charis-
matic leaders, who promise to create a new form of politics that embodies
the true will of the people.
Nevertheless, it is important not to associate charismatic leaders in Eu-
rope with weak and/or personal party organization of the Berlusconi type.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, built up an extensive organization, in-
cluding youth and professional groups. Under his daughter Marine, the FN
has sought to broaden and deepen membership and keep out the type of
extremist who previously helped produce a “spoiled identity.” The case of
the Finns Party is interesting in this context. The PS, which has never been
linked to extremism, has been led by Soini for virtually its whole exis-
tence. Although he developed a strong personal charismatic appeal, he
used political entrepreneurial skills to create a strong organization in a way
that has been described as “charisma plus” (Arter 2016). Soini’s image
both as a man of the people and as a competent leader attracted a substan-
tial body of floating voters as the party took off.
This raises the issue of the relative importance of organization and the
personalization of politics. Many academics have argued that there is only
weak evidence in parliamentary democracies that personalization signifi-
cantly influences voters, not least because the media in liberal democracies
are pluralistic and/or non-partisan (Karvonen 2010). A particular problem

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for the radical right is that in most countries they enjoy little mainstream
media access, let alone support. However, this has encouraged an exten-
sive use of new media to bypass gatekeepers, which has become highly
important as most West European countries have moved toward universal
Net coverage and the digital divide has been reduced. Moreover, the claim
that personalization has little impact on voting needs careful examination
in the specific context of the radical right.
Can the FPÖ’s rise be divorced from the fact that the newspaper Neue
Kronen Zeitung (which has an enormous share of the Austrian readership)
strongly supported Haider and set an agenda that helped him? More gener-
ally, charismatic leaders fit into paradigms based on storytelling and melo-
drama in the popular media. There is also a tendency for the media to re-
flect public opinion as well as set the agenda, which means that coverage
of issues such as immigration and the economy recently have featured
prominently. In the Netherlands, Wilders needs the media, as he has no
mass party. There is evidence that his vision and provocative statements
have made him attractive to gatekeepers (van der Pas, de Vries, and van
der Brug 2013). A similar trend has taken place in Italy, where Salvini has
enjoyed extensive media access as well as using new media, which has
more than compensated for the loss of the LN’s own newspaper and televi-
sion channel.
Especially where extremist parties face media exclusion and/or lack
charismatic leadership, it is also important to consider local political con-
texts. In the new millennium the British National Party (BNP) and the
Greek Golden Dawn have sought to build organization and gain votes
through highly localized campaigning, which involved providing services
such as helping the old, repairing housing, and supporting those most in
need (Dinas et al. 2016). In both cases this helped them make electoral
breakthroughs in local elections before moving onto the national stage—
though the BNP imploded after the 2010 general election, with incompe-
tence and splits among the leadership playing a major part.

Cultural Legitimation
A third approach, linked to political culture analyses, holds that the rise of
charismatic leaders is helped by some form of historical legitimation. This
is sometimes referred to in terms of “discursive opportunity structures,”
highlighting the omission in previous approaches of an important factor
that helps explain national variation.

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 A classic study of Hitler’s charisma does not stress personal traits so
much as the nature of the interwar crisis and the German tradition of
strong leaders that Hitler consciously exploited (Kershaw 1998). A major
problem for the radical right in the post-1945 era has been overcoming the
fear of strong leaders, especially any who evoke echoes of fascism, which
remains a powerful delegitimizing tool—used even against those who have
no connection with a fascist past, such as Trump. In the case of those who
did have a clear fascist past, such as the BNP’s Nick Griffin, this undoubt-
edly helped prevent them getting anything like the potential vote achiev-
able by a less extreme party.
However, leaders can employ images that play on counterhistorical allu-
sions. The attraction of Bossi’s gangly image can be seen not only in terms
of a reaction to Mussolinian macho posturing but also in terms of Catholic
iconography of the twisted, tortured body on the cross (Barraclough 1998).
Bossi’s frequently shabby image also contrasted sharply with that of tradi-
tional politicians and rich newcomers such as the impeccably dressed
Berlusconi. All of this helps explain his appeal by the mid-1990s to those
who had formerly been on the left, as well as to Catholics. Jean-Marie Le
Pen frequently used a language of resistance (to immigration, to political
correctness, and so on) in order to counter charges of fascism—though this
sat somewhat uneasily with a Vichy-inspired language aimed at the ex-
treme right and his infamous claim that the Holocaust was but a “detail” of
history.
In the case of the FN, one of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s greatest successes
was manipulating conceptions of Frenchness. On one hand, he sought to
create a primordialist sense of French identity, based on deep ethnic links
and historical greatness. On the other, he has cleverly exploited a more
modernist, assimilationist conception of being French—an “open” invita-
tion to join the nation, but one that requires its new citizens to become
truly French by assimilating in a way that earlier immigrants from coun-
tries such as Belgium and Italy had. Moreover, Le Pen cleverly deployed a
“differentialist” discourse, initially disseminated by nouvelle droite intel-
lectuals such as Alain de Benoist, which has sought to divert charges of
racism by rejecting hierarchies and stressing difference. This was used to
argue the Muslims could not be assimilated and that their culture was a
threat to the secular French state. It is worth adding that France has a tradi-
tion of strong leaders, but in the interwar era no significant fascist move-
ment materialized. Tradition, therefore, provides a set of templates, but it
requires a skilled political leader to deploy them successfully.

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 Charisma can also emerge in societies lacking a tradition of strong polit-
ical leadership, as the Netherlands shows. Fortuyn’s relatively free market
ideology and conception of leadership was more commercial than political.
It was “businesslike but with a heart,” according to his website—an impor-
tant factor in a work-oriented culture within which mainstream politicians
were falling into increasing disdain. Fortuyn had been both an academic
and a media personality before he became a politician, and he constructed
an image of a man who understood the real problems of society and who
was not afraid to speak out against politically correct elites. Wilders simi-
larly tailored his appeal to Dutch values, including a strong support for
women’s equality and gay rights that has been missing in many of the
more male-oriented radical right parties (and whose vote is often heavily
male).

Psychological Affinities
A fourth broad set of approaches seeks to understand charisma and/or the
radical right in terms of the psychology of voters. These arguments can be
important to explaining the relatively sudden increase in support for radi-
cal right parties. For example, recent white fears in the United States about
ethnic minorities, new immigration, and linked issues such as welfare
spending raised existential concerns about threats to the “normative order,”
which meant that white people who felt that change had reached a tipping
point were willing to take a risk on an inexperienced politician such as
Trump, whose radical (albeit vague) policy solutions appealed within a po-
larized electorate (Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Stenner 2010).
Much of the early post-1945 work of this type on fascism was influ-
enced by Theodor Adorno’s theory of the authoritarian personality, which
depicted strict upbringing within the family, school, and other institutions
as producing a tendency toward conformism and respect for strong leader-
ship. This approach ignores other powerful motives for turning to fascism,
noted earlier, and it is weak at explaining its sudden takeoff electorally in
both Italy and Germany. Nevertheless, in spite of further problems opera-
tionalizing the concept, variations have been used to explain postwar radi-
cal right voting. In general, it seems that strongly held nationalist-exclu-
sive views have been a better predictor of voting than authoritarianism
(Dunn 2015), but there is growing evidence that a pool of authoritarian
voters is available to be mobilized by the right leader (YouGov UK 2016).
Such support further disproves another common early approach to the

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revival of the radical right, namely, the claim that it was essentially an un-
structured protest vote. There is no doubt that radical right voters are
protesting many things, including the performance of the mainstream par-
ties, immigration, and the state of the economy in recent years. However,
they are also making a rational choice in the sense that they are aligning
themselves with parties whose views on issues such as immigration are the
closest to their own. Although there have been effective mainstream chal-
lengers who have stolen parts of the radical right’s clothes, for example
Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 French presidential elections, radical right
parties and their domineering leaders tend to have strong issue ownership
in this field.
A rare attempt specifically to analyze the psychological appeal of
charisma comes from Madsen and Snow (1991). They argue that a person
overwhelmed by change may simply not vote, but a charismatic leader
helps give people a sense that the leader can change things while at the
same time remaining responsive to the followers’ needs. Put another way,
people have a need to understand complex events, and often find it easiest
to come to terms with complexity through the image of a single person
who is held to be special, but in some way accountable. Madsen and Snow
call this “proxy control.” Although the full thesis is difficult to test empiri-
cally, it is certainly the case that leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen have
exerted a strong appeal to the apolitical, to those most disconnected from
mainstream politics. Polls in France showed that this group, often called
the “marais electorate,” grew from 19 percent of the electorate in 1981 to
31 percent by 2002. Trump exerted a similar appeal in winning the U.S.
presidency in 2016.
However, while Madsen and Snow may offer a reason people become
hungry for leaders, they do not tell us exactly what type of leader appeals
—they focus unduly on the magnetizability of followers rather than the
magnetism of a leader. At this point, specific leader appeals can be added
back into the equation. In the organizational psychology literature about
successful leaders, the characteristics that most stand out—vision and con-
fidence—featured at the top of the earlier list of charismatic traits. People
are also attracted to leaders who are seen as special but not distant. Theo-
ries of identity creation point to the importance of defining the “other” as
an important part of the process. From a political point of view, focusing
on the “other” also allows for the creation of a wider constituency of sup-
port than does focusing on specific positive traits. Indeed, as the conclud-
ing section will underline, one of the most important aspects of the charis-

380
matic leader is his/her ability to put together support based on notably dif-
ferent factors and motivations.

CONCLUSION

The concept of charismatic leadership has undoubtedly become debased in

popular usage. Even academics often use the term in an undefined way
and/or stretch the concept to include political leaders who are not truly
charismatic. For example, Bush after 9/11 adopted aspects of charismatic
discourse, such as a mission to destroy terrorism, but the support that ral-
lied around him was more the result of office and situational charisma
rather than personal charisma.
Trump has failed to benefit from office charisma because he has so po-
larized voters that he had little chance of broadening his base. Indeed,
many radical right leaders and parties remain stigmatized, turning voters
away more than attracting them. This is especially true of those who can
effectively be tagged with the “fascist” or “extremist” label. Although
Jean-Marie Le Pen polled higher in four presidential elections than his
party’s standing at the time, large numbers of French voters saw him as be-
yond the pale—as his failure to achieve even 20 percent of the vote in the
2002 presidential run-off ballot shows.
Many of the arguments presented above seem to point away from sug-
gesting that charismatic leadership has been important to the rise in sup-
port for radical right parties. The current academic conventional wisdom
holds that this rise has been based heavily on the demand side, particularly
issues linked to immigration, which since the 1980s has been the number
one issue for many supporters of the radical right in Western Europe and
increasingly in the United States. Economic problems in many countries
have further increased support for policies such as restricting immigration
and welfare chauvinism, as well as fears about globalization and growing
inequalities between rich and poor. These factors were far more important
than Hanson’s discredited leadership in the sudden revival of the Aus-
tralian One Nation Party during 2016.
Another problem with the classic formulation of the charisma thesis—il-
lustrated both by studies of fascism and by studies of the more contempo-
rary radical right—is that it features a binary approach, which focuses on
macro (societal) or micro (individual) factors. But local and group (meso)
perspectives are also crucial to understanding support, including the role

381
played by opinion leaders. This points to the possibility that charisma may
act mainly on a minority, who then recruit (often by using other forms of
appeal) a wider constituency. For example, the rise of the Lega Nord has
to be understood in part within the context of local networks, including
strong family groups in which the young often socialized the old into new
allegiances. Golden Dawn, a party clearly lacking any form of charismatic
leadership, has similarly sought to build and use local networks, partly as a
way of bypassing the hostility of mainstream media (reinforced by a strong
new media presence).
However, I do not want to end by concluding that historians and social
scientists should banish the term “charisma.” Rather, I want to argue that
charisma remains an important approach to understanding the success of
radical right parties in two major senses.

Coterie Charisma
While leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen or Bossi have failed to display
mass affective charisma, they have unquestionably displayed what I term
“coterie charisma” of the type that Mussolini and especially Hitler had ear-
lier achieved. In other words, they attracted a hard core of supporters, both
in their inner courts and more locally, who have held that the leader was
driven by a special mission and/or that the leader was invested with unique
powers. This helped keep the party together in the wilderness years and in-
spired great exertions on behalf of the cause. This relationship with core
followers is very different from that of a leader such as Blocher and to a
lesser extent Berlusconi, whose parties were based on factors such as
strong organization and media support, respectively (though the media
often featured Berlusconi and he attracted an element of coterie charisma)
(McDonnell 2016).
However, it is important to stress that coterie charisma does not have to
be affective. Some may see the leader more in terms of potential effective-
ness in holding a group together, and in terms of the ability to win support.
Certainly some of those who helped set up the FN in 1972 saw the choice
of Le Pen in such terms. When the FN experienced a major split in 1998–
1999, it was largely over the belief that the party’s support had plateaued
around 15 percent and needed a new leadership, less tainted with extrem-
ism, in order to drive it further forward. Marine Le Pen’s succession in
part reflected a dynastic and nepotistic tendency in the party, but it also
demonstrated a strong belief in the party’s inner core that she was the

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leader who could achieve the electoral breakthrough, perhaps even win a
presidential election. A high level of respect for a strong leader was also
important in helping another founding father, Geert Wilders, to develop
the PVV as an electoral machine, including the training of candidates and
exclusion of extremists—though this again underlines the importance of
organization for sustained party success (de Lange and Art 2011).

Centripetal Charisma
Some voters came to see parties such as the FN, FPÖ, and LN through the
matrix of their leaders—a characteristic that I term “centripetal charisma.”
The Nazis are an even better example, as by the 1930s they were com-
monly known as “the Hitler Party.” Put another way, such leaders are
viewed as immanent, as the embodiment of the party—a trait especially
common when linked to foundational or turning-point leader mythology
(which can cause a problem when there is a succession, though the new
leadership of Marine Le Pen and Salvini shows that this is not necessarily
fatal to a party’s prospects, as the new leader can become the new embodi-
ment of the party).
The ability of a party to present a united front, epitomized by a single
leader who tends to dominate media coverage, has two important conse-
quences. First, voters are offered, to adopt rational choice terminology, a
low-cost form of signaling that helps send key policy messages to potential
supporters. One of the most striking things about the poll evidence for
many radical right leaders and parties is that voters are not simply protest-
ing. Many may be alienated from the mainstream and have other griev-
ances, but they are attracted by various policies (although they can come
from different parts of the ideological spectrum). For example, during the
2002 presidential elections in France, a poll that asked people on what cri-
teria they would choose their candidate found that Le Pen’s supporters
ranked platform first, with the highest score of all the sixteen first-ballot
candidates (62 percent), whereas personality ranked fifth (29 percent).
Second, by becoming the epitome of their parties, leaders such as Jean-
Marie Le Pen have helped to overcome the dissonance that might have
been created by the market segmentation politics they have pursued. The
Weberian conception of charisma implies a leader dominated by a single
mission, but leaders such as Le Pen and Zhirinovsky went out of their way
to target appeals at different sectors of the electorate. To some extent this
even involved potentially contradictory discourses—for example, Le Pen’s

383
evocation of Vichyite themes with his attempt to court left-wing voters
through welfare chauvinism and his use of resistance discourse. The poten-
tial dissonance created by different discourses was partly resolved by de-
veloping these through coteries at the local level and highly targeted cam-
paigning. But by perceiving politics through the medium of the national
leader, many voters used a form of cognitive dissonance to homogenize
their party image in a way that would have been much less likely had their
primary focus been mainly on policies.
It is important at this point to return to a point touched upon earlier,
namely, the political entrepreneurial skills of leaders. Certainly some are
more capable than others of constructing a broad constituency of support.
Bossi, for example, briefly assembled a coalition based on small-business
interests and resentments against the central government in Rome and
mainstream politicians. But when he sought to broaden his themes, he
turned further to the right, especially on immigration. Where the LN
achieved local electoral success outside its “natural” constituency of small
northern industrial towns, it was often helped by notables who broadened
the party’s appeal—for instance, in Milan, where ex-socialist Marco For-
mentini became mayor. Recently, a crucial change enacted by Salvini after
support for the LN slumped has been a broader appeal, which even encom-
passed dropping the LN’s foundational regionalism. Although agenda-set-
ting is a complex issue (involving the media, mainstream parties, and oth-
ers) it is important not to play down the role of leadership, and in particu-
lar the role of charismatic leaders who can confidently set out a new vi-
sion.

384
NOTE

1. I am very grateful to James Eatwell for his comments on this chapter.

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CHAPTER 14

389
 MEDIA AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

ANTONIS A. ELLINAS
FEW things frustrate right-wing radicals and their critics more than media
coverage. Radicals blame the mainstream media for ignoring or misrepre-
senting their views and for being part of the elite they are trying to oust.
Donald Trump calls journalists liars, Geert Wilders tells the critical media
to “drop dead,” Marine Le Pen calls them a “self-proclaimed elite,” and
Nigel Farage accuses them of bias. Critics complain that the media help
radicals by magnifying and legitimizing their views and by failing to hold
them accountable. The American news media are blamed for the oversized
exposure granted to Trump, the Dutch media are thought to have helped
Wilders rise to political prominence, the French media are seen as “too
soft” on Le Pen, and the BBC received twelve thousand complaints for fa-
voring Farage (see, e.g., Elliott 2016; Kissane 2014; Guardian 2015;
Bacon 2015; Reynolds and Sweney 2014; New Observer 2015). The de-
bate about the role of the media in the rise of right-wing radicalism is not
new. The European media have been criticized for their fascination with
the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider in the 1980s and 1990s,
and more recently American broadcasters, especially Fox News, have been
associated with the “making” of the Tea Party movement. The ongoing de-
bate about the association between the media and right-wing radicalism is
not surprising. The way the media deal with radicalism relates to some of
the most complex issues democratic polities face. Media coverage raises
questions about the degree of tolerance societies should display when it
comes to the often intolerant ideas of right-wing radicals and, more gener-
ally, questions about the limits of the freedom of expression democracies
grant to groups and individuals.
Normative considerations aside, the relationship between the main-
stream media and the radical right raises important questions about the net
effect of the media on political outcomes. Despite the persistent concern of
politicians and pundits about the role of the media in the rise of radicalism,
there are few comparative efforts to systematically gauge the effects of
media coverage. This chapter provides an overview of empirically
grounded efforts to understand the relationship between the media and the
radical right. The chapter mostly engages with works on radical right-wing
parties but also tries to utilize scholarly insights from the social movement
literature. In line with the now voluminous literature on radical right-wing
parties, the chapter begins with an examination of how the media affect

390
political demand for radicalism before it turns to their effects on political
supply. It then examines various factors shaping media effects before con-
sidering possible explanations for media behavior. The chapter concludes
with some suggestions for future research.

THE MEDIA AND POLITICAL DEMAND FOR RIGHT-WING

RADICALISM

Efforts to understand the relation between the media and radical right-wing
parties naturally begin with a consideration of media effects on voters. As
intermediaries transmitting party messages to voters, the media are thought
to shape voter preferences in ways that favor the radical right. The micro-
level processes triggered by media content vary, but a rich literature focus-
ing on American politics agrees that they are important. Mostly focusing
on individual-level effects and drawing from the behavioralist tradition
(Kinder 1998), this literature shows that the media can set the political
agenda (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder 1987), frame issues (e.g., Iyengar 1991;
Gamson 1992), prime audiences (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Krosnick
and Kinder 1990), and, under some circumstances, persuade voters (e.g.,
McGuire 1968; Zaller 1992). Media content is shown to shape how people
think about important issues such as welfare and race (Gilens 1999;
Mendelberg 2001) and ultimately influence policies. And various patterns
of media consumption are shown to affect major political outcomes, such
as learning, participation, and voting (Prior 2007).
Scholarly insights from the long and rich behaviorist tradition in politi-
cal communication have not gained significant traction in the examination
of the European radical right. Although much is made about how the
media affect the fortunes of European radical right-wing parties, there is
little empirical work directly linking media content to individual voter be-
havior. Most of the evidence associating the media with political demand
for radicalism relates to agenda-setting and framing.
With regard to agenda-setting, this evidence shows that the media help
determine the issues upon which radical right-wing parties are known to
thrive. The media are shown to give attention to immigration and crime—
issues that individual-level evidence links with radical right-wing voting
(e.g., van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2000; Norris 2005; Ivarsflaten
2005, 2008; Rydgren 2008). An analysis of the Flemish press and televi-
sion over a period of ten years shows the extensive and growing media at-
tention to issues such as immigration and crime. Time-series data suggest

391
an association between media coverage of these issues and electoral sup-
port for the radical right Vlaams Blok (Walgrave and de Swert 2004). As
the recent media coverage of the refugee crisis in Europe suggests, media
coverage of immigration does not occur in a contextual vacuum. In the
1990s, increased reporting on issues such as immigration largely reflected
the actual situation on the ground. In Austria, as elsewhere in Europe, the
opening of eastern frontiers gave rise to migratory flows that naturally re-
ceived a lot of media attention. In the early 1990s immigration topped all
other political issues in Austria, and its salience is thought to have added to
the electoral fortunes of the Freedom Party (Plasser and Ulram 2003). Sim-
ilarly, an analysis of Dutch newspapers between 1990 and 2002 finds a
significant association between the salience of immigration in the news
and the intention to vote for anti-immigrant parties, such as the Lijst Pim
Fortuyn (Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart 2007). Interestingly, this associa-
tion holds after controlling for contextual variables such as unemployment
and immigration. Recent research on the rise of right-wing radicalism in
Eastern Europe tends to confirm the findings from Western Europe. The
Hungarian Jobbik is thought to have benefited from the exposure granted
to themes such as crime, corruption, and the Roma population (Szabó and
Bene 2015, 125).
An aspect that is particularly relevant today due to the refugee crisis in
Europe is not just how much but also how the media report on issues such
as immigration. A number of studies show that in the 1990s European
media framed immigration in negative terms, associating it with unem-
ployment and crime (e.g., ter Wal 2003). The way the media framed immi-
gration helped legitimize the xenophobic agenda of radical right-wing par-
ties, which tried to build their electoral capital by generating economically
and culturally induced fear against foreigners. The media—especially the
tabloid media—are also blamed for generating public cynicism and politi-
cal distrust by negatively framing contemporary politics. Moreover, media
“populism” is generating demand for entertaining, sensationalist, and dra-
matized politics that facilitate the rise of right-wing radical populists (Maz-
zoleni, Stewart, and Horsfield 2003). In line with research linking political
dissatisfaction with radical right-wing voting (e.g., Knigge 1998; Norris
2005), the argument here is that the media help create a political environ-
ment conducive to the rise of radicalism. In France, for example, the media
are thought to have inadvertently helped the rise of the National Front “by
portraying a vague, uncertain political climate, stressing the impotence and
detachment of politics” (Birenbaum and Villa 2003).

392
 Media agendas and framing can indirectly affect the behavior not just of
potential right-wing radical voters but also of activists. The extent to which
the media cover political issues and the way in which they cover them af-
fect the structure of incentives activists face to mobilize. Media coverage
of collective action affects the availability of “discursive opportunities”
(della Porta and Diani 2006). Through editorial decisions regarding the
coverage and framing of political activism, the media can facilitate or hin-
der further mobilization by providing information to social movement ac-
tivists about the reactions of institutional and social agents. In this sense,
the magnitude and nature of the discursive opportunity signal the potential
benefits and costs of undertaking political action. The political action liter-
ature (e.g., Barnes and Kaase 1979; Norris 2002; Dalton, Van Sickle, and
Weldon 2009) does not directly acknowledge the importance of this me-
dia-induced information, but it is arguably crucial for activists to deter-
mine the probability of their activism succeeding. Evidence from violent
right-wing activism in Germany in the early 1990s shows how highly pub-
licized acts against asylum seekers in Hoyerswerda cascaded across the
country, inspiring skinheads and shaping their strategy (Koopmans 2004;
see also Koopmans and Olzak 2004). It is worth examining whether the
media are having a similar effect on nonviolent right-wing activism in
Germany and elsewhere in the mid-2010s. It is plausible that the coverage
of demonstrations led by Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung
des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of
the West) in Dresden has contributed to the spread of anti-Muslim ac-
tivism in other parts of Germany and, to a lesser extent, in other European
countries.

THE MEDIA AND THE POLITICAL SUPPLY OF RADICALISM

The media influence the radical right not only by affecting the way voters
or activists behave but, more important, by affecting the capacity of politi-
cal parties and social movements to expand their appeal.1 The most obvi-
ous effects of the media are on interparty competition, which is one of the
standard explanations for the divergent electoral fortunes of radical right-
wing parties (Kitschelt 1995; Abedi 2002; Bale 2003; Cole 2005; Meguid
2005; van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005; Arzheimer and Carter
2006). Explanations of radical right performance based on party competi-
tion tend to assume that communicative resources are evenly distributed
across the Downsian spectrum and that parties evenly compete for voters.

393
But media access—and the capacity to reach voters that comes with it—
varies considerably among parties, especially between established and new
parties. Established parties have guaranteed access to the media and can
use their privileged position in the political system to limit the commu-
nicative resources available to competitors. Their “cartel” status grants
them the capacity to define the parameters of media access by making or
altering the rules regarding the coverage of new or smaller political actors
(Katz and Mair 1995, 15–16; Katz and Mair 2009) by the mainstream
media, especially the broadcast media. The cartelization of politics docu-
mented in the political party literature translates into an asymmetry in the
distribution of communicative resources that penalizes new or small par-
ties.
For political outsiders, this communicative resource gap is particularly
important because they tend to lack the organizational infrastructure and
the financial resources to disseminate their messages to voters. The media
are an important resource for all political actors but are even more impor-
tant for smaller or new actors that lack alternative resources to communi-
cate their program. Lacking media access, smaller or new actors tend to
spend a lot of time on the streets to reach local audiences through conven-
tional party activism, such as canvassing or small-scale public talks. Or
these actors resort to unconventional protests to impress passers-by or get
some media attention, even if it is negative. Moreover, their limited finan-
cial resources are not enough to buy substantial national advertising.
Media access can change their fortunes by allowing them to communicate
their messages to audiences much wider than their street activism can
reach and their limited financial resources can buy. Scholarship on right-
wing radicalism tends to sidestep the issue of media access, but the trans-
formative effects it can have on the structure of political competition do
not go unnoticed by scholars of political communication. Analyses of how
the Berlusconi-controlled media facilitated the transformation of the Italian
right (Statham 1996; Gunther and Mughan 2000) provide some indications
of the transformative effect the media can have on party competition. Ross
Perot’s media-induced political ascendance in the 1990s and the effect it
had on the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections (Laurence 2003) further
point to the need to incorporate media effects in Downsian models of polit-
ical competition.
The media have an additional effect in political competition by granting
or denying new players validation, momentum, and legitimacy. First,
media coverage gives political outsiders the image of being important.

394
“The mere fact of recognition, of being singled out for attention, is evi-
dently enough to bestow prestige and authority” (Kinder 1998, 177). Being
singled out in the news immediately grants actors the status of shapers of
everyday politics, placing them on the political spectrum in ways that their
own organizational or advertising efforts cannot achieve. As Gamson and
Wolfsfeld note in their analysis of social movements, media spotlights turn
actors into players in the political game—what they term the “validation
effect” (1993, 116). Second, the media can give political outsiders momen-
tum, signaling not just their importance but also their growing political
clout. The way the conservative media, especially Fox News, reported on
the initial Tea Party demonstrations illuminates the momentum the media
can give to a start-up movement. Fox became an amplifier of Tea Party ac-
tivism and rhetoric, giving national momentum to its predominantly local
demonstrations and generating the impression of a fast-growing and
widely spreading grassroots movement. “Along with right-wing blogs and
talk radio, Fox News, including the colorful host Glenn Beck, created the
sense that a massive ‘movement’ was afoot” (Skocpol and Williamson
2012, 86). A similar argument has more recently been made about the
media coverage of Donald Trump. The oversized exposure granted to
Trump in the early stages of the Republican campaign by major news out-
lets is thought to have benefited his candidacy (Patterson 2016). Third, the
media can grant political outsiders legitimacy. Acquiring legitimacy
through media presence is important for all political newcomers, but it is
particularly important for radical right-wing actors, especially in Europe.
Because of the interwar legacy of right-wing extremism, with which the
radical right has come to be associated, media exposure can be crucial for
enhancing the acceptability of radical right-wing parties. Media visibility
can remove the stigma of extremism that these parties tend to bear and
help them become respectable political actors. Scholars studying parties,
movements, and the media might find it hard to measure the legitimizing
effect of the media, but right-wing radicals are fully aware of it. The exam-
ple of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s description of this effect after a 1984 career-
changing appearance on a popular French television program is instructive
of the need to better appreciate the impact the media can have.
Just like that, I must have changed. Just like that, I became an ac-
ceptable politician. Just like that, I must have changed my “look,”
just as they are saying today. And yet, I had changed neither my
look, nor my message, nor my language, nor my behaviour. What
had changed was that a television network, Antenna 2, granted me
an “Hour of Truth.” Sixty minutes, after a battle that has been

395
 going on for 28 years. An hour is nothing, but it was enough for me
to get rid of the monstrous and carnival-like mask that all my oppo-
nents have so generously applied to me. (Quoted in DeClair 1999,
76)
The analysis of how the media affect right-wing radicalism would be su-
perfluous if media outlets simply reflected political reality—if, in other
words, the exposure granted to radicals simply reflected their electoral or
political standing. However, this is not the case. Le Pen’s 1984 prime-time
interview preceded the surprising electoral breakthrough of the National
Front in the European elections (DeClair 1999, 76). The sequence of
events is critical for understanding the effect of the media in the electoral
ascendance of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party as well. The media exposure
granted to the party by the right-leaning newspaper Neue Kronen Zeitung
and the left-leaning weekly magazine Profil in the mid-1980s preceded the
electoral breakthrough of the party in the 1986 Austrian legislative elec-
tions. The exposure granted to the party was four times bigger than the
electoral result pollsters had predicted for the Freedom Party at the time
(Ellinas 2010, 56). Evidence from the United States is also telling of the
distortive effect the media can have on political reality. As in the case of
radical right-wing politicians in Europe, the avalanche of media attention
granted to Trump preceded and was not justified by his standing in the
polls. As one report noted, “Major news outlets covered Donald Trump in
a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbers—a high vol-
ume of media coverage preceded Trump’s rise in the polls” (Patterson
2016). In contrast to the experience of various European countries or the
United States, in Germany the media have been much more hesitant to
give any access to right-wing radicals, even after their parties achieved re-
gional electoral breakthroughs. The analysis of German newspaper and
television content across time reveals the insurmountable communicative
barriers German radicals face (Ellinas 2010, 76–124).

THE SIZE OF MEDIA EFFECTS

The media are a political resource that can grant right-wing radicals vali-
dation, momentum, and legitimacy, and hence affect political outcomes.
The size of these media effects varies depending on a number of factors.
First, communicative resources are most useful to radical right-wing par-
ties and movements when there are opportunities in the broader political
environment that can help them utilize media access to improve their polit-

396
ical standing. Such opportunities partly depend on the strategies and ca-
pacity of systemic actors to deal with political challenges (e.g., Kriesi
1995). These challenges (such as large immigration flows and major eco-
nomic crises) can cause divisions among systemic actors and bring about
strategic missteps that open the political space for the entry of new con-
tenders in the political game. Strategic miscalculations occur, for example,
when systemic actors take tough albeit unsustainable policy positions aim-
ing to address these challenges. Flip-flopping on issues after helping to
radicalize political competition over these matters helps create the space
for challengers (Ellinas 2010). The new actors can more effectively capi-
talize on the political opportunities if they have communicative resources
at their disposal.
Second, media effects are stronger for smaller or newer right-wing ac-
tors rather than established or older ones. Before parties or movements ac-
quire a critical size that makes them relevant political actors (what Sartori
calls the “threshold of relevance” [1976, 121–129]), the media can have
much stronger effects on their development than when they have passed
this threshold. As mentioned before, smaller or newer actors tend to lack
alternative resources to communicate their messages to voters or activists.
Hence the media can make up for right-wing radicals’ resource deficien-
cies. Once parties or movements pass this threshold of relevance, their re-
liance on the media is probably smaller than before. Their size grants them
greater financial resources through bigger state subventions or membership
fees. It also allows them to build an organizational infrastructure and es-
tablish more effective mechanisms for mobilizing voters and activists. This
limits their subsequent reliance on the availability of communicative re-
sources. Put simply, the media are most effective prior to the initial break-
throughs of new or smaller actors and are less important for their persis-
tence. Political persistence requires more than access to communicative re-
sources. In fact, media access can prove detrimental for political actors if it
delays or substitutes for the buildup of a solid organizational infrastruc-
ture. The availability of communicative resources might affect the “inter-
nal” supply (Mudde 2007) by encouraging actors to avoid establishing
strong organizations and primarily rely on the media for the communica-
tion of messages to voters and activists. This makes them vulnerable when
communicative resources become scarce and might turn them into “flash
party” phenomena. Parties such as New Democracy in Sweden and Popu-
lar Orthodox Rally in Greece were largely media-induced phenomena that
failed to build the necessary organizational infrastructure to sustain their
newly acquired political gains, and they quickly lost their political clout

397
(Taggart 1996; Ellinas 2013). By contrast, the Greek Golden Dawn in-
vested its newly acquired resources in building a relatively extensive net-
work of local branches that allowed it to avoid collapse when state authori-
ties launched a criminal investigation and imprisoned its leadership (Elli-
nas and Lamprianou 2016). The media initially helped Golden Dawn
achieve its 2012 electoral breakthroughs, and by the time they blocked ac-
cess, in late 2013, Golden Dawn had already set up the organizational in-
frastructure that allowed it to endure.
Third, the effects of the media depend not only on the amount of airtime
or coverage right-wing radicals get but also on the type of coverage. Part
of the debate about the role of the media in the rise of right-wing radical-
ism relates to how the media choose to deal with radicals. As mentioned
earlier, Fox News has been accused of covering the Tea Party in a way that
helped it establish an image of a nationwide grassroots movement. Simi-
larly, the Neue Kronen Zeitung has been accused of having a “soft spot”
for Haider (Höbelt 2003, 15) and Proto Thema of exaggerating and pro-
moting the social activism of Golden Dawn (Psarras 2012). While positive
coverage clearly helps, it is unclear what the effects of negative media
coverage are on the fortunes of right-wing radical parties and movements.
Especially for smaller or newer actors, it is plausible that bad publicity can
be good for them. Even when negative, the coverage of radical right-wing
appeals makes it easier for potential voters or activists to be drawn to
them. Negative coverage of an actor by the systemic media can inadver-
tently turn that individual’s pariah status into an attractive vehicle of politi-
cal protest. For example, the framing of the Sweden Democrats as an un-
welcome “beast” is thought to help them project themselves as the true op-
ponents of the system (Hellström and Hervik 2014). And in Hungary, Job-
bik has made electoral advances despite being “quarantined” by the main-
stream media (Szabó and Bene 2015, 125).
That being said, negative coverage can plausibly be damaging for right-
wing radical parties and movements if it associates them with political vio-
lence and thoroughly scrutinizes their leaders and positions. This is partly
the case of the National Democratic Party of Germany, which is generally
associated with violent acts and demonstrations. The electoral momentum
of the radical right Republikaner in the late 1980s is thought to have been
stopped by negative coverage in the tabloid Bild, which helped associate
the party with Nazism but also with incompetence (Art 2007). A similar
approach by the media (and civil society) frustrated the electoral attempts
of the German People’s Union in the 1990s (Art 2004). In Britain, the con-

398
troversial appearance of the former leader of the British National Party,
Nick Griffin, on BBC’s Question Time probably did more damage than
good to the party, as he was “ripped to shreds” by the media for his perfor-
mance on the program (Startin 2014, 293).
Fourth, media effects are likely to vary between older and newer media.
In recent years, radical right-wing parties and movements have resorted to
the use of new media to lower the communicative barriers to entry into the
political market. Extensive use of the Internet by parties and movements
decreases the amount of financial resources necessary to reach wide audi-
ences, giving challengers the capacity to overcome their visibility obsta-
cles. Radical right-wing actors rely on the Internet to disseminate informa-
tion about their ideas and activities and on social media and blogs to estab-
lish direct contact with potential voters or activists. There is some evidence
suggesting the potential effects of new media on the rise of right-wing rad-
icalism. In France, the National Front turned to the Internet “to bypass the
media and speak directly to the people” (Bratten 2005, 520). Concerned
about media hostility toward the party, in the mid-1990s Le Pen started
using the party website as a means to directly communicate with potential
supporters. Similarly, after Golden Dawn was blocked by the mainstream
media in late 2013, the party’s website became the main platform for com-
municating with its voters and activists, publishing more than a dozen
news stories per day and covering all central and local party activities,
most with photo and video content (Ellinas 2015). The True Finns also
owe part of their success to the political traction generated by the blogging
of one of their members, Jussi Halla-aho. The anti-immigrant movement in
Finland initially developed as an online platform that helped Halla-aho get
elected in the local Helsinki elections (Horsti 2015).
The changing mediascape makes it easier for radical right-wing parties
and movements to communicate directly with potential supporters, but it is
doubtful whether the new media can match the effects of the mainstream
or “old” media. As mentioned earlier, the mainstream media get to affect
the fortunes of the radical right not only by granting exposure but also by
offering validation, momentum, and legitimacy. The number of concurrent
website visitors, YouTube views, Facebook likes, and retweets can offer
clues as to the potential size and importance of radical actors, and hence
help build momentum for them. But it is unlikely that the new media can
grant validation and legitimacy in the same way the established media can.
The validating and legitimizing effects of the mainstream media come
from the degree of authority they command over their audiences. This au-

399
thority inevitably adds some clout to the political actors they choose to re-
port on or interact with. Arguably, the new media are not endowed with as
much authority as the old media, in part due to the presumably more elabo-
rate processes of news gathering and checking the latter are thought to em-
ploy. Moreover, the presence of radical right-wing actors in the new media
is largely the result of their own efforts rather than of decisions taken by
news editors or journalists. For these reasons, new media publicity does
not have the same validating and legitimizing effects as coverage by the
mainstream media. These differences might be starker in settings where
the mainstream media command high levels of authority from their audi-
ences than in systems where they are mistrusted.

FACTORS AFFECTING MEDIA BEHAVIOR

In addition to understanding the relationship between the media and right-

wing radical parties and movements, it is also important to consider possi-
ble explanations for media behavior. To begin with, it is necessary to ap-
preciate the cataclysmic changes that have come about in the media indus-
try in the past decades. Technological innovation and market liberalization
have increased the supply of media outlets and increased pressures for rev-
enue-generating content. Technological and economic change led to the
dismantling of public broadcasting monopolies in most countries and to
the proliferation of private media conglomerates competing for bigger au-
diences. The quest for bigger audiences and competition for advertising
revenues are thought to have taken a toll on quality journalism. Market-
based logic has turned audience size into the ultimate selector of news con-
tent, encouraging the production of sensational, simplified, and dramatized
content, focusing on personalities instead of policies. This “dumbing
down” of news and the turn to “infotainment” is thought to have helped
give rise to populist politicians, who best match the news outlets’ search
for conflictual frames, controversial statements, and even conspiratorial
narratives. The media have been willing to grant exposure to politicians
such as Farage, Haider, Le Pen, or Wilders because their talent or charisma
(Eatwell 2005; van der Brug and Mughan 2007) in political communica-
tion helps increase audiences and, ultimately, revenues. The outsized expo-
sure granted to radical right-wing actors also relates to the nature of the ap-
peals. The cultural or nationalist frames these actors use resonate well with
national publics and match the commercial interest of media conglomer-
ates to reach wide audience. In this sense, the commercial interests of
media agents define the characteristics of the political supply of both radi-

400
cal right-wing politicians and appeals.
Changes in the media industry can go a long way to account for why the
media are willing to grant free publicity to right-wing radicals, but that
factor cannot adequately explain variation in media behavior. The com-
mercial drive for media audiences is present across countries and periods,
but media behavior toward radicals does not solely follow commercial
considerations. Media organizations operate in political environments and
their behavior is also determined by their interaction with this environ-
ment. These patterns of interaction can go a long way to explain differ-
ences in how the media treat radical right-wing actors and activists. In set-
tings where the media have strong ties with the political system, it is rea-
sonable to expect that the treatment of radicals is at least partly driven by
political considerations. The way the Berlusconi-owned media treated—
and helped rehabilitate—the post-fascist Alleanza Nationale is an instruc-
tive example of how political and commercial considerations can become
fused. Rather than being solely driven by commercial interests, the expo-
sure granted to Gianfranco Fini helped forge a political alliance on the
right of the political spectrum. Similarly, in France the decision of public
broadcasters to give Jean-Marie Le Pen prime-time exposure in the mid-
1980s is thought to have been politically motivated. It was conceived as an
effort by the socialist government to split the rightist vote by making the
National Front a visible political force (Ellinas 2010). The degree of auton-
omy media organizations have from the political system is not always easy
to trace, and regulatory rules do not always make sure that political ties are
adequately known. Media corporations are sometimes part of bigger con-
glomerates, and their own commercial interests are often downplayed in
favor of those of the conglomerates they are part of. The behavior of loss-
making media—for example, giving or denying exposure to a potential
government ally or foe—can be part of a broader corporate strategy to use
media influence to extract lucrative state contracts or licenses. In parts of
Southern Europe, media coverage can become instrumentalized for the
achievement of these broader commercial goals (Hallin and Papathanas-
sopoulos 2002). Although full media autonomy from the political system
might not be possible, some systems are known to be more autonomous
than others—either on paper or in practice (Hallin and Mancini 2004). In
such systems, journalists might have more authority to make decisions on
whether to grant or deny access to radical political actors. Where the
media have more autonomy from the political system, it is more likely that
media behavior will—at least partly—depend on journalistic norms. In
Britain, professional norms of impartiality and political pluralism encour-

401
age journalists to grant exposure to all political views, albeit keeping a
critical distance from them. By contrast, in Germany journalists consider it
a civic duty to avoid giving radical voices a say in the political discourse
(Ellinas 2010). The degree of journalistic autonomy is likely to be stronger
in settings where journalists have strong professional associations and a
high degree of professionalization (Hallin and Mancini 2004). In such set-
tings civil society is likely to be stronger, and arguably social actors might
be better able to shape media behavior than in settings where there is lim-
ited space for the development of a vibrant civil society. Strong civic asso-
ciations can better hold the media accountable and influence their behavior
by reacting to media coverage and editorial decisions. The protests outside
the BBC in 2009 against its decision to include Nick Griffin in a prime-
time political debate is indicative of how social actors can take action to
hold the media accountable for their behavior. Perhaps because of social
protest, that was the last time Griffin appeared on Question Time. With the
rise of the social media, social actors have gained a new platform for keep-
ing the mainstream media accountable for their behavior. Time will show
whether how this new platform can be used to monitor the way the media
relate to right-wing radicalism.

CONCLUSION

The way the media relate to radical right-wing actors remains one of the
least studied areas in the now voluminous literature on the radical right.
Although the media are often blamed for the rise of right-wing radicalism,
there is still a dearth of scholarly work on this topic. The evidence pre-
sented here is indicative of the need to further understand how the media
relate to radical right-wing parties and movements. The media can affect
the demand for right-wing radicalism by setting the agenda on or framing
key issues such as immigration and crime. Put simply, the media can make
and frame the issues of the radical right, and hence help legitimize the po-
litical space in which it can thrive. Perhaps more important, the media can
affect political competition. Media access and exposure are a political re-
source that can help political outsiders enter the political game. For right-
wing radical parties and movements, this resource is particularly important
because it can give them validation, momentum, and legitimacy. Media ef-
fects vary depending on availability of political opportunities, develop-
mental phase of the radical actor, type of coverage, and type of medium.
Media behavior is mostly driven by commercial considerations but varies
depending on the autonomy media agents have from the political system.

402
 Future research can provide insights on the role of the media by further
examining how it affects the demand and supply of right-wing radicalism.
With regard to political demand, there is a need for more work linking
media cues with voter preferences or activist motivations. Despite frequent
claims about the link between the media and radical right support, there is
very little individual-level work examining this link. Advances in experi-
mental research design in political science (e.g., Druckman et al. 2006) can
perhaps help yield insights on the micro-level mechanisms linking media
content and radical right support. The analysis of the effects of radical-
party, anti-immigrant, and anti-politics media cues on radical right support
is suggestive of the potential insights such experimental techniques offer
(Sheets, Bos, and Boomgaarden 2015). Using these techniques, future re-
search can systematically examine how media cues affect newer and estab-
lished radical right challengers. The degree of novelty of party-specific
cues might have differential effects on voters. More experimental work
can also help examine whether negative party cues can, under certain con-
ditions, have a positive effect on radical right support. Future research can
benefit from the consideration of individual-level effects of not only old
but also new media, including social media. This work can focus on possi-
ble differences between the old and new media in terms of the validation,
momentum, and legitimacy they grant to radical right actors. Moreover,
this work can try to examine how individuals react to cues that associate
radical right actors with violence—an issue that merits more attention in
general.
Research related to the supply of radicalism can benefit by broadening
the analysis to consider how the media treat not only radical right actors
but other new parties or movements. This might help provide comparative
analytical leverage for understanding whether the effects of media cover-
age differ across the party or movement spectrum (see Bos et al. 2011).
Again, the distinction between newer and older actors is important for fur-
ther understanding temporal aspects of media effects. Moreover, it is im-
portant to analyze how the structure of the media system affects the supply
of radical or other political challengers. It is reasonable to expect that the
more pluralistic and autonomous the media system (della Porta and Diani
2006, 220), the more likely it is for radical parties and movements to get
opportunities for political ascendance. The range of media systemic factors
affecting the treatment of political challengers, including the radical right,
might include not only an analysis of the basic characteristics of media
systems across Europe (Hallin and Mancini 2004) but also a look at the
regulatory environment. An analysis of the rules of the media game would

403
need to take into account not only the old media but also the new media,
which are intrinsically harder to monitor and regulate. The analysis of how
the media affect the supply of radicalism can also pay more attention to the
positive effect the media can potentially have on exposing or ridiculing the
radical right. If the media have as much power as radicals and their critics
suggest, then they should be able not only to “make” but also to “break”
the radical right.

404
NOTE

1. This section draws upon and updates material from Antonis A. Elli-
nas, The Media and the Far Right in Western Europe, Playing the Na-
tionalist Card © Antonis Ellinas 2010, published by Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, reproduced with permission.
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CHAPTER 15

411
 THE NON-PARTY SECTOR OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

JOHN VEUGELERS AND GABRIEL MENARD

THIS chapter avoids treating the realm of the radical right outside of polit-
ical parties as a mere residual category—as a marginal and amorphous
jumble of organizations and networks whose activity unfolds primarily or
solely outside the party system. Instead we consider the non-party sector as
a challenger for political and cultural hegemony in contemporary liberal
democracies alongside—if not in practical cooperation with—parties of
the radical right. Whether party and non-party sectors of the radical right
actually cooperate, common projects and opponents unite them. Their
struggles are directed vertically as well as horizontally. Pushing upward,
so to speak, one struggle pits the radical right against the hegemon: liberal
democracy. Pushing sideways, another struggle pits the radical right
against counterhegemonic rivals such as communism. So conceptualized,
the object of our study assumes diverse forms. To our knowledge, no pre-
vious scholarship has attempted to synthesize the geographically broad,
cross-disciplinary research on these forms. In an effort to identify notewor-
thy elements, relationships, and research problems, we therefore tack back
and forth between induction and deduction. This approach seems appropri-
ate given the current state of knowledge, which is uneven and fragmented.
Some will recoil when we call the radical right a counterhegemonic con-
tender. Antonio Gramsci—cofounder of the Italian Communist Party and
originator of the theory of cultural and political hegemony—died of poor
health after years of confinement in fascist prisons. Later, from Ernesto
Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and the Birmingham School of cultural studies
through to Slavoj Žižek, left-wing intellectuals have claimed the struggle
against hegemony as their own. Some four decades ago, however, Ray-
mond Williams did not restrict himself to the left when referring to “forms
of alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture” or “efforts and
contributions of those who are in one way or another outside or at the edge
of the terms of the specific hegemony” in theorizing the unsettled dynamic
between hegemony and its challengers (Williams 1977, 113). Indeed, intel-
lectuals of the New Right have made a “Gramscianism of the right”—an
ethnocentric and elitist critique of liberal economics, politics, and morality
—their explicit objective:
The path to power presupposes an earlier conversion of a small
number of decision-makers, of members of the bourgeoisie subli-

412
 mated into aristocrats. The value it gives to ideology, to culture, to
intellect, to style – all this orients the Nouvelle Droite quite natu-
rally toward the intelligentsia, who are blessed with social capital,
capable of exercising an influence across society, and sometimes
occupy positions of political power. This was the strategic objec-
tive they adapted freely from Gramsci. (Duranton-Crabol 1988:
168)
How has the non-party sector of the radical right—not just the intellectual
schools of the New Right, but other elements as well—responded to hege-
monic pressures and problems in capitalist liberal democracies by dissent-
ing with ideas and opinions to which the majority acquiesce, if not con-
sent?

MAPPING THE NON-PARTY SECTOR

Elements of the non-party sector are located within a two-dimensional

space defined by (1) the continuum of civil society between the intimate
sphere and public life and (2) the continuum of social interaction between
the market logic of capitalism and other, non-market logics (such as those
of politics, leisure activity, group solidarity, or the family). Table 15.1 situ-
ates the elements of the non-party sector of the radical right according to
their position along each of these two axes.
This map provides a point of entry into a subject more complex, fuzzy,
and heterogeneous than a schema suggests. Before digging deeper, we
simply list the main elements examined in this chapter:
• Publishers
• Intellectual schools
• Party parallel organizations
• Voluntary associations
• Small groups
• Political sects
• Families
Each of these is a supra-individual reality. Hence we exclude lone-wolf
terrorism because the extent to which perpetrators belong to extremist net-
works or receive logistical support from others varies widely (Gruenewald,

413
Chermak, and Freilich 2013; Becker 2014; Berntzen and Sandberg 2014;
Spaaij and Hamm 2015).
Table 15.1 Map of the Non-Party Sector of the Radical Right
Logic of exchange
Market/non-
Market market Non-market
Location in civil Public Pub- Intellectual
RRP parallel
society realm lishers schools
organizations
Interest
groups
Religious
groups
Voluntary
associations
Social move-
ments

Pub- Neighbor- Small groups

lic/private hoods
Private Acquaintances Political sects
realm
Friendships
Families

Source: Adapted from Hicks, Janoski, and Schwartz 2005, fig. 1.2.
Notes
1. Other chapters in this volume examine in more detail the relations
with religion and social movements, respectively.
2. Interest groups, neighborhoods, acquaintances, and friendships are in-
cluded out of a concern with comprehensiveness but not examined in
this chapter due to a paucity of relevant research or their lack of formal
organization.

414
 PUBLISHERS

The sheer volume of research on radical right communication through the

Internet far exceeds the amount of research on its use of print media. One
reason for this disparity is the ease of collecting Internet data that are
quantitative or readily quantifiable (e.g., site hits or links to other web-
sites). Yet dissident newspapers, books, journals, and other printed matter
persist as alternative media, as vehicles for circumventing corporate-
owned media with sympathies—if not interests—tied to mainstream par-
ties, liberal democracy, and the capitalist economy. In the United States,
publishers of books and journals that promote Holocaust negation, conspir-
acy theories, and opposition to immigration include Social Contract Press
and American Free Press. Occupying the overlapping spaces of cultural
conservatism, opposition to globalization, and admiration for fascism or
Nazism, established publishers in continental Europe include Arktos (Lon-
don), Krisis (Paris), Áltera (Madrid), Settimo Sigillo (Rome), and Antaios
(Steigra, Germany). New information technologies have reduced the trou-
ble and cost of designing, printing, and copying on paper, while radical
right websites promote paper-based publications in part because the very
qualities that make the Internet easier to study also make it easier to moni-
tor (Berlet 1998). Because they help in avoiding public reprobation, offi-
cial censorship, and legal prosecution, print media thus persist as alterna-
tive forms of radical right communication.

INTELLECTUAL SCHOOLS

The self-proclaimed intention of intellectuals of the radical right is not to

influence voting but to oppose dominant ways of thinking and to reframe
the terms of public debate. In part these thinkers are engaged in a cultural
battle against the ideals and legacies of the 1960s social movements. Per-
haps their main contribution has been to subvert the left-liberal celebration
of difference, which in the hands of the radical right provides a justifica-
tion for anti-immigrant politics on the grounds that multiculturalism under-
mines the human variety (Taguieff 1989).
In the United States the New Right and the Christian right of fundamen-
talist Protestantism overlap considerably. Conservative think tanks such as
the Free Congress Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the
Heritage Foundation provide a well-funded institutional base for ideo-
logues whose enthusiasm for capitalism is not shared by their counterparts

415
in Europe. Given the bipartisan structure of American politics, not radical
right parties per se but the extreme right fringe of the Republican Party
(embodied most recently in the dissident Tea Party or the activists and
cadres around Donald Trump) as well as right-wing independents provide
the New Right with its allies (Minkenberg 2000; Gross, Medvetz, and Rus-
sell 2011).
In Europe (with the partial exception of Great Britain, where the audi-
ence for the radical right includes the right wing of the Conservative
Party), radical right parties provide the main political interlocutor for New
Right intellectuals even if relations between the two are not always
smooth. Unlike most of their American counterparts, the religious stance
of the European New Right includes a mixed and even unsympathetic
view of Christianity, honored as an essential component of Western tradi-
tion by some thinkers but derided as a slave morality by others more in-
spired by Nietzsche. The European New Right also displays a greater sym-
pathy toward certain alternatives to Christianity: the pantheism of the an-
cient Greeks or the pagan cults of the Celts and Norsemen. Out of anti-
Semitism or a celebration of the globe’s core civilizations, some thinkers
even accept Islam. This should not to be confused with a celebration of
ethnoreligious pluralism or multiculturalism, which the New Right equates
with bastardization, weakening, and decadence.
Unlike the New Right in the United States, the same logic by which the
European New Right attacks the excessive materialism of today’s Western
world leads it to discern in capitalism as well as communism the same fun-
damental flaw: both are said to neglect the higher, more “spiritual” realm
of human needs and aspirations. Attracted to Holocaust denial and readier
to admire Nazism and fascism, the European New Right is more völkisch
(ethnoracialist). Whereas the American New Right, which tends to be lib-
ertarian, decries the power of the state, its European counterparts call for a
stronger, more protective state capable of enforcing boundaries against in-
ternational migration, cultural Americanization, and global economic com-
petition (Bar-On 2008; McCulloch 2006). Instead of furthering the ideal of
a politically autonomous Europe that protects citizens and upholds the dis-
tinctiveness of peoples, the European Union is derided as a Jacobin, anti-
federalist institution too wedded to the global free market (de Benoist
2014).
National context affects the spread and reformulation of the ideas of the
New Right. Unlike the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civili-
sation européenne (GRECE) in France, the Neue Rechte backed the idea of

416
a conservative revolution and contributed to debates about “a new German
national consciousness derived from a collective historical identity outside
the ‘shadow of Auschwitz’ ” (Minkenberg 1997, 74). Born as a dissident
youth faction within the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, the leading
neofascist party of postwar Europe before its self-dissolution in 1995),
Italy’s nuova destra rejected the violence of the anni di piombo in favor of
an eclecticism that transcended the left-right cleavage in addressing issues
such as environmental degradation (Casadio and Masterson 2014). The
anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism of the continental New Right fit un-
easily with more entrenched beliefs within the British radical right about a
hierarchy of races or an international Jewish conspiracy (Copsey 2013).
Wariness toward Europe on the part of the National Bolsheviks in Russia
—for whom a stronger Eurasia should oppose a unipolar United States—
also affects the international cross-fertilization of radical right ideas
(Whine 2012). Even the Internet sets limits on the spread of radical right
discourse. Three-quarters (74 percent) of the more than 100,000 visitors to
a right-wing French website, Blog Éléments, have accessed it from France;
followed by Belgium (5 percent), the United States (4 percent), Switzer-
land (3 percent), and Canada (2 percent); with Italy, the United Kingdom,
Spain, Tunisia, and Germany at around 1 percent each. Although this web-
site has been accessed from other countries as well, its global reach re-
mains uneven (Blog Éléments 2016).
The autonomy of intellectuals from the market varies too. American
conservatives attack the academy as a bastion of liberalism, socialism, and
political correctness, yet in some cases they control small colleges or oper-
ate from “academic business schools and free market–oriented depart-
ments of economics” (Gross, Medvetz, and Russell 2011, 333). In addition
to well-funded think tanks, others belong to media organizations, business
groups, legal foundations, or associations favoring home schooling. From
these institutions, they have contributed to the sharpening of the post-
1960s “cultural wars” as well as the hardening of a conservative identity
within the American electorate (Gross, Medvetz, and Russell 2011).
Institutions of higher education seem to have provided a more congenial
home in Europe. Admittedly, Alain de Benoist, the French intellectual who
originated the European New Right, is a non-academic whose professional
career unfolded from a base in the world of publishing (Bar-On 2008). Yet
the three thousand members of GRECE, the group he led, consisted espe-
cially of “students, teachers and the academic middle class” (Minkenberg
1997, 71). Outside France the influence of GRECE seems to have radiated

417
among academics who function as public intellectuals: Marco Tarchi in
Italy, Aleksandr Panarin, in Russia and members of the Neue Rechte in
Germany (Minkenberg 2000; Peunova 2012). Possible exceptions are Den-
mark and Great Britain, where the social background and institutional lo-
cation of New Right intellectuals seem more diverse (Macklin 2015; Ryd-
gren 2004).
Intellectuals and parties of the European radical right oppose the Euro-
pean Union and share in a common project of shaping debates on immigra-
tion, minorities, and integration. Above all, intellectuals such as de Benoist
have given parties such as the Front National and the Lega Nord a lesson
in how to combat ethnoreligious diversity: not through the discredited dis-
course of biological racism but instead via the more palatable celebration
of difference and authenticity. According to this rhetorical strategy, cul-
tural survival justifies closed borders, restrictions on social welfare for
“foreigners,” and public referenda on immigration. Underlying tensions set
limits on collaboration between intellectuals and parties, however. Emerg-
ing during the 1970s as a rejection of party and extra-parliamentary poli-
tics alike, the New Right instead chose a “meta-political” battle. It is wary
and even pessimistic about what, under current historical conditions, can
be achieved by radical right parties even if elected to power. Although the
economic stances of radical right parties vary widely, they alienate the
New Right whenever they embrace the free market. Consistent with his
plea for cultural diversity, de Benoist has even “defended the right of Mus-
lim schoolgirls to wear the hijab in the liberal, secular French school sys-
tem against what he called ‘the ayatollahs’ of the assimilationist, French
Republican tradition” (Bar-On 2008, 337). Parties of the radical right wish
to tear down the European Union by bringing back state sovereignty. The
intellectuals, by contrast, envision a Europe composed of small “ethno-
democracies”: independent regions, not nation-states, within a single Euro-
pean polity (Bar-On 2008; Spektorowski 2016).

PARTY PARALLEL ORGANIZATIONS

Parallel organizations are sponsored by parties but have no juridical rela-

tion with them. The hoped-for benefits are multiple: training potential
cadres, upholding partisan or activist identity, and disseminating the
party’s message within specific segments of society (Ignazi 1989, 299).
Although not a radical right party per se, the MSI provides an apt example.
This neofascist party was divided into local, provincial, and regional sec-

418
tions, each nested hierarchically into the level above and all subordinated
to the national offices. The MSI also ran a youth wing whose leaders were
chosen by the party executive. Alongside these official structures, how-
ever, parallel organizations targeted specific social categories: students,
workers, and military veterans. This linked the party to right-wing nation-
alist currents in civil society, which responded to events in national or in-
ternational affairs by forming committees, leading rallies, or brawling with
leftists. Over the longer run, parallel organizations kept the MSI in tune
with generational change, student unrest, worker grievances, and veterans’
interests. Parallel organizations not only aided the party’s penetration of
society: as antennae, they helped the neofascists to avoid irrelevance by
adapting to citizen concerns (Ignazi 1989, 262–306).
An unprecedented surge in support for the MSI in 1972 inspired the
foundation of the National Front in France that year. The two parties re-
mained friendly, and eventually the French party implemented the neo-fas-
cists’ model of societal penetration. The youth wing of the National Front
gathered momentum in 1984 by exploiting the broad right-wing mobiliza-
tion against the Socialist government’s plan to suspend funding for
Catholic schools. By the 1990s the youth wing operated in Catholic and
public high schools as well as the state universities, where it combated not
only the left but also the anti-racist movement. Enjoying a more arm’s-
length relationship with the party were its student organizations, which
competed in elections for university student councils. Just as the MSI had
focused on Italian veterans who fought on the losing side in the Second
World War, the National Front created a parallel organization for French
veterans of the wars in Indochina and Algeria. Equally autonomous from
the party hierarchy were organizations for members of the police force, of-
ficers in the military reserve, and repatriated settlers from France’s former
North African colonies. Other “circles” close to the National Front
grouped together small-business owners allergic to taxes and state bureau-
cracy. While some groups competed against Catholic and left-wing unions
in recruiting among workers, others reached out to farmers, women, envi-
ronmentalists, or traditionalist Catholics (Birenbaum 1992, 220–252).
The foregoing illustrates the overlap between radical right parties and
interest groups, on one hand, radical right social movements on the other.
In Australia and the United States, some environmental groups have used
widely accepted premises (which treat environmental quality as a function
of technology and lifestyle, multiplied by population size) as a justification
for nativist, anti-immigration politics (Veugelers 2006, 100–102). After

419
1995—when France experienced its greatest wave of labor protest in al-
most three decades—the National Front tried to channel anti-globalization
and anti-European Union sentiments into parallel organizations for em-
ployees of prisons, postal services, and public transportation (Igounet
2014, 273–278). The anti-union stance of the radical right sets harsh limits
on such initiatives, however.

VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS

Despite their greater distance from us in time, we know more about rela-
tions with voluntary associations for the interwar far right (particularly in
Germany) than for the contemporary radical right. According to the mass
society thesis, Nazism relieved the psychological anxieties of atomized in-
dividuals, people uprooted from community and no longer guided by tradi-
tion. Against this thesis, research by Hamilton (1982) and Koshar (1986)
has shown that (1) to spread their message and recruit supporters, Nazi ac-
tivists targeted the local leaders of clubs, associations, and Protestant or
farmers’ groups; (2) if an association leader joined the Nazi Party, then or-
dinary citizens and organization members were likely to follow; (3) strong
Protestant voting for the Nazis reflected the party’s success in infiltrating
Protestant organizations; and (4) early opposition to the Nazis came from
within social networks anchored in the Catholic Church or working-class
organizations. Not atomization but social ties—notably those embedded in
voluntary associations—explain the spread of Nazism.
Supporters of radical right parties harbor intolerance toward religious or
ethnoracial minorities. Tolerance, in turn, depends on exposure to diversity
through cross-pressures. Putting these pieces together, we can expect that
association membership will have a heterogeneous effect on radical-right
support. Membership will boost support for the radical right if it tightens
the bonds among members of a social category, thereby insulating them
from contact with other social categories, and it will dampen support if di-
versity of membership builds bridges across different segments of society
(Oberschall 1973).
Conventional indicators of social capital, such as association density,
fail to capture the crucial distinction between bonding and bridging. This
might explain why most studies of social capital and the radical right find
only weak support for the hypothesis that active involvement in voluntary
associations dampens the support for these parties (Coffé, Heyndels, and
Vermeir 2007; Rydgren 2009, 2011; Jesuit, Paradowski, and Mahler 2009;

420
Poznyak, Abts, and Swyngedouw 2011). Research that instead differenti-
ates between associations that ward off cross-pressures and those that do
not reveals a strong relationship with radical right support, even after con-
trolling for factors such as gender, class, education, and union membership
(Veugelers, Menard, and Permingeat 2015).

SMALL GROUPS

The radical right overlaps with small groups such as fan clubs that support
European football teams as well as bands of neo-Nazi skinheads that en-
gage in violence against minorities. Although their size and level of formal
organization vary, these groups provide milieus for a culture of machismo
that tends to exclude women. From a sociological perspective, these are
“defensive reactions to limited opportunities by young (predominantly
male) adolescents” that occupy the intersection between gangs, youth sub-
cultures, deviant behavior, and peer groups (Abercrombie et al. 2000,
148). Patterns of recruitment suggest that networks of football hooligans
and racist skinheads can overlap considerably (Miller-Idriss 2009, 98).
Football hooliganism is “the competitive violence of socially organized
fan groups in football, principally directed against opposing fan groups”
(Spaaij 2006, 11). The terms “gang,” “firm,” or “crew” are used inter-
changeably to refer to groups consisting of football casuals—avid fans
who may or may not be hooligans (Redhead 2015). Research has concen-
trated on Britain (in particular England), where football hooliganism has
provided a privileged terrain of recruitment for parties of the radical right
(the National Front during the 1970s, the British National Party since the
1990s). This research favors an ethnographic approach to what Poulton
(2012) refers to as a “hyper-masculine subculture”—one that “involves a
great deal of symbolic opposition and ritualized aggression” (Spaaij 2006,
22). Field notes by one researcher of an English firm includes these quotes
from members:
“See that [points at St. George’s flag flying above a church], that
makes me proud, it’s what being English is all about, but where I
come from that isn’t seen anymore. The Pakis have taken over the
churches and turned them into mosques, now what the fuck is that
about, eh? [sings] Give me bullets for my gun and I will shoot the
Muzzie scum, No surrender to the Taliban.”
“I am sick of the lot of them [Muslims] and their demands, all take,

421
 take, take. They take the piss out of us, bringing in hundreds of
them over through arranged marriages and that, looking after one
another and fucking us over. It has to stop; this is England, not
Afghanistan!
They can’t live like us cos they are not evolved for it, they are sim-
ple, made for awkward villages in the mountain where they can sit
around eating stinking curries and raping chickens. They come
over here and ruin England, I mean, would you want to live next to
them? I don’t, but they are taking over. That is why I want them
gone.” (Garland and Treadwell 2010, 13)
Rivalries are neutralized by alliances in which crews join together to exac-
erbate interracial mistrust and violence. Working with white supremacist
groups, British football firms have engaged in violent conflicts against mi-
norities and anti-fascist activists. Sometimes their patriotic, anti-Islam
protests have escalated into riots (Garland and Treadwell 2010).
In France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, the organized fans of football
teams are known as ultras (Spaaij 2006, 22). In Italy, where the ultras
come from a broader class base than in Britain, the link between fans and
politics is long-standing and widely understood. Some groups have a
working-class, leftist following; others have a middle-class membership
that leans toward conservatism and neofascism. Political differences that
tear apart older groups of ultras may spawn spin-off groups. Inspired by
Britain’s hooligans and skinheads as well as the tense political climate in
their own country, during the 1970s Italian fans adopted distinctive fash-
ions as well as banners and chants modeled after political movements. Al-
though less closed to women than their British counterparts, the ultras
show a similar concern with territoriality (down to their seating in stadi-
ums, where they dominate the curved stands behind the goals) and defense
of a common space against the encroachments of outsiders (fans for rival
teams, supporters of opposing political orientations, and, since the 1990s,
non-European migrants). This has led to the orchestrated heckling of non-
white players on the playing field, violent street clashes between leftists
and rightists, and links between the ultras and neofascist groups as well as
the radical right Lega Nord (Podaliri and Balestri 1998).
European football hooliganism overlaps with skinhead subculture,
which extends from Britain to Russia. Nazi skins differ from traditional,
apolitical, anti-racist, or gay skins. Thus not all skinheads in Britain, Ger-
many, or the United States are political racists (Borgeson and Valeri 2005;

422
Watts 2001). In Russia, by contrast, “the overwhelming majority . . . are
racist or neo-Nazi” (Shashkin 2008, 100). By comparison with football fan
groups, this subculture exhibits a lower level of institutionalization, for
skinheads are embedded in loose and fluid structures at the local level
while remaining open to outside and even international influences. Yet two
similarities with football hooliganism remain: both originated in Britain
and then spread to the Continent, and both engage in violence toward
ethno-racial minorities (Brown 2004; Szayna 1997, 124–125).
Although various symbolic practices (e.g., the color of boot laces worn)
provide markers of difference within this subculture, an international style
connects skinheads (Miller-Idriss 2009, 98; Watts 2001, 608). Concerts by
white power bands provide a meeting place for right-wing skins (Brown
2004). Partnerships with other organizations are possible:
In the United States, racist skinhead groups may be allied locally
with neo-Nazi groups, with traditional organizations such as the Ku
Klux Klan, or with such groups as Aryan Nations or the World
Church of the Creator. In Germany, rightist skinheads may find po-
litical partners with neo-Nazi groups or with Kameradschaften and
political “discussion groups.” (Watts 2001, 608)
The fluid organizational structure of the skinheads makes it difficult for
parties to form enduring relations with them. Some radical right parties
hire skinheads as security guards or provocateurs for rallies or meetings.
But such arrangements are mostly episodic. Skinheads provide radical
right parties with allies who are unreliable and possibly damaging. Skin-
heads may know little about a party’s platform nor care for its discipline.
Their presence may become a liability for a party seeking an image of re-
spectability. When skinheads move into middle age and exit the subcul-
ture, however, their relationship with party politics may tighten as they be-
come radical right voters, activists, or cadres.

POLITICAL SECTS

Due to its secrecy and exclusivity, the sect lies on the intimate side of the
public-private divide. Like churches, political parties find strength in num-
bers. For sects, be they religious or political, the number of members mat-
ters less than their worthiness. Purity, solidarity, and devotion place sect
members among the elect, whose uncompromising fidelity to a higher
morality sets them against the wider society (O’Toole 1976, 150–151). El-

423
ements of the non-party radical right with sect-like characteristics include
the groupuscule and the paramilitary unit or militia.
Organizationally, extreme-right groupuscules exhibit both differences
and similarities with the world of skinheads. They impose tighter bound-
aries around membership and stricter rules over action. Yet like the skin-
heads they are modular, hence available for pragmatic alliances with oth-
ers:
The groupuscule has the Janus-headed property of combining orga-
nizational autonomy with the ability to create informal linkages
with, or to reinforce the influence of, other such formations. This
enables groupuscules, when considered in terms of their aggregate
impact on politics and society, to be seen as forming a non-hierar-
chical, leaderless and centreless (or rather polycentric) movement
with fluid boundaries and constantly changing components. (Grif-
fin 2003, 30)
Modularity—which the Internet promotes—has enhanced the adaptive ca-
pacity of the anti-hegemonic right. After 1945 the liberal capitalist system
rendered the language of national rebirth suspect by identifying it with the
losers of the Second World War. Absent more favorable conditions for the
reactionary or revolutionary right, postwar groupuscules prevented these
political traditions from dying out.
Seen this way, the watered-down version of ultra-nationalist politics
now on offer by parties of the radical right shows their readiness to forfeit
principled resistance in exchange for compromise with the status quo.
Rhetoric does not always match practice, however, for groupuscules do co-
operate with radical right parties. CasaPound in Italy has promoted the
Lega Nord by joining the party’s rallies, endorsing its candidates, and
placing activists onto its electoral slates (Castelli Gattinara, Froio, and Al-
banese 2013; Froio and Castelli Gattinara 2015). Other groupuscules have
fielded their own candidates in elections or provided advisors to radical
right politicians. Disseminating propaganda, organizing protests or boy-
cotts, and populating the Internet with anti-Semitism or Nazi-fascist apolo-
gia, groupuscules thus show considerable variation in their accommoda-
tion to the norms of liberal democracy (Griffin 2003).
The American militia cloaks itself in the language of activist patriotism.
Reflecting on relations between citizen and political authority, Tocqueville
wrote:

424
 The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must
rely upon himself to combat the ills and trials of life; he is restless
and defiant in his outlook toward the authority of society and ap-
peals to its power only when he cannot do without it. (Tocqueville
1969, 189)
Along with this “defiant outlook,” the American militia reflects another
national peculiarity: as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” Upholding
the anti-authority tradition in American society, militias insist that in areas
such as gun control, federal taxes, and jury nullification the government
has stripped citizens of their fundamental rights and freedoms. Conspiracy
theorists add the mass media, international Jewry, large corporations, and
the United Nations to “the establishment” that threatens the American way
of life. To resist government monitoring, militias keep their membership
lists secret (Van Dyke and Soule 2002, 504). Like the Nazi skins, loose af-
filiations with like-minded groups link them to the Ku Klux Klan; unlike
the skinheads, these links have extended to a broader fringe of anti-tax or
anti-immigrant groups as well as the Christian Identity movement and pre-
decessors such as the Minutemen and Posse Comitatus (Chermak, Freilich,
and Suttmoeller 2013; Perry 2000; Pitcavage 2001).
Communication and recruitment occur through informal social net-
works, radio talk programs, mail-order catalogues, leafletting at gun
shows, and the Internet. Members are not subsumed within a single na-
tional organization. Instead they belong to either “above-ground” organi-
zations, which have “a centralized command that follows a paramilitary
structure and employs military style ranks,” or “below-ground” organiza-
tions, militias closer to the ideal type of the political sect that “strive to be
secretive underground cells” and evade government infiltration by limiting
membership to fewer than fifteen people (Freilich, Pienik, and Howard
2001, 187). Bonding activities include public displays of military bearing,
secret initiation rites, and private paramilitary maneuvers. Norms of tradi-
tional masculinity are involved in other ways as well. Membership is
stronger in states that have more law enforcement personnel, ardent gun
owners, or veterans of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, and militia activity
tends to be higher in states with a greater gap in wages between men and
women (Freilich, Pienik, and Howard 2001).
Fascist paramilitary units inspired by Mussolini’s squadristi operated in
interwar Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Serbia,
Croatia, and Lithuania. Today the paramilitary groups of Eastern Europe

425
fall into two types: combatant units fighting the post-communist wars and
vigilante formations with a racist orientation (Mareš and Stojar 2012, 160).
After 1989 and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, extreme-right paramili-
tary units recruited among football hooligans at home as well as among
skinheads and extreme nationalists in Russia and Western Europe. Armed
units of Russian nationalists also formed during the breakup of the Soviet
Union, particularly in former republics with significant proportions of Rus-
sians. By comparison with combatant units, the geographic extension of
vigilante units is much greater—it encompasses Russia, Lithuania, Hun-
gary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Czech Re-
public. Members wear uniforms, belong to hierarchical structures, and at-
tend training camps. Some units overlap with the skinhead subculture. In
certain localities they organize vigilantes who take the law into their own
hands by mounting a kind of community policing. Apart from distributing
propaganda, members attack leftists, gays, drug users, and homeless peo-
ple as well as Roma, Muslims, Albanians, and other “undesirables.” A cell
structure inspired by the decentralized organizational model of paramili-
tary units in Germany has become widespread (Koehler 2014; Mareš and
Stojar 2012).
Political sects link to the party sector as halfway houses for activists,
who may withdraw into the groupuscule or paramilitary group because the
party lacks ideological purity (as shown by a watering down of its image
or message, a pragmatic alliance with another political party, or a disap-
pointing record if elected to office) or move into the party because the sect
lacks wider influence or relevance. They can also serve as laboratories for
ideas later adapted or adopted by radical right parties. The groupuscule or
militia may provide an abeyance structure that keeps networks and identi-
ties alive during a lull in radical right party organization, or they may offer
a fallback position for cadres and members during a period of party trans-
formation (when members move from an old radical right party to a grou-
puscule or militia before proceeding to a successor party if one should
form). Groupuscules and militias also provide parties with temporary ac-
tivists at election time; security personnel at rallies, marches, and other
public events; and shock troops for physical confrontations with left-wing,
anti-racist, or anti-fascist activists.

FAMILIES

After hitting a peak during the 1960s and 1970s, research on the family’s

426
role in political socialization is enjoying a comeback. Much of this re-
search studies the kind of upbringing that encourages democratic aspira-
tions and citizen involvement. Other research examines the intergenera-
tional transmission of partisan preferences: correlations between the parti-
san choices of parents and their adult children are high, yet parents tend to
bequeath not a preference for a particular party but a heuristic that simpli-
fies choice. A product of trust and frequent interaction between family
members, this heuristic rules out certain parties while others stay inside the
set of possible alternatives. In sum, parents transmit cognitive shortcuts
that reduce complexity and narrow options at electoral time, when the cru-
cial question is whether to maintain or withdraw support for the party the
voter supported previously (Zuckerman, Dasović, and Fitzgerald 2007).
Research on Western Europe suggests that the intergenerational trans-
mission of partisan heuristics may help to explain support for the non-
party radical right. In Italy, neofascist activists of the 1960s and 1970s
tended to come from families that had encouraged their political orienta-
tion (Veugelers 2011). Studies of radical right activism in contemporary
Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands provide further evidence of
parent-to-child continuity (Dechezelle 2008; Klandermans and Mayer
2005). According to Miller-Idriss (2009), by contrast, anti-racist education
in Germany may be failing due to differences in the generational experi-
ences of teacher and student. The prevailing public narrative of German
identity
is characterized by a continuing sense of institutionalized shame re-
sulting from the Holocaust and an accompanying antinationalist
consensus that invalidates national pride as a legitimate expression
of national belonging. Teachers’ well-intentioned efforts to enforce
the illegitimacy of national pride and German identity, I argue,
coupled with resistance to the taboo on pride among younger Ger-
mans, have the unintended consequence of increasing the appeal of
radical right-wing groups. (Miller-Idriss 2009, 172)
Yet students also may be less receptive to a teacher’s message if it clashes
with what they hear at home. Parents who are activists in the white power
movement in the United States use home schooling and control over their
children’s friends and television programs to construct a counterhege-
monic home setting in which they “play white power music, use racial epi-
thets, or reiterate the Aryan struggle for their children” (Simi, Futrell, and
Bubolz 2016, 19).

427
 Racial prejudice is one of the strongest predictors of support for the rad-
ical right. In turn, families either encourage or discourage the kind of
cross-cutting influence that—like membership in voluntary associations—
affects tolerance. People whose immediate family, in-laws, or circle of
friends includes “immigrants” are much more likely to have a positive atti-
tude toward minorities (Martin 1996, 23). In addition to shaping partisan
orientations, therefore, family relations affect the likelihood of being at-
tracted into the non-party sector by shaping attitudes toward those who are
different.

DISCUSSION

Research on the non-party sector of the radical right reveals much varia-
tion in terms of the geographic and substantive areas covered. Table 15.2
sets forth our assessment of this variation, but it is biased by an almost ex-
clusive focus on English-language publications. A review of research pub-
lished in other languages would likely show that our assessment is too
harsh (particularly with respect to Eastern Europe). Our assessment may
also exaggerate the extent to which the volume of research on the non-
party radical right in North America (particularly the United States) ex-
ceeds that for Europe. Nonetheless, we feel some confidence in asserting
that there is relatively more research on football hooliganism in Britain,
groupuscules in Europe, militia groups in the United States, racist skin-
heads, and intellectual schools in Western Europe and the United States.
Research directed at English-reading audiences can contribute by filling in
gaps in our empirical knowledge as set forth in Table 15.2.
Table 15.2 Current State of Research on the Non-Party Sector of
the Radical Right
North Amer- Western Eu- Eastern Eu-
ica rope rope
Publishers + - -
Intellectual schools ++ ++ +
Party parallel orgs. n/a + -
Voluntary associa- - + -
tions
Neighborhoods - + -

428
 Small groups ++ ++ +
Political sects ++ + +
Families - + -
Legend: ++Much research;+Some research;-Little research; n/a Not
applicable
The accumulation of more information can provide only a favorable
condition for the advance of knowledge. Bringing facts to bear on knowl-
edge—and vice versa—will require comparison across time and place, in
dialogue with theory. Although we cannot predict with precision how re-
searchers who study the non-party sector of the radical right will proceed,
we are inclined to believe they will uphold the interdisciplinary approach
so evident in previous research.
So pervasive is the integration of the Internet into social relations in Eu-
rope and North America that the radical right has not been spared. Recent
work suggests the non-party sector benefits from the anonymity, geograph-
ical compression, and low entry barriers that Internet communication al-
lows (Caiani and Parenti 2009, 2013; Jackson and Feldman 2011; Perry
2000). The Internet has made it easier for the radical right to share ideas,
coordinate activities, disseminate propaganda, form alliances, sell mer-
chandise, and recruit members. This enables some groups (such as neo-
Nazis or Holocaust deniers) to survive in inhospitable environments, and
others (such as the English Defence League) to persist without formal or-
ganizational structures. Online networks can foster collective identity
among participants with little or no connection to offline mobilization, so
virtual communities have emerged within the online milieu itself (Caren,
Jowers, and Gaby 2012). But the effects on organizations remain varied:
some radical right groups seem to thrive on isolation and autonomy, while
others gain from the exponential growth in potential interconnection of-
fered by the Internet.
This raises the question of historical variation in sociopolitical struc-
tures. Have the Internet and related technologies changed either the non-
party sector or its relations with parties of the radical right? Hiding behind
this question is the issue of political involvement. For those who claim the
Internet will encourage citizen engagement, democracy is treated as syn-
onymous with wide and active involvement in public affairs. Considera-
tion of the radical right suggests this assumption is debatable: the Internet
serves anti-democratic tendencies too. To resolve this question requires not

429
a focus on new technologies in isolation but rather a comparison of past
and present. Care must be taken in such work to distinguish recent ad-
vances in the ability to measure and observe the radical right—especially
over the Internet—from changes in the form and substance of groups in the
non-virtual world. Intellectual schools may respond differently from skin-
heads or football hooligans, moreover. Under the assumption that effects
are not uniform, domain differences in the temporal effect of the Internet
must be taken into account.
A second historical comparison might examine not change but continu-
ity. Research on families and voluntary associations, discussed above,
shows them to be milieus in which affinities toward the radical right are
transmitted. Presumably other elements of the non-party sector also keep
the past alive, albeit selectively. Carriers of collective memory with an
affinity for the radical right include organizations in the southern United
States that glorify the Confederacy and treat the state with suspicion, as
well as voluntary associations in France that maintain nostalgia for empire
and antipathy toward the Fifth Republic, which is held responsible for the
“loss” of colonial Algeria in particular. Many more such groups must fill
the role of what are labeled variously as “submerged networks,” “halfway
houses,” “free spaces,” “protected spaces,” or “sequestered social sites”—
namely, “social networks, organizations or small-scale settings beyond the
direct control of the powerful that allow the communication of an opposi-
tional culture” (Veugelers 2011, 244). Studying these hidden subcultures
—which unite the unique losers of history who populate different coun-
tries, such as the victims of decolonization, democratization, national uni-
fication, international partition, or post-communism—provides insight into
how a potential electorate for the radical right can survive during pro-
longed periods of demobilization (e.g., when a polity has no viable radical
right party to which potential supporters can give their vote).
What about the victims of capitalism? Across Europe and North Amer-
ica, economic globalization has meant deindustrialization, factory closings,
layoffs, underemployment, precarious work, pressure on wages, and a
broadening of the gap between the wealthy few and the rest of society.
Kitschelt (1995) expects support for radical right parties to be stronger in
post-industrial societies more exposed to international economic competi-
tion. Pointing to the intervening role of domestic political institutions,
Swank and Betz (2003) add a modification: the safety net provided by a
strong welfare state moderates the extent of radical right support because it
shields workers from the shocks of liberalized international markets. The

430
relevance of this research to the study of the non-party sector for the radi-
cal right is shown in a suggestive study by Van Dyke and Soule (2002),
who find that loss of jobs in manufacturing and agriculture in each of the
fifty states of the United States explains much of the spatial variance in the
number of militia groups across the country. Building on such findings, fu-
ture research should examine the extent to which the interaction between
economic globalization and welfare protection explains differences in the
non-party sector of the radical right. More refined studies of cross-national
differences will also attend to sectoral specificities, for some sectors (e.g.,
intellectual schools) may prove less responsive to macro-structural condi-
tions than others (e.g., party parallel organizations).
When comparing continents, one is struck by a contrast: the hypertrophy
of the non-party American radical right alongside the atrophy of its party
organizations. We hypothesize that relations between party and non-party
sector depend on two aspects of party systems: their core tendency (cen-
tripetal or centrifugal) and the permeability of the moderate right to the
radical right (as indicated by the acceptance of ideas, candidates, electoral
alliances, or governing coalitions). In centripetal systems (such as the
American party system, with the notable exception of the 2016 presidential
race), the space for the non-party sector enlarges to compensate for an
unmet demand in the electorate; in centrifugal systems, by contrast, radical
right parties shrink the opportunities for the non-party sector by meeting
this demand. In addition, where parties of the moderate right are more per-
meable to the radical right, space for the non-party sector opens up, again
to meet unmet or frustrated demand in society.
Future research on the radical right thus might benefit from population
ecology models, which suggest that a scarcity of resources in the political
niche shared by party and non-party elements will induce competition, not
benign coexistence or friendly cooperation (Veugelers 1999). It should
also examine the two contradictory situations identified in Table 15.3
(symbolized respectively as ↓↑ and ↑↓). What happens to the non-party
sector when the moderate right is open to the radical right but the system is
centrifugal or the moderate right is closed to the radical right but the sys-
tem is centripetal? Do relations between parties of the moderate and radi-
cal right trump the core tendency in defining the space for the non-party
sector of the radical right?
Table 15.3 Party-System Dynamics and Space for the Non-Party
Sector of the Radical Right

431
 Core tendency of
party system
Cen- Centrifu-
tripetal ↑ gal ↓
Permeability of moderate right to radi- Open ↑↑ ↓↑
cal right parties ↑
Closed ↑↓ ↓↓
↓
Legend: ↓ Space expands; ↑ Space shrinks
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CHAPTER 16

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 THE POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

MICHELLE HALE WILLIAMS

SOMETHING is rotten in the state of Denmark! This reference from Act
1, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet could easily be rhetoric coming from
the halls of Borgen. In January 2016 the Danish parliament passed a bill
allowing authorities to seize assets exceeding $1,450 from asylum seekers
in order to help cover the cost of supporting their integration. Government
officials have indicated that the Danish welfare state simply cannot meet
its obligations to citizens given pressures of the rising number of refugees
seeking to gain entry (Delman 2016). Denmark is not alone in this regard.
Across Europe and beyond, governments are becoming more unwelcom-
ing toward immigrants and less inclined toward multiculturalism. Mass
publics also appear to share higher levels of intolerance for immigrants as
public opinion increasingly rejects multiculturalism. Yet scholars have
struggled to causally and directly connect the volume of immigration or
even the presence of non-native nationals with governmental and public
reactions. This chapter asserts that a parallel phenomenon, radical right-
wing party (RRP) populism, mediates the effort of governments and mass
publics to manage multiculturalism. In order to examine the impact of
RRPs, it discusses the trajectory of party impact research and then pro-
vides examples of indicators and impact potential, particularly over the
past thirty years in Western Europe, where this type of party emerged
playing a New Politics role. It then examines impact potential of the more
recent spread of bandwagoning RRPs in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in
the world. It asserts that RRP impacts manifest in governmental and public
anti-immigrant positions either directly or indirectly through interaction ef-
fects. Perhaps what is rotten in Denmark smells even though it is less di-
rectly seen.

THE RESEARCH TRAJECTORY OF PARTY IMPACT STUDIES

Over the past sixty years party impact studies have utilized various charac-
terizations of party impacts and effects. One approach to understanding
party impact has been through the institutionalist lens. For institutionalists,
the opportunities and constraints of the party system, the electoral system,
and other rules that structure political competition in a country advantage
some party types over others (Riker 1962; Duverger 1964; Lijphart 1991,
1995; Kirchheimer 1966a, 1966b; Lawson and Merkl 1988; Katz and Mair

440
1995). Institutional advantages for parties tend to provide for a certain
number of effective parties in a party system and favor certain party types
such as large rather than small parties, catchall or cartel parties over nar-
row issue parties, and mainstream over fringe parties. In other words, ac-
cording to this approach, some parties are barred from exerting impact by
the structure of the system, while certain parties are advantaged and likely
to have more impact.
A second approach looks at party impact by assessing power in goal at-
tainment. In this framing, party impact results from wielding power, pri-
marily by virtue of leading the government. If democracy is majority rule,
then it stands to reason that those actors that manifest a clear majority—or,
failing that, those that hold a plurality position that places them in govern-
mental authority—are powerful and have impact. The presumption re-
mains that often only one party can achieve its goals in a competitive rela-
tionship with other parties. However, work that considers multiple parties
in the party system has widened scholarly understanding of party behavior
(for a strong theoretical overview, see Müller and Strøm 1999). Scholars
of political parties have debated what constitutes party impact according to
various notions of the goal of parties, specifically whether it is votes
(Downs 1957; Janda 1980; Lawson 1976), office (Leiserson 1968; Strøm
1990, 567), seats (Robertson 1976), issues (Harmel and Robertson 1985,
517), or policy effect (Axelrod 1970; Lijphart 1984; Luebbert 1986). The
fact has remained that goal attainment has been a commanding means of
assessing party impact over time, asking whether parties achieve what they
seek.
A third approach to party impact assessment has been through examin-
ing systemic responsiveness. Such approaches revolve around key ele-
ments of democratic theory, suggesting that parties are democratically re-
sponsible for playing a role of reflecting, representing, and acting accord-
ing to public interests (Ware 1987). The American Political Science Asso-
ciation’s Committee on Political Parties expressed this idea of parties as
responsive to their publics in its 1950 report “Toward a More Responsible
Two-Party System.” These approaches typically hold that shifts in parties
and party systems result from changes in public opinion, with the ideologi-
cal or policy location of voters often understood as the median voter. This
stems from the idea that public mood drives party positioning and that par-
ties are responsible vessels of democratic linkage (Dalton, Farrell, and
McAllister 2011). Parties become the essence and embodiment of democ-
ratic government in their function as interest aggregators, process simpli-

441
fiers, and dynamically adaptive representers of citizens. If impact is to be
asserted from systemic responsiveness models, it falls along the lines of
David Easton’s systems theory process model (Easton 1965), whereby par-
ties translate inputs into policy output through legislative change. In other
words, impact arises where parties take public demands and turn those into
policy outcomes.
A common denominator of the three approaches above is the individual
unit level of analysis applied to party impact study. In each instance, the
theorizing has tended to treat impact as the result ultimately of a single
party wielding its power to produce outcomes or impact. Electoral success
means sitting in highest government office, yielding the ability to produce
policy outcomes. The view of parties as goal-driven, competitive actors
defaults to a perspective on party impact whereby parties are evaluated in-
dividually on their merits. They govern on their own, produce outcomes on
their own, and compete on their own to win individual goals.

RADICAL RIGHT-WING PARTY IMPACTS: THE CASE FOR

IMPACT

Institutionalist approaches to studying RRPs have suggested factors that

contribute to their electoral success and the profile of their voters. These
approaches have traced periods of electoral rise of RRPs alongside periods
of electoral decline in popular votes and support (Spies and Franzmann
2011). Many have examined causal factors in electoral rise with the as-
sumption that once an RRP is electorally successful it has impact. Andrej
Zaslove (2012) has examined opportunity structures for RRP impact
through focus on four cases: Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, and Austria. He
finds that winning enough votes and then seats to be in the governing
coalition can play a key role, but electoral systems and a variety of other
structural variables constrain this opportunity (Zaslove 2012, 442–443).
In terms of goal attainment, most RRP scholars seem to agree that if
RRPs (or any party, for that matter) were to govern outright, they would
have clearer impacts, yet rarely are such cases found empirically. In the
case of Austria, where the RRP has won the highest percentage in an elec-
tion and served in coalition government, Fraser Duncan (2010, 350) has
asserted, “Clearly, it is impossible to refute definitively the claim that the
radical right’s presence in office resulted in more restrictionist policies
than would have been the case had they not been in government.” How-
ever, Duncan’s next word is “yet,” and he goes on to recognize that tracing

442
the causal arrow back to the RRP (or any party) as solely or primarily re-
sponsible fails to apprehend the complex context that surrounds legislative
decision-making and policy outcomes. Such an understanding mirrors
David Easton’s (1965) reasoning when he famously described legislative
decision making as a “black box,” where much happens that cannot be im-
mediately seen or pinpointed in the process or in causal logic—a perspec-
tive that has been revived convincingly in recent work (Norris 2012, 36;
Dalton, Farrell, and McAllister 2011, 7). Since RRPs rarely govern coun-
tries outright, they may seek goals along the lines of influence within the
party system rather than top governmental office.
Goal attainment studies have progressed toward increasing focus on the
dynamics of the party system for understanding impact. The position of a
party as governing by majority or in coalition is the starting point, as such
a position suggests more direct control of the policy-making agenda. How-
ever, this literature has turned toward looking at party system effects as
well, acknowledging that representation and notions of proportionality
provide a logic in which being at the governing table in the legislature al-
lows parties to push and pull one another in certain otherwise unlikely pol-
icy directions. For this reason, more recent studies of RRP goal attainment
typically have looked at RRPs interacting with other parties to have influ-
ence in politics. Party interaction logic applies unequivocally to RRPs who
are contender parties, parties with credibility and legitimacy based on Sa-
lonfähigkeit, or conduct appropriate to parliament. Some manifestations of
the radical right choose this path of domestication to fall in line with other
political parties and become more or less part of the political establish-
ment, while others do not, and some cycle between these styles of behavior
over time. Party interaction models of impact may contextualize under-
standing of political outcomes in suggesting that party systems rather than
individual party actors account for these outcomes, but such studies have
often found it difficult to provide a causal arrow of impact or to say with
confidence that RRPs have achieved their goals. Building on Bonnie
Meguid’s (2008) model of niche party competition, an RRP dynamism lit-
erature has emerged, focusing on ups and downs in niche party and RRP
cycles of party positioning and appeals in party system competition (van
de Wardt 2015; Spies and Franzmann 2011; Meyer and Wagner 2013;
Muis and Scholte 2013). Mainstream right parties, for instance, have
moved rightward on positions such as immigration and other culturally
framed issues to better compete with other parties, while reverberating ef-
fects have contributed to center and left party strategy as well (de Lange
2012, 914; Abou-Chadi 2014; Bale et al. 2010; Loxbo 2010, 312; Rydgren

443
2010).
Systemic responsiveness approaches have allowed for additional focus
areas. Studies of populism and the anti-immigrant position espoused by
RRPs have examined connections between these parties as the democratic
manifestation of unmet public interests. For instance, Pippa Norris (2005)
demonstrated how RRPs have greatest impact where they supply a politi-
cal message reflecting disenfranchised voters who feel that mainstream
parties are not representing them well. Norris asserts that supply-side ef-
fects are key for RRP impact, where the party message and issue framing
matter more than, and sometimes without correspondence to, actual social
and economic conditions in driving support for radical right-wing parties.
Much of the work on the populism of RRPs conveys this same contention
that RRPs have been important where mainstream parties have failed to
represent people, allowing RRPs to stake a claim that they speak for the
people who otherwise have little voice in the political process. Some re-
search has shown that RRPs can have important indirect impacts or effects
on immigration policy even when they exist as non-contender parties. Indi-
rect impact may be accomplished through swaying public mood, as that in
turn can put pressure on other parties to co-opt RRP issues, adjusting their
positions in order to retain or recapture voters inclined toward RRPs
(Minkenberg 2013; de Lange 2007; Schain 2006, 272; Williams 2006).

RADICAL RIGHT-WING PARTY IMPACTS: THE CASE

AGAINST IMPACT

Most work repudiating impact claims deals with goal-attainment and sys-
temic-responsiveness frameworks. In terms of goal attainment, skeptics
have suggested that office holding changes RRPs, often domesticating
them so that they quit pressing for the type of change demanded prior to
obtaining office. In addition, they point to the lack of a clear causal arrow
whereby RRP impacts are overestimated and contingent on too many fac-
tors. RRPs in office have not had attributable impact on public opinion, ac-
cording to Dunn and Singh (2011), who examine twenty-nine countries
with individual-level survey data to see if the degree of intolerance is af-
fected by the presence of RRPs in parliament. In a comprehensive book
resonant with case study examples from the United Kingdom, France, and
Italy, João Carvalho (2013) asserts that RRP effects may be overestimated
in much recent work dealing with them, and argues that RRP impact is too
contingent upon factors beyond RRP control, including party system com-

444
petition and mainstream party agency. Carvalho calls for caution in at-
tributing impact due to the indirect nature of RRP influence on agendas in
immigration policy through a “contagion” of positions and ideas that
peaked by the early 1990s before giving way to more consensus on immi-
gration restriction (Carvalho 2013, 180–181).
On systemic responsiveness, naysayers contend that little evidence ex-
ists to substantiate the RRPs’ claim that they reflect the popular will. Pol-
icy directions, such as the anti-immigrant direction, would likely exist in-
dependent of RRPs, and therefore it proves difficult to confirm the RRP
claim to agenda-setting as a manifestation of popular discontent. Cas
Mudde has pointed to cases where restrictive immigration policy can result
from party systems where RRPs are not present as evidence that RRP im-
pact is overstated. He contends that RRPs are neither a necessary nor suffi-
cient condition for bringing stricter immigration policy (2013, 11–12).
Mudde also points to a lack of empirical evidence confirming a right turn
in European politics often attributed to radical right-wing parties. In his es-
timation, RRPs becoming “major players in West European politics,”
which he finds unlikely, would not potentially and has not to date yielded
fundamental transformation of the political system (2013, 16; 2014). An
innovative empirical test of this position looks at cabinet composition and
policy output in nine West European countries, finding that RRPs do not
exert a direct policy impact (Akkerman 2012, 523–524). It goes on to con-
clude that cabinets dominated by mainstream right-wing parties are more
likely than cabinets dominated by left-wing parties to press for restrictive
immigration policies.

CONSIDERING DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT PARTY IMPACTS

There is much modeling of cause and effect, with the main approaches to
political science engaging in causal logic development and theorizing.
However, direct attribution of effect and thus impact has proven difficult
given complex causality in the social world. Complex causality implies
that the myriad of causal factors contributing to empirical phenomena can
prove difficult to sort out. To the extent that the social world may be un-
derstood as a system of interaction, there are often interactions between
factors that alter the overall effect generated. In sum, linear causation may
be said to oversimplify social matters in many instances. So while political
science has come far in ascertaining which factors contribute causally,
complex causality makes it a challenge to isolate effects as derivative of

445
any one factor. For instance, scholars isolate certain inputs that produce
economic development, including stable government, class diversity, capi-
talist incentives, and historical conditions, among other factors. Scholars
isolate certain factors more likely to produce democracy, such as the exis-
tence of certain rights and freedoms, mass political mobilization, and con-
testation or oppositional politics. However, it is not uncommon for case A
to have conditions 1 and 2 without condition 3, while case B has condi-
tions 1 and 3 without condition 2, and both have either economic develop-
ment or democracy resulting. Additionally, the by-product of conditions 1
and 3 may be an entirely new factor that would not exist apart from the in-
teraction effect, which adds to the complexity of causality.
If effects and impact result from complex causality and systems of inter-
action among factors, then where does this leave party impact assessment?
One perspective may be that it requires drawing more heavily from theo-
rizing to inform causal logic. For instance, in an attempt elsewhere to grap-
ple with radical right-wing party impact operationalization, I have sug-
gested insight from the physical sciences regarding forces of nature, such
as gravity holding elements of a planetary system at fixed distances from
one another, or Newton’s laws, such as action provoking reaction
(Williams 2015). Much of the direct knowledge of impact and forces that
act upon one another in the physical sciences takes observation and in-
forms it with rich theory to suggest the how behind impact. This is because
much of the causal inputs are either unmeasurable or unseen in the physi-
cal sciences. This leaves some mystery to be accounted for by strong theo-
rizing with solid rationale. Perhaps impact assessment regarding radical
right-wing parties would do well to work to develop a richer base of theo-
rizing to inform assumptions regarding cause and effect rather than becom-
ing frustrated with the lack of seen causal inputs connecting directly to
clear effects and impacts.

COMPLEXITIES OF RADICAL RIGHT IMPACT: MOVING

TARGETS OVER TIME AND FLUIDITY BETWEEN PARTY AND
SOCIAL MOVEMENT MANIFESTATIONS

The radical right, unlike its mainstream counterparts, may be said to pre-
sent itself as a dynamic organizational form, strategically metamorphosing
between party and social movement across time. Political science may
struggle to grapple with moving targets in terms of causal modeling. Theo-
retically, political science inclines toward an understanding of a positive

446
linear relationship between the degree to which interests are organized and
the amount of impact or efficacy that prevails (Figure 16.1).

FIGURE 16.1 Relationship Between Degree of Formal Organization of

Interests and Impact.
Yet what if the relationship is linear but negative for the radical right?
As expressed elsewhere in this volume, the populism inherent to the con-
temporary radical right involves positioning themselves as the outsiders
standing in opposition to political elites and establishment political parties.
One challenge for the radical right then becomes how to keep this momen-
tum alive should the party become so successful as to enter public office,
much less a governing coalition. It stands to reason that populists in power
are no longer populists, as they have come to represent the very thing that
they previously opposed. A domestication effect likely occurs for most or-
ganized radical right-wing parties whereby they attain highest office
through one set of strategies and tactics and with the message framed
around a stance of opposition, and this no longer resonates once they move
into the position of governing. For instance, the Freiheitliche Partei Öster-
reich (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria) reached the position to which other
radical right parties aspire when in 1999 legislative elections it won more
votes (and seats) than any other political party. However, rather than
sweeping reform of immigration laws and border tightening alongside cul-
tural nationalism, the country moved in the direction of increasing social
welfare spending (Williams 2013). Not only that, but the party split several
years later, with the charismatic leader Jörg Haider breaking away to start
a new party, the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Alliance for the Future
of Austria), which after its initial parliamentary appearance stumbled and
failed to win any seats in parliament at all before fading into obscurity.

447
Meanwhile, the FPÖ under a new charismatic leader since 2005, Heinz
Christian Strache, has returned to the rabble-rousing, marching, assemblies
in public squares, and shouting from the floor of parliament that had paved
the way for its rise to power in the 1990s. In the three most recent national
legislative elections since the leadership change, FPÖ support has risen
steadily to approximate peak popular support levels of the 1990s. This
seems to illustrate a populist life cycle whereby institutionalization and of-
fice may actually domesticate and dilute the populism of the radical right
for a time. However, tactical shifts leading to a return to undomesticated
behavior may follow as the party needs to rejuvenate its support.
Social movements of the radical right have a different set of opportunity
structures that may result in unique kinds of impact or at a minimum in
different ways of achieving impacts. Social movements of the radical right
take aim at directly shaping public mood and attitudes without the need to
domesticate or tone down their rhetoric, behavior, or actions; they can win
without winning votes, seats, or highest office. This potentially allows so-
cial movements to disseminate a stronger and more virulent message posi-
tioned farther to the right and appealing to what may be a more radicalized
and passionate fringe faction. If such a social movement gains momentum
and traction among increasingly wider audiences, the potential for greater
impacts is possible. This is premised upon the logic outlined above of co-
optation, yet without necessarily positioning the social movement itself as
the beneficiary. In other words, the social movement can be loathed and
widely despised or discredited, yet if it stirs emotions, fears, or concerns
within the public mood, then it has accomplished its objective. Social
movements of the radical right variety can afford to alienate supporters by
presenting a strong message; they do not seek followers at that point so
much as believers. They may know from the outset that they will not carry
the torch forward themselves on an issue or ideological position, but rather
that the best they may do is to stir the public enough that mainstream party
actors must take note and act on it or else risk the loss of their own sup-
porters. This makes a primary objective of theirs co-optation by the main-
stream, which is ironic because mainstream parties also claim the victory if
they are able to “steal the thunder” of the radical right by taking away ide-
ological ground and key messages. When mainstream parties co-opt radi-
cal right positions, this typically shifts their own position in the direction
of the far right ideologically. This often occurs where pronounced faction-
alization exists within established parties and floating voters result (Kirch-
heimer 1966a, 1966b), whereby mainstream parties must strive to reinvig-
orate their political base of support and regain their claim to wider ideolog-

448
ical territory ceded to the radical right.

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF THE RADICAL RIGHT WING IN

WESTERN EUROPE

This section will examine evidence of the impact of the radical right across
several countries and among manifestations of both the political party and
social movement variety. Drawing on theoretical approaches to the study
of parties and impact, as well as examples of work dealing with RRPs and
their effects, it will extract and consider indicators from these various ap-
proaches discussed above (Table 16.1).
Table 16.1 Approaches and Indicators of RRP Impact
Approach to
Impact Key Indicators of Impact
Institutionalism Votes, seats
Goal attainment Governing party position, party competition/con-
tender parties, policy or position change through
party competition – co-optation
Systemic re- Supply to match unmet demands; representation of
sponsiveness the voiceless faction = populism; public support of
RRPs, agenda-setting
Non-contender Public mood and attitudes, especially toward immi-
parties, social grants
movements
In examining the political impact of the radical right, this section en-
deavors to also highlight the challenges of impact assessment and possible
directions for moving it forward.
Institutionalist approaches to impact emphasize electoral success of
RRPs, which has been varied across space and time. The rise and prolifera-
tion of the contemporary radical right in Western Europe dates to the mid-
to late 1980s, with many scholars attributing the initial breakthrough of an
RRP to the French Front National (FN, National Front) in 1986. The most
electorally successful RRPs across Western Europe tended to have a vote
share relatively close to 10 percent through the end of the twentieth cen-
tury, such as the FN, which obtained 10 to 15 percent of the French vote
on first ballots in the 1990s, or the Belgian Vlaams Blok (VB, Flemish

449
Bloc) under the leadership of Filip Dewinter receiving similar electoral
support. Some RRPs exceed the bar, such as the Schweizerische
Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party) and the Austrian FPÖ, which
have routinely garnered 20 percent or more of popular support. Still others
stayed well below that bar, such as in Germany, where the radical right re-
mained divided among several parties including the Republikaner (REP,
Republicans), the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, Na-
tional Democratic Party) and the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU, German
People’s Union), or in Scandinavia, where RRPs were just beginning to
emerge as separate brands of populists shifting from anti-tax, market lib-
eral radical right-wingers toward the anti-immigrant radical right of the
contemporary Dansk Folkeparti (DF, Danish People’s Party). However, in
the first decades of the twenty-first century, many RRPs in Europe have
seen higher percentages of the national-level popular vote than they did
earlier.
In the most recent elections, the strength of RRPs compared with other
parties is fairly robust. For instance, in France the FN surged to an all-time
high with a vote share of 17.9 percent in 2012 under its then-new leader,
Marine Le Pen. Additionally, new RRPs emerged, such as Geert Wilders’s
Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands,
which emerged in 2006 winning 5.6 percent of the vote and then nearly
doubled its vote share by 2012, when it attained 10.1 percent of the vote.
In the United Kingdom, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) emerged in
1997, winning only 0.3 percent of the vote. But it achieved a more than
300 percent increase in vote share from 2010 to 2015, when it won 12.6
percent of the vote despite residing in an electoral system (a two-party,
single-member district system) designed to mitigate the success of third
parties. A longtime Euroskeptic party, UKIP saw this surge in support co-
incide with its turn toward an anti-immigrant and anti-Islamist radical right
platform over recent years.

450
FIGURE 16.2 Snapshot of rrp Strength Relative to Other Parties
Source: Election data for each country taken from Wikipedia’s most re-
cent election results.
Goal attainment impact for rising RRPs, with their sights set on entering
and leading national governments, tended to emerge more toward the late
1990s. It was then that RRPs began to enter the highest offices of national
government: in the governing coalitions of Austria with the FPÖ and BZÖ,
in Denmark with the DF, in Italy with the Liga Nord (LN, Northern
League), in the Netherlands with the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF, Pim Fortuyn
List), and in Norway with the Fremskrittspartiet (FrP, Progress Party). In
two countries RRPs reached a position of winning the most votes among
all parties in elections to lead the government, including in Switzerland
with the SVP and in Austria with the FPÖ. In the case of Austria, however,
the RRP was in the coalition formation position in 1999, but stepped aside
to allow the party with the second-highest number of votes, the Österre-
ichische Volkspartei (OVP, Austrian People’s Party), to form the govern-
ment. This was for a variety of reasons, which may be summed up most
simply as extremely negative reaction from Europe and throughout the
world to the possibility of an RRP prime minster leading a national parlia-
ment. Issue co-optation and strategic competition by RRPs are ways that
parties have moved toward goal attainment without being in the top offices
of government. Issue co-optation may be understood as the push-and-pull
effect of RRPs within the party system to move other parties farther to the
right even if the RRPs are small or not part of coalition governments. This
suggests that their presence within parliament matters. Measures of party
competition, proximity, or porosity on the right may be used to show im-

451
pact of RRPs under the auspices of goal attainment resulting from issue
co-optation. Additionally, manifesto analysis of party position shifts might
provide evidence of the push-and-pull effect of RRPs within the party sys-
tem, where non-RRPs begin to incorporate distinctive RRP positions. In
the case of France’s party system, it can be argued that Marine Le Pen’s
FN drove the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, Union for a
Popular Movement) farther to the right as her party gained popularity for
its issue positions (Godin 2013). The logic suggests that in order to com-
pete with FN, UMP had to adjust its positions farther to the right than they
were absent the rise in support for the FN in order to remain a viable con-
tender on the political right.
Systemic-level indicators of RRP impact tend to focus on RRPs embrac-
ing public opinion and mirroring public concerns. This plays to a stylistic
strength of the RRPs, as they have cultivated a populist style over the past
three decades. They claim to speak for the people and promise to say out
loud what their national publics are concerned about, particularly where
mainstream parties are not responding to these public concerns. Radical
right messages appear to resonate with many European publics, at least in-
sofar as public opinion polls can provide an indication of this. In French
polls ahead of 2017 elections published June 1, 2016, Marine Le Pen dom-
inated the field of other contenders on projected first-round ballot support,
at 28 percent. This compares with second-place finisher Nicolas Sarkozy
of the right-wing end of the mainstream UMP, polling 21 percent, and
then-current president François Hollande lagging behind with less than
half of Le Pen’s level of support, at 14 percent (de Montvalon et al. 2016).
As the 2017 French elections played out, competition centered on the right
side and fairly far to the right, much as it did in the 2002 election, where
the FN won the most votes on the first-round ballot. Analysis attributed
pre-election surges in French RRP support to the platform and resonating
messages of the FN; meanwhile, the mainstream candidates faltered and
appeared unable to keep pace. In the days ahead of the presidential elec-
tion, the political right remained factionalized. Le Pen persisted in a tight
race with Emmanuel Macron and his newly formed party of the political
center La République En Marche! (REM, Republic on the Move!). Ulti-
mately, however, both the French presidency and legislature were won by
REM.
Additional impact may be found at the social movement and non-con-
tender party level, where RRPs tend to defy the conventional logic of po-
litical parties, sometimes achieving what counts as a win even when they

452
themselves are not contender parties. At this level, RRP effects and impact
tend to become entangled with social movement effects, especially given
the RRP tendency to become a moving target transitioning back and forth
between party and social movement forms over time. In fact, parties out-
side of power tend to have much in common with social movements, as
both utilize tactics of rabble-rousing and execute outsider strategies rather
than exhibiting Salonfähig or contender party behavior. This example was
illustrated above in Heinz Christian Strache’s revision of Austria’s FPÖ
party and its behavior when it left coalition government to resume populist
demonstrations both inside and outside parliament. In terms of the evi-
dence that may best capture the impact of social movement and non-con-
tender RRPs, public attitudes may provide an indication if they shift on
key RRP issues such as immigration. Measures of anti-immigrant senti-
ment have long been associated positively with RRP impact, giving them
credit for focusing attention on this issue area. To the extent the RRPs
have been called single-issue parties for their concentration and common
emphasis on anti-immigrant positions in recent decades, the anti-immi-
grant issue position has been commonly utilized to test whether that issue
is resonating as a result of their efforts. Impact of RRPs and their related
social movements then may be seen in rising anti-immigrant sentiment and
in policy or platform positions that reflect this disposition.
At the non-contender party level, indications of strong anti-immigrant
sentiment in the public mood aid in establishing impact. To the extent that
these parties behave differently than contender RRPs—in particular, tar-
geting public mood with tactics aimed at eliciting strong and emotional re-
sponses, such as in regard to immigrants—such measures of public mood
seem to provide a means of getting at their effect. In Europe, findings from
the Global Attitudes Survey conducted in 2016 suggest a wave of rising
anti-immigrant sentiment across Western Europe (Wike, Stokes, and Sim-
mons 2016). While France and Spain are among the least likely countries
to associate refugees with negative social consequences such as terrorism
and therefore danger and fear, even in these cases 46 and 40 percent, re-
spectively, of those polled indicated a belief in this association. Radical
right partisans were much more likely to hold this view, according to the
survey, than those associated with liberal economic parties and left-of-cen-
ter parties. For instance, 87 percent of UKIP constituents in the United
Kingdom expressed concern that refugees increase the likelihood of terror-
ism, while only 39 percent of left-wing Labor Party supporters felt this
way. Similarly in France, 85 percent of those supporting the FN were fear-
ful of terrorist outcomes associated with the presence of refugees in their

453
country, while just 31 percent of those supporting the Parti Socialiste (PS,
Socialist Party) agreed (Wike, Stokes, and Simmons 2016, 30). Such num-
bers suggest correlation between public mood and non-contender RRPs
that provides some basis for claims of impact at this level.
Also at this level of non-contender party impact, examination of social
movements without political party affiliation may focus on public mood
indicators. Contemporary radical right social movements are capturing
headlines and likely shaping discourse and public opinion toward immi-
grants because of contextual factors ripe for exploitation, such as the Syr-
ian refugee crisis in Europe. One such social movement, Patriotische
Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Eu-
ropeans Against the Islamization of the West), has been particularly effec-
tive at positioning itself to influence public mood against great odds. Ger-
man democratic institutions and a cultivated postwar political culture of
tolerance and multicultural political correctness where racism is taboo
have for decades served as a check on radical right effects (Art 2011). As a
result, Germany has often been the country least likely to manifest radical
right impact. This makes the case of Pegida all the more noteworthy.
Pegida was founded by Lutz Bachman in October 2014 and gained mo-
mentum largely through use of social media. A colorful figure with, by
some accounts, a checkered past, Bachman created a Facebook presence
inviting people who were concerned about Islamization of the West to
demonstrate in Dresden (Rucht and Teune 2015, 12). Bachman, who owns
a public relations and advertising company, was able to effectively utilize
social media campaigns to draw tens of thousands of demonstrators out at
a time to peacefully walk the streets with anti-Muslim signs.
Unlike the NPD membership and neo-Nazi skinheads of past decades,
Pegida supporters come from the middle ranks of German society in terms
of several demographic categories, such as income, age, and gender.
Pegida demonstrators have been nicknamed “pinstriped Nazis” in refer-
ence to their largely middle-class, middle-age profile (Nye 2015, 5).
Pegida demonstrators have indicated that they oppose the Islamization of
the West and in particular the Islamization of their own societies. Yet
Pegida affiliates overwhelmingly come from parts of Germany, such as
Saxony, where there are few Muslims, and in Germany as a whole Mus-
lims make up approximately 5 percent of the population of more than
eighty million, raising the question of whether the presence of foreigners is
truly what drives their passion for the cause (Schwan 2015, 10). Just as
scholars of radical right-wing parties have failed to find a causal connec-

454
tion between immigration volume and support for radical right-wing par-
ties, the causal arrow is not direct with Pegida either.
To know whether Pegida or any other social movement is having an im-
pact requires searching for indications in the public mood and attitudes.
Both social movements and non-contender parties outside of government
have a common challenge in gaining influence for their cause: they are not
able to work within the institutions of democratic government to bring
changes that they seek. Therefore, they have to rely solely on changing the
hearts and minds of people, or at least a critical mass of them, if they hope
to make a difference politically. The question, then, is whether Pegida has
changed hearts and minds in Germany and possibly beyond. Groups using
the same acronym have claimed identification with it and have carried out
demonstrations in Vienna, Copenhagen, and Newcastle to promote the
anti-Islamic-immigrant message. Pegida UK has had members of UKIP re-
portedly declare support of it. Early in 2016, Pegida UK marchers were
carrying signs that bore the image of then U.S. Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump and the slogan “Trump Is Right!” to suggest
commonality across the Atlantic (Bourke 2016).
There is little doubt that Pegida has gotten considerable attention in Ger-
many and beyond. Additionally, and important for asserting social move-
ment impact, it has seemed to affect public mood and attitudes toward
Muslim immigrants in Germany. By January 2015, only three months after
Pegida was founded, one in three Germans supported the group’s marches
as a legitimate reaction to Islamic influence in Germany, according to a
Stern magazine poll of 1,006 people (Deutsche Welle 2015). Ten months
later, in October 2015, German politicians referred to Pegida’s influence in
creating a climate of fear and also for inciting hatred and in some instances
violence against immigrants and refugees in Germany (Delcker 2015).
Counterdemonstration movements reacting to Pegida emerged, dwarfing
Pegida’s turnouts (Decker 2015). However, Pegida wins attention to its
central anti-Islamic message even as movements protesting it have
emerged. This paradox of win-win proves somewhat unique to non-con-
tenders: they win when they gain supporters, but they also win when they
alienate supporters while raising public awareness. Heightened public
awareness of their message, even if it engenders opposition to them, al-
lows them to put that message out more widely, engendering a climate of
fear among the public. The radical right has arguably been successful at in-
fluencing politics through the promotion of a climate of fear (Williams
2006). In May 2016, Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann was found guilty and

455
fined in a Dresden district court for “inciting racial hatred” through his in-
flammatory comments, through Facebook posts but also at public events
and rallies where evidence was recorded that later was viewed in court
(Brady 2016). While Bachmann lost that case, in the process he set in mo-
tion a chain reaction at the agenda-setting and public discourse levels.

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF THE RADICAL RIGHT WING

BEYOND WESTERN EUROPE

One of the benefits of comparison of the West European RRPs is that they
have much in common, including timing of their emergence, political or
socioeconomic factors conditioning their rise, and populist positioning.
However, this section attempts to move beyond Europe to examine other
select manifestations of the radical right wing while attempting to identify
commonalities but also differences among RRPs using the populist, anti-
immigrant worldview as a common denominator. The expectation is that
different RRPs will have varied impacts. While this author specializes in
West European manifestations, this section will acknowledge and more
summarily address the spread of radical right-wing populism beyond this
geographic area. It asserts an expectation that if radical right-wing populist
movements outside Western Europe have tended to adopt the “winning
formula” of anti-immigrant issue positioning and populist styles of mobi-
lization, closer study by experts on those regions will likely reveal impacts
similar to those found in Western Europe. It may be noted, however, that
radical right-wing populism of the current variety originated in Western
Europe in the late 1980s, while many of the extra-European manifestations
are more recent and therefore may be expected to have less thoroughly de-
veloped indications of impact at this point.
In Eastern Europe, racism and xenophobia feed anti-immigrant senti-
ment at considerably higher levels than in Western Europe. One study
found that while 20 percent of the public was xenophobic across Europe,
the number in Poland and Hungary was as high as 40 percent in comparing
dark-skinned to light-skinned people (Minkenberg 2013a, 16–17). This
same study used European Values Survey data from 2008 to show, for in-
stance, that xenophobia was more than five times higher in Lithuania than
in France. Despite similarities, there are also some noteworthy differences
between East and West European manifestations of radical right-wing pop-
ulism. One difference is that the radical right in the East typically opposes
both economic neoliberalism and state socialism of the communist era,

456
presenting a stronger anti-establishment message with a desire to overturn
existing and former orders (Minkenberg 2013b, 13). By contrast, most
West European populists tend to direct their opposition more toward exist-
ing centers of power and present elites than toward the system itself. An-
other key difference is that East European parties tend to be caught in
older ways of framing nationalism and xenophobia around fascism, with
swastikas more commonly used as symbols and outright racial-purity
strands of racism rather than the newer anti-immigrant issue framing from
the late 1980s seen among West European RRPs, which is premised upon
immigrants as scapegoats for economic and social problems. In Eastern
Europe, one difference may be the tendency to scapegoat one’s own na-
tional minorities before immigrants (Minkenberg 2013b, 15). Finally, in
terms of impact, electoral support for RRPs in Eastern Europe has fluctu-
ated dramatically over time, whereas it has tended to be rather stable in
Western Europe. This suggests that despite a presence, East European
RRPs are not having the same level of effect or even perhaps the same
type of impact as do RRPs in Western Europe. Rather than a supply-side
impact, where RRPs deliberately generate issue-based political change,
East European RRPs and social movements perhaps represent more of a
side effect of political change post-communism. They may be better un-
derstood not as producing certain impacts but as a manifestation of nation-
state building that follows post-communist transition (Minkenberg 2013b,
15).
Global trends in a populist right direction have been suggested in ac-
counts by journalists, economists, and political scientists (Oxenham 2016).
In other chapters in this volume, scholars consider radical right-wing par-
ties and social movements in several other parts of the world, and this
chapter defers to their expertise for specification of such phenomena. Yet
in terms of impact, it is noteworthy that prognoses of a global right turn
tend to be based primarily on public anti-immigrant sentiment alongside
the rise in support for populist parties and social movements. Some band-
wagoning of European RRPs seems apparent in these other parties and so-
cial movements. In terms of impact, a few indicators provide insight re-
garding the extent to which radical right-wing populism is shaping politics
worldwide.
Selective evidence of populist radical right impact beyond both Western
and Eastern Europe manifests in anti-establishment public attitudes. Pop-
ulist candidates and parties globally appear to be faring quite well at pre-
sent, when elections are fraught with battles between establishment politics

457
and anti-establishment populists. One suggestion has been that populist
waves tend to come in response to adverse conditions. For instance, a
working paper by economists found that across 800 elections and just
under 150 years, far-right populists surge in sustained support following
sharp economic downturns and financial crises (Funke, Schularich, and
Trebesch 2015). Other contemporary conditions such as increases in immi-
gration, some of which is due to refugees seeking asylum, are common to
many parts of the advanced industrial world. Many countries are grappling
with similar challenges that force national identity issues to the forefront
as states attempt to respond to economic and social problems in a context
where many publics have grown frustrated with their governments. The
model of European RRPs purports to capitalize on such conditions to mo-
bilize wary publics and their governments into action.
When it comes to estimating the impact of the non-European RRPs and
movements, the same indicators of impact from Table 16.1 may be applied
and future scholarship may want to examine these across other cases. Still,
RRPs beyond Europe may be more like those of Eastern Europe in terms
of reacting to things in their societies beyond the “winning formula” of the
West European RRPs and without the same anti-immigrant single-issue
focus. This becomes an important distinction in measures of impact used
in Table 16.1 that examine public mood or focus impact measurement on
the immigration issue and its policy manifestations. A sample comparison
of anti-immigrant sentiment suggests that possibility across several non-
European countries mentioned elsewhere in this volume. When asked
whether they would not like immigrants or foreign workers as neighbors,
the public response varied, with 9.3 percent agreeing in Australia, 36.3
percent in Japan, 32.8 percent in Russia, 19.5 percent in Ukraine, and
14.11 percent in the United States (World Values Survey, wave 6, 2010–
2014, variable 39). This suggests a climate amenable to RRP impact, but
not necessarily for all of the same reasons. It may also be worth consider-
ing that RRPs beyond Western Europe could prove less able to capitalize
upon favorable conditions given their recency and lesser stage of political
development in many cases. Additionally, attributing causation to these
RRPs for impact may require more contextual understanding to know if
they are situated within a milieu of change or whether they are driving that
change. Finally, some of the newer manifestations of RRPs may lack legit-
imacy as contender parties constraining some avenues of impact. Brief
comparison of the Australian and Japanese cases may illustrate some of
this variation.

458
 In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (ONP) is commonly
associated with the populist right wing and yet has never elected a candi-
date to the national House of Representatives. In terms of impact, the party
does poorly on the institutionalist and goal attainment measures, as its vote
and seat shares have been meager and it has never been in governmental
power. Its representation has been confined to the state level, where it typi-
cally has one to three seats, if any at all. The peak of popular vote share for
this party came in the Queensland state legislative elections, where the
ONP won 22 percent of popular support in 1998. Popular vote share has
never again come close to that level at either state or national levels. Na-
tional-level legislative seats were won by this party for the first time in
2016, with four seats in the upper house of the legislature, the Australian
Senate. The party leader has been known to claim impact in terms of sys-
temic responsiveness and the ONP’s effects on other parties. Hansen
claims to represent ordinary people who feel disenfranchised by elites,
who they believe do not represent or act in the public interest (Taylor
2016). In fact, Hansen claims that parties in power are now waking up to
ideas that she and her party have espoused since the late 1990s, suggesting
that issue co-optation has occurred. Still, given the source of this assertion,
its credibility has to be taken as somewhat weaker than it would be if ONP
had won electoral support and gained seats. Party systems typically avoid
such reactions until a sustained and consistent level of popular support
emerges. The best chance for this party, which has been around since the
late 1990s, may be in terms of affecting public mood and attitudes, as out-
sider parties and social movements attempt to do. On this measure, the
2016 election campaign suggests some effect on the public. Poll data re-
veal that 62 percent of Australians say that Pauline Hansen speaks for ordi-
nary Australians, and 42 percent are pleased to see her in parliament and
agree with what she has to say (Lewis 2016). This contrasts sharply with
her marginalized status two decades ago in Australian politics. ONP is part
of the political discourse of this election, and there is evidence that the
public is reacting supportively, suggesting some mass-level impact.
This contrasts with the case of Japan, where the populist far right ap-
pears to be more of a flash in the pan, without longer-term roots in that po-
litical system. While it might be argued that seeds of fascist imperialism
from the World War II era may be present, and cultural homogeneity is
known to be important to many Japanese, the populist right wing has not
manifest in party form until relatively recently. Additionally, Japan has
lacked a climate favorable to right-wing (or indeed any) political opposi-
tion, in the context of which prevalent social movements could fuel RRP

459
development by presenting similar messages. The Japan Restoration Party
(JRP) is a recent populist radical right spark, a third-party contender in a
party system long dominated by one political party, the mainstream Lib-
eral Democratic Party (LDP). The JRP attempt at sustaining right-wing
populism was short-lived and perhaps more of a flash party phenomenon.
The JRP formed in September 2012, won fifty-four seats in the legislature
as a result of that election, and dissolved two years later to merge with a
few other small parties and movements into the new Japan Innovation
Party (JIP). Not quite two years later, in March 2016, JIP dissolved, and a
merger of it and other parties resulted in the formation of the Democratic
Party, a much more centrist party that has moved away from right-wing
populist factions of the former JRP. The RRP brand seems to be undefined
still in Japan, and therefore attributing impact to the Japanese populist
right may be somewhat premature. The situation may be worthy of further
exploration over time.

CONCLUSION

As the writing of this chapter concludes, several European states are facing
national elections in the latter half of 2017, including Germany and Aus-
tria. In Germany, AfD elected twenty-four MPs to Berlin’s state-level par-
liament in 2016, with unprecedented representation in ten of the sixteen
German state assemblies, and Angela Merkel has spoken to her main-
stream right CDU/CSU party of the potentially dire implications of this
(Amann, Neukirch, and Pfister 2016). As the third most popular party in
Germany through much of the campaign, behind the two mainstream par-
ties, AfD seems poised to become the first RRP to enter the Bundestag
since the 1950s, easily surpassing the 5 percent threshold. In the event of
another grand coalition, a third place finish would position AfD as the
voice of the opposition. In Austria, elections scheduled for 2018 were
called for early by the grand coalition junior partner, the ÖVP. Grand
coalition partners were increasingly unable to work together on initiatives
producing gridlock and internal party divisions. Days after calling for elec-
tions, the ÖVP named a new, young, dynamic party leader, Sebastian
Kurz, the former Foreign Minister, which resulted in an immediate in-
crease of 8 percent in the polls at the expense of both the mainstream left
and FPÖ, which had consistently been 5 to 10 points out in front. Still, the
FPÖ has the potential to enter coalition government with either the main-
stream left or right with a support base that rivals their numbers.

460
Already in 2016 through the middle of 2017, several countries have held
elections where populists on the far right played a key role or won out-
right. In summer elections of 2017, the FN candidate Marine Le Pen lost
the presidency but with 8 seats in parliament the FN obtained its greatest
Fifth Republic presence apart from the 1986 proportional representation
election. Across the Atlantic, the right wing of the U.S. Republican Party
secured the presidential nomination for Donald Trump on a platform that
has been compared to RRP positions in Europe (Bourke 2016). Mean-
while, his image has been utilized by social movements of the radical right
worldwide who claim a common anti-establishment and anti-immigrant
message. Like U.S. Republicans competing with the Tea Party in 2012,
Conservatives in the United Kingdom were not likely to lose seats in a par-
liamentary election to UKIP; rather, as factionalization on the right
emerges and votes are split, this gives an advantage to the mainstream left,
necessitating a response by the mainstream right (Webb and Bale 2014,
961). UKIP did not win any seats in parliament despite spending a year
polling in third place before plummeting over the final three months to fin-
ish fifth. In Hungary, the far-right government of Victor Orban sponsored
a referendum calling for quotas on migrants in defiance of European
Union (EU) plans to disperse asylum-seekers more broadly across both
Western and Eastern Europe (Prifti and Hutcherson 2016). While low
voter turnout on October 2, 2016, invalidated the “yes” vote, it follows the
direction of Brexit, the British decision to exit the EU taken by popular
referendum in June 2016. According to Prime Minister Theresa May,
Brexit signaled one key message: that people of the United Kingdom want
to see less immigration (Wheeler and Hunt 2016). In sum, present times
seem ripe for considering the impact potential of RRPs and related social
movements.
This chapter weighs in regarding whether RRPs make changes or just
noise in political systems. They are present, but are they having an impact?
The chapter suggests four types of indicator measure appropriate to RRP
impact assessment, based on the existing literature. It provides examples of
impact assessment on these indicators using evidence from Western Eu-
rope and beyond. While finding variation across RRPs, it provides selec-
tive evidence of instances where RRPs appear to be having an impact ac-
cording to several indicators. Context matters in understanding RRP im-
pact because of the often indirect nature through which that impact
emerges. This is because RRPs are not typically alone wielding power but
instead are part of a complex party system where other actors are involved.
The party system itself is situated within a dynamic web of political inter-

461
action where sociopolitical conditions, actors, and institutions all play a
role. Yet this chapter suggests that scholars would likely find it difficult to
negate altogether the impact of RRPs in contemporary politics, even if
they incline toward a desire to see more direct evidence of it. The chapter
has made an effort to provide evidence of where RRPs shape governance,
at times directly but more often indirectly by mediating debates—in partic-
ular, on immigration, multiculturalism, and national identity. This reflects
democratic representation broadly understood, whereby the majority may
rule, yet the outcomes emerging are conditioned by the voices of many. In
sum, while RRP impact is not always immediately seen, other senses and
sensibilities may serve to corroborate that it is there.
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CHAPTER 17

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THE RADICAL RIGHT AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS

MANUELA CAIANI AND DONATELLA DELLA PORTA

TYPICALLY in sociology and political science, the radical right has been
addressed through so-called breakdown theories, while left-wing radical-
ism has been analyzed from the perspective of mobilization theories,
which are widespread in social movement studies.1 For a long time, espe-
cially in the United States, unconventional forms of collective action were
identified as crisis behavior. Considering collective phenomena as the sum
of individual behaviors, psychologically oriented theories defined social
movements as the manifestation of feelings of deprivation experienced by
individuals, with aggression resulting from a wide range of frustrated ex-
pectations. Phenomena such as the rise of Nazism, but also more contem-
porary movements, were considered as aggressive reactions to frustrations
resulting either from a rapid and unexpected end to periods of economic
well-being and of increased expectations on a worldwide scale or from sta-
tus inconsistency at the individual level. This type of approach resonated
with interpretations of the extreme right as non-reflected reactions to social
crisis and unsuccessful integration.
These studies have offered valuable insights in understanding the devel-
opment of the radical right. Nevertheless, there are also some weaknesses.
Research on the contextual characteristics of the development of the radi-
cal right has not always been able to explain the causal mechanisms that
intervene between macro-level causes and micro-level behaviors. Addi-
tionally, the focus on some potential causes has left other possible explana-
tions unexplored. Writing about the dramatic growth of popular support
for xenophobic parties in the previous two decades, Martin Schain, Aris-
tide Zolberg, and Patrick Hossay (2002) have lamented that literature on
the radical right tends to be society-centered, avoiding politics-centered ar-
guments. The analysis of the meso organizational level has also been lim-
ited to the political parties, with selective attention to their strategic issue
framing. When non-institutional activities of the radical right entered the
picture, it was mainly in the form of political violence.
Some of the missing aspects in research on the radical right have be-
come central in social movement studies. Though rarely applied to the
analysis of right-wing groups, certain concepts developed from research on
social movements have high heuristic capacity in this field as well. In par-
ticular, this approach has stressed political opportunities rather than social

469
threats, organizational resources rather than grievances, frames rather than
ideology, repertoire rather than violence, networks rather than individual
pathologies, and relations rather than structures.
Building on this field of knowledge, Caiani, della Porta and Wagemann
(2012) have proposed an analysis of the radical right as a social move-
ment. Using some of the main concepts in the field, they have developed
their analysis around the model presented below (Figure 17.1).
So-called breakdown approaches have been criticized in analyses of
left-wing social movements that have conceptualized social movements as
largely instrumental rational actors that mobilize around collective inter-
ests and/or identities. These have been opposed by resource mobilization
approaches, which stress that in historical situations, in which structural
strains and conflicts are always present, the emergence of collective action
has to be addressed by looking at the conditions that enable discontent to
be transformed into mobilization—that is, at how the resources necessary
for collective action are mobilized. In this view, social movements are
made up of actors acting in a rational way—or at least in as rational a way
as those involved in conventional forms of political action. Protest actions
are seen as deriving from a calculation of the costs and benefits and as
being influenced by the presence of resources, in particular organizations
and entrepreneurs (della Porta and Diani 2006). The (material and sym-
bolic) resources available contribute to explain the tactical choices made
by movements.

470
FIGURE 17.1 The Radical Right as Social Movement Organizations
Repertoires for protest are seen here as influenced by a political oppor-
tunity structure (POS), which has both a formal, institutional aspect and an
informal, cultural one. Cross-time and cross-national research on social
movements has stressed the important influence of political context on a
movement’s capacity to mobilize, as well as on the forms of its mobiliza-
tion. Stable institutional characteristics such as the functional and territor-
ial distribution of powers, as well as the contingent shift in the configura-
tion of allies and opposition, have emerged time and again as important in-
dependent variables in explaining social movements’ development. Be-
yond political opportunities, the discursive opportunity structure (DOS)
plays a significant role in influencing the potential acceptance of social
movement claims within a broader culture. As social movements are polit-
ical actors, they tend to be very sensitive to the opening of channels of in-
stitutional access, which tend to facilitate protest but moderate its form. In
contrast, closed (or closing) opportunities tend to produce radicalization of
protest repertoires (see della Porta and Diani 2006 for a review).
Recently, two different theoretical developments have brought about
some shifts in attention. On one hand, there has been growing focus on the
cultural and symbolic dimensions of social movements (Jasper, Goodwin,
and Polletta 2001; Flam and King 2005). On the other, a more relational
vision of protest has been promoted, with attention paid to the social

471
mechanisms that intervene between macro-level causes and macro-level
effects (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). In a critique of the structuralist
bias of previous approaches, attention moved toward the relational, cogni-
tive, and affective mechanisms through which contextual input is filtered
and acquires meaning. The effects of political opportunities depend in fact
on the social construction of these opportunities by the relevant actors.
In what follows, we will use the abovementioned concepts taken from
social movement studies in order to provide an overview of some scholar-
ship on the contemporary radical right, looking first of all at the organiza-
tional structure in the radical right milieu and considering the complex in-
terplay among various actors linked to each other in cooperative as well as
competitive interactions. Like other social movements, right-wing ones are
networks of more or less formal groups and individuals, and the extent and
structure of these networks define their mobilizing capacity. Second, we
suggest that these networks use a broad repertoire of collective action.
While research on the radical right has usually focused either on electoral
behavior or on violent action (with very few exchanges between the two
fields of research), we analyze instead the different forms of protest used
by the radical right, addressing the ways in which the available resources
and political opportunities do influence these choices. While much re-
search has focused on either violent or electoral behavior, our data allow
us to locate those within a broader repertoire of collective action. Just as
for the social movement organizations that have been studied in the left-
libertarian movement family, studies of the radical right treat the move-
ment as “eventful” in terms of its relational, cognitive, and emotional ef-
fects on the individual and collective actors that take part in it (della Porta
2015). Third, and in line with the “cultural turn” in social movement re-
search, we consider the frames through which the collective actors in-
volved in the radical right construct and communicate their (internal and
external) reality (Snow and Byrd 2007). Located somewhat below the
level of (broad and fixed) ideology, frame analysis fits our interest in the
ways in which organizations bridge different specific issues. This res-
onates with our assumption that, much like other collective actors, radical
right organizations have to be considered as acting upon specific concerns
and attempting to mobilize a potential base of sympathizers.
Within a relational approach, we shall pay particular attention to
processes of interactions between the radical right and other actors, both
allies and opponents. In social movement studies, radical right groups have
been addressed under the label of “countermovements.” Although criti-

472
cized as too narrow a frame to account for the complexity of right-wing
social movements, the concept of countermovement is useful in focusing
attention on the conflictual interactions between movement families.

POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE RADICAL RIGHT

The literature on collective action has emphasized that levels and forms of
mobilization by social movements, interest groups, and citizens’ initiatives
are strongly influenced by political opportunity structure and discursive
opportunity structure—the set of opportunities and constraints that are of-
fered by the institutional structure and political culture of the political sys-
tem in which these groups operate (see Tarrow 1994; Koopmans et al.
2005). In general, the concept of POS has been defined mainly by looking
at the degree of “closure” or “openness” of a political system (e.g., in
terms of electoral system, degree of centralization, configuration of power
between allies and opponents, etc.), as well as in terms of more inclusive
or exclusive cultural contexts vis-à-vis the challengers (e.g., the political
culture of the elites, the way authorities manage collective action, etc.).
Movement organizations have been shown to adapt to the public decision-
making structure, mobilizing when and where channels of access open up
(Tarrow 1994).
From this perspective, economic and social crises have been mentioned
as determinants of the emergence and development of radical right move-
ments and mobilizations (Prowe 2004), as well as political instability, al-
lies in power (Koopmans 2005), the legacy of an authoritarian past (Koop-
mans et al. 2005; Mudde 2007, 233–255), youth subcultures and hooligan-
ism (Bjørgo 1995), and the diffusion of xenophobic values within society
(Rydgren 2005, 2012). It remains controversial whether social support for
radical groups decreases or encourages violence (Sageman 2004).2
Among studies focusing on economic aspects, there is the so-called de-
privation school, which relates right-wing extremism to anomie and
poverty, bridging the macro-level socioeconomic features and individual
factors (e.g., Heitmeyer 2002, Perrineau 2002). In this regard, the sense of
insecurity arising from the breakdown of traditional social structures (so-
cial class, family, religion) and the grievances generated in critical eco-
nomic, social, or political conditions brought about by processes of global-
ization and modernization are considered “precipitant” factors favoring
right-wing extremism and the emergence of violent behavior. Similarly,
studies of current right-wing radicals both from political parties and from

473
non-partisan radical right organizations stress that these people are usually
young (often not even eighteen years old), with a lower-class background
and lack of education and professional skills (Merkl 2003).
Difficulties in primary socialization, a result of the weakening of the
sense of family and entrenchment in the community (Merkl 2003), are also
a factor favoring right-wing extremism. However, there is also evidence
that places in question the positive correlation between right-wing extrem-
ism and (low) economic status. For example, the study by Canetti and
Pedahzur (2002) showed that right-wing extremist sentiments were unre-
lated to socioeconomic variables. Similarly, and contrary to common wis-
dom, a comfortable individual situation is found to be more conducive to
radical right party affinity than job insecurity and deprivation (De Weerdt
et al. 2004, 81). In fact, according to Mudde, “populist radical right parties
are supported by people who want to hold on to what they have in the face
of the perceived threats of globalization (i.e. mass immigration and the
post-industrial society)” (2007, 223).
Among the studies that focus on the political macro-level factors of
right-wing extremism, many stress the effects of the institutional frame-
work on the development of the radical right. Right-wing populist politics
is defined not only by idiosyncratic issues orientation, but also by struc-
tural constraints, such as those of the electoral system and the partisan al-
ternatives it affords (Denemark and Bowler 2002). These studies concen-
trate on long-term institutional variables (such as characteristics of the
electoral systems; see Kitschelt 2007; Arzheimer and Carter 2006), as well
as medium-term party-system factors (such as models of party competi-
tion; see van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005; Carter 2005; Kitschelt
1995) and short-term contextual variables (such as immigration levels; see
Lubbers, Scheeper, and Billiet 2000).
Alternatively, there are studies (a minority, as mentioned earlier) that
adopt concepts and hypotheses from social movement studies in order to
understand radical right movements, such as the idea of political opportu-
nity structure (e.g., Arzheimer and Carter 2006; Mudde 2010). This con-
cept, used to explain the mobilization of social movements, refers both to
stable contextual features (such as a country’s institutional framework, the
functional and territorial distribution of powers, and the party system or
form of government) and to dynamic and contingent factors (such as the
shift in the configuration of allies and opposition, new laws, or changes in
power relations) (Tarrow 1994, 85). While open opportunities imply easy
access for new challengers in the political system, the lack (or closing) of

474
these opportunities often culminates in escalation (della Porta 1995).
Koopmans (2005), for example, in a cross-country study of racist and radi-
cal right violence in Europe, argues that this type of extremism seems to be
motivated more by the lack of opportunities (such as through established
political channels of expression) than by the presence of grievances in the
society (such as the presence of immigrants, economic difficulties, etc.).
Similarly, Arzheimer and Carter (2006) examine the influence of political
opportunity structure on right-wing extremist party vote. By adopting a
“three-pronged approach” that focuses on long-term institutional features,
medium-term factors related to the party system, and short-term contextual
factors, they find that the unemployment level, the position of the main
right-wing party, the degree of disproportionality of the electoral system,
and the presence of a grand coalition in government are key factors in the
success of radical right parties across Western Europe.
Other studies focus on the relationship between societal support and vio-
lent right-wing radicalization, stressing that it can move in several direc-
tions, some unexpected. For example, the German “societal consensus”
against right-wing extremism can also be exploited by activists to reinforce
their collective identity by presenting themselves as victims (Caiani, della
Porta, and Wagemann 2012). Indeed, the nation’s sensitivity concerning its
historical past and German guilt have greatly increased the provocative po-
tential of racist and anti-Semitic symbolism (Kersten 2004, 180), some-
thing that can be easily abused by the radical right.
Looking in particular at discursive opportunities, waves of right-wing
violence have been linked to the spreading of values such as extreme na-
tionalism, intolerance, xenophobia, authoritarianism, opposition to the left,
and anti-parliamentarism (Prowe 2004). There are cross-national differ-
ences in the spread of these values. From a historical perspective, cultural
racism is considered today’s substitute for the biological racism of the past
(Wieviorka 2004).
In brief, the main conclusion that we can derive from this section is that
macro-level studies shed light on the contextual preconditions that may
favor the emergence and diffusion of right-wing extremism. However,
such studies could still greatly benefit from greater consideration of low-
scale mechanisms and middle-range political variables capable of provid-
ing a link between these preconditions and individuals.

RADICAL RIGHT NETWORKS

475
While much attention has been paid to why individuals decide to mobilize,
many scholars have concluded that grievances alone are not enough to cre-
ate movements (Buechler 2000). Recent literature has pointed at the com-
bination of underlying motives and social networks as the basis for move-
ment recruitment and the path to popular mobilization (Diani and
McAdam 2003). Social network analysis has been considered particularly
interesting for social movements, which are networks whose formal char-
acteristics have been addressed in the development of theories of collective
behavior (Rosenthal et al. 1985; Snow et al. 1986; McAdam 1988; Fernan-
dez and McAdam 1988; Gould 1993; Diani 2003). In fact, individual and
organizational social networks are important elements in the processes of
collective mobilization, increasing communication and coordination flows
among groups (Diani 2011). They are also considered to influence individ-
ual behavior and readiness to take part in collective action (della Porta and
Diani 2006), as in the case of friendship and family ties, which have been
found to favor political participation, even in radical groups (della Porta
1995).
This holds true for radical right movements as well. The movement’s
very numerous websites have a faithful public, who use the Internet in
order to meet each other, exchange information, mobilize, create fences,
build barriers, and dig trenches (Roversi 2006; Caiani and Wagemann
2009).
In regard to the German radical right, Caldiron notes that a series of bul-
letin board systems connected to the Thule network substantially aided
German neo-Nazi activists as they (successfully) fought against the disso-
lution of many of their groups in the first half of the 1990s, and those sys-
tems allowed the activists to conserve links and connections among them-
selves (Caldiron 2001, 335).
Recent research on about six hundred right-wing political parties and
non-party organizations (including violent groups) in France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States found that more
than one-third of radical right organizations have cross-national and inter-
national contacts through links among their respective websites (Caiani
and Parenti 2013, 67). In addition, all of them engaged in networking on-
line in order to be connected with other radical right organizations (includ-
ing those of different types—for example, political parties and subnational
youth groups) of their own country.
Finally, and most important, the overall configuration of these radical

476
right virtual communities constructed through networks online was differ-
ent in each of the six countries, embodying a different potential mobiliza-
tional structure (Caiani and Parenti 2013, 121). The Italian and British rad-
ical right networks appear to be very fragmented, highly diversified, and
difficult to coordinate, whereas the German network (and in part the
French network) is denser and much more concentrated on a few central
actors (a “star model,” in social network analysis language; Diani 2003).
The Spanish network has a middle position between these two types. The
American network appears even more fragmented and dispersed than the
Italian and British ones, with many isolated organizations (a “segmented-
decentralized” structure; Diani 2003, 312).
These results confirmed that radical right organizations are aware of the
importance of social networking, “with community members effectively
using this online service to make contact with other supporters within their
localities, forming both on- and offline communities and networks in sup-
port of the radical right” (Bowman-Grieve 2009, 1003). Furthermore, the
shape of networks has been connected to the forms of action used by orga-
nizations within a particular social movement sector, being likely to be
more disruptive within highly segmented networks and more moderate
within densely connected networks (Hadden 2008).
Studies that focus on extremist organizations from an organizational
point of view also look at organizational changes. In Germany, for exam-
ple, in the aftermath of the parliamentary decline of the Nation-
aldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party),
non-partisan groups found themselves in constant danger of being banned
by the law, so they dissolved their previous rigid structures and became or-
ganized in rather flexible Kameradschaften, or comradeships (Caiani and
Wagemann 2009). In the United States, the Tea Party and its members
have been found to have a loose, reticular organization, with uneasy rela-
tions with both the Republican Party and radical right groups (Skocpol and
Williamson 2012).
Koopmans and colleagues (2005), in a cross-national study of radical
right discourses, pointed out the importance of organizational characteris-
tics to the groups’ strategic repertoire of action. In particular, they link dif-
ferent organizational forms (more institutional versus more flexible) with
different types of political action (more moderate versus more controver-
sial) (187). Moreover, the presence of a specific organizational form is re-
lated to specific factors, in particular the political space made available by
the position of mainstream political parties on immigration, as well as the

477
electoral strength of radical right parties (195).
Despite the growing importance of the linking practices of extremists
and other groups, including through the Internet (Ackland and Gibson
2005, 1), there is only a limited number of empirical studies on these is-
sues (for an exception, see Caiani and Parenti 2013). Indeed, research on
radical right movement organizations and their networking is still in its in-
fancy (Burris, Smith, and Strahm 2000; Zhou et al. 2005), and the litera-
ture is mainly focused on radical right political parties and electoral cam-
paigns. Furthermore, the few existing studies focusing on radical right
movements and their networks (including online) usually concentrate on
the U.S. case (see Burris, Smith, and Strahm 2000, among others), and
comparative studies are rare.

THE ACTION REPERTOIRE OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

Despite the growing scientific interest in the subject, empirical investiga-

tions into the strategic choices related to the mobilization of right-wing or-
ganizations are still scarce, with few attempts to consider both external
(structural) and internal (organizational) factors (Caiani and Borri 2013).
Research on the radical right has usually focused either on electoral be-
havior or on violent action, with very few occasions for exchanges be-
tween the two fields of research. Studies on political violence and the radi-
cal right have stressed the pathology of these behaviors, and sometimes
even their irrationality. In studies of the individuals involved in extremist
right-wing organizations, deprivation (relative or absolute) has been linked
to psychological disturbances in explaining aggressive behaviors. Right-
wing extremism in particular has been considered an anomic behavior—at
best, a symptom of diffuse grievances. In breakdown theory, radical poli-
tics is explained by the weakening of norm-enforcing institutions (della
Porta and Diani 2006, ch. 1). Looking at past European (and other) history,
the spread of radical right-wing ideas has been linked to rising unemploy-
ment as well as economic crises and, more recently, rapid and large waves
of immigration. From a political point of view, analysts refer to the inca-
pacity to deal with these social conditions, as well as weak (or unstable)
popular and elite support for democracy. This approach resonates with a
mainly quantitative stream of research that has linked macro-level environ-
mental causes (poverty, unemployment, authoritarian regimes, ethnic divi-
sions) to aggregated indicators of political violence.

478
 While this approach has some merit in terms of identifying the general
preconditions for violent behavior, it also has limits. First of all, it focuses
on just one part of radical right action—certainly a relevant component, as
it often has dramatic results, but not the only (or even the most frequent)
type of action. Additionally, research on macro-level conditions or micro-
level behavior tends to leave unanswered the question of the causal mecha-
nisms that intervene between conditions and effects (Coleman 1986). The
social movement approach pays more attention to these mechanisms,
whether explicitly or implicitly. Rarely applied to the analysis of political
violence in the past, this approach has been increasingly used in recent re-
search, mainly in case studies on specific historical instances of radicaliza-
tion of political and social conflicts (see della Porta 2008 for a review),
with some attempts at generalization (Tilly 2003). Even more rarely, social
movement studies have inspired research on the radical right (for excep-
tions, see Koopmans et al. 2005).
A recent study of newspaper accounts of protest events looked at radical
right mobilization in Italy, Germany, and the United States between 2000
and 2006 (Caiani, della Porta, and Wagemann 2012). It showed that, be-
yond violence, the radical right family uses a variegated repertoire of ac-
tions, including conventional political actions (lobbying, electoral cam-
paigns, and press conferences); demonstrative actions (legal actions aim-
ing to mobilize large numbers of people, such as festivals, street demon-
strations, public meetings, and petitions; Gentile 1999, 242); expressive
events (legal actions focusing on right-wing activists and sympathizers, in
order to reinforce in-group cohesion and identity); confrontational actions
(which aim to disrupt official policies or institutions and are therefore usu-
ally illegal, such as blockades, occupations, illegal but nonviolent demon-
strations, and disturbing the meetings of political adversaries; Koopmans
1993, 640); and finally violent actions (illegal action implying some form
of symbolic or physical violence against things or people). In particular,
the study highlighted a clear difference between the more violent mobiliza-
tion of the U.S. radical right and the mix of demonstrative and conven-
tional action used by the Italian and German radical right (Caiani, della
Porta, and Wagemann 2012, 88ff.).
Another study based on interviews with around thirty radical right repre-
sentatives of organizations in Italy and Spain, either parties (Movimento
Sociale Fiamma Tricolore, Fronte Sociale Nazionale, España 2000, etc.),
political movements (Hermandad de la Vieja Guardia, Fascismo e Lib-
ertà), or subcultural groups (CasaPound and Sindicato Universitario

479
Español), held between 2010 and 2011, found that half of the actions and
initiatives initiated by radical right groups and individuals in the two coun-
tries between 2005 and 2009 were violent (41.9 percent), ranging from
acts of “light” violence against people or things (insults; threats to social,
religious, or ethnic minorities; graffiti or slogans in praise of fascism and
Nazism; desecration of Jewish cemeteries) to acts of “heavy” violence (as-
saults against left-wing activists, homosexuals, and immigrants; bomb at-
tacks against political opponents such as trade union offices, squatted so-
cial centers, left-wing parties, or leftist newspapers). However, the remain-
ing actions ranged from identity-building events (such as concerts and
meeting) to demonstrative actions (including boycotts). Moreover, they
showed that the level of radicalism varied according to the type of radical
right group involved. Similarly in Italy and Spain, the most moderate
groups are political parties and movements, whereas subcultural youth and
neo-Nazi groups emerge as the most violent (Caiani and Borri 2013,
566).3
Another assumption imported from social movement research is that
(right-wing) political violence stems from the radicalization of social and
political conflicts. In this sense, it is the product of the interactions of a
number of actors within what organizational sociology calls the organiza-
tional field. Radical right-wing groups interact with similarly ideologically
oriented groups, either grassroots groupings or political parties. They con-
front opponents such as, for example, anti-racist groups or autonomous
squatted centers. They also interact with political institutions, some of
which can be perceived as allies (e.g., right-wing parties), some as adver-
saries. They might collaborate with secret police or have sympathetic sup-
port in the police forces, but they might also violently clash with the police
on the street and be repressed by the courts. A study based on interviews
with radical right activists in Italy and Spain found that in both countries
their strategies of action tended to be more radical when the targets of the
action were political adversaries such as left-wing opponents and immi-
grants (Caiani and Borri 2013, 564).
Moreover, as social movement scholars stress, for right-wing extremist
groups just as for other political actors, the choice of repertoires of action
is influenced by the available political opportunities. Political conditions
influence their behaviors by determining the attitudes of potential allies
and opponents, and therefore the chances of policy success as well as de-
gree and forms of repression. Institutional actors might certify (that is, give
legitimacy to) the groups’ requests and/or values (McAdam, Tarrow, and

480
Tilly 2001). But potential allies can also “decertify” the radical groups,
isolating them and even calling for their repression. In addition, more-sta-
ble conditions—for example, legal provisions for outlawing political
groups, the limitation of speech rights, the tradition of inclusion or stigma-
tization of radical right groups—have direct, structural effects on the radi-
cal right’s chances for survival as well as their forms of action. All of this
confirms the strict connections between “routine politics” and violence to
which scholars of riots as well as underground politics have pointed
(Auyero 2007). The political opportunity approach would suggest that
right-wing organizations are more prone to use radical protest when deal-
ing with closed political opportunities, and less likely to engage in radical
strategies of action when political opportunities are more open (Caiani,
della Porta, and Wagemann 2012, 76). In this respect, the previously men-
tioned study based in Italy, Germany, and the United States found a clear
prominence of violent acts and incidents in the United States in compari-
son to the two European countries. This can be explained by the lack of
radical right-wing parties in the United States that can play a role as insti-
tutional allies for the radical right milieu and channel the radical right mo-
bilization into institutionalized party politics, thus contributing to a moder-
ation of the action repertoires. However, the greater use of violence could
also be related to the availability of material and symbolic resources of the
U.S. radical right groups, which can exploit (including for non-democratic
goals) the high degree of tolerance in the United States toward individual
freedom of expression, even symbols of hate and violence, as well as the
rights linked to the use of firearms. In Germany, however, the greater
stigmatization of the radical right following the historical experience with
Nazism seems to have reduced the propensity toward violent forms of ac-
tion. Finally, the presence of relatively well-rooted and supportive moder-
ate right-wing parties as potential allies and/or more unstable countercul-
tural milieus is considered to have an impact on the organizational strate-
gic choices of right-wing radical groups (see Kersten 2004 on Germany).
For instance, there is evidence that hooliganism can be a fertile recruiting
ground for radical-right activists. Usually (violent) skinheads and other
right-wing activists are organized both in an extremist group and in more
moderate and institutionalized organizations, such as, for example, the
Junge Nationaldemokraten (JN, Young National Democrats), the youth or-
ganization of the NPD in Germany (Wagemann 2005). In fact, after sev-
eral electoral defeats, the NPD has developed close contacts with militant
activists (Heitmeyer 2002). Non-partisan organizations are seen to be suit-
able loci of recruitment for activists, since a formal party organization is

481
less attractive than group life in non-partisan violent organizations (Speit
2004, 19).
Additionally, the different degrees and forms of interactions between
movements and countermovements influence the tactics of the radical right
groups (della Porta 1995). The rare social movement studies concerned
with the radical right have suggested looking at them under the label of
“countermovements.” Countermovements arise in reaction to successes
achieved by social movements, and the two then develop in symbiotic de-
pendence. Even though the concept of countermovement has been criti-
cized as too narrow a frame to account for the complexity of right-wing
social movements, the concept is useful in focusing attention on the con-
flictual interactions between different movement families, which might
lead to a strong sense of conflictuality and the prevalence of a Manichean
view of politics (Klandermans and Mayer 2006; della Porta 1995). More-
over, movements and countermovements tend to imitate each other, recip-
rocally adapting particular tactics and the choice of arenas in which to act
(see, for example, Meyer and Staggenborg 1996).

FRAMING ON THE RADICAL RIGHT

Recent social movement studies have stressed the importance of looking at

cognitive, emotional, and normative aspects of mobilization (della Porta
2015; Fligstein and McAdam 2011). Political opportunities are filtered
through the visions that radical right organizations and individuals have of
them: that is, they define their strategies based on their appreciation of the
potential support they can obtain. In this sense, they are not only struc-
turally given, but also culturally constructed. Cognitive mechanisms are,
therefore, relevant in influencing organizational and individual behavior.
Especially in closed countercultures, such elements as public opinion, po-
tential alliances, and the risks of non-action are filtered through the
group’s construction of external reality. Feelings of injustice, self-percep-
tions by the group, widespread myths, and dominant narratives all affect
the construction of this “imagined” reality. Structural effects are mediated
by the militants’ perceptions of the reality through which their political in-
volvement develops (della Porta 2008).
In addition to cognitive mechanisms, normative mechanisms also play a
role. As the resource mobilization approach has stressed for social move-
ments, apparently anomic behaviors are often governed by inherent norms:
this applies to crowds as well as to such dissimilar forms of political action

482
as social movements and terrorist organizations. Both individuals and or-
ganizations justify their activities within a broader normative system, how-
ever deviant it may be from the society’s most commonly accepted one.
Very often, individuals and organizations appeal to general norms that
they feel have not been implemented, claiming that they act in order to
stand in for institutions they perceive as too weak (Davis 1973).
Indeed, as is the case for any collective actor, radical right organizations
have to motivate individuals to action, providing followers and potential
followers with rationales for participating in and supporting their organiza-
tions (Bjørgo 2004).The main tool for determining the link between indi-
vidual motivations at the micro level and environmental conditions at the
macro level is therefore the analysis of the activists’ perceptions and of the
small-group dynamics that intensify and radicalize their involvement (della
Porta 2015). In order to understand radical politics—like other forms of
politics—it is therefore important to investigate individual and group un-
derstandings of the external reality, as well as their position in it. The con-
cept of “frame” was developed in social movement research to address the
symbolic construction of external reality. Frames can be defined as the
dominant worldviews that guide the behavior of social movement groups.
They are very often produced by the organization’s leadership, which pro-
vides the necessary ideological background within which individual ac-
tivists can locate their actions. The social science literature on frames has
taken two different approaches (Johnston and Noakes 2005). Some authors
focus on individual cognitive processes, analyzing the way in which nor-
mal people try to make sense of what happens by framing events into fa-
miliar categories (see Gamson 1988). Others look instead at the meso or-
ganizational level and consider the instrumental dimension of the symbolic
construction of reality by collective entrepreneurs (Snow and Benford
1988). Frame analysis focuses on the process of the attribution of meaning,
which lies behind any conflict. There are three stages of this process:
recognition of certain occurrences as social problems, possible strategies to
resolve these problems, and motivations for acting on this knowledge.
Snow and Benford (1988) define these steps as the diagnostic, prognostic,
and motivational dimensions of framing.
Group-level analyses (and frames) have to date been relatively ne-
glected in the literature on extremism and political violence, which focuses
in particular on organizations and their dynamics, leaders, ideologies, and
propaganda. Among the works on radical right political parties, there are a
few studies that employ qualitative data sources (such as interviews with

483
party activists) to account for the internal dynamics of right-wing activism
and groups. For example, drawing on 140 interviews with party activists in
different countries, Art (2011) explains the cross-national variation in radi-
cal right electoral support using the dynamics of party building and, in par-
ticular, the ability of radical right parties to recruit through their discourse
and to maintain a moderate and educated membership and leadership.
Other meso-level studies underline the important role of frames and the
framing activity of groups for their maintenance and survival. Theda
Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson (2012) have showed that the activists of
the American Tea Party, often swing voters of the Republican Party, fre-
quently have experience with local associations, often are religious, and
often have very conservative beliefs. Tea Party activists express anxiety
about the Great Recession by despising those who draw public assistance
without deserving it, singling out blacks, Latinos, and especially illegal
immigrants. They favor minimalist state intervention and oppose taxes.
Other main elements of radical right rhetoric include the superiority of one
race (or religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) over others (O’Boyle
2002, 28); racism in terms of “otherness” (Minkenberg 1998, 45); right-
wing activists as “executers of a general will” (Heitmeyer 2002, 525); and
“blood” and “honor” (Wagemann 2005). However, the radical right, in Eu-
rope as in the United States, is a “plural family” (Caldiron 2001), including
various types of organizations that have different ideological tendencies
and that mobilize around different issues. Some of them are characterized
by neofascist or even neo-Nazi positions, while others have reduced their
neofascist aspects to a sort of “right-wing socialism” with anti-globalist
and anti-liberalist traits. They cover a wide range of groups: extreme right
political parties and movement (parties include the Front National in
France, the British National Party [BNP] in the United Kingdom, and the
Movimento Sociale Italiano; movements include the National Alliance in
the United States and the Bloc Identitaire in France),4 neo-Nazi groups
(such as the English Blood and Honour),5 revisionist/negationist and nos-
talgic groups (the Reduci della Repubblica Sociale Italiana),6 cultural right
wing associations,7 publishers and commercial sites (for example, those
selling militaria), and subcultural youth organizations such as skinhead,
music, and sports groups.8 Furthermore, there can be “single-issue extrem-
ists,” groups active on a specific subject, such as anti-abortion or animal-
or environmental- rights extremists (Freilich, Chermak, and Caspi 2009);
examples of single-issue organizations are the English Campaign for a

484
Referendum on Immigration and Stop the Islamification of Europe.9
Finally, beyond the types of groups common to the European countries,
in the American context some additional types of organizations are present
online: white supremacist groups (which endorse neo-Nazi ideology and
favor an authoritarian government), Christian Identity organizations
(which, as mentioned, have strong racist and anti-Semitic positions based
on religious arguments),10 Ku Klux Klan groups (whose main characteris-
tic is support of racial segregation),11 and militia and patriot organizations
(such as the Oklahoma Constitutional Militia), which are often armed
paramilitary groups with anti-government and conspiracy theory as their
core ideology (Freilich, Chermak, and Caspi 2009).12 Despite being re-
ferred to as “far right,” empirically many of these groups are not easily
placed according to traditional political categories, often combining ele-
ments of left-wing and right-wing philosophy with populist language and
rhetoric. In addition, while most far-right social movement organizations
belong to the (non-parliamentary) extreme right rather than to the (parlia-
mentary) radical right, there are exceptions. For example, Patriotische
Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Eu-
ropeans Against the Islamization of the West) is organized as a loose net-
work, with ties among the ultras (organizations of football fans) as well as
in the party system through Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative
for Germany). Some of its leaders, however, were very visible, and used
an aggressive style of language. From the beginning, Pegida’s demonstra-
tions were met by counterdemonstrations that, in most cities, greatly out-
numbered Pegida’s supporters. Surveys at Pegida’s demonstrations indi-
cated that the overwhelming majority of participants were men (80 per-
cent), mostly were between thirty-six and fifty-five years old, mostly were
non-religious (70 percent), had relatively low salaries and educational
level, had a strong propensity toward law and order as well as the defense
of national interests, and were very unhappy with the functioning of
democracy in Germany (Geiges, Marg, and Walter 2015, 66–70). While
the organization presents itself as endorsing non-violence, the presence of
hooligans as well as the radical right at its demonstrations is accepted
(Geiges, Marg, and Walter 2015, 118).
In terms of framing, Pegida called for “European patriots” to protest
against “Islamization” as well as “economic asylum seekers” and Salafists.
While most had formerly voted for the Christian Democrats or the Freie
Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), many participants

485
had voted for AfD in the last elections (Geiger, Marg, and Walter 2015). It
also employs populist framing, in which the mainstream media as well as
the main parties are accused of lying to the people. Core claims include a
new immigration law, direct democracy, and more investment for internal
security. The enemy tends to be defined broadly, including immigrants,
Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Turks, counterdemonstrators, “party democracy,”
and the European Union. The attack on Islam is often justified as being in
defense of Western values, including democracy and freedom. In terms of
action, Pegida used protests in the street, with regular Monday demonstra-
tions that was reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the former Ger-
man Democratic Republic, as was its slogan, “We are the people.” The
first demonstration took place on October 20, 2014, in Dresden, with 350
demonstrators. Attendance at subsequent demonstrations increased
quickly, reaching 15,000 on December 15 and 25,000 on January 12, but
declined after that.
The role of ideology, and in particular political ideology, in current
right-wing movements continues to be somewhat controversial. Indeed,
whereas radical right ideology is clearly identifiable,13 its militants have a
very diffuse idea of politics and are not always politically engaged. Many
studies argue that only a minority of recruits join right-wing extremist
groups because they agree with their ideology and politics, or because
there is some form of political commitment. For example, in most cases
young people do not join racist groups because they are racists, but instead
gradually adopt racist views because they have become part of a racist
group. New recruits are usually not particularly concerned about politics or
ideological content, but frequently have vague feelings of hostility against
foreigners (Bjørgo 1997). Enticements to join violent right-wing groups,
such as access to alcohol, the martial physicality they embrace, and—very
important—right-wing hate music, are far more centrally motivating than
political ideology (Merkl 2003). The desire to belong to a group also plays
an important role (the “protection factor”; see Bjørgo 2005).
Other studies underline the role played by political entrepreneurs (the
leaders of the organizations), who exploit the violent attitudes of the ac-
tivists and provide them with the necessary ideological justifications. Be-
cause right-wing extremists generally dehumanize their enemies, attacks
on targeted groups such as black people or enclaves of foreign workers (in
Europe) are justified by their ideology. Griffin (2003), in an article about
acts of political violence in which participants risk death, postulates three
distinct forms of political fanaticism that can lead to suicidal behavior: the

486
fanaticism of politicized religions, the fanaticism of political religions, and
the fanaticism of “the loner” (87). The role played by the need to “sacral-
ize” life appears to be of crucial importance in all three forms. Activists
can fall back on ideological frames provided by political entrepreneurs and
use these frames to choose their victims (Heitmeyer 2002). Thus, a very
dangerous mixture of radical ideology and violent attitudes emerges:
“There is an overlap between the ideological orientation of the [ideologues
of political right-wing extremism] and the willingness of [intoxicated
members of youth gangs] to select objects of attack that meet [the re-
quired] ideological distinction” (Zimmermann 2003, 231).

CONCLUSION

There has been in recent years a revival of research on the radical right.
Although offering important knowledge, this wave of research has been
selective, focusing especially on radical right parties. In general, research
on the (non-party) radical right has followed a “breakdown” approach,
identifying societal, political, and cultural dysfunctions and pathologies as
causal preconditions for the growth of the radical right. Explanations for
the electoral success of the populist right have stressed frustration in re-
sponse to economic distress, massive migration, and economic globaliza-
tion. This frustration is perceived as bringing about fear and rage, which is
then channeled toward radical parties. In essence, these explanations favor
anomie as the basis of xenophobic scapegoating.
Recent research has also characterized the radical right as a successful
social movement of “losers of globalization” (Kriesi et al. 2008). Reac-
tions to globalization take different forms: “The radical left opposition to
the opening up of the border is mainly an opposition to economic liberal-
ization and to the threat it poses to the left’s achievement at the national
level. The populist right’s opposition to the opening up of the borders is
first of all an opposition to the social and cultural forms of competition and
the threat they pose to national identity” (18). The success of the radical
right in mobilizing these “losers” is often cited as the reason parties have
shifted their focus from the economic dimension in the 1970s to the cul-
tural one today (265).
In this chapter, borrowing some of the main concepts of social move-
ment studies, we started with the observation that grievances alone are not
sufficient to explain either the radical right mobilization or its characteris-
tics. The understanding of these mobilization processes requires us to con-

487
sider the availability of resources to be mobilized and of actors that mobi-
lize them, as well as the opening of political and discursive opportunities.
In order to understand the development of social movements of the radical
right, we have therefore to look at their cognitive framing, their repertoires
of action, and their capacity for networking.

488
NOTES

1. Many URLs of the Radical Right organizations constantly appear and

disappear, since they are monitored by authorities and closed. They
often are re-opened again under different names. Therefore it is possi-
ble that some URLs active at the time of the analysis are not existing
anymore at their previous web address. However, the identity and
name of the groups remain the same, therefore it can be easy to search
their new websites browsing the Web.
2. For details about these specific dimensions of the political and cultural
opportunities for the extreme right, see Koopmans et al. 2005, Mudde
2007. Other important aspects commonly considered as part of the
POS and COS for right-wing groups are the presence of allies in
power (e.g., center-right parties) and nostalgic attitudes toward fascist
or Nazi regimes.
3. In this category are usually found those groups that define themselves
as political parties or movements and that openly partake in political
activities, such as elections, political debates, and policy issues (Ca-
iani, della Porta, and Wagemann 2012). Close to these types of radical
right organizations are also youth organizations related to parties and
political journals, magazines, and reviews.
4. These organizations refer to the Third Reich and are apologists for
Hitler and the German National Socialist ideology. Their websites, for
instance, contain Nazi symbols and references to the purity of the
Aryan race and racial hatred.
5. The main characteristics of the revisionist and “negationist” groups
are historical revisionism and Holocaust denial, a proposal to rewrite
history, and documentation of the crimes of communism. These
groups refer to the twenty years of Fascist regime in Italy and the Salò
Republic and are apologists for Benito Mussolini. The main difference
between these and neofascist/neo-Nazi groups is that the former do
not refer to contemporary political events. Holocaust denial groups are
particularly present in the U.S. case.
6. These extreme right organizations can be divided into two subgroups:
traditional cultural associations, on one hand, and “new age” and
“neo-mystic” groups, for example the Italian group Sodalizio del Cer-
chio Antico, on the other. The latter are characterized by their frequent

489
 reference to Celtic mythology or a kind of new spiritualism that chal-
lenges the official Christian religion (Caiani and Parenti 2013).
7. These groups are characterized by music (which they define as “antag-
onistic”) and sport as their main interests, and their sites often include
fascist or Nazi symbols or symbols taken from Celtic mythology. Con-
tacts between skinheads and soccer hooligan groups are very frequent
in some European countries (e.g., in Italy). In Germany, there is the
specific category Kameradschaften, organizations with a flexible
structure whose classification between neo-Nazi and skinhead groups
is controversial.
8. These websites are racist and anti- Semitic, advocating violence as a
strategy to achieve their goals.
9. http://www.referendum.1hwy.com and the SIOE website, http://
sioeengland.wordpress.com.
10. See http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Christian_Identity.asp?LEARN_
Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&
xpicked=4&item=Christian_ID.
11. These websites are racist and anti- Semitic, advocating violence as a
strategy to achieve their goals.
12. In order to make the categories of extreme right organizations compa-
rable across our countries, in the following analyses we have grouped
the KKK and Christian Identity groups in the category “cultural orga-
nizations,” militia and patriot groups in the category “nationalists,”
and white supremacists in “political movements.”
13. Its ideological cores are nationalism, xenophobia, anti-establishment
critiques, and sociocultural authoritarianism (law and order, family
values) (Mudde 2007).
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CHAPTER 18

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 YOUTH AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS
THE relationship between youth and the radical right is a particularly criti-
cal intersection to understand. Scholars are in significant agreement that
political attitudes form during adolescence and early adulthood and tend to
persist over time. Thus political attitudes developed during youth may
have lifelong consequences for future political values and behavior
(Siedler 2011, 175). This fact makes it all the more surprising that there
has been so little definitive scholarship on why youth engage in the radical
right (Mudde 2014), despite a long history of youth political support for
far right parties, participation in formal youth groups such as the Hitler
Youth, and engagement in far right subcultures. There has been a wealth of
scholarship on voter behavior and populist support for far right-wing par-
ties in recent years, including research that traces youth voting patterns and
predictors of right-wing political party affinity among youth (see, e.g.,
Siedler 2011) in both national and cross-national contexts. Some of this re-
search has pointed out that youth are more likely than adults to support far
right-wing parties (Mieriņa and Koroļeva 2015; Arzheimer 2009). But as
Cas Mudde (2014) points out, most youth do not vote at all, and voter be-
havior studies can include only youth who are of voting age. Moreover, re-
searchers often define “youth” for empirical purposes as those between
eighteen and thirty-five years old—within which the main voter support
for far right parties comes from those between twenty-five and thirty-five
(Mudde 2014, 4). Taken together, these restrictions mean that the samples
from which conclusions are drawn about youth support for far right parties
are rather limited. Younger adolescents—who can’t vote—as well as youth
who choose not to vote are necessarily left out of these analyses. While
such studies provide useful indications, they cannot be understood as rep-
resentative data about youth support for far right parties in general.
Moreover, most youth engage in the far right not through formal voting
but through engagement in extreme and radical far right subcultures
(Mudde 2014, 5), which is also where the locus of far right youth violence
is centered. While not all far right youth engage in violence, young people
are more likely than adults to engage in far right violence and are dispro-
portionately the perpetrators of anti-immigrant, xenophobic, racist, and
other far right attacks. There has been significant interest in studying far
right youth subcultures, from far right music scenes to skinhead gangs and
soccer hooligans. Much of this work comes from disciplines such as an-

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thropology and sociology and relies on small, in-depth case studies and
ethnographies of groups within one particular city or region, which can
make broader generalizations more challenging, particularly across na-
tional and cultural contexts. However, there are some trends that appear
consistently across a variety of smaller case studies, including the embed-
dedness of the far right’s allure in issues such as a desire to belong to a
group and a desire to rebel against mainstream society, as I discuss below.
However, more research is clearly needed.
Part of what makes definitive explanations of youth engagement in the
far right difficult is that studies offer contradictory explanations, drawing
on evidence gathered for varying age ranges of youth, youth in different
countries, or youth engaged in formal political parties versus subcultural
scenes. What is clear is that youth engagement in the far right is driven by
a combination of structural conditions and cultural factors.1 While most
explanations for far right engagement tend to focus on either structural or
cultural elements, in this chapter I will argue that the most compelling ex-
planations are ones that show how both facets work together to attract
youth to far right political parties, organizations, movements, subcultures,
and scenes. For example, I suggest that youth who experience structural
conditions such as economic uncertainty are made more vulnerable to far
right parties’ and groups’ rhetoric in part because they find cultural ele-
ments such as the desire to belong and the desire to resist mainstream au-
thority more appealing. In the following sections, I first attempt to define
the terms “youth” and “radical right” and then turn to a discussion of vari-
ous structural and cultural factors that offer explanatory value for far right
youth political engagement and voting behavior as well as their cultural
engagement in far right subcultural scenes. I conclude by highlighting a
more limited set of scholarship that has pointed to ways in which structural
and cultural factors mutually reinforce one another to strengthen the appeal
of the far right, particularly for youth.

DEFINING TERMS

The parameters of both terms—“youth” and the “radical right”—need

specification. While the term “youth” is sometimes used in reference to
younger children as well as to adults in their early thirties, I define “youth”
as encompassing the period of life from early adolescence through the
mid- to late twenties, in part because this is the primary period in which
political attitudes develop and emerge (Siedler 2011). At the early end of

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this phase, youth are just beginning to experience greater freedom of
movement from parents and other authorities. At the latter end, most youth
are transitioning into financial independence, working, or training/studying
full-time for future careers. During this decade of life, young people de-
velop more independent political ideas, experience romantic and dating re-
lationships, and often find peer and friendship groups to be at least as im-
portant to their daily lives as their familial relationships, if not more so. It
is also a phase when their individual and collective identities are develop-
ing and changing, as they come into contact with new people and friends,
learn more about their communities and worlds, and navigate complex sets
of expectations from the cultural worlds of their peers, families, and
broader communities.
Defining the radical right is a somewhat more complex endeavor. There
is significant variation in how the far right wing is understood across coun-
tries, in part because of different historical and legal contexts—for exam-
ple, Germany distinguishes legally between right-wing radicalism and
right-wing extremism, but this is not always the case elsewhere. Most re-
search publications on the far right establish a definition for the term right
at the outset, but these definitions vary across disciplines and national con-
texts. Moreover, the labels are often ideologically laden (e.g., some use the
term “hate groups,” but far right wing groups often position others as the
“haters”) (Shafer 2002, 84) and often heavily contested.
In this chapter, I follow Rydgren’s definition (Chapter 1 in this volume)
of the radical right as consisting of a subset of right-wing extremism that is
hostile to democratic governance or constitutions but not necessarily ac-
tively opposed to democracy per se (also see Mudde 2000). However, be-
cause it is often difficult to distinguish between right-wing radicalism and
right-wing extremism in practice and because there is tremendous cross-
national variation in what constitutes the “radical” right, I rely on the term
“far right” as a way of referencing attitudes, scenes, groups, and political
parties that espouse some combination of xenophobic, anti-democratic, au-
thoritarian, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-government, fascist, homo-
phobic, ethnonationalist, or racist values, beliefs, actions, and goals. “Far
right” thus encompasses a wide range of groups, including populist and
Euroskeptic political parties, parts of the U.S. Christian right, the Tea
Party movement, patriot groups, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups,
right-wing terrorist cells such as Germany’s National Socialist Under-
ground, “lone wolf” terrorists such as Norway’s Anders Behring Brevik or
the United States’ Wade Michael Page, and the newly defined “alt-right.”

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 In sum, I regard far right youth as youth who are either actively engaged
or quietly supportive of nationalist or exclusionary platforms that seek to
maintain or restore national ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1990) to reflect an
idealized community based on racial, ethnic, linguistic, or national criteria.
Far right American youth, for example, include youth who are white or
Aryan nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, racist skinheads, and members
of anti-government patriot militias or hate groups as well as youth who ex-
press views consistent with these groups—on social media, for example—
even if they are not formal members. While I have settled on the term “far
right,” however, it is important to acknowledge that explanations for far
right engagement have to be contextualized within a broad spectrum and
with an understanding that scholars lack full agreement on what the “far
right” actually is. For analytical purposes in this chapter, I use the terms
“far right” and “radical right” interchangeably except where otherwise in-
dicated.
Finally, it is important to note that far right youth identity is not clearly
bounded or monolithic. Adolescence and early adulthood are key phases of
identity formation, during which youth may move in and among various
subcultural communities, engaging in contradictory actions or espousing
conflicting identities and differences between what they do in public and
what they say in private. Change also occurs rapidly for this age group;
youth voter behavior in one election may not predict future behavior in the
next election, and youth engagement in subcultural scenes during early
adolescence may not persist into adulthood.
In my own research with German youth, I have found it most accurate to
speak of youth who are in and around the far right scene, which acknowl-
edges that youth move in and out of various subcultural scenes in experi-
mental and playful ways, shifting from core to periphery and back again.
Sometimes these shifts take place over years, and sometimes the contradic-
tions are apparent even in the course of a single interview. Scholars have
long understood identities to be fluid, complex, and contradictory, with
boundaries that are porous rather than fixed (Benhabib 2002). Identifica-
tion with far right scenes is no different. However, even if they are experi-
mental or contradictory, identities and actions can be dangerous and harm-
ful, particularly when they originate in scenes where violence against oth-
ers is valorized, celebrated, or encouraged, as is the case with many far
right youth subcultural scenes and groups. Acknowledging that youth in
the far right have flexible engagements in far right scenes does not there-
fore imply that those engagements are any less consequential or worthy of

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intervention.

STRUCTURAL EXPLANATIONS

Structural explanations for radical behavior or attitudes typically argue that

individuals’ positions within the social structure or the conditions and situ-
ations that shape their lives explain their political viewpoints and their en-
gagement in far right movements, scenes, or parties. Youth reactions to so-
cietal insecurity are particularly central in this regard, whether experienced
through economic strain or through demographic and social change. Indi-
vidual factors such as family socialization, gender, and peer groups also
play a significant role.

ECONOMIC STRAIN

Perhaps the most dominant structural explanation relates to issues of eco-

nomic stress, arguing that economic downturns, depressions, and reces-
sions make youth particularly susceptible to far right extremism or radical-
ism or contribute to anti-immigrant attitudes. While most of the empirical
work does not distinguish between youth and older adults on this point,
there are exceptions. Bay and Bleksaune’s (2014) cross-national analysis
of the effects of being unemployed on young people’s political marginal-
ization found that in general, both employed and unemployed youth were
not very interested in politics at all, and that unemployed youth were “less
interested than the little-interested employed youth” (32). More recently,
Siedler’s (2011) research on the German case found that youth’s own un-
employment is not related to their identification with a far right party—
rather, it is the experience of growing up with an unemployed parent that
matters. The effect is stronger among sons than daughters and is especially
strong for youth living in eastern, rather than western, Germany. The rela-
tionship even has a negative effect for youth in western Germany, where
youth who are unemployed are less likely to support far right parties
(Siedler 2011, 754). However, youth who “express economic worries” are
more likely to identify with an extreme right-wing party. Siedler also
found a gendered effect: young women who are worried about their eco-
nomic situation are more likely to express right-wing views. In other
words, while unemployment itself does not predict youth far right party
identification in Germany, a sense of economic insecurity does.
There is a wealth of additional research on related areas, such as what

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scholars call the “relative deprivation” thesis (the extent to which individu-
als are deprived of the successes they had anticipated achieving), whether
far right voters are “losers” of postindustrial modernization, and the “eth-
nic competition” thesis, in which far right wing anger stems from a sense
of competition with immigrants for scarce resources, jobs, or marital part-
ners (Rydgren 2007). But arguments in these areas have been made for
general populations rather than differentiating across generations or co-
horts within or across countries.

DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Arguments about the role of economic worries for far right youth engage-
ment are paralleled by arguments grounded in how youth navigate social
change related to immigration and migration, globalization, and cultural
homogenization. The argument is that individuals’ far right engagement is
motivated by their sense of perceived threat to traditional societal norms
and values or based on xenophobic, anti-Islam, or anti-migrant attitudes
(see, e.g., Goodwin, Cutts, and Janta-Lipinski 2016). Some scholars di-
rectly connect the issue of economic insecurity to issues of racism or xeno-
phobia by arguing that economic uncertainty and crisis make calls for na-
tionalism, homogeneity or xenophobia, and order or authoritarianism more
appealing (Katsourides 2013, 569). Although Katsourides’s work on the
Cyprus case and other work in this vein is not directed exclusively to
youth populations, research on the structural conditions for the general
population is especially relevant for youth because young people in parts
of Europe have been disproportionately affected by recent economic
downturns.
Like work on economic insecurity, research on the role of demographic
and social change has not been universally clear, in part because of varia-
tion across national contexts. Several studies have shown connections be-
tween youth engagement in far right groups and attitudes that are ethno-
centric, xenophobic, Islamophobic, or racist, such as van der Valk’s (2014)
research in the Netherlands, which found that ethnic prejudice is more im-
portant than political ideas in motivating youth to engage with extreme
right-wing movements. But others have taken care to point out that such
attitudes are found across generations, even if youth are more likely to en-
gage in violence on the basis of those attitudes (Lööw 2014). Variation
across and within countries also makes generalization on these points diffi-
cult. Mieriņa and Koroļeva (2015), for example, show that youth from

503
post-socialist settings, along with Greek youth, hold stronger anti-immi-
grant and xenophobic attitudes compared with youth in other West Euro-
pean countries. However, they found strong variation within individual
countries as well, making cross-national comparisons complicated.
It is also important to understand that youth attitudes on issues of social
change vary from those of their older adult counterparts in important ways
that also map onto the strategies far right and populist parties are using to
recruit voters. For example, while far right parties have traditionally posi-
tioned themselves against changing societal and legal norms around the le-
galization of same-sex marriage, the expansion of abortion rights, or rising
single parenthood, there has been a recent change in strategy among far
right parties on this point. Specifically, some far right parties have recently
actively positioned themselves as pro-LGBTQ rights as a strategy to dif-
ferentiate so-called Western norms and values from Islamic ones (Spier-
ings et al. 2017). By positioning themselves as pro–gay rights, far right
parties aim to appear more modern as they situate this position as against a
“perceived Islamic threat” (Spierings et al. 2017, 216). While the strategy
is too new for there to be evidence yet on the relative effectiveness of this
strategy for youth mobilization, given the strength of support for LGBTQ
rights among younger generations, it stands to reason that this particular
strategy may appeal to youth voters.
More broadly, it is clear that youth and adult attitudes toward all kinds
of social changes—including rising immigration and diversity—are af-
fected by broader societal institutions or global events, such as legal bans
of political parties, symbols, and groups; extraordinary acts of terror and
violence; domestic crime; and the growth and visibility of far right politi-
cal parties. Again here, however, researchers have not consistently ex-
plained whether there is variation between youth and adults in their sam-
ples. For example, Durso and Jacobs (2013) show that hate group presence
increases when street crime increases, because racist groups have “suc-
cessfully harnessed” the public’s resentment against minority group crimi-
nal activity (140). But they do not specify whether youth are more likely
than adults to join those hate groups. Other explanations for far right en-
gagement and attitudes that fall within this category of “societal insecu-
rity” include the rise of Islamophobia following incidences of Islamist ter-
rorism or the rise of racism and anti-government patriot groups after the
election of the first African American president in the United States in
2008. The rise in anti-migrant, anti-refugee, and Islamophobic rhetoric in
Germany following the mass sexual assaults in Cologne and other German

504
cities is another good example. The far right wing becomes more attractive
when the broader social and political environment is saturated with anti-
immigrant or Islamophobic rhetoric, and youth are presumably no less im-
mune to such rhetoric than adults, although more research is needed in
order to demonstrate this empirically.

INDIVIDUAL BACKGROUND

Youth are not only attracted to the far right because of external economic
and social conditions; we also know that some combination of individual,
family, and peer group characteristics can be predictors of racist and xeno-
phobic attitudes or make individuals more likely to engage in violence or
hold extreme political positions. Several scholars have documented gender
as a consistent predictor of far right wing political support, for example
(Gigengil et al. 2005). Other situational characteristics are known to have
predictive value, such as region of residence within a given country, ances-
try, and type of community. For example, in Canada, research has shown
that individuals were more likely to vote for the Canadian Alliance if they
were from the west of Canada, were men of northern European ancestry,
or were rural women (Gigengil 2005, 1183).
Siedler’s analysis of youth voter behavior in Germany shows a strong
effect among youth living in western Germany whose parents express
affinity with a right-wing party: such youth are significantly more likely
(35 percentage points higher) to support far right wing parties (Siedler
2011, 756). Youth who grew up with a single mother are also more likely
than those from two-parent families to support far right wing parties. As
Siedler argues, his findings “suggest that family events during childhood
such as the experience of life with a single mother or the experience of
jobless parents are more important than household income in determining
adult children’s far right-wing party affinities” (756). However, other re-
search has shown that families play a complicated role in the development
of youth political attitudes and engagements. While previous theorists had
consistently posited that social marginalization or authoritarian family
background underpinned youth engagement in right-wing extremism (see,
e.g., Heitmeyer 1988, 1999; Heitmeyer et. al. 1992), more recent work has
challenged this premise. For example, Thomas Gabriel’s (2014) work trac-
ing the life narratives of far-right extremist youth in Switzerland shows
clearly that youth’s racist attitudes are not simply passed down across gen-
erations. Family background matters, but it appears that growing up in an

505
environment of parental non-attention, absences, and lack of communica-
tion interacts with parental or family members’ political orientations and
attitudes in important ways. As Gabriel writes, the common ground across
youth biographies “consists of a lack of significant adults who are visible,
and can thus be experienced, through their interaction and affective sym-
pathy for the adolescent” (44).
Other research has suggested that anomie and isolation play a role in
how young men in particular express anger through the far right. Isolated,
angry young men who are not socially integrated would thus be more
likely to engage in far right wing violence (similar to explanations of
school shootings in the United States). However, as Rydgren (2007, 247)
explains, this explanation has largely fallen out of favor in the face of
strong evidence that far right activity is strongest in socially strong com-
munities and that far right wing party members are not particularly isolated
or asocial. Other explanations that fall into this category include the role of
young people’s military experience or time in prison (in the United States
in particular, through the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang) as an entry
point for right wing extremism during formative experiences in early
adulthood (see, e.g., Simi, Bubolz, and Hardman 2013).
Taken together, research on predictors of far right engagement has
shown that certain individual traits and characteristics, such as region, par-
enting style and involvement, or experience in authoritarian institutions,
make certain youth more likely to find far right wing rhetoric and argu-
ments compelling. In sum, along with the scholarship described above,
which shows that insecurities brought about by the economy or social
change can underpin far right and radical right youth engagement, it is
clear that structural factors are critical in creating conditions under which
youth are attracted to the far right in at least three ways. First, we see that
youth who are marginalized from traditional measures of economic suc-
cess or who are experiencing economic crises or youth underemployment
may be susceptible to the rhetoric of radical right parties and leaders. Re-
search has been consistent in showing that it is not actual unemployment
that matters most in this regard, but rather the experience of economic
strain or insecurity, whether through the experience of growing up with a
jobless parent or through worrying about one’s own economic future. Sec-
ond, we know that societal insecurity brought on by rapidly changing de-
mographics or societal norms and identity as well as specific global, local,
and national events—such as 9/11 or the 2015 Paris attacks—serves as a
catalyst to far right and radical right wing engagement. The broader social

506
climate also plays a role; we see bumps in radical right participation fol-
lowing rises in domestic crime and when far right political parties become
more visible and vocal. Finally, scholarship has identified specific per-
sonal and individual characteristics that make youth from certain kinds of
social backgrounds more likely to espouse radical right views. For many
countries, men, rural youth, youth who experienced authoritarian back-
grounds, and youth who were incarcerated or in the military are all at
higher risk compared to other groups. Parental involvement (or non-in-
volvement) and home environments also play a role. Overall, these struc-
tural conditions contribute to environments in which youth become more
receptive to radical right rhetoric, but they don’t offer a complete explana-
tion for youth engagement in the far right. To fully understand the attrac-
tiveness of the far right, we have to situate these structural conditions
within an analysis of cultural factors.

CULTURAL FACTORS

Although most analyses of youth engagement in radical and extremist

movements continue to focus on structural explanations for radicalization
and engagement, there is growing awareness that cultural factors play a
significant role, perhaps even more significant than structural ones. Specif-
ically, I argue that far right youth engagement is motivated by a combina-
tion of what I call cultural push and pull factors. On the one hand, youth
are drawn to a sense of belonging and identity that they gain from engage-
ment with formal far right groups and subcultures, in part through perfor-
mances and articulations of masculinity and male comradeship. On the
other hand, youth are attracted to far right, radical, and extremist groups as
a space to express anger, rebellion, and resistance against the mainstream.
The valorization of violence is threaded through both push and pull fac-
tors: both expressions of male comradeship (expressed, for example,
through a sense that one’s mates or peers “have my back”) and expressions
of anger against others (immigrants, authorities, etc.) frequently directly
invoke or evoke physical violence. Both elements are a key part of far
right and right-wing extremist music, for example—which is the aspect of
far right subculture that experts believe is the primary entry point for most
youth (Mudde 2014, 7).

BELONGING AND COMRADESHIP

507
Research has consistently shown that youth propensity to join far right
groups, movements, and subcultures is driven in no small part by their de-
sire to belong to a group (Kimmel 2014; van der Valk 2014). Scholarship
in this area has largely focused on the role of national identity and nation-
alist fantasies, the role of peer groups, peer pressure and friendship net-
works, mechanisms of in-group belonging and group cohesion, and the
role of masculinity and hypermasculine aspects of the far right (Miller-
Idriss 2009, 2017a).
Recent work has included, for example, Pete Simi’s (forthcoming) work
on the performance of violent talk, Köhler and Speransky’s (forthcoming)
work on the use of humor in the far right, and my own work on nationalist
myths, fantasies, and commercialized symbols (Miller-Idriss 2017b; also
see Rydgren 2007 on myths and fantasies) as well as broader scholarship
on the far right music scene and the impact of racist and xenophobic lyrics
on recruitment and radicalization. Explanations in these areas of research
tend to center around emotion (Pilkington 2016) and the desire for a sense
of belonging, identity, and what Roger Griffin labels “rootedness,” com-
bined with “a sense of harmony with the world,” a “feeling that your life
makes a difference,” and a sense of satisfaction from participating in
“some event or process larger than oneself” (Griffin 2008b, 75). Stephanie
Dechezelles (2014) argues that far right Italian youth organizations all in-
clude a “teleological project concerning the ideal society” that is linked to
legendary ideas related to national roots, origins, and martyrs (52–54).
Georg Schuppener (2007, 97) argues that the public display of symbols
using nationalist mythological references “facilitates the production and
propagation of identity and a feeling of belonging to the group.” In my
own work I have argued that the nationalist elements of far right wing
symbols may take on a stronger appeal for youth who are negotiating
rapidly transforming demographic landscapes. Far right engagement thus
not only is about expressions of hatred against others but also is a way of
achieving belonging and membership and finding a sense of security and
stability while navigating postmodern uncertainty.
Related work has traced the connections between groups transnation-
ally, arguing that there is a growth in a kind of transnational nationalism
through the emergence of what George Michael calls “a new pan-Aryan
identity based on race and civilization that transcends national borders”
(2009, 56). Many neo-Nazi groups cross-nationally, for example, draw on
at least a few of the same codes and symbols in their print and online ma-
terials, in music lyrics, in commercial products, and in organizational

508
logos. This speaks to the transnational dimensions of young people’s
meaning systems—to the potential for shared national(ist) meanings to
cross boundaries and borders and emerge as global meanings (a process
that we might expect to increase in the face of globalization’s ongoing ac-
celeration).
Other identity-based explanations have focused on gender and the role
of gendered identities and norms around masculinity as they relate to far
right engagement (Miller-Idriss and Pilkington 2017). Men have been
widely documented to be more engaged than women in far right-wing
movements and to be more likely to vote for far right parties (Gigengil et
al. 2005). A wide variety of explanations exists for this discrepancy, rang-
ing from gendered differences in a variety of beliefs and values, such as
traditional morality or anti-immigrant attitudes (Gigengil et al. 2005; also
see Pilkington and Miller-Idriss 2017) to a focus on the role of masculinity
and hypermasculinity and the pressure that males—particularly adoles-
cents—feel to conform to scripted ideals about appropriate masculine be-
havior (Pascoe 2007; Way 2011). Historical analyses have also focused on
the role that idealized masculinity played in youth support for Nazism, as
Brewster and Brewster (2014) point out, explaining how ideas about man-
hood and “youthful vigour” shaped ideas about masculinity that aligned
with notions of fierce, patriotic loyalty displayed by warriors in the nation
(695). Other scholars have also pointed out the importance of the far
right’s hegemonic masculinity for male youth engagement in the scene
(Pilkington, Garifzianova, and Omel’chenko 2010; Kimmel 2014; Miller-
Idriss 2017b).
Finally, there is some work on far right-wing subcultures, music, and
groups that suggests that the consumption and display of “lifestyle ele-
ments” such as tattoos, symbols, coded clothing and clothing styles, and
far right music may have a constitutive role in far right youth engagement.
Bourdieu (1984) perhaps most famously argues that one’s “taste” for par-
ticular kinds of clothing or other products helps create and convey social
meaning. Subcultural styles thus not only reflect identities but also may be
facilitators of particular kinds of social relationships and lifestyles (Aron-
czyk and Powers 2010) and may thus have autonomous explanatory power
for the construction of individual and group identities. Relatedly, beyond
the sheer emotional pull of group belonging and solidarity with peers
(Omel’chenko 2010), the simple, fun nature of house parties, music, and
the use of alcohol (Simi and Futrell 2010) play important roles.
Most of these identity-based explanations rest on an understanding of

509
identity as a major source of meaning and social integration. Belonging to
a group with a shared sense of purpose, in this line of thinking, helps
young people navigate the disorientation of (post)modernity and gives
them a sense that they are part of something larger, stronger, and more
powerful than themselves (Watts 2001). But to the extent that such groups
have strict criteria for belonging and espouse exclusionary, racist, and
xenophobic views of nationality, they may also help serve as incubators
for further radicalization into extremist scenes or ideologies.

RESISTANCE AND REBELLION

A second set of cultural explanations for far right wing engagement has fo-
cused less on mechanisms of social integration through identity and be-
longing and more on mechanisms of social isolation. In this set of explana-
tions, far right engagement is driven in part by anger and a rejection of so-
cietal norms or of mainstream society and its institutions through breaking
taboos or lashing out against a system that is perceived as corrupt or as
having “failed” an individual. Scholars have argued that youth engagement
in the far right is driven in part by a desire to rebel or lash out (Van der
Valk 2014). The recent work of Simi and colleagues on military experi-
ence and far right terrorism, for example, examines the fact that a dispro-
portionate number of convicted far right extremists in the United States
possess military experience (Simi, Bubolz, and Hardman 2013). Through
in-depth analysis of a number of individual cases, they find that during the
transition to far right terrorism from far right extremism, individuals de-
velop a political framing of their own personal experiences, “reframing
personal failure as ‘unfair betrayal’ resulting from a corrupt system” (657).
In their research, the experience of involuntary exit from the military cre-
ated significant anger toward an “unjust system” (660) and helped facili-
tate individuals’ radicalization process toward far right terrorism. This is
not a straightforward formula; rather, they find that “anger finds greater
focus after the person begins affiliating with similarly situated individuals”
(662).
Related research has suggested that far right wing participation—partic-
ularly for young people—is a mode of resistance and cultural subversion.
Social movement research has demonstrated, for example, that social
spaces and social movement “scenes” can aid in enacting and expressing
countercultural and oppositional cultures (Poletta 2001; Leach and Haunss
2009; Goodwin and Jasper 2004; Futrell and Simi 2004). I have argued in

510
the German case, for example, that the deployment of coded, commercial-
ized symbols in brands such as Thor Steinar, which are popular with the
far right, may be a conduit of youth resistance to a perceived pressure to
conform to societal expectations about what youth should be (Wallace and
Kovacheva 1996). For example, elsewhere I detail several ways in which
far right wing youth in Germany deploy images and references to death
(Miller-Idriss 2017b) as aggressive displays that provoke fear, anxiety, and
horror by threatening or even terrifying viewers. The use of death symbols
is also a countercultural move against prevailing societal and cultural
norms and taboos that render death silent and invisible. This would support
van der Valk and Wagenaar’s (2010) findings that the extreme right is “a
place of excitement, provocation and violence” for youth. In sum, explana-
tions rooted in resistance, rejection, and anger suggest that far right wing
engagement may be for some a form of youth protest or an expression of
anger against mainstream society and its institutions (Shoshan 2016).
Of course, these culturally based explanations—that far right engage-
ment is explained by issues of identity and belonging or by issues of rebel-
lion and resistance—are not mutually exclusive. Far right wing engage-
ment may well simultaneously be a strategy through which emotional and
oppositional resistance is expressed and identification with peers is fos-
tered.
More generally, many explanations for far right youth engagement are
most compelling when they are linked together, either pairing structural or
situational explanations with cultural ones or using cultural explanations to
provide additional nuance to the mechanisms through which certain struc-
tural predictors work. I have come to think of these kinds of explanations
as “blended explanations,” which I discuss in further detail below.

BLENDED EXPLANATIONS: HOW STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS

AND CULTURAL FACTORS WORK TOGETHER

The work of Pete Simi and his colleagues, discussed above, illustrates how
a cultural factor can offer nuance to a situational and structural predictor
(e.g., involuntary exit from the military) by disentangling the dynamics
and mechanisms through which that predictor works. In this particular
case, Simi, Bubolz, and Hardman show how prior military experience and
in particular the experience of involuntary exit from the military acts to
disrupt some individuals’ military identity and creates an uncertain future
and anger toward a system that has failed him/her (Simi, Bubolz, and

511
Hardman 2013, 664). Thus, cultural explanations have in part aimed to un-
pack the mechanisms, dynamics, and processes through which some of the
structural predictors actually work.
Other examples of blended explanations connect structuralist explana-
tions about societal insecurity with cultural explanations related to collec-
tive nationalist fantasies. In my own work, for example, I have suggested
that the salience of particular symbols may shift in response to stressful or
instable periods in the nation’s history, drawing on related arguments Kim-
mel (2004) and Nagel (2010) have made in regard to idealized images of
masculinity and femininity. For right-wing youth, hypermasculine symbols
such as the inflated biceps of Viking gods depicted in right-wing tattoos
and other subcultural scene elements may reflect youth fantasies of a ro-
mantic, pure, and untroubled past (also see Claus, Lehnert, and Müller
2010; Virchow 2008, 2010). Based on interviews with former neo-Nazi
young men in Sweden, Kimmel (2014) has argued that young men who
experience economic insecurity “feel themselves to be emasculated” (71)
and seek out places to feel like they belong, to “secure a masculine identity
and experience community” (74), but also to rebel against adults. Nazism
became a “masculine rite of passage” for “alienated and insecure adoles-
cent males” whose commitments were not to right-wing extremist ideol-
ogy per se but rather to a “masculinizing project” (79).
Youth subcultural engagement with far right music, parties, soccer vio-
lence, and other elements of the far right youth scene can also be under-
stood through the lens of research on protest and youth resistance. Break-
ing social taboos, using abhorrent symbols, or listening to music youth
know the mainstream rejects can be ways through which youth who feel
powerless in other aspects of their lives exert control (Futrell and Simi
2004; Linden and Klandermans 2006). Other scholars have explored simi-
lar themes in studies of the ways in which subaltern groups engage with
dominant and hegemonic cultural codes and myths (see, e.g., Barthes
1972, Hall 1973, and the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contempo-
rary Cultural Studies). Dick Hebdige’s (1979, 17, 105) work on punk sub-
cultures, for example, showed how subcultural styles can be “subversive
practices” that “obliquely” express a challenge to hegemonic authority. In
this explanation, far right cultural practices are best understood as embed-
ded in and responding to structural conditions that have marginalized par-
ticular groups of young men from traditional markers of economic or so-
cial success.
Another blended explanation is offered by Roger Griffin (2008a, 2008b)

512
in his work on fascism and notably in his explanation of why Nazism ap-
pealed to voters. Griffin combines explanations grounded in the modern-
ization/social change framework with cultural explanations rooted in the
power of myths, rituals, and cultural belonging. In this explanation, in the
context of social change or disruption in modern society, myths, rituals, or
fantasies of a new world order, a rebirth, or a future utopia based on a fan-
tasy of a prior stability take on particular power. The idea here is that the
loss of the kind of unifying worldview that was held by traditional soci-
eties and which helped make the world meaningful has led to a sense of
chaos, disorder, and decline for some individuals. This kind of uncertainty
and chaos increases the appeal of myths, rituals, and ideas of rebirth and
renewal, or the notion of a phoenix-like rise from the ashes (Griffin 2008b,
78–80) and the dawning of a new era in which “we” (nation, people, Volk,
etc.) will be on top again, in which the period of societal despair will be
over, in which one is promised to be a part of something bigger and better
than oneself. Thus, youth engagement in the right wing may be motivated
by language, symbols, music, or representations that invoke a sense of na-
tional or ethnic destiny, of an awakening and renewal, a rebirth, the dawn-
ing of a new era or a new world order. Such kinds of symbols and lan-
guage are peppered throughout much of the commercial clothing and prod-
ucts popular in far right youth scenes, for example, and they are also a part
of the discourse of far right parties and election campaigns in a variety of
national contexts.

AREAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

It is worth calling attention to several directions for future research that

would advance our understanding of the conditions under which youth en-
gage in radical and extremist right-wing movements, political parties, sub-
cultures, scenes, or violence. We still know frustratingly little about
whether there are definitive factors across national contexts that character-
ize youth who become active in radical right party organizations, about
whether there are common triggers that shift youth from radical right en-
gagements into extremist right-wing activities, and about which youth are
likely to engage in violence.
We do not know enough about whether youth engagements in and sup-
port for far right wing movements and parties differ from other ideological
radical and extremist movements (left wing, Islamist or other religious rad-
icalism, etc.). More work that compares youth recruitment, engagement,

513
and radicalization within far right scenes to similar kinds of radicalization
in other forms of radicalism and extremism is needed. Many of the same
kinds of myths and narratives about sacred origins espoused by far right
groups show up in the language used by Islamic State, for example, as they
recruit disenchanted youth in Europe with a call to heroically restore the
Islamic caliphate and to be part of a bigger movement. But there has been
little scholarly analysis of these similarities. In part, this gap is due to inad-
equate cross-ideological conversation among experts on various dimen-
sions of extremism, terrorism, and radicalism, although there have been re-
cent efforts to change this. Still, we need more research that is truly com-
parative, both across national contexts and across ideological ones, in
order to tease out common patterns as well as unique factors that might
fuel far right engagement in particular places (see, e.g., Mudde 2005). Cer-
tain structural and cultural factors may prove to have stronger explanatory
value in some countries: just a few of many examples are the U.S. prison
system’s Aryan Brotherhood; the legal policy of banning symbols in Ger-
many that has fueled the emergence of coded, commercialized symbols
and clothing there; and the depth of the economic crisis in Greece, com-
pared with elsewhere in Europe and North America. There are inherent
challenges in cross-national or cross-ideological comparisons as well, in
part because of variations in how data is collected, but also because the
scope of far right youth participation varies across countries. Moreover, as
Lucassen and Lubbers (2012) recently (and not surprisingly) argue, the se-
lection of countries in cross-national comparisons significantly affects the
results.
In addition to more cross-ideological and cross-national research di-
rected specifically at youth populations, there are several substantive areas
in need of further research. First, we need more research attending to the
embodiment of extremist and nationalist beliefs and behaviors. Political
ideologies are not only held intellectually and are not only expressed
through voting, particularly for youth; they are inscribed on bodies in
youth choices about clothing, hair style, tattoos, musculature, body image,
and violence enacted against other bodies (Nayak 2005). There may be
ways in which the bodily incorporation of nationalism—its physical enact-
ments and performances, its intersections with masculinities and sexuality,
its cultivation of physical strength and valorization of brotherhood and ca-
maraderie—proves particularly appealing for young men who have experi-
enced some of the structural conditions and stresses discussed above. More
research in this area would be helpful.

514
 Relatedly, we need more research not only with youth who are in the
“core” of extremist and radical right-wing movements but also with those
who are on the “periphery” or in interstitial spaces, moving in and out of
far right scenes or shifting support for political parties throughout their
adolescence and young adulthood. What makes some youth more vulnera-
ble to recruitment, mobilization, and radicalization at any particular mo-
ment, compared with their peers? Studying those on the periphery would
mean acknowledging that radical and extremist engagement is not only a
refuge of the very weakest but is also—perhaps even more often—com-
posed of actions, attitudes, and beliefs among those who are not com-
pletely marginalized. Developing a better understanding of youth who are
“at risk” for far right radical and extremist engagement would be ex-
tremely useful.
Finally, and most centrally to the overall arguments in this chapter, I
would call for more research that explicitly aims to disentangle the varied
ways in which structural and cultural factors work together to motivate and
radicalize youth. This would likely mean pursuing more mixed-methods
studies, since structural explanations have tended to be based on large-
scale, quantitative surveys and regression analyses, while cultural explana-
tions have tended to be based on small-scale, qualitative ethnographies of
youth. The varied kinds of methodological and linguistic expertise needed
to do this well would also almost certainly mean engaging teams of re-
searchers across multiple national and ideological contexts. While the Eu-
ropean Union has funded some of this kind of cross-national work on
youth, much remains to be done.

515
NOTES

Author contact information: cynthia@american.edu. Portions of this are

adapted from an ESRC keynote talk entitled Sociological Explanations for
Far Right Engagement in Comparison, Athens, Greece, September 25,
2014. A significantly expanded version of the arguments presented here
appears in my book The Extreme Gone Mainstream, which is forthcoming
from Princeton University Press. I am grateful to Chanae Brown,
Stephanie Dana, and Alessandra Hodulik for research assistance.
1. I should also note that other scholars have taken different approaches
to categorizing explanations for far right or right wing extremist en-
gagement—looking for example at supply-side or demand-side expla-
nations, as Rydgren (2007) does, where the former is focused on how
organizations, movements, and parties mobilize and the latter is fo-
cused on individuals’ own practices and beliefs.
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CHAPTER 19

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 RELIGION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

MICHAEL MINKENBERG
IN today’s Western world, and especially in “secular Europe” (Berger,
Davie, and Fokas 2008), religion is on the rise again, mostly due to the in-
flux of new religions via migration, new political conflicts, and the grow-
ing (re)assertion of Christian heritage among domestic actors. In this way,
at least, religion offers itself as a central frame of xenophobic and radical
right mobilization: the German movement Patriotische Europäer gegen die
Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the
Islamization of the West) claims to fight for the protection of the “occi-
dent” against alleged Islamization; in Switzerland, the radical right
Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party) initiates refer-
enda against the building of minarets, among other things; in the United
States, movements such as the Tea Party (and parts of the Republican
Party) want to preserve what they call the “Judeo-Christian” identity of
their country; and in Eastern Europe, organized religion in the shape of the
ultra-Catholic Radio Maryja in Poland keeps railing at liberalism in its var-
ious manifestations. Yet in the academic debate, religion remains conspic-
uously absent in concepts of the radical right; instead, it is usually treated
as a strategic ploy or superficial issue—with the notable exception of a few
electoral studies (Arzheimer and Carter 2009; Immerzeel, Jaspers, and
Lubbers, 2013; for a general overview see Camus 2011).
The question arises, then, of the extent to which religion provides an
ideological component of the radical right, what kind of religion is at play,
and whether and how it can be used to explain the radical right’s suc-
cesses. These questions cannot be addressed without first clarifying how
religion is understood and in what ways a conceptual link between the rad-
ical right in democratic societies and the various dimensions of religion
can be established and, second, outlining the relevance of religion for the
radical right in historical perspective. Subsequently, the chapter discusses
the programmatic development and organizational profile of major radical
right actors as far as religion is concerned (“supply side”), adds a look at
the evidence for the relevance of religion on the “demand side,” and puts
the radical right trajectory into a larger context of societal and political
changes. This will be done with a focus on contemporary European and
non-European democracies with a Christian legacy, such as “the West”
(Taylor 2007); other regions shall be left for future treatment. An argument
can be advanced that particular religious beliefs may not be a core element

523
of the radical right, which in most Western countries is a largely secular
movement or party family; however, religion functions as a relevant con-
text factor and frame for political mobilization.

CONCEPTS OF THE RADICAL RIGHT: BRINGING RELIGION

BACK IN

Most popular definitions of the radical (or populist or extreme) right do

without religion. Instead, ethnicity, racism, and/or the opposition to immi-
gration constitute the definitional cores (see, e.g., Betz 1994; Carter 2005;
Ignazi 2003; Mény and Surel 2000, 2002; Norris 2005). In a more elabo-
rate definitional attempt, Cas Mudde lists nationalism as the key concept,
which he then specifies by distinguishing the dimensions of internal ho-
mogenization, external exclusiveness, and ethnic and/or state nationalism
before qualifying it with additional key features such as xenophobia, au-
thoritarianism, and an anti-democratic stand (see Mudde 2007, 16–24).
In a similar vein and following earlier writings (see Minkenberg 2000,
2008), here right-wing radicalism shall be defined against the backdrop of
modernization theory, with its emphasis on the fundamental processes of
functional differentiation at the societal level and growing autonomy at the
individual level (see Rucht 1994). It is seen as the radical effort to undo or
fight such social and cultural change and their carriers by radicalizing in-
clusionary and exclusionary criteria (see Minkenberg 1998, 29–47; also
Carter 2005, 14–20; Kitschelt 2007, 1179; Rydgren 2007). In line with an
earlier explanatory model, the modernization-theoretical assumption is that
the potential for radical right-wing movements exists in all industrial soci-
eties and can be understood as a “normal pathological” condition (Scheuch
and Klingemann 1967). In all modernizing countries there are people, at
the elite level and at the mass level, who react to the pressures of readjust-
ment with rigidity and closed-mindedness. Under normal conditions these
views are part of the mainstream, but in times of accelerated change they
are radicalized by right-wing movements or parties offering political
philosophies that promise an elimination of pressures by offering visions
of a simpler, better society: a return to a romanticized version of the nation
(see Minkenberg 2000). Whether they are seen as a “normal pathology” or
a “pathological normalcy” (Mudde 2010), the central point remains un-
changed: it is the overemphasis on, or radicalization of, images of social
homogeneity that characterizes radical right-wing thinking. Right-wing
radicalism is a political ideology, the core element of which lies in the

524
myth of a homogeneous nation, a romantic and populist ultra-nationalism
that is directed against the concept of liberal and pluralistic democracy and
its underlying principles of individualism and universalism.
This definition focuses explicitly on the idea of the nation as the ulti-
mate focal point, situated somewhere between the poles of demos and eth-
nos. The nationalistic myth consists of the construction of an idea of nation
and national belonging by radicalizing criteria of exclusion that can be eth-
nically based but also may be cultural, that is, religious, aiming at the con-
gruence between the state and the nation (Smith 2001, 34). Historically,
this notion of homogeneity resulted from the transformation of an emanci-
patory nationalism to an integral or official version (see Alter 1985; An-
derson 1983) and by the end of the nineteenth century culminated in a ro-
mantic ultra-nationalist myth of belonging; as such, it borders on or even
inhabits chiliastic (that is, quasi-religious) characteristics, especially when
moral qualities of the nation and the notion of a national rebirth were
added (see Griffin 1991, 32–33).
If at all, the literature on the contemporary radical right considers the re-
ligious factor only when identifying religious minorities as targets of radi-
cal right thinking and activities or in electoral analyses where it is usually
treated as one of many demographic variables (see Arzheimer 2008, 362;
Norris 2005, 183; but see Arzheimer and Carter 2009; Immerzeel, Jaspers,
and Lubbers 2013). In contrast, the nationalism scholarship abounds with
references to religious characteristics beyond the obvious cases of Poland,
Ireland, and the United States (see Haselby 2015; Marx 2003; Zubrzycki
2006). In fact, early research on national identity was closely linked to reli-
gion. German historian Friedrich Meinecke distinguished between state
nation and cultural nation, the latter being rooted in religion, the most im-
portant of the “cultural goods” (Meinecke 1908, 2–3), and Ernest Renan,
though defining the nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” added to this defin-
ition the requirement of a “soul,” that is, a spiritual dimension (Renan
1947 903).
Contemporary nationalism research continues to use these distinctions.
An important strand of scholarship dissociates religion from nationalism,
arguing, as does Benedict Anderson (1983), that secularization and the
modern national movements resulted in replacing religion by nationalism,
which in itself was then seen as a surrogate religion, or a “political reli-
gion” (Smith 2001, 35). Others go one step further and distinguish various
ingredients of nationalism, such as language, ethnicity, religion, kingship,
or the sense of belonging to a “historical nation” (Hobsbawm 1990, 67,

525
73). While Eric Hobsbawm dismisses religion as a necessary requirement
for the emergence of nationalism (as he does with language, ethnicity, and
kingship), he discovers, like Smith, quasi-religious traits, or the role of
“holy icons” in it. A more conceptual effort to link up religion with nation-
alism has been suggested by Willfried Spohn (2003a, 2003b). In a world-
wide review, he shows that even in Europe, where the form of secular na-
tionalism dominates, nationalism includes Christian components, and he
concludes that the contemporary rise of religious and ethnic nationalism
can be explained as a reaction to the previous authoritarian imposition of
the Western European model of state secularism within predominantly re-
ligious and multiethnic societies. A similarly systematic account of the re-
lationship shows that religion, far from being replaced by an allegedly sec-
ular nationalism, is more often than not intertwined with nationalism, can
constitute a distinct version of nationalism, and can be seen as a cause of
nationalism (Brubaker 2012, 2013; see also Jaffrelot 2009).
But what is understood by religion varies greatly in these writings. Gen-
erally religion, like secularization, is a multidimensional concept and en-
tails at least the two dimensions of belief (in the supernatural) and its insti-
tutionalization (see Bruce 2003, 9–10; also Bruce 1996, 7). With Max
Weber (1980) and Roland Robertson (1987), the world’s large religions
can be distinguished principally along these two dimensions of institution-
alization and belief, the latter as a this-worldly or otherworldly orientation
toward the world. The particular mix of a this-worldly orientation and a
highly organized or formal structure, as in Christianity, makes an orga-
nized religion a potent political actor—and can contribute to tensions when
its fundamental orientations differ from those of the polity in which it op-
erates. On the level of the individual, Max Weber’s distinction between re-
ligion as beliefs and as practice is relevant for political behavior; in this
vein, religion typically enters political studies as either denominational af-
filiation or church attendance, with different effects on politics (see also
Driskell, Embry, and Lyon 2008). Seen in this multidimensional light, sec-
ularization does not necessarily mean the disappearance of religion. Un-
derstood as the ongoing differentiation of religious and nonreligious values
and institutions, it represents a variant of theories of rationalization and
modernization that postulates a continuing functional differentiation of
modern societies (Weber 1920; also Bruce 2002; Norris and Inglehart
2011). But this modernization process reflects separate “moments of secu-
larization” (Casanova 1994): “institutional differentiation,” in particular
the separation of state and church; “decline,” or the loosening of ties be-
tween the individual and the values and institutions of religion; and “priva-

526
tization,” the (forced or voluntary) retreat of religion from the public
sphere (see also Taylor 2007, 1–3). Against this backdrop, religion as a po-
litically relevant factor can be minimally distinguished in three respects:
religion as worldview or identity (in terms of confessional or denomina-
tional content); religion as religiosity, that is, as attachment to religious
values and authorities; and religion as (institutional) actors, such as
churches and religious communities as well as their political allies (see
Fox 2013). In all these dimensions, religion can be relevant for the radical
right as part of the agenda, as lending legitimacy, and as a political support
mechanism.

RELIGION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT IN HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVE

Historically, the radical right as a fundamentally anti-liberal or anti-demo-

cratic force is closely connected to the counterrevolutionary tradition of
Catholicism (see Camus 2011). With the onset of the Enlightenment and
liberalization and democratization of European societies, the most vocifer-
ous opponents could be found in religious quarters that were deeply entan-
gled with the ancien régime. Even in the United States, illiberal state
churches persisted into the early nineteenth century, and the Protestant
hegemony corresponded with and in some regions even transformed into
the longtime dominance of anti-Catholicism, biological racism, and anti-
Semitism (see Bennett 1988; Lipset and Raab 1978). Today, all major
Christian churches and denominations embrace democracy and human
rights as inviolable, but this process was far from linear and unidimen-
sional.
In the Protestant countries of the European north and northwest, in
which the church was also the national or state church—as in the Protes-
tant majority countries outside Europe (the United States, Canada, Aus-
tralia, New Zealand) where the Protestant churches underwent disestab-
lishment in the course of the nineteenth century—a convergence between
Protestantism and liberal ideas occurred in the context of a progressing
secularization triggered by the Protestant emphasis on individualism, egal-
itarianism, and acceptance of diversity (see Bruce 2002, 4; Bruce 2003;
also Maddox 1996; Kallscheuer 2006). But within the world of Protestant
Christianity, different paths of democratic development unfolded (see
Berger, Davie, and Fokas 2007: 36–37; also Martin 2005). Where Re-
formed Protestantism, in particular Calvinism, dominated, an early evolu-

527
tion of parliamentary rule and republicanism could be observed (see An-
derson 2009, 21–27; also Gorski 2011, 44–55). With a delay, Lutheran
Scandinavia followed the liberal (but not republican) path, helped by “the
internal variety within the state church and the laicist attitude of the de-
vout” (Martin 1978, 68; see also Gustafsson 2003, 51–52).
The exceptional case is Protestant Brandenburg-Prussia, which during
the seventeenth century developed into an absolutist state with illiberal
elites that, together with the Lutheran state church, prohibited democrati-
zation until the late nineteenth century. A major cause for this develop-
ment can be seen in the protracted conflict between a Calvinist state elite,
in particular the Hohenzollern rulers, and the Lutheran estates, church, and
population, all of whom were “disciplined” into submission to the state
from above (see Gorski 2011, 55–71). The Lutheran emphasis on authority
in the German lands also resulted in a split of German Protestantism in the
nineteenth century and well into the twentieth over the issues of liberalism
and democracy, with a majority supporting the authoritarian regime of the
Second Empire and distrusting democracy in the Weimar Republic. Nu-
merous studies show that while Catholics, deeply encapsulated in their
Catholic milieus, were reluctant to support the Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers’
Party), Protestants were more willing to open up toward the Nazi Party and
regime (see Childers 1983; Falter 1991; Lipset 1963). While during the
1930s a split emerged between the pro-fascist Protestant majority and an
anti-fascist minority, it took until 1985 for the Lutheran churches in West
Germany to issue an official document endorsing democracy and human
rights (see Graf 2009; Huber 1990, 2007).
In Catholic societies during nation-building, on the other hand, Protes-
tantism and liberalism were seen as an attack on the Church and its power,
and a conflictual if not antagonistic relationship between Catholicism and
liberalism prevailed. Nation-building by mostly liberal elites put Catholi-
cism on the defensive, and often the question of loyalty was invoked;
democracy emerged as a “nightmare” (Anderson 2009, 31). In the French
Third Republic, in unified Italy, and in the German Empire, these tensions
culminated in an aggressive anti-clerical politics; as a result, Catholic mi-
lieus developed as an organized opposition to the nation-state and the na-
tion-builders (see Grzymała-Busse 2015).
This is not to deny liberal and pro-democratic tendencies among nine-
teenth-century European Catholicism (e.g., the French priest Robert de
Lamennais or the south German bishop Ketteler; see Uertz 2005, 17; also

528
Maddox 1996, 196ff.). But only in Belgium did Catholic clergy and laity,
by joining the liberals in their struggle for independence from the Nether-
lands, adopt liberal ideas, not without safeguarding substantial privileges
for the Catholic Church (see Gould 1999, 25–44; Kalyvas 1996, 187–192).
Overall, while in many countries Catholic parties emerged that more or
less accommodated themselves with the liberal political order, Catholic
churches and lay organizations continued their anti-liberal politics and in a
number of cases allied themselves with racist or proto-fascist movements,
such as the Action Française or the Falange in Spain (see Birnbaum 1993,
89–117; Meyer Resende 2015, 19; Winock 1993).
The uneven development of democracy along confessional lines and the
“unholy alliance” between right-wing throne and Catholic altar manifest
themselves in the particular paths taken in interwar Europe of the twentieth
century (see Bruce 2003; also Whyte 1981, 76–82). With few exceptions,
including the Weimar Republic in Germany and the liberal regime in Bel-
gium, it was the Protestant countries in which democracy survived the
crises of the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of fascism and communism,
whereas fascist movements and elites were particularly successful in
Catholic Europe. Steve Bruce ascribes to the Catholic Church an anti-de-
mocratic politics in countries with a Catholic monopoly: either they coop-
erated openly with right-wing authoritarian regimes and groups, as in Italy,
Spain, or France (especially after the establishment of the Vichy regime)
or they took a more passive role, as in Germany. His explanation points
less at the doctrinal aspects of Catholicism than the structural aspects:
“Catholicism, Orthodoxy and, to a lesser extent, Lutheranism, with their
insistence on the primacy of the institution of the church, are much more
likely to see the state of the political embodiment of ‘the people’ as a com-
munity, rather than as the expression of the preferences of individuals”
(Bruce 2003, 110; see also Warren 1941). Table 19.1 provides an overview
of democratic and right-wing authoritarian regimes in the interwar period,
listing only those non-democratic regimes that emerged independently
from or before German occupation, such as the Dollfuß regime in Austria
or Marshall Pétain’s regime in France. German puppet regimes such as
Tiso’s in Slovakia are not included.
The pattern in Table 19.1 corresponds to recent comparative research
about the breakdown of democracy in interwar Europe, which emphasizes
political and cultural causes instead of economic ones (see Berg-Schlosser
and Mitchell 2002). With the exception of Belgium, there was not a single
Catholic country that did not undergo a regime change and establishment

529
of a fascist or right-wing dictatorship. Moreover, in many Catholic coun-
tries that turned to the right, the Catholic community experienced a split
between pro- and anti-fascist forces (see Whyte 1981, 79–81).
Only twenty years after World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust,
the Catholic Church reached reconciliation with liberalism and, in the Sec-
ond Vatican Council (1962–1965), accepted human rights, pluralism, and
democracy (see Casanova 1994, 71; Anderson 2009, 38–40). However,
this does not mean that all of Christianity has come to terms with democ-
racy, tolerance, and pluralism in the postwar era. First, as a reaction to
Vatican II, illiberal Catholic forces split from the church and formed their
own, politically right-wing organizations that claimed to preserve the “true
teachings” of the church. Most prominent in Western Europe is a group
around ex-bishop Marcel Lefebvre (died 1991), the Fraternité St. Pie X,
with a strong base in France (see Camus and Monzat 1992, 148–229).
Similar right-wing Catholic groups exist in Eastern Europe, for example
Radio Maryja in Poland, which recycles the ultra-Catholic, anti-democra-
tic, and anti-Semitic ideas of Polish interwar politician Roman Dmowski
(see Pankowski 2010, 95–98). Second, in an almost parallel movement,
fundamentalist Protestant groups in Western democracies, in particular the
United States but also in Nordic Europe, politically invisible for a long
time, reacted to the modernization shifts of the 1960s and 1970s and the
ongoing liberalization of Western societies with a pronounced shift to the
right (see Minkenberg 1990). In fact, religious fundamentalism, whether
Protestant or Catholic or any other denomination, has been defined as an
anti-liberal and anti-modern religious force with immediate political con-
sequences (see Fox 2013, 109–121; also Almond, Appleby, and Sivan
2003; Marty and Appleby 1991; Bruce 2000). Clearly, not every religious
fundamentalism should be considered an expression of right-wing radical-
ism, but if it allies itself with the national idea, Christian fundamentalism
in Western democracies is the quintessential radical right force in religious
terms (see Fox 2013, 116–120). Finally, research after World War II has
shown persistent links between authoritarian personality traits and (racial)
prejudice, with religiously rigid orientations playing a key role (see Allport
and Ross 1967; Altemeyer 2003; Doebler 2015).
Table 19.1 The Protestant-Catholic Divide, Church-State Relation-
ships, and Political Regimes in Interwar Europe
Right-Wing Authoritarian Regime
(start of non-democratic regime; atti-

530
 Democracy tude of major church toward regime)
Catholic
Belgium Austria (1934; supportive)
Countries
[Czechoslova- France (1940; supportive)
kia]*
Hungary (1920s; supportive)
[Ireland]** Italy (1922; supportive)
Poland (1938; supportive)
Portugal (1933; initially supportive)
Spain (1939; supportive)

Protestant or Denmark (oc- Germany (1933; passive)

Mixed Protes- cupied by
tant Countries Germany, Baltic states (“benign despotism” in
the 1930s)
1940)
Finland (occu-
pied by Ger-
many, 1944)
Netherlands
(occupied by
Germany,
1940)
Sweden
Switzerland
United King-
dom

* Czechoslovakia had a numerical majority of Catholics in the interwar

period but mixed religious traditions; moreover, in the first decade of its
existence the country experienced a cross-partisan wave of anti-Catholi-
cism, led by the first president, Tomas Masaryk.
** Ireland underwent a transition to full independence from the UK
after World War I, which by 1937 resulted in a democratic constitution
with substantial privileges for the Catholic Church, thus adding a dose
of illiberalism to the regime, congruent with a political culture in which

531
 “a dogmatic overemphasis on Catholic rules, duties, and obligations”
persisted (Dillon 2002, 55).
Sources: Anderson 2009, 49–54; Bruce 2003, 97–111; Whyte 1981, 79–
81.

IDEOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION: MERGING RELIGION AND

NATIONALISM

After World War II, Western democracies underwent several waves of

radical right-wing mobilization, usually in terms of a “national opposition”
directed at the democratic political order and centered on a crucial issue of
democratization (see von Beyme 1988). In this sense, historian Wolfgang
Wippermann rightly pointed out that “with the collapse of fascist regimes
in Italy and Germany . . . the era of fascism has ended—but not the history
of fascism” (Wippermann 1983, 183; my translation). In contrast to the
earlier waves (1950s, 1960s, and 1970s), the third wave of a renewed radi-
cal right since the 1980s brought religion back on its agenda (see Minken-
berg 2000).
This renewal of the radical right and the return of religion must be seen
in the context of far-reaching social and cultural change in Western soci-
eties, variously labeled as “post-industrialism,” “value change,” “the third
modernity,” and so on (e.g., Beck 1986; Inglehart 1990). What these con-
cepts refer to is a heightened concern with cultural orientations and iden-
tity politics, a new surge of individualization and pluralization, and a
deemphasis of authority, both religious and rational-legal in the Weberian
sense, all of which opened the gates for religious messages even in the
context of a secularizing world in at least the first two of Casanova’s di-
mensions (see above). The “silent revolution” of post-materialist value
change, new social movements, and a left-libertarian discourse, with the
Greens among the early advocates of multiculturalism, was then followed
by a “silent counter-revolution” of right-wing authoritarian and ethnocul-
tural parties and movements (see Ignazi 1992, 2003; Minkenberg 1990,
1993).
On the level of discourse, new radical right groups emerged that sought
to shape public debate and the minds of people rather than voting behavior
and which harbored a strong religious message. These groups—think
tanks, intellectual circles, political entrepreneurs—are summarized as the
“New Right” in the literature (see Bar-On 2007; Minkenberg 1998;

532
Taguieff 1994). In Europe the most prominent groups were the French
nouvelle droite groups Club de l’Horloge and especially GRECE, led by
philosopher Alain de Benoist, and its European offshoots. They were in-
spired by the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution and the “political the-
ology” of anti-liberal intellectual Carl Schmitt (2010). This New Right
builds a bridge, or hinge, between established and traditional conservatism
and the organizations of the new radical right. It is characterized by its ef-
fort to create a counterdiscourse to the “ideas of 1968”—the proclamation
of an ethnocentrist cultural war with the goal of filling terms of public de-
bate with a right-wing meaning of a homogeneous nation, a strong state,
and discrimination against all things “foreign.” The most important ideo-
logical renewal consists of the New Right’s concept of “ethnopluralism,”
which demarcates New Right thinking from old-fashioned ideas of biolog-
ical racism and white superiority. In direct appropriation of the left’s con-
cept of the right to be different, the New Right emphasizes the incompati-
bility of cultures and ethnicities and advocates the right of the Europeans
to be different, to preserve the cultural (Christian) identity of the nation,
and to resist cultural mixing—a countermodel to concepts of multicultural-
ism (see Camus 2011).
Later, smaller far right groups and movements without electoral ambi-
tions and a more particular agenda emerged, introducing religious narra-
tives and mobilizing against Islam in an increasingly aggressive fashion.
To these belong Aarhus Against the Mosque in Denmark in the 1990s; the
successful mobilization for the banning of minarets in Mosques in Switzer-
land in 2009; and since 2014, the East German Pegida movement (see
Minkenberg 2008, 48–50; Rucht et al. 2015). From the nouvelle droite to
Pegida, the ethnopluralist argument has turned religion into a master frame
that is meant to provide a direct link between these groups and the political
mainstream, thereby bypassing all parties and partisan discourse.
Likewise in the United States, the ideological renewal on the far right
consists of leaving behind institutional racism and discrimination and tra-
ditional concepts of biological racism. After 1968, it was the fundamental-
ist Christian Right movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which, although not
radical right in toto, advocated an anti-liberal and ultra-nationalist reinter-
pretation of American civil religion and contributed “a combination of the
Bible and Edmund Burke” (Lowi 1996, 5) to U.S. politics (see Casanova
1994; Grzymała-Busse 2015; Minkenberg 1998). In the 1990s, the ethno-
centrist America First movement joined the Christian Right, and its leader,
Pat Buchanan, proclaimed at the Republican Party convention in 1992:

533
“There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America.
It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold
War itself” (quoted in Lowi 1995, 211). Both these movements strove to
preserve the “European core” of the United States, and both stood for an
updated version of a particular American tradition that fuses racism and re-
ligion (see Barkun 1994; Durham 2000; Swain 2002). More recently, the
Tea Party has added its own brand of welfare chauvinism and anti-parlia-
mentary zeal to the Republican Party’s programmatic development, often
framing its issues in religious terms by proclaiming, in ahistorical fashion,
that the United States was founded as a Christian nation (see Lepore 2011,
126–129). Considering that Christian Right activists and social conserva-
tives make up a large portion of Tea Party activists, the movement has
consolidated the cultural conservative current within the Republican Party
(see Skocpol and Williamson 2012). Against this background, it should not
come as a surprise that in 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump and
his anti-Muslim and xenophobic message resonated widely in large parts
of the Republican rank and file, as it did among White supremacists,
thereby connecting the racist right with the religious conservatism and the
Republican mainstream (see Mahler 2016; Piggott 2016). Donald Trump’s
taking over the Presidency in January 2017 changed little in this regard.
In contrast to the United States, the European new radical right con-
sisted mainly of political parties rather than movements, but initially they
all cultivated a heavily ethnocentrist platform with little room for religion.
This is especially true for those parties that began their career as economi-
cally oriented or anti-tax parties, such as the Progress Parties in Scandi-
navia or the Lega Nord in Italy. These parties have largely ignored the sub-
ject of religion in their platforms; in some countries such as Austria, anti-
clerical traditions get in the way of mobilizing voters on religious issues.
However, the recent shift of radical right parties toward emphasizing a re-
ligious divide by attacking Islam and claiming the role of defenders of the
Christian or Judeo-Christian heritage in their respective countries, or Eu-
rope in general (Immerzeel, Jaspers, and Lubbers 2013, 946), does not
need to be interpreted merely as a strategic ploy to gain political advan-
tages (Arzheimer and Carter 2009, 989).
A number of these groups and parties already had long-standing links to
ultra-conservative or fundamentalist currents of Christianity. For example,
Le Pen’s Front National cultivated an alliance with the anti-liberal Lefeb-
vrists, some of whom held prominent posts in the party, and party leaders
such as Bruno Mégret emphasized the Catholic roots of French identity

534
(see above, and Camus 2011; Minkenberg 1998. Likewise, despite the
anti-clerical tradition in Austria, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ,
Freedom Party of Austria) and Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Al-
liance for the Future of Austria), just like the Swiss SVP and the Italian
Lega Nord, have increasingly attacked Islam as incompatible not only with
their countries’ democratic order but also with their Christian identity (see
Betz 2005, 159–164; Skenderovic 2009, 187). The British National Party
(BNP) has discovered Islam as the country’s enemy, as has the Dansk
Folkeparti (DF, Danish People’s Party) (see Goodwin 2011, 177–178; Ry-
dgren 2004; Widfeldt 2015, 146–149, 171). Moreover, in Denmark,
Protestant fundamentalists sided with the DF (see Minkenberg 2008, 48–
50)—not to mention the Lijst Pim Fortuyn or Geert Wilders’s Partij voor
de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands, which were cen-
tered on an strongly Islamophobic platform from their beginning (Art
2011, 179–187; Mudde 2007, 84). Recently, the German radical right en-
hanced this trend. While the Republikaner in the early 1990s still focused
more on xenophobia than Islam, the more radical Nationaldemokratische
Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party) echoes its British
counterparts in embracing anti-Semitism as well as Islamophobia. The new
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany), first orga-
nized as a fiercely anti-EU and anti-euro party in 2013, has moved further
to the right and increasingly mobilized against immigrants, refugees, and
Islam. Its various sub-organizations include a Protestant-pietist group,
Christians in the AfD, similar to the Lefebvrists in the Front National
(Häusler and Roeser 2015, 135–136). This brief summary of the West Eu-
ropean radical right illustrates the travel of the concept of ethnopluralism
from the intellectual New Right of the 1970s into the party platforms of
nearly all contemporary radical right parties in the West (see Art 2011,
130–131; Mudde 2007, 84–86). Today, a religiously colored ethnoplural-
ism serves as a master frame to mobilize support and appear more main-
stream.
Where mainstreaming is not an issue, radical right groups remain out-
right racist and/or put more emphasis on anti-Semitism instead of Islamo-
phobia, with the obvious results of finding political allies in anti-Semitic
circles in the Muslim world (see Camus 2011, 272–274). It may be true
that “the Extreme Right has little interest in Islam or Judaism as such: for
it, supporting or opposing one or the other is merely a way of taking sides
in the two major battles its adherents believe will shape the future of Eu-
rope” (274). Nonetheless, if these battles continue—and the prospects of
further immigration of Muslims and non-Christians make this an almost

535
certain development—the radical right in its various shades will become
wedded to religion in ways unprecedented in postwar Europe.
In contrast to Western Europe, the East European radical right has stood
for a merger of religion and ultra-nationalist platforms since it appeared on
the political scene in the 1990s. Most notably, the Polish radical right pro-
fesses an ultra-Catholicism that recycles the anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, and
anti-Western doctrines of interwar ideologue Roman Dmowski, who popu-
larized the phrase “Polak Katolik,” which declared Catholicism as a pre-
requisite for being Polish (see Porter-Szücs 2011, ch. 9; Zubricki 2006.
These anti-modern ideas find particular resonance with listeners of Radio
Maryja, in street marches organized by the All-Polish Youth, and in parties
such as the now defunct League of Polish Families or the current Prawo i
Sprawiedliwość (PiS, Law and Justice) party (see Kasprowicz 2015;
Pankowski 2010; Pytlas 2015, 86–106). The Slovenská Národná Strana
(SNS, Slovak National Party) stands for a particularly strong fusion of na-
tional identity and Catholicism, which in the first phase of national inde-
pendence in World War II bordered on clerical fascism. These traditions
are carried on by today’s SNS, which, similar to the Polish radical right,
merges Catholicism and nationalism; moreover, the previous leader, Jan
Slota, even tried to rehabilitate the fascist priest Jozef Tiso and his regime
under the aegis of Nazi Germany (see Pirro 2015, 89–91; Václavík 2015).
In Hungary during the 1990s, the Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (MIEP,
Hungarian Justice and Life Party) and Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége
(Fidesz, Alliance of Young Democrats) took over Catholic voters when the
Hungarian Christian Democratic party declined in the wake of internal ri-
valries (see Kovács 2001, 258). Today, Jobbik Magyarországért Mozga-
lom (Jobbik, the Movement for a Better Hungary) echoes other radical
right parties in the region by emphasizing that Hungarian national identity
and Christianity are “inseparable concepts” (see Pirro 2015, 71–73). Simi-
larly in Bulgaria, Ataka (National Union Attack), which was formed as an
anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim party, propagates a Bulgarian nation unified
by the Orthodox Christian creed (see Avramov 2015, 300–301; Pirro 2015,
61). And in Romania, where radical right parties have declined since 2000,
the Orthodox Church of Romania has taken over the role of an anti-liberal
safeguard of the Orthodox identity of the country (see Andreescu 2015).
As a summary of the programmatic survey, Table 19.2 illustrates how
and to what extent the radical right disseminates a religious agenda, either
in terms of affirming a religious identity of the nation they claim to defend
(typically Christian or more specifically Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox)

536
or by attacking “others” on religious grounds. This reasoning leads to three
major types: a largely non-religious radical right, a fundamentally religious
radical right, and a radical right that added religion to its repertoire in the
course of its existence.
Table 19.2 The Radical Right and Their Religious Agenda in Se-
lected Countries Since the 1990s
Party Movement
No explicit religious refer- NPD/DVU, Re- ANS/FAP, NPD
ence/agenda from the beginning publikaner (D) (D)

NA/NNP/NVU, Dansk Front (DK)

CD (NL)
FANE (F)
MSI/AN (pre- ANS/JSN (NL)
1995) (I)
NOP, ONR, PWN-
MSFT (I) PSN (PL)
BNP (GB)
MG, MÖM (H)
PRM (RO) NSS, SNJ (SR)
VR (RO)
Aryan Nation (US)

Explicit religious refer- AfD (D) Tea Party (US)

ence/agenda as an addition to
ethnocentrist platform Vlaams
Blok/Belang
(B)
Front National
(F)
DF (DK)
Lega Nord (I)
FPÖ, BZÖ (A)
SVP (CH)

Explicit religious refer- Lijst Pim For- Identitarian Move-

ence/agenda as core of platform

537
from the beginning tuyn, PVV ment (various
(NL) countries)Pegida
KPN-SN, (D)
ZChN, LPR CCS (F)
(PL)
New Era (DK)
[PiS (PL)] Aarhus Against the
SNS (SR) Mosque (DK)
MIÉP, KDNP, Radio Maryja, All-
Jobbik (H) Polish Youth (PL)
[Fidesz (H)] MS (SR)
Ataka (BG) [ROC (RO)]
Constitution Christian Identity
Party (US) (US)
[Christian Right
(US)]

Sources: Country chapters in Bertelsmann Stiftung 2009, updated.

Notes: Parties with sustained electoral relevance and/or government par-
ticipation are in bold.
Groups in square brackets are not strictly part of the radical right family
but contain strong radical right tendencies.
Countries:
(A) Austria
(B) Belgium
(BG) Bulgaria
(F) France
(D) Germany
(GB) Great Britain
(H) Hungary
(I) Italy
(NL) Netherlands
(PL) Poland
(RO) Romania
(SR) Slovak Republic

538
(US) United States
Parties and Movement Organizations:
AfD Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany)
AN Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance)
ANS Aktionsfront Nationale Sozialisten (Action Front of National
Socialists)
BNP British National Party
BZÖ Bündnis Zukunft Österreiches (Alliance for the Future of Aus-
tria)
CCS Comités Chrétienité-Solidarité (Committees Christianity-Soli-
darity)
CD Centrumdemocraten (Center Democrats)
DF Dansk Folkepartiet (Danish People’s Party)
DVU Deutsche Volksunion (Germam People’s Union)
FANE Fédération Action National-Européen (Federation of National-
European Action)
FAP Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Free German Workers
Party)
Fidesz Fidesz: Hungarian Civic Union Alliance
FNE Faisceaux nationalistes européennes ((European National Fas-
cists)
FPÖ Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria)
GUD Groupe Union Defense (Union Defense Group)
HZDS Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko (Movement for a Democra-
tic Slovakia)
JSN   Jeudg Storm Nederland, Stormfront (Netherlands Youth
Storm)
KPN- Konfederacja Polski Niepodleglej (Confederation for an Inde-
SN pendent Poland)
KDNP Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt (Christian Democratic Party)
LPR Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families)
MG Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard)
MIÉP Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja (Hungarian Justice and Life
Party)
MÖM Magyar Önvédelmi Mozgalom (Hungarian Self-Defense Move-
ment)
MS Matica Slovenska (a cultural association for language and cul-
ture)

539
 MSI Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement)
MS-FT Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore (Social Movement—Tri-
colore Flame)
NA Nationale Alliantie (National Alliance)
NNP Nieuwe Nationale Partij (New National Party)
NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland (National Democra-
tic Party of Germany)
NSS Nové Slobodne Slovensko (New Free Slovakia)
NVU Nederlandse Volksunie (Dutch People’s Union)
ONR Obóz Narodowo-Radikalny (National-Radical Camp)
NOP Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (Polish National Rebirth)
PiS Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice)
PWN- Polska Wspólnota Narodowa: Polskie Stronnictwo Narodowe
PSN (Polish National Union)
PVV Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party of Freedom)
PRM Partidul Romania Mare (Party for Greater Romania)
ROC Romanian Orthodox Church
SNJ Slovenská Národná Jednota (Slovak National Union)
SNS Slovenská Národná Strana (Slovak National Party)
VR Vatra Romaneasca (Romanian Cradle)
ZChN Zjednoczenie Chrześcijańsko Narodowe (Christian National
Union)

SUPPORT PATTERNS FOR THE RADICAL RIGHT: THE

CHANGING RELIGIOUS CLEAVAGE

It has been almost a truism in political sociology that practicing Christians,

in particular Catholics, are unlikely voters for radical right parties. The
“master case” in the literature is Catholics in Weimar Germany, who were
not easily seduced by the NSDAP, due to their attachment to the Zentrum
party and the integration into a Catholic milieu tied to the church (Lipset
1963; Falter 1991; and above). Comparative studies in postwar Europe
showed repeatedly that practicing Christian voters tended to lean toward
the right but not the radical right (see Norris and Inglehart 2011, 204–207).
The stability of the religious cleavage in Europe even in the context of
widespread secularization (see Minkenberg 2010) may lead to the expecta-
tion that religious voters will remain unavailable to the radical right (see
Arzheimer and Carter 2009, 988). A number of studies support this as-

540
sumption on a country-level basis. For Belgium, Jaak Billiet (1995) found
that practicing Catholics in Flanders were less xenophobic than the aver-
age Flemish voter and hence less likely to vote for the Vlaams Blok (VB,
Flemish Bloc; now Vlaams Belang. And in France, Nonna Mayer (1999,
109–112) demonstrated that devout Catholics were underrepresented in the
Front National’s electorate and that the Catholic Church, if it spoke out
against the party, could depress the Catholic vote for the FN; only the
small group of fundamentalist Catholics attached to the Fraternité St. Pie X
(see above) voted disproportionately for the party.
Recent data from 2014 and 2015 by and large confirm these findings.
Tables 19.3 and 19.4 summarize the religious support patterns in selected
European countries. While Catholics are overrepresented in the electorates
of the Austrian FPÖ and the French FN, these particular people attend
church more infrequently or very rarely compared to those with strong ties
to the church. This tends to be also true for the Danish except that those
who never go to church are underrepresented among DF voters. Bi-confes-
sional Germany exhibits an interesting confessional difference: while
Catholics are underrepresented among AfD voters, Protestants and those
with no affiliation (centered in the new Länder in the east) are overrepre-
sented, as are those who never go to church. Apparently, the ties of
Catholics to the church as well as to the Christian Democrats may still
work against this AfD vote, while Protestants are more easily attracted.
The same holds true for the Calvinist minority in Hungary, which casts
their vote disproportionately for Jobbik, while the populist right in both
Hungary and Poland (Fidesz, PiS) enjoy more support from devout Chris-
tians. These findings are contrasted by many studies showing that class is a
rather reliable predictor of radical right voting, at least in Western Europe,
and that in particular members of the working class vote disproportionately
for the radical right across many West European countries (see Betz 1994;
Oesch 2008; Rydgren 2013)—a finding that can be interpreted as another
facet of the overall decline of the social class cleavage.
Table 19.3 Religious Denomination and the Radical Right Vote
(percent of respondents)
France Austria Denmark Germany

AFD
DF
vot-
FN FPÖ vot-
ers (all)
voters (all) voters (all) ers (all)

541
Roman 98 (89) 98 (91) 2 (2) 22 (42)
Catholic
Protestant 2 (3) 2 (3) 94 (93) 61 (52)
Other/None 0 (8) 0 (6) 4 (5) 17 (6)
N 55 (578) 97 (796) 86 (668) 18 (1203)

Poland Hungary
PiS voters (all) Fidesz voters Jobbik voters (all)
Roman Catholic 100 (99) 78 63 (69)
Protestant 0 (n.d.) 22 30 (24)
Other/None 0 (1) 0 7 (4)
N 258 (707) 253 64 (470)
Source: European Social Survey (7th wave, between September 2014
and January 2015), author’s calculations. Recall question: “Which party
did you vote for in the last national elections?”
Table 19.4 Religiosity (Frequency of Churchgoing) and the Radical
Right Vote (percent of respondents)
France Austria Denmark Germany
FN DF ADF
vot- FPÖ vot- vot-
ers (all) voters (all) ers (all) ers (all)
Several 2 (2) 0 (2) 0 (1) 1 (1)
times a
week
Weekly 3 (6) 8 (12) 2 (2) 4 (6)
Monthly 3 (6) 11 (16) 9 (9) 2 (11)
Rarely 35 (37) 53 (48) 62 (54) 23 (42)
Never 57 (49) 28 (22) 27 (34) 70 (40)
N 126 (1059) 153 (1093) 143 (1178) 69 (2082)

Poland Hungary

542
 PiS vot- Fidesz vot- Jobbik vot-
ers (all) ers ers (all)
Several times a 14 (9) 0 0 (0)
week
Weekly 62 (46) 10 4 (7)
Monthly 12 (18) 12 4 (9)
Rarely 11 (22) 48 45 (48)
Never 1 (5) 30 47 (36)
N 260 (772) 415 158 (853)
Source: European Social Survey (7th wave, between September 2014
and January 2015), author’s calculations. Recall question: “Which party
did you vote for in the last national elections?”
If the link between cleavage change and class voting is favorable for the
radical right, then the robustness of the religious cleavage should be ex-
pected to work against a connection between religiosity and radical right
voting. Recent studies, however, suggest that this might be a premature
conclusion. A cross-country analysis of West European voters shows that,
holding other variables constant, “religious people are neither more nor
less likely to adopt negative attitudes towards immigrants than their agnos-
tic compatriots” (Arzheimer and Carter 2009, 999). However, the authors
add that this does not mean the political irrelevance of religion, because it
is the attachment to Christian Democratic or conservative parties that
keeps these voters from opting for the radical right (Arzheimer and Carter
2009; also Knutsen 2004, 82–83). This finding is supported by another
more recent analysis (Immerzeel, Jaspers, and Lubbers 2013, 959) but here
the authors point out that the practice dimension of religion needs to be
separated from the belief dimension: in a number of countries, orthodox
believers are more anti-immigrant than other believers and hence a likely
electorate for radical right parties (960). In other words, where high reli-
giosity combines with orthodox or fundamentalist beliefs that are dissoci-
ated from the established churches, such as with Calvinism in Holland and
Hungary or the Lefebvrists in France, support for radical right positions or
parties is more likely (see also Minkenberg 2009).
These and other studies point at the importance of the attachment of reli-
gious voters to Christian Democratic parties and, if no such party exists,
conservative parties that are traditionally supported by the more religious

543
segments of the electorate. Therefore, the role and relevance of the reli-
gious cleavage in Western democracies deserve particular attention. Far
from declining like the class cleavage, the religious cleavage exhibits a ro-
bustness that is all the more striking if the general secularization trend—in
terms of detachment from conventional religious institutions and beliefs—
is taken into account (see above). However, there is evidence of significant
shifts within the religious field: the gradual replacement of the confes-
sional divide by the divide between secular and religious voters as well as
a considerable variation between countries (see Minkenberg 2010). For ex-
ample, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart 2011, 206–207) show that in
many Western democracies (and many more non-Western countries as
well) the correlation between (subjective) religiosity, that is, the signifi-
cance of God for the individual, and a general political orientation to the
right or left remains strong. But the patterns diverge: the relationship be-
tween church religiosity and voting behavior is strongest in countries
where Protestant or Catholic/Christian Democratic parties or movements
have been established and which have experienced a particular shift in sec-
ularization as disenchantment. Here, religious issues are especially salient
in party competition (see also Huber and Inglehart 1995). The new kind of
polarization between the religiously devout and the religiously detached
cannot by itself be interpreted as a “return of religion,” but it provides new
opportunities for religion as a political frame in identity issues (instead of
“secular frames” such as class interests or ethnic identity) that radical right
actors can use. Moreover, the pluralization of the religious makeup of
Western democracies contributes to the growing adoption of a religious
frame in radical right discourse. Postwar developments in Europe as well
as the entire history of immigration countries such as the United States or
Australia have led to ever increasing levels of cultural and religious diver-
sity. For example, a survey of new religious communities in Europe be-
tween 1960 and 2000 has yielded two thousand entries (Davie 2000, 116).
Against the background of the transformation of the religious cleavage
and a growing religious diversity, religion, as conceptualized in terms of
the (historically inherited) confessional makeup of society and the (re-
cently relevant) presence of Islam, should be added to other explanatory
factors on the demand side (see. e.g., Mudde’s list of factors, which ex-
cludes religion; Mudde 2007, ch. 9). In an earlier attempt by the author to
identify key context factors for successful radical right mobilization, reli-
gion was included among various cultural variables, such as the dominant
understanding of national identity, whether in ethnic, cultural, or political
terms; the share of foreign-born population; and the level of resistance to

544
multiculturalism. Structural factors were configured with regard to the de-
gree of polarization or convergence between the major parties; the level of
voting along a value-based, New Politics cleavage; the state’s and major
parties’ response to the radical right; and the type of electoral system (see
Minkenberg 2003, 2008). Table 19.5 presents an overview of these factors.
The data in Table 19.5 suggest a significant role of religion at the turn of
the century (prior to 9/11 and the heated debate about Islam). In line with
the historical record stated by Bruce and others (see Table 19.1), four of
the five cases in which radical right-wing parties scored high in the 1990s
were Catholic countries; seen from another angle, there were no Catholic
countries where the radical right parties score low average results (with de-
mocratic “latecomers” Spain and Portugal being exceptions here). By the
end of the 1990s, Protestant Denmark and Norway had joined the group.
In Table 19.6, the countries have been grouped according to the domi-
nant religious tradition and level of secularization, the latter of which per
se does not seem to favor radical right parties. Instead, one could argue
that the combination of two cultural factors in particular feeds the reso-
nance and mobilization of the radical right parties: a traditional Catholic or
Protestant homogeneity or even monopoly, and a particularly strong pres-
ence of Islam that challenges this homogeneity, on the other. This, how-
ever, does not apply to movement mobilization, as Catholic countries ex-
hibit comparatively weak radical right movements or, as far as comparable
data are available, racist violence; these seem higher in Protestant coun-
tries (see Table 19.5 and Minkenberg 2008). From this observation, an in-
ference can be made that the current radical right is strong where it couples
its ultra-nationalist or racist message with Islamophobia, especially in
countries with a long tradition of Christian mono-confessionalism. Wide-
spread Islamophobia and the rejection of multiculturalism in large parts of
Western European publics (see EUMC 2003, 2006) provide an opening for
the radical right to look more “mainstream” and less extremist, in contrast
to earlier racist discourses such as anti-Semitism or biological racism. In
the following, this link shall be examined in a more dynamic way.
If accelerated social and cultural change (in light of the modernization-
theoretical approach outlined above) provides opportunities for the radical
right, then the changes in the religio-cultural map of Western democracies
might feed the rise of these parties and movements more than a single con-
fessional difference. In fact, the pluralization and increasing heterogeneity
of the religious map lead to a growing number and intensity of conflicts at
the intersection of politics and religion in many Western democracies (see

545
Bramadat and Koenig 2009.
As shown earlier in a comparative overview of the religious composi-
tion of Western societies (Minkenberg 2007, tab. 2, 898–899), already in
2000 Islam was the third- or even second-largest religious community in
fourteen out of nineteen democracies. The countries where Islam was sec-
ond are among those that were traditionally very homogeneous in denomi-
national terms, two Lutheran cases in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway)
and five Catholic cases (Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain; see also
Pew 2010). In the group of Protestant immigrant countries (Australia,
Canada, and the United States) plus Finland, it is the Orthodox Church that
takes third or second place.
Table 19.5 Party Strength and Movement Strength of the Radical
Right and Context Factors in Western Europe (c. 2000)
Culture Structure Actor
Move-
Party ment
1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 2a 2b 2c 2d Strength Strength
Austria 0.5 1 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 1 HIGH LOW
France 0.5 1 0 1 1 0 0 0.5 0 HIGH LOW
Italy 0.5 0 0.5 1 1 0 1 1 1 HIGH LOW
Den- 1 0 0.5 0 1 0.5 1 1 1 HIGH MEDIUM
mark
Norway 1 0 n.d. 0 1 0.5 0.5 1 1 HIGH MEDIUM
Switzer- 0 1 n.d. 0 0.5 0.5 1 1 HIGH MEDIUM
land
Belgium 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 HIGH- MEDIUM
MED.
Nether- 0 1 0 0 0 0.5 1 1 1 LOW MEDIUM
lands
Ger- 0.5 1 1 0.5 0 1 1 0 1 LOW MEDIUM
many
(West)
Ger- 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 LOW HIGH
many

546
(East)
United 1 0.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 LOW HIGH
King-
dom
Sweden 1 1 0 0 0.5 0.5 0.5 0 1 LOW HIGH

Context Factor 1:
Culture
1a Nation type: ethno-cultural nation 1, political nation 0
1b Share of foreign-born population: 1 high, 0 low
1c Level of resistance to multicultural society: 1 above
EU level, 0 below EU level
1d Predominant religious tradition: Catholic 1, Protes-
tant 0
1e Islam Second-largest religion 1, other 0
Context Factor 2:
Structure
2a Cleavages: convergence 1, polarization 0
2b Cleavages: strong New Politics voting, 1 weak 0
2c Political opportunity structures: state and parties’ lati-
tude 1, exclusion/repression 0
2d Political opportunity structures: PR electoral system
1, majority 0
Sources: See Minkenberg 2008.
Table 19.6 Confessional Makeup, Secularization, and the Radical
Right in Western Democracies (post-2000)
Weak RR Presence Strong RR Presence
Catholic
Ireland Belgium*
Portugal France*
Spain* Italy*
Austria*

Mixed Protestant Switzerland

Germany
Netherlands

547
 Canada

Protestant Great Britain Denmark*

Sweden Norway*
Australia Finland
United States

Notes
Strong RR presence: countries with a radical right party that has re-
ceived at least 4 percent of the vote in every national election in the past
twenty years.
Countries with high levels of secularization (measured by low church-
going rates) are underlined (for details of classification, see Minkenberg
2009 and Norris and Inglehart 2004).
Countries in which Islam is the second-largest religious community are
marked by an asterisk.
Moreover, from around 1980 until around 2000, religious diversity in-
creased in all Western democracies except for Sweden and the United
States. These processes of pluralization and the growing presence of (non-
Christian) immigrants do not only challenge the established institutional
and political arrangements in the religio-political field (see Bramadat and
Koenig 2009) but also provide opportunities for radical right parties. This
dynamic is depicted in Table 19.7 which measures religious diversity as
the degree of religious fragmentation.
One group of countries exhibits low levels of diversity and a low degree
of pluralization (Ireland, Portugal); here the monopoly of Catholicism by
and large persists, and the pressure for change is limited. In these coun-
tries, no radical right party has emerged. The situation changes in the next
group, with low levels of diversity but a medium degree of pluralization
(Belgium along with the Nordic countries except Sweden. These countries
also start with a denominationally homogeneous society, but in all of them
except Finland, Islam now occupies second place among the large reli-
gious communities. Here, with the exception of Finland, a radical right
party has become a permanent fixture in the party systems.
Table 19.7 Religious Diversity, Pluralization, and the Radical Right
in Western Democracies

548
 Weak Plural- Strong Plural-
ization (d < Moderate Pluraliza- ization (d >
0.10) tion (d = 0.10–0.20) 0.20)

Low level of di- Ireland Belgium France

versity
Portugal Denmark Italy
(< 0.20)
(Sweden: d = Finland Austria
negative)
Norway Spain

Moderate di-
versity
(0.20–0.50)

High level of Switzerland Germany

diversity (>
0.50) Australia Great Britain
Canada Netherlands
New Zealand
(USA: d =
negative)

Countries in bold have a strong radical right-wing party in their party

system (at least 4 percent of the vote in every national election in the
past twenty years.
Religious diversity is measured by 1 – H (where H is the value of the
Herfindahl index, defined as the probability that two randomly drawn
persons belong to different religious denominations).
Notes
Base of categorization: Diversity value of 1980 (0 completely homoge-
neous, 1.00 completely diverse).
d = Difference in diversity value between 1980 and 2000 (trend).
In countries in italics, Islam is the second-largest religious community.
Source: See Minkenberg 2007, 898–899.
This scenario grows more acute in the third group, where starting from a

549
low level of diversity a strong degree of pluralization occurs. Again, in
these countries, which are all predominantly Catholic (France, Italy, Aus-
tria, and Spain), Islam takes second place, and, except for Spain, the radi-
cal right has established itself firmly in the party system.
The remainder of the countries fall into the category of already elevated
levels of diversity. This category comprises the non-European democracies
and those European countries that constitute the heartland of the Protestant
Reformation, which early on institutionalized religious diversity. These are
the countries where the (initially) dominant Protestant church never had a
clear monopoly; among them, Switzerland stands out with its strong radi-
cal right party, which had consolidated before the later waves of immigra-
tion (for the peculiarities of the radical right in Alpine countries, see Betz
2005). In all countries with a strong radical right, these parties belong to
the middle category in Table 19.2 above: they started their career with a
strong ethnocentrist message and have meanwhile added a substantial dose
of religion to their agenda, mostly as self-declared defenders of the Christ-
ian identity and legacy of their country or Europe against the alleged Is-
lamization.

CONCLUSIONS

Religion and the radical right in liberal democracies interact at various lev-
els. These are the levels at which religion acquires a political quality: the
levels of beliefs and doctrine (ideology), the organizational and institu-
tional levels, the levels of legitimization and mobilization (see Fox 2013,
56–108). While there is nothing new in this connection, at least in modern
European history, what is new is the “return of religion” in an age of secu-
larization even among political actors who were long interpreted as provid-
ing a substitute for the waning powers of religion: an extreme “faith” in
the nation as the key to meaning and problem-solving in the context of an
increasingly complex world.
As this chapter suggests, this return of religion to the West European
radical right agenda since the 1990s is mainly due to outside forces and a
societal dynamism, in particular the process of religious pluralization,
rather than the beliefs of the activists or the tradition of the parties con-
cerned. It is a strategic adjustment, not the soul of the radical right, which
remains its anti-plural ultra-nationalism. However, because of the enduring
success of dyeing the radical right agenda with religion, in particular Is-
lamophobia, religion may become a core component of the radical right

550
ideology—as it has been in Eastern Europe since the radical right’s incep-
tion after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Here, secularization as a politi-
cally imposed process in the Communist era does not need processes of
pluralization or a growing presence of Islam to ignite religious fervor: the
extreme anti-communist impulse of the radical right leads directly to the
historical connection between religion and nation-building in the region.
Where liberal democracies have marginalized illiberal religions or reli-
gious legacies that, historically, had fed the radical right, religion has re-
turned to radical right mobilization, even in secularized societies, against
the perceived threat of rapid sociocultural change and its (alleged) agents
and protagonists. Overall, then, religion is to stay with the radical right,
even more so in light of the waning confessional divides and the transfor-
mation of the religious cleavage into the believers, whatever their denomi-
national background, and the non-believers.
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CHAPTER 20

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 RADICAL RIGHT CROSS-NATIONAL LINKS AND
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

MANUELA CAIANI
LIKE many other political actors, the radical right is currently expanding
beyond national borders, creating cross-national links and international co-
operation (Wright 2009; Europol 2011). To date, however, in sociology
and political science there are few empirical analyses on the topic. In fact,
although left-wing internationalization is very well known and studied
(e.g., Caiani and della Porta 2009), so far there has been scarce scientific
attention to the right wing and especially to how the radical right responds
to processes of transnationalization (for which European integration can be
considered a regional case) (for important exceptions see Mudde 2007;
Simmons 2003; Caiani, della Porta, and Wagemann 2012). However, there
are good reasons to ask how the radical right responds to the challenges of
transnational politics, not least since internationalization processes of all
kind are contradictory to central myths of the right, namely, ethnonational-
ism and national identity. Whereas the preservation of national identities
might have the least importance for the left, this is a central issue for the
radical right (Simmons 2003, 1). Furthermore, internationalization
processes are an important explanation for the recent dynamism of right-
wing extremism in many West European democracies (e.g., Hermet 2001;
Mény and Surel 2000, Kriesi 2008). Betz (1994) interprets contemporary
radical-right politics as a “late modern populism,” while Minkenberg
(1992, 56–58) sees it as a reaction against post-materialism and Heitmeyer
(1992) refers to “anti-modernity/globalization” explanations. In addition,
European integration is seen as having restructured social and cultural
cleavages, developing an opposition between the positions of trans- and
supranational integration and those of national demarcation, with radical
right parties and movements supporting “demarcation” through economic
and cultural protectionism (Kriesi 2008). In Europe, the dynamics of glob-
alization and economic expansion have led to a rise in unemployment and
in anti-immigration sentiment as well as “an increase in the number of
racial-nationalist parties and organizations and a rise in anti-Semitism”
(Wright 2009, 189). As noted, “racial-nationalist leaders in both North
America and Europe are able to exploit the new political conditions and
widespread fears to their advantage . . .. Advocating white-European privi-
lege and heritage, racial-nationalists can effectively formulate a troubling
but potent transnational message” (Wright 2009, 190).

562
 However, the relationship between radical right-wing groups and
transnational politics is ambiguous. Despite opposing a supranational sys-
tem, many radical right movements consider it necessary to engage in poli-
tics on a transnational level. Like any other kind of political organization,
radical right organizations do not exist in a vacuum, but instead are em-
bedded in a larger context of multilevel governance. In Europe’s electoral
arena, there have been many attempts by radical right parties to create a
“European” right-wing group within the European Parliament, such as the
Independence/Democracy group during the 2004–2009 legislature (Conti
2011). Outside the institutional arena, in recent years a trans-border radical
right network has emerged that is made up of “close contacts throughout
the EU” and supported by the participation of “like-minded nationals from
all around the states at right-wing events, such as White Power Music con-
certs” (Europol 2011, 29). It has been argued that “transnational processes
of exchange and learning play an important role in the success of right-
wing extremism and right-wing populism in Europe” (Langenbacher and
Schellenberg 2011, 22). Confronted with the “global challenges” of the
twenty-first century, right-wing extremists seek to create a transnational
network based on a “global white identity” (Daniels 2009).
In sum, although the formation of radical right cross-national links and
international identities is a scientifically (and socially) relevant issue,
scholarly attention has been so far partial and selective, and many impor-
tant related questions remain unexplored. For example, what do radical
right wing parties and movements say and actually do about transnational
politics (that is, European integration) and the building of cross-national
links and international cooperation? Is the contemporary radical right able
to deemphasize the traditional nationalism at the core of its identity
(Mudde 2007) and mitigate national differences in order to give birth to a
transnational radical right family? What factors favor the transnationaliza-
tion of the radical right? As Graham (2013, 176) argues, whereas previous
studies have focused upon the foreign policy goals of radical right-wing
populist and fascist parties, few have explored the nature of transnational
networking by the far right within contemporary Europe (for exceptions,
see Durham and Power 2010; Mammone 2008).
In this chapter, we aim to fill this gap by providing an overview of some
scholarship (coming from social movement studies, history, sociology, and
the study of political parties) on the contemporary radical right. We look
first of all at the level of contextual macro variables: the political opportu-
nities provided by the process of European integration to the transnational-

563
ization of the radical right. We consider the complex interplay among vari-
ous national actors, linked to each other in cooperative as well as competi-
tive interactions, as they face international institutions. Second, we suggest
that another important mechanism for the development of cross-national
radical right links and cooperation is the frame, which operates at the meso
organizational level (Rydgren 2005). Indeed, it has been argued that
frames—common constructions of social and political problems—are at
the basis of the formation of collective identities, including transnational
ones, and act as a precondition for cooperation (della Porta and Diani
2006). Located somewhat below the level of (broad and fixed) ideology,
frame analysis fits our interest in the ways in which organizations bridge
different, specific issues and identities across countries. We shall therefore
investigate the new tactics and frames of the radical right vis-à-vis an inte-
grated Europe, illustrating the degree and forms of its transnationalization
in terms of the scope of mobilization, targets, organizational contacts, ac-
tion strategies, and issues. Third, and in line with the new turn in social
science research toward studying the effects and use of information and
communication technologies (e.g., Bennett and Segerberg 2013), we con-
sider the potential role of the Internet in the building of transnational links
and international cooperation within the contemporary radical right, a re-
search topic still in its infancy—and one that we argue deserves further at-
tention in future research on the radical right. Differences and similarities
between radical right political parties and non-party organizations concern-
ing the formation of cross-national links and international cooperation will
be emphasized, as well as historical examples that aim to contextualize
current developments on the topic.

POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE

INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

When it comes to right-wing extremist mobilization (including transna-

tional mobilization), economic and social crises have been mentioned as
determinants of its emergence and development (Prowe 2004), as have po-
litical instability, allies in power (Koopmans 2005), the legacy of an au-
thoritarian past (Koopmans et al. 2005; Mudde 2007, 233–255), youth sub-
cultures and hooliganism (Bjørgo 1995), and the diffusion of xenophobic
values within society (Rydgren 2005). In addition, disaffection from poli-
tics, mistrust of democratic institutions, and anti-establishment sentiments,
in particular in the form of opposition toward the European Union, are in-
creasingly considered important (e.g., Mudde 2007). In terms of political

564
opportunities favoring the internationalization of the radical right, scholars
agree that European integration can potentially catalyze political dissent,
providing radical right parties and groups with a new and powerful issue to
compete on (Almeida 2010). The anti-immigrant, anti-minority-rights
campaigns are not the only issues that unite the European radical right.
The far right is also virulently anti-Brussels. Euroskepticism has been
noted to be a common trait of current radical right-wing formations, a
stance of both political parties (Vasilopoulou 2011) and non-party organi-
zations (Caiani and Della Porta 2011). According to Hooghe, Marks and
Wilson, this negative attitude toward European integration stems from “a
series of perceived threats to the national community,” including immigra-
tion, multiculturalism, and the loss of national sovereignty and traditional
values (2002, 976). These are all core myths of the radical right that are
challenged by processes of supranational integration (Bar-On 2011, 217).
Moreover, European institutions can provide an institutional arena for radi-
cal right organizations to make themselves visible and accountable, to rec-
ognize each other, and to establish coordination.
Since the mid-1980s, the European Parliament elections have repre-
sented an occasion where West European radical right parties have tried to
coordinate among themselves, at least for the political campaign (Almeida
2010, 243). The 2014 elections in particular marked a clear advancement
of the nationalist and Euroskeptic radical right actors all over Europe. The
French Front National (FN, National Front) and British UK Independence
Party (UKIP) performed very strongly, winning respectively twenty-four
and twenty-two seats. In Denmark, the radical right Dansk Folkeparti (DF,
Danish People’s Party) triumphed with 27 percent of the vote, doubling its
members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from two to four. In Austria,
the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria) in-
creased its vote tally by 7.2 percent from the previous election, and in Ger-
many even the neo-Nazis of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutsch-
lands (NPD, National Democratic Party) gained one seat in the European
Parliament.1 On this occasion, the attempt by the radical right to form a
parliamentary group within the European Parliament almost succeeded in
the form of the European Alliance for Freedom (EAF), the radical right
coalition led by France’s Marine Le Pen. The EAF was a pan-European
political party of radical right-wing Euroskeptics founded in 2010 and ini-
tially aggregating delegations from the FN, the Dutch Partij voor de Vri-
jheid (PVV, Party for Freedom), the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish
Interest), the FPÖ, the Sweden Democrats (SD), the Slovenská Národná

565
Strana (SNS, Slovak National Party), and the Italian Lega Nord (LN,
Northern League). The DF, UKIP, and the Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD, Alternative for Germany) refused to join the new alliance, while the
more radical and anti-Semitic European nationalist parties such as Ger-
many’s NPD, the British National Party (BNP), Greece’s Golden Dawn,
and Hungary’s Jobbik were not permitted to. After the European elections,
however, due to internal splintering the proposed EAF group did not
achieve the EU requirement of seven member states represented, and their
MEPs have continued to sit as non-inscrits, that is, not in one of the recog-
nized political groups.
Historical studies note that attempts to establish trans-European institu-
tions were made by the radical right before the Second World War. Italian
and British fascists, for instance, attended an International Conference of
Fascist Parties in 1932, and representatives from France, Norway, and Ire-
land attended the 1934 Fascist International Congress in Montreux (Bar-
On 2007). During the Spanish Civil War, British and other European sym-
pathizers joined the Friends of National Spain, and members of the Irish
Blue Shirt Movement joined the Spanish Foreign Legion to fight against
the Republic (Keene 2001, 2–7). However, nothing enduring was created
and the Axis alliance was primarily a strategic one (Mammone, Godin, and
Jenkins 2012, ch. 20).
Almeida (2010, 244), who studied the various attempts made by the rad-
ical right to give birth to a European party since 1979 (when the first elec-
tions for the European Parliament were held), uses records of transnational
coalition-building and data on legislative activities in the European Parlia-
ment to show that efforts, although still limited, have been made to Euro-
peanize radical right parties, using adaptive strategies that would allow
them to operate within a multilevel polity. According to Almeida, they
have failed to establish themselves as a relevant actor at the European level
for two reasons: their non-involvement in European policy making and
their inability to engage in durable transnational cooperation because of di-
vergent domestic strategies.
Drawing on empirical evidence from radical party behavior at the Euro-
pean level, three patterns of horizontal interaction between radical right
parties in the European Parliament can be identified: institutionalized ties
with radical right parties, institutionalized ties with other parties, and isola-
tion. No efforts at establishing ties were effective. In addition, in an at-
tempt to stay within the realm of democratic acceptability, a number of in-
dividuals who formerly had been members of radical right parties have

566
opted for membership in a less controversial group. Almeida (2010, 247)
believes that constraints operating at the domestic level were the main rea-
son for the repeated inability of the radical right to establish transnational
cooperation. A different hypothesis is put forward by other scholars such
as Fenneman and Pollmann (1998): that the lack of cohesion between radi-
cal right MEPs is a product of ideological heterogeneity.
Beyond institutionalized contacts within the European Parliament, other
studies have revealed the presence of cross-national contacts among radi-
cal right actors, both parties and non-party organizations (radical right po-
litical movements, cultural associations, etc.), in Europe and beyond. For
example, one recent work that included fifty-four interviews with repre-
sentatives of the most important radical right organizations in six European
countries (Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain) and
the United States (Caiani and Kröll 2014) showed that most of the radical
right organizations interviewed (71 percent) have frequent transnational
contacts, either with right-wing groups in other countries or at the interna-
tional level with umbrella federations. For instance, the representative of
the English Democrats stressed that they “have been approached by sev-
eral foreign organizations such as the Flemish Nationalist Party and the
Austrian FPÖ in order to find topics of common interest and to work on a
common platform (Caiani and Kröll 2014, 10). Similarly, the German
movement Junge Nationaldemokraten (JN, Young National Democrats)
declared that it was in regular contact with a variety of youth right-wing
organizations in Europe, including the Nordisk Ungdom (Nordic Free-
dom), and the NPD claimed links with other European radical right parties,
such as the Falange Española de las JONS (Spanish Phalanx of the Com-
mittees for the National-Syndicalist Offensive), the BNP from the United
Kingdom, and Dělnická Strana Sociální Spravedlnosti (DSSS, Workers’
Party of Social Justice) from the Czech Republic (Caiani and Kröll 2014,
11). The representative of the American Third Position explained that his
group had recently had “transoceanic” contacts with the French FN, and
other American organizations have had contacts with the BNP (Caiani and
Kröll 2014, 12). This high degree of horizontal “transnational embedded-
ness” may be related to the weak institutionalization of supranational right-
wing actors, which pushes national radical right movement organizations
to be involved directly at multiple levels. There are, however, some na-
tional specificities that emerge from this study: in some countries (includ-
ing the United States, France, Austria, and Britain) the radical right is
more internationally oriented, and in other countries, for instance Italy, the
radical right tends to have fewer cross-national linkages. What is more in-

567
teresting is that regardless of country variations there are important differ-
ences in cross-national links depending on the type of radical right organi-
zation: cross-national contacts are more typical of the most institutional-
ized and resourceful organizations (Caiani and Kröll 2014, 10).
In regard to political parties, the interwar fascist movements sought to
develop partnerships. The same happened after 1945, as in the case of John
Bean and Colin Jordan’s BNP of the very early 1960s, which boasted of its
“racial nationalist” credentials and developed organizations such as the
Northern European Ring in order to foster international exchanges with
fellow “northern Europeans” in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and
Germany. In more recent times, John Tyndall and Nick Griffin’s BNP im-
ported ideas from abroad, drawing on continental reference points such as
Jean-Marie Le Pen and the nouvelle droite, as well as fostering links with
America via its American Friends of the BNP organization.
Regarding non-party radical right organizations, the easing of Europe’s
borders (and the development of information and communications tech-
nologies; see below) is affecting the outlook and activities of right-wing
extremists (Whine 2012). Within an even more integrated Europe, there
can be many manifestations of coordination among radical right national-
ists, though these can take a variety of different and not necessarily “politi-
cal” forms, such as international gatherings, clothing, and music. Pan-Eu-
ropean associations promote closer contact around symbolic or expressive
events (see also Caiani, della Porta, and Wagemann 2012, ch. 5). One ex-
ample is the case of the European National Front, founded in 1999, which
has affiliates in Bulgaria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece, Italy,
Portugal, Romania, and Spain and in August 2006 mobilized up to ten
thousand supporters for the Deutsche Stimme festival in Sachsen, Ger-
many (Whine 2012, 494; see also AIVD 2005). The annual Dresden march
commemorating the Allied bombing, organized by the German NPD, at-
tracted more than three thousand people in 2005, six thousand in 2008, and
thousands again in 2009.
Finally, the importance of youth structures in socializing far-right ac-
tivists at a transnational level is underlined by many scholars (e.g., Graham
2013, 191), and Eastern and Central Europe are no exception. Cross-na-
tional radical right contacts and links are generated during symbolic
events, and the impact of the Western (in particular German, American,
and British) radical right on the East and Central European scene has been
proven to be strong (Mareš 2012). In the last several years, the scene in
Eastern and Central Europe has been increasingly influenced by ideas from

568
the modern Italian non-fascist radical right, such as those promoted by the
Zentropa website and the Italian subcultural youth movement CasaPound,
which endorse new social approaches to right-wing radicalism, focusing
on the protection of European populations from global capitalism. East and
Central European radical right youth organizations have copied organiza-
tional structures from groups elsewhere, and have established contacts
with other organizations (for example, with the German Autonomous Na-
tionalists). Methods they have adopted include occupying abandoned
buildings, organizing cultural programs and educational and training activ-
ities for sympathizers, offering sympathizers a broad range of leisure-time
activities, and engaging with students (Mareš 2012, 10). Regarding politi-
cal parties, Mareš identifies several attempts at coordination between radi-
cal right organizations in Western, Eastern, and Central Europe (Mareš
2012, 1). In 2009 the DSSS, which is the strongest right-wing extremist
party in the Czech Republic, initiated intensive relations with the German
NPD. In 2011, for example, both parties adopted the Riesa Manifesto on
human rights abuses, and their relations and cooperation extend beyond
just those two groups to the organizations affiliated with both parties
(Mareš 2012, 2–3). Moreover, Central European groups are involved as
equal partners in pan-European projects, including pan-European political
parties, such as the establishment in 2009 of the Alliance of European Na-
tionalist Movements (AENM), aggregating the Hungarian Jobbik, the
BNP, the Italian Fiamma Tricolore, the National Democrats in Sweden,
the Finnish National Party, the Belgian National Front, the All-Ukrainian
Union Freedom, the Portuguese Partido Nacional Renovador, and the Re-
publican Social Movement from Spain. Also, the Slovenian National
Party, the Imperium Europe movement from Malta, and smaller organiza-
tions from Bulgaria and Poland attended events organized by the AENM,
including its 2012 meeting in Milan, Italy. We have noticed that despite
nationalist tensions running high between some right-wing extremist
groups in this region, for example between the Slovak and Hungarian
groups, common issues such as an anti-Roma agenda serve as the basis for
transnational cooperation, as in the participation of members of the Slovak
party Brotherhood in rallies organized by the DSSS in the Czech Republic,
or the participation of representatives of the Czech Workers’ Party, the
Nuova Dreapta (New Right) from Romania, and the Polish organization
Falanga in the Nationalist Olympic Games in Slovakia organized by some
Slovak radical right parties (Mareš 2012, 6). In fact, despite strong nation-
alism being one of the core values of the radical right (Mudde 2007), cur-
rent right-wing organizations, both political parties and movements, appear

569
to have adapted to the transformation of the context in which they mobilize
and become more transnational.
An important indicator of the transnationalization of right-wing extrem-
ism today concerns the scope of its mobilization, that is, the territorial di-
mension of the radical right’s activity, which can vary from the local level
to the international level. According to Caiani and Kröll (2014), although
most of these organizations’ initiatives appear still mainly focused on the
national (in 73 percent of cases) and local levels (in 52 percent of cases),
30 percent of them are active also at the international level, organizing
events across national boundaries and at the EU level. These figures are
even higher than those that emerged from previous empirical research on
left-wing radical social movements.2 Such right-wing transnational events
include the European campaign to boycott the products of American multi-
national companies, cultural events such as concerts, and European party
meetings and congresses.3 The president of the French organization Bloc
Identitaire explained that his group had contacts with some members of the
European Parliament, including the Italian deputy Mario Borghezio, from
the LN. Similarly, the spokesperson for the British Freedom Party declared
that his party spoke with “politicians from the local council level all the
way up to MEPs from Britain and other European countries” (Caiani and
Kröll 2014, 4).
Researchers are also seeing an increase in the transnationalization of the
radical right over time. As Figure 20.1 indicates, the proportion of transna-
tional radical right actors (that is, radical right groups with a presence in
more than one country, or Europe-wide federations) at events increased
from 2.4 percent in 2005 to 4 percent in 2007, dropping back to 3.2 per-
cent in 2009. For example, the music festival Hammerfest, which took
place in the United States in 2005, involved radical right bands from all
over the United States and Europe, according to an article in the Atlanta
Journal and Constitution on October 1 of that year. Similarly, the number
of transnational right-wing events as a proportion of all right-wing events
also increased slightly (from 3.5 percent of all cases in 2005 to 6.3 percent
in 2006, 4.5 percent in 2007, 5.6 percent in 2008, and 4.6 percent in 2009).
Furthermore, right-wing initiatives with supranational targets (that is, the
EU) rose from 4.5 percent of all initiatives in 2005 to 9.3 percent.4 Ex-
plained the Italian party Forza Nuova in March 2003 about the campaign it
organized against the United States and globalization: “We are doing con-
sultations among leaders of nationalist movements in Europe, with the aim

570
of extending the boycott campaign against the USA to a transnational
level.”

FIGURE 20.1 The Development Across Time of Transnational Radical

Right Actors, Events, and Targets (2005–2009, All Countries) (%)
In brief, the main conclusion that we can derive from this section is that
despite its traditional association with the national, the modern right is a
transnational phenomenon. Whether in its fascist, conservative, or other
forms, it organizes across national barriers, linking together movements in
different countries (Durham and Power 2010). Historical analyses like the
one conducted by Mammone (2015) on the French and Italian radical right
show that transnational tendencies have always existed on the radical right,
with movements, activists, and thinkers establishing links and exchanging
ideas, personnel, and strategies across national boundaries since 1945, al-
though these processes have been accelerated by the process of European
integration.

INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE RADICAL RIGHT AND

“FRAMES”

Some scholars look at the internationalization of collective actors as diffu-

sion of ideas, norms, and values, and they postulate that processes of diffu-
sion of “frames” are a precondition for the formation of transnational co-
operation and identities, which in turn can function as a basis for the devel-
opment of cross-national linkages (della Porta and Diani 2006). Network-
ing, for the radical right as for any political party, represents an important
political activity, particularly on an international level, functioning as a

571
crucible for the exchange of ideas and information on policy and praxis
(Graham 2013, 177). This diffusion of shared frames and common “reper-
toires of protest” also facilitates the further development of “tolerant” sup-
port networks for ideologically inspired “intolerant” action; these networks
can provide logistical and indeed emotional support to activists who are
frequently marginalized within the context of their own domestic politics
(della Porta and Tarrow 2004). The diffusion of ideas can be explored by
applying frame analysis, focusing on the social construction of problems
and solutions and the way organizations spread their vision of society
(Johnston and Noakes 2005).
In this sense, transnationalism of the radical right has been often ex-
plored through studying the movement of ideas—how they transfer from
one arena to another. Many historians, such as Roger Griffin, Andrea
Mammone, and Claudia Baldoli, to mention a few, have highlighted the
mechanisms through which radical right politics has operated across na-
tional borders, showing that radical right leaders and groups have drawn
on each other’s endeavors to develop their activism. For example, the
French FN was the driving force behind the development of similar parties
in Western Europe, and it became the spearhead of the radical right in Eu-
rope (FES 2010, 6). Another example is the case of the BNP in the United
Kingdom and the NPD in Germany, which through the sharing of ideas,
information, policy, and praxis among their leaders and activists have de-
veloped a common ideological “master frame” in order to interpret and ex-
plain the impact of global changes to national and local audiences, most
obviously through the invocation of populist anti-Muslim nostrums (FES
2010, 177). In particular, both individual networking and party youth
structures are an important mode through which certain party cadres are
selected for further socialization and radicalization via international ac-
tivism. Party congresses, festivals, and demonstrations also serve as a
focus for such international activities (FES 2010, 194). This type of
transnational relationship between the BNP and NPD is just one of a
plethora of similar ties, historical and contemporary, political and cultural,
that exist across the far right spectrum.
One important indicator of the transnationalization of the radical right is
the presence of transnational issues in the public discourses of these orga-
nizations, and—most important—“common positions/visions” on them
(Ivarsflaten 2007), as a basis for the potential development of cross-na-
tional links and international cooperation. A recent study based on system-
atic content analysis of various documents (party newspapers, magazine,

572
leaflets, online discussion forums) of different types of radical right orga-
nizations (political parties, political movements, and subcultural youth
groups) in Italy and Germany from 2000 to 2006 (Caiani, della Porta, and
Wagemann 2012) showed that European issues appear in the discourse of
the radical right in the two countries (in 11 percent and 5 percent of docu-
ments analyzed, respectively, out of a total of 3,700 samples), without sig-
nificant differences among the different types of groups. This suggests the
salience of the issue in the institutional as well as social sectors of these
political forces (for instance, in Italy the subject of Europe is discussed in
49 percent of samples taken from political parties, versus in 35 percent of
samples from subcultural organizations and 14 percent of samples from
political movements) (Caiani 2014, 452). If we consider that in the dis-
course of the radical right, “Europe” and “European integration” are often
associated with “globalization” (a theme that arises in about 20 percent of
samples in both Italy and Germany), it is evident that the process of inter-
nationalization plays an important role in the rhetoric of this political area
(Mudde 2007).
In addition, there is a high degree of convergence in the Euroskeptic dis-
course of the radical right in the countries analyzed. The way the radical
right perceives and (negatively) represents the EU through frames is strik-
ingly similar across countries, despite the fact that these organizations do
not really cooperate and in a sense are even in competition with each other.
Indeed, according to the Italian and German radical right organizations an-
alyzed, “European integration and globalization of markets has not only
economic but also cultural and political consequences.” Globalization not
only leads to the “loss of identities of peoples” but also brings about “limi-
tations to the sovereignty of the national states” (to cite a May 2002 exam-
ple from the Italian group Forza Nuova). Europe is considered a “totalitar-
ian superstate,” a sort of “dictatorship,” an “intrusive body,” a “distant and
oppressing power” (a characteristic that is very often mentioned as being
in opposition to “the European peoples”), and a “centralizing state.” More
specific references to European policies describe a “market-oriented” EU
that conditions national political and economic choices, serving the inter-
ests of international finance rather than the real interests of the nations. For
instance, according to the radical right, at the national level the EU “in-
creases unemployment,” “damages the competitiveness of small busi-
nesses,” will “lead to the closure of many domestic businesses” and “to the
invasion of foreign goods,” and will “provoke the development of finan-
cial crimes” (Caiani 2014, 452–454). Marine Le Pen in France talks in a
very similar way of the “catastrophic experiment” of the euro. Her FN, as

573
well as the Dutch PVV, sees European institutions (especially the Euro-
pean Commission) as “centralizing,” and criticizes their weak legitimacy
(they are often characterized as “not elected”). They propose instead to
give more power to the European Parliament and the council representing
national governments. By contrast, the corruption of the European elites
has been one of the main topics of the Hungarian Jobbik’s recent electoral
campaign.
A somewhat different picture is offered in the analysis conducted by
Almeida (2010) on the programmatic responses of radical right parties to
European integration, based on electoral manifestos (national and Euro-
pean) from 1983 and 2007. The author stresses that while some of the most
prominent members of the radical right party family, such as the FN in
France and the FPÖ, have placed their opposition to Europe at the core of
their program, the radical right does not constitute a homogeneous and sta-
tic Euroskeptic bloc, because there are differences in the salience different
radical right parties attribute to European issues, as well as differences in
the programmatic realignments that have marked their European policies
(Almeida 2010, 244).
It is evident that greater coherence in political discourse and action in
this area could favor the development of cross-national contacts and in-
creased cooperation among radical right parties (Caiani and Conti 2014).
In the end, despite many factors being involved in issue mobilization and
the creation of a pro-EU/anti-EU cleavage in many West European coun-
tries, the success of this process depends, as Caiani and Conti (2014) sug-
gest, on the ability of radical right organizations to come to terms with
their ideological background, give priority to this emerging cleavage, and
establish greater synergies with one another.
However, there are also commentators who consider that the most im-
portant element in the transnationalization of the radical right involves
ideas and frames, and not so much their common opposition toward Euro-
pean integration. Instead, they see Islamophobia as a common ground for
building pan-European right-wing unity (see, e.g., Hafez 2014). As noted,
there have always been international links between fascist and far-right
groups, going as far back as the late 1920s; however, what is new is that
international linkages between elements of the far right have recently coa-
lesced around anti-Muslim prejudice—a kind of lowest common denomi-
nator that they can all agree on, as opposed to white supremacism, anti-
Semitism, parliamentary democracy, and many other traditional ideologi-
cal features of the radical right (On Religion 2014).

574
 THE INTERNET’S ROLE IN CROSS-NATIONAL LINKS AND
COOPERATION: MISSING THE GAP?

We cannot neglect the key role played by the Internet in the international-
ization of the radical right. As recent studies highlight, both European and
American far-right organizations are increasingly active on the Internet, in
order to avoid national laws and police investigations (Bartlett, Birdwell,
and Littler 2011; Caiani and Wagemann 2009; De Koster and Houtman
2008; Ramalingam 2012). The new virtual means of communication of-
fered by the Internet are thought to favor transnational solidarity (Chase-
Dunn and Boswell 2004). “The development of information and communi-
cation technologies” and the “easing of Europe’s border” are the “new en-
ablers allowing white supremacists and neo-Nazis to connect and cooper-
ate” (Whine 2012, 317). Also, studies on terrorism and political violence
stress that isolated individual “consumers” can find a common identity
through radical right websites, convincing them that they are not alone but
instead are part of a community, albeit a virtual one (Adams and Roscigno
2005; De Koster and Houtman 2008). Furthermore, as scholars of social
movements underline, the Internet can play an important role in mobiliza-
tion by reducing the cost of communication among a large number of indi-
viduals (della Porta and Mosca 2006; Whine 2000), by solving the prob-
lem of leadership and networking, and by allowing the organization of
transnational and even global events (Petit 2004). In addition, in a fashion
similar to cybercriminals, right-wing extremists can also use the Internet
for illegal or borderline-legal activities, such as hacking, exchange of hid-
den instructions, mass threat emails, and fraud (Perry and Olsson 2009).
Finally, the Internet can be an effective means of realizing the concept of
“leaderless resistance” based on a network of “phantom cells,” as some
American radical right activists have promoted (Levin 2002).
To date, there are few empirical analyses on the topic. Existing research
on the transnationalization of social movements and the role played by the
Internet therein has focused primarily on left-wing and/or religious Islamic
organizations (Bunts 2003; della Porta and Mosca 2005; Pianta and Silva
2003; Qin et al. 2007). The few studies on the radical right and Internet
politics have tended to concentrate on specific country or organization case
studies, lacking comparative and transnational dimensions (see, e.g., Atton
2006). Other works addressing the transnationalization of the radical right
focus on either the offline transnational activities of these actors (mainly
political parties during electoral campaigns; e.g., Vasilopoulou 2011) or
the online transnational links between radical right groups, missing the

575
bridge between the online and offline spheres. For example, Burris, Smith,
and Strahm (2000), through a social network analysis of websites of eighty
white supremacist organizations, showed that more than two-thirds pro-
vided links to like-minded organizations in foreign countries. In another
study, Gerstenfeld, Grant, and Chiang (2003) found that 51 percent of the
157 English-language right-wing extremist websites surveyed included
links to organizations from other countries, and around 26 percent offered
non-English content.
Most interestingly, Caiani and Kröll’s (2014) study based on fifty-four
interviews with representatives of major radical right organizations in Eu-
rope and the United States (both political parties and non-party organiza-
tions) showed that the Internet has become an essential tool for most of
these organizations and their international activities, in terms of both en-
abling their action and facilitating communication between organizations
and individuals. In fact, 81 percent of the interviewed individuals (with no
significant differences across countries or types of groups) emphasize that
the Internet “helps a lot” in this regard.5 Many of the organizations studied
by the researchers are wholly Internet-based. This is the case, for example,
with the White Voice group, whose spokesperson explained that they are
“based on the Internet and have a strong following around the world.” And
the representative of Vanguard News Network (VNN) stressed that they
are “not a true ‘organization,’ in formal legal terms,” but are “websites and
forums that do projects and [offline] rallies from time to time” and that
they are active supranationally, “since anyone from any country can join
[the] forum and post” (Caiani and Kröll 2014). The individuals inter-
viewed emphasized the effectiveness and “security” of cyberspace in facil-
itating various supranational activities, as did the representative of the U.S.
group who declared that his network does not “operate as an organization,
but as [a] lone wolf in small cells . . . with the aim of avoiding prosecution
by the state” and that “the Internet works quite well in reaching out to like-
minded people”; it allows his group to avoid having physical meetings,
which “government agencies” and other entities “can infiltrate” (Caiani
and Kröll 2014, 5–6). The Internet is also increasingly important for the
horizontal transnationalization of the radical right. Many of the radical
right representatives who were interviewed explained that “via the Inter-
net, like-minded organizations can be searched, as many of the organiza-
tions are represented by their own homepage” and that “networking can be
done between rank and file members, and by people who otherwise would
never meet or communicate. This exponentially increases and speeds up

576
the dissemination of ideas and activism globally.” In this sense, the Inter-
net allows “some kind of exchange with organizations from other countries
as they follow one another’s reports and sometimes use articles and docu-
ments taken from the respective websites” (Caiani and Kröll 2014, 4). An
example of this is the European movement and website Stop Islamification
of Europe, founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom, which is against the
expansion of Islam in Europe; thanks to the Internet, this group is active in
several European countries. Other examples of transnational right-wing
mobilizations organized and supported through the Internet are political
party meetings and congresses, such as the conference “Our Europe: Peo-
ples and Tradition Against Banks and Usury,” organized in March 2009 in
Milan by the British BNP, the French FN, and the German NPD with the
aim of bringing together representatives of the main extreme right parties
and followers in Europe (described in, for example, La Repubblica on
March 25, 2009). Another is the European congress organized by the Ger-
man party Republikaner in Rosenheim in 2008, involving extreme right
parties from all over Europe (reported on in Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 19,
2008). Extreme right organizations also make some attempt to promote
virtual debates among members and sympathizers on their websites,
through forums, and via mailing lists (present in 25 percent of cases ana-
lyzed by Caiani and Kröll [2014, 6]), and they endeavor to construct their
group identity thorough website sections providing basic information re-
garding the group (e.g., “About Us,” “Who We are,” etc., in 74 percent of
cases) and the group’s goals and mission (e.g., “Statement,” “Constitu-
tion,” “Manifesto,” seen in 60 percent of cases). Indeed, many right-wing
organizations stress that they are more likely to become known because of
the Internet, since “Google and other web robots pick up the website and
forum headlines which bring browsers from around the world” (Caiani and
Kröll 2014, 7). In sum, information and communication technologies
(ICTs) enable right-wing extremists to reach their target audience and at-
tract a wider audience beyond their borders—something that most main-
stream mass media outlets seem to deny. Building on this result, we can
also note that ICTs may act as a “force multiplier” for these types of
groups, by enhancing the power of right-wing extremists and allowing
them “to push above their weight” nationally and cross-nationally (Whine
2000).

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we started from the observation that an important aspect to

577
be explored in current research on the radical right is whether we are wit-
nessing an internationalization of the radical right, something that social
movement scholars acknowledge can be greatly enhanced by the use of
new technologies. We therefore illustrated, by relying on several empirical
studies coming from history, sociology, and political science and focusing
on either macro- or meso-level factors of explanations, the intensity and
trends of current radical right cross-national links and cooperation. Today,
right-wing extremist organizations across the world, whether parties or
non-party organizations, are adapting to transnational politics (in particular
the process of European integration) through either political communica-
tion or mobilization. Although in general radical right actions and initia-
tives still take place mainly at the local level (especially in the case of the
more informal radical right groups, such as subcultural youth groups), the
transnational arena is increasing in importance. As we have seen, the ma-
jority of radical right organizations mobilize beyond the national level, tar-
get transnational institutions and politicians, and have cross-national con-
tacts with similar organizations in other countries. This suggests that
American and European radical right organizations are acquiring a strong
“international approach” (Gerstenfeld, Grant, and Chiang 2003, 37). Sec-
ond, even though radical right groups strongly oppose political globaliza-
tion and European integration, they become entrepreneurs of a sort of
transnationalization of the right-wing movement itself (Halikiopoulou,
Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012). As Bar-On (2011, 208) notes, “The
stances of most of the radical right-wing political parties within the Euro-
pean Union have become identical: support for pan-European unity, and
rejection of the contemporary ‘technocratic’ EU.” Far-right movements
can be narrowly conceived as nationalist organizations, yet often their ide-
ologies synthesize national and transnational visions. Paradoxically, the
unifying feature of this global identity is globalization as a common
enemy. The new transnational right-wing extremists can be thus described
as “globalized anti-globalists” (Grumke 2013). Finally, some scholars may
consider the cyber world to be limited and without connection to the “real”
world, but we and many of the authors cited in this chapter have argued
that radical right organizations “contribute regularly and with purpose
within the online communities they have helped to create and forge within
cyberspace” (Bowman-Grieve 2009, 1005). Research indicates that the In-
ternet seems to be a useful tool for this “transnational” activation of the
radical right, in terms of increasing its supranational targets, giving it the
opportunity for supranational mobilization, and giving birth to suprana-
tional organizations.

578
NOTES

1. Successes were also achieved by the Dutch PVV (15 percent), the
Hungarian Jobbik (13 percent), the Greek Golden Dawn (9 percent),
and the Sweden Democrats (7 percent).
2. The interview question concerning the scope of the mobilization (Ca-
iani and Kröll 2014) allowed more than one choice (5-point scale:
from district level to European/transnational level). Research on
protest events collected from newspaper sources and focusing on left-
wing movements has stressed the paucity of protests directly targeting
supranational European institutions (e.g., Della Porta and Caiani 2009;
Imig and Tarrow 2001).
3. For example, the Spanish party Falange Española demonstrated
against approval of the European Constitution in 2005 (discussed in
the newspaper El País on May 20, 2005).
4. The notion of “scope of the actor” refers to the organizational exten-
sion of the organization and/or institution. In our coding scheme, the
categories for the scope of the actor that initiates the event and the
scope of the actor-target of the mobilization vary from local to interna-
tional. The notion of “scope of the event/action” refers to the scope of
mobilization. That is, if an article mentions “radical right organiza-
tions from different member states,” the scope is “European Union.”
The category “multilateral” refers to “actors involved from two or
more countries.”
5. Examples of transnational right-wing action launched and sustained
through the Web are the Spanish online forum Europeans.org, where
xenophobic ideas are discussed, and the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist
campaign launched by the French movement Bloc Identitaire from its
website.
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CHAPTER 21

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 POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

LEONARD WEINBERG AND ELIOT ASSOUDEH

OUR focus is on radical right violence in the Western world, more specifi-
cally North America and Western Europe. While much of the public’s at-
tention has been fixed recently on terrorist attacks staged by the Islamic
State (IS), al Qaeda (AQ), and their jihadist affiliates, radical right groups
along with individual perpetrators have been responsible for many violent
attacks carried out in some of the most economically advanced regions of
the world.
In this chapter we pay little attention to radical right violence in Eastern
Europe, not because it is unimportant (Hungary and Poland are presently
ruled by far right parties) but because their recent histories depart substan-
tially from those of their Western counterparts (for a summary, see Ramet
1999). Political parties and other organizations expressing nostalgia for
pre-communist authoritarianism have an appeal in the East rarely seen in
the West (Ramet 1999). In addition, Eastern Europe, given its economic
problems, is not experiencing the dilemmas posed by mass immigration
from the Middle East and North Africa. Violence in Eastern Europe ap-
pears largely home-grown. Roma are often targets of attack in Romania,
Hungary, and elsewhere. Anti-Semitism persists even in the absence of
Jews. Cemetery desecrations are not uncommon. The American investor
George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew with dual citizenship, is frequently
depicted as a danger to national sovereignty, growing out of his alleged de-
sire to dominate and control Hungary and its neighbors (Wistrich 2010,
183–212). International warfare persists—for example, fighting over the
future status of Ukraine—decades after such armed conflicts have become
unimaginable in the West.
Despite meaningful differences in the countries involved, we are essen-
tially adopting a most-similar-systems approach to the problem of evaluat-
ing violent operations carried out by a substantial collection of “lone
wolves,” small groups, and (not uncommonly) right-wing populist political
parties. In order to undertake this task we begin by defining our terms.
First, what do we mean by the term “radical right populism”? And second,
under what conditions do radical rightists employ violence to convey their
various messages?
First, what do new right-wing populists stand for? The Dutch political
scientist Cas Mudde (2002, 187–189; 2007 has proposed to answer this

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question by a close examination of the platforms or general policy state-
ments of European parties to whom the label has become attached. Mudde
labels such parties as members of a “party family” bound together by a
common ideological core. These views include:
• Nationalism. A belief that a state and the people who inhabit it should
be the same: France for the French.
• Exclusionism. Mudde includes under this category racism, ethnocen-
trism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia (hostility to foreigners).
• Anti-democratic outlook. This can include either elitism (the notion
that some people are born to rule) or support, at least rhetorically, for
the common man (as opposed to support for an often self-selected po-
litical elite based on wealth and party political privilege).
• Anti-party outlook. The notion that political parties weaken the state
and the people; the terms “political movement” and “rally” are pre-
ferred.
• Statism. A stress on the importance of a strong state while simultane-
ously supporting competitive capitalist enterprise. Endorsement of
“welfare state” chauvinism—the idea that the benefits of the welfare
state should be limited to the “in-group,” and newcomers and mem-
bers of minority groups need not apply.
• Traditional ethical outlook. As Mudde (2002, 189) puts it, a “con-
cern with the breakdown of the nucle[ar] family, community, religion,
and traditional morality.” These provide the “historical basis of soci-
ety and their decline means the breakdown of society.”
• Monism. The notion that there is only one correct side to any question
or political dispute. Other sides are simply wrong and don’t deserve a
hearing.
The American version of radical right populism appears to differ from its
European counterparts in a number of ways. First, given the nature of vot-
ing procedures in the United States, right-wing extremism rarely produces
viable political parties that express the qualities Mudde mentions. Rather,
to the extent these perspectives get expressed through American political
party politics, they tend to be articulated by factions or even individual
personalities within one of the two major parties. The last significant third-
party movement in the United States was George Wallace’s pro-segrega-
tionist Independent American Party in 1968. On the other hand, the United
States abounds with what the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and

588
the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the two leading watchdog organiza-
tions, label as “hate groups.” By the SPLC’s annual calculation, the num-
ber of neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan, nativist, and anti-Semitic groups peaked at
over a thousand during the first years of the Obama administration.1
Next, Mudde mentions statism as an important attribute of the populist
(European) far right. This is certainly not true in American politics. Radi-
cal right-wing groups in the United States are emphatically anti-statist. Op-
position to the federal government includes such organizations as the anti-
tax Tea Party movement; the Posse Comitatus, whose view is that no gov-
ernment entity above the county level should be considered legitimate; the
“sovereign citizen” movement; and various neo-secessionist groups advo-
cating the withdrawal of Texas (and, in some views, all the states of the
old Confederacy) from the Union.
Religion is another point of departure. American radical right populism
is strongly influenced by religious ideas. Opposition to abortion, an issue
that has led to violence on numerous occasions, possesses a strong attrac-
tion for American radical rightists, but this is largely missing from the Eu-
ropean scene.

Is there a distinctly American version of far right populism?2 Berlet and

Lyons (2000, 6–18) think there is, with several distinct emphases:
• Producerism. The idea that the world is divided into productive and
creative people, on the one hand, and parasites and moochers, on the
other. A fictionalized version of this understanding may be found in
the work of Ayn Rand.
• Demonizing and scapegoating. Social and political opponents are
not simply wrong about this or that, but rather are embodiments of
evil against whom constant vigilance is required.
• Conspiracism. The United States and other governments are domi-
nating and manipulating their citizens’ lives. It follows that radical
right populists typically see the world in apocalyptic terms; evil is im-
minent. During this period of “tribulation” the forces of good shall tri-
umph and achieve salvation, while enemies and “demons” are to be
destroyed.
Other than an appeal to the people writ large and suspicions about out-
siders and a country’s current leadership, it isn’t completely clear how
much European and American right-wing populists have in common. Part

589
of the difference is no doubt institutional. In America the populist outlook
is typically expressed less by political personalities and elected officials
and more by media celebrities and religious spokespersons out to expand
their audiences at the expense of competitors. This may explain the hyster-
ical tone of American radical right populists, which is different from the
tone of most of their European counterparts. Certainly there are parallels to
be drawn between Donald Trump, who was the Republican presidential
candidate in 2016, and the former long-serving Italian prime minister Sil-
vio Berlusconi. Both these multi-billionaires have exploited their wealth,
celebrity status, easy access to the mass media, and demagogic speaking
style to win impressive electoral support.
How and why does radical right populism lead to violence in what are,
after all, democratic settings? The first thing to stress is that the turn to vi-
olence isn’t monocausal. As with Herbert Kitschelt’s (1995, 159–201) ob-
servation about voter support for radical right parties in Western Europe,
so too in this case no single condition explains the use of violence.
It seems fair to stress that the linkage between far right extremism and
radical right violence is relatively complex. First, there are right-wing pop-
ulist parties who are legally bound (on pain of exclusion from the electoral
process) to deny any open support for violence, but whose typically youth-
ful adherents may take it upon themselves to carry out violent attacks on
immigrants and vulnerable minorities; these include the Nation-
aldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party) in Ger-
many, Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc; later Vlaams Belang, Flemish Interest)
in Belgium, and Golden Dawn in Greece. Second, recently some countries
have witnessed the appearance of right-wing protest movements whose
spokespeople express fear about the impending “Islamization” of Euro-
pean civilization. The English Defence League, the Scottish Defence
League, and the German-based Patriotische Europäer gegen die Is-
lamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamiza-
tion of the West, known as Pegida) are examples. Frequently these move-
ments become engaged in protest marches and anti-immigrant rallies that
often deteriorate into street-corner brawls with members of a targeted im-
migrant minority group. In Madrid, Brussels, Paris, Rome, and various
German cities these protests have taken the form of nighttime firebombing
of immigrants’ homes and businesses (with the cry “Foreigners out!”).
Third, there are clandestine groups whose raison d’être is terrorism. The
National Socialist Underground in Germany, for example, spent years as-
sassinating Turkish immigrants suspected of involvement in the drug trade

590
before its members were arrested by the police (Lehr 2013).
Holbrook and Taylor (2013, 2) write, “As a broad generalization, we
might say that extreme right-wing political violence and terrorism consti-
tutes an umbrella term that is applied to cluster together extremist and vio-
lent political activity that targets specific communities and actors who are
blamed for the failed aspirations and grievances of belligerents.”
Another way of putting it is to say there is a strong element of vigilan-
tism about populist radical right violence. In an opinion study conducted in
the United States during the turbulent last years of the 1960s, University of
Michigan investigators distinguished between those who support violence
to promote “social change” and those who support or carry out violence
for purposes of “social control.” As they put it: “ ‘Vigilante’ refers to a
person who uses violence to achieve social control without the legitimate
authority to do so” (Blumenthal, Kahn, and Andrews 1972, 180). The po-
litical theorist A. James Gregor (Gregor and Panunzio 2014, 46–57) refers
us to the paramilitary Fascist movement in Italy before Mussolini’s seizure
of power in 1922.
The late Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak (1995) developed a dy-
namic framework for understanding the dynamics of left- and right-wing
terrorism. From Sprinzak’s perspective, the adoption of terrorism by an ex-
tremist movement with universalist goals is the outcome of a protracted
conflict. For those extremist movements seeking to promote social change
(i.e., left-wing revolutionary objectives), the first stage on the path to ter-
rorist violence involves a crisis of confidence in a government’s ability to
carry out changes its critics regard as essential for a country’s well-being.
There follows a process of disenchantment culminating in the movement’s
decision that violence is the only way to bring about change.
When Sprinzak turns his attention to the far right, he refers to “particu-
laristic” violence. For radical right groups with specific grievances against
ethnic, racial, or religious minority groups in the population, the path to vi-
olence is much shorter. Like the English Defence League or the Italian
Northern League (Lega Nord), radical right bands direct ire at specific
groups in the population, such as Syrian refugees, Roma, or African Amer-
icans. Radical right anger mounts when such groups begin to demand im-
provements in their social, economic, and political conditions. At a certain
point in these groups’ strivings for equality, radical right movements look
to government to keep such “inferior” groups in their subordinate posi-
tions. If this fails to happen, as in South Africa at the end of the apartheid

591
regime, the radical rightists deny that the government is still legitimate. So,
under these circumstances, both the government and the particular group
become targets of popular radical right violence. In the late 1950s and
early 1960s, French settlers in Algeria believed they had been betrayed by
General Charles de Gaulle’s new Fifth Republic regime (established in
1958) and its willingness to negotiate with the Algerian Front de Libéra-
tion Nationale (National Liberation Front). The pro-settler Organisation
Armée Secrète (Secret Army Organization) emerged and launched a cam-
paign of terrorism against both Algerian civilians and government officials
in metropolitan France, including several failed assassination attempts on
de Gaulle himself.

FORMS OF RIGHT-WING VIOLENCE

Populist radical right violence takes on a variety of forms. First, there is

the ethnic, religious, or race-based riot (often based on moments of mass
protest). Next, in sharp contrast to rioting, is the lone wolf attack, in which
a single individual or a small handful of individuals take it upon them-
selves to stage a terrorist attack on an “enemy” target (Feldman and Jack-
son 2013). Third, often terrorist attacks are launched collectively by mem-
bers, real or aspirational, of a larger-scale movement (white supremacist or
skinhead groups) seeking to reduce the presence of some despised minor-
ity element in the country and restore the power of a heretofore dominant
segment in the population (“White power! White pride!” has become a
transnational slogan); the late neo-Nazi William Pierce’s best-selling The
Turner Diaries and Hunter offer guidance. Fourth, there are occasionally
cases when right-wing populist political parties look the other way when
their members, typically youth groups attached to them, are involved in at-
tacks on minorities and recent immigrants. The far right Golden Dawn in
Greece and the National Democrats in Germany may serve as examples.
As may be imagined, riots usually involve the least amount of planning
but also typically involve the most participants of any type of radical right
violence. Often these episodes begin as protests, such as marches, mass
rallies, and other expressions of mass discontent staged by members of an
aggrieved minority. Northern Ireland in 1968–1969 comes to mind. Protest
marches in the American South aimed at securing the right to vote for
African Americans during the civil rights era offer another case. Anti-Se-
mitic riots in France during the Dreyfus case of the 1890s would serve as a
third example. In other words, by publicly demonstrating a demand for

592
equality or an improvement in socioeconomic conditions, the minority
group inadvertently invites a violent backlash.
Horowitz (2001, 74–88) suggests that the spread of rumor is often im-
portant in the transformation of public demonstrations into violent riots.
Rumors help to escalate an increasingly volatile situation by exaggerating
the dangers posed by threats to the status quo—or even by the invention of
a threat where none existed. For instance, the twelfth-century rumor that
Jews were kidnapping and killing Christian infants as part of their
Passover ritual led to widespread violence against Jews in medieval Eng-
land and their expulsion from the kingdom for centuries. All this occurred
long before new social media permitted rumors to spread on a worldwide
basis almost instantaneously.
According to Horowitz’s analysis, some attributes or alleged attributes
of target groups make them vulnerable to attacks by rioters. Does the tar-
geted minority group have a long-standing reputation for aggressive be-
havior? Is it widely believed that such a group identifies with a country’s
enemies, especially during wartime? (An obvious case is the treatment ac-
corded Armenians by Turkish civilians in 1915–1916 during World War
I.) Is the minority target group seen as a political threat? If it, for instance,
acquires the right to vote, will it then upset the current balance of power
among contending political parties? If the answer to these questions is af-
firmative, the chances increase that some precipitating event will ignite a
riot given the background conditions already prevailing.
The assassination of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in January
2004 by a Moroccan Dutch jihadist provides us with another type of riot.
Van Gogh had directed a film, Submission, based on a book by Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, that was highly critical of Islam. Many Dutch Muslims were re-
pelled by the depiction of their religion. One of those offended, a young
Muslim social worker, stabbed van Gogh to death on a street in Amster-
dam. The killer left a message on the victim’s body explaining the purpose
of the murder.
This was not the end of the story, however. Bands of Dutch youth retali-
ated by setting fire to mosques and other Muslim institutions throughout
the Netherlands. The van Gogh killing set off ethnic rioting based on the
desire for revenge against any and all Moroccan emigres.

LONE WOLVES

593
The threat posed by “lone wolves,” individuals with no discernible group
or network affiliation, is of growing concern to public officials in the
West. The American president Barack Obama described lone wolf attacks
as the single most dangerous form of terrorism facing the country. Other
leaders appear to agree. The reason for the alarm is that an isolated indi-
vidual or two can be exceptionally hard to identify and locate before they
strike. Timothy McVeigh, who called himself a “sovereign citizen,” had a
small handful of friends with like views, but before he attacked Oklahoma
City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 18, 1995, few law en-
forcement officers knew his name. The same anonymity applies to mem-
bers of the National Socialist Underground who over a period of years
murdered individual Turks in Germany without being identified by the
federal criminal police.
Radical right support for “lone wolf” terrorism is not hard to identify.
Radical right websites such as Stormfront and the website of the group
White Aryan Resistance display pictures of lone wolves or repeatedly flash
the slogan “LONE WOLF!” on their home pages. The link between radical
right violence and the lone wolf is not hard to discern. It is traceable to the
work of Louis Beam, a former American Klansman. Following the acquit-
tal of a handful of American radical right leaders on federal sedition
charges in 1985 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Beam wrote an essay on “leader-
less resistance.” In this article Beam claimed that the authorities were find-
ing it increasingly easy to defeat hierarchically organized and violent radi-
cal right groups, such as the Covenant, Sword of the Lord, and the Broth-
erhood. Most of these neo-Nazi, racist, and anti-Semitic bands either had
been penetrated by the local police, the FBI, or agents of watchdog organi-
zations or had had naive members persuaded to inform on their fellow
members through some combination of bribery and blackmail.
In view of this situation, Beam reasoned that the only effective way to
overcome police surveillance was for single individuals or small cells to
react spontaneously to new developments by striking out at government
targets. The destruction of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco,
Texas, in 1993 by federal agents inspired Timothy McVeigh to detonate a
massive truck bomb in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City two
years later, an explosion that left more than a hundred people dead. An-
other episode: in 1999 a former member of Aryan Nations, Buford Furrow
Jr., drove from his home near Portland, Oregon, to a northern suburb of
Los Angeles. There he attacked the local Jewish community center, which
was holding a summer camp for young people. Fortunately, no one was se-

594
riously injured at the Jewish center. However, after leaving the center Fur-
row approached a Filipino American postal carrier and asked for direc-
tions; in response to the man’s willingness to help, Furrow shot him dead.
Lone wolf right-wing terrorists are hardly confined to the United States.
In October 2015, for example, the mayor-elect of Cologne, Germany, Hen-
riette Reker, was almost stabbed to death by a right-wing activist who op-
posed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s relatively open immigration policy
(Trolanovski and Thomas 2015). The most notorious European radical
right case to date (2016) was that of Anders Breivik. In 2011 Breivik, a
young Norwegian, became convinced that Western Europe was in effect
committing suicide by permitting large populations of Muslims to immi-
grate. This mass migration would lead to the destruction of Western Chris-
tianity and Western civilization as a whole (see Caldwell 2009). Worse,
the entire white race faced extinction. In a number of postings Breivik ar-
gued that the Social Democratic Party in his country was responsible for
the government’s misguided pro-immigration policy. In order to save his
country before it was too late, Breivik decided to attack the Social Democ-
rats. Accordingly, on July 22, 2011, he detonated a bomb in central Oslo
that killed eight people. He then headed by boat to the nearby island of
Utoya, where the Social Democrats’ youth organization was holding a
summer retreat. There Breivik took out his gun and began shooting young
attendees. By the time the police caught up with him two hours later,
Breivik had killed some sixty-nine teenagers and wounded many more
(Jackson 2013).
Other cases of lone wolf right terrorism might be mentioned—for exam-
ple, the case of Daniel Cohen-Bendit (aka “Danny the Red”). Cohen-Ben-
dit had been a far left student revolutionary during the Paris mass protests
in 1968. Later, as a German citizen, he was elected to the Bundestag. Later
still he was the target of an assassination attempt by a radical right student.
Jeffrey Simon (2013, 240–241) was able to report on the frequency of
lone wolf attacks in much of the Western world (the fifteen countries
whose records he examined included the United States, Britain, France,
Germany, Italy, Spain, and Canada) between 1968 and 2010. Simon re-
ports a total of 198 lone wolf attacks over these years. They represent a
small fraction (1.8 percent) of the total number of terrorist acts over this
same period. But these lone wolf events were like ripples in a stream after
someone threw a rock into the water. A lone wolf assassination can have
major consequences far beyond the initial killing. In Israel, for instance,
the 1994 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a radical right

595
gunman had a major negative effect on the peace process between Israelis
and Palestinians.

RADICAL RIGHT GROUPS AND VIOLENCE:

PARLIAMENTARY VS. EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY OPTIONS

To start, we should recognize that in both Europe and America we are

dealing with thousands of organizations. These groups vary in a number of
ways. Some are short-lived, while others are long-lasting. Some operate in
the open, while others are clandestine. Some consist of no more than a
handful of individuals, while others number their supporters in the thou-
sands. Taken together, though, these groups appear to belong to the same
family of radical right populists that was defined at the beginning of this
chapter. Perhaps the best (or at least the most straightforward) way of clas-
sifying them is on the basis of a distinction between “parliamentary” and
“extra-parliamentary” groups. The critical distinction is whether the group
in question competes in national elections in the hope of achieving repre-
sentation in parliament.
Before discussing the radical right’s presence in parliament, we need to
make a few observations about how party politics are structured on oppo-
site sides of the Atlantic. First, in the United States, Great Britain, and
Canada, voting in national elections is based on a winner-take-all system
whereby a successful parliamentary candidate need only win one vote
more than his or her rival to take the seat. Many states (e.g., Italy, Spain,
Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany) do not count ballots this
way. Instead they rely on proportional representation to assign seats. This
means it is far easier for parties with, say, 10 percent of the vote to achieve
a meaningful presence in parliament. In other words, it is harder for small
radical right populist groups to achieve parliamentary representation in the
United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom than it is in most Conti-
nental democracies.
But radical right populist parties in Europe still need to overcome other
barriers before they are able to achieve representation in the various parlia-
mentary bodies. Because of their Nazi and Fascist experiences during
World War II, Germany and Italy explicitly require political party leaders
to express their support for their country’s constitution before they are per-
mitted to present themselves to the voters. Furthermore, the authenticity of
these commitments may in some countries be challenged before the courts,
as occurred with Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Golden Dawn in Greece, the

596
National Democratic Party in Germany, and (earlier) the Italian Social
Movement.
As the Italian political scientist Piero Ignazi (2003) has pointed out, the
more successful radical right parties have chosen to develop agendas that
address contemporary European problems rather than express nostalgia for
interwar Fascism and Nazism. Certainly in Western Europe the “nostal-
gics” have rarely fared well at the polls. The success stories, such as the
Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party) and the Freiheitliche
Partei Österreich (Freedom Party of Austria), address issues involving
mass immigration, the dangers posed to Christian civilization by the Mus-
lim influx, cultural Americanization, and transnational organizations (es-
pecially the European Union).
James Madison and the United States’ other eighteenth-century “found-
ing fathers” designed a constitutional system to promote compromise. This
federal system, with its division of powers and overlapping jurisdictions at
the center, would work only if the various branches of national govern-
ment were willing to compromise with one another in the policy-making
process. If they were not, the result would be stalemate and deadlock. This
is the situation in which the country finds itself in 2014. In both the House
of Representatives and the Senate, a large number of Republican legisla-
tors have been elected with the support of the Tea Party movement, a large
faction of the Republican Party that arose following the election of Barack
Obama in 2008. The new president’s commitment to reform of the health
care system (Obamacare), citizens’ fears of gun control legislation, and
specious claims that Obama was not born in the United States and there-
fore was ineligible to serve as president set off an almost hysterical reac-
tion on the Republican Party’s far right. These fears resulted in the forma-
tion of the Tea Party.
Led by skilled political operatives, the Tea Party has become an impor-
tant ideological force in Congress. Its ideologically driven adherents re-
gard compromise as the equivalent of treason and behave accordingly. The
overall result has been a highly polarized political system and the paralysis
of the policy-making process.

RADICAL RIGHT PARTIES IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

Table 21.1 displays the strength of far right parties in the European Parlia-
ment in the 2014 Europe-wide elections and the change from 2009.

597
 Some twenty right-wing populist parties competed in both the 2009 and
2014 European Parliament elections. Of these, eleven failed to win any
representation in 2014. Of the remainder, some parties declined in their
electoral support between 2009 and 2014 (e.g., Italy’s Northern League,
the United Kingdom’s British National Party), and some made an impres-
sive showing (e.g., the National Front in France). Overall, though, radical
right populist parties gained a total of fifteen seats over their performances
in the 2009 balloting.
These gains are of some significance. But they hardly pose a serious
threat to European democracy—at least at the transnational level. But what
about the far right parties’ performances in national parliaments?
Some of the far right parties have participated in government coalitions
in recent decades. The Northern League (Italy), Jobbik (Hungary), and the
Freedom Party of Austria have all achieved cabinet-level posts
(Hainsworth 2008, 41–42). In the cases of Hungary (Jobbik) and Poland
(Law and Justice Party), they control the executive (2017).
On the other side of the ledger, though, a number of radical right parties
have been excluded from direct participation in parliament because of their
propensity for violence or support for violence. National courts have de-
clared Greece’s Golden Dawn outside the law because of its open expres-
sions of hatred and violent attacks on migrants from the Middle East and
Africa. The Vlaams Blok (VB, Flemish Bloc) was outlawed by the courts
because its leader gave a TV interview during which he voiced skepticism
about the size of the Holocaust. But its leaders then created a new party—
Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest) which is trying to moderate its
image as a party of the far right. At least in these Western European states,
the rulings served to remind other far right parties they run a danger of
being excluded from the parliamentary process if they or their more mili-
tant units go too far in attacking aliens, foreigners, and the “usual sus-
pects.”
We might also remember that radical right populist parties typically op-
erate in a competitive electoral environment. Far right parties are likely to
have competition from other contestants on the right. Conservative parties
may seek to break the radical right’s monopoly on xenophobic themes by
adopting them as their own.
The American situation requires some commentary. The United States
offers a virtual cornucopia of far right groups, including explicitly neo-
Nazi and neo-Confederate (secessionist) ones. By the middle of the first

598
Obama administration, the SPLC was reporting more than one thousand
“hate groups” active around the country. Within this “cultic milieu” there
were also militia groups prepared to take up arms against an alleged gov-
ernment conspiracy (often thought to be Jewish-led) to rob citizens of their
guns and turn America over to the United Nations, China, or Israel.
Table 21.1 Radical Right Parties in European Parliament Voting,
2014 Results and Change from 2009
Percentage of Number of
Vote Seats
Change
Change from
Country (# MEPs) and Parties 2014 from 2009 2014 2009

Austria (18) 20.2 +2.9 4 +2

– Alliance for the Future of Aus- 0.5 −4.1 0 0
tria (BZÖ) 19.7 +7.0 4 +2
– Freedom Party of Austria
(FPÖ)

Belgium (21) 6.4 −4.8 1 −1

– National Front (FNB) 0.0 −1.3 0 0
– Popular Party (PP) 2.3 +2.3 0 0
– Flemish Interest (VB) 4.1 −5.8 1 −1

3.0 −9.0 0 −2
Bulgaria (17)
– Ataka

26.6 11.8 4 +2
Denmark (13)
– Danish People’s Party (DF)

25.0 18.7 24 +21

France (74)
– National Front (FN)

599
Germany (96) 1.0 −0.3 1 +1
– National Democratic Party of 1.0 +1.0 1 +1
Germany (NPD)
0.0 −1.3 0 0
– Republicans

Greece (21) 12.1 +4.4 3 +1

– Popular Orthodox Rally 2.7 −4.5 0 −2
(LAOS) 9.4 +8.9 3 +3
– Golden Dawn (XA)

14.7 −0.1 3 0
Hungary (21)
– Movement for a Better Hungry
(Jobbik)

Italy (73) 6.2 −4.0 5 −4

– Northern League (LN)

Netherlands (26) 13.2 −3.8 4 −1

– Party for Freedom (PVV)

2.7 −6.0 0 −3
Romania (32)
– Greater Romania Party (PRM)

Slovakia (13) 5.3 −0.3 0 −1

– People’s Party—Our Slovakia 1.7 +1.7 0 0
(LSNS)
3.6 −2.0 0 −1
– Slovak National Party (SNS)

9.7 +6.4 2 +2
Sweden (22)
– Sweden Democrats

1.1 −4.9 0 −2
United Kingdom (73)

600
 – British National Party (BNP)

Total for European Union (751) 52 +15

Source: http://www.results-elections2014.eu/en/election-results-2014.
html, cited in Mudde 2014.
Radical right groups in the United States differ from their West Euro-
pean counterparts in their religious focus. America and to a lesser extent
Canada are home to such religious sects as Christian Identity, Creativity,
Odinism, and Cosmotheism (Gardell 2003; Barkun 1997). Without offer-
ing much detail, we should point out that Identity theology stresses that
Jews are literally seeds of Satan; Creativity equates race with religion and
rejects all supernatural explanations for human behavior; Odinism involves
the worship of Europe’s pre-Christian Norse gods and the rejection of
Christianity based on its roots in Judaism and its alleged goal of weaken-
ing the warrior spirit of white people on a worldwide basis; Cosmotheism
is the invention of the late neo-Nazi William Pierce and stresses the one-
ness of nature, although some have contended it is more a tax dodge than
anything else.
In addition to the stress on these dissident religious conceptions, the
American radical right differs from West European radical right groups by
their propensity to distance themselves from the surrounding world and es-
tablish rural compounds. Over the course of the last few decades such radi-
cal right groups as the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, the Church
of Jesus Christ Christian, and the late William Pierce’s National Alliance
all set up rural compounds removed from the madding crowds of city life.
American radical right youth groups have also been exceptionally vio-
lent. Here pride of place probably belongs to skinhead gangs (e.g., Ham-
merskins, Nazi Low Riders), many originally formed in prisons as part of
the Aryan Warriors gang. Their dystopian goal is to ignite a race war, or
racial holy war (RAHOWA), in which members of the white race will tri-
umph over the black race and thereby restore the country to its alleged nat-
ural racial order. Since 2009 the SPLC’s Intelligence Unit has identified
some sixty radical right attacks aimed at setting off this type of race-based
conflict (see Figure 21.1).

601
FIGURE 21.1 Right-Wing Terrorist Plots in the United States
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center, Terror from the Right, Novem-
ber 10, 2015, available at https://www.splcenter.org/20100126/terror-
right#plots.
Firearms were the weapons of choice for these radical rightists. And
about one-quarter of the attacks were carried out by “lone wolves.”
By publishing accounts of these attacks, the SPLC was attempting to
draw a comparison to the vast attention paid to Salafist/jihadist terrorists,
presumably active throughout the United States and the Western world
more generally. By emphasizing the threats radical right groups, too, pose
to national security, the SPLC and other watchdog organizations want to
encourage law enforcement agencies to pay more attention to these groups.
Some examples:
March 25, 2010: “A man later identified as Brody James Whitaker
opens fire on two Florida state troopers during a routine traffic stop
. . .. Whitaker flees, crashing his vehicle and continuing on foot. He
is arrested two weeks later in Connecticut, where he challenges the
authority of a judge and declares himself a ‘sovereign citizen’ im-
mune to the laws of the land.” . . .
August 5, 2012: “Longtime neo-Nazi skinhead Wade Michael Page
opens fire with a 9 mm handgun inside a Sikh temple, killing six
people and critically wounding three, including a police officer.
Wounded by police, Page then shoots and kills himself at the
scene.” . . .

602
 June 6, 2014: “Armed with multiple guns and explosives, Dennis
Marx, a man described by law enforcement as an antigovernment
sovereign citizen, enters the Forsyth County Courthouse in subur-
ban Atlanta and opens fire. Marx is reportedly wearing a bullet-
proof vest and a gas mask. As he approaches the building, he
throws out homemade smoke grenades that briefly cover his ap-
proach with orange smoke. He shoots one officer in the leg before
being killed by deputies in a hail of gunfire.” (Intelligence Report,
Southern Poverty Law Center 2015)
The watchdog organizations in the United States and Europe also note that
radical right groups on both sides of the Atlantic now make extensive use
of the Internet to recruit new members and promote race supremacy (Hoff-
man 1997). It is worth remarking here that the American radical right
groups host a variety of European websites and have other Internet-related
ties to like-minded groups in Europe. In France and Germany, for exam-
ple, “hate speech,” racism, Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and public
displays of the swastika are prohibited by law. The U.S. Constitution’s
First Amendment makes it possible for right-wing European groups to ex-
press themselves in the United States in ways that are unlawful in their
home countries.
Accordingly, various observers of radical right activity have noted a
growing sense of solidarity between American and European extremists.
And from time to time extremists have made attempts to establish Euro-
American organizations on the basis of a shared worldview: that the white
race is being threatened by extinction on a worldwide basis. At one time,
the argument goes, the threat was largely external, coming from nonwhite
races residing in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Now the growing
waves of nonwhite immigration to Europe and America have established a
need for greater cooperation among racially conscious whites on both sides
of the Atlantic (Whine 2012). This cooperation has been aided by contem-
porary communications technology and European agreements providing
for visaless travel among EU members.

ANTI-SEMITISM

Hatred of Jews has long been a staple of radical right politics in Europe.
Acts of violence have been relatively common. In recent years observers
have sounded an alarm, maintaining that anti-Semitism is undergoing a
substantial revival (Laqueur 2006, 125–150). Is this true, and if so, to what

603
extent?
Some years ago the ADL conducted a worldwide survey of attitudes to-
ward Jews in one hundred countries. Responses were based on a five-item
index designed to measure hostility to Jews. Table 21.2 reports the results
for Western and Eastern Europe and for North America.
What these results suggest is that dislike of Jews is very limited in the
countries of North America and Western Europe, with the exceptions of
France and Greece. Eastern Europe is another story. Even in countries that
rarely have more than a handful of Jews, this historical center of anti-
Semitism still has large numbers of people who regard Jews with hatred
and contempt. How, then, can we explain the claim of an anti-Jewish re-
vival?
The answer is that the nature of anti-Semitism has changed. In Western
Europe, certainly the principal perpetrators have become Salafist/jihadist
Muslims. And once upon a time the European left defended Jews against
their common enemy on the right.
Now, because of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Muslims along with
Marxist groups assign a reactionary and racist role to Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank and define the Palestinians as the victims of Western im-
perialism and racism. On occasion newspaper cartoons in Sweden and
other Nordic countries depict the Palestinians as Christ once again being
crucified by the Jews. On the other hand, some on the radical right have
now become supporters of the Jewish state. For example, at recent English
Defence League demonstrations in heavily Muslim East London, marchers
were seen waving the Israeli flag as a means of taunting Muslim by-
standers.
In general, as reported by the FBI in the United States as well as by Eu-
ropean governments and civil society groups, in 2014 religiously moti-
vated hate crime incidents were higher in Europe than in the United States,
while hate crime incidents motivated by race, sexual orientation, and dis-
ability were much higher in the United States than in Europe (see Figure
21.2).
Muslims living or attempting to live in Western Europe have become
targets of widespread hostility in recent years. The term “Islamophobia”
arose from Britain, but cultural anxiety about Muslims can be dated further
back in the past, to the identification of the Pope as a “friend of Turks” as
one of the excuses for the English Reformation under Henry VII. Alliance

604
between the Catholic Church and the Islamic faith was seen as a major
threat by many writers and intellectuals, and fear of persecution by either
or both powers served to unite England and Europe (Taras 2012).
The cultural and religious differences between Christianity and Islam
have been highlighted ever since Islam was invoked to justify terrorism,
and hate groups often identify these differences as the source of terrorist
acts. But in the years following 9/11, raciest stereotypes have arisen based
on who the terrorists were, stereotypes that are often misapplied racially to
Arabs. This hostility has become violent as Muslims have become associ-
ated with multiple and spectacular terrorist attacks staged in Paris and
Brussels.
Table 21.2 Anti-Semitism in Europe and North America.
Country Index Score, 2014 Index Score, 2015
Austria 28% 28%
Belarus 38% 38%
Belgium 27% 27%
Bosnia and Herzegovina 32% 32%
Bulgaria 44% 44%
Canada 14% 14%
Croatia 33% 33%
Czech Republic 13% 13%
Denmark 9% 8%
Estonia 22% 22%
Finland 15% 15%
France 37% 17%
Germany 27% 16%
Greece 69% 67%
Hungary 41% 40%
Iceland 16% 16%
Ireland 20% 20%
Italy 20% 29%

605
Latvia 28% 28%
Lithuania 36% 36%
Moldova 30% 30%
Montenegro 29% 29%
Netherlands 5% 11%
Norway 15% 15%
Poland 45% 37%
Portugal 21% 21%
Romania 35% 47%
Russia 30% 23%
Serbia 42% 42%
Slovenia 27% 27%
Spain 29% 29%
Sweden 4% 4%
Switzerland 26% 26%
Ukraine 38% 32%
United Kingdom 8% 12%
United States 9% 10%
Source: Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Semitism Index. Light shading
indicates a decrease in the index, and dark shading indicates that anti-
Semitism increased in that country. Available at http://global100.adl.
org.

606
FIGURE 21.2 Hate Crime Incidents in the United States and Europe by
Motivation Bias in 2014
Source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics (2014), available at https://www.fbi.
gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2014/tables/table-1, and 2014 Hate
Crime Data by OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human
Rights (ODIHR), available at http://hatecrime.osce.org/infocus/2014-
hate-crime-data-now-available.
Among religiously motivated hate crime incidents, although anti-Se-
mitic motivations remain at the top of the list on both sides of the Atlantic,
official reports indicate that hate crimes against Muslims, mosques, and
their properties escalated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sep-
tember 11, 2001.3 The anti-Muslim rhetoric propagated by hate groups
often identifies any Muslim community or cultural presence as incompati-
ble with human rights, and as a direct threat to national identity. The most
common hate incidents reported were attacks against mosques, as well as
personal attacks against women wearing head coverings.4
For leaders of the Christian right, another movement is seen as the
prime culprit of the destruction of American society and culture: the
LGBT rights movement. Christian thought-leadership organizations such
as Focus on the Family identify an ideological battlefront that must be
fought on political terms to keep control of the United States government
in the hands of those who refuse to acknowledge or bow to LGBT values.5
Across Europe, LGBT rights advocates are often portrayed as threatening
to structures that are the foundation of democracy and freedom—marriage,
family, and even public health. Those who identify as LGBT experience
stigmatization, lack of legal protection, discrimination, and hate crimes.6

607
 CONCLUSIONS

What we have sought to describe in this commentary has been the politics
of backlash. Even in the best of times modern politics often involves the
mobilization of hatred. These are not the best of times. Millions of people
victimized by brutality and mass killings in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia,
and elsewhere have sought a safe haven in Europe and to a lesser extent
North America. Their presence has set off a reaction, as nominally Christ-
ian Europeans worry that their religious beliefs and cultural values face
what many regard as unprecedented challenges. When we add to these
challenges the appearance of mass casualty terrorism, as in New York,
Madrid, London, and Paris—with a promise of more to come—the ingre-
dients are present for a prolonged period of right-wing backlash, including
a strong dose of violence.

608
NOTES

1. For more information, see the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report
on the rise of hate groups in 2009, available at https://www.splcenter.
org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2011/year-hate-extremism-2010.
2. We should note that the term “populism” originally referred to a re-
form-minded American movement that began in 1880s and was in-
tended to curb the power of the banks and large businesses, the rail-
roads especially.
3. For more information, see the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report
on anti-Muslim hate groups, available at https://www.splcenter.org/
fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/anti-muslim.
4. For more information on hate crimes motivated by bias against Mus-
lims in Europe, see http://hatecrime.osce.org/what-hate-crime/bias-
against-muslims.
5. For more information, see the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report
on anti-LGBT hate groups, available at https://www.splcenter.org/
fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/anti-lgbt.
6. For more information on hate crime against LGBT people across Eu-
rope, see http://hatecrime.osce.org/taxonomy/term/235.
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P A R T III

612
CASE STUDIES

613
CHAPTER 22

614
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN FRANCE

NONNA MAYER
AMIDST the so-called third wave of extreme right parties that arose in
Western Europe in the mid-1980s, the oldest and the most successful is the
French Front National (FN, National Front), co-founded by Jean-Marie Le
Pen in 1972. It was described as “the prototype of the New Radical Right,”
an illustration of a “winning formula” that combined “an appeal to vigor-
ous state authority and paternalism in the family with an endorsement of
free market capitalism in the economy” (Kitschelt 1995, 91), and it be-
came a model for many similar movements. New populist radical right
parties have appeared since, such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP)
under Nigel Farage, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom)
under Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the True Finns under Timo Soini,
et cetera. If at one point they had stolen the spotlight from Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s party, that is no longer true since his youngest daughter, Marine le
Pen, took over in 2011. She has launched a campaign of dédiabolisation,
or de-demonization (Dézé 2015), that is meant to renew the movement,
turn it into a mainstream party, and allow it to rise to power.1 After a long
procedural feud with her father, she finally expelled him from the party on
August 20, 2015, turning a page in the history of the FN. This chapter
compares the “old” and “new” FN. After an introductory section summa-
rizing the history of the radical right in France, I will describe the creation
of the Front National by Jean-Marie Le Pen and the changes brought about
by his daughter. A concluding section shows that the party has arrived at a
turning point: it is no longer exactly like the father’s party, but it is still far
from becoming part of the mainstream and from achieving office.

FROM THE COUNTERREVOLUTION TO THE FRONT

NATIONAL

The cultural matrix of the Front National goes way back into the past, to
the Revolution of 1789 and the countermovements it stirred up (Winock
2015; Goodliffe 2012). The first component is traditionalism. “Ultras” was
the name given to the Catholic reactionary right, which defended the
monarchy and the “ancien régime” against republicanism and political lib-
eralism. Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald were their intellectual
guides.

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 The second component is nationalism. Sparked by the Prussian defeat of
France in 1871, nationalism moved from the left to the right of the political
spectrum, and turned anti-parliamentary, militarist, anti-Semitic, and often
violent. It gave birth to organizations such as the Ligue des Patriotes (Pa-
triots’ League), founded by the nationalist poet Paul Déroulède in 1882,
and the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France, founded in 1889 by the
journalist Edouard Drumont, the author of Jewish France (1886). It in-
spired the 1886–1889 Boulangist movement (Hutton 1976). Led by a for-
mer minister of defense, General Georges Boulanger, nicknamed “General
Revenge,” the movement had a meteoric electoral rise, especially in the
working-class districts of Paris. But when its leader refused to stage a coup
d’état, it collapsed as quickly as it had appeared.
The third component is anti-Semitism, which reached a climax with the
Dreyfus affair in 1894. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was convicted of
treason for providing intelligence to the German enemy, and he was sen-
tenced to life imprisonment. But later it became apparent that the charges
had been falsified. The affair divided France, opposing those who believed
in Dreyfus’s innocence, including the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme
(founded in 1898) and Emile Zola (author of an open letter to the president
of the Republic, “J’accuse”),2 to those who saw him as a traitor, starting
with the Ligue de la Patrie Française.
The years after World War I saw the development of veterans’ mass
movements, such as the Croix de Feu of Lieutenant Colonel François de la
Rocque, and the nationalist leagues had their golden age. The most active
and influential movement, founded in 1898 in the aftermath of the Dreyfus
affair by Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo, was Action Française and its
youth movement, Camelots du Roi (Weber 1962). It was guided by the
doctrine of “integral nationalism” forged by Charles Maurras, which had
as its goal the defense of France against its enemies—Jews, Protestants,
Masons, and métèques (an insulting term for foreigners)—and which
called for the restoration of the monarchy and the authority of the Catholic
Church as the best means to ensure social order (Davies 2002). After the
German defeat of France in 1940 and the death of the Third Republic, Ac-
tion Française rallied behind Marshal Philippe Pétain and his project of na-
tional revolution, welcomed by Charles Maurras as a “divine surprise.”
When the war was over, the French extreme right was totally discredited
by the fact that many of its members had collaborated with the German oc-
cupation and the Vichy regime. Its electoral influence was nonexistent, and

616
its attempts to make a comeback were short-lived. It supported the Pou-
jadist movement in the 1950s, which drew as much as 11.6 percent of the
vote in the legislative elections of January 2, 1956, sending some fifty
deputies to the National Assembly.3 But they were swept away two years
later by the Algerian crisis and the return to office of General Charles de
Gaulle. The decolonization process briefly remobilized the far right in the
defense of “French Algeria.” But only 5.2 percent of the electorate voted
no in the April 8, 1962, referendum on the Evian agreements giving inde-
pendence to Algeria, and the candidate of the “national right,” Jean-Louis
Tixier-Vignancour, failed to get more than 9.2 percent of the vote in the
first round of the 1965 presidential election. Altogether, his party, the Al-
liance Républicaine pour les Libertés et le Progrès (ARLP, Republican Al-
liance for Liberty and Progress), and the other extreme right movements
drew just 0.5 percent of the vote in the legislative elections of 1967 and
0.08 percent in 1968, in the wake of the student protests that brought to-
gether practically all right-wing groups against the “leftist” peril.
A third attempt came in 1971–1972 at the initiative of the nationalist-
revolutionary activists of Ordre Nouveau (ON, New Order), successor to
Occident.4 Inspired by the electoral success of the Italian neofascist party
MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano, Italian Social Movement), they planned
a National Front that would bring together the many components of the ex-
treme right in order to field candidates for the 1973 legislative elections.
The principle was adopted at ON’s congress in June 1972, and the consti-
tutive congress of the Front National pour l’Unité Française (FNUF, Na-
tional Front for French Unity) was held on October 5, 1972. It started as a
heterogeneous gathering, bringing together those nostalgic for Vichy with
anti-Gaullists, Poujadists with neofascists, intellectuals with activists,
under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The ex-paratrooper Le Pen, a
former president of the nationalist student association of Paris (the Corpo),
was elected a deputy in 1956 on the Union et Fraternité Française ticket
headed by Pierre Poujade, also founder of the Front National des Combat-
tants (National Veterans Front) and campaign manager for the pro–French
Algeria candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965. Le Pen had an
ideal profile: a man of action who was involved in all the battles of the ex-
treme right, yet politically respectable. The first electoral test for the new
party, the 1973 parliamentary elections, was a failure. Its candidates drew
less than 0.5 percent of the vote. Torn by internal dissension, in harsh com-
petition with its rival Parti des Forces Nouvelles (PFN, Party of New
Forces) and its brilliant leader Pascal Gauchon, the FN remained in politi-

617
cal oblivion for ten years. In the 1979 European elections, the two organi-
zations could not reach an agreement for a joint slate of candidates. In the
1981 presidential election, their leaders could not manage to muster the
five hundred signatures of elected representatives necessary to run for the
presidency. In the parliamentary elections that followed, the Front Na-
tional candidates drew less than 0.2 percent of the vote. The book
L’extrême droite en France, published in the fall of 1983, pronounced its
funeral oration: “Scattered into a myriad of tiny islets, powerless coteries,
shadow circles, it is no more but a relic of the past” (Petitfils 1983, 123).

THE LE PEN PHENOMENON

The picture started to change after the victory of the Socialist left in the
elections of 1981. Some of the Front National candidates made surpris-
ingly good showings in the 1982 cantonal elections. In the 1983 municipal
elections, the slate headed by Le Pen in the Twentieth Arrondissement of
Paris drew 11.3 percent of the vote, while in Dreux (Eure-et-Loir), the
slate headed by the Gaullist party, the Rassemblement pour la République
(RPR, Rally for the Republic), which included nine FN candidates, almost
defeated the slate headed by the Socialist mayor, Françoise Gaspard. That
election was invalidated after several irregularities were detected, and the
by-election that took place thereafter marked the actual rebirth of the
French extreme right (Stirbois 1988; Gaspard 1995; Albertini and Doucet
2013). In the first round, on September 4, 1983, the slate led by the secre-
tary general of the Front National, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, gave his party its
best showing since its creation, 16.7 percent of the vote. Then, in order to
defeat the left in the second round, a joint slate of candidates representing
the RPR and the FN was created, and it won the election with more than
55 percent of the votes, allowing the election of ten FN town councilors.
Allying itself with the moderate right, a move widely debated in the media
and strongly opposed by the left, provided the Front National with the po-
litical legitimacy and the visibility it longed for. In the following weeks, it
made progress in several other special elections. The 1984 European Par-
liament election confirmed that Le Pen’s party had gained a national audi-
ence: more than two million voters supported Le Pen’s slate, called Front
d’Opposition Nationale pour l’Europe des Patries, which won 11.2 percent
of the vote and ten seats in the European Parliament.

The Electoral Rebirth of the Radical Right

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The 1984 European Parliament election marked the beginning of the FN’s
electoral takeoff. In the legislative elections of 1986, its candidates drew
9.7 percent of the votes, and thanks to reform of the electoral rules, thirty-
five National Front deputies were elected. Between 1988 and 1998 the FN
saw its share of the vote rise, settling around 15 percent, first in the presi-
dential race of 1988 (when the FN received a 14.9 percent share), then in
the legislative elections of 1997, and after that in the regional elections of
1998. In the presidential election of 2002 not only did Le Pen surpass his
1995 vote tally, with 16.9 percent, but he qualified for the second round,
coming in ahead of the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
Roughly the same combination of economic, ideological, and political
factors explains the electoral comeback of radical right-wing parties in Eu-
rope in the mid-1980s (Betz 1994; Kitschelt 1995; Carter 2005; Norris
2005). They thrived on economic recession and unemployment, growing
popular disaffection with politics and established parties, fears kindled by
European unification, and the uncertainties of post-communism. At a
deeper level, they were driven by a “silent counterrevolution,” promoting
the traditional values of family, religion, and hard work in reaction to the
post-materialist, permissive values of the sixties (Ignazi 1992). But in each
country the evolution of the extreme right has its idiosyncrasies (Art
2011).
Several factors played a decisive part in France. The first one was decol-
onization in Algeria. The Evian agreements of 1962 that granted indepen-
dence to the former French colony put an end to seven years of war, but
opposition to decolonization spurred an unprecedented wave of terrorist at-
tacks by the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS, Secret Army Organiza-
tion) and the exodus of one million French settlers from Algeria, for fear
of reprisals. Widespread anti-Arab feelings stem from that period. The sec-
ond factor was the electoral dynamics of the Union de la Gauche (Union of
the Left), which led to the presidential victory of François Mitterrand on
May 10, 1981. The intense political polarization of this election distracted
most French people from the economic recession of the time, as well as
temporarily staving off the political disenchantment and party dealignment
that most Western democracies were experiencing at this time (Lawson
and Merkl 1988). The election of a Socialist president and the nomination
of four Communist ministers in the government of Pierre Mauroy radical-
ized many right-wing voters; two years later, the return of the left to more
orthodox social and economic policies alienated some of its supporters, en-
larging the audience for the Front National beyond its traditional bound-

619
aries.
Besides a favorable opportunity structure, the FN managed to mobilize
specific political resources. One was Le Pen’s charisma and his rhetorical
skills. A poll conducted just after Le Pen’s first, controversial appearance
on France’s leading television political program, L’Heure de Vérité, on
February 13, 1984, indicated that the number of those who planned to vote
for the FN in the coming European elections had doubled between the be-
ginning and the end of the show, and in the following days the party’s
membership exploded. The second resource was their ideas: the FN put
forward issues neglected by the mainstream parties, mainly law-and-order
issues and immigration. The first electoral platform of the Front National
in 1973, called “Défendre les Français,” was a violent attack against the
Gaullist party, which the FN accused of selling out to the Communists and
of being corrupt and lax. It called for the birth of a new right wing, “social,
national and popular,” that would champion stricter control of immigra-
tion, restoration of law and order, less state intervention, and the defense
of traditional values such as the nation, the family, education, and manual
labor (Chiroux, 1974, 212–216). A common feature of the party’s plat-
forms, from the first one in 1973 to those after the party achieved some
measure of electoral success, starting with “Les Français d’abord” (Le Pen
1984), can be summed up by the concept of national populism (Taguieff
1984, 1989). The constant preoccupation of the FN is the defense of
French national identity against its enemies both interior and exterior,
mainly immigrants and especially Arabs and Muslims, and the forces of
“cosmopolitism” and “globalization.” Another is to give back to the people
the power confiscated by the elites and the political establishment. In order
to do so, the Front National recommended “national preference” policies,
reserving jobs, welfare benefits, education, and housing for French citi-
zens. What changed after 1988, under the new deputy leader, Bruno
Mégret, and other intellectuals influenced by the circles of the New Right
such as Yvan Blot or Jean-Yves Le Gallou, was the style of the programs,
reformulated in more “politically correct” terms and thus acceptable to a
larger audience. They highlighted the cultural differences between groups
instead of the supposed inferiority of some, and they avoided blatantly
racist formulations. “Words are weapons,” Bruno Mégret liked to say. His
idea was to polarize the political debate and replace the traditional
left/right cleavage by a new one, opposing the FN to the “Gang of Four,” a
nickname for the four main parties—the Communist Party, Socialist Party,
UDF and RPR—that was evocative of their supposed collusion.

620
 The third type of resource was organizational. Bruno Mégret turned the
activist group of the early FN into a structured organization of more than
forty thousand members, with party schools, a press (National Hebdo,
Présent, Le Choc du Mois, Minute), a political communication unit, and a
network of circles spreading the party’s influence in all sectors of society:
youth groups (Front National de la Jeunesse), women, veterans, business-
people (Entreprise Moderne et Liberté), farmers (Cercle National des
Agriculteurs), and others (Birenbaum 1992). Last, the party was helped in
its quest for political legitimacy by its opponents’ strategies. The 1983
electoral alliance with the UDF and the RPR in Dreux pulled the FN out of
the political ghetto where it had been confined. Even though the official
line of the mainstream right changed after Le Pen characterized the gas
chambers of the Holocaust as a “detail” of history in 1987, a policy of
local alliances continued, from the 1986 regional elections to the 1998 re-
gional elections, where in four regions the UDF presidents of the regional
council owed their seat to the support of the FN councilors. As for the left,
it helped Le Pen gain access to the media. François Mitterrand, in June
1982, exhorted the public television networks to “respect their obligation
of pluralism” and invite the FN to participate in their programs.5 Then the
electoral law was changed just before the 1986 legislative elections,
switching from majority to proportional rule; this system, which was more
favorable to small parties, limited the losses of the Socialist Party but also
allowed the Front National, with its 9 percent share of the vote, to have
thirty-five deputies elected to the National Assembly (Mayer 2017b). In
1988 Jacques Chirac would restore the old majority system, and in the
1988 legislative election, with the same proportion of votes, only one FN
deputy was elected.

The Post-1998 Party Decline

However, the FN’s electoral performance masked the fact that the party
was in deep crisis because of a growing rivalry between Le Pen and Bruno
Mégret, his deputy leader since 1988. Now, nearly ten years later, Mégret
was a rising star, overshadowing the party founder. With his wife, Mégret
won the municipal by-election in Vitrolles, giving a fourth large city to the
FN in February 1997. In the elections for the central committee at the
party’s congress in Strasbourg one month later, he came in first with over
three thousand votes, way ahead of his rival, secretary general Bruno Goll-
nish, and received a standing ovation.

621
 Mégret and Le Pen openly disagreed on a political strategy for the FN.
Mégret was in favor of an alliance with the mainstream right, while Le Pen
preferred a strategy of confrontation. The final straw was Le Pen’s deci-
sion that in case he was declared ineligible to run as candidate in the Euro-
pean Parliament elections of 1999, he would have his wife, Jany, lead the
FN list, instead of Mégret. Mégret challenged the decision in December
1998 and called for a parallel national council. He and his allies (nick-
named the “felons”) were immediately excluded, and Mégret left the FN,
taking with him more than half of the party officials and elected represen-
tatives. The split led to the creation of a new movement, the Front Na-
tional–Mouvement National (FN-MN), which in October 1998 was re-
named Mouvement National Républicain (MNR, National Republican
Movement) after a court ruled that Bruno Mégret could not use the name
Front National. Even though Mégret’s movement was short-lived, the split
was a severe blow for Le Pen’s party. At the next party congress, in 2000,
the number of members had fallen to twelve thousand (from forty-two
thousand in 1997), and the number of voters plummeted. In the European
elections of June 1999 the FN drew 5.7 percent of the vote, a drop of al-
most 5 points compared to the previous elections.
The April 21, 2002, presidential election came as a surprise. In what
was perceived as an “earthquake,” Le Pen qualified for the second round,
and his 16.9 percent share of the vote was considered outstanding. Yet he
came in ahead of the Socialist candidate by a very small margin, 194,000
votes. Recalculated in proportion to the number of registered voters, his
real percentage of the vote was hardly higher than in the 1995 presidential
election (11.7 percent versus 11.6). What made the difference was the po-
larization of the campaign around the issue of law and order, as well as an
unusual amount of strategic voting, especially among right-wing voters
(Blais 2004, 294–295).6 And Le Pen’s success was short-lived. In the sub-
sequent 2002 legislative elections, the FN’s percentage of the vote dropped
to 11.3 percent, in the 2007 presidential election to 10.4 percent, and to 4.3
percent in the following legislative elections. Most observers predicted at
the time the imminent political death of the party and of its leader. They
were wrong.

The Succession
Long before he even thought about who would succeed him as head of the
party, Le Pen secured a position in the party for his youngest daughter,

622
Marine Le Pen. Because she was a young lawyer with a strong tempera-
ment, and above all a Le Pen, he saw her as a precious political asset, ig-
noring the reluctance of the party’s old guard. At the Congress of Stras-
bourg in 1997, before the split, he nominated her for a spot on the central
committee.7 In 1998 he placed her at the head of the party’s new legal de-
partment. That same year she took over Generation Le Pen, a group cre-
ated to modernize and rejuvenate the party. In 2000 she was elected to the
party’s central committee, and he appointed her as a member of the party
leadership. In the presidential campaign of 2002 she was part of the FN’s
communications team called “Ideas-Images,” and she herself started ap-
pearing in the media, quickly overshadowing the deputy leader, Bruno
Gollnisch, and the secretary general, Carl Lang. At the 2003 party con-
gress, although she came in just thirty-fourth in the elections for the central
committee, her father appointed her a vice president. In the 2007 party
congress she came in second, just after Bruno Gollnisch, and her father ap-
pointed her vice executive president. Meanwhile, she represented the FN
in several national and local elections. She was elected regional councilor
in Nord-Pas de Calais in 1998, in Ile de France in 2004, in Nord Pas de
Calais again in 2010, and then in the new region Nord-Pas de Calais-Pi-
cardie in 2015, and she represented the party in the European Parliament
starting in 2004. After 2007 she also paid particular attention to underpriv-
ileged constituencies in the region Nord Pas de Calais, more specifically
the small former mining town of Hénin-Beaumont, where she was elected
town councilor in 2008. With the help of the regional councilor Steeve
Briois,8 she was going to make the town the new “laboratory” of the FN, a
role that Dreux had played for the FN in the 1980s.
At the party congress in January 2011, the only other candidate for party
leader besides Marine Le Pen was Bruno Gollnisch, who proposed that he
chair the party and she run as a candidate in the 2012 presidential election.
His plea was in vain, however: she was elected president of the FN with
67.6 percent of the party members’ votes.

THE “NEW CLOTHES” OF THE FRONT NATIONAL

Marine Le Pen had a threefold strategy. First, she wanted to rebuild what
was left of the party after the 1998 split. It was the theme of her investiture
speech: “The party I shall chair will be a party renewed, open and effec-
tive. My assigned goal from now on is to make of it with you the most
powerful, efficient and operative instrument possible in our strategy of the

623
conquest of power.”9 Her second priority was to expand and diversify its
shrinking electoral audience, winning over reluctant upper-middle-class
voters. Her third priority, the one that received the greatest attention in the
media, was to “de-demonize” the party—to get rid of the labels of racism,
anti-Semitism, and extremism attached to it by its opponents, and to show
the FN was “a party like any other.”

The “De-Demonization” Strategy

De-demonization has been a part of the FN’s strategy ever since the
party’s creation in 1972. Le Pen systematically filed lawsuits against those
who dared call his party “racist” or “extreme right.” In 1989 he launched a
large-scale “theoretical counteroffensive” against the way his opponents
“demonized” him and his movement.10 But Marine Le Pen, who had in-
sisted on the importance of such a strategy long before she took over the
party (Le Pen 2006), made it the centerpiece of her normalization enter-
prise. Unlike her father, she got immediate, massive support in the media
when she announced the birth of the “new” FN (Dézé 2015). Also unlike
her father’s approach, at the heart of hers was the banning of anti-Semi-
tism within the FN. Her companion Louis Aliot, one of the vice presidents
of the movement, expressed it openly: “De-demonization is only con-
cerned with anti-Semitism. While handing out leaflets in the street, the
only glass ceiling I saw wasn’t immigration, nor Islam . . . Others are
worse than we are on these issues. It is anti-Semitism that prevents people
from voting for us. It’s the only thing. . . . As soon as you break this ideo-
logical stranglehold, you free the rest. That’s all there is. Marine Le Pen
agrees with that. She did not understand why and how her father and the
others did not see it was the stranglehold.”11 Indeed, she had opposed her
father on that issue more than once in the past: she condemned his re-
peated comments about the gas chambers, saying explicitly that she con-
sidered the Shoah to be “the height of barbarism,”12 and she took a two-
month leave from the FN’s bureau in January 2005, after his comments
characterizing the Nazi occupation of France as “not so inhuman” in an in-
terview with the extreme right journal Rivarol. When in April 2014 Jean-
Marie Le Pen said of the singer Patrick Bruel, who is of Jewish ancestry
and who refused to perform in a town with a FN mayor, “On fera une
fournée la prochaine fois,” or “Next time we’ll do a batch,” using the word
for “batch,” fournée, that evokes the word for “oven,” four, she removed
her father’s blog from the FN’s website. And when her father referred to

624
the gas chambers as a “minor detail,” both on television and in an inter-
view for the same publication, Rivarol, on April 9, 2015, and defended
Pétain and the collaborationists of the Vichy regime, she had had enough.
It marked the beginning of a merciless war between father and daughter, in
which the de-demonization sought by Marine Le Pen was a key point of
contention, each of her father’s deliberate verbal excesses destroying fur-
ther his daughter’s patient efforts to change the image of the FN. On May
4, the party’s executive bureau suspended Jean-Marie Le Pen and called
for an extraordinary general assembly of the members by mail, to modify
the party’s statutes. On July 2, a Nanterre court invalidated the suspension,
and later that month the party itself rescinded the suspension, on the
grounds that a physical congress was required for such a step. On August
20, Jean-Marie Le Pen was definitively excluded from his party.13
Marine Le Pen’s strategy is to present the party line in a more accept-
able way. It is in the name of democracy and republican values that she
stigmatizes radical Islamism, presented as a threat to women’s rights, to
gays, and to Jews. It is a way to draw in voters, and especially Jews, for as
one author wrote, “What better proof of ‘normalization’ than a high score
(or close to the national average) for the FN among voters of Jewish
faith?” (Fourquet 2015, 384). She has also targeted “French Islam.” She
started in 2007 when she was managing her father’s presidential campaign,
with a controversial poster showing a young Maghrebi woman in low-cut
jeans blaming both left and right for having destroyed the social fabric:
“Ils ont tout cassé.” In the regional elections of 2014, the FN tried to mobi-
lize votes in the outskirts of Paris, with leaflets claiming “Muslim perhaps,
but French first,” while a poster with the headline “Choose your suburb”
pictured on one side a young woman wearing a Phrygian cap with the
three colors of the French flag painted on her cheeks, and on the other side
the same young woman wearing a niqab.

A Rising Tide
Since Marine Le Pen took the lead, the FN’s electoral success has been
spectacular, in sharp contrast with its previous poor performances. Its sup-
port is on the rise again, growing from 10.4 percent of the vote in the pres-
idential race of 2007 to 15 percent in the 2011 cantonal elections, 17.9 per-
cent in the 2012 presidential election, nearly 25 percent in the 2015 Euro-
pean elections, a little over 25 percent in the 2015 departmental elections,
and 27.7 percent in the first round of the regional elections also in 2015. In

625
the second round of the 2015 regional election FN candidates garnered 6.8
million votes—beating Marine Le Pen’s achievement in the 2012 presi-
dential election, when she received 6.4 million votes, and that of her father
in the 2002 presidential election, when he got 4.8 million. And since the
European Parliament elections of 2014 the FN has come out ahead of the
Socialist left and the Sarkozyist right (Les Républicains, formerly UMP).
One year ahead of the 2017 presidential election, opinion polls showed
that Marine Le Pen would come in first among those planning to vote in
the first round regardless of whom she would be facing, with the only ex-
ception being Alain Juppé, prime minister from 1995 to 1997 under Presi-
dent Jacques Chirac.14 This suggested that no matter whom she faced, she
would qualify for the second round.
The number of elected representatives of the FN has soared. In the mu-
nicipal elections of 2014, the FN slate of candidates often drew more than
30 percent of the vote, allowing the party to win eleven towns and elect
1,546 town councilors, a record number. In the 2015 European Parliament
elections, the FN beat out the Socialist left and the Sarkozyist right in
electing twenty-three deputies, becoming the largest French group in the
Parliament at Strasbourg. In the departmental elections the same year, the
FN presented paired candidates15 in 93 percent of constituencies, more
than any other party. And they drew almost 25 percent of the vote, far
ahead of the pairs presented by the Union de la Droite (20.8 percent) and
the Parti Socialiste (13.9 percent). In the 2015 regional elections, they
elected 358 regional councilors, three times more than in the previous elec-
tions. At the national level, they gained parliamentary representation in
2012, with, two deputies and, for the first time, two senators.
Such unusual successes, as well as the change in leadership, make the
party more attractive, and since 2012 it has been rallying new recruits, re-
juvenating and feminizing its troops (Crépon 2012, Crépon and Lebourg
2015). It is always difficult to accurately estimate party membership. But
because of the legal actions that marked the recent history of the move-
ment, there are official court documents establishing the number of FN
members who paid their membership dues for the congress: 42,000 in De-
cember 1998 (before the split of the “mégrétistes”) and 51,551 in July
2015. It is still far from the 83,000 the party claims on its website, but
10,000 more than at a time when the party was at its earlier apex. In paral-
lel, the FN is developing networks to extend its influence beyond the party
circles and bring in new ideas and a new identity. At the time of the 2012

626
presidential election, Marine Le Pen created the right-wing coalition
Rassemblement Bleu Marine. More recently numerous thematic groups
have been set up to appeal to different publics: Racine (teachers), Mari-
anne (students), Audace (young professionals), Cardinal (managers), Nou-
velle Écologie (those interested in alternative energy), Clic (a group for
people involved in and interested in the arts), and so on. The most recent
achievement is the creation of a FN students’ association at Sciences Po
Paris in March 2016; that group, provocatively, was called Jean Moulin,
after the hero of the French Resistance. It was followed by another stu-
dents’ group at Sciences Po Bordeaux, named more classically after the
poet Charles Péguy. The party is looking for academics and higher-ranking
civil servants to form a party elite that tomorrow could be able to govern,
on the model of Florian Philippot, the party’s vice president for strategy
and communication, who comes from the prestigious Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (ENA).
Meanwhile, the image of the FN has improved. Marine Le Pen’s ap-
proval rating on the monthly TNS Sofres/Le Figaro Political Barometer
has risen from 14 percent before her election to 29 percent four months
after, with occasional peaks at 32–33 percent. By contrast, her father on
average was below the threshold of 20 percent, with the exception of a
short-lived peak at 31 percent at the time of the 1995 presidential election.
The same goes for the image of the party, which now varies between a 20
and 25 percent approval rating; under her father, the party had an average
approval rating around 10 percent.16 And the view that the FN and its
leader are “a danger for democracy,” which was shared by some three-
quarters of the French between 1994 and 2004, is now held by closer to 50
percent.17

A Glass Ceiling?
In spite of the increasing audience of the FN after 2011, there are limits to
its political progression and to the process of de-demonization.
Marine Le Pen’s political style and her crusade against Islamic funda-
mentalism certainly have more appeal to groups of voters that her father
repelled, such as Jews, gays, practicing Catholics, and women. Among
Jewish voters, support for Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret combined
in the 2002 presidential election was 6 percent (vs. 19.2 percent of the gen-
eral population who supported one or the other); in 2012, Marine Le Pen’s
support among Jews rose to 13.5 percent (vs. 17.9 percent for the general

627
population).18 Among Catholics, the repeated warnings of the French
Church, condemning FN’s ideas as contrary to the universalist message of
the Evangels, seemed a rampart against such a vote. Yet in the first round
of the 2015 regional elections almost one-third of Catholics voted for FN
candidates, compared to a little over a quarter in the departmental elections
nine months before.19 According to a recent survey, support for the FN
has been rising among gay couples also.20 Even in the public sector, a tra-
ditional stronghold of the left, the FN is progressing, especially at the
lower levels of the civil service hierarchy.21 Last, and even more impor-
tant because they represent some 53 percent of the French registered elec-
torate, women in 2012 were as likely to vote for Marine Le Pen as men
were, which had not been the case before. One of the earliest and best-es-
tablished findings about electoral support for populist radical right parties
in Europe is that they attract more men than women, a trend that has been
labeled the “radical right gender gap”(Givens 2004; see also Chapter 10 in
this book, by Hilde Coffé), but this may no longer be true in France. In the
2012 presidential election, unlike her father, Marine Le Pen got almost the
same level of support among female and male voters. After controlling for
the other sociodemographic and attitudinal variables that explain electoral
support for the FN, there was no difference whatsoever. A “Marine Le Pen
effect” was particularly noticeable among women in low-skilled, low-paid,
non-manual-labor jobs. For the first time, the probability of a Le Pen vote
was higher among those working in sales and services, who are predomi-
nantly female, than among blue-collar workers, who are mostly male
(Mayer 2015a). These elections took place in a specific political context:
the first post-recession national elections, dominated by the rejection of
Nicolas Sarkozy, the “president of the rich.” Yet the gender gap reap-
peared in the subsequent midterm elections for the European Parliament as
well as in the municipal, departmental, and regional elections (Barisione
and Mayer 2015; Mayer 2017a). The numbers of those who say they in-
tend to vote for Marine Le Pen in the 2017 presidential election are again
practically the same among male and female voters.22 It is a little early to
be sure that Marine Le Pen has completely overcome women’s reluctance
to vote for her, but a postelectoral survey indeed confirms the trend
(Amengay, Durovic, and Mayer 2017).
There are other barriers to the FN’s progression. The first one is the left-
right cleavage. Voters on the left are more resistant to the FN’s calls. As
was also true when the party was under her father’s control, the farther

628
right a person is on the traditional left-right scale, the higher the probabil-
ity that she will vote for her—support for Marine Le Pen in the first round
of the 2015 regional elections varied between 11 percent among voters lo-
cated at the far left to almost 65 percent at the other end. The “Leftist Lep-
enists,” as Pascal Perrineau called them (Perrineau 1995, 2017)—that is to
say, FN voters who locate themselves on the left (between 0 and 4 on a 0–
10 scale), represented 5 percent of Marine Le Pen voters in 2015 (Mayer
2017a).
Another barrier is education. Education teaches one to think rationally,
to accept complexity and diversity. And it conditions employment and so-
cial status. In post-industrial societies, the educational divide has taken on
a growing importance, opposing educated workers who are more likely to
benefit from globalization to the less educated workers who are more vul-
nerable to globalization and who reject it. It is among the “globalization
losers” that the radical right parties have developed the fastest (Kriesi et al.
2008; Bornschier and Kriesi, 2013), and in particular unskilled manual and
non-manual workers. The educated upper and middle classes resist. In the
first round of the 2015 regional elections, the FN lists drew a record 52
percent of the vote among manual workers, versus 20 and 23 percent
among the upper and middle service classes (Mayer 2017a). These were
midterm elections, with a turnout just under 50 percent. If one recalculates
the FN vote on the basis of all registered voters, these figures should be di-
vided roughly by two. But still, the contrast persists between the better-ed-
ucated and the less well-educated, between the upper middle class and the
working class.
The limitations of the de-demonization strategy are even more visible
when one looks at voters’ motivations. Marine Le Pen’s goal was to show
that her party had shed its racist and xenophobic overtones. The reality is
more complex. Both before and after she took over the party, FN support-
ers stand out because of their ethnocentric and authoritarian vision of the
world (Adorno et al. 1950). They strongly reject foreigners, immigrants,
and minorities, and call for tougher law-and-order policies. Such an atti-
tude is usually more frequent on the right than on the left of the ideological
spectrum, but it reaches a peak among both Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen
voters. Since the end of the 1960s, French society on the whole has be-
come more open and permissive because of rising education levels, gener-
ational turnover, and the spread of post-materialist values. But FN voters
are persistently more intolerant than other voters, and the gap has even
widened since Marine Le Pen took over. In the first round of the 2007

629
presidential election, 71 percent of those who voted for her father wanted
to restore the death penalty, a proportion 30 percentage points above the
sample’s average, and 89 percent found the number of immigrants exces-
sive, a 33 percentage point difference. In the 2015 regional elections, the
proportions were respectively 60 and 91 percent among FN voters, but the
differences were respectively 33 and 43 percentage points above the aver-
age. And in spite of Marine Le Pen’s wish to diversify her party’s plat-
form, the main motivation of her voters is the rejection of immigrants and
consequently the rejection of a European Union accused of letting them
flow in (Mayer 2013).
The strength of the old patterns is even more obvious if one looks at the
party members and followers. In the 2015 departmental elections 104 FN
candidates were eventually prosecuted for blatantly racist, homophobic,
and anti-Semitic comments.23 Many new recruits, who had taken for
granted the changes brought about by Marine Le Pen, expressed their dis-
appointment publicly and left the party. Pooled data from the annual
Barometer on Racism and Anti-Semitism of the Commission Nationale
Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (CNCDH) allows us to explore preju-
dice among sympathizers of the FN—those who say the FN is the party
they feel the closest to—between 2009 and 2014. While they are less com-
mitted than actual party members, they are more engaged than simple vot-
ers. They are like a magnifying glass of the party’s transformations. The
results are clear-cut: compared to sympathizers of other parties, whatever
the question, whatever the period, the interviewees close to the FN gave
the most negative answer and were the most inclined to reject people of
another color, religion, or culture. For instance, on a global scale of ethno-
centrism, 87 percent belong to the upper quartile, the most prejudiced (vs.
48 percent of the interviewees close to the other right-wing parties, and 18
percent among those close to the left-wing ones). They are twice as likely
as sympathizers of other parties to have a high score on the anti-Semitism
scale. They support the most flagrant forms of racism, such as belief in a
hierarchy of human races (36 percent, vs. the sample average of 11 per-
cent). And a record 82 percent claim to be “somewhat” or at least “a little”
racist (vs. 25 percent among sympathizers of all other parties, and 16 per-
cent among left-wing sympathizers (Mayer 2015b).
While the party’s image has definitely improved, it still faces two im-
portant limitations. In France a large majority still sees the FN as an ex-
tremist and dangerous movement. In the last European elections, the FN
scored an 8.8 on the classical eleven-point left-right scale (going from the

630
far left at 0 to the far right at 10)—highest among all radical right parties
in Western Europe (Barisione and Mayer 2015). In April 2016, 78 percent
of a sample of the adult population living in France said they considered
the FN as an “extreme right party,” the same proportion as in 2015. Sixty
percent see it as a “xenophobic party.” And since 2015 some 60 percent
see it as “a danger for democracy,” a rise of ten points compared to
2014.24
The second persistent weak point of the FN is its lack of political credi-
bility. In the same 2016 survey, corroborated by many others, only 27 per-
cent of respondents think the FN capable of governing the country, a drop
of 4 percentage points from 2015. And Marine le Pen is not considered to
have the stature of a future president of the republic.25 Even within the
party, several officials, despite being close to Marine Le Pen, express pri-
vately their doubts about the present capacity of the FN to govern France.
One of them admitted in September 2014: “You imagine Marine at the
Elysée Palace tomorrow? There are not enough ministers! Who is her chief
of staff? Who is ambassador in Washington? Even if there is just a dissolu-
tion [of the National Assembly] and we could have 150 deputies, whom do
we get?”26
And if the party has considerably filled out its platform, giving more im-
portance in particular to economic issues (Ivaldi 2015), in the opinion of
most French people it remains a niche party (Meguid 2005, 2008; Meyer
and Miller 2015), specialized on one or two issues, mainly immigration
and, to a lesser degree, law and order.

CONCLUSION

One year before the 2017 French presidential election, the situation was at
first glance promising for the FN. The economic situation was difficult,
with a lingering high level of unemployment, especially among the young.
A series of unprecedented terrorist attacks in 2015 fed fear of Islamic fun-
damentalism. The increasing flow of migrants and refugees from the Mid-
dle East and Africa favored a drift toward nationalism and a reflex toward
closure. And the disaffection felt toward the political class in general had
reached historical heights, with 89 percent of the population sharing the
feeling that the political class does not care about what people like them
think, 67 percent of the opinion that democracy does not function well, and
65 percent saying they trust neither the left nor the right to govern the

631
country.27 At that stage, surveys of people who intended to vote indicated
that Marine Le Pen should easily beat her 2012 vote tally by some ten per-
centage points. But although the FN has won an increasing number of
votes since 2011, it still has not rallied a majority behind it to govern, not
even at the local level. In a French system dominated by the electoral two-
round system, it gets excellent showings in the first round but fails to make
alliances in the second round. In the 2015 regional elections, in spite of a
national vote tally near 28 percent in the first round and the mobilization
of an extra 800,000 voters in the second, it did not win one single region,
deprived of its victory by the tactical withdrawal of the Socialist candi-
dates in the two regions it could have conquered, Provence-Alpes-Côte
d’Azur and Nord-Pas de Calais-Picardie.
The 2017 series of elections are a perfect illustration of these predica-
ments. In the first round of the presidential election, Marine Le Pen came
ahead the Socialist and LR candidates, qualifying for the second round. In
the second round, she attracted a record 10.9 million voters, more than a
third of the electorate. Nevertheless, her score was below the 40 percent
she expected on the faith of opinion polls. During the debate with her rival
Emmanuel Macron, between the two rounds, she ruined in two hours the
benefit of seven years of de-demonization strategy, appearing at the same
time aggressive and incompetent. In the following legislative elections, in-
stead of the electoral landslide she promised, her party only got eight MPs
elected, not even enough to form a group at the Assemblée nationale. The
image of the FN and of its leader is deteriorating28. And with the depar-
ture of its vice-president Florian Philippot to create an new party, The Pa-
triots, the party is going through its worse crisis since the scission trig-
gered by Bruno Mégret in 1998–1999.
The Front National is at a turning point, its political mutation unfin-
ished. For the old guard of the party, starting with its founder, Jean-Marie
Le Pen, the de-demonization strategy has gone too far and the FN has be-
trayed its principles.29 For the mainstream parties and their voters, de-de-
monization has not gone far enough, for the FN is not yet a party like the
others. Marine Le Pen faces a strategic dilemma. Going further—changing
the name of the party, openly repudiating its doctrine of “national prefer-
ence” (which has already been renamed “citizen priority”), and becoming
mainstream—could eventually lead to a new split in the party, while mak-
ing it less attractive to voters initially drawn to its anti-system attitude. Not
going further forbids her to reap the political dividends of her electoral dy-

632
namic. At the eve of a “refoundation” congress scheduled for March 2018,
her party appears more than ever shattered by doubts and divisions.

633
NOTES

1. See the video of her speech at the party congress in Tours, January
15–16, 2011, on YouTube, available online at https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=fhxPleoKlWU.
2. L’Aurore, January 13, 1998.
3. Pierre Poujade founded a short lived (1953–1958) xenophobic and
anti-Semitic tax protest movement defending small shopkeepers and
artisans, the Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans (Hoff-
mann 1956).
4. Established in 1964 and dissolved in 1968.
5. Letter from François Mitterrand, June 22, 1982, answering a May 24
letter from the National Front’s leader complaining that his party’s
congress had been totally neglected by the media, quoted in Faux,
Legrand, and Perez 1994, 15–24.
6. Reverse strategic voters are those who do not vote for the candidate
they really prefer in the first round, to send a signal of discontent.
Blais estimates the proportion of reverse strategic votes among Le Pen
voters in the first round at 3.6 percent, mostly supporters of Jacques
Chirac who were sure he would win in the next round but who sup-
ported Le Pen’s ideas on immigration and law and order.
7. She was not elected, but among the twenty members he could nomi-
nate.
8. Born in Hénin-Beaumont from a working-class background, he joined
the party at the age of twenty and bore the colors of the FN in all local
elections since 1995. He finally was elected mayor on March 30,
2014.
9. Video of FN congress in Tours, January 16, 2011, available online at
http://www.frontnational.com/videos/congres-du-fn-a-tours-discours-
d’investiture-de-marine-le-pen.
10. Le Monde, September 2, 1989.
11. Interviewed on December 6, 2013, by Valérie Igounet (Igounet 2014,
420).
12. Interview in Le Point, February 3, 2011.

634
13. Jean-Marie Le Pen appealed the decision; the judgment was scheduled
for October 5, 2016.
14. Internet survey by TNS Sofres One Point for LCI, RTL, Le Figaro,
April 15–16, 2016, of a sample of one thousand registered voters. If
the candidate of Les Républicains was Nicolas Sarkozy, the survey es-
timated, he should draw 24 percent of the vote, Marine Le Pen 29 per-
cent, and François Hollande 16 percent. If the candidate of the right
was Alain Juppé, the survey estimated he would draw 36 percent, Ma-
rine Le Pen 26 percent, and Hollande 13 percent.
15. The electoral system was changed to establish gender parity: the par-
ties must present a pair of candidates, one woman and one man, in al-
phabetical order.
16. Poll data available online at http://www.tns-sofres.com/dataviz?
type=2&code_nom=lepenmarine and http://www.tns-sofres.com/
dataviz?type=2&code_nom=lepen. Proportion answering “yes” to the
question “Would you tell me if you wish her/him to play an important
role in the months and years to come?” For parties the question is
slightly different: “Do you have a very good, somewhat good, some-
what bad, or very bad opinion of the following party: Front National?”
That survey is available online at http://www.tns-sofres.com/dataviz?
type=3&code_nom=fn.
17. Survey available online at http://www.tns-sofres.com/sites/default/
files/2016.02.05-baro-fn.pdf.
18. The estimation comes from the pooling of electoral surveys conducted
by the polling institute IFOP between 2012 and 2014, giving a sample
of 510 interviewees declaring themselves of Jewish faith (Fourquet
2015, 377–384).
19. Survey by IFOP for Le Pèlerin Magazine, December 6, 2015, avail-
able online at http://www.pelerin.com/A-la-une/Elections-regionales-
2015/Pour-qui-ont-vote-les-catholiques-au-premier-tour-des-
Regionales.
20. See François Kraus, “Gays, bis et lesbiennes: Des minorités sexuelles
ancrées à gauche,” Sciences Po/CEVIPOF, no. 8, January 2012, avail-
able online at http://www.cevipof.com/rtefiles/File/AtlasEl3/
NoteKRAUS.pdf; Sylvain Brouard, “Les bénéficiaires du mariage
pour tous votent-ils plus à gauche?,” Sciences Po/CEVIPOF, no. 9,
February 2016, available online at http://www.enef.fr/app/download/

635
 13205334525/LA_NOTE_%239_vague2.pdf?t=1455010923.
21. Luc Rouban, “Les fonctionnaires et le Front national,” Sciences
Po/CEVIPOF, no. 3, December 2015, available online at http://www.
maire-info.com/upload/files/etudecevipof.pdf.
22. TNS Sofres-OnePoint survey for Le Figaro, LCI, and RTL, April
2016.
23. See the compilation by the journal Libération: http://www.liberatio10
n.fr/france/2015/02/27/islamophobie-homophobie-la-compilation-des-
derapages-fn_1210335 and by the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur:
http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/elections-departementales-
2015/20150310.OBS4235/racisme-antisemitisme-homophobie-le-vrai-
visage-des-candidats-fn.htm.
24. Survey Ipsos Steria, for Le Monde, Sciences Po/FJJ, “Fractures
françaises,” available online at http://www.ipsos.fr/decrypter-societe/
2016-04-27-fractures-francaises-2016-repli-et-defiance-au-plus-haut.
25. Ibid. Also, the annual Baromètre d’image du FN for Le Monde/RTL,
from January 2016: http://www.tns-sofres.com/publications/
barometre-2016-dimage-du-front-national.
26. Quoted in “FN: des doutes sur la capacité à gouverner au sein même
du parti,” RTL, September 9, 2014.
27. Baromètre de la confiance politique, CEVIPOF/Opinion Way, wave 7,
January 2016, available online at http://www.cevipof.com/fr/le-
barometre-de-la-confiance-politique-du-cevipof/resultats-1/vague7.
28. According to an IFOP survey for the Journal du Dimanche (JDD),
conducted in September 2017, 66 percent of the respondents see her as
“sectarian,” 56 percent “not attached to democratic values,” 59 percent
consider “she does not understand the people’s problems,” 65 percent
she is “incompetent,” 68 percent that she has “no solution to pull the
country out of recession.” Last, 73 percent think “she does not have a
presidential stature,” 7 percentage points above the proportion found
in March 2017, available online at http://www.ifop.com/media/poll/
3841-1-study_file.pdf.
29. For instance, on May 1, 2016, her father called the de-demonization
strategy “a naive, stupid, or treacherous calculation.” He said this at a
ceremony honoring Joan of Arc, furious that his daughter had decided
to replace the traditional march with a banquet with the party officials

636
 that year (20 Minutes, May 2, 2016).
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CHAPTER 23

641
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND
SWITZERLAND

UWE BACKES
GERMANY, Austria and the greater part of Switzerland are historically
interwoven to form a common cultural area bound together by a shared
language modified by regional differences.1 In this chapter a comparison
of political developments in these three states will be made after consider-
ing each case individually. This procedure highlights the common ground
between groups on the right-wing fringe of each country’s party system.
To an extent the differences between the way right-wing groups devel-
oped in each of these countries is due to the different histories of the re-
spective states. Recently, however, they have moved closer to each other
in the face of very similar problems. To a degree Switzerland is a special
case due to its multilingual cantons and the early development of a plural-
ist civic culture that sustains an extraordinarily dynamic democratic consti-
tutional state. This is particularly true given the autocratic relapses toward
right-wing politics in neighboring German-speaking countries.
By international standards all three states are wealthy, have a high living
standard, the rule of law and a thriving political culture that promotes free-
dom for their citizens. Thus they are very attractive for people from re-
gions of the world threatened by violence, insecurity, daily violations of
human rights and dim social and economic prospects. In times of rapid
globalization mass migration from geographically and culturally remote
countries has created heated debates on critical issues in these German-
speaking lands. Such debates have immediate consequences for the mobi-
lization of opposition groups and creation of right-wing populist parties
(Kriesi et al. 2012).
Please note that the term “radical right” is not restricted to groups that
reject democratic values and rules in every respect. These are groups iden-
tified in terms of populism, anti-elitism, exclusive claims to represent the
interests of the people, the skillful use of fear and resentment and the use
of a homogenizing discourse of identity that develops anti-pluralist tenden-
cies that are hostile to minorities (Mudde 2007). By contrast, in this study,
right-wing extremism is characterized as implicitly or explicitly negating
the fundamental values and rules of democratic constitutional states
(Backes 2010, 181–183). This means that many groups exist in a fluid

642
state or in gray areas, making clear identification difficult.

GERMANY

Historical Overview
After 1945, German right-wing radical parties were generally less success-
ful electorally than similar parties in some other European countries with
older democratic traditions. For example France, where in comparison
with Germany right-wing parties have flourished. This difference has to do
with the memory of the magnitude of Nationalsozialismus (NS, National
Socialist) crimes and the ongoing public debates about the Nazi legacy.
Political scientists distinguish three waves of right-wing mobilization in
postwar Europe. During this period German right-wing radical parties
failed to make significant contributions to any of them (Beyme 1988; Zim-
mermann and Saalfeld 1993). Furthermore, in Germany the stability and
intensity of the dynamics of right-wing protest declined over the decades.
This finding remained valid even after the German reunification, despite
the autocratic heritage of Eastern Germany.
Reunited Germany was not among those European countries, such as
Iceland, Luxembourg, or Portugal, where right-wing radical parties re-
mained completely insignificant. Likewise, it was not among those EU
member states where right-wing radical parties achieved landslide elec-
toral gains and were thus able to exert considerable influence on political
debates and decision-making (Backes and Moreau 2012; Grabow and
Hartleb 2013; Stöss 2010, 174–215).
This can be illustrated by the results of the European elections of 2004
and 2009. In 2004 the national-populist party Republikaner (REP, Repub-
licans), which up to then had been the only German right-wing party to be
represented in the European Parliament, received 1.9 percent of the vote.
In 2009 this fell to 1.3 percent. The share of the NS-oriented Nation-
aldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party of
Germany) was 0.9 percent in 2004. In 2009, they tactically withdrew from
the elections in favor of the right-wing extremist Deutsche Volksunion
(DVU, German People’s Union). With only 0.4 percent of the vote, this
party came off even worse than the NPD five years earlier. The DVU was
led for a long time by the Munich publisher of the Deutsche National-
Zeitung, Gerhard Frey, and merged with the NPD in 2011.

643
 The relative weakness of right-wing extremist parties partially explains
the diversity and vitality of action-oriented groups (neo-Nazis, skinheads,
etc.) and their propensity for violence (Backes and Mudde 2000; Braun,
Geisler, and Gerster 2009; Klärner and Kohlstruck 2006). After the Ger-
man reunification, the NS-oriented scene, which had developed in West
Germany in the 1970s, expanded to the Eastern federal states. There it
merged with specific local groups. The same was true for the right-wing
extremist elements of the skinhead subculture which, after originating in
Great Britain, spread to both West Germany and to a lesser extent East
Germany in the 1980s. Soon their hate-filled music, which took on local
color, became an essential element in the growth of right-wing extremism.
One peculiarity of Eastern Germany was its often symbiotic relationship
to the NPD, which since the end of the 1990s was prominent in local elec-
tions. For example, in 2004 they gained 9.2 percent of the vote in Saxony
and in 2006 they achieved 7.3 percent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vor-
pommern, therefore creating regional strongholds.
Xenophobic violence peaked for the first time in the early 1990s, against
the background of rapidly rising numbers of asylum seekers. Then it stabi-
lized at a relatively high level. A particularly high share of the offenses
were physical attacks on people identified as “strangers,” “foreigners,”
“wogs,” “social misfits,” “homosexuals,” and “left-wing ticks.” In most
cases these attacks happened spontaneously under the influence of alcohol
and music and appear to indicate a “deficiency in effective regulation”
(Möller and Schumacher 2007, 312).
Only a minority of the perpetrators expressed a clear ideological orienta-
tion. Offenses by ideologically committed terrorist groups displaying a
high level of planning, thus indicating the development of underground
structures with appropriate logistics, such as bomb attacks, robberies, kid-
napping, and blackmail, remained quantitatively insignificant (Backes
2013; Willems and Steigleder 2003).
However, several groups belonging to the mixed zone of NS-oriented
comradeships and overtly right-wing extremist skinhead groups developed
terrorist approaches. The most horrible spectacular case was that of the
Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU, National Socialist Under-
ground), which managed to remain undetected for a long time. They were
accused of nine murders of immigrants of Turkish or Greek origin and one
police officer in the years 2000 to 2006. They also carried out several bank
robberies and assaults. After the two main perpetrators committed suicide,

644
the discovery of a DVD containing a video of their cynical confessions re-
vealed their hidden political background.
Investigators reconstructed the perpetrators’ personal contacts with the
“Blood and Honor” network. The way in which they carried out their acts
was in line with the concept of “leaderless resistance,” which is common
in this right-wing scene. There were also obvious similarities to the ways
in which the Swedish “Laserman” and the British “nail bomber” acted
(Pfahl-Traughber 2015).

Current Situation

Elections and Seats

After its early regional successes in Saxony, the NPD, which had had the
greatest success of all right-wing parties in elections, experienced a decline
with its share of the vote falling from 9.2 percent in 2004 to 5.6 percent in
2009 and 4.9 percent in 2014. Similarly in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern its
share fell from 7.3 percent in 2006 to 6.0 percent in 2011 and to 3.0 per-
cent in 2016. Separating itself from other right-wing groups and running
on its own again for the European Parliament elections of 2014, it only
slightly increased its results from the 0.9 percent it gained in 2004 to 1.0
percent. At the same time the more moderate REP’s share of the vote went
down to 0.4 percent.
Nevertheless, the NPD celebrated the election of its long-serving federal
chairman, Udo Voigt, as a success. This was possible only because of a
change in German electoral law which abolished the requirement that par-
ties gain at least 5 percent of the vote in order to take a seat. It had previ-
ously become clear that the party had lost its power to mobilize support,
even in its East German strongholds. This decline can partially be ex-
plained by grave financial problems and a leadership crisis that led to the
resignation of the party chairman, Holger Apfel, and other long-term mem-
bers. Furthermore, the second chamber of the German Parliament, the
Bundesrat, representing the federal states, had initiated ban proceedings
against the party in late 2013 (Brandstetter 2013).
Instead of existing right-wing extremist parties gaining an advantage
from the decline of the NPD, a new party benefited from all of this tur-
moil: the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany),
which was founded in 2013 against the background of the euro crisis. The
AfD received 7.1 percent of the vote in its first election. In the federal

645
elections of September 2013 it fell short of the 5 percent threshold needed
to elect members to the parliaments of the federal states. Even so, the party
was satisfied with its 4.7 percent. The party’s fortune improved in Septem-
ber 2014, when it gained 9.7 percent of the vote in Saxony, 10.6 percent in
Thuringia and 12.2 percent in Brandenburg. In the former West German
states the AfD also began to make gains. In February 2015 it gained 6.1
percent of the vote in Hamburg, and in May 2015 it won 5.5 percent of the
vote in Bremen.
After the European Parliament elections of 2014, the party went through
a transformation process in the course of which the economically liberal
wing of the new party centered around the economist Bernd Lucke and the
former president of the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI, Fed-
eral Association of German Industry), Hans-Olaf Henkel, broke away to
found the Allianz für Fortschritt und Aufbruch (ALFA, Alliance for
Progress and Change) in July 2015. Under pressure of the refugee crisis,
their approval ratings, which had begun to slide, rose rapidly. At the same
time the remainder of the party slowly moved closer to the profile of the
European populist radical right while keeping a clear distance between it-
self and the NPD (Decker 2015). Despite a decline in the number of new
refugees arriving in Germany, the party was triumphant in the March 2016
elections for the parliaments of some federal states, both in the eastern and
western parts of the country. In Saxony-Anhalt it gained 24.2 percent of
the vote, while its share of the vote in Rhineland-Palatinate was 12.6 per-
cent and in Baden-Württemberg 15.1 percent. Terrorist attacks by individ-
uals with a jihadist background nourished the favorable atmosphere, so the
party received considerable gains in the elections of September 2016 (20.8
percent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and 14.2 percent in Berlin).
These elections showed that the AfD had succeeded in capturing protest
votes both from the supporters of traditional mainline parties, especially
the CDU/CSU, from the SPD and even the left-wing party Die Linke (The
Left). At the same time, the AfD’s right-wing extremist competitors suf-
fered losses in all three federal states. Never before in the history of the
Federal Republic of Germany had a protest party succeeded in achieving
more than 24 percent of the vote right from the start. The vast majority of
AfD voters said that they voted for the party “due to disappointment” with
existing political parties (Neu 2016).

Ideology and Programs

646
The fragmented political camp to the right of the Christian Democratic
parties is ideologically and programmatically diverse. Such parties incor-
porate aspects of historical German nationalism: the bringing together of
all Germans under the umbrella of an authoritarian state, the “conservative
revolution” (consisting of elitist theories combined with ideologies of rev-
olutionary national liberation), and völkisch elements promoting biological
and/or cultural racism. These older ideologies are now combined with new
ideological fragments such as ethnopluralism, Islamophobia, and “white
power” to create a tense synthesis (Backes and Jesse 1996; Botsch 2012).
Among the right-wing parties, the NPD has the closest affinity to Na-
tional Socialism, and its official platform clearly shows racist elements.
For example, its new basic platform, passed in 2010, labels the NPD a “so-
cial homeland party.” Concerning this self-assessment they follow the
model of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Aus-
tria). This leads them to lament the “ethnic infiltration” of Germany “as a
result of immigration” and to plead for the reestablishment of an intact
“ethnic community” where the family becomes the “bearer of biological
heritage.” This is linked to calls for a “national economy based on terri-
tory.” In the interest of “maintaining German ethnicity,” it rejects the inte-
gration of foreigners (NPD 2010, 5, 7, 9, 12).
The official NPD platform, however, conflicts with directions given by
the party leadership to party functionaries by not providing more detailed
explanations regarding the “repatriation of foreigners.” Such “foreigners”
include people referred to as “passport Germans.” These are people who
hold German citizenship without being ethnically German. Here völkisch-
racist elements are combined with criticisms of capitalism and a social
program based on comprehensive social security for those whom they rec-
ognize as ethnic Germans (NPD 2006; Backes 2007; Kailitz 2007).
The profiles of right-wing, or “national camp,” competitors to the NPD
are further removed from historical National Socialism in terms of ideol-
ogy and their platforms. Consequently, they are not as overtly disloyal to
the existing political system and sometimes present themselves as the true
friends of the constitutional order based on Germany’s Basic Law.
What they have in common with the NPD is their hostility to main-
stream political parties. While the NPD resurrects an old term that origi-
nated in former communist East Germany: “bloc parties,” the AfD refers
to these as “old parties.” Furthermore the AfD argues that these parties
form a “cartel,” insufficiently controlled by a media “which on the whole

647
toes the official line on any given issue” (AfD Landesverband Baden-
Württemberg 2015, 19). As a result, the AfD claims that these parties are
incapable of serving the interests of the people in a crisis situation.
Like the NPD, the AfD also considers immigration to be the major prob-
lem facing modern society. Consequently, it fans fears of an approaching
disaster. However, it does not promote an expatriation program, aimed at
removing migrants who are already in Germany. Instead it demands strict
control of migration. Further, it argues that immigrants must be forced to
assimilate, not integrate, into German society. They “must adjust to Ger-
man society, not the other way round” (AfD Landesverband Baden-Würt-
temberg 2015, 24).
In this context the AfD invokes “Christian occidental values.” By con-
trast, many members of the NPD are followers of Odinism and other forms
of neo-paganism, not Christianity. Whereas anti-Semitism is part of the
NPD’s brand, it seems as if Jews and Israel do not exist in the AfD’s (offi-
cial) repertoire of enemy stereotypes.
Like most right-wing parties, the AfD explicitly rejects “Islam” as a “re-
ligion belonging to a different culture” (Tillschneider 2016). But this does
not rule out the possibility that “people belonging to the Islamic faith”
might be accepted as long as they “live with us peacefully and are inte-
grated” (AfD Landesverband Baden-Württemberg 2015, 24).
Increasingly, the AfD, which originally supported neoliberal economic
policies, presents itself as socially protective and a critic of capitalism
while keeping a safe distance from the radical anti-capitalism of the NPD.
During the election campaigns of spring 2016 the AfD did not support “tax
populism,” but presented itself as the champion of budgetary rigor, sup-
porting extensive tax relief for families and massive investment in security
at the local and national level.

Organization
Nazism created a reaction against nationalism in Germany after 1945. As a
result, political movements that tried to maintain, or create, explicitly na-
tionalist programs were isolated from the majority of people. This led to a
high degree of fragmentation among such groups. By the end of 2014 the
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (known in German as
the Verfassungsschutz) estimated that around twenty-one thousand people
were “potential converts to right-wing extremism” (Bundesministerium
des Innern 2015, 34). A considerable part of these group were described as

648
“subcultural right-wing extremists.” These included 7,200 “skinheads” and
5,600 “neo-Nazis.” Another 6,850 people belonged to numerous small as-
sociations or clubs that maintained a nationalist ethos, while the remaining
5,200 were members of political parties, the majority of them members of
the NPD.
Competing with the NPD was the anti-Muslim Bürgerbewegung pro
NRW (Citizens Movement of Nordrhein-Westfalen), with 950 members,
and two small neo-Nazi parties: Die Rechte (The Right), with 500 mem-
bers, and Der III. Weg (The Third Way), with 200 members. Considered to
be more moderate is the REP, which is not included in the report. Never-
theless, it sometimes cooperated with the Bürgerbewegung pro NRW on a
local level.
At the beginning of 2014 the REP had still about 4,800 members
(Deutscher Bundestag 2014, 269). In addition, the initially Eurosceptic but
mostly socially conservative and economically liberal AfD was not subject
to surveillance by the Verfassungsschutz in the year covered by the report.
According to its own information, before its 2015 split the AfD had around
20,000 members. After the followers of party founder Bernd Lucke had
left the AfD, its members counted only 16,400 in December 2015 (Nieder-
mayer 2016, 2).
The AfD’s ability to mobilize and gain members is similar to that of the
early NPD in the second half of the 1960s. It seems doubtful, however,
given its inner heterogeneity and still unclear party platform, that it will be
successful in integrating new members in the long run.
Similarly, the NPD, which radicalized after 1996, was not capable of ex-
ploiting its regional election successes or of strengthening its organiza-
tional base. Its membership numbers peaked in 2007 with 7,200 members.
Then its membership declined to the number it had in the first years of the
“Voigt period,” with about 5,000 members by the end of 2015.
However, in eastern Germany it achieved higher membership numbers,
and in some local strongholds it was more deeply rooted than in the old
Federal Republic. In these areas it exploited the right-wing extremist sub-
cultures and “comradeship” to gain new members (Backes, Mletzko, and
Stoye 2010). This explains the high degree of overlap between NPD func-
tionaries and those of other militant groups. The commitment of active
members increased its ability to campaign, while its affinity to National
Socialism limited its electoral impact. In contrast to this, the comparably
moderate AfD has been much more successful, winning over disappointed

649
middle-class voters from the established parties.

AUSTRIA

Historical Overview
For a long time the “radical right” in the Viennese Republic has been rep-
resented by the FPÖ, the successor organization of the Verband der
Unabhängigen (VdU, Independent Federation). It was founded “by former
National Socialists for former National Socialists” (Pelinka 2013, 1). Its
existence, however, was only possible by making adjustments to accom-
modate to the constitutional framework, social conditions, and legal re-
quirements of the newly founded constitutional state.
A revision of the party’s platform and a partial liberalization that began
in the 1960s did not result in the expected electoral success. This led to the
founding of the Nationaldemokratische Partei (NDP, National Democratic
Party) in 1966–1967 by the militant South Tyrol activist Norbert Burger. It
was modeled on the then successful NPD in Germany and attempted to
offer a nationalist alternative that did not hide its affinity to National So-
cialism. As such, it was only moderately successful in Austrian elections at
the federal and state levels. Because of its affinity for National Socialism it
was banned in 1988 (Dworczak 1981; Bailer and Neugebauer 1993).
Meanwhile, the young, charismatic chairman of the FPÖ, Jörg Haider,
pushed the liberal nationalist Norbert Steger from the FPÖ’s top position
using a right-wing populist strategy: by claiming that he was against the
“party cartel” of the ÖVP and SPÖ. This way, by exploiting attractive
protest issues and changing content, Haider succeeded in opening up the
party to new groups of voters. His strategy led to spectacular successes in
the 1999 elections for the national parliament, where the party won 26.9
percent of the vote. This enabled them to form an ÖVP-led government.
Assuming governmental responsibility resulted in a dramatic decline in
popularity with the voters and a split within the party (Duncan 2010;
Luther 2011). In opposition again after 2006, under its new chairman
Heinz-Christian Strache, it was able to live up to its earlier successes under
Haider, whose Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Alliance for the Future
of Austria) had lost significance after his death in a road accident in Octo-
ber 2008 (Heinisch and Hauser 2015).

650
Current Situation

Elections and Seats

After a low in the 2002 and 2006 elections for the National Council, a re-
sult of its participation in government and the split, the FPÖ began to re-
gain support (Luther 2009). Hence in 2008 the party was able to increase
its share of the vote by presenting itself as a “social home party.” This tac-
tic enabled it to successfully win over classical SPÖ voters (Kritzinger et
al. 2013; Luther 2009). Five years later, against the background of the EU
financial crisis and a series of corruption scandals (Luther 2015, 148–149),
the FPÖ once again increased its share of the vote, to 20.5 percent. This
occurred at a time when it had to deal with two Eurosceptic competitors.
The much weakened BZÖ won 3.5 percent of the vote, thus missing the
4 percent threshold required for participation in the parliament. On the
other hand, with a 5.7 percent share, Team Stronach—headed by eighty-
year-old Austrian-Canadian industrialist and billionaire Frank Stronach—
was elected to parliament. The voting behavior in this election showed pat-
terns similar to those of earlier elections: the FPÖ was more attractive to
working-class, mainly male voters with a low level of formal education
and few ties to the church. These are people worried about economic de-
velopment and considered unlikely to establish good relations with mi-
grants (Johann et al. 2014). The party was particularly successful among
classical SPÖ voters and benefited from new forms of conflict such as im-
migration and a general anti-European sentiment. These anti-establishment
patterns eclipsed older ones such as social stratification and religious affili-
ation, which had predominated within the Austrian party system before
(Aichholzer et al. 2013).
In opposition, the FPÖ could fully exploit its role as a populist protest
party. This and the lack of Eurosceptic competitors, such as the Liste
Hans-Peter Martin, which had been successful in 2009, and Team
Stronach, both of which did not run in this election, resulted in an increase
in votes for the FPÖ. This is a pattern that was repeated in the European
elections of May 2014. There the FPÖ’s share of the vote rose from 12.7
percent in 2009 to 19.7 percent.
After initial difficulties, the party formed an alliance with the MEPs of
the French Front National (FN, National Front), the Italian Lega Nord
(LN, Northern League), the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for
Freedom), and the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest), to form

651
the Europe of Nations and Liberty faction in the European Parliament
(Heinisch and Hauser 2015). On national level, in the following election
the party was able to prove its mobilization capability by having candi-
dates elected to the parliaments of the federal states.
In Upper Austria in September 2015 they gained 30.4 percent of the
vote, and in Vienna in October 2015 30.8 percent of the vote. Thus the
FPÖ became the second-strongest party. Professional observers considered
the formation of an SPÖ-FPÖ coalition in Burgenland after the elections of
May 2015 an indication of increasing options for the FPÖ’s coalition. In
the first round of the presidential elections in April 2016, the FPÖ’s popu-
lar candidate, Norbert Hofer, won 36.7 percent of the vote, knocking out
two candidates of the governing coalition. In the second round in May he
missed by a hair’s breadth against the Green candidate, Alexander van der
Bellen. In July 2016, Austria’s Supreme Court ordered a rerun of the presi-
dential election because of technical errors.

Ideology and Program

During this period, the legitimacy of traditional parties, in terms of ac-
cepted sets of principles as well as the doctrine of the Christian corporative
state, increasingly declined among voters. As a result, a form of German
nationalism that crossed the borders of existing states served as the ideo-
logical link of the so-called third camp. In most cases it combined with a
certain degree of willingness to recognize what was presented as “the good
side” of National Socialism.
German nationalism was one of the cornerstones of the early FPÖ,
alongside anti-communism and the rejection of democratic government
based on consensus (Proporzdemokratie, consociational democracy) and
grand coalition governments (Luther 2006, 277). What is left of this long-
standing approach to politics is opposition to the “cartel” of the two tradi-
tional big parties, ÖVP and SPÖ, which, their challengers claim, can only
be broken up with the tools of direct democracy.
Whereas anti-communism lost its significance after the fall of the Iron
Curtain, giving up on German nationalism required a change of program.
In the party platform that was passed in 1997, this theme was replaced by
Austrian patriotism, though in most cases this was relativized. For exam-
ple, in the new platform, passed in Graz in 2011, we can read the statement
“The language, history, and culture of Austria are German” (FPÖ 2011, 5).
This, however, is modified by referring to the necessity of protecting tradi-

652
tional non-German minorities.
The reference to Christianity was reinforced in the party during the pe-
riod of populist protest in the 1990s. This was done against resistance by
the traditionally anti-clerical party voter base in order to win over new vot-
ers and to make the ÖVP ready for a coalition (Luther 2006, 279). During
the election campaign of 2013 the party used the slogan “Love your neigh-
bor—for me, this means our Austrians.” Therefore it is possible to argue
that this basic Christian-sounding language was, in fact, used only for pro-
paganda purposes. This seems to be confirmed by the party’s position con-
cerning immigration policy, which became a focus of its platform in the
1990s with slogans such as “Austria for Austrians,” “Austria first,” and
“Stop immigration.”
The FPÖ’s Jerusalem Declaration of December 2010, which combined
support for “Jewish-Christian cultural values” with criticism of “Islam as a
totalitarian system pursuing the goal of conquering the world,” set a new
tone (FPÖ 2010). With this the FPÖ joined the ranks of a European de-
fense against “Islam” in order to protect the “Jewish-Christian occident.”
This aims at disproving the accusation of being anti-Semitic and extremist,
leveled both by the party’s Austrian opponents and by the EU, on the occa-
sion of joining the Schüssel government (Ahtisaari, Frowein, and Oreja
2000). Since then, statements against Muslims and sweeping criticism of
Islam are easily found in the 2013 Handbuch freiheitlicher Politik (Hand-
book of Free Politics), which is a guide for party functionaries and has be-
come a key text for the FPÖ (Krzyzanowski 2013, 142–144).2

Organization
In 2014 the FPÖ claimed 50,000 members, the same number it claimed
when it joined the federal government in 2000 (Luther 2006, 374; Luther
2007). It dominates the right wing of the Austrian party system and is
rooted in a network of party associations and affiliated groups that em-
brace families, young people, students, employees, businesspeople, et
cetera. This way it embraces all important segments of Austrian society
(Moreau 2011, 24).
Its inclusive nature partly explains the lack of outright opposition to the
existing system, or sustained criticism of it, as well as its failure to em-
brace groups that can be labeled as right-wing extremist. Under its
telegenic and eloquent federal chairman, Heinz-Christian Strache, the
party has gained a leader whose appeal is similar to that of Haider.

653
 In rebuilding the party, Strache counted on the support of the competing
nationalist-inclined groups as a “traditional recruitment pool” (Pelinka
2013, 5; Horaczek and Reiterer 2009, 86; Schiedel 2007, 118–126). Stra-
che himself came out of this milieu, which led him to appreciate them as a
“school for life” and the source of the “rebirth of the FPÖ” (Strache 2006,
33–35). By utilizing their support he was able to consolidate and extend
his standing within the party. At the same time the tensions between the
“party in public office” and the “party on the ground” that had developed
when the party first participated in government disappeared—the experi-
ence of opposition served to consolidate the party.
One link between the right wing of the FPÖ and the subculture of hard-
core NS sympathizers and other right-wing extremists is the monthly mag-
azine Die Aula (The Forum), which is published in Graz. Its subtitle is Das
freiheitliche Monatsmagazin (The Liberal Monthly Magazine), and for a
long time it was the FPÖ’s most important publication among students and
academics who considered themselves “national-liberal.” Over time this
periodical became even more radical, with the result that at the end of the
1990s the FPÖ’s federal leadership and the Styrian branch distanced them-
selves from it. This was due to an ongoing investigation on the basis of the
Prohibition Act, passed in 1947 to ban the Nazi Party and suppress any re-
vival of it, looking into the magazine’s possible connections to acts of
right-wing violence. The extremist nature of the magazine becomes obvi-
ous when one looks at the activities of its editor, Martin Pfeiffer. In 2010
he was elected chairman of the Gesellschaft für freie Publizistik (Society
of Free Publications), which is officially classified as a mouthpiece for
right-wing extremism by the German Federal Office for the Protection of
the Constitution. Pfeiffer is also known to have frequently attended NPD
events (Lasek 2015).
Although the Austrian right-wing extremist scene is interwoven with the
German one, it has a smaller number of followers. Also, as a result of
criminal prosecutions, informal Internet circles predominate. Unfortu-
nately, neither the non-governmental organization Dokumentationsarchiv
des österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW, Documentation Centre of Aus-
trian Resistance) nor the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the
Constitution and Fight Against Terrorism in Vienna publishes data on this
scene’s organizational development (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz
und Terrorismusbekämpfung 2015).

SWITZERLAND

654
Historical Overview
Due to its historically liberal and democratic traditions, the vitality of its
constitutional state starting in at least the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and the fact that it retained its geographic and political integrity
throughout the twentieth century, Switzerland is not counted among the
“usual suspects” when it comes to the right-wing extremism. Nevertheless,
since 1945, as in other European countries, a right-wing extremist subcul-
ture that is friendly to fascism and even National Socialism has existed
there (Altermatt and Kriesi 1995; Skenderovic 2009a). Furthermore, in
Switzerland a form of radical right-wing populism was able to succeed
earlier than elsewhere.
Since the end of World War II, several right-wing populist parties have
been represented in the national parliament (Skenderovic 2009b). Initially
it was the Nationale Aktion gegen die Überfremdung von Volk und
Heimat (NA, National Action Party Against the Overpopulation of People
and Homeland by Foreigners), founded in 1961, that took the lead. It has
been represented in the National Council since 1967 by a former member
of the National Front of the early 1930s, the authoritarian Catholic son of a
big industrialist from Zurich, James Schwarzenbach (Buomberger 2004).
Furthermore, the Schweizerische Republikanische Bewegung (SRB, Swiss
Republican Movement), which he founded after leaving the NA, had par-
liamentary seats at the national level for some time. The same holds for the
Vigilance movement, which was represented in the National Council by
Mario Soldini in 1986–1987.
In the 1980s it was particularly the Schweizer Demokraten (SD, Swiss
Democrats), the successor party of the NA, and the Auto-Partei (Car Party)
that combined the topic of foreign domination with other issues. Other
groups, such as the ethnoregionalist Lega dei Ticinesi (Ticino League) and
the Geneva-based Mouvement des Citoyens Genevois (Movement of the
Citizens of Geneva), gained only a few of seats higher than the provincial
(canton) level (Rusconi 1994).
On federal level, the most successful of all of these parties was the
Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party), founded in 1936
as the Bauern-, Gewerbe- und Bürgerpartei (BGB, Farmers, Industrial
Workers, and Citizens Party). For a long time this was a moderate, eco-
nomically liberal, socially conservative party. It assumed the name the
Swiss People’s Party after merging with two other liberal parties active on

655
a provincial, or canton, level of politics (Ladner 2015, 78). In the 1990s its
Zurich-based wing, represented by the successful entrepreneur Christoph
Blocher, became dominant, edging out the more moderate Bern-based
wing of the party.
The party then pursued a populist strategy, which included resisting
Switzerland’s integration into the European Union. This policy consider-
ably increased its share of the vote in the elections for the National Coun-
cil during the 1990s. This meant that smaller but very active right-wing ex-
tremist parties received fewer votes (Lachat and Selb 2005). In the follow-
ing decade the SVP was able to further increase its share of the vote and
became successful in the French-speaking regions of Switzerland. Like
other right-wing populist parties in Europe, it gained support among the
working class and people with a lower-than-average income (Oesch 2008).
Then in 2007 it achieved 29 percent of the vote, allowing it to send 66 rep-
resentatives to the National Council, making it the strongest faction there.

Current Situation

Elections and Seats

The SVP is one of the traditional Swiss parties that in 1959 agreed on pro-
portional representation when electing members of the Bundesrat (Govern-
ing Council). Christoph Blocher’s election to the Governing Council in
2003 resulted in a disruption of the existing system of proportional repre-
sentation, because now the SVP had two representatives in the Governing
Council instead of one. Blocher also violated the principle of collective re-
sponsibility stipulated by the constitution by acting as a representative of
his party rather than the Governing Council itself, sharply criticizing coun-
cil decisions publicly even though he was a member and his own party was
participating in it.
This attitude resulted in Blocher being voted out of the Governing
Council in the parliamentary elections of September 2008. The moderate
conservative SVP politician Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf was elected in his
place. This increased intraparty tensions, leading to a split and the found-
ing of a new party, the Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei (BDP, Citizens
Democratic Party), and contributed to the first-ever decline in vote share
for the SVP, which fell to 26.6 percent during the parliamentary elections
of October 2011.
Four years later, however, against the background of the EU financial

656
and refugee crisis, the party was able to more than recoup its losses, taking
29.4 percent of the vote—thus achieving the highest result ever of any
party in the parliamentary elections since the introduction of proportional
representation in 1919, and allowing it to consolidate its position as the
strongest power in the Governing Council. The party claimed credit for
having made migration a campaign issue (Kuenzi 2015). In the Governing
Council elections of December 2015 it again won a second seat in the
council.
Under Blocher, the SVP developed from a German-Swiss to a Swiss
party, which is very successful even in the cantons of the Romandie, the
French-speaking part of western Switzerland (Kriesi et al. 2005). In sum-
mer 2014 an internal analysis came to the conclusion that since the recent
parliamentary elections it had been able to increase its share of seats in 14
out of 18 canton parliaments. The best results were seen in the German-
speaking cantons, but even in Geneva the party was able to increase its
share of the vote (SVP 2014). In Ticino, on the other hand, where the Lega
dei Ticinesi is predominant, it was not as successful in the canton elections
of 2015 (Jankovsky 2015).
In conclusion, the SVP has succeeded both in the traditional strongholds
of the Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz (SP, Social Democratic
Party), where it appealed to urban working-class voters, and in the
Catholic strongholds of the Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei (CVP,
Christian Democratic People’s Party), where it is attractive to both young
and old voters, especially among men (Lutz 2012, 14). It was also very
successful in the context of the referenda against the building of minarets
in 2009, the expulsion of foreign offenders in 2010, and the campaign
against mass immigration in 2014.

Ideologies and Programs

The right wing of the Swiss party system is ideologically heterogeneous.
The small, fragmented extreme right often shows affinity to the fascist ide-
ologies of the interwar period and to the Swiss Front of the 1930s (Alter-
matt and Kriesi 1995, 100–101). As in other German-speaking countries,
the “white power” ideology, which is common in the skinhead subculture,
may be considered an Anglo-Saxon import, combining racism with ele-
ments of a “fashionable” style. Intellectual right-wing circles try to replace
traditional ethnocentrism with ethnopluralism, but they are still entangled
in homogenizing constructions of identity.

657
 The populist right, as represented by the SVP, is different from the ex-
treme right in keeping a distance from fascist ideologies of the interwar pe-
riod and in the lack of a clear anti-system attitude. On the contrary: the
SVP presents itself as the only credible defender of Swiss exceptionalism,
with its combination of independence, neutrality, direct democracy, and
federalism.
However, it combines the ideology of exceptionalism with an identity
discourse that has developed as a result of moving closer to the ideological
profiles of other right-wing populist parties in Europe. The SVP opposes
the class politics of all other parliamentary parties in Bern, whom it ac-
cuses of subjecting “Switzerland to foreign rule derived from the EU”
(SVP 2015, 8). It warns against the “selling out of Switzerland’s sover-
eignty” by way of international treaties and its inclusion in EU structures,
which are sweepingly denounced.
At the same time it wants strict controls and limitation of immigration
and an end to what it calls the “asylum chaos.” In this context it avoids the
“foreign domination” rhetoric of its right-wing populist predecessors while
at the same time channeling existing anxieties and resentments
(Buomberger 2004). Its way of arguing shows features of “differentialist
nativism” that is free of ethnocentrism (Bernhard, Kriesi, and Weber 2015,
126; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2015, 60). Further, the SVP differs in
some ways from right-wing populist parties, especially in its demand for a
“lean state” and its embrace of liberal economic and social policies (SVP
2015, 18). These demands are the most important element of continuity in
the party’s profile (Ladner et al. 2010, 59).
Its declared belief in “Switzerland’s Christian occidental culture” pro-
vides a clear delimitation from Islam, which, the party claims, is granted
immunity from criticism even though it imports ideas that contradict
Switzerland’s legal system and democratic principles (SVP 2015, 90). The
SVP was the trailblazer for the ban on minarets, which the party claims
have no right to exist in Switzerland because they are symbols of a reli-
gious and political claim to territorial power (Betz 2009, 99; Albertazzi
and Müller 2013). In this context its populist discourse is clearly revealed,
but on other topics it is not fundamentally different from other parties in
Switzerland (Bernhard, Kriesi, and Weber 2015).

Organization
The extreme right in Switzerland is organizationally fragmented. Accord-

658
ing to estimates by the government’s security agency, in the first decade of
the new millennium the potential number of followers of violence-prone
groups was about 1,000. This was well above the level of the 1990s (Bun-
desamt für Polizei 2009, 41).
The populist right, on the other hand, has a much greater number of ac-
tive supporters. Therefore, by moving closer to the profiles of other right-
wing populist parties in Europe and by successfully mobilizing voters
since the 1990s the SVP was able to absorb elements of the radical right.
By the end of 2015 the SVP claimed to have 90,000 members (Bundeskan-
zlei 2015, 18).
Under Blocher the SVP, which began in Zurich, became more leader fo-
cused, and its internal party processes were made more efficient through
the application of business management methods. Nevertheless, there was
still room for lively internal debates. As a result, membership numbers and
donations to the party rose. Blocher extended the network of provincial
(cantonal) and local sections of the party, therefore creating loyal groups
and party-affiliated organizations. For example, he attempted to incorpo-
rate closely affiliated groups such as Young4FUN, a youth association that
runs parallel to the long-standing Young SVP, the Bund der Steuerzahler
(Taxpayers Society) and the Auto Allianz (Automobile Alliance).
Supported by funds from Blocher, the party leadership adopted the prin-
ciples of “media-centered campaigning” (Skenderovic and Mazzoleni
2007, 91). As a result, it engaged in permanent campaigning, pushed cer-
tain people to the fore, established a staff of professional advisors, and in-
creasingly followed the recommendations of marketing experts. During
this process it developed an aggressive political style aimed at destroying
political opponents, delegitimizing them by labeling them as part of a cor-
rupt “political class.” This allowed it to present itself as the sole champion
of the people. Consequently, the SVP contributed to the erosion of the con-
sensus-oriented coexistence of existing parties that was typically Swiss
(Kriesi and Trechsel 2008, 92; Church and Vatter 2009).

COMPARISON

Cultural, Political, Economic, and Social Framework Conditions

The countries compared are different in terms of the duration and persis-
tence of their traditions as constitutional states. By the second half of the

659
nineteenth century Switzerland was already showing elements of the con-
stitutional state, both in its provincial governments, or cantons, and at na-
tional level. By way of contrast, the democratization of both Austria and
Germany happened much slower.
The republics created in Austria and Germany after World War I suf-
fered a lot from the weakness of their liberal and democratic cultures. As a
result, they proved to be only short-lived. By way of contrast in Switzer-
land, the constitutional state defied the anti-liberal and anti-democratic
movements that encircled it (Luebbert 1991). After 1945 the political cul-
tures of Germany and Austria moved closer to that of Switzerland insofar
as the newly created democratic constitutional states underwent a consoli-
dation process and developed a decidedly anti-Nazi, anti-totalitarian politi-
cal culture.
In Germany and Austria both radical and extreme right-wing groups
were able to connect to more influential historical movements than in
Switzerland. Where they did so overtly, however, they faced strong cul-
tural and political reactions that limited their further development. This is
particularly true for the former West Germany, which, due to the trauma of
the collapse of the Weimar Republic, had embedded the concept of a “mil-
itant democracy” in its constitution. Thus it created anti-extremist defense
mechanisms that characterized the political culture, even though these
mechanisms (such as banning a party) were seldom used (Backes and
Jesse 1996; Flümann 2015; Jaschke 2004).
In Austria, the 1947 Prohibition Act, intended to prevent the develop-
ment of National Socialist–type parties, had a similar effect. After the
amendment of the law in 1992, it has increasingly been used to suppress
National Socialist–type activities as well (Bailer 2013). However, Austria
can draw upon only a few possibilities for state intervention. In contrast to
Germany, Austrian law allows interference with the right to political ac-
tivism and the banning of political parties only in case of violence.
Furthermore, Austria’s political class is less restrained than that of Ger-
many by a “culture of contrition.” Instead, the political right benefits from
a “culture of victimisation” (Art 2006)—the common public discourse that
defines Austria as the first victim of National Socialism. For a long time
this way of avoiding the truth had produced a profound debate on the NS
past.
A similar phenomenon exists in Switzerland, with its uninterrupted de-
mocratic tradition. The Swiss only belatedly started discussing certain dark

660
sides of their pre-1945 history, such as economic ties to the NS regime
(Skenderovic 2009b, 2; Art 2011, 171–173). Provisions such as the protec-
tion of the state in Switzerland, at least in theory, essentially refer to the
use of violence (Kreis 1993). As such, they are of little use when it comes
to explaining the success of the SVP. This is because it developed neither
from a right-wing extremist subculture, like the NPD, nor from a “third
camp,” like the FPÖ, although there may be thin lines of historical connec-
tions to the Frontism of the 1930s (Skenderovic 2009b, 125–126).
At no time in its history was the pluralist civil culture in Switzerland
strangled to death by a dictatorship. On the other hand, in Austria the au-
thoritarian corporative state and the totalitarian NS regime meant that the
country went through two periods of dictatorship with different degrees of
repression.
Germany’s past of double dictatorship also clearly influences present-
day politics. In eastern Germany, the Soviet occupation led to the estab-
lishment of a second ideologically grounded regime with a totalitarian ten-
dency, which transformed the economic life of the society more deeply
than the previous NS regime had. Consequently, within a period of just
over half a century, 1933 to 1989, these two regimes together almost com-
pletely destroyed civil society and after Germany’s reunification in 1990 it
has proved difficult to rebuild it again. Even 25 years later it has not yet
reached the vitality of the ancient civil cultures of Western Europe (Backes
2008).
The weakness of present-day civil society in eastern Germany corre-
sponds with the fact that political parties, trade unions, churches, and reli-
gious communities are not deeply rooted in today’s society. This increased
the chances of the emergence of an “uncivil society,” with the NPD as its
most important political expression (Kopecky and Mudde 2002). This
problem can also be seen in other post-communist states in Central and
Eastern Europe. However, since the early 2000s, the level of countermobi-
lization against extremism by society and the state, in terms of both pre-
emptive and legislative action, is considerably higher. This can be seen in
a recent study of Saxony (Jesse, Schubert, and Thieme 2014, 305–329).
Today, post-communist societies are characterized by increasing social
change. This involves the transition from industrial to service economies
and onward to an information society. In this process, a change from mate-
rial to post-material value orientations is taking place. In Western Europe
this happened over a relatively long period of time, but now in Eastern Eu-

661
rope it is happening very rapidly with the level of change sometimes even
surpassing that in the West (Kriesi et al. 2012). Thus, Germany’s eastern
states should be compared to the post-communist states in Central and
Eastern Europe and not to the old states of Western Europe (Minkenberg
2015).
Germany’s eastern states form a kind of political laboratory that does
not exist in either Austria or Switzerland, which developed a “neutral”
comfort zone of wealth. This had the result that for a long time people liv-
ing in these countries believed it was possible to ignore what was happen-
ing in other parts of the world (Heinisch 2008, 40).
In all European countries, party systems today are characterized by a
weakening of the classical lines of social conflict: class, religious denomi-
nation and the urban/rural divide. Now we see the development of new
frontlines, which often intersect the old ones, thus influencing voting be-
havior (Arzheimer 2008; Givens 2005).
Piero Ignazi has described a “silent counter-revolution” against the post-
materialism of the 1968 movement and its successors (Ignazi 1992). This
can be grasped more generally as a conflict between libertarian individual-
ist and traditionalist communitarian values (Bornschier 2010). The crisis of
supra-national (including European) institutions and the negative concomi-
tants of mass migration work in favor of a reorientation of people’s iden-
tity in terms of “one’s own kind.” This tendency is stronger in Germany’s
eastern states, where democratic parties are much more weakly rooted than
in the western part. This holds true even though the eastern states have far
fewer foreigners and new migrants than the western states.
Austria and Switzerland aside, a hard-core NS-affine party seems more
likely to be successful in Germany’s eastern regions than in the western re-
gions. Furthermore, it was in eastern Germany that the softer right-wing
populist variant of political protest parties had their first and particularly
impressive successes in elections.
The Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes
(Pegida, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident)
movement is an expression of public outrage that both builds on and feeds
anxieties about unemployment and the influx of migrants. Thus it has de-
veloped a broader and more sustainable mobilization power in places such
as the streets of Saxony’s capital, Dresden (Geiges, Marg, and Walter
2015; Patzelt and Klose 2016; Vorländer, Herold, and Schäller 2015). By
way of contrast, its branches in western Germany and other West Euro-

662
pean cities, such as Vienna and Basel, were mostly limited to the right-
wing fringe.

Opportunity Structures
Long-term prevailing conditions may provide good opportunities for right-
wing extremist parties if unforeseeable incidents with immediate, signifi-
cant consequences change constellations of actors. In Germany, the in-
creasingly more frequent grand coalition governments provide a good op-
portunity for both opposition parties and political outsiders if the ruling
parties do not appear capable of solving problems the electorate believe to
be urgent. In Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the reelection of the
NPD to the parliaments in 2009 and 2011 was preceded by SPD/CDU gov-
ernments. The degree of the AfD’s successes in the federal states in March
2016 appears to be due to the ruling grand coalition’s inability to quickly
address problems identified by the populace.
On national level, the weakness of the parliamentary opposition in rela-
tion to the federal chancellor’s refugee policy is a case in point. In this
“crisis” the leftist opposition Green Party supported Angela Merkel’s pol-
icy more vehemently than did the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s own
CDU, the conservative CSU.
This situation is similar to that in the consensus-oriented political sys-
tems of Switzerland and Austria, where proportional representation allows
right-wing populist challengers to present themselves as alternatives to the
ruling “cartels.” Within the direct-democracy-oriented system of Switzer-
land, the SVP seems to find it easier to manage the balancing act between
participating in government and oppositional behavior than the FPÖ did
when it participated in the two Schüssel cabinets.
However, good opportunities need not only be a consequence of the be-
havior of the moderate, democratic parties. They can also result from the
interaction of the radical and extremist militant fringes. A comparison of
the interaction structures on the right-wing fringe of the political spectrum
seems to confirm the absorption thesis: party success absorbs militancy on
the streets (Koopmans 1996). In Austria and Switzerland, where parties
have been successful in mobilizing the right-wing fringe, the non-parlia-
mentary and fundamentally oppositional right becomes less attractive.
Such a phenomenon happened only occasionally in Germany, mostly at re-
gional level, with the result that the militant fringe became more attractive.
This suggests that if AfD continues to see successes in Germany, we might

663
expect a decline in numbers of the followers of right-wing militant groups
and their activities.
However, detailed studies on interrelationships and interactive dynamics
show that the absorption thesis in its simple form does not sufficiently
grasp the structure of prevailing conditions. The NPD election successes in
Saxony did not result in a lasting decline of militant activities because the
party had a symbiotic relationship to the “comradeship scene” and its NS-
influenced core ideology and propaganda actually stimulated violence. In
this case the absorption and stimulation effects neutralized each other. Fur-
thermore, the dynamics of interaction are essentially influenced by two
other factors that tend to be ignored in many studies: involuntary advertis-
ing effects of sensation-oriented media coverage, on one hand, and the ac-
tivities of militant anti-fascist groups, on the other. In contrast to what
these anti-fascist groups claim, it appears that their activities did not con-
tribute to the containment of violence but actually escalated the incitement
of it (Backes, Mletzko, and Stoye 2010).
What can be shown for Saxony, however, is obviously not true for the
FPÖ and SVP. None of these parties is interwoven with the militant scene
the way the NPD is in Germany’s eastern states. This is true even though
both the FPÖ and the SVP do not lack functionaries who have connections
to hard-core right-wing groups and/or have cooperated with them at least
on some occasions (Schiedel 2007, 107–157; Skenderovic 2009b, 326–
329). These parties are successful because of their ability to convince con-
siderable parts of the electorate that they are credible democratic alterna-
tives to the long-predominant parties of a consociational democracy.
In Switzerland this was made easier by the fact that the SVP “con-
verted” to populism but was not born under its sign (Albertazzi and Mc-
Donnell 2015, 51). In Austria this is not quite the case, as the roots of the
“third camp” go back as far as National Socialism. The longtime cordon
sanitaire was pierced again and again, at first during a period of liberaliza-
tion and finally it became completely obsolete (Dolezal 2008, 114–115;
Luther 2011). In Germany, on the other hand, parties to the right of the
CDU/CSU, if they were successful at the federal-state level, were not in-
cluded in coalition governments (Minkenberg 2001).

Actor Capabilities
Successful right-wing extremist parties must be capable of reacting to un-
satisfied public concerns by proposing attractive alternatives. When it

664
comes to political content, there seems to be no simple “winning formula”
such as that suggested by Herbert P. Kitschelt, which involves a combina-
tion of xenophobia and economic liberalism (Kitschelt 1995; Arzheimer
2008, 311). In fact, different right-wing groups exploit a variety of real
concerns that they combine in different ways with a range of options that
they propose as solutions in specific situations. As a result, they often do
not propose identical solutions to what are essentially the same problems.
Nevertheless, in most cases offers of homogenizing identity combined
with demonization of enemies play an important role.
Consequently, in the three countries compared here there is no formula
for political success. What works in one place has no appeal in another.
Although the profile of economic liberalism found in the SVP seems to
meet Kitschelt’s conditions, during the election campaign to the National
Council of 2013 the FPÖ used the slogan “Council flats for Austrians
only.” In doing so, it proposed a form of socialism based on ethnicity
(Kritzinger, Müller, and Schönbach 2014, 42). Similarly, the NPD in the
former East Germany sought to attract traditional left-wing voters, who be-
longed to the party The Left, by the use of radical anti-capitalist rhetoric
(Backes 2008, 35–39).
Just as important as this type of tactic is the ability of right-wing parties
to skillfully adjust their rhetoric and programs to changing demands. Jörg
Haider, as a member of the FPÖ and the BZÖ, proved to have a talent for
this, to such a degree that former close allies accused him of “throwing
values and ideals overboard” (Strache 2006, 94). He was also said to have
lost the ability to distinguish between the party and his personal interests.
Successful right-wing populist parties in Austria and Switzerland are
clearly leader-focused, and the attractiveness and charisma of people in the
party leadership play no small part in the parties’ success. In Germany,
both the extreme right and the radical right lack such attractive personali-
ties. This is a result of decades-long delimitation and delegitimization by
the state. Consequently, these German right-wing organizations attract
people to their leadership positions “who had nothing else to lose” (Art
2011, x). This was particularly true for the NPD, whose regional successes
were due to favorable social and economic conditions and the exploiting of
opportunities, not to the perceived charisma of its leaders (Steglich 2010).
As a result of its radicalization in what many see as a right-wing direc-
tion, the AfD has lost some of its competent, although not very charis-
matic, founding personalities. Currently it lacks a unifying figure capable

665
of stabilizing the party in the face of severe criticism and attacks in the
media. In this situation the AfD has attempted to prevent influx from a
number of (mostly unsuccessful) right-wing extremist groups. In March
2016 the federal board of the AfD decided to dissolve the state association
of the Saarland branch because of its leading functionaries’ close contact
with the NPD. More than it seems to be the case for parties in the other
German-speaking countries, the successful limitation of right-wing ex-
tremist views and leaders appears to be the precondition for the AfD’s fu-
ture success.
For decades right-wing populist parties in Austria and Switzerland were
far more socially acceptable than in Germany. In these countries the public
scandals that resulted from inflammatory statements by their leaders and
politicians did not result in the lasting delegitimization of these parties. For
example, the SVP successfully achieved what might be called “counter-
scandalizing” by “exploiting the accusation of them being right-wing ex-
tremists” to argue that this was untrue (Udris 2011, 308). Thus these par-
ties had no difficulty in recruiting qualified personnel to make their party
organization more professional and increase their ability to campaign.
The SVP was successful with this even though it did not receive party
funding from the state. This is important because in many European coun-
tries, unlike Britain and North America, the state attempts to create a situa-
tion where all political parties operate on a level playing field financially
by providing monetary support to political parties. This support is particu-
larly generous in Switzerland’s neighboring countries. As a result, in Aus-
tria, where parties did receive funding from the state, “managers and pro-
fessionals” accounted for 38 percent of the candidates of right-wing par-
ties; in Switzerland, where the SVP did not receive such support, the com-
parable figure is 45 percent. By way of contrast, the relevant figures for
the German right-wing extremist parties was only 22 percent for the NPD
and 18 percent for the REP (Art 2011, 50). Here the connection between
actor capability and cultural prevailing conditions becomes obvious.
Further, in Germany not only the representatives of the NPD but also
those of the much more moderate AfD operate within a hostile social envi-
ronment. This is true in most areas other than their original geographic
strongholds (Borstel and Heitmeyer 2013). They are also confronted by a
variety of forms of repression, including violent attacks by militant “anti-
fascists” who, ironically, behave like the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s.
Thus staff recruitment proves to be difficult. This may be significant in the
coming years and prevent the lasting establishment of even a comparably

666
moderate right-wing populist party.

667
NOTES

1. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Irving Hexham, Depart-

ment of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, for his generous
support and numerous valuable comments on earlier versions of this
article.
2. Available online at http://www.fpoe-bildungsinstitut.at/documents/
10180/13608/Handbuch_freiheitlicher_Politik+(2).pdf/3530ad0f-
4bd0-47e2-9b8b-88a4b2a7a89d.
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CHAPTER 24

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN BELGIUM AND THE NETHERLANDS

JOOP J. M. VAN HOLSTEYN

THE term “Low Countries” most often refers to Belgium and the Nether-
lands, although sometimes Luxembourg is included as well. Belgium and
the Netherlands share parts of their history and were united in a single
kingdom under King William I from 1815 until 1830, but are basically de-
fined and connected by their common geography: “they form the delta area
of the rivers Scheldt, Meuse and Rhine” (Kossmann 1978, 2). This impor-
tant but at the same time rather trivial common characteristic is not
enough, of course, to devote a chapter to both Dutch and Belgian populist
radical right parties. From the perspective of comparative political science,
however, the two countries share important characteristics that may more
convincingly justify their inclusion in a single chapter and allow for a
treatment as most-similar systems. For instance, both countries are rela-
tively small advanced multiparty representative democracies that devel-
oped a strong and lasting tradition of consensus politics, have always been
governed by coalition governments that are ever more difficult to form as a
result of increasing electoral volatility, and were actively involved in the
very early stages of what has become the European Union (see, e.g., Fiers
and Krouwel 2005; Timmermans and Moury 2006; Praag and Van Aelst
2010; Vollaard, Beyers, and Dumont 2015).
Moreover, the general conclusion that populist radical right parties con-
stitute “the most successful new European party family since the end of the
Second World War” (Mudde 2013, 4) definitely holds for the Netherlands
and Belgium. In his overview of election results for sixteen such parties in
seventeen Western European countries for the period 1980–2011, Mudde
ranks the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom) third,
with a maximum of 15.5 percent of the vote in general or national elec-
tions, and the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest) sixth, with
12.0 percent.1 The rise and electoral success of Vlaams Blok (VB, Flemish
Bloc), the direct predecessor of Flemish Interest, is considered to be one of
“the most notable political evolution in Flanders, and more generally in
Belgium since the beginning of the 1990s” (Coffé, Heyndels, and Vermeir
2007, 143). And closely related to their electoral success, in the Nether-
lands both the short-lived Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF, List Pim Fortuyn) and
the PVV are among the few radical right populist parties that had the op-
portunity to participate in a governmental coalition, albeit in the case of

679
the PVV not as a full coalition partner but only as a support party for a
right-wing minority government (Mudde 2013; Holsteyn 2011; see also
Otjes and Louwerse 2014).
In this chapter the Dutch and Belgian members of the radical right party
family are central, in particular the more recent and the most prominent
ones; space does not allow for an extensive presentation and description of
all of the radical right parties in the postwar era. Also, small fringe parties
that are electorally and politically insignificant arguably do not deserve
full treatment. Specifically, this means that for the northern part of the
Netherlands attention will be paid to the LPF and PVV and for the south-
ern part of the Low Countries to the VB in its two subsequent manifesta-
tions for Flanders and, only in passing due to its increasingly marginal
electoral and political role, the Front National (FN, National Front). Other
parties are of even less importance or simply do not qualify as a radical
right party, such as the highly successful Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA,
New Flemish Alliance), or are mentioned only in passing for having
played a small part in the postwar history of the radical right in the Nether-
lands and Belgium.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE CONTEMPORARY

RADICAL RIGHT

However succinctly sketched, the historical background is necessary. By

“ignoring historical legacies, or treating them as a residual variable, one
misses the underlying causes of the radial right’s success and failure” (Art
2008, 437). And in light of the impressive electoral and political success of
the LPF and PVV in the first years of the twenty-first century, it is remark-
able that contemporary Dutch radical right parties in fact do not have deep
and long historical roots. Radical right parties of any political relevancy
are a recent phenomenon in the Netherlands (e.g., Lange and Art 2011,
1234). This is at least partly the result of the dark shadow that the Second
World War cast on Dutch politics for over half a century. Political initia-
tives and politicians that were even slightly reminiscent of this dark page
in European and Dutch history were deemed to have a seriously contami-
nated reputation and could only be unsuccessful. More generally, it may be
true that the question of whether the Second World War constituted a com-
plete break or simply an interlude in Dutch political history is hard to an-
swer (e.g., Daalder 1986), but that there should be no future for right-wing
extremism in the Netherlands after the war was, at the official level at

680
least, an established fact. Even while the war was still going on, the Dutch
government in exile in London instituted the Besluit Ontbinding Landver-
raderlijke Organisaties (Decree to Disband Traitor Organizations), which
applied to all political parties and organizations that could be seen as ex-
tensions of the infamous Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (NSB, Na-
tional Socialist Movement), the national socialist party that had actively
collaborated with the Germans during the war. In the mid-1950s this de-
cree proved useful to legally ban the Nationaal Europese Sociale Beweg-
ing (NESB, National European Social Movement), and until the 1970s the
decree was occasionally referred to and sometimes used in the continuing
battle against right-wing extremist parties (Donselaar 1995; Eskes 1988).
As late as 1977 the Dutch minister of justice suggested the possibility of
relying on this particular decree as a means of banning the neofascist Ned-
erlandse Volks-Unie (NVU, Dutch People’s Union). However, it was a
complicated matter to demonstrate that this party was an extension or res-
urrection of the NSB and its political heritage. Given the amount of time
that had passed, the decree seemed to have become superfluous.
The extremely hostile legal, public, and political attitude toward radical
right political initiatives never resulted in the complete absence of such
groups or parties (Donselaar 1991), but it was only in the 1980s that such
parties began to become a force of any electoral and political significance
in Dutch politics. In the general elections of 1982 Hans Janmaat, who was
the political leader of the radical right or right-wing extremism in the
Netherlands for almost twenty years, was elected to the Dutch Second
Chamber (the lower house) as a representative for the Centrumpartij (CP,
Center Party). Due to the low threshold of the Dutch electoral system, 0.8
percent of the total vote was enough to earn Janmaat entrance to the main
Dutch representative institution and to shock the established political par-
ties and society at large. In the following years, however, the electoral suc-
cess of his CP and subsequently the Centrum Democraten (CD, Center De-
mocrats) and rival but minor radical right or right-wing parties remained
limited, and the parties’ political impact was negligible (Mudde and Hol-
steyn 2000; Voerman and Lucardie 1992). For Janmaat, who was the per-
sonification of political evil, it was a bitter irony that, shortly after his own
political career had ended, Pim Fortuyn entered the scene and stole “his”
radical right show at the very beginning of the twenty-first century (Ver-
maas 2002).
For Belgium the Second World War and German occupation were ar-
guably no less dramatic and painful than for the Netherlands, but the last-

681
ing political consequences for radical right parties may have been less se-
vere, or at least different. One of the main ideological ingredients of these
parties, Flemish nationalism, was never completely uprooted. This also en-
abled in particular the modern Flemish radical right parties in the Dutch-
speaking northern part of Belgium not only to draw on an old ideological
tradition but also to profit from an existing party such as the nationalist
Volksunie (VU, People’s Union) and various other nationalist organiza-
tions (e.g., Art 2008; Lange and Art 2011, 1233; Mudde 1995). The VU
was established in 1954 but had political roots in the prewar years and the
societal and political manifestations of the Flemish Movement of that time;
the party was explicitly Flemish nationalist and fought against the political
repression of and in favor of amnesty for former Flemish nationalists,
many of whom had collaborated with the German occupiers, as one of its
main political issues. And although the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV,
Flemish National Union) had been an outspoken pro-Nazi party and col-
laborated with the German occupiers during the Second World War, the
postwar impact was more ambiguous than was the case in the Netherlands.
“This choice of the party-political wing of the Flemish Movement during
the Second World War remains a liability for the Flemish Movement
today. It does, however, itself keep that link alive by its claim ever since
the end of the war that the Flemish collaborators were acting out of sheer
idealism” (Deschouwer 2009a, 84). This “claim” has always been dis-
puted, and against this background it is understandable that it took the VU
some time to become a political force to be reckoned with.
The political success of the VU did not come without problems and
drawbacks, however. In the 1970s the almost permanent Belgian political
debate on the ordering of the state resulted in the so-called Egmont Pact,
which called for the federalization of Belgium. This political compromise
caused a split within the VU: “The result of the VU’s signing the Egmont
Pact was the departure of several prominent leaders, a backlash from the
party’s base, and the eventual foundation of the Vlaams Blok in May
1979” (Art 2008, 428; see also Mudde 2000, 81–85). As was the case with
the VU, it took the VB several years to become successful electorally, and
it was only in the 1990s that the nationalist and by then fiercely anti-immi-
grant party was successful at the national (Flemish) level: on November
24, 1991, the VB managed to get over 10 percent of the vote in parliamen-
tary elections.2 This was the beginning of a series of impressive electoral
performances by the party. In 2004 the Vlaams Blok was found to be in
breach of the law against racism and as a result had to make some substan-

682
tive changes; its change of name to Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang) did
not really affect the existence of one of the more stable radical right parties
in Western Europe (Erk 2005). The recent rise of the nationalist New
Flemish Alliance and the neoliberal Lijst Dedecker (LDD, Dedecker List)
likely negatively impacted the electoral results of the VB, but the result
was a decline of the VB and not its disappearance (Pauwels 2011).3
The southern, French-speaking part of Belgium, Walloon, is not free of
right-wing or radical right political parties, but it can be argued that “right-
wing populism is very much a Flemish affair” (Deschouwer 2009a, 90).
The different political contexts in the two major parts of Belgium offer
very distinct opportunities to radical right political parties and has resulted
in a francophone Front National (FN) that in terms of party organization,
internal discipline, political leadership, and media presence cannot com-
pare to the Flemish counterpart, the VB (Coffé 2005a).

THE CONTEMPORARY RADICAL RIGHT

When it comes to the main contemporary radical right parties in the Low
Countries, the LPF and the PVV for the Netherlands and the VB for Bel-
gium, the chapter will first address their ideological core features and pro-
file. These parties arguably belong to the same party family, but that of
course does not mean that they are ideologically identical and do not have
substantive characteristics of their own. Second, and following the more
recent focus in the literature on relevant (internal) supply-side facets of the
radical right (e.g., Rydgren 2007), the party organizations of these parties
will be sketched, with special attention to party membership. According to
Geert Wilders, the decline and fall of the LPF, which can be considered
the forerunner of his PVV, was the direct result of party membership;
Wilders deliberately made the decision to establish a party without individ-
ual party members, with a single exception: Wilders himself. The electoral
development of the main radical right parties in the Netherlands and Bel-
gium is then presented, followed by reflections on the wider societal con-
text and networks that these parties are embedded in and connected to, or
not. This allows for a sketch of the existence of the so-called cordon sani-
taire, first proclaimed in 1989, that at the elite political level has kept the
VB out of government (Gijsels 1992, 102–105). Because of this, one of the
hard choices that all parties have to make—whether to prioritize votes,
policy, or office (e.g., Strom and Müller 1999)—is essentially no longer
something the VB itself can decide, at least as long as majority govern-

683
ments are the political norm and the radical right VB has not reached the
necessary amount of electoral support.

Ideological Profile
According to some scholars, the label “anti-immigrant parties” or “anti-im-
migration parties” would fit this party family better than the term “radical
right” (e.g., Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2000, 2005); the main reason for
using the term “radical right” is that “it is the one most often used” (Brug
and Fennema 2007, 474). Be that as it may, it can convincingly be argued
that its substantive political position with respect to immigrants, immigra-
tion, and integration of ethnic minorities constitutes the core feature of the
radical right ideology. It is also this key aspect that makes the radical right
party family much more homogeneous than one might expect: “Radical
right parties appear to have adopted a distinct and specific policy profile
with a clear focus on anti-immigration views” (Enssner 2010, 167). At the
same time, too exclusive a focus on their position with respect to immi-
grants and the integration of minorities would not do justice to the fact that
most if not all radical right parties combine this core ideological feature
with other substantive issue positions, thereby making them all unique
members of one and the same family.
Pim Fortuyn and his LPF, for instance, combined issue positions that
made him hard to classify. “From the beginning, the ideological positon of
the LPF has mystified Dutch observers” (Akkerman 2005, 35), and likely
other observers as well. Fortuyn, a flamboyant and extravagant political
entrepreneur and dandy, could be considered simply a “pink populist”
(Mudde 2002), but after the publication of a controversial interview in one
of the leading Dutch national newspapers, de Volkskrant, on February 9,
2002, in the run-up to the general elections of May that year, he suddenly
became associated with outright right-wing extremism. His statements
about Islam being a backward culture and about how the first article of the
Dutch constitution, in which equal treatment for all is guaranteed and dis-
crimination is forbidden, should if necessary be repealed in an attempt to
strengthen freedom of speech, resulted in references to the Second World
War and to Anne Frank, a symbol of German terror, by various established
political leaders (Chorus and Galan 2002, 144). The interview, in which
the most infamous statements were partly made up by the journalists
(Wansink 2004, 21–24), in effect was the end of Fortuyn’s political career
within the party Leefbaar Nederland (LN, Livable Netherlands) and the
successful start of his own LPF (Chorus and Galan 2002, 155–180; Ryd-

684
gren and Holsteyn 2004, 46–47). However important that interview was
for Fortuyn’s political career, for the harsh opinion climate preceding the
general elections, and for political opponents’ efforts to disqualify Fortuyn
as their competitor, it does not constitute a fair or valid profile of Fortuyn
and his LPF.
A better picture of the ideological profile of the LPF takes into account
the position of this truly new party within the broader political and ideo-
logical context. For a long time Dutch politics was structured by two main
cleavages, religion and social class, and only in the last quarter of the
twentieth century did this highly stable party and ideological structure
began to change (Irwin and van Holsteyn 1989a, 1989b). The debate on
the exact number of relevant cleavages in contemporary Dutch politics and
the best way to characterize them has not yet been decided, but that For-
tuyn and his LPF had a lasting impact on this underlying political and elec-
toral structure can be considered an established fact (Pellikaan, Meer, and
Lange 2003; Pellikaan, Lange, and Meer 2007; Aarts and Thomassen
2008). Although his political program, most extensively presented in vari-
ous books, in particular The Mess of Eight Purple Years (Fortuyn 2002), is
an “eclectic—but not necessarily incoherent—mixture of liberalism, na-
tionalism, communitarianism and populism” (Lucardie 2008, 158), and as
such opens a debate on whether the LPF is a genuine radical right party, it
can be argued that Fortuyn forced the established parties into more articu-
lated ideological positions on the issue of immigration and integration of
ethnic minorities—that is, the issue of multiculturalism (Pellikaan, Meer,
and Lange 2003) or, more generally, the conflict between integration and
demarcation (Aarts and Thomassen 2008, 211; Kriesi et al. 2006). Proba-
bly Fortuyn’s outlook was not essentially ethnic or ethnocratic, instead
having roots in a more civic version going back to the French Revolution
(Akkerman 2005), but the fact that immigration and the integration of im-
migrants was definitely central to his concerns and at the top of his politi-
cal agenda (Lucardie 2008, 159), where it was framed within a populist
anti-establishment and anti-elitist rhetoric, does from an ideological per-
spective qualify Fortuyn and his LPF as a member of the new radical right
party family (Rydgren 2007, 242). This of course does not refute the cor-
rect observation that “it is difficult to portray him as a right-wing extrem-
ist, although some politicians and activists of the Left tried to do this” (Lu-
cardie 2008, 160).
That Geert Wilders and his one-man-band, PVV, belong to the radical
right party family is less contested, although classifying Wilders’s ideol-

685
ogy is not that easy, particularly since there have been some changes in the
ideology and the core political issues of his party since Wilders left the lib-
eral-conservative Volkspartij voor Vrijdheid en Democratie (VVD, Liberal
Party) in September 2004 and established his own party in 2006 (Vossen
2011). First, it should be noted that labeling of the party and of its leader
as “extreme right” (Rodrigues and Wagenaar 2010) or even “(neo)fascist”
(Riemen 2010) can best be understood in terms of the political fight and
rhetoric against this party, and not so much as a sincere or valid attempt at
ideological characterization (e.g., Lucardie 2009). Based on a much more
thorough analysis, Koen Vossen (2013, 65–110; 2010; 2011) concludes
that after 2006 Wilders’s political thinking crystallized into an ideology
that is essentially built upon four pillars: (1) the fight against Islam as a to-
talitarian political ideology instead of simply a religion, and against what
is called the threat of so-called Eurabia; (2) populism, albeit with a denun-
ciation of the political elite—of which Wilders himself, ironically, has
been a member for most of his professional career, being an assistant of
the VVD, a liberal parliamentary party, starting in 1990 and an MP for the
VVD from 1998 until he left this party (but not the Second Chamber) in
2004—that is much stronger than the rather half-hearted glorification of
the common people; (3) nativism and nationalism, including the increasing
resistance against the European Union and the ongoing process of Euro-
pean integration; and (4) law and order as a more or less separate but key
issue. Like all members of the radical right party family, Wilders and his
PVV have some idiosyncratic elements, including libertarian positions on
ethical/political issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage, but
these are clearly outweighed by similarities between the PVV and other
radical right parties, “such as the anti-immigration stance, the populist
framing of politics and the aversion to supranational organisations”
(Vossen 2011, 187).
In the previous section it was noted that the Flemish VB could grow on
traditional nationalistic political ground. This of course shows in its origi-
nal political profile, which has always had a strong and likely dominant
nationalistic—or, if the focus is solely on Flanders, regionalist—flavor
(Gijsels 1992, 183; Mudde 2000, 96; Deschouwer 2009a, 84–85). In the
first decade after its establishment, the VB focused mainly on the indepen-
dence of Flanders, but in the 1990s the party added “a strong anti-immi-
gration and law-and-order discourse to its separatist programme” (De-
schouwer 2009a, 88; Mudde 1995), thereby qualifying as a full member of
the radical right party family and developing into “one of the strongest rad-
ical right parties in western Europe over the last two decades” (Art 2008,

686
425). In the original foundational principles of the Vlaams Blok, there is
only a minor reference to migrants and political refugees, and the issue of
migration and integration was not on the agenda of the first five party con-
ferences; it was only at the sixth party conference, in March 1984, that the
party elaborated on this issue and presented its anti-immigration plans (Gi-
jsels 1992, 201–202). While Gerolf Annemans became spokesman for the
hard-line Flemish nationalists at the top of the VB, Filip Dewinter became
party spokesman and the face of the VB on the immigrant issue (Erk 2005,
498); he had played this role before but it became particularly evident after
his presentation of a seventy-point plan in June 1992 in an attempt “to ex-
plore in depth the party position as regards the problem of immigrants” (as
cited in Gijsels 1992, 208; see also Mudde 2000, 97). And although the
VB from the 1990s onward showed all the ideological features of a radical
right party (Mudde 2000, 17), the two main features arguably are its na-
tionalism and its anti-immigration stance. The transformation of the
Vlaams Blok into the Vlaams Belang in November 1994 in response to a
court decision with respect to some of its constituting foundations was not
associated with any major ideological change. If anything did change, it
happened gradually: “It has slightly softened its xenophobia” (Erk 2005,
495).

Party Organization and Party Membership

For quite some time the rise and success of radical right parties was ex-
plained mainly from the perspective of the demand side of electoral poli-
tics, that is, opinions and attitudes among the electorate that would sub-
stantively fit the ideological profile or political program of these parties.
The study of the radical right was inspired by what Mudde has labeled “the
paradigm of the normal pathology thesis,” in which the “supply-side of
politics is almost completely ignored, as is the role of the populist radical
right itself” (Mudde 2010, 1172). However, in many West European coun-
tries in particular, mass political attitudes did not differ enough to fully ex-
plain the variation in the rise and success of separate members of the radi-
cal right party family as well as the variation within individual countries
over time (Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005; Brug and Fennema 2007).
This perspective has changed, however, and one could argue that “the
more recent literature on the radical right has largely rejected the proposi-
tion that ‘demand side’ variables (the factors that shape the electorate’s de-
mand for radical right parties) provide sufficient explanations for cross-na-
tional variation” (Ansell and Art 2010, 5).

687
 As a result, it is not only the more general opportunity structure (e.g.,
Arzheimer and Carter 2006; Koopmans and Muis 2009) and the external
supply-side factors and macro-level features within the various countries,
such as the electoral system and the size and position of the main competi-
tor(s), that have attracted scholarly attention (e.g., Brug, Fennema, and
Tillie 2005). Increasingly, attention has been paid to what might be called
the meso-level or internal supply side: characteristics of the radical right
parties themselves, in particular their political leadership and party organi-
zation (e.g., Carter 2005; Kitschelt 2007; Mudde 2007; Rydgren 2007).
From an agency approach, political leadership has been studied in an at-
tempt to explain not only differences between countries but especially
within countries: “Agency is a key factor when one seeks to account for
within-country variations in the success of radical right parties” (Lange
and Art 2011, 1231). And while political leadership is a vague and slippery
concept, in particular if leadership is interpreted in terms of charisma or,
even more problematic, pseudo-charisma (e.g., Eatwell 2006; Kitschelt
2007; Mudde 2007), it can also be considered functionally related to party
institutionalization and party organization (Lange and Art 2011; Ansell
and Art 2010).
The three main radical right parties of the Low Countries show a differ-
ent picture with respect to their development of their internal party organi-
zation. The Dutch parties LPF and PVV are especially interesting, since
their development is clearly connected; Geert Wilders tried to learn his les-
son from the rapid decline and disappearance of the LPF and deliberately
opted for an organizational structure that would allow him not to make the
mistakes that, according to him, Fortuyn and his political friends had
made, with such fatal consequences for the LPF. Indeed, Wilders estab-
lished and developed a political party without individual party members,
except for Wilders himself (see also Table 24.1 for party membership fig-
ures for the major contemporary radical right parties, plus the direct Dutch
predecessor CD), and the PVV “can hardly be regarded a true membership
party” (Ridder, Holsteyn, and Koole 2015, 135). This is a deviation from
conventional and common party models (e.g., Krouwel 2006), in particular
in the West European political context, where parties are as a general rule
membership organizations. Individual party members are assumed or ex-
pected to contribute to several vital functions that parties are supposed to
fulfill in representative parliamentary democracies: being both sensors of
their party helping to pick up relevant social and political currents and am-
bassadors for their party within society, showing the outside world that
their party is well established and has broad citizen support at the mass

688
level, nominating themselves as candidates for representative positions,
contributing money in the form of membership fees and donations, and
more generally contributing to the various decision-making processes and
political activities within or on behalf of their party (e.g., Ridder 2014;
Scarrow 2007).
That Geert Wilders refrained from these (potential) advantages of hav-
ing individual party members and made the conscious choice to create “a
rare example of a party in a contemporary parliamentary democracy that
completely eschewed traditional membership enrollment for supporters”
(Scarrow 2015, 66) can best be understood in light of the then recent de-
velopments of the List Pim Fortuyn and Wilders’s interpretation of those
developments. As previously noted, Fortuyn was expelled from LN after
his infamous newspaper interview on February 9, 2002, with general elec-
tions scheduled for May 15. Fortuyn seriously considered leaving politics,
but within a week some of his friends successfully convinced him of his
important political mission and helped him establish a new organization:
the LPF was registered at the Electoral Council on February 15 (Chorus
and Galan 2002, 155–160). Fortuyn was preparing for the campaign and
elections and did not have the time or the ambition to personally get in-
volved with the buildup of the party organization. Moreover, he believed
that “the good people will come to the party once I am elected in the Sec-
ond Chamber” (Chorus and Galan 2002, 163). In other words, Fortuyn pre-
ferred and prioritized his role as an external political leader above his role
as an internal leader of the LPF, a role that he fully neglected (Lange and
Art 2011). And although Fortuyn’s friends, most of whom lacked the rele-
vant political knowledge and experience, managed to nominally and for-
mally put a LPF party organization together before the May elections, this
organization was never institutionalized (Lange and Art 2011). This unde-
veloped, unstable organizational structure was not strong enough to carry
the weight of electoral success and the political responsibilities of govern-
ment participation. After Fortuyn was killed by an animal rights activist
nine days before the elections, his LPF succeeded in electing twenty-six
MPs (out of a total of 150 seats in the lower house) and formed part of the
new governmental coalition. But the party became the site of numerous in-
ternal fights: “The very day after the death of its founding father, the re-
maining members of the executive committee began quarrelling over his
succession” (Lucardie 2008, 162). This was the beginning of a series of in-
ternal quarrels and bitter fights that resulted in subsequent crises (Lucardie
and Voerman 2012, 127–132): splits within the (parliamentary) party, a
permanently contested leadership, and, within three months of its forma-

689
tion, the fall of the coalition cabinet because other coalition partners had
no trust in the unstable LPF (Chorus and Galan 2002; Lange and Art
2011). So it may be true that even charismatic parties can be successfully
institutionalized (e.g., Pedahzur and Brichta 2002), but the LPF, which
centered around the personality of Pim Fortuyn himself—“No doubt that
Fortuyn had charisma, in the original quasi-religious sense as defined by
Max Weber” (Lucardie 2008, 157)—definitely does not show empirical
evidence for this thesis.
Table 24.1 The Radical Right in the Low Countries: Party Member-
ship Figures, 1990–2014
The Netherlands Belgium

Center De- List Pim Party for Vlaams Blok/Vlaams

mocrats Fortuyn Freedom Belang

(CD)a (LPF)b (PVV)b (VB)b

1990 n.a. — — 3,452

1991 ± 2,000 — — 4,069
1992 ± 3,000 — — 4,682
1993 3,541 — — 6,131
1994 n.a. — — 7,372
1995 ± 5,000 — — 9,322
1996 n.a. — — 10,038
1997 n.a. — — 10,048
1998 n.a. — — 11,218
1999 n.a. — — 14,424
2000 n.a. — — 17,167
2001 n.a. — — 17,356
2002 n.a. — — 17,544
2003 — 4,100 — 16,860
2004 — ± 4,000 — 17,892
2005 — 2,111 — 21,942

690
 2006 — 1,274 1 25,090
2007 — — 1 25,000
2008 — — 1 23,850
2009 — — 1 22,500
2010 — — 1 n.a.
2011 — — 1 17,139
2012 — — 1 16,433
2013 — — 1 n.a.
2014 — — 1 17,255c

Sources:
a Documentatiecentrum Nederlandse Politieke Partijen (http://dnpp.ub.
rug.nl/dnpp/themas/leden/per_jaar)
b MAPP Project: database Party Members (http://www.projectmapp.eu/
databases) c Information from Marc Hooghe
For the Front National, no data on party membership are available; ac-
cording to Belgian experts on political parties, this is the likely result of
the many internal fights within the FN and weak internal party organiza-
tion, probably meaning that there is no official and valid list of individ-
ual party members.
The spectacular rise of the LPF and its no less spectacular fall was one
of the main political events in the early years of the twenty-first century
and of course did not go unnoticed by Geert Wilders—“a professional
politician, who has worked in the Dutch House of Parliament most of his
adult life” (Vossen 2011, 180–181). When he left the conservative-liberal
VVD in September 2004 as a result of a political conflict with the parlia-
mentary party and the VVD party leader with respect to Turkey’s possible
future membership in the European Union—in what was a clear manifesta-
tion of his increasingly outspoken and radical ideas on the dangers of
Islam from 2001–2002 onward—he remained an MP under the political
label Groep Wilders (Group Wilders) from 2004 to 2006 (Vossen 2013,
41–64). In 2004 Martin Bosma, a political scientist who shared the strong
anti-Islam, anti-left, and pro-Israel positions that Wilders had developed
after his “neoconservative phase” (Vossen 2011), joined the group and
quickly developed into Wilders’s strategic and ideological right-hand man.

691
However, even Bosma would never become a member of the PVV, which
was officially registered by the Electoral Council in February 2006. The
PVV, with Wilders as its only member, was established by the Stichting
Geert Wilders (Geert Wilders Foundation) and Geert Wilders himself—“in
fact, the party consisted of Wilders and Wilders” (Lucardie and Voerman
2012, 164). The new party immediately decided to introduce a member-
ship stoppage (Vossen 2013, 178; Lange and Art 2011, 1240). This drastic,
unconventional move can be understood in light of earlier “worst prac-
tices” of several parties in the mid-1990s, Wilders’s negative personal ex-
perience within the VVD as a traditional party organization (with the in-
herent procedures of internal consultation and deliberation), and above all
the rapid fall of the LPF: “Wilders learned directly from the LPF’s experi-
ence, and continues to use the party’s fate as a warning to his own party
cadre” (Lange and Art 2011, 1230).
Note, however, that this preference for a memberless party from the
very start was primarily a result of negative considerations and arguments
—a deliberate attempt to avoid the troublesome situations and tragic
events of the internally divided LPF (Lange and Art 2011, 1237). It was
only after some years that this negative, pragmatic choice was defended as
a positive choice on more principled grounds (Lucardie and Voerman
2012, 173). Party ideologue Bosma provocatively argued that the PVV
was the first real modern party in the Netherlands, with a party organiza-
tion that had its roots not in the period 1880–1900 but in the twenty-first
century. This made the PVV “a network party, an internet party, a virtual
party” (Bosma 2010, 213). Referring to the general debate on the decline
of parties, he noted various major advantages of this modern party organi-
zation, without any intermediate levels and individual party members: the
new party organization was more democratic, more flexible, more effi-
cient, less bureaucratic, less internally oriented, and very cheap (Bosma
2010, 213–216). “I will make a prediction. Our model is the model for the
future. It will be copied by many others” (Bosma 2010, 217).
The future will tell whether Bosma is correct or not, but even within the
PVV his position was contested, for instance by MP Hero Brinkman, who
in May 2010 in the media and subsequently in an internal memo made sev-
eral proposals for the internal democratization of the PVV, including the
introduction of party membership. Although Wilders responded carefully
and did not directly veto these plans (Lucardie and Voerman 2012, 172),
his political aide-de-camp, Bosma, reacted critically in a response made
public by the current affairs program EenVandaag: “Membership parties

692
are fossils.” Brinkman saw the relatively high number of preference votes
in the general elections of 2010 as an indication of voter support for his
position, but his plans to reform the party organization were never carried
out.4 Still, this rare party model, chosen by Wilders to avoid a repetition of
the LPF’s political history, definitely did not hinder its internal institution-
alization and resulted in a successful, viable, and effective political party.
But even without individual party members or an extended party organiza-
tion, there is no guarantee of party unity. The conclusion by Lange and Art
that Wilders managed to constitute and maintain unity among his fellow
MPs and was the leader of a parliamentary group that “as a whole is usu-
ally characterized as cohesive and disciplined” (2011, 1244) was valid for
quite some time, but in recent years there have repeatedly been internal
party tensions (Lucardie and Voerman 2012, 179–184). Several MPs have
left the PVV, some in reaction to highly controversial statements made by
Wilders on the night of the local elections of March 19, 2014.
“Both Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders were thus building their parties
from scratch” (Lange and Art 2011, 1233), but their older Flemish radical
right party family member Vlaams Blok started out from a much firmer
historical basis and within the established conventional party organiza-
tional framework or paradigm (Art 2008). As a result of the splitting off of
the Volksunie, the VB inherited a well-developed party organization, one
that “did not really change over the years” (Buelens and Deschouwer
2003, 9). Consequently, the VB fits the general Belgian picture in which
“all [parties] have a very similar structure” (Deschouwer 2009a, 93). So
the original VB and its successor, Vlaams Belang, do not constitute the de-
viant party model that the PVV is for the Netherlands but can, at least from
an organizational perspective, be considered a rather conventional and
very well institutionalized membership party.
Right from the very start the VB was aware of the fact that party mem-
bers were important “to build up the party organization, to distribute the
party program and to increase the chance to win elections” (Buelens and
Deschouwer 2003, 3). It should be noted, however, that the Vlaams Blok
is, compared to other Belgian political parties, less internally democratic
(Jagers 2002) and that contemporary individual members of the Vlaams
Belang still do seem to have fewer formal rights and opportunities to par-
ticipate within their party than most of their fellow party members from
other Belgian parties (Haute 2015; see Table 24.1 for membership figures).
Unlike in other Flemish parties, for instance, members of the VB do not
have the right to directly vote on their new party chair—that is, for a party

693
official with substantial power in Belgian politics. This relative lack of in-
ternal democratic influence apparently did not hinder Belgian/Flemish citi-
zens from joining the party. Although for several decades now there has
been a general ongoing decline in party membership figures in advanced
Western democracies (e.g., Biezen, Mair, and Poguntke 2012; Delwit
2011), with much effort the VB managed to increase its party membership
until well into the twenty-first century. It is only very recently (since 2007;
see Quintelier and Hooghe 2010; Hooghe and Boonen 2014) that the VB
has been unable to escape this general trend of party membership decline
among established parties. Nevertheless, over a period of some forty years,
under the political leadership primarily of Philip Dewinter, with his “al-
most unique combination of external and internal leadership qualities”
(Mudde 2007, 272), and Gerolf Annemans, the VB has become a stable,
well organized, and institutionalized party, with a rigorous internal party
discipline (Buelens and Deschouwer 2003, 36).5 This is a world of differ-
ence from the chaotic Dutch LPF, and shows that, in contrast to what
Wilders and Bosma like to think, a membership party can act as a unified
and disciplined member of the radical right party family in the twenty-first
century.6 “When it comes to organizational level, even opponents of the
party agree that the VB is among the best-structured populist right parties
of Europe” (Pauwels 2011, 68).

Elections and Electoral Support

The previous sections presented the most relevant radical right parties of
the twenty-first century in the Low Countries. The focus was on the supply
side, in particular internal aspects (i.e., party ideology, party organization),
but insight into the electoral support for such parties has to be based on
both supply-side and demand-side factors and the interaction of these fac-
tors (e.g., Brug and Fennema 2007, 482; Rydgren 2007). The fact that re-
cently more scholarly attention has been paid to supply-side factors should
of course not obscure the continuing relevancy of attitudes and opinion at
the mass level that constitute the demand side of (electoral) politics.
Although until the early 2000s the Dutch case seemed to be the odd one
out as regards the success of contemporary radical right parties in ad-
vanced Western democracies (e.g., Mudde and Holsteyn 2000; Rydgren
and Holsteyn 2002), this likely was a result not of demand-side factors but
first and foremost of supply-side factors. Without a single exception, the
various extreme or radical right parties of the so-called Centrumstroming

694
(named after the Centrumpartij en Centrum Democraten; see also Holsteyn
and Mudde 1998) were “all badly organized parties, lacking both cadre
and members. In addition, and in part because of this, the Dutch extreme
right has always been plagued by scandals and splits. Therefore, it has
never been able to present successfully to the voter its potentially ‘attrac-
tive product’ ” (Mudde and Holsteyn 2000, 162). Moreover, until the mid-
1990s, to the surprise of electoral researchers, the issue of immigration and
integration, the core issue of the radical right, had almost no substantial
electoral impact in the Netherlands. In an analysis of voting behavior in
the Dutch general parliamentary elections of 1994, for instance, the in-
creasing influx of ethnic minorities into the Netherlands led researchers to
think it “was almost inevitable that this would eventually become a politi-
cal issue, for some people felt that the numbers allowed in should be cut
back and/or felt that those allowed in should make greater efforts to inte-
grate into Dutch society” (Irwin and Holsteyn 1997, 111–112). Already at
that time there was a strong feeling among the general public that immi-
grants should adapt to Dutch society. But the issue of immigration and in-
tegration had no major electoral effect, most likely because no party had
the relevant “attractive product” available. “Despite the fact that many re-
spondents (in 1994) had mentioned immigration as the most important
problem in the country, it seems to have little impact upon their choice of
party. For some voters it may have reinforced their ideological leaning and
strengthened their decision to support a party, but it was not an issue that
cut across ideological lines and had a major, independent impact upon the
vote” (Irwin and Holsteyn 1997, 113).
The “major revamping of electoral politics” that was first noticed in the
1990s manifested itself clearly in the parliamentary elections of 2002, in
which Fortuyn and his LPF had electoral success that was unprecedented
for a completely new party (see Table 24.2 for election results). This suc-
cess could not convincingly be explained by a major shift to the right by
the Dutch electorate (e.g., Holsteyn and Ridder 2005), that is, by demand-
side factors.7 An analysis of consecutive national election studies showed
“only moderate shifts in some issue opinions and virtual complete stability
in others. Whatever shift may have occurred, it is hardly large enough to
account for the major shifts in voting behavior that were observed in May
2002” (Holsteyn, Irwin, and Ridder 2003, 75). Consequently, the success
of the LPF should be attributed to Fortuyn and the political message he so
loudly and clearly presented in his numerous media performances. Admit-
tedly, integration and immigration were not the only topics Fortuyn ad-

695
dressed, but his position on these highly salient political issues was well
communicated to the Dutch electorate (e.g., Holsteyn, Irwin, and Ridder
2003) in a full exploitation of the “discursive opportunities” that were
available to him (Koopmans and Muis 2009; see also Boomgaarden and
Vliegenthart 2007). Finally demand and supply were connected: “Pim For-
tuyn arrived on the scene and began ‘to say the things we have all been
thinking’ ” (Holsteyn and Irwin 2003, 62). Fortuyn was an “idol with an
idea,” and his core idea referred to the silenced but darker sides of the
Dutch multicultural society. In the explanation of the interconnected per-
sonal popularity and electoral success of Fortuyn and his LPF, other right-
wing political issues (e.g., a tough position on law and order, increasing in-
come differences) as well as dissatisfaction with the incumbent “purple”
governmental coalition and diffuse political cynicism were statistically sig-
nificant, but the “two issues that account for the greatest amount of this ex-
plained variance are ‘sending back asylum-seekers’ and ‘foreigners should
adapt’ ” (Holsteyn and Irwin 2003, 62; see also, e.g., Bélanger and Aarts
2006; Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2005; Lange 2007).
Note that any explanation for the “relative collapse” (Mair 2008, 248) of
the LPF, which went from 17 percent of the vote in 2002 to about 6 per-
cent in 2003, also needs both demand-side and supply-side factors, even
though the latter are arguably the most prominent: the elimination of For-
tuyn, the continuous fight for the LPF leadership among his successors, the
party’s miserable performance as a coalition partner, and the damage that
was done to the LPF’s reputation by the incessant internal quarreling.
Also, established political parties quickly responded to the rise of the LPF
and adopted what they perceived to be attractive parts of the LPF message
and style; some changed their leadership, all promised to pay more atten-
tion to what the mass of people were worried about, and several parties de-
veloped a stricter position on the immigration issue (Irwin and Holsteyn
2004; Pennings and Keman 2003). At the same time the societal context
and opinion climate changed rapidly; problems related to the multicultural
society remained high on the public agenda, but the economic wind was
turning sharply and economic problems ranked higher on the 2003 public
agenda than they had the previous year (Holsteyn 2003; Praag 2003). Con-
sequently, while the electoral demand for a party that could address prob-
lems of immigration and integration did not disappear, likely this time vot-
ers probably considered established parties to be attractive options once
more, and many voters likely had economic problems and solutions in
mind when they entered the polling station (Praag 2003; Holsteyn and
Irwin 2004).

696
 Table 24.2 The Radical Right in the Low Countries: Election Re-
sults (%) 1991–2014
The Netherlands Belgium
Center De- Party for Vlaams
mocrats List Pim For- Freedom Blok/Vlaams Be-
(CD) tuyn (LPF)a (PVV) lang (VB)
1991 6.6
1994 2.5
1995 7.8 [12.3]
1998 0.6
1999 9.9 [15.5]
2002 17.0
2003 5.7 11.6
2004 [24.2]
2006 0.2 5.9
2007 12.0
2009 [15.3]
2010 15.5 7.8
2012 10.1
2014 3.7 [5.92]
Source: For the Netherlands, results are for the Second Chamber of Par-
liament; for Belgium the results are for the elections for the Belgian fed-
eral House of Representatives. Note that the results for the VB are na-
tional Belgian results, while the VB as a regional/nationalist Flemish
party has electoral support only in the Flemish part of the country. Re-
sults for the separate regional parliament, which has been directly
elected since 1995, are in square brackets.

Note: a For 2006, the percentage refers to vote share for the party list of
the LPF.
That the established parties did not effectively succeed in making a radi-
cal right party completely redundant was proven by Geert Wilders and his

697
PVV, with their surprising electoral success in 2006 (Holsteyn 2007, 1145)
and in subsequent parliamentary elections. Although the PVV lost a sub-
stantial amount of its support in 2012, the party still managed to get over
10 percent of the vote and even improved its vote share to over 13 percent
in the general elections of March 2017. Wilders, an outspoken and both in-
ternally and externally effective leader, was electorally relevant (though he
did not have any major direct electoral impact; see, e.g., Pas, Vries, and
Brug 2011; Schumacher and Rooduijn 2013), as were attitudes of political
cynicism, political protest, and anti-elitism, but the key to the electoral
success of the PVV was in its substantive policy positions, with immigra-
tion and (particularly in the most recent years) European integration as the
two main building blocks. “Wilders succeeded in convincing voters that he
is the one that represents the right-wing, anti-immigrant voters” (Schu-
macher and Rooduijn 2013, 132).
In a broad sketch of the changing political and opinion climate of the
Netherlands for the tumultuous period 1998–2012 (Tillie et al., 2016),
looking at the general idea of the process of globalization and the impact
of international economic and cultural developments on the political and
electoral cleavage structure of many individual Western countries, includ-
ing the Low Countries (e.g., Kriesi et al. 2006, 2008), it was argued that
the “losers” of the ongoing modernization process might form an attractive
potential pool of voters for (populist) radical right parties (e.g., Minken-
berg 2000), such as the LPF and subsequently the PVV. During this period
mass attitudes with respect to immigration and integration did not substan-
tially change, but the so-called losers continued to be (much) less tolerant
of asylum-seekers and immigrants compared to so-called winners. More-
over, over the years 1998–2012 these attitudes toward ethnic minorities
became interrelated with increasingly salient attitudes toward the European
Union and the ongoing process of European integration (Tillie et al. 2016,
180), which are arguably also relevant for a better understanding of con-
temporary radical right-wing voting (Werts, Scheeper, and Lubbers 2012).
In the first decade of the twenty-first century this has resulted in a (new)
political cleavage with major electoral potential for a radical right party
such as the PVV, since this party “is the only major political formation that
combines the ‘negative’ positions on this cleavage in Dutch politics. This
makes the PVV the political ally of the losers of the process of globaliza-
tion” (Tillie et al. 2016, 180–181). So in the interaction between demand-
side and supply-side factors the LPF and the PVV have been acting as the
national-level political representatives of particularly those citizens and
voters with attitudes hostile to the EU, to further European integration, and

698
to ethnic minorities and the multicultural society—issues that arguably are
related to the maintenance of the “Dutch identity” (e.g., Aalberts 2012, 18;
Rydgren 2008, 754), are interrelated, and have been electorally relevant in
the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century (Tillie et al. 2016,
182).
For Belgium, and specifically for the Vlaams Blok in Flanders, it was
also a combination of related political attitudes that ultimately proved to be
a successful electoral formula. As has been said, the party was established
on a nationalist basis, but it was only after politically adopting or “upgrad-
ing” the issue of immigration and integration of (ethnic) minorities in its
program and campaign rhetoric that the VB realized its electoral break-
through (in 1991), which was followed by a series of electoral successes in
subsequent national or federal elections (see Table 24.2). Immediately
after the split of the VU, the party concentrated on the issue of nationalism
in an attempt to put political pressure on other parties, in particular the
VU: “The Vlaams Blok set out to operate as a zweeppartij (literally ‘whip
party’) of the Volksunie (VU). . . . [T]he VU was the dominant Flemish
nationalist party and, in the eyes of the Vlaams Blok, it was making too
many concessions to [the] French speaking community. The Vlaams Blok
strove for the independence of Flanders. This chauvinist programme gave
the party the stable but small support of between 1 and 2% of voters”
(Coffé 2005b, 75).
In the 1980s the anti-immigration dish was added to the nationalist
menu of the VB, and in 1987, after an outspoken anti-immigrant election
campaign, this strategy paid off for the VB, winning it an extra seat in par-
liament. Although originally the attention to and strong focus on this new
issue was controversial within the party, it is likely because of that elec-
toral impact that since then the VB has made immigration one of its two
core issues: “In the end, the Vlaams Blok chose to follow the more elec-
torally rewarding strategy and thus to focus on the anti-immigrant issue,
but it combined it with the original nationalism” (Coffé 2005b, 76). In the
early 1990s the VB, even with a probably “more central—separatist—
issue” on the agenda, undoubtedly qualified as an anti-immigrant or radi-
cal right party (Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2000, 94), as its mass support
thrived “not so much [on] the presence of foreigners, but rather the fear of
the Islamic way of living” (Coffé, Heyndels, and Vermeir 2007, 153). On
November 24, 1991—afterward often referred to as Black Sunday8—the
VB achieved 6.6 percent of the vote nationally (and over 10 percent of the
Flemish vote), turning it from a small political party into a medium-sized

699
one (e.g., Swyngedouw 1992). And there were several Black Sundays to
follow, until in the mid-2000s a downward electoral trend set in, likely due
not to a diminishing demand for the program on offer by the VB but in
part to the changing political landscape and the increasing competition
from ideologically more or less related parties with a better prospect of be-
coming politically effective (e.g., Pauwels 2011; Brug, Fennema, and
Tillie 2005).

THE RADICAL RIGHT AND THE WIDER POLITICAL AND

SOCIETAL CONTEXT

Political parties are neither isolated social phenomena nor introverted or-
ganizations acting on and for their own individual sake. To be effective as
linkage organizations within representative liberal democracies (e.g., Law-
son 1980; Dalton, Farrell, and McAllister 2011), parties should be well
embedded in and firmly interconnected with their wider societal and politi-
cal environment. As regards the radical right parties in the Low Countries,
the situation for the Dutch parties and the Flemish VB form each other’s
mirror image: whereas both the LPF and the PVV have never been rooted
in society at large but were offered the opportunity to participate as a gov-
ernmental coalition partner shortly after their establishment and almost im-
mediately following their major electoral success, the VB has been soci-
etally well connected from the start, but in contrast to the preceding na-
tionalist or regionalist Belgian parties, the presence of the so-called cordon
sanitaire has meant that the VB has never been able to act as a party with
governmental and policy responsibilities, “not even in the smallest village”
(Deschouwer 2009b, 573).
In the Netherlands there has never been a formal exclusion of radical
right parties at the parliamentary level. But the CP and CD’s “historical
ties to extremist subcultures” (Akkerman and Rooduijn 2015, 152) led to
an informal or semi-official cordon sanitaire being formed within the Sec-
ond Chamber of the Dutch parliament as part of a broader societal, legal,
media, and political strategy to fight those parties. The self-proclaimed
“democratic” parties represented in the lower house preferred to isolate
and ignore these parties instead of taking formal steps (Vetten 2016). In
the new millennium, however, the Dutch electoral system and its extreme
proportionality resulted in the LPF and PVV winning a large number of
parliamentary seats in the Second Chamber, meaning that the formation of
a new governmental coalition was hard without the support of these par-

700
ties. Because of this, the exclusion of radical right parties in the parliamen-
tary arena was no longer a serious, viable option. It may still be “theoreti-
cally possible that established parties do not bother enacting any strategy
against an anti-immigrant party when it is very small and thus not power-
ful” (Spanje and Brug 2007, 1027), but in a situation of political fragmen-
tation combined with the conventional intention to form a majority coali-
tion, it may simply be politically infeasible—or at least very difficult and
time consuming, as the cabinet formation of 2017 shows—to employ a
strategy of exclusion or ostracism against radical right parties in the
Netherlands. The LPF after its first electoral success in 2002 (see e.g.,
Irwin and Holsteyn 2004) and the PVV after its second electoral success in
2010 were included in the new government, although the support of the
PVV and Geert Wilders for the coalition of the Christen-Democratisch
Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal) and the liberal-conservative
VVD was extremely problematic for the coalition partners and after a long
formation process resulted in an atypical governmental coalition (Holsteyn
2011; Otjes and Louwerse 2014).9 Also, before the PVV entered or at least
supported this coalition, in the Second Chamber the PVV in its parliamen-
tary votes supported and was supported by other parties in a way that does
not show any exclusionist tendency and can best be interpreted from a gen-
eral left-right perspective: “The PVV votes in the same way as the other
parties on the right” (Otjes and Louwerse 2015, 75).10
This incorporation of Dutch radical right parties into the political system
does not seem to be paralleled by their integration within society at large.
The LPF has understandably been qualified as “a bubble party, or a flash
party” (Mair 2008, 248): the flash came by surprise, and the bubble had
burst before connections within Dutch civil society were established. The
PVV definitely is not a flash party but has deliberately been developed as a
top-down organization and a strictly political project, with representation
at the national, subnational, and supranational levels but without any insti-
tutionalized links with organized societal groups or movements. The es-
sentially self-imposed societal isolation is probably symbolized best by the
fact that for over ten years now Geert Wilders has employed bodyguards
for personal protection because of death threats.11 But “even before secu-
rity measures were deemed necessary, Wilders was said to avoid meetings
with his constituents, leaving The Hague [the political center of the
Netherlands] only for working visits to the Middle East or to the foreign
offices of important countries” (Vossen 2010, 29). Over and above the
controversial character of his party and Wilders himself, such an attitude

701
on the part of the “political boss” is arguably not helpful for the establish-
ment of societal connections.
As previously said, the opportunity structure in which the VB operates
in Belgium is opposite to what has been sketched for the Dutch radical
right parties. The VB has always been embedded within the (preexisting)
nationalistic subculture of Flanders, but for decades it has been effectively
isolated at the narrower political level. “In Flanders, all other parties repre-
sented in the national parliament reached a formal agreement as early as
1989, committing themselves not to undertake any political agreements
with the Flemish Bloc—either in the context of the democratically elected
institutes or in the context of the elections for these institutes” (Spanje and
Brug 2007, 1029–1030). Ignoring the more fundamental question of the
justification for excluding an electorally supported party that at least for-
mally plays the political game according to established procedures and
general democratic rules (e.g., Rummens and Abts 2010), and admitting
that participation in government may also have substantial negative elec-
toral effects (something that is likely even more so for anti-establishment
parties, which by committing themselves to participation in government
give the impression of being part of the political establishment [e.g.,
Spanje 2011]), this cordon sanitaire ultimately seems to pay off electorally.
From an electoral perspective, the impact of political isolation or ostracism
on radical right parties is mixed and suggests that such parties may in
some cases even profit from it (Spanje and Brug 2009). If, however, the
political party environment of such isolated parties changes and they are
joined in the political arena by less controversial competitors that include
in their ideology elements that are also part of the radical right political
program, the isolated radical right party may lose its attractiveness. Admit-
tedly, it took almost twenty-five years to show any result, but in the end
“the VB, as a consequence of the cordon sanitaire, is becoming increas-
ingly seen as unable to deliver which in turn casts a shadow on the party’s
electoral fortune” (Pauwels 2011, 62). If radical right parties are consid-
ered to be a danger to society and democratic politics and if other parties
are willing and able to effectively employ a strategy of isolation and os-
tracism, in the long run this may result in the decline of such parties: “a
sustained strategy of containment combined with an attempt to provide de-
mocratic alternatives for dissatisfied voters will, in the end, convince ex-
tremist voters that their vote is indeed a wasted one. Recent electoral re-
sults in Belgium indicate, for instance, that a combination of the sustained
cordon with the emergence of an alternative protest party (Lijst Dedecker)
and an alternative nationalist party (N-VA) as well as a repositioning of

702
some of the existing mainstream parties (notably of the Christian Democ-
rats) has now, finally, started to erode the electoral success of the extremist
Vlaams Belang” (Rummens and Abts 2010, 663).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In his overview of three decades of radical right parties in Western Europe,

Mudde qualified the phenomenon as “a relatively minor nuisance” (2013,
14). But as of the beginning of 2016, the PVV was polling as the biggest
political party in the Netherlands, with national elections for the Second
Chamber of Parliament scheduled for March 15, 2017; at these elections
the PVV scored over 13 percent of the total vote, but in light of earlier
polls this was considered a disappointing result by Wilders and his sup-
porters.12 And public debate and the level of scholarly attention for these
parties over the last two decades give a different impression: that of an ex-
tremely important political development and a major political and societal
problem. Whether the rise and electoral and political success of radical
right parties is considered a problem for advanced Western liberal democ-
racies, in the Low Countries and elsewhere, is primarily a subjective, nor-
mative question, but discussion of this question certainly would benefit
from a solid understanding of the character of the radical right party family
and its individual members.
Being members of the same family does not necessarily mean that they
look much alike or share an identical profile and political fate. The three
main twenty-first-century manifestations of the radical right party family
in the Low Countries have different substantive and organizational charac-
ters and political and electoral histories. The LPF was essentially the polit-
ical vehicle of the “pink populist” Pim Fortuyn, who supplied the Dutch
electorate with an electorally attractive, welcome mix of anti-immigrant
and anti-elitist positions. But because of the death of its leader before the
successful 2002 elections and its lack of internal leadership and party orga-
nization afterward, the LPF turned out to be a textbook case of a flash
party, whose life span “stretch[es] over only a short period, in which the
party appears on the scene, quickly reaches its apex, and subsequently dis-
appears” (Pedersen 1982, 12). Geert Wilders explicitly tried to incorporate
lessons from the short history of the LPF when he established the PVV, a
party that was strict on immigration, integration, and crime, and also
against the EU and European integration. His efforts resulted in an atypical
party model and organization without individual party membership. The

703
PVV proved that such a party can be viable electorally,13 and that it can
function politically (as an unofficial part of a governmental coalition), but
the sustainability of the PVV should be considered questionable. The party
is not embedded in society at large, and because of its controversial char-
acter and its unconventional party organization—“from an organizational
perspective, the PVV actually is no party” (Lucardie and Voerman 2012,
164)—it likely does not offer a fertile breeding ground for new political
talent and future political leadership. The major Belgian (Flemish) radical
right party, the VB, is much older than its Dutch relatives: it stems from
the late 1970s, and from a rather different cultural and political context.
Starting as a primarily nationalist/regionalist party, the VB became suc-
cessful after adopting the core issue of radical right parties in its program
and promoting the anti-immigration and anti-immigrant issue to the high-
est political agenda. This proved to be a double-edged sword: until the
early 2000s the VB scored an impressive electoral record, but because it
has been excluded by all the other parties, the VB has never been in a posi-
tion to execute its radical right program at any governmental level. Over-
all, the main radical right parties of Belgium and the Netherlands tell three
different stories: the LPF showed how an electorally and politically suc-
cessful but badly organized party can fall as quickly as it can rise; the PVV
shows that it is possible for a strong leader to establish and maintain a radi-
cal right party that is successful at elections but is less effective politically,
and most of all likely has an uncertain future because of its dependency on
its leader; and the VB shows that a radical right party that supplies the na-
tionalist and anti-immigrant positions that part of the electorate “demands”
can have a long series of good election results without ever having any di-
rect effect on policy, until a close (nationalist) competitor emerges that
might be more effective politically.

704
NOTES

Many thanks to Dr. Nicolas Bouteca (Ghent University) for his comments
on the draft version of this chapter.
1. Mudde does not include the LPF in his overview of electoral success
stories of populist radical right parties, since he considers this party a
neoliberal populist party (Mudde 2007, 47). This party, however, is
most often considered to be a radical right populist party and garnered
17.0 percent of the vote in the general elections of 2002.
2. Note that this 10 percent refers to the proportion of the electorate in
Flanders or the Flemish vote and constituted 6.58 percent of the over-
all Belgian vote.
3. This changed in 2014, when the VB was losing votes in particular to
the N-VA, and in some districts did not reach the electoral threshold
of 5 percent. After this serious electoral dip the VB increased its elec-
toral support in the polls, likely a result of the refugee crisis and the
terrorism linked to Islam.
4. Hero Brinkman left the PVV in March 2012, partly as a result of the
frustration that his reform proposals were never taken seriously within
the PVV.
5. As previously noted, this double leadership may be considered instru-
mental in combining the “two distinct streams” within the VB ideol-
ogy, nationalism and xenophobia or at least a strong anti-immigrant
position (Erk 2005, 498). Gijsels in his history of the VB (1992, 247–
253) devoted major attention to Dewinter and Annemans along with
Karel Dillen, the grand old man of the VB and other nationalist orga-
nizations, movements, and initiatives.
6. One of the reasons the Walloon radical right party Front National has
never come close to the political success of its Flemish family member
has to do with its everlasting tendency to internally quarrel and split:
“It is no exaggeration to say that the FN began to split from the mo-
ment of its creation” (Art 2008, 434). More generally, it can convinc-
ingly be argued that the lack of success of the contemporary radical
right in Walloon is primarily the result of supply-side factors (Coffé
2005a, 2005b).
7. Note that this section does not include any reference to potentially rel-

705
 evant demographic or socio-structural factors, since such factors and
the socio-structural explanations that have been built on them are less
convincing in studies that focus on developments within countries
over a relatively short period time. In this approach I concur with the
position taken by Brug, Fennema, and Tillie that “our analyses did not
generate support for sociostructural models. However, the fact that a
model without sociostructural variables explains the electoral support
for anti-immigrant parties so well should not be interpreted to mean
that social and economic conditions and developments are irrelevant
for the development of these kind of parties. It may even be true that
such social developments are at the heart of the rise of anti-immigrant
parties. Yet these developments are so similar in all EU countries that
they cannot account for the large differences in electoral support for
anti-immigrant parties that we find in these countries” (2005, 567).
8. When the VB suffered a serious electoral blow on May 25, 2014, the
media referred to this day as White Sunday.
9. Note that the coalitions of which radical right parties were an official
(LPF) or unofficial (PVV) partner did not govern for their full term
but had to resign after 86 and 557 days, respectively. Still, the fact that
these coalitions fell early fits the more general patterns in the twenty-
first century of governmental coalitions not able to serve their full
four-year term.
10. Since the LPF started to fall apart almost immediately after its en-
trance in parliament, an analysis of its parliamentary behavior and
votes is much more problematic.
11. It is obvious, of course, that Wilders did not choose this extremely
awkward personal situation.
12. For the polling data, see http://peilingwijzer.tomlouwerse.nl
13. The PVV likely profits from the refugee crisis that Europe is dealing
with. Wilders also explicitly showed his sympathy with the Patriotis-
che Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida, Patri-
otic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) movement,
which originated in Germany but is spreading over the Low Countries
as well. For example, Wilders gave a speech at a Pegida protest in
Dresden in April 2015.
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CHAPTER 25

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN SOUTHERN EUROPE

CARLO RUZZA
IN recent decades, several analysts have examined the electoral trends and
the societal impact of the radical right in Europe. Their work is mainly fo-
cused on single countries or on two-country comparisons, but broader
comparisons have also been made (Immerzeel and Pickup 2015; Rydgren
and Ruth 2013; Mudde 2007, 2013; Rydgren 2005; Norris 2005; Minken-
berg 2000; Kitschelt 1995). This work has identified several factors per-
taining to sociological, ideological and institutional variables (Rydgren
2007). In this chapter, we will compare the radical right in Italy, Spain,
and Greece, examining both demand-side and supply-side factors and con-
centrating on the financial crisis that began in 2007 and its aftermaths.
Supply-side factors are institutional features and changes that pertain
particularly to the structure of the political system and its impact on differ-
ent parties and party families—here, the radical right. Recent upheavals re-
lated to the financial crisis have brought about substantial changes in the
political systems of European countries, and particularly countries in the
south of Europe. Demand-side factors are features and changes in the ex-
pectations, aspirations, values, attitudes, and other sociological features of
the population, which may favor a specific type of political response, in
this case a preference for the radical right. Among sociological factors, an
often-cited one concerns the attitudinal and lifestyle changes attributed to
key aspects of modernization and globalization dynamics. In recent years,
these factors have been redefined by the strong impact of the financial cri-
sis on southern Europe (Trenz, Ruzza, and Guiraudon 2015). Scholars uti-
lizing diverse methodologies have devoted much attention to what has
been dubbed the “losers of globalization syndrome,” whereby citizens en-
countering hardships in their personal lives are seen as more likely to vote
for radical-right parties (RRPs) (Merkl and Weinberg 2003; Norris 2005).
While these studies are not conclusive, the impact of factors such as
media frames linking immigration to crime and socioeconomic marginal-
ization also play a crucial role in explaining support for the radical right in
several contexts (Rydgren and Ruth 2013; Rydgren 2008). As noted by
several authors, the crisis has accelerated and radicalized these frames in
the media and in political arenas (Trenz, Ruzza, and Guiraudon 2015). The
financial crisis and subsequent events have also powerfully shaped the so-
cieties and affected the political systems of Italy, Spain, and Greece, par-

717
ticularly because these countries have been hard hit by the economic, so-
cial, and political consequences. During the crisis, these countries also
faced a massive increase in migration flows, particularly those related to
local wars in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, but also from a
wider range of countries. This resulted in additional difficulties that were
magnified by the general context of weak state structures in southern Eu-
rope, which are often unable to process the additional demands that sub-
stantial influxes of population bring about.
In this context, the trajectory of the radical right in southern European
states illustrates the impact of economic hardship. While there are substan-
tial differences among the three states, we believe they have sufficient sim-
ilarities in historical and economic terms to allow a general examination of
the distinctive impact of the crisis on the radical right. After reviewing the
salient characteristics of the right in Italy, Spain, and Greece and its recent
trajectory, we will discuss broader regional features of the role of the radi-
cal right in these countries.

THE RIGHT IN ITALY, SPAIN, AND GREECE

The Radical Right in Italy

The distinction between radical right and extreme right is not always clear
in Italy. There have been frequent mergers, programmatic redefinitions,
and hybridizations between different types of right-wing parties. In gen-
eral, two components can be distinguished in the Italian political right. The
first is connected to the legacy of Fascism as a political system and an ide-
ology that collapsed after the Second World War but left in its wake a par-
liamentary party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian Social
Movement), and a number of non-parliamentary groups and movements
that in various guises lasted until the present. A second component consists
of ethnonationalist parties—a family of movements and parties known as
the Leagues—that emerged in the 1980s, the largest of them being the
Lega Nord (LN, Northern League). This formation is characterized by its
independentism or strongly autonomist program.
The former component advocates nation-state nationalism, law-and-or-
der policies, and strong family values. It was for many years mainly an ex-
pression of the traditional right, rather than of the radical right. Its main
ideological features were those of a social right intent on providing welfare
support to its voters, who were strongly represented in the petite bour-

718
geoisie of the Italian south, and on promoting “family values” and law-
and-order policies. Its electoral outcomes ranged around 5 percent of the
vote throughout much of the post–World War II period. These outcomes
changed after the collapse of the First Italian Republic in the early 1990s,
which caused an overall restructuring of the political system and the disap-
pearance of previous dominant forces (Ruzza and Fella 2009). Over the
following years, the ideology of this right changed. Under the leadership
of Gianfranco Fini, it began to incorporate elements of free-market ideol-
ogy, accepting international capitalism and neoliberal values. In the span
of a few years, its electoral support expanded greatly. It began to form
strong alliances with the center-right Party of Silvio Berlusconi, in coali-
tion with which it governed Italy on and off for long periods. In the transi-
tion it also distanced itself from its fascist past, acquiring elements of a
radical right party (Ruzza and Fella 2009). These included the distinctive
traits of nativism, authoritarianism, and, to a certain extent, populism
(Mudde 2007).
The transition from a nostalgic traditional right to a combination of ne-
oliberal right and radical right took place gradually and incompletely. The
old generation that had experienced the postwar transition from authoritar-
ianism retained elements of biological racism, notably anti-Semitism. It re-
tained an often strong affection for the symbolism of Fascism—songs, im-
ages of Mussolini, and war paraphernalia—but as it gradually disappeared
from the scene, this type of right became much less influential. Some of its
components refused to accept representative democracy and remained ex-
cluded from the parliamentary arena. In the 1990s, a major reorientation of
the MSI took place. The party that Fini had led for many years was re-
named the Alleanza Nazionale (AN, National Alliance) in 1995 after a key
congress that opened it to more-moderate components, renounced its anti-
capitalism and anti-Americanism, and formally relinquished its Fascist
legacy. In 2007, AN merged with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI, Forward
Italy) party. The two parties took the new name of Il Popolo della Libertà
(PdL, People of Freedom). The merger did not prove beneficial for AN,
however, because Berlusconi was more interested in ensuring the loyalty
of new entrants into political institutions. Fini unsuccessfully challenged
Berlusconi’s leadership but was marginalized and ostracized, losing con-
trol of the party and also of the old faction within it.
After the collapse of the Berlusconi government in 2011, part of the old
AN component left the PdL and reassembled under the name Fratelli
d’Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy). In recent years, they have constituted the

719
remnant of this distinctive tradition. They have a new and younger leader,
Giorgia Meloni, and they have acquired elements of the radical right, par-
ticularly its nativism. Similar formations, such as La Destra (The Right)
under Francesco Storace, remain marginal but occasionally join forces
with FdI. In the European Parliament elections of 2014 they received 3.67
percent of the vote.
The second component of the radical right, currently represented only
by the ethnonationalist LN, opposes nation-state nationalism, considering
the historical process of Italian unification to be fundamentally unsuccess-
ful and misguided. The LN first gained prominence as a regionalist party
with a platform that mixed cultural and political autonomism. In advocat-
ing regional autonomy, the LN was at loggerheads with the nationalist tra-
dition of the right, discussed above. However, over the years, these two
components of the Italian right converged with Berlusconi’s parties of the
center-right (the FI and the PdL) on other aspects, notably a neoliberal
ethos and program. These features sat uneasily with the ethos of localism,
traditional values, and conservative policies of the right. Nevertheless, the
two components formed strong and long-lasting coalitions that ruled Italy
for almost two decades until Berlusconi left government (Ruzza and Balbo
2013). This meant that their values and policies had a marked and measur-
able impact on the center-right. For instance, Fazzi (2015) notes that under
the centre-right coalitions not only reformist policies in the welfare sector
and financing of social services were reduced, but cuts specifically im-
pacted services to the migrant community. The right specifically disputed
and reduced budget lines for the integration of migrants. However, after a
series of corruption scandals that heavily involved this party and led to the
indictment of its former leader, Umberto Bossi, in 2011, the party lost al-
most half of its support; in the 2013 national elections, it obtained 4 per-
cent of the vote. It should be noted that the LN electorate is concentrated
in the northern part of the country, where its impact is much greater.
In recent years, the ethnonationalist component under the new leader-
ship of Matteo Salvini has recouped some of its losses, receiving 6.6 per-
cent of the vote in the European Parliament elections of 2014. However, it
has further reinforced its radical right traits, deemphasizing its autonomist
stance and accentuating its anti-migrant position, notably with its anti-Is-
lam and anti-Roma messages. Its center-periphery political discourse is
still linked to populist, anti-elitist frames and remains central in the party’s
geographical strongholds, but it now aspires to a broader national repre-
sentation. The identity of the LN as a national radical right formation has

720
been further accentuated with the creation in 2015 of a new formation
called Noi con Salvini (Us with Salvini), which seeks to appeal to voters in
central and southern Italy—a goal that the old Northern League was un-
able to achieve. This new formation also appeals to disaffected voters of
Berlusconi’s center-right party. The two radical rights, the FdI and the LN
—have found common ground on several issues, notably support for anti-
migrant policies, but also elements of a traditional law-and-order platform.
For instance, in late 2015 they campaigned against new legislation grant-
ing legal recognition to civil partnerships and adoption rights to homosex-
uals.
Nonetheless, strong new competitors have emerged who articulate these
aspirations in order to channel the political expressions of anti-elitist and
populist sentiments. This is particularly evident with the new Movimento 5
Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement), whose anti-political stance is similar to
that typically adopted by RRPs, but whose impact on the electorate has
been remarkably rapid and successful (Mosca 2014). This can be ex-
plained by the fact that both types of right have been partners in governing
the country, achieving results that many Italians consider unsatisfactory
and undermining the credibility of their aspiration to appear untainted by
the frequent corruption scandals that have involved the entire Italian politi-
cal class.
Overall, the recent trajectory of the Italian radical right and its main for-
mations—FdI and the LN—is marked by the loss of relevance of Berlus-
coni’s party following the 2013 elections and the expulsion of Berlusconi
from the Senate after he was found guilty of tax evasion. This engendered
a competition for the leadership of a now shrinking right. In the meantime,
at the national level a new leader, Matteo Renzi, had emerged with a mix
of soft populism and a new coalition encompassing a small center-right
party, Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD, New Center-Right), which had aban-
doned Berlusconi’s party to join Renzi’s government. This further weak-
ened Berlusconi’s center-right coalition. Its radical right component was
by now reluctant to recognize his dominant role. Without direct access to
power through its stronger coalition partner, the radical right has attempted
to lead the coalition through a strategy of radicalization, but with uncertain
results. For instance, the M5S won the 2016 mayoral elections in large
cities such as Rome and Turin. This trajectory clearly illustrates the alter-
nation of processes of radicalization and de-radicalization, which are re-
lated to the radical right’s closeness to a governing role. As of late 2017 a
prolonged and controversial discussion on a new electoral law took place

721
as the Italian Constitutional Court ruled that the electoral law was partly
unconstitutional and needed to be changed. A new and largely proportional
electoral law was approved in October 2017. This will have momentous
consequences on the political opportunities and the related strategies of the
right.

The Radical Right in Spain

The role of the radical right in Spain is different and electorally much less
important than in Italy. The Spanish extreme right, traditionally Francoist
and fascist, is highly fragmented. The main radical-right parties are
Democracia Nacional, founded in 1995 and characterized by an anti-glob-
alist and anti-capitalist program (Mudde 2007, 189); Espana-2000, estab-
lished in 2002; and Plataforma per Catalunya, also founded in 2002
(Mudde 2007). The radical right has also been unsuccessful, never obtain-
ing more than 1 percent of the vote (Alonso and Kaltwasser 2014, 23–25).
Several explanations have been suggested for the right’s limited impact. In
terms of supply-side factors, Spanish electoral law, though based on pro-
portionality, is not conducive to the success of small parties. This is caused
by a number of factors, which include the weakness of small parties in
many of the small constituencies on which the Spanish electoral law orga-
nizes the vote, and the lack of arrangements for the accumulation of re-
minders at state level. With this system, small parties lacking geographical
concentration are penalized. Thus RRPs are penalized by the structure of
the political system. In addition, as argued by Alonso and Kaltwasser, in
Spain the political space that defines RRPs has effectively been occupied
by conventional parties focused on the right-left cleavage and the center-
periphery cleavage (Alonso and Kaltwasser 2014). Other reasons cited to
explain the limited size of the Spanish radical right refer to ideology or to
party positioning in the political space. For example, many themes of the
radical right have been taken up by the Partido Popular. Other related fac-
tors are a fairly egalitarian political culture and less hostility against mi-
grants because of their necessary role in the economy (Arango 2013). Fur-
thermore, in ideological terms, the Spanish extreme right has traditionally
framed its grievances in terms of the old Francoist program, which now
appears antiquated and unacceptable to many Spaniards, particularly in re-
gard to issues such as the devolution of power and European integration
(Carter 2005, 43). These attitudes tend to extend to RRPs.
In terms of recent dynamics, it has been noted that in the early years of
the financial crisis the number of migrants and the salience of the migra-

722
tion issue actually diminished (Alonso and Kaltwasser 2014). This de-
prived RRPs of a key grievance. Second, in recent years other parties have
better interpreted the populist values that define RRPs, such as the left-
wing movement Podemos, whose anti-elitist and anti-political stances res-
onate in wider sectors of the electorate (Müller 2014). Even more strongly,
ideological competition is currently coming from Ciudadanos, a party with
a complex ideology, which on some issues combines traditional left and
right allegiances and thus appeals to a wider range of voters (Teruel and
Barrio 2015). Although Ciudadanos has sometimes been labeled the
Podemos of the right, it lacks the distinctive features of the radical right,
and its participatory and deliberative ethos makes it more acceptable to the
broader electorate. While it expresses sweeping anti-political sentiments, it
is not characterized by nativism and anti-Europeanism. In fact, unlike
RRPs, on key issues such as immigration it welcomes more European in-
volvement (Teruel and Barrio 2015). Thus, as in Italy, the most salient de-
velopment in Spain is the incorporation of populist and anti-elitist values
into a new family of parties, but unlike in Italy, there is no real remaining
political salience of RRPs.

The Radical Right in Greece

Among the EU countries, Greece is distinctive both because of the severity
of the financial crisis and the recent success of its right. It has been argued
that Golden Dawn, the main Greek right-wing party in recent years, be-
longs to the extreme right rather than the radical right, although it shares
some features of the latter (Ellinas 2014, 3). However, as in other in-
stances, the distinction between the two types of right is often not clear be-
cause hybrid formations are not unusual, particularly since there are sev-
eral mechanisms for the Europe-wide diffusion of discursive frames and
policy programs, including the growing role of Internet communication
and the circulation of leaders and activists (both discussed later). In this
case, Golden Dawn shares its ideology with the European extreme right,
which makes it similar to old extreme-right formations such as the British
National Party. However, its electoral success, its roots in civil society,
and some of its communication strategies make it similar to radical right
parties such as the Front National in France. Nonetheless, this party re-
mains ostracized, as are other extreme right parties. For instance, in 2014
Marine Le Pen’s Front National ruled out collaboration with Golden
Dawn, as well as with the Hungarian party Jobbik and Ataka in Bulgaria
(Willsher 2014).

723
 The connection between RRPs and the crisis is particularly evident in
Greece. Golden Dawn was formed in the 1980s, but before the crisis its
electoral impact was negligible. This situation was sharply reversed in
2010 when the party suddenly took 5.29 percent of the vote in local elec-
tions, with particularly strong upswings in areas of Athens. This success
was confirmed in the national elections of May and June 2012 when it ob-
tained nearly 7 percent of the vote. In the May 2014 local, regional, and
European Parliament elections, the party confirmed its strong standing, de-
spite marked oscillations in its popularity in the months before the elec-
tion, which were due to a stabbing incident and other episodes of violence
committed by the leadership and its militants.
Golden Dawn’s electoral base is similar to that of other RRPs (Ellinas
2013). It is supported by a mainly male, urban, and young electorate with
secondary-level education. In ideological terms, Golden Dawn retains the
distinctive iconography and political discourse of its Nazi background—al-
though it has been argued that it has recently moderated its rhetoric (Elli-
nas 2014, 4). References to biological racism contrast with the culturalist
stances of other RRPs. Similarly, its rigid, ideologically based internal hi-
erarchy and military ethos are unusual in other RRPs. However, it shares
with other RRPs a strong anti-migration stance and anti-political senti-
ments.
Many analysts have linked the success of this party clearly to the finan-
cial crisis, which in Greece has impoverished large sectors of the popula-
tion. In this context the party has been able to fashion its communications
so that it appears to be the only voice that is not part of the “system,”
whereas all other parties are held at least in part responsible for the eco-
nomic and social hardships that Greeks have experienced. This is often the
clear advantage of previously marginalized parties in times of crisis. As
the literature points out, their absence from power makes them appear less
compromised than all other political formations (Mudde 2007). However,
while political formations of this type are seen as lacking staying power,
this is not the case for Golden Dawn, for which its detractors predicted an
imminent collapse that has so far not taken place (Ellinas 2014).

THE ITALIAN, GREEK, AND SPANISH RRPS COMPARED

On the surface, the three cases discussed above are rather different. The
Italian radical right is relatively stronger than RRPs in the other two coun-
tries, but its size is due to a combination of ethnonationalist sentiments and

724
radical-right themes. Hence, some of this strength might be an expression
of ethnonationalism rather than an RRP identity. Strong ethnonationalism
is also a feature in Spain, although in this case it is hindering the radical
right there (Alonso and Kaltwasser 2014). Thus, at least in part, the two
countries are not as different as they might first appear. Conversely, the
Greek radical right is uneasily emerging from an extreme right back-
ground, and some analysts think it has not fully evolved into a RRP. How-
ever, as noted, this extreme right component is also present in Italy, a fea-
ture that links the Italian and Greek cases.
Considering this context in comparative terms poses the question of why
the radical right is supposedly limited by its competition with ethnonation-
alism in Spain but not in Italy, and why the affirmation of the old extreme
right has been successful in Greece but much less so in Italy and Spain. To
answer these questions, one needs to compare the broad features of the po-
litical systems of the three countries as they developed during the crisis.
The first comparison points to features common to these three south Euro-
pean societies; the second points to the distinctive elements that have mod-
ified the trajectory of the right in each one of them.

The Weakness of the South European State, Poor Border Controls,

and Implications for the Radical Right
South European societies have in common a structural weakness of the
state. This general weakness has many aspects and results in poor imple-
mentative capacity in a wide variety of policy fields. Public services are
often inefficient, and state resources are allocated by party-controlled pub-
lic bureaucracies in a particularistic manner, which creates widespread
anti-political sentiment. It is difficult to estimate how much of the problem
is a result of ineffectiveness and unfairness in the Mediterranean states and
how much is a function of political corruption, but the weakness is widely
perceived throughout Southern Europe (della Porta and Vannucci 2012).
As stated in a recent Transparency International report, “A number of
countries in southern Europe—Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain—are
shown to have serious deficits in public sector accountability and deep-
rooted problems of inefficiency, malpractice and corruption, which are
neither sufficiently controlled nor sanctioned” (Mulcahy 2012).
This, in turn, results in decreased social protection of vulnerable indige-
nous constituencies, as well as migrants, in areas such as housing, health,
and employment rights. In this context, the platform of the radical right

725
tends to be characterized as a set of particularistic claims for scarce wel-
fare state resources and privileged access to the job market. More than
elsewhere, a “politics of the enemy” frame successfully shapes the impact
of the radical right, because migrants are directly perceived as competitors.
The inability of the state to control labor markets and the activities of the
population on its territory means that this competition is stronger and more
unregulated than in northern European countries. However, this competi-
tion is greater in some countries than in others, and greater in certain re-
gions of a country. It is particularly strong in southern Italy and Greece,
but not in Spain, where migrants actually diminished in number during the
initial phases of the crisis and their role in the economy, particularly in un-
skilled jobs, was more valued. Hostility tends to increase among the
“losers of globalization,” whose influence has often been identified as a
source of support for the radical right, but this diffusion is selective in the
three countries considered (Norris 2005).
Widespread political corruption and a significant presence of organized
crime in some areas also magnify RRPs’ impact. Ineffective control of
their borders by states results in migrant flows being perceived as a secu-
rity issue. The trafficking of migrants, their use in drug smuggling, and
their recruitment into organized criminal enterprises result in support for
the securitization frame that distinguishes the radical right. As a conse-
quence of these illegal activities, the radical right has made inroads in all
the large cities of the three countries considered, where the absence of ef-
fective policing and the concentration of poverty in key areas has had a
generalized impact.
The connection between grievances conducive to radical right support
and migration is accentuated by the multiple provenances of migrants in
southern Europe. Located on the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea
are the assembly and departure points of migrants heading for the EU.
Spain, Italy, and Greece receive migrants from a very wide range of coun-
tries. A similar situation pertains to the Balkan route, which has significant
implications for Greece. After a dangerous journey, migrants arrive ex-
hausted, impoverished, and unwelcome; upon their arrival, they are fre-
quently exploited as agricultural labor in some of the poorest areas of Eu-
rope. They then gradually make their way north, with their passage affect-
ing the socioeconomic structure of the Mediterranean countries. Their po-
litical agency is very limited because of their transience and illegal status,
and because they hail from such a wide variety of countries, which limits
effective linguistic and cultural communication. In this context, the pres-

726
ence of migrants and refugees is more easily exploited for political gain by
the radical right. In countries with a colonial past, such as the United King-
dom and France, migrant groups frequently share a common language,
have acquired citizenship, and have established niches in the political sys-
tem that represent them. They are politically and culturally more able to
confront the radical right in political and social arenas. This is not the case
in south European countries. There, even large parties of the center-left are
weary of representing them, aware that public opinion is often unsupport-
ive and less able and willing to confront the political communication of the
radical right (Fella and Ruzza 2012).
Migrants’ limited political efficacy is compounded by another conse-
quence of the weakness of southern European states: poor control of the
territory means that violent attacks against migrants and refugees by both
organized and unorganized right-wing extremists cannot be effectively
prevented. Just as there are components of civil society striving to support
ethnically marginalized groups, so there are civil society groups that vic-
timize them. If the personal cost of violence is limited by poor policing, a
range of threatening behaviors are more likely to find legitimate political
expression. This will take different forms according to the history and the
system of political opportunities of the various countries. It may result in
attacks against migrants in Greece and in the creation of vigilante groups
in the north of Italy, where forms of harassment also take place (Ruzza
2009). In addition, there are civil society groups that utilize their associa-
tions to support vulnerable constituencies differentially, that is, according
to “ethnocratic” ideologies that may be oriented by nation-state nationalist
frames or by regional ethnonationalist ones, but which are linked to politi-
cal parties of the right—for instance, Golden Dawn in Greece and the
Northern League in the north of Italy. One key aspect of the crisis has been
the large number of individuals and families who have unexpectedly expe-
rienced poverty and need for assistance. Several civil society organizations
have engaged with them, trying to alleviate the problems of the recently
unemployed and the new homeless, who often have fallen behind on mort-
gages or are unable to pay rent. Among these organizations, the right has
in some situations, and particularly in Greece, taken on a service delivery
role. In such cases, the frame of the “deserving poor” has been utilized in
conjunction with exclusionist frames for migrants and refugees.
Thus, the political opportunities of the radical right are distinctive and
ample in southern Europe, but they differ among the three countries.

727
The Legacy of Transitions to Democracy and the Radical Right in
Southern Europe
The geopolitical opportunities available to the radical right in southern Eu-
rope are magnified by the still recent context of transitions to democracy,
and therefore by the persistence of ideological frames and institutional
structures related to the historical legacy of fascism and more generally to
right-wing authoritarianism. This is not only evidenced in ideological
terms by the Francoist memories of Spain, the legacy of the Greek
colonels’ rule, and the long-lasting survival of the MSI (a party directly in-
spired by Fascism) in Italy. It is also related to an incomplete institutional
transition whereby in Italy, for instance, no equivalent to the German de-
Nazification process took place and key institutions such as the police re-
mained virtually unchanged after the collapse of Fascism. This implies that
law-and-order solutions remain viable in popular culture, and are embed-
ded and accepted in some institutional routines, such as the policing style
in control of ordinary crime and the control of contentious politics. These
institutional behaviors are glorified by RRPs, making them distinctive in
the political market and ensuring a constituency for them in certain institu-
tional domains, such as those still marked by the incomplete transition
from authoritarianism that at least in part commonly shapes the political
culture of these three countries. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that
there are substantial differences between early radical right frames and re-
cent ones and that, as will be argued, they differ among countries. How-
ever, some common features can be identified in ideological terms.

The Ideologies of the Radical Right in Southern Europe:

“Ethnocracy” and Its Relation to Nationalism
Typically in southern Europe, as elsewhere in Europe, biological racist
frames have generally been replaced by culturalist ones in RRPs. This is in
line with the tradition first clearly expressed by the French nouvelle droite
of Alain de Benoist (Taguieff 1993; de Benoist 2011). Cultural framings of
the radical right, moreover, increasingly borrow elements from the new so-
cial movements of the 1980s, particularly the discourse on human rights,
but redefining and applying them to an “ethnic disadvantage of whites”
rhetoric, whereby claims to victimhood are reversed and utilized as a
source of grievances to advocate for the supposedly oppressed white ma-
jority (see Rydgren’s introduction to this book, Chapter 1).
A second cultural frame that emerges in all south European radical right

728
parties and movements is a populism in which “the people” are presented
as a unified entity and portrayed as being deceived by elites. Hence there is
an increasing tendency to identify the EU and its elites as responsible for
the oppression of the people. South European radical right movements and
parties are thus connecting populism and Euroskepticism (Betz 1994;
Meny and Surel 2002). Clearly, a populist framing of Euroskepticism is
not limited to the European South—it is, for instance, a distinctive feature
of the dynamics that led to the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.
These encompassed the political sentiments of the “losers of globaliza-
tion,” which include a protectionist reaction to the globalization of the
economy and a sociocultural response to the values of cosmopolitanism
fostered by globalization, such as negative reactions to increased migration
dynamics (Inglehart and Norris 2016). These components have also
marked the political cultures of countries in the European South. However,
there their impact has been increasing in the course of the crisis because
the populist discourse of the south European right has resonated with both
economic protectionism and nationalist identitarian values. It focused
more and more closely on a revival of nation-state nationalism against EU-
imposed cosmopolitanism, which is perceived as elitist and deceitful
(Trenz, Ruzza, and Guiraudon 2015). A convergence on the populist and
ethnocratic human rights frames has greatly facilitated interactions among
European radical right parties and movements. In recent decades, contacts
among European radical and extreme right movements and parties have in-
creased. Political discourse circulates across European states, and it in-
forms electoral platforms and policy framings.

CONCLUSIONS

The foregoing analysis points to a relatively stronger affirmation of RRPs

in Italy and Greece than in Spain. However, this takes place within the
general context of the greater success of other anti-system parties belong-
ing to different party families. It would be an error to concentrate on a sin-
gle variable to explain the differential success of radical right organiza-
tions in Southern Europe. This is not only because there are several con-
textual factors at play in the different case studies, but also because the dif-
ferences should be contextualized in terms of the much stronger success
and higher political impact of other anti-system parties.
The literature has traditionally pointed to the weakness of the radical
right in southern Europe (Carter 2005). This weakness remains, even if

729
RRPs have made major advances in two countries during the crisis. In fact,
the politically relevant change is the success of parties such as the M5S in
Italy, Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain, and Syriza in Greece, rather than
RRPs. Bearing this in mind, one still needs to focus on the marked differ-
ences in the strengths and weaknesses of these RRPs. The literature has
traditionally explained the poor performance of the radical right by noting
that the absence of strong post-industrial values has hindered its develop-
ment. However, this explanation has been criticized on methodological
grounds (Mudde 2007, 204). It appears even weaker at present, in a situa-
tion where large advances have been achieved, if not by the radical right,
then by parties that seem to express a post-materialist agenda focused on
issues of deliberative and participatory democracy, as do all the anti-sys-
tem parties mentioned above. In this context, more country-specific expla-
nations seem necessary to account for both the success of anti-system par-
ties and the relatively modest success of RRPs in three countries of the Eu-
ropean south.
If the success of anti-system parties in all three countries considered
here is strongly connected to the financial crisis and to their generally dis-
credited party systems, we argue that the differential success of RRPs is
better explained by a distinctive interaction between supply-side and de-
mand-side factors in each of the countries. In Italy, the relative success of
the Northern League, even if somewhat diminished recently, is due to the
successful transition of an established political formation from an ethnona-
tionalist party to a distinctive RRP. We maintain that a significant variable
in the transformation of regionalist ethnonationalist forces into radical
right ones in Italy but not in Spain is the lesser depth and diffusion of these
sentiments. We agree with the view that the dominant ethnonationalist
cleavage of Spain prevented the emergence of RRPs because several of
their defining issues were already taken by these formations.
We argue that that this has not happened in Italy because of the shallow-
ness and late appearance of politicized northern Italian ethnonationalism.
The fact that this ethnonationalism has an “invented” character is often
stressed in the literature (Fella and Ruzza 2006; Gâomez-Reino Cachafeiro
2002; Ruzza and Fella 2009). Its political action repertoire is based on a
wide array of forms of theatrical action, nation-state symbolism, and glori-
fication of language usages that do not sound persuasive to large groups of
the electorate in the north, and they often appear distasteful even to the
southern electorate (Fella and Ruzza 2006). The manufacture of nation-
state symbolism, which is well documented in classic texts on nationalism,

730
has been accomplished too quickly and too transparently to be persuasive
(Anderson 1983). It is precisely because of its recent, partial, geographi-
cally circumscribed, and apparently purely instrumental construction that it
could be easily reinterpreted in radical right terms in a way that would be
impossible in the Spanish context. However, it is for these same reasons
that in the end such radical right parties as the LN have been unable to
compete with a new entrant in Italy, the M5S. However, the shallow nature
of the LN’s ethnonationalism allows for a bridging, merging, and transfor-
mation of political frames that social movement researchers have docu-
mented in new movements and which would not be possible in a country
such as Spain, where the ethnonationalisms are old and established (Snow
and Benford 1988). The concept of a competition for political space be-
tween the ethnonationalist nativism and the anti-migrant nativism is per-
suasive: if ethnonationalism monopolizes nativism, less of this sentiment
will be available for other political usages.
Thus, the radicalization of the anti-migrant turn constitutes a new politi-
cal opportunity for the Northern League, which may aspire to obtaining a
broader electorate.1 This is a different setting from the Spanish one, where
there are several regions with viable and distinct ethnonationalist parties.
In Spain, ethnonationalism is deeply rooted in the political culture of large
parts of the country. Conversely, in Italy the coexistence of a radical-right
component and a separatist regionalist one was accomplished early in the
history of the LN, together with a Euroskeptic turn (Chari, Iltanen, and
Sylvia 2004). In this context, the LN can choose to emphasize or neglect
the ethnonationalist program or the radical right program, and it can do so
differently in different parts of the country and at different points in time.
In a period of perceived mass migration such as the present, the radical
right identity is therefore the prevalent one. Similarly, in Greece, nativism
is connected to historically strong and confrontational nationalist senti-
ments, and this gives strength and viability to RRPs. In other words, the
substrate of political culture in the various countries channels the common
emergence of anti-system sentiments in different directions. However, it
does not direct them in favor of incumbents or recent incumbents, not only
because of their high “systemness,” which is increasingly perceived as a
shortcoming, but also because of the commonly poor performance of insti-
tutionalized politics in southern Europe (Sartori 1976).
Thus in Italy, when in the early nineties Berlusconi presented his newly
founded party, Forza Italia, as a moderate center-right alternative to the
corrupt system of the first Italian Republic, he achieved high credibility

731
and electoral success. However, two decades later, with the country once
again risking financial disaster amid accusations of mismanagement, the
RRP recipe acquired an unusual level of acceptability. This acceptability
had already been increased by Berlusconi’s willingness to accept radical
right parties as junior parties in government since the early 1990s. How-
ever, while Berlusconi’s party legitimated this previously marginalized
party family, it also cannibalized it over the years, incorporating some of
the other parties’ political personnel and key ideas. This process of selec-
tive incorporation of RRP frames is even now continuing within the pre-
sent Renzi coalition, within which the center-right component articulates
some of the law-and-order values and anti-migrant sentiments that were
originally signature policies of the RRPs, and this is once again limiting
their potential success.
Nevertheless, all RRPs have historically been comparatively less in-
volved in episodes of political corruption, and this gives them some long-
lasting attractiveness in many contexts. Obviously, their small size and rel-
ative distance from power limit their chances of involvement in political
corruption, and in a period of mounting anti-political sentiment, these
characteristics help them. They were positioned as the more anti-system
and marginalized parties—even if in Italy the Northern League had been a
junior party in government and had had its share of well-publicized cor-
ruption scandals.
The same observation applies to Greece, where conventional political
forces were widely perceived to be responsible for the impact of the finan-
cial crisis that began in 2007, which was particularly damaging for Greece.
Reactions against perceptions of political corruption also took place in
Spain. And, as noted, this applies particularly to political parties and the
public sector. However, perceptions of corruption are regularly higher in
Italy and Greece than in Spain. For instance, in 2015 Spain ranked thirty-
sixth in the world (twenty-first in Europe) in perceived corruption (where
higher numbers indicate less perception of corruption), while Greece
ranked fifty-eighth in the world (twenty-eighth in Europe) and Italy sixty-
first in the world (thirtieth in Europe)—next to last in the list of West Eu-
ropean countries. Demand-side variables have also clearly been at work. In
the three countries considered, one sees an impoverished, disaffected pop-
ulation, where the “losers of globalization” syndrome embraces large por-
tions of the electorate (Norris 2005). However, as Alonso and Kaltwasser
(2014) argued, this electorate has yet to find a voice in its country’s politi-
cal offering.

732
 To conclude: an important asset of RRPs is their anti-party and sweep-
ingly anti-political ideology, or to be more specific, their strategic use of a
populist discourse through which they articulate a vertical split between an
undifferentiated “people,” which they claim to represent, and an equally
undifferentiated elite, which they see as the main threat to society (Aslani-
dis 2015; Ruzza and Fella 2011). The electorate is more tempted to accept
RRP recipes if conventional parties have been so discredited as to make
political outsiders appealing. This has typically been the case in both Italy
and Greece, but it is also true in Spain, although not in terms of RRPs. As
argued, the momentous political change of southern European countries is
the affirmation of anti-system parties such as Syriza in Greece, Podemos in
Spain, and M5S in Italy. It should be noted that in Italy this is the second
occurrence of such a reaction. In the early 1990s conventional parties were
so involved in widespread political corruption that the electorate over-
turned the entire party system. In those years, the LN was the outsider run-
ning on an anti-corruption platform, only to be later involved in repeated
episodes of political corruption itself. Given this background, it is not sur-
prising that anti-system protest is now often embodied in a different type
of party family in several countries, particularly in Italy and Spain. How-
ever, it should be noted that aspects of nativism and anti-migrant policies
are now also incorporated in M5S, which seems to suggest the diffusion of
RRPs’ ideology beyond their traditional constituencies. A similar develop-
ment is possibly taking place in Spain, where Ciudadanos has also been
seen as incorporating nativist and anti-migrant sentiments.

733
NOTE

1. It should be stressed that in the Italian context, ethnonationalist senti-

ments are mainly confined to only a part of the country. There are
other ethnonationalisms, such as Sardinian and Vallée d’Aosta parties,
but they remain rather marginal (Hepburn 2009). Tyrol nationalism is
rather different because it is an example of border nationalism with
somewhat different characteristics (Harvie 1994).
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CHAPTER 26

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

MATTHEW J. GOODWIN AND JAMES DENNISON

THE radical right in the United Kingdom has traditionally been associated
with failure. In contrast to the experience of several other Western democ-
racies, the failures of extreme and radical right parties in the United King-
dom led academics to point to “British exceptionalism” (Eatwell 2000), or
to portray this case as the “ugly duckling” in the wider family of Europe’s
extreme right (Griffin 1996). Explanations for the failure of the radical
right have variously focused on political culture, the majoritarian electoral
system, and supply-side factors, mainly the toxic legacy of fascism that
dominated the postwar period. Kitschelt (1995) traced the weakness of the
radical right in the United Kingdom to the role of agency, specifically its
failure to adopt a more electorally appealing “winning formula” and also
the tendency of the mainstream center-right Conservative Party to limit the
political space available for the radical right. At least until 2010, the ex-
treme right in the United Kingdom remained generally committed to crude
biological racism, anti-Semitism, and a thinly disguised hostility toward
liberal parliamentary democracy. After that, however, the collapse of the
extreme right in the United Kingdom coincided with the ascendancy of the
UK Independence Party (UKIP), which merged its founding goal of
Britain’s exit from the European Union with much of the radical right’s
ideological trappings of anti-immigration, nationalism, and anti-establish-
ment populism.
Between 2010 and 2016, UKIP scored a string of impressive successes,
finishing ahead of the mainstream parties in the 2014 European Parliament
elections, then winning nearly 13 percent of the popular vote in the 2015
general election before, arguably, playing a significant role in both secur-
ing and winning Britain’s 2016 EU referendum. If UKIP is the heir to and
representative of the radical right in the United Kingdom, it has laid to rest
the possibility that the country is immune to radical right success. How-
ever, despite UKIP’s prominence, there remains uncertainty over whether
UKIP is a bona fide member of the radical right party family, as well as
how its sudden success can be explained. In this chapter, we examine the
evolution of the extreme and radical right in the United Kingdom, provid-
ing an overview of its historical, organizational, and electoral develop-
ment. We then consider the case of UKIP—whether it belongs in the radi-
cal right party family and how the demand and supply sides of British poli-
tics have contributed to its success. In the final section we consider the role

739
of UKIP in the United 2016 referendum on European Union membership
and what the future is likely to hold for the radical right in Britain.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

Consistent with Rydgren (2007, 240), we define the radical right as a polit-
ical movement anchored in the twin core traits of ethnonationalism and
anti-establishment populism. Such parties, observes Rydgren, put empha-
sis on “ethno-nationalism rooted in myths about the distant past. Their pro-
gram is directed toward strengthening the nation by making it more ethni-
cally homogeneous and by returning to traditional values. They generally
view individual rights as secondary to the goals of the nation.” Members
of the diverse radical right party family, Rydgren continues, “also tend to
be populists in accusing elites of putting internationalism ahead of the na-
tion and of putting their own narrow self-interests and various special in-
terests ahead of the interest of the people.” However, unlike several other
Western democracies, in the United Kingdom movements that are often
associated with the radical right have historically advocated a more ex-
treme ideological position, which is closer to Carter’s (2005) definition of
neo-Nazism, including an overt hostility toward liberal democracy, con-
spiratorial anti-Semitism, and biological racism. At least until the electoral
rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), few parties exhibited the more
“palatable” ethnopluralist doctrine and acceptance of parliamentary
democracy associated with the radical right.
This ideological positioning had clear repercussions. Husbands (1988,
65) notes that while far right parties in France and Germany were able to
make significant electoral impressions in the mid-1960s, the extreme right
in Great Britain at that time was a “tiny political irritant, heavily stigma-
tized in the public mind by its often unashamedly neo-Nazi sympathies
and celebration of Hitler and therefore usually able to mobilize only nuga-
tory levels of support.” By early 1967, however, a number of fringe far
right-wing political organizations had coalesced around the National Front
(NF), a far right coalition that achieved some minor electoral successes
and high visibility in the 1970s. The NF was initially an attempt by Arthur
Chesterton, the anti-Semitic, anti-liberal-democracy founder and leader of
the ultra-conservative League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), to build on the
momentum of his former outfit, which had come under threat from the
growing white-nationalist Racial Preservation Society (RPS) and the Mon-
day Club, an anti-decolonization, traditionalist pressure group dedicated to

740
pushing the Conservative Party to the right. Chesterton managed to unite
the LEL, the British National Party (unrelated to the modern BNP), and
members of the RPS, while seeking to avoid the electorally toxic Greater
British Movement (GBM) and National Socialist Movement (NSM), both
of which were openly committed to Nazism and anti-Semitism (Walker
1977). After GBM leader John Tyndall, who would later become NF
leader, moderated his position, GBM members were later allowed to join,
and would be followed in by members of an assortment of minor far right
organizations over the following year.
The NF’s initial attempts to publicly downplay anti-Semitism and
Nazism and to place unity and electoral expediency over ideological purity
opened a new chapter for the radical right in Britain. The NF also emerged
against the favorable backdrop of Conservative MP and shadow defense
secretary Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, which called for
the voluntary repatriation of nonwhite immigrants, underscoring growing
public concern over immigration. Following local elections in which only
a handful of NF candidates won more than 10 percent of the vote, at the
1970 general election the party fielded ten candidates gaining an average
of 3.6 percent of the vote, albeit in a political context of few competitor
minor parties. Thereafter the emergence of the more indisputably neo-Nazi
John Tyndall and Martin Webster as co-leaders “did not appear to have
harmed the Party’s appeal. Both tried to excuse their earlier records [of
neo-Nazism] as youthful indiscretions. They now attempt to portray their
movement as a respectable political party” (Kosmin and Grizzard 1974,
18). After the NF candidate won 9 and 8 percent of the vote in two 1972
by-elections and a whopping 16 percent in the May 1973 West Bromwich
by-election, in which the party claimed to have the tacit support of Enoch
Powell, hopes were high for the following general elections.
The 1972 decision by the UK government to give residency to expelled
Ugandan Asians had given the NF a prominent issue on which to focus its
campaigns, most visibly in the form of fascist-style street marches that re-
flected the neo-Nazi roots and the urban, young, male demographic profile
of a significant portion of the party’s membership. Kosmin and Grizzard
(1974) nonetheless identified three distinct groupings within the NF—neo-
Nazis and fascists, populists including former Labour and even former
Liberal Party members, and higher-social-status ultra-conservatives, often
formerly of the armed forces. The relative breadth of the NF’s coalition re-
sulted in highly divergent campaigning strategies according to con-
stituency. The NF’s policies centered on strict social authoritarianism, in-

741
cluding corporal and capital punishment, opposition to British involvement
in international organizations, closer ties with the “White Common-
wealth,” economic protectionism coupled with hostility toward “interna-
tional financiers,” and, most prominently, forced repatriation of nonwhite
immigrants and a commitment to “smash” the Irish Republican Army
(IRA). Strategically, the NF held anti-Semitism as a “core component”
while publicly dismissing charges of such, and instead attempting to gain
mass appeal via “anti-black hostility,” which it “frequently claimed was
not impelled by racist motives” (Husbands 1988, 71–72).
Despite being described as a “flourishing organisation” by the London
Evening News, obtaining “publicity out of all proportion to its strength,”
and putting forward the minimum number of candidates required to air a
party political broadcast in 1974, the NF’s average vote share would fall in
the February 1974 general election to 3.2 percent and the party would fail
to get back any of its electoral deposits (the deposit of £500 required to be
a candidate in a general election, returnable if the candidate receives 5 per-
cent of the vote; Kosmin and Grizzard 1974, 18). The average NF vote
share fell slightly again in October of that year, demonstrating that “the an-
ticipated advance had not materialised” (Le Lohe 1976, 292), which, in the
face of Britain’s unforgiving majoritarian voting system, sapped the party
of morale. These disappointments accentuated divisions and infighting be-
tween a “populist” faction, which accused leader Tyndall of neo-Nazism
and notably chanted “Nazi! Nazi!” during the party leader’s 1974 confer-
ence speech, and Tyndall’s faction, who accused the former group of left-
wing sympathies. Power would shift between these two groups, debilitat-
ing and splitting the party by the time of the 1979 election. Despite osten-
sible ideological differences between the two factions, both were awash
with biological racism, white supremacism, conspiratorial anti-Semitism,
and calls to overthrow the parliamentary system (Fielding 1981) and the
ideological core of the party leadership remained essentially extremist.
Eventually the anti-Nazi “populists” would form their own party—the Na-
tional Party—which at its first meeting narrowly voted against banning
“all those with Nazi, Fascist or Communist backgrounds” and claimed to
be more uncompromisingly anti-immigration than the NF (Walker 1977,
193). It won two local elections in Blackburn in 1976, somewhat over-
shadowing the NF. In the same year, eighty NF candidates won more than
10 percent of the vote in local elections against a background of Malawian
Asian immigration. However, the 1979 general election ended in a poor
average vote share of just 1.3 percent for the NF, despite the party having
fielded more than three times as many candidates as it had in 1974. Com-

742
bined with the ongoing splintering, this finished off the party as a signifi-
cant force.
The far right would spend most of the next two decades in the electoral
wilderness. In the 1983 general election the rump NF would put forward
sixty candidates, who averaged just 1 percent of the vote. The newly
formed British National Party (BNP) fielded fifty-four candidates, two-
fifths of whom had previously run as NF candidates, gaining an average
vote share of just 0.6 percent, with only five running campaigns (Goodwin
2011). The latter party had been formed a year earlier by John Tyndall and
was dominated by former NF members, leading Tyndall to later remark
that between the BNP and NF “there was ‘scarcely any difference’ in ide-
ology or policy save in the minutest detail” (Goodwin 2011, 37). Despite
attempts by the some of the “moderating” nationalist organizations that
initially coalesced around the BNP to distance the party from overt fascism
and ultra-nationalism, the party was soon filled with neo-Nazis, particu-
larly from the Greater British Movement. Despite seeing its membership
fall by more than half, to just eight hundred by the end of the 1980s—con-
siderably fewer than the still more established rump NF—the BNP at-
tracted short-lived attention in 1993 when it managed to win one seat on a
local council in East London by harnessing local anger over perceived
preferential treatment for nonwhites in social housing. Following sustained
anti-BNP campaigning, the party would lose the seat just one year later.
Aside from this flurry, Tyndall’s BNP avoided serious investment in elec-
toral politics well into the 1990s, instead focusing on organizational
growth, leaving it unable to replicate the far right’s relative successes of
the 1970s.
The primary explanation for the far right’s lack of electoral success in
the 1980s, aside from division and infighting, was the anti-immigration
rhetoric of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who believed that the work-
ing class “need[ed] to be reassured rather than patronised” on the subject
(Kaufmann 2013). In reality, both emigration and immigration had been
falling since the late 1960s, and in 1979—the year Thatcher took power—
fewer than 200,000 immigrants arrived in Britain. After a sharp dip during
her first term in office, this figure would gradually rise from 1984 onward,
and in the Conservatives’ final year in power in 1997 under John Major,
just under 325,000 immigrants arrived, according to the Office for Na-
tional Statistics. The still relatively low levels of immigration, coupled
with a socially conservative government, choked off the far right’s rele-
vance. However, following the landslide election of Tony Blair and “New”

743
Labour, there emerged more political demand for parties that opposed im-
migration. Between 1997 and 2004, non-EU immigration more than dou-
bled, from 166,000 per annum to 370,000, and following the 2004 EU
eastern enlargement, annual EU immigration rose from 66,000 to 269,000
by 2015. Just as had happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, public
concern over immigration rose in unison with immigration levels. Whereas
prior to 1999, the percentage of Britons who were concerned enough about
immigration to list it as one of their top three issues was never higher than
5 percent, by 2006 it had overtaken health and defense as the issue about
which the United Kingdom was most concerned, according to Ipsos-
Mori’s issue index.
Just as immigration was becoming a salient issue for the first time in a
generation, from 1999 onward, under the new leadership of Cambridge
graduate Nick Griffin, the BNP began to overhaul its ideological message
to voters, invest in electoral politics, and target working-class communities
in northern England. Though the party remained broadly committed to the
racial nationalism that had dominated its formative period, Griffin sought
to adopt elements of the new ethnopluralist doctrine, which asserted the in-
compatibility rather than inequality of certain racial groups and was be-
coming increasingly popular among Europe’s more successful radical right
parties such as the National Front in France and the Freedom Party of Aus-
tria. Griffin, working within a significantly more centralized leadership
structure than the committee system of the NF, also replaced overt anti-de-
mocratic appeals with anti-establishment populism, turned the party away
from conspiratorial anti-Semitism (even fielding a Jewish candidate in the
2004 local elections) and toward Islamophobia (including calls for banning
the burqa, the sale of halal meat, new mosques, and further Islamic immi-
gration), and began to invest heavily in local politics or “community ac-
tivism.”
After the party’s candidates won an average of 3.6 percent of the vote in
the 2001 general election, higher than the NF had ever achieved, the BNP
attracted additional members who were largely former Labour voters moti-
vated by “anxiety over immigration and rising ethno-cultural diversity,”
both of which were interpreted as threats to the working class (Goodwin
2011, 142). Members highlighted Islamic immigration and British Mus-
lims as a particular threat to British society and tended to be from white
neighborhoods in cities with large numbers of Muslims, suggesting a seg-
regation effect (Biggs and Knauss 2011), which was also found among
their voters in local elections (Bowyer 2008). The growing BNP would

744
win just short of 200,000 votes in the 2005 general election—equal to the
NF’s tally twenty-six years earlier. In spite of periods of infighting and an
ideological “recalibration” following the lack of breakthrough in the 2004
European Parliament and local elections (Copsey 2009), throughout the
rest of the decade the party became increasingly prominent, reaching its
high-water mark in 2009.
In that year, the BNP recorded 943,598 votes (6.3 percent of the total)
and gained two seats in the European Parliament. Nick Griffin appeared on
the BBC’s town-hall debate program Question Time amid national contro-
versy. By this time, the party had a total of 55 local councilors in England
(and was the second party in one East London borough). By that point the
party enjoyed an annual income of nearly £2 million (up from less than
£80,000 in 2001), its membership peaked at over 12,500, and it was em-
ploying more than a dozen full-time staff members, compared to just three
in 2001 (Goodwin 2011). The BNP enjoyed particularly strong support in
northern and economically disadvantaged communities where average ed-
ucation levels were low and there were large Muslim communities (Ford
and Goodwin 2010). Between 2005 and 2009 fifty-two of the fifty-eight
council seats won by the BNP came at the expense of Labour incumbents,
and the BNP did particularly well in those local elections in which the
Conservatives failed to run a full-blooded campaign or even offer a candi-
date (Wilks-Heeg 2008). The party’s voters were disproportionately
“skilled working-class” men who were pessimistic about their economic
future, who were strongly dissatisfied with the established parties, and who
saw immigration as their primary political concern (Goodwin 2011; Ford
and Goodwin 2010). Unlike the NF, however, whose supporters tended to
be young, the BNP’s voter base was disproportionately old.
In the aftermath of the 2010 general election, which saw the party re-
ceive more than half a million votes and poll strongest in districts that
recorded the largest increases in unemployment, the BNP disintegrated as
a consequence of its failure to secure seats in parliament, financial prob-
lems, and infighting over Griffin’s leadership style and “modernizing” am-
bitions. Simultaneously, the rise of the Euroskeptic, anti-immigration, yet
more respectable UK Independence Party stripped the BNP of its non-ex-
tremist voter base. Conversely, the founding in 2009 of the far right, anti-
Islamic English Defence League—a street protest movement and at one
time the most prominent “counter-jihad” movement in Europe—provided
a welcome new home for young radicals who were more interested in
thuggish hooliganism than in diligently navigating electoral politics in the

745
face of the UK’s morale-sapping majoritarian system. In the 2012 local
elections the BNP attracted fewer than 26,000 voters, compared to more
than 240,000 four years previously (on the BNP’s collapse, see Goodwin
2014). In the 2015 general election the party fielded just eight candidates.
Former BNP members would go on to set up a number of ideologically
similar parties, including the British Democratic Party, Liberty GB, the
Britannica Party, the Britain Freedom Party, and Britain First. All of these
groups expressed commitment to British nationalism, anti-Islam, and,
above all, an ethnopluralism that seeks the preservation of “traditional”
British culture, with varying degrees of racist, fascist, and neo-Nazi under-
tones. Britain First, the most significant of these offshoots, was founded in
2011 and has a uniquely strong social media profile (more than 1.5 million
Facebook followers in 2016), yet intermittent attempts to convert its online
presence into electoral success have so far failed, with its vote shares not
reaching anywhere near those of the BNP or even the NF. Indeed, 62 per-
cent of the BNP’s 2010 voters would five years later opt for a party with
just as strong anti-immigration, anti-European, and anti-establishment cre-
dentials as Griffin’s now shattered outfit, and without nearly as much of
the neo-Nazi baggage—the UK Independence Party (Fieldhouse et al.
2015). (See Table 26.1.)
Table 26.1 NF, BNP, and UKIP General Election Results, 1970–
2015
Can-
Election di- Average Vote in
and Party Votes dates Seats Contested Highest Vote
1970, NF 10,902 10 3.6 5.6
1974 76,865 54 3.2 7.8
(Feb.), NF
1974 113,843 90 3.1 9.4
(Oct.), NF
1979, NF 191,719 303 1.3 7.6
1983, NF 27,065 60 1.1 3.7
1983, BNP 14,621 54 0.6 1.3
1987, BNP 563 2 0.5 0.6
1992, BNP 7,631 13 1.2 3.6

746
 1997, BNP 35,832 54 1.4 7.5
2001, BNP 47,129 33 3.9 16.4
2005, BNP 192,746 117 4.3 17.0
2010, BNP 563,743 339 3.8 14.6
2015, BNP 1,667 8 0.5 0.9
1997, 106,028 194 1.1 5.7
UKIP
2001, 380,575 428 2.2 7.8
UKIP
2005, 603,298 496 2.8 10.4
UKIP
2010, 919,546 572 3.5 9.4 (17.3 in
UKIP Speaker’s seat)
2015, 3,881,129 614 13.2 44.4
UKIP

THE CONTEMPORARY RADICAL RIGHT: UKIP

The collapse of the traditional extreme right increased the amount of polit-
ical space that was available for the UK Independence Party, a “hard” Eu-
roskeptic party that was founded in 1993 with the goal of withdrawing
Britain from the EU. UKIP emerged from the Anti-Federalist League, a
minor party that had been mobilized in the context of the upcoming Maas-
tricht Treaty and its plan for a common European currency and greater in-
tegration of the various European Communities into a single European
Union. UKIP’s founder, a left-wing professor at the London School of
Economics, initially hoped to distance the party from the radical right and
thus avoided the word “British” in its name (Ford and Goodwin 2014).
Most of the early recruits to the party were former Conservatives whose
existing suspicions about European integration had been confirmed by the
United Kingdom’s disastrous involvement in the European Exchange Rate
Mechanism. UKIP’s first foray into electoral politics came amid financial
difficulties and infighting at the still majoritarian 1994 European Parlia-
ment elections, when the party came in fifth with 1 percent of the vote.
Commentators initially considered UKIP a single-issue anti-European
party, though some compared it to the 1950s French Poujadist movement,

747
which relied heavily on the support of the self-employed and small busi-
ness owners and blamed a corrupt elite for national decline, social change,
and cultural degeneration (Ford and Goodwin 2014).
During the remainder of the 1990s, however, UKIP was overshadowed
by the Referendum Party, an upstart party that was flooded with funds by
multimillionaire Sir James Goldsmith, which similarly campaigned for a
referendum on the question of whether or not Britain should remain in the
EU. The Referendum Party managed to secure 2.6 percent of the national
vote in 1997, fielding candidates for 547 seats, while UKIP managed just
0.3 percent of the vote, having stood candidates for 194 seats. UKIP fin-
ished ahead of the Referendum Party in just two districts, and only one
candidate, future leader Nigel Farage, received enough votes (over 5 per-
cent) to have his electoral deposit returned. Despite electoral disappoint-
ment, UKIP would be flooded by Referendum Party activists later that
year after Sir Goldsmith died. Around the same time, a small group of
UKIP candidates, including Farage, ousted erstwhile leader Alan Sked
who they viewed as too erratic, too intellectual and too autocratic. Sked re-
sponded that he had resigned because the party now contained racist mem-
bers and had “been infected by the far right.” Continual infighting over the
next decade would regularly be accompanied by accusations of far right
sympathies and collusion with the BNP, underscored when photos
emerged in the press of Farage meeting with BNP leaders during the
2000–2002 party leadership of Jeffrey Titford, formerly leader of the radi-
cal right New Britain Party.
From 1999 onward, UKIP became increasingly prominent in the public
imagination as the obvious anti-European choice—a choice increasingly in
demand in Britain—in European Parliament elections, which had switched
to a proportional system. In 1999 UKIP won 7 percent of the vote and
three seats, which they would increase to 16 percent and twelve seats, fin-
ishing third, in 2004 under the leadership of former Conservative MP
Roger Knapman and with former Labour MP, talk show host, and minor
celebrity Robert Kilroy-Silk as a candidate. Prior to the election, these two,
respectively, boosted the professionalism and prominence of UKIP, while
reinforcing the party’s claims to be a single-issue organization on neither
the left nor the right.1 Whereas between 1997 and 2001 UKIP had been
overshadowed by then Conservative leader William Hague’s ardent anti-
single-currency campaigning, in 2004 and afterward UKIP was able to lay
claim to being the only British party to oppose the EU eastern enlargement
of that year. UKIP’s political context would become more favorable still

748
after David Cameron took over as leader of the Conservative Party in
2005. An upper-class, socially liberal self-styled “heir to Blair” who was
committed to “modernising” the Conservatives and getting them to “stop
banging on about Europe,” Cameron was the perfect foil for new UKIP
leader Nigel Farage, who, after taking over in 2006, committed the party to
social conservatism, laissez-faire economics, and populist swipes at the
British and European political elites. Farage also resisted considerable
calls from UKIP’s membership and National Executive Committee to form
an electoral pact with the BNP, which had roundly outperformed UKIP in
the 2005 general election. In doing so, Farage would gain ideological sym-
pathy from a large pool of disgruntled conservatives while maintaining
UKIP’s legitimacy as a non-extremist party.
The Farage-led UKIP went into the 2009 European Parliament elections
in the context of a high-profile MP expenses scandal that had implicated
all three of the mainstream parties to varying extents and was exacerbated
by the still unraveling financial crisis. After their strong 2004 showing and
with immigration only momentarily overshadowed by economic issues,
UKIP was now an obvious choice for voters with a broad range of con-
cerns, though it still had to deal with the BNP to its right and the non-gov-
erning Conservatives to its left. The party again won just over 16 percent
of the vote, this time increasing the number of its member of the European
Parliament (MEPs) to thirteen. Soon after, Farage resigned as leader,
paving the way for Lord Pearson—a traditionalist former Conservative
who had previously invited Dutch radical right politician Geert Wilders to
speak in the House of Lords—to take over as leader. Pearson’s time as
leader would be notable for his criticism of the role of Islam in society,
culminating in a call for “uniculturalism” and “restoring Britishness” in the
party’s 2010 manifesto, directly mirroring the cultural focus of Continental
Europe’s radical right, in contrast to the BNP’s explicitly racial outlook. In
the run-up to the 2010 general election, Pearson controversially called for
UKIP candidates to stand down in districts with Euroskeptic Conservative
or Labour candidates; moreover, he ran a self-admittedly amateurish cam-
paign. Nevertheless, UKIP won an impressive 3.1 percent of the vote na-
tionally, solidifying its place as Britain’s fourth (albeit still fringe) party
and making the “modernized” BNP electorally redundant.
Throughout the following Parliament, notable for resulting in the first
coalition government in seventy years, UKIP made rapid and unprece-
dented electoral gains. With the Liberal Democrats stripped of their protest
vote base, the Conservatives both led by and “in bed with” liberals, and

749
Labour moving to the left under the hapless and thoroughly metropolitan
Ed Miliband, the political horizon had opened up for Farage’s party, which
now made highly simplistic anti-immigration and populism its primary po-
litical messages, dropping the Kulturkampf of Lord Pearson. Despite al-
most continuous infighting, in the 2013 local elections UKIP won an aver-
age of 23 percent of the vote in wards in which they ran candidates and in-
creased the number of their councilors from 4 to 147. By this time Farage
—increasingly a household name—was consciously focusing UKIP’s still
nascent electoral machine away from areas with young, ethnically diverse,
and highly educated voters and toward the older, less educated, more
working-class electorates found in England’s market towns, who tended to
be deeply unimpressed by the social changes in Britain since 1997. One
year later, as anxieties over the financial crisis dissipated and amid in-
creased immigration from the eastern member states of the again enlarged
EU (which by now was routinely presented in the British press as a be-
yond-redemption economic basket case), UKIP—already the primary elec-
toral vehicle for anti-European sentiment—stormed to a first-place finish
in the 2014 European Parliament elections. Thereafter, UKIP and Farage
dominated media attention in the run-up to the 2015 general election, dur-
ing which time they would gain two Conservative MPs via defections. In
the election, UKIP finished third, securing 13.6 percent of the vote, which
—disappointingly for the party—resulted in just a single House of Com-
mons seat, yet again triggering a period of infighting and calls from rivals
for Farage to resign.
Following the election, UKIP’s polling figures remained stable at be-
tween 10 and 15 percent, suggesting that it was now established as the new
third force in British politics. Any predictions that UKIP would disappear
following the 2016 referendum on EU membership seem premature, de-
spite a subsequent fall in the party’s polling figures following the decision
to leave. Indeed, it remains uncertain what type of party UKIP actually is
—a single-issue party, a traditionalist Conservative spin-off, a prototypical
radical right party, or something in between.

IS UKIP RADICAL RIGHT?

There remains no clear consensus among academics about the correct ide-
ological label for UKIP. Until fairly recently, UKIP was widely seen as a
right-wing single-issue party (Usherwood 2008; Hayton 2010), as was “the
anti-EU faction of the Conservative Party, on both membership and ideo-

750
logical grounds” (Usherwood 2008, 259). However, as a result of the
greater attention given to both UKIP and the European radical right, their
fairly concurrent growth, and the former’s increased campaigning on is-
sues besides EU memberships, academics increasingly label UKIP as a
full-fledged member of the European radical right party family (Art 2011;
Driver 2011; Ford and Goodwin 2014; Bale, Hough, and van Kessel 2013;
Goodwin and Milazzo 2015; Hayton 2016; Evans and Mellon 2016). It
should be noted that these works tend to be empirical explanations for ei-
ther the growth of UKIP or for individual-level support for Farage’s party,
rather than theoretical or comparative works concerned with correctly
placing the party within a typology. Moreover, a significant number of
academics still equivocate over whether UKIP properly and wholly sub-
scribes to the radical right ideology, as the party’s emphasis on Euroskepti-
cism and (until very recently) its lack of interest in other issues or policy
prescriptions made it at the very least anomalous within that category
(Ford and Goodwin 2014).
It is this focus on Euroskepticism—essentially a constitutional and insti-
tutional issue—rather on than cultural, identitarian, or ethnic concerns that
has forced academics to hesitate before placing UKIP within the radical
right family. Leach (2009, 197) summarizes UKIP’s ideology as “not
racist or fascist and only questionably nationalist . . . It may perhaps be de-
scribed as populist.” More recently, Lynch and Whitaker (2013, 295) con-
sider UKIP’s radical right credentials directly and conclude that despite in-
termittent moves toward the radical right, the party remains essentially a
hard niche Euroskeptic party and a direct reaction to the soft Euroskeptic
mainstream Conservatives. They note that “extremist views towards Is-
lamic culture featured prominently in UKIP’s discourse under Lord Pear-
son, party leader from 2009 to 2010,” but that “since the return to the lead-
ership of Nigel Farage in late 2010, the radical right turn has stalled. A
2011 policy statement did not include the burqa ban, with Farage saying it
is ‘something that I have inherited to some extent.’ . . . Farage has also de-
scribed the position on uniculturalism [defined in the party’s 2010 general
election manifesto as “aiming to create a single British culture embracing
all races and religions”] as ‘pretty unhelpful. Hands up, we got it wrong.’ ”
Lynch and Whitaker (2013, 308) conclude that UKIP is not a populist radi-
cal right party and that, aside from adopting stringent anti-immigration
rhetoric (to which the public is largely receptive), “aping the populist radi-
cal right’s xenophobia would risk contaminating the party brand.” Simi-
larly, Tournier-Sol (2015) characterizes UKIP’s ideology as reliant on
three traditions—Euroskepticism (justified on the grounds of democracy,

751
independence, and a global role for the United Kingdom), conservatism
(with the party as the “true” heir to Thatcher’s economic liberalism and so-
cial conservatism), and populism (couched in terms of defending or restor-
ing democracy).
Mudde (2017a) specifically excludes UKIP from the party family that
he labels “populist radical right” on the grounds that its core ideology does
not contain the nativism that, alongside authoritarianism and populism, he
uses to define the group. Nativism, which argues that the nation-state
should retain the ethnic, national and religious homogeneity of its native
group and that threats to this homogeneity, both internal and external, un-
dermine the citizenry’s happiness, safety, and prosperity and should there-
fore be resisted, has indeed featured only sporadically in UKIP’s rhetoric
and policies. However, Mudde (2017a, 6) goes on to speculate that “UKIP
seems increasingly pushed into a radical right direction, and might move
there after the Brexit referendum, which has significantly reduced the
saliency of its main issue, i.e. exit from the EU.” Mudde (2017b, 617) goes
on to admit that “unlike many of my colleagues, I do not consider UKIP to
be a populist radical right party.” Mudde also excludes from the grouping
the British National Party, whose “racism and historical revisionism” give
it features of the distinct extreme right.
How well does UKIP align with Rydgren’s (2007) definition of the radi-
cal right as parties that combine ethnonationalist xenophobia and anti-es-
tablishment populism? With regard to the former, Rydgren sees the radical
right as concerned with “strengthening the nation by making it more ethni-
cally homogenous and by returning it to traditional values” (Rydgren
2007, 240). Here we only see a tentative link to UKIP’s policy outlook,
which has ideological roots entirely separate from those of the French nou-
velle droite, which formed in the 1960s and 1970s to counter the intellec-
tual dominance of the left and acted as the prototype for much of Western
Europe’s radical right tradition. These groups, primarily concerned with
national identity and “ethnopluralism,” aimed at avoiding the “cultural ex-
tinction” of Western Europe’s nations by segregating the native popula-
tions and expelling outsiders.
Whereas these parties use an ethnopluralist justification for their claim
that Europe’s nations have the right to protect their cultural identity,
UKIP’s ideas of national identity have been far more couched in constitu-
tional, economic and political terms stemming from their founding mission
of taking Britain out of the European Union. When UKIP has discussed
cultural identity, particularly with regard to immigration, it has largely

752
been as a means to justify its Euroskepticism rather than as the party’s de-
sired end in itself. Furthermore, when UKIP has spoken of the British peo-
ple in monistic terms, it has been in order to juxtapose that imagined group
against the European Union—framed as alien, distant, and thoroughly at
odds with the British political tradition—and, by logical continuation, with
those members of the domestic political elite that have acquiesced to the
inherited liberties and privileges of British citizens being surrendered to or
undermined by foreign institutions. As already discussed, the major excep-
tion to this rule came about during the party’s leadership under Lord Pear-
son, when the party’s “Restoring Britishness” policy was underpinned by a
“uniculturalism” in response to external threat fostered by “corportatist
Americanized pressures” and an “an anti-British British establishment
born of a 1960s self-loathing.” Moreover, UKIP’s membership and even
politicians have intermittently gained news coverage following racist com-
ments that clearly display an ethnic understanding of nationality, in spite
of UKIP’s manifesto commitments to civic rather than ethnic nationalism
(Ford and Goodwin 2014).
Moreover, though UKIP has undoubtedly long been an anti-immigration
party—a position that has only gotten stronger in recent years and to which
party insiders have consciously given more prominence in campaigning—
its anti-immigration sentiment has tended to focus on European Union mi-
gration, which UKIP has lamented as a reflection of the British electorate’s
inability to control its borders and to pursue its own selective immigration
policy. UKIP’s anti-immigration policy has been a mobilizing strategy for
the party’s central policy of pursuing British withdrawal from the Euro-
pean Union rather than a necessary approach to maintaining Britain’s eth-
nic homogeneity, as the British National Party had sought to do.
However, from this point of departure, UKIP has then adopted many of
the arguments against immigration (and thus against EU membership) that
other radical right parties have—focusing on criminality, social insecurity,
welfare costs, and the effects of migration on wages, particularly those of
low-skilled workers. Overall, whereas most European radical right parties
have seen ethnicity as the defining trait of the nation and immigration as a
threat per se to the nation, UKIP has framed institutions and liberties as the
defining trait of the British nation and “uncontrolled” immigration merely
as an example of how those institutions and liberties have been under-
mined by the European Union and its supporters in the domestic elite. In
this sense, UKIP’s ideology might be seen as a particularly stringent radi-
cal or populist variation on classical Toryism.

753
 What of the second aspect of Rydgren’s definition? By 2016, UKIP un-
questionably held anti-establishment populism at the heart of its rhetoric, if
not its core ideology. To UKIP and its leader, Nigel Farage, the historical
travesty of Britain’s membership in the European Union was evidence
enough that Britain’s political elite was corrupt and that, given the loss of
democratic power that the British people had subsequently suffered as a
result, the defining conflict in the United Kingdom was between a “pure
people and corrupt elite” (Mudde 2004, 543). In this sense, UKIP has long
since adopted a populist vision of the key struggle in society and, further-
more, has campaigned using classically populist interpretations of contem-
porary politics. Rydgren (2007, 243–244) states that “to create distance be-
tween themselves and the established political parties, populist parties aim
at recoding the political space, with its diversity of parties, into one single,
homogenous political class. . . . According to the new radical right-wing
parties, in reality the established parties do not compete but collude . . .
[making] it possible for the new radical right wing parties to present them-
selves as the real champions of true democracy—as a new kind of party—
which takes the worries and interests of the common man into account.”
UKIP has long campaigned against the three parties as if they were a sin-
gle bloc of pro-European social democrats—using the portmanteau term
“LibLabCon”—who have surrendered power to an alien, undemocratic in-
stitution and who are run by “a bunch of college kids who are completely
untouched by the real people of this world.” From 2014 onward, Farage
began to more forcefully vocalize the populist message of his party, which
he described as “The People’s Army.”
UKIP’s classification as a radical right party is contingent on whether
one’s definition of the radical right is based on policy proposals or core
ideology. UKIP clearly complies with the former type of definition, such
as that used by Givens (2005, 30), who states, “They take an anti-immi-
grant stance by proposing stronger immigrant controls and the repatriation
of unemployed immigrants, and they call for a national (i.e., citizens only)
preference in social benefits and employment (‘welfare chauvinism’). In
contrast to earlier extreme right or fascist parties, they work within a coun-
try’s political and electoral system. Although they do not have the goal of
tearing down the current political system, they are anti-establishment.
They consider themselves ‘outsiders’ in the party system, and therefore not
tainted by government or mainstream parties’ scandals.” On the other
hand, UKIP is a poor fit with the radical right as defined in ideological
terms by Minkenberg (2000, 174): “a myth of a homogeneous nation, a ro-
mantic and populist ultra-nationalism which is directed against the concept

754
of liberal and pluralistic democracy and its underlying principles of indi-
vidualism and universalism. The contemporary radical right does not want
to return to pre-democratic regimes such as monarchy or feudalism. It
wants government by the people, but in terms of ethnocracy instead of
democracy.”
Instead, UKIP has become an increasingly ideal-typical Western Euro-
pean radical right party in recent years in order to complement, give rele-
vance to, and underpin support for its single-issue ideological core of Eu-
roskepticism. This has manifested itself in fervent opposition to immigra-
tion (in particular from other European Union member states), free move-
ment of people from Eastern Europe, and a rejection of the pro-European
political elite—both in EU institutions and in Westminster. In this sense,
UKIP has arrived at the key policies of radical right parties, albeit from a
different point of departure that focuses on constitutionalism and institu-
tions more than culture and ethnicity. It would be reasonable to argue that
UKIP’s emphasis on ethnonationalism has thus far failed to reach the lev-
els even of Enoch Powell. However, with the key constitutional issue at
the heart of UKIP at least partially resolved following Britain’s EU refer-
endum, we may see the party keep its anti-immigration and populist frame-
work and swiftly replace its Euroskeptic conservative ideological heart
with one that more perfectly aligns with the radical right parties of Conti-
nental Europe.

EXPLAINING THE RISE OF UKIP

Demand-Side Explanations for UKIP’s Growth

The most fundamental factor in explaining the initial birth and growth of
UKIP during the 1990s was the growth in Euroskepticism within the
British electorate. In 1991, the number of Britons who thought EU mem-
bership was a good thing was 44 percentage points higher than the number
of those who were opposed. By 1999 this difference had dropped to just 1
percentage point. In short, whereas during the late 1980s British attitudes
toward integration were strongly supportive, by the turn of the millennium
just as many Britons thought EU membership was a bad thing as thought
that it was a good thing, with increasing proportions also showing ambiva-
lent views. Moreover, the consistent gap in relative support for European
integration between the United Kingdom and the European Union average
explains why it was a Euroskeptic party that would grow in Britain and

755
only later seek to add votes by taking on radical right trappings, rather than
the often reverse pattern of radical right parties in other EU member states.
Euroskepticism has remained the primary explanatory factor for UKIP
support, with Clarke and colleagues (Clarke et al. 2016, 135) using time
series analyses of UKIP’s polling performances to show that between
April 2004 and April 2014 “Euroscepticism was fundamental, with UKIP
support moving in dynamic equilibrium with changing public attitudes to-
wards EU membership.” However, Clarke and colleagues (2016, 149) go
on to show “that attitudes towards Europe are not the whole story. Control-
ling for attitudes about EU membership and shocks associated with various
events, adverse public reactions to major valence issues involving the
economy, immigration and the NHS influenced UKIP support. In all three
cases, public dissatisfaction worked to increase UKIP’s electoral stock.”
At the aggregate level, besides the increase in British Euroskepticism
over the last twenty-five years, a second attitudinal phenomenon has both
boosted the potential for UKIP’s support and explained its decision to in-
creasingly take on the trappings of a radical right party. Between the early
1990s and 2016, concern over immigration went from being a fringe politi-
cal issue and afterthought for most voters to consistently being considered
one of the most important issues affecting the United Kingdom. Moreover,
after the 2004 eastern enlargement of the EU, British voters increasingly
tended to see EU membership and immigration as a single issue. Between
2004 and 2013 attitudes toward immigration and toward the European
Union became increasingly correlated (Evans and Mellon 2016). Attitudes
toward Europe became increasingly polarized between those who were
concerned over immigration and those that were not, with the former
group growing at a faster rate. UKIP, by 1999 the UK’s premier Euroskep-
tic party, were best poised to benefit as the British public came to see Eu-
rope and immigration as one issue, and as more and more voters turned
against both.
However, as Rydgren (2007) and others point out, radical right parties
are distinct as a party family not only because of their opposition to immi-
gration, but also in their social authoritarianism and their populist critique
of the elite. To what extent do demand side trends on these issues explain
the rise of UKIP? If we take support for the death penalty as a metric of
authoritarian attitudes, it is clear that the demand-side has been becoming
less favorable for a radical right party over the last thirty years. Whereas
75 percent of Britons were in favor of the death penalty in 1983, this figure
had fallen to just 48 percent by 2015, a linear, long-term decline, accord-

756
ing to the British Social Attitudes survey. However, as we show below, the
increasing social liberalism of all three mainstream parties in response to
that of the electorate left space for a significant party that could monopo-
lize such views. In terms of populist attitudes, the evidence is more mixed.
Between 1997 and 2015, the proportion of the electorate responding that
they were dissatisfied with democracy experienced a non-linear increase
(Fieldhouse et al. 2015). In 1997, 40.6 percent of the electorate claimed to
be dissatisfied with British democracy, a figure that fell to 34.6 percent in
2005 before increasing to 52.8 percent in 2015. Conversely, in the ten
years prior to the 2015 general election, distrust of politicians fell—in
2005, 35.4 percent of the public did not trust members of Parliament, a fig-
ure that shot up to 48.1 percent in 2010 (shortly after a political scandal re-
garding expenses) before falling to just 30.6 percent in 2015—a still sub-
stantial portion. Again, it would seem that UKIP is not riding a new wave
of populism or anti-establishment attitudes, but instead has been able to
cater to a preexisting demand for anti-elite discourse in a political context
of long-term partisan and class dealignment.
Particularly from 2010 onward, analyses of the UKIP vote suggest that
the party’s rebranding as an anti-immigration, populist party allowed it to
draw most of its votes from economically insecure citizens who felt
strongly concerned about immigration, cut adrift from the established par-
ties, and under threat from rapid social and ethnic change. In terms of the
sociodemographic profile of UKIP voters, Ford and Goodwin (2014) show
how the party became the principal political vehicle for a particular seg-
ment of society—older, less well-educated, working-class, and typically
male voters who felt “left behind” by the rapid economic and social trans-
formations in the United Kingdom in recent years. Goodwin and Ford
argue that two causal mechanisms lie behind UKIP’s rise: first, the in-
creasingly evident demarcation of social groups who lack the educational
qualifications, income, and skills needed to adapt and thrive in a modern
post-industrial economy, and second, a growing value divide that has seen
traditional and socially conservative and authoritarian positions marginal-
ized by the mainstream political consensus. This research shows how
UKIP became the most popular electoral choice for voters who were the
most strongly concerned about immigration. Moreover, UKIP gained dis-
proportionately large segments of the vote from those who believed that
the country should leave the EU and those who felt disenchanted with es-
tablished politics. Nigel Farage and his party were thus fueled principally
by a coalition of voters who opposed immigration, felt hostile toward the
mainstream political class, and strongly disapproved of their country’s EU

757
membership (Dennison and Goodwin 2015). There is further evidence
that, on the whole, UKIP voters identify as right-wing yet are highly sym-
pathetic to claims that “big business takes advantage of ordinary people”
or that privatization has gone too far (Goodwin and Milazzo 2015). Over-
all, the social profile of UKIP voters in general elections largely reflects
those of radical right parties in other West European democracies. How-
ever, in European Parliament elections, UKIP has also attracted more af-
fluent, middle-class, and less populist conservatives, dubbed “strategic Eu-
roskeptics,” alongside the typically radical right “polite xenophobe” voters
(Ford, Goodwin, and Cutts 2012).

Supply-Side Explanations for UKIP’s Growth

In 1999, the year of the first European Parliament election using propor-
tional representation in the United Kingdom and the first in which UKIP
ran a slate of candidates, the policy positions of the Conservative Party and
UKIP were impressively similar. With the sole exception of Britain’s rela-
tionship with the European Union, UKIP and the Conservatives shared a
similar social conservative and free market outlook. From the early 2000s
onward, however, the two parties diverged significantly. After their third
consecutive election defeat to Labour in 2005, the Conservatives elected a
new leader, David Cameron, who explicitly attempted to modernize the
party, mostly by accepting the socially liberal consensus, moving the party
to the left economically, and embracing Britain as a multicultural country.
As can be shown in Figure 26.1, this resulted in significantly greater policy
divergence between UKIP and the Conservatives. After the 2008 financial
crisis, the Conservatives campaigned on a manifesto of deficit reduction,
primarily via fiscal austerity. In doing so, Cameron’s party shifted right-
ward on economic matters, though it largely maintained its newfound rela-
tive social liberalism.

758
FIGURE 26.1 Clear Blue Water: Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian
Manifesto Positions, 1999–2014
Source: Chapel Hill Expert Survey
In the midst of an improved political opportunity structure—which also
included an incumbent Liberal Democrat party, robbed of its protest voter
base, and an ambiguous Labour Party—Farage spent much of the 2010–
2015 Parliament transforming his party from a Euroskeptic Conservative
offshoot into a full-fledged ideal-typical European radical right party (Ford
and Goodwin 2014; for more on the changing party system after 2010, see
Dennison 2016). A key element of this transformation was to fuse mass
immigration, European Union membership, and populist critique of
Britain’s political class as a single messaging strategy. Moreover, as Fig-
ure 26.1 shows, between 2010 and 2014, UKIP took on far more authori-
tarian policies, nearly to the extent of the British National Party in 2010—
although the BNP was left increasingly irrelevant in the shadow of UKIP’s
more palatable ascendancy. By 2014, UKIP was more distinct from the

759
Conservatives on social policy than the latter were distinct from the Lib-
eral Democrats or Labour.
On the increasingly salient issue of immigration, Cameron had promised
to “return annual net migration to the tens of thousands,” a sharp reduction
compared to the Labour years. Evans and Chzhen (2013) show that it was
indeed discontent over immigration, rather than over the financial crisis,
that led erstwhile Labour voters to abandon their party in 2010. To the vot-
ers who had “hoped that the Conservative Party’s return to power, albeit
shared with the Liberal Democrats, would usher in a ‘harder line’ on im-
migration . . . the 2010–2015 Parliament would prove to be a disappoint-
ment” (Dennison and Goodwin 2015, 169). Those voters who were most
opposed to immigration had no major party to turn to after 2010, with
Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives now all discredited
on the matter, and the BNP divided and collapsed into irrelevance follow-
ing its electoral eclipse by UKIP in 2010 and purist street-marching com-
petition in the form of the English Defence League.

FIGURE 26.2 Best Party to Handle Immigration, 2010–2015

Source: YouGov Issues Tracker
As shown in Figure 26.2, after 2010 UKIP was increasingly thought of
as the best party to handle immigration, robbing the Conservatives, who
had traditionally held ownership of the immigration issue, of a major
British political prize (Dennison and Goodwin 2015). Aggregate-level data
gives insights into how the UKIP won ownership of immigration. Prior to
the 2015 election, 69 percent of voters believed the government was han-
dling immigration badly and 8 percent believed it was handling it well,
while simultaneously only 19 percent believed that a Labour government

760
would handle it well (Fieldhouse et al. 2015). Similarly, 60 percent of vot-
ers placed the blame for contemporary immigration levels on the Conserv-
atives. Though voters still regarded the Conservatives as more anti-immi-
gration than the Labour Party, by 2015 both parties were seen as relatively
uninterested in the issue, unwilling and unable to reduce immigration, in
comparison to UKIP (see Table 26.2). In short, “in only five years, Farage
and UKIP transformed themselves from an afterthought on the issue of im-
migration into the primary vehicle for voters who felt intensely anxious
about this issue and who wanted to see change” (Dennison and Goodwin
2015, 181). Although UKIP’s policy specifics regarding immigration re-
mained vague—its “muddled approach” during the election campaign in-
cluded repeated policy changes and conflicting statements by party leaders
—by 2015 UKIP had the mantle of “last, best hope” for an end to mass im-
migration in the eyes of segments of the electorate (Dennison and Good-
win 2015, 183).
Table 26.2 Attitudes Toward Parties Regarding Immigration
Immigration is In government they They would be suc-
important to would try to reduce cessful in reducing
the party immigration immigration
Con- 37 41 18
serva-
tives
Labour 21 19 10
UKIP 90 79 60
Source: British Election Study, March 2015
Favorable developments in the political opportunity structure were not
the only supply-side changes that worked in UKIP’s favor in the period
after 2010. Internally, the party became far better equipped to fight elec-
tion campaigns, not least in terms of financial resources. Whereas in the
year of the 2010 general election, UKIP’s expenditure was 1.8 percent that
of the Conservatives and 2.6 percent the size of Labour’s, in 2015 UKIP
was spending 16 percent as much as the Conservatives and 14 percent as
much as Labour—still significantly less, though enough to make its pres-
ence felt by their target voters, according to Electoral Commission figures.
In 2015, 39 percent of voters claimed to have been contacted by UKIP in
the four weeks prior to the election, more than double the 16 percent who

761
had been in 2010 (Fieldhouse et al. 2015). Once UKIP had shown that,
with Farage at the helm, it meant business about electoral politics, dona-
tions began to flow in, meaning that in 2015 the party was able to run a
significant if clearly second-tier campaign.
In contrast to previous radical right parties in the United Kingdom,
UKIP’s ability to attract financial donations was undoubtedly underscored
by the reputational shield that the party enjoyed thanks to its single-issue
Euroskeptic roots, rather than a history of racism, fascism, or extreme right
politics. This reputational shield allowed the party to fend off accusations
of extremism and similar attempts by mainstream parties to undermine
UKIP’s legitimacy to potential voters and funders in the face of the “wide-
spread social norms of racial equality and abidance to democratic institu-
tions” (Ivarsflaten 2006). As the party moved toward increasingly authori-
tarian positions after 2010, Farage repeatedly reasserted UKIP’s non-racist
profile, noting that his was the only British party to ban previous members
of the BNP from becoming party members. This reputational shield, com-
bined with Farage’s charismatic leadership gave UKIP supply-side advan-
tages that no radical right party in British politics had hitherto enjoyed.
Overall, on the supply side of politics we argue that, within the confines
of Westminster’s majoritarian system, UKIP was able to experience elec-
toral significance only after both of the major parties had proven them-
selves unable to deal with the primary political demand of the day—an end
to mass immigration. In order to seize on this opportunity, UKIP was
happy to differentiate itself from the Conservatives by becoming a more
orthodox radical right party. Cameron’s earlier decision to make the Con-
servatives more socially liberal meant that UKIP was able to make a clear
electoral offer to a public who had long lost since lost faith in the Euro-
pean project and, confronted by perpetually unpopular mass immigration,
had also run out of more palatable alternatives to UKIP by 2015.

THE RADICAL RIGHT AND THE EU REFERENDUM

If there had been any lingering doubts about the depth of support for
UKIP’s primary policies—withdrawal from the European Union and a re-
duction of immigration—these were quashed in 2016 when the British
electorate voted in favor of leaving the EU. Some commentators inter-
preted the referendum outcome as the result of xenophobia, racism, and
nationalism—and, not least because of Farage’s involvement in the cam-
paign, as the ultimate triumph for the radical right populism that was

762
growing in popularity across Europe and seemingly held a majority in the
United Kingdom.
Subsequent analysis of the vote to leave the EU revealed that it had been
strongest in areas of the country that have larger numbers of pensioners
and larger numbers of low-skilled and less well educated working-class
citizens, areas that had often experienced a sharp increase in the number of
EU nationals over the previous ten years, and areas where citizens were
most antipathetic to the values that had come to dominate a more socially
liberal media and political class (Clarke, Goodwin, and Whitely 2017).
Contrary to findings about UKIP supporters in general elections, however,
voters who wanted Britain to leave the EU tended to be more optimistic
about their economic future than those who voted to remain, suggesting
that the EU vote was a reflection of long-term Euroskepticism rather than a
cry for help from “losers of globalization” (Evans, Carl, and Dennison
2017). Indeed, the Leave coalition was, in effect, an enlarged replica of
UKIP’s previous European parliamentary coalitions of “polite xeno-
phobes” and “strategic Euroskeptics”—expanded in the context of a binary
rather than multi-party ballot. Indeed, analyses at the local level suggest
that districts that were the most likely to vote for Brexit were the same
ones that had given UKIP its strongest support in elections two years ear-
lier, a finding that underlines the central role of Euroskepticism in driving
the growth of UKIP (Heath and Goodwin 2016).
In 1995 Kitschelt explained the poor electoral performances of British
radical right parties as the result of the United Kingdom’s majoritarian
electoral system and the subsequent ability of the Conservative Party to
limit the prospects of rival parties by taking on selective radical policies,
particularly regarding immigration, authoritarianism, and traditionalism.
Between 2005 and 2015 this view suddenly seemed rather dated, not only
because of the impressive growth of first the BNP and then UKIP, but also
because of the Conservative Party’s move toward relative social liberalism
under David Cameron’s premiership. However, following the British refer-
endum on EU membership, Kitschelt’s explanation seems rather more rel-
evant again. Theresa May, who was widely seen as a hard-liner on law and
order while serving as home secretary, put anti-immigration, anti-cos-
mopolitan, populist, nationalist, and even statist sentiment at the heart of
her rhetoric after becoming prime minister. In her first party conference
speech as prime minister she asserted that “too many people in positions of
power behave as though they have more in common with international
elites than with the people down the road. . . . [I]f you believe you are a

763
citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. . . . Just listen to the way
a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find your
patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your
views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconve-
nient.”2
Just as the more modest growth of the radical right in the United King-
dom in the 1970s pushed the Conservative Party, under Margaret Thatcher,
to seek working-class votes by adopting radical right, anti-immigration
rhetoric, in the 2010s the growth of UKIP placed additional electoral pres-
sure on Conservative backbenchers to take on more Euroskeptic, anti-im-
migration stances, culminating first in David Cameron’s promise to hold a
referendum on EU membership should the Conservatives win the 2015
general election. In this sense, the UK’s majoritarian electoral system may
have dampened the radical right’s electoral performances, but it has pro-
vided a powerful, indirect incentive for those at the heart of government to
adopt radical right policies when there is sufficient public demand. This in-
centive is weaker in countries with more proportional and less adversarial
electoral systems in which mainstream parties tend to enter coalitions with
radical right parties only as an absolute last resort when more moderate op-
tions have been exhausted. Given this, the indirect effect of the radical
right on policy in the United Kingdom has possibly been greater than the
direct effect of the radical right on policy in Continental European coun-
tries, despite better electoral performances there.
Following Britain’s 2016 EU referendum, what future can there be for a
party that has achieved its Euroskeptic goal? Usherwood (2016, 29) identi-
fies three hurdles for UKIP to face following the referendum: first, finding
a leader who is as popular and charismatic as Farage; second, setting a di-
rection for the party that, aside from anti-EU and anti-immigration senti-
ment, has “no ideological coherence”; and, third, losing its primary institu-
tional representation, which was in the European Parliament. Like the
United Kingdom itself, UKIP and the radical right are at a turning point.
Three scenarios seem possible. One is that 2016 may have been the high
tide for radical right politics in the UK and, following the shock of Brexit,
the electorate may now cry out for a moderating force or may be happy to
rally around a Conservative Party that seems committed to Brexit. A simi-
lar scenario would see UKIP decline but its radical right policies gain
strength as the Conservatives seek the electoral gains to be had in imple-
menting not only Brexit but also sharp reductions in immigration, a
rounder rejection of multiculturalism manifested in authoritarian policies,

764
and, if possible, a populist critique of the existing political, financial, and
legal elites and their supposed special interests. A third scenario may see
the radical right open a fresh chapter as the new official opposition in the
United Kingdom, acting as a replacement for the Labour Party, which,
faced with the choice between satisfying its liberal elite and its working-
class voter base, has recently thrown all its weight behind the former, and
in doing so has opened up for grabs vast sections of the electorate who are
unlikely to ever vote Conservative regardless of any post-Brexit rebrand-
ing.
After the EU referendum Nigel Farage resigned as leader of UKIP and,
following a very short spell with Diane James as leader, Paul Nuttall, an
audibly working-class northern former deputy leader, won the ensuing
election. Nuttall set about explicitly attempting to attract Labour’s work-
ing-class base with a combination of anti-immigration, anti-Islamic, and
authoritarian policy promises. Nuttall vowed to “replace the Labour Party
in the next five years and become the patriotic party of the working peo-
ple.” Nuttall sought to maintain UKIP’s elevated prominence and party
structures but replace the party’s Euroskeptic heart with that of a classi-
cally ethnonationalist radical right party. It did not work at the 2017 UK
General Election, as UKIP’s vote share fell to a tenth of its 2015 level, at
just 600,000. At the time of writing, the far right founder of Sharia Watch
UK and Pegida UK, Anne Marie Waters, was the favorite to win UKIP’s
leadership election. If she is successful, Britain will then finally have a
bona fide, full-fledged member of Western Europe’s populist radical right
party family.

765
NOTES

1. Kilroy-Silk would leave UKIP just months after the 2004 election
amid acrimony over his leadership ambitions and would set up his
own Euroskeptic party, Veritas, taking a significant portion of UKIP’s
activists and two of its London Assembly members with him.
2. Theresa May’s 2016 conference speech is available online at http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/theresa-mays-conference-
speech-in-full.
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CHAPTER 27

770
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES

ANDERS WIDFELDT
FOR many years the four biggest Nordic countries were neatly split into a
dichotomy when it came to the radical right. Denmark and Norway had
significant populist radical right parties, and Finland and Sweden did not.
This provided a setting for a “most similar systems design” comparison.
Such a study was never conducted in full, although Rydgren’s (2006)
analysis of Sweden was an example of a study of radical right failure. Ryd-
gren did, in his conclusion of that book, remain open to the possibility of
an eventual permanent radical right breakthrough in Sweden, and so it
proved, with the entry into parliament of the Sweden Democrats in 2010.
By this time the Finns Party (previously known in English as the True
Finns) was also in the ascendancy, and made its full electoral breakthrough
in the parliamentary election of 2011. Both the Sweden Democrats and the
Finns have since consolidated, and in the Swedish case significantly
strengthened, their respective positions.
In the mid-2010s, therefore, all four Nordic countries have significant
populist radical right parties. Not only have they grown electorally, at
times reaching support levels near or above of 20 percent (in the Swedish
case so far only in opinion polls), but they have also abandoned their status
as politically isolated. In Norway (2013) and Finland (2015) populist radi-
cal right parties have joined center-right coalition governments. This has
not yet happened in Denmark, but the Danish People’s Party has since the
early 2000s exerted considerable policy influence as a recognized coopera-
tion partner of the center-right parties. The only remaining case of political
isolation is the Sweden Democrats.
This transition from the fringes into a kind of extended mainstream is
one of the key developments of the Nordic populist radical right since the
turn of the century. In order to understand this process, however, the ori-
gins of these parties need to be examined. This will take place in the fol-
lowing section. Subsequent sections will look at their ideologies and elec-
toral bases, before their political impact will be studied more systemati-
cally. The account will cover four out of the five nation-states in the
Nordic region: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Iceland will be
left out because it does not have any significant party classifiable as pop-
ulist radical right.

771
 ORIGINS

Of the parties studied in this chapter, the Finnish Perussuomalaiset (PS;

The Finns, formerly known in English as True Finns) has the earliest ori-
gins. Its predecessor party, the Suomen Maaseudun Puolue (SMP, Finnish
Rural Party), was originally formed in 1959 under a different name (see
Table 27.1 at the end of this section). The founder, Veikko Vennamo
(1913–1997), was a former government minister for the Agrarian League
(later to become the Center Party). His main agenda was to represent the
interests of deprived small-scale farmers. Vennamo had developed close
personal links to such farmers when he, as a non-party official in the Min-
istry of Agriculture, had been responsible for the resettlement of displaced
farmers after land losses to the Soviet Union in the Second World War. He
left the Agrarian League after a personal battle with Urho Kekkonen, pres-
ident of Finland from 1956 to 1981, and formed a new party. From this
platform Vennamo earned a reputation as a hard critic of Kekkonen’s pres-
idency and as champion of the “forgotten people” (Arter 2010). Vennamo
was replaced as SMP leader by his son Pekka in 1979, and the party was in
government from 1983 to 1990, but it fell on difficult times after the
younger Vennamo left politics to become director-general of the Post and
Telecommunications Board. After a disastrous election result in 1995,
SMP went bankrupt and was disbanded. PS was formed out of the ashes of
SMP (Pekonen, Hynynen, and Kalliala 1999, 39–40).
Initially PS was small, although it was never completely unrepresented
in the Finnish parliament. Timo Soini assumed the leadership in 1997, and
after a somewhat slow start, he gradually developed a political style and
rhetoric that worked well in the media. The party got 4.1 percent of the
vote in the 2007 election, and grew to 19.1 percent in 2011. This unprece-
dented success owed much to Soini, whose jovial but hard-hitting rhetoric
against the domestic and EU establishments resonated with the electorate.
After the 2015 election, despite a marginal drop in the vote share to 17.7
percent, the party entered a three-party coalition with the Center and Con-
servative parties. When PS was formed there were obvious political and
personal links to the former SMP, even though Soini claims that PS was
not intended as a mere continuation. Soini had himself been deputy chair
as well as party secretary of SMP, and the party’s only candidate elected to
parliament in 1995, Raimo Vistbacka, joined PS at its formation and re-
mained a PS representative in parliament until his retirement in 2011
(Arter 2012). There are, of course, also differences between SMP and PS.
For one thing, the support base of the 2000s PS bears little resemblance to

772
the initially largely rural constituency of the 1970s SMP, but this develop-
ment has been gradual and actually began with SMP, whose successes in
the 1970s and 1980s owed much to a broadening of its appeal.
Table 27.1 Summary of Populist Radical Right Parties in the Nordic
Countries
Coun- Party Name and Life
try Acronym Span Name Changes
Fin- Suomen 1959– Formed as Suomen Pientalon-
land Maaseudun 1995 poikien Puolue (Finnish Small-
Puolue (SMP, (suc- holders’ Party); changed to SMP
Rural Party) ceeded in 1967
by PS;
see
below)
Den- Fremskridtspar- 1972– None
mark tiet (FP, (in-
Progress Party) signifi-
cant
after
1999)
Nor- Fremskrittspar- 1973– Formed as Anders Lange’s Party
way tiet (FrP, (ALP; full name in text); changed
Progress Party) to FrP in 1977
Swe- Sverigedemokra- 1988– None
den terna (SD, Swe-
den Democrats)
Swe- Ny Demokrati 1991–ca. None
den (NyD, New 2000 (in-
Democracy) signifi-
cant
after
1994)
Fin- Perussuoma- 1995– No name change, but since Au-
land laiset (PS, The (succes- gust 2011 the party refers to itself
Finns) sor to in English as The Finns, or The
SMP; Finns Party, instead of the earlier

773
 see True Finns
above)
Den- Dansk 1995– None
mark Folkeparti (DF, (defec-
Danish People’s tion
Party) from FP;
see
above)
The electoral breakthrough of SMP took place in 1970, eleven years
after the party was formed. The populist parties that broke into the Danish
and Norwegian parliaments three years later were more recent creations.
The pivotal event can be said to have taken place on January 30, 1971,
when the then almost unknown lawyer Mogens Glistrup (1926–2008) ap-
peared on Danish TV, declaring that it was immoral to pay tax and that
there were ways to avoid doing so. He became a media celebrity overnight,
and after abortive attempts to enter existing parties he formed the Frem-
skridtspartiet (FP, Progress Party) in 1972. The party was an instant suc-
cess, receiving 15.9 percent of the vote it its first electoral attempt in De-
cember 1973.
Three months earlier, a party with a similar anti-tax agenda had entered
the Norwegian parliament with a somewhat more modest 5 percent of the
vote. Initially the Norwegian party named itself after its founder, Anders
Langes Parti til Sterk Nedsettelse av Skatter, Avgifter og Offentlige In-
ngrep (Anders Lange’s Party for a Drastic Reduction in Taxes, Fees and
Public Intervention), more commonly referred to as Anders Lange’s Party
(ALP). Formed in April 1973, ALP was to a significant extent inspired by
Glistrup, although Lange already had a reputation as a kind of fringe mav-
erick in the Norwegian political debate (Iversen 1998).
Glistrup and Lange could be described as political catalysts. Their im-
pact was immediate, and in some respects lasting, but they were not per-
sonally able to capitalize on their initial successes. Lange died in 1974, and
it is of course impossible to know what would have happened if he had
lived, but internal discontent with his leadership had developed before his
death, and there is much to suggest that he lacked the political and organi-
zational skills to take the party further. Lange was also comparatively old,
born in 1904. In the case of Glistrup, his limitations became apparent
rather soon. His vanity and unwillingness to compromise led to frustration
among many erstwhile supporters, and he gradually lost control of the

774
party. A decisive blow to his political career took place in 1983, when
after a long legal process he was sentenced to jail for tax evasion. When
Lange died and Glistrup was sent to jail, they were replaced in parliament
by individuals who, although unknown at the time, would become key fig-
ures in their respective party. Lange’s seat was taken by the business exec-
utive Carl I. Hagen (1944– ), and Glistrup’s by the home care worker Pia
Kjærsgaard (1947– ).
Hagen was appointed party leader in February 1978. The year before,
the party had changed its name from ALP to Fremskrittspartiet (FrP,
Progress Party), but in the same year it had also lost its place in parliament.
The party Hagen took over was in serious crisis, with opinion polls indi-
cating support levels of less than 1 percent (Iversen 1998). Hagen, how-
ever, was to remain leader for the next twenty-eight years, in the process
taking FrP to previously unimaginable electoral heights. Personal factors
are of course difficult to isolate, and Hagen’s reign as leader was by no
means free of mistakes, but everything suggests that his contribution to the
party’s growth in support was crucial. The party returned to parliament in
1981, and when Hagen handed over the leadership to Siv Jensen in 2006,
FrP was the country’s second-biggest party. Its best election result to date
is 22.9 percent in the 2009 parliamentary election.
In Denmark the situation was more complicated. FP had many internal
tensions, which did not all disappear with the exit of the divisive Glistrup.
Kjærsgaard built her own power base in the party quite soon after entering
parliament in 1984, but FP had a vague organizational structure and she
was never the formal party leader. After a chaotic FP congress in the fall
of 1995, Kjærsgaard and her allies defected and formed Dansk Folkeparti
(DF). Kjærsgaard became leader, and together with a fairly small group of
collaborators built up an effective party organization. At the time of the
split it was not obvious which was the stronger, FP or DF, but it relatively
soon became clear that the latter had the upper hand, and the parliamentary
election in 1998 removed any doubts. FP formally still exists, but it re-
ceived less than 1 percent of the vote in 2001 and has not since partici-
pated in elections. DF, meanwhile, went from strength to strength, crossing
the 10 percent level for the first time in 2001. The change of leader from
Kjærsgaard to Kristian Thulesen Dahl in 2012 has not halted the party’s
progress, and DF surpassed 20 percent in 2015. In the process DF has also
broken its political isolation, as will be further discussed below.
Sweden was for many years without a significant populist radical right
party. This seemed to change in 1991, when the newly formed Ny

775
Demokrati (NyD, New Democracy) entered parliament with 6.7 percent of
the vote. The initiative to form NyD came from the nobleman and industri-
alist Ian Wachtmeister and the entrepreneur Bert Karlsson, the latter
known for his involvement in the entertainment industry. Although Wacht-
meister became the formal party leader, and in practice also functioned as
such, NyD was widely regarded as having a dual leadership. This was a
party that resembled Kitschelt’s (1997) much-discussed “winning for-
mula,” with a combination of market economics and immigration skepti-
cism. Initially NyD prioritized the former, but immigration was part of the
message from the outset, and the anti-immigration rhetoric became more
intense from 1992 onward. The “count and the servant” was at first an ef-
fective leadership combination, but internal divisions soon developed, and
when Wachtmeister announced his resignation as leader in February 1994,
the party imploded. It was annihilated in the 1994 election, and although it
continued to exist for a few years, it was an irrelevance from then on.
The background of Sverigedemokraterna (SD, Sweden Democrats) is in
key respects different to the other discussed parties. It grew out of the
short-lived Sverigepartiet (SvP, Sweden Party), which in turn had been
formed in late 1986 as a merger between a small populist party, Fram-
stegspartiet (Progress Party), and the anti-immigration campaign group
Bevara Sverige Svenskt (BSS, Keep Sweden Swedish). After a brief pe-
riod of apparent momentum SvP succumbed to internal battles, and in
early 1988 several factions laid claim to the party name. It appears that it
was one of those factions, containing several former BSS activists, that de-
cided to take the name Sverigedemokraterna in February 1988 (three years
before the formation of NyD). The links to BSS, whose anti-immigration
rhetoric could be quite drastic, is part of a historical burden that may well
have delayed SD’s electoral breakthrough.
Also besides the BSS links, the young SD harbored many problematic
individuals, including skinheads, people with criminal records, and veter-
ans of 1930s and 1940s fascist and Nazi organizations. SD’s first party
leader, Anders Klarström, had previous links to the openly National So-
cialist Nordiska Rikspartiet, and had been convicted of vandalism, threats,
and theft (Larsson and Ekman 2001, 125–126). Public SD meetings were
often attended by supporters wearing political uniforms and various in-
signia. Confrontations with counterdemonstrators could turn violent, and
although the party claims that most of the troublemakers were hangers-on
without SD membership, the public image of SD in its early years must be
described as problematic for a party aiming for broad electoral appeal

776
(Hellström and Nilsson 2010). To use Ivarsflaten’s (2006) terminology,
SD’s lack of a “reputational shield” is apparent. The party has, however,
systematically tried to polish its image. The low-key style of the SD leader
since 2005, Jimmie Åkesson, has been conducive to this process. Never-
theless, the transformation of SD from a fringe phenomenon, which it still
was when Åkesson became leader, to a parliamentary entry in 2010 and
the third-biggest party in 2014 is remarkable.
The origins and life spans of the seven Nordic populist radical right par-
ties discussed in this section are summarized in Table 27.1. Denmark,
Sweden, and Finland have contributed two parties each, and Norway one.
Four parties, the Finnish SMP, Danish FP, Norwegian FrP, and Swedish
NyD, were founded from scratch, by what could be termed as political en-
trepreneurs (Arter and Kestilä-Kekkonen 2014). It may be an exaggeration
to call these individuals charismatic, at least in the strict Weberian sense,
but they were subject to a kind of cult following and their respective agen-
das were driven by a combination of ideological conviction and personal
grievances. The founders were initially successful but struggled to main-
tain unity, and their parties were soon hit by internal conflicts, which in the
case of NyD led to a quick demise. SMP and FP survived longer but
lacked stability, and they too succumbed eventually. The Norwegian FrP
could have gone the same way but was transformed under Hagen’s leader-
ship.
The Danish DF and Finnish PS grew out of existing or former parties—
DF as defectors from FP, and PS as a continuation of the defunct SMP. Al-
though they have adapted to a changing environment, they still share many
key characteristics of their respective predecessors, with personalized lead-
ership and populist rhetoric. They can also be said to share the same ori-
gins. In a strict sense they are of course separate entities, but unlike their
predecessors they can hardly be said to have been formed from scratch. A
difference between DF and PS is that the former emerged as a conse-
quence of a bitter conflict in FP; this is not applicable to PS, whose prede-
cessor succumbed to financial difficulties. Another difference is that FP
had not (and still has not) closed down, while of course SMP folded before
PS was formed. The Swedish SD also grew out of another party. The pre-
decessor, SvP, was short-lived and insignificant, and it is not quite clear
whether it still existed at the time of SD’s formation, but it would be mis-
leading to claim that SD was formed from scratch. Unlike NyD, FP, ALP,
and SMP, it was, furthermore, not primarily associated with one or two
particular individuals. Rather, the indirect links to BSS—via SvP—suggest

777
that SD at least in part has social movement origins, which cannot be said
of any of the other parties discussed.

IDEOLOGY

Taking into account name changes and predecessor parties, the ideological
origins of FrP, DF, PS, and SD differ quite considerably. FrP and DF
started as populist anti-tax parties, PS began as an interest party for small-
scale farmers, and SD is the only one of the four to have prioritized immi-
gration from the very outset. Since then all parties have become more sim-
ilar, although not identical. Immigration entered the agendas of FrP and FP
in the mid-1980s, and PS’s predecessor, SMP, followed suit in the early
1990s (Arter 1992). In Denmark FP continued to combine immigration
criticism with tax protest. This combination was still visible in the early
days of DF, but the party has since moved toward a welfare chauvinist po-
sition, with tax cut proposals significantly toned down and increasing pri-
ority given to a welfare system for indigenous Danes. The party is prag-
matic about whether the welfare system should be private or public, but it
believes that the state should take overall responsibility (DF 2009).
PS, too, prioritizes welfare chauvinism, and as an opposition party, it
portrayed itself as something of a foe against austerity and deprivation. As
part of a government forced to deal with an economic downturn, however,
PS has been pushed into a number of concessions on welfare policy, which
has led to loss of support and internal unrest. The only contemporary
Nordic example of a populist radical right party with a clear-cut market-
oriented outlook is FrP. That party’s most radical tax cut proposals have
been dropped, and its view of the welfare state has grown more positive,
but a significant part of the right-wing economic agenda has been kept.
Since 1996 FrP has recycled a part of the original party name as a bench-
mark statement in its Principles manifestos. The party defines itself as a
“liberal people’s party” whose “main aim is a drastic reduction in taxes,
fees and public intervention” (FrP 2013a, 2).
Referring to Mudde’s (2007) core populist radical right ingredients of
nativism, authoritarianism, and populism, it is quite clear that all four par-
ties qualify as nativist. The DF position on immigration is spelled out in
the 2002 Principles manifesto: “Denmark is not a country of immigration,
and never has been. We will therefore never accept a multiethnic transfor-
mation of the country” (DF 2002, iv). Also, for SD immigration is a key
priority. The party has moved away from more radical demands made in

778
the 1990s, such as the mandatory repatriation of immigrants from “ethni-
cally distant cultures” who arrived after 1970 (Widfeldt 2015a), but it re-
mains belligerent in its immigration rhetoric. In the summer of 2015 SD
paid for English-language messages to be displayed in a Stockholm sub-
way station, apologizing to tourists for the Swedish “mess” of “forced beg-
ging” (Kvarnström 2015). A year later, SD member of parliament Kent
Ekeroth, commenting on a protest by asylum seekers against tightened
asylum laws, said that asylum seekers “should not move around freely in
society,” and received support for this position from party secretary
Richard Jomshof (Söderin 2016). Thus, even though DF and SD have de-
veloped policies in a wide range of areas and cannot straightforwardly be
labeled as single-issue parties, anti-immigration is a core raison d’être for
both parties.
Immigration is not a defining issue for FrP and PS to quite the same ex-
tent, but it is nevertheless a key part of their respective profiles. FrP, for
example, has claimed that in 2009 party leader Siv Jensen introduced the
expression “sneak Islamization” into the Norwegian language (Watne
2010). After the atrocities committed by former FrP member Anders
Behring Breivik in July 2011, however, the party toned down its rhetoric,
and in 2013 second deputy party leader Ketil Solvik-Olsen distanced him-
self and the party from the term “sneak Islamization” (Glomnes, Grønning,
and Melgård 2013). In its policy manifesto from 2013 FrP argued that it is
“ethically indefensible” not to reduce immigration, in order to “pre-empt
conflicts in the Norwegian society,” and proposed that the intake of mi-
grants from “countries outside the Western cultural sphere be significantly
reduced” (FrP 2013b, 38–39).
PS leader Timo Soini has rarely if ever been directly linked to drastic
statements about immigration, but other party representatives have been
more belligerent. An example is Jussi Halla-Aho, a member of the Euro-
pean Parliament and former member of the national parliament, who in
2012 was fined by the Supreme Court for hate speech on his blog. Halla-
Aho and other PS members of parliament have links to xenophobic organi-
zations and online discussion forums, although these links are personal
rather than to PS as a party (Raunio 2013, 149). In the immigration policy
manifesto from the 2015 election, PS states that “immigration will change,
irreversibly, the host country’s population profile, disrupt social cohesion,
overburden public services and economic resources, lead to the formation
of ghettoes, promote religious radicalism and its consequences, and foster
ethnic conflicts” (PS 2015b, 1).

779
 The four studied parties also meet the criteria of authoritarianism and
populism. All advocate more law and order, with harsher punishments for
crime (SD 2014, 5; DF 2009, 33–34; FrP 2013b, 27–31; PS 2015a, 5–6).
They are populist in the sense of employing anti-establishment rhetoric,
having a monolithic conception of “the people,” and preferring direct over
representative democracy (compare van Kessel 2015). Parties with experi-
ence in government or as a government support party have toned down the
anti-establishment rhetoric, but the populism has not disappeared. In its
2013 Principles manifesto, FrP’s anti-elitism is restrained, but the party
states that “power should be transferred from politicians to people in gen-
eral [folk flest]” (FrP 2013a, 2). Jupskås (2015, 206–207) argues that FrP is
a case of “populist persistence.” Among other things, this is based on a
survey of parliamentary candidates in 2009, according to which a signifi-
cantly higher proportion of FrP candidates than candidates of other parties
were of the view that Norwegian democracy was about to lose its legiti-
macy and needed reform. Indeed, the party advocates more direct democ-
racy, such as referendums, in its manifestos (FrP 2013a, 3, 6; 2013b, 4, 7,
34, 75–76).
Regarding PS, there is a variety of opinions in the literature about
whether it can be classified as a PRR party, or is better understood as pop-
ulist of a different variety, but the populist element is undisputed. Westi-
nen (2014, 125) refers to PS as a “nationalist-populist party, which com-
bines ethno-nationalism and antielitism”; Arter and Kestilä-Kekkonen
(2014) as a “populist entrepreneur party”; and Raunio (2013, 133–134) as
“populist and Eurosceptical.” In addition, PS is a relatively rare case of a
party openly defining itself as populist (Raunio 2013, 133–134). The pop-
ulist credentials of DF and SD are also clear-cut, according to the literature
(Meret 2015; Rydgren 2004; Hellström and Nilsson 2010) as well as party
manifestos. The SD Principles manifesto from 2011 describe it as “prob-
lematic to maintain a state . . . where there is no consensus about who
should count as part of the people” (SD 2011, 5). The 2002 DF Principles
manifesto (DF 2002, vii) states that “Only in a free Denmark can the coun-
try develop after the will of the people.” Both SD and DF advocate more
referendums (SD 2011, 3; DF 2009, 12).
An overall ideological assessment of the four main post-2000 populist
radical right parties reveals key similarities, but also differences. It can be
argued that all four meet the three populist radical right criteria of na-
tivism, authoritarianism, and populism, although immigration is given
higher priority in DF and SD than in FrP and PS. The government experi-

780
ence of FrP and PS has contributed to the toning down of populism (a
pressure that especially SD has not yet been subject to). One difference is
the economic outlook, with FrP more inclined toward market liberalism
than the other three. PS is arguably the most welfare-oriented. To this
could be added that DF, PS and SD are all strongly opposed to the Euro-
pean Union. FrP has been more ambiguous, in part due to the fact that
Norway is not a member of the EU and the question of accession is un-
likely to enter the agenda in the foreseeable future, but in 2017 the party
decided to oppose EU membership.
That DF and SD are clear-cut populist radical right parties is undisputed,
except possibly within the parties themselves. Doubts can be raised about
PS because of its emphasis on welfare policy compared to immigration,
and about FrP because of its emphasis on market economics and its self-
identification as liberal/libertarian. Based on an analysis of ideology, inter-
national contacts, and party names, Jungar and Jupskås (2014) found that
DF, PS, and SD fit into the populist radical right party family, while FrP is
an outlier. Also, Mudde (2007) does not classify FrP as populist radical
right. As shown above, however, it is possible to find evidence of the three
main populist radical right ingredients of nativism, authoritarianism and
populism in FrP.

ELECTORAL SUPPORT

The fluctuations in electoral support and parliamentary representation for

Nordic populist radical right parties are reported in Table 27.2. The varia-
tions are considerable, but the long-term trend can only be described as in-
creasing, although by no means continuously so. The very low results for
SD in the 1980s and 1990s are included to illustrate the party’s metamor-
phosis into a significant political force. The best result so far is FrP’s 22.9
percent in 2009. This is among the best performances by any European
populist radical right party, exceeded only by the Swiss Schweizerische
Volkspartei (SVP, Swiss People’s Party) and the Freiheitliche Partei Öster-
reich (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria). No Nordic populist radical right
party, however, has won the highest number of votes in a national parlia-
mentary election. FrP (in 1997, 2005, and 2009) and DF (in 2015) have
had the second-highest vote totals; SD (in 2014) and PS (in 2011 and
2015) have had the third-highest. In Denmark, DF received the most votes
in the 2014 European Parliament election.
Moving on to factors explaining populist radical right voting, much re-

781
search has described the typical populist radical right voter: a young,
working-class or lower-middle-class male, without higher education quali-
fications, employed in the private sector, who dislikes immigration and the
political establishment. This stereotype has proved quite durable, but, as
with any stereotype, its empirical foundation can be questioned. As shown
in a recent research anthology, the detailed sociodemographic composition
of the populist radical right vote is complex and not consistent across dif-
ferent countries (Rydgren 2013). Similarly, the concrete reasons for oppos-
ing immigration vary, as do the ways in which these translate into voting
behavior (Rydgren 2008). Evidence from the Nordic countries is largely in
line with the stereotype, although not without exceptions (Rathlev 2008;
Holmberg and Oscarsson 2016; Arter and Kestilä-Kekkonen 2014; Bengts-
son et al. 2014, 161–175). A problem with these and other studies is that
they seldom allow broad comparisons. The work of Bengtsson and col-
leagues (2014), for example, is based on data from 2005–2007, which cov-
ers DF, FrP, and PS, but not SD, which at that time had not made its elec-
toral breakthrough.
Table 27.2 Parliamentary Election Results for Nordic Populist Rad-
ical Right Parties, 1970–2015 (percentage of vote and, in
parentheses, number of seats held by party and total num-
ber of seats in parliament)
Year Denmark Finland Norway Sweden
1970 SMP 10.5
(18/200)
1972 SMP 9.2
(18/200)
1973 FP 15.9 ALP 5.0
(28/175) (4/155)
1975 FP 13.6 SMP 3.6
(24/175) (2/200)
1977 FP 14.6 ALP 1.9 (0)
(26/175)
1979 FP 11.0 SMP 4.6
(20/175) (7/200)
1981 FP 8.9 FrP 4.5
(16/175) (4/155)

782
1983 SMP 9.7
(17/200)
1984 FP 3.6 (6/175)
1985 FrP 3.7
(2/157)
1987 FP 4.8 (9/175) SMP 6.3
(9/200)
1988 FP 9.0 SD 0.02 (0)
(16/175)
1989 FrP 13.0
(22/165)
1990 FP 6.4
(12/175)
1991 SMP 4.8
NyD 6.8
(7/200) (25/349)
SD 0.1 (0)

1993 FrP 6.3

(10/165)
1994 FP 6.4
NyD 1.2 (0)
(11/175)
SD 0.2 (0)

1995 SMP 1.3

(1/200)
1997 FrP 15.3
(25/165)
1998 FP 2.4 (4/175)
NyD 0.2 (0)
DF 7.4 SD 0.4 (0)
(13/175)

1999 PS 1.0 (1/200)

2001 FP 0.6 (0) FrP 14.6
(26/165)

783
 DF 12.0
(22/175)

2002 SD 1.4 (0)

2003 PS 1.6 (3/200)
2005 DF 13.3 FrP 22.1
(24/175) (38/169)
2006 SD 2.9 (0)
2007 DF 13.9 PS 4.1 (5/200)
(25/175)
2009 FrP 22.9
(41/169)
2010 SD 5.7
(20/349)
2011 DF 12.3 PS 19.1
(22/175) (39/200)
2013 FrP 16.3
(29/169)
2014 SD 12.9
(49/349)
2015 DF 21.1 PS 17.7
(37/175) (38/200)
Note: For key to party abbreviations, see Table 27.1. Years where there
were no elections in any country are excluded. Cells where there was an
election but none of the analyzed populist radical right parties partici-
pated have been left blank.
To redress this situation somewhat, a binomial logistic regression analy-
sis has been conducted for all four studied countries, based on European
Social Survey data from 2014–2015. The dependent variable is a di-
chotomy between voting for the respective populist radical right party and
any other voting decision, including not voting. The independent variables
are selected to indicate key sociodemographic and attitudinal variables to
give an overview of populist radical right voting in the Nordic countries as
of the mid-2010s. The results are presented in Table 27.3.

784
 The results reported below should be treated with caution. Compared
with results from opinion polls and actual elections, the proportions of
populist radical right voters are underrepresented in all four countries in
these data. With this caveat in mind, two main observations can be made.
First, opposition to immigration has a clearly significant effect in all four
countries. Second, there is otherwise a lack of consistent patterns across
the four countries. Of the twelve independent variables analyzed, immigra-
tion is the only variable that is significant everywhere, while household in-
come and opinions about gay and lesbian lifestyles are the only ones not to
be significant anywhere. In Denmark and Sweden three variables are sig-
nificant (but not the same ones); in Finland five; and in Norway seven.
In Denmark, immigration is complemented by criticism of the EU and,
to a limited extent, lack of higher education qualifications. Denmark is,
furthermore, the only country where distrust of politicians does not have
an effect; possibly this reflects the legitimacy and policy influence of DF
(discussed in the next section). In Sweden the complementary factors are
distrust of politicians and—somewhat tenuously—a positive effect of so-
cial capital. Still, the strong impact of immigration on SD voting is no-
table. This, coupled with the fact that Sweden has the highest pseudo r-
squared, suggests the electoral appeal of SD relies particularly heavily on
immigration. In this respect, Sweden deviates somewhat from the other
three countries. The lack of an EU effect in Sweden is also worth noting.
In Finland, on the other hand, EU opposition does have a clear effect.
Other clearly significant variables in Finland are gender and immigration.
Distrust of politicians and increasing age also have an impact. Norway is
the only country to display significant effects of respondents’ experience
from unemployment, lack of social capital, private sector employment, and
opposition to redistributive economics. Tentatively this suggests that FrP
voters can be described as financially and socially insecure but economi-
cally ambitious. The strongest effects in Norway, however, are increasing
age and opposition to immigration.
Table 27.3 Sociodemographic and Attitudinal Support Profiles of
Nordic Populist Radical Right Parties (predicted proba-
bilities of voting for the DF, PS, FrP, and SD; binomial lo-
gistic regression analysis)
Denmark Finland Norway Sweden
B SE B SE B SE B

785
Gender .006 .235 −.710*** .185 −.446 .242 −.259
Age .011 .006 .011* .005 .028*** .007 −.011
Ever un- .312 .242 .066 .182 −.669** .237 −.104
em-
ployed
House- −.023 .042 .067 .036 −.062 .043 −.009
hold in-
come
Employ- .074 .266 .191 .194 .659* .271 .177
ment
sector
dummy
Higher −.632* .322 −.491 .262 −.367 .289 −.406
educa-
tion
dummy
Trust in .007 .054 −.091* .046 −.127* .057 −.265***
politi-
cians
Social −.015 .025 −.025 .020 −.092*** .028 .071*
capital (3
variables
com-
bined)
Immigra- −.122*** .022 −.060*** .018 −.142*** .022 −.209***
tion (3
variables
com-
bined)
Reduce .061 .094 −.097 .091 .220* .109 −.026
income
differ-
ences
Gays/les- −.012 .127 −.001 .079 −.067 .124 .109
bian
freedom

786
 EU inte- −.183*** .050 −.206*** .044 .078 .052 −.051
gration
Constant .049 1.099 .814 .794 1.477 1.065 1.463
Nagelk- .264 .171 .279
erke R²
Source: European Social Survey, round 7 (2014–2015. Dependent vari-
able: party voted for in most recent national election; 1 = voted populist
radical right; 0 = all other answers, including non-voting. Numbers of
populist radical right voters and total number of cases in the analyses are
121/1211 in Denmark, 171/1749 in Finland, 120/1229 in Norway, and
62/1431 in Sweden.
* = p ≤ .05
** = p ≤ .01
*** = p ≤ .001
Outside Norway there is no general support for the notion of populist
radical right voters as deprived, or “losers of modernization” (Betz 1993).
Norway apart, there is also no general pattern that they are lacking social
capital, which is in line with Rydgren’s (2009) findings. On the whole, the
lack of stable patterns across the countries suggests that the respective sup-
port profiles of the studied populist radical right parties have commonali-
ties, but also important differences. Thus, the growing question marks
about the existence of a stereotypical populist radical right voter are rein-
forced.

IMPACT

The most striking post-2000 development in the European populist radical

right family is the growth in legitimacy and political influence. If von
Beyme (1988) identified three phases in the postwar development of pop-
ulist radical right parties, a fourth phase, characterized by increased legiti-
macy and influence, can be said to have started around 2000. In a growing
number of countries populist radical right parties have been included in
coalition governments; in others they have served as government support
parties. The Nordic countries have also been affected, after many years of
populist radical right isolation. The first Nordic country to enter the fourth
phase was Denmark, where after the 2001 election DF served as a parlia-

787
mentary support party for a liberal-conservative minority coalition. The
arrangement was renewed after the 2005 and 2007 elections, and ended
only in 2011, when the center-right bloc narrowly lost the election. From
this position, DF exerted considerable influence on migration and integra-
tion policy. Denmark’s asylum policy was tightened, which became evi-
dent in immigration statistics (Widfeldt 2015a, 134–138).
Between 2011 and 2015, when Denmark was governed by a weak cen-
ter-left minority coalition led by the Social Democrats, DF was in essence
an opposition party. The election in June 2015, however, resulted in a cen-
ter-right majority as well as significant gains for DF. Coalition negotia-
tions took place with the liberal party Venstre, but were unsuccessful.
Venstre did not, for example, agree to DF’s demands for border controls;
DF also opposed plans for an income tax cut and was unhappy with Ven-
stre’s welfare proposals. In the end DF decided not to enter government.
With fewer seats than DF, Venstre formed a single-party minority govern-
ment. Despite the disagreements, it seemed clear that DF could have en-
tered government if the party had chosen to do so. The decision to stay
outside appears to have been mainly strategic. The official motivation was
that the party could exert more influence outside government than inside
(Chor and Mansø 2015; Petersen 2015; Dahl 2015).
In Norway, FrP has on several occasions held the balance of power be-
tween the left and right blocs. In 1986 FrP used this position to force a
center-right government to resign, and the following year it prevented the
center-right from returning to power. These decisions may have come
across as curious for a party whose main aim was to become an accepted
part of the center-right bloc, but FrP wanted to show the center-right par-
ties that its support should not be taken for granted. This, plus a reputation
for populism and unpredictability, contributed to the continued isolation of
FrP. The party again held the balance of power between the two blocs be-
tween 2001 and 2005, but it was not able to exert any systematic policy in-
fluence. In 2003 the center-right minority coalition even made a budget
agreement with the Labor Party (Aalberg 2004).
FrP’s preference was clear—the party aimed to be part of a center-right
coalition. The Conservative Party became more open to the idea, but the
smaller Christian People’s Party and Venstre were firmly against. The
problem for the parties opposing the inclusion of FrP in government was
that their resolve was not rewarded by the voters. In the 2009 election,
Venstre had a particularly disastrous result, and party leader Lars Spon-
heim, one of the most outspoken critics of FrP, lost his seat in parliament

788
(Allern 2010). The issue of FrP and government was academic after the
2005 and 2009 elections, both of which resulted in center-left majorities,
but in 2013 the center-right parties got the most seats and the issue came to
a head. The resolve to keep FrP out had weakened in the Christian Peo-
ple’s Party and Venstre, and government negotiations began among FrP,
the Conservatives, Venstre, and the Christian People’s Party. The latter
two parties abandoned the negotiations after a week but declared that they
would not try to stop the formation of a Conservative-FrP minority coali-
tion. Such a government was duly formed, and took office on October 16,
2013 (Allern and Karlsen 2014). FrP leader Siv Jensen became minister of
finance, and the party got six other cabinet posts (Bergh and Karlsen
2014).
Its time in government has not been easy for FrP. The party was forced
into a number of policy concessions in the 2014 budget negotiations
(Bergh and Karlsen 2015, 231). In June 2015 the Conservative Party
reached an agreement with all other parliamentary parties except FrP and
the Socialist Left to accept an annual intake of eight thousand refugees
from Syria for three years. This put a strain on the relations between the
two governing parties, and there was some speculation whether FrP would
continue in government (Andreassen, Kagge, and Ask 2015). The strains
increased further after the local and regional elections in September 2015,
when FrP got 9.5 percent of the vote, the first time since 1993 that the
party had been below 10 percent in a nationwide election. Later in the
year, however, Norway tightened its immigration policy in response to the
unprecedented levels of refugees entering Europe. FrP claimed to have
been a decisive force behind the policy changes, arguing that Norway had
introduced the most restrictive asylum policies in Europe (FrP 2015). Thus
despite its difficult experience in government, the party has had influence
in some of its prioritized areas.
In Finland, SMP participated in government between 1983 and 1990,
but its successor, PS, was small and isolated for the first fifteen years of its
existence. After its massive electoral breakthrough in 2011 it seemed pos-
sible that PS would enter government. What eventually prevented this
from happening was not opposition from other parties but PS’s refusal to
accept Finnish participation in EU bailouts of ailing eurozone economies
(Sundberg 2012). After the 2015 election, however, in which PS saw its
vote totals drop somewhat, government negotiations were successful, re-
sulting in a center-right three-party majority coalition that was led by the
Center Party and included PS and the Conservatives. PS leader Timo Soini

789
assumed the post of foreign secretary, and the party also took three other
portfolios (Nurmi and Nurmi 2015). The problem for PS as a new govern-
ment party was the declining Finnish economy. In opposition the party had
been a firm critic of austerity policies, but in government it was forced to
agree to a number of welfare cuts, for example in sickness benefits
(Suominen 2015). The party was also forced into concessions on asylum
policy (Gestrin-Hagner 2015). As a consequence, PS started to drop in
opinion polls, and internal tensions grew (Tabermann 2016; Kjellberg
2016).
Thus, populist radical right parties are actual or possible government
parties in three out of the four studied countries. The exception is Sweden,
where SD is firmly ostracized by all other parties. SD held the balance of
power between the two main blocs between 2010 and 2014 as well as after
the 2014 election. This has made governing difficult, as the only alterna-
tive to cooperation with SD is either cross-bloc agreements or hoping that
SD will not vote down government proposals despite its not being in-
cluded in negotiations beforehand. The center-right Alliance coalition, in
office until 2014, lost a number of parliamentary votes because of SD
(Widfeldt 2014). The problem was inherited by the Social Democratic–
Green minority coalition that took office after the 2014 election. The situa-
tion came to a head in December of that year, when the new government
presented its first budget. SD hid its intentions until the day before the
budget vote, when the party declared that it would vote for the opposi-
tion’s budget proposal. Mattias Karlsson, deputizing for Åkesson, who was
on sick leave for exhaustion, stated that SD would continue to vote against
the budgets of any government that allows increased immigration and
gives the Green Party influence on migration policy (Karlsson 2014). On
his return Åkesson stated that when he was consulted about the December
vote he responded, “Give ’em hell” (Nilsson, Högström, and Parkkila
2015).
The initial response from the government was that it would dissolve par-
liament, but before such a decision was formally made, a “December
agreement” was reached between the government and the four center-right
Alliance parties. The agreement, intended to run for two parliamentary
terms until 2022, meant that the smaller of the two main blocs would desist
from voting against government budgets (Widfeldt 2015b). This in effect
deprived SD of its pivotal position. However, the agreement was internally
criticized within the center-right parties. At its October 2015 party con-
gress, the Christian Democrats voted to abandon the December agreement.

790
The other center-right parties then declared that the agreement was no
longer valid (Larsson 2015). The center-left government was still able to
get its budget through parliament, as the center-right parties presented their
own separate budget motions rather than a joint proposal, but the possibil-
ity of future joint Alliance budget motions could not be ruled out. The
problem was that SD could continue to block budget proposals from both
of the main blocks. The only way to resolve this position was to start nego-
tiating with SD, but there was still resistance against this from all the other
parties.
The dilemma for the Alliance parties in Sweden is that without SD sup-
port there will be unstable minority governments for the foreseeable fu-
ture. With some kind of working relationship with SD, there would be a
comfortable right-of-center majority in the Swedish parliament. The ques-
tion is for how long the center-right parties will continue to let their princi-
pled opposition to SD stand in the way of the opportunity to govern with a
stable majority. The experiences from Denmark, Norway, and Finland sug-
gests that a working relationship between the center-right and populist rad-
ical right parties is possible. As shown in this section, the longer-term Eu-
ropean trend of increasing legitimacy and impact for populist radical right
parties applies to three Nordic countries. This development is likely to also
reach Sweden; the only question is when.

CONCLUSION

To provide an authoritative and reasonably durable account of the Nordic

populist radical right parties in the 2010s is a challenging task. Their for-
tunes are constantly changing, as is their social and political environment.
Nevertheless, everything suggests that the Nordic populist radical right
parties are here to stay. Their fortunes will fluctuate, but the implosion of
the Swedish NyD in the 1990s is unlikely to be repeated. A potential prob-
lem for populist parties is that they often depend heavily on personal lead-
ership. FrP and DF, however, have emerged unharmed from leadership
changes, and SD did not suffer when Jimmie Åkesson was on sick leave
between October 2014 and April 2015. The possible question mark seems
to be PS, whose successes have depended heavily on Timo Soini. When
Soini stepped down from the leadership in 2017, Jussi Halla-Aho was
elected as his successor. Soini, the other PS ministers plus many of the
party’s parliamentarians, then defected to form a breakaway party, which
stayed in government (Husu 2017). Future developments are impossible to

791
predict.
Another potential problem is the burdens that follow political responsi-
bility. To be sure, both FrP and PS have suffered from their participation
in government, although the final balance sheet is not yet at hand for either
government. The comparative populist radical right government experi-
ence is mixed, with the Austrian FPÖ (and the splinter group Bündnis
Zukunft Österreich [BZÖ, Alliance for the Future of Austria]) and the
Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn suffering, but the Italian Lega Nord and Swiss
SVP faring better. It can be argued that the DF position as a support party
between 2001 and 2011 is one of the most successful cases of populist rad-
ical right policy influence in a European context. Its position outside the
actual cabinet allowed DF to cherry-pick issues where cooperation was
possible and to avoid more difficult areas, such as EU-related matters. The
decision by DF to stay out of government after the 2015 election suggests
that the party feared the consequences of government responsibility. It
should be noted, however, that although the burdens of government are a
problem for populist radical right parties, this is not something specific to
them. In addition, the Austrian experience suggests that the damage from
being in government can quite quickly be repaired when the party is back
in opposition.
That populist radical right parties are here to stay in the Nordic countries
is in the 2010s verging on a trivial statement. That their presence will af-
fect their respective political systems and societies is also quite obvious.
Everything suggests that these parties will directly or indirectly influence
migration policy in the foreseeable future. The details of the consequences
are difficult to predict, but all the four studied Nordic countries have in re-
cent years tightened their asylum policies, and a reversal of this trend is in-
creasingly unlikely.
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CHAPTER 28

798
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN EASTERN EUROPE

LENKA BUŠTÍKOVÁ
THE contemporary radical right in Eastern Europe is a relatively new phe-
nomenon, but has been steadily gaining in prominence. Although many
radical right movements today embrace the legacy of the fascist move-
ments of the interwar period, their novelty lies in their adherence to the
rules of electoral competition and—at least on the surface—their rejection
of outright violence as a solution to internal political conflicts. Given the
range of East European countries in term of ethnic heterogeneity, eco-
nomic performance, and cultural legacy, it should not be surprising that
East European radical right parties reflect this diversity. In some countries,
such as Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Latvia, ethnic-
ity and language create cleavages that structure radical right politics. In
more ethnically homogeneous countries, such as Hungary, Czech Repub-
lic, and Poland, the ethnic cleavage is less pronounced and radical right
politics are focused either on mobilization against Roma or on social and
religious issues that map onto particular party systems. Despite the new
forms of the radical right in Eastern Europe, historical legacies cast a long
shadow on contemporary events, due to the increasingly widely held belief
that liberal democracy is not compatible with a vision of societies ruled ex-
clusively by titular majorities.
Since the dawn of East European democracies in the early 1990s, schol-
ars have expressed pessimism about their prospects. The new political and
economic regimes, it was argued, were expected to create a large impover-
ished underclass and a politically unsophisticated electorate, which many
believed would block democratic and economic progress. The challenges
of nation-building, mixed with Leninist legacies, were primed to create
contentious, exclusionary communities that would be incompatible with
free markets and liberal democratic institutions. Initially, many nascent
East European democracies managed to overcome these economic and po-
litical transitional challenges only to discover that identity politics had be-
come a pervasive feature of their party systems. Democracy had empow-
ered minorities and politicized the protection of minority rights. In some
instances, the backlash against diversity and inclusiveness was immediate,
reflecting the birthing and growing pains of post-authoritarian polities. In
other cases, nationalism emerged in the subsequent era of normal politics.
After the preoccupation with the establishment of basic electoral institu-
tions passed, resentment toward opportunities that the new liberal democ-

799
ratic order opened up for minorities resulted in the countermobilization of
the radical right.1
There are two types of radical right mobilization against minorities in
Eastern Europe. The first is mostly found in ethnically homogeneous coun-
tries and is characterized by mobilization based on socially conservative
issues, against sexual minorities, and targeting social groups and ethnic
minorities with limited ability and capacity to politically organize, includ-
ing gays and lesbians, Roma, Jews, Poles, Germans, and Greeks. Radical
right parties in Albania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and
Slovenia fall into this category. In more ethnically pluralistic societies,
parties seeking electoral support mobilize against constitutive, larger eth-
nic groups with a high degree of politicization; radical right parties in this
category are found in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Macedonia, Ro-
mania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Strong radical right parties can be found in both categories. Perhaps the
most successful and enduring radical right party is the Slovenská Národná
Strana (SNS, Slovak National Party), which emerged in the 1990s and has
ever since dominated the fringe of the Slovak political spectrum. The SNS
was present in seven out of nine parliaments, both before and after inde-
pendence. Since 1993, after Slovakia split from the Czechoslovak federa-
tion, SNS has served in half of the governments. This impact is highly un-
usual because most radical right parties in Eastern Europe are rather short-
lived and their electoral success tends to be episodic, proceeding in bursts
that rarely survive for more than two or three electoral cycles. On average,
radical right parties are quite weak, rarely exceeding 7 percent of the popu-
lar vote (see Figure 28.1, also Bustikova 2014).
Weak electoral support for the radical right parties does not make for
good headlines. The party that is currently most in the media spotlight is
the Hungarian party Jobbik, due to its extreme rhetoric and its exceptional
ability to attract more than 16 percent of the popular vote in two consecu-
tive national elections. Jobbik also gets media attention because of the
Hungarian trajectory of democratic backsliding under the leadership of
Jobbik’s mainstream party cousin Fidesz, led by Viktor Orbán. Jobbik
grew out of a student group organization and draws its support both from
young, affluent, and educated voters as well as from voters in economi-
cally depressed regions of Hungary. Although Jobbik is a political force to
be reckoned with, one should keep in mind that two other radical right par-
ties, in Poland and Romania, were also in the limelight for a time before

800
they disappeared into oblivion. It is therefore plausible that a similar fate
awaits Jobbik.
The anti-communist, anti-establishment Polish radical right party Liga
Polskich Rodzin (LPR, League of Polish Families) won about 8 percent of
the popular vote in the 2001 and 2005 elections. It was advocating socially
conservative values and supported by fringe elements in the Polish
Catholic Church. It disintegrated after the education minister, appointed
from the LPR, encountered strong opposition after a corruption scandal
that involved regional savings banks and implicated the parties of the rul-
ing coalition, including the LPR. Similarly, the now defunct but once
prominent Greater Romanian Party peaked in the elections of 2000 and
2004 with double-digit popular support but imploded after the party’s
founder, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, saw his control weaken. These examples
of prominent radical right parties gone bust illustrate the volatility of radi-
cal right party support and their episodic and meteoric nature.

FIGURE 28.1 Cumulative Vote Shares for the Radical Right Parties by
Electoral Cycles
The radical right in Eastern Europe is similar to its West European
cousins in its emphasis on mobilization against minorities. Until 2015, that
mobilization was exclusively against minorities with electoral rights who
have been settled in for centuries. The influx to Europe of a million-plus
refugees from Syria expanded the portfolio of minorities to rally against
and, paradoxically, Westernized the East European radical right in its op-

801
position to Islam and migrants with non-European backgrounds.2 How-
ever, the radical right in Eastern Europe has three unique characteristics
that distinguish it from its older West European cousins (Art 2011;
Arzheimer 2009; Arzheimer and Carter 2006; Betz 1993; Eatwell 2003;
Giddens 2005; Golder 2003, 2016; Kitschelt 1995; Meguid 2008; Mudde
2007, 2016; Norris 2005; Inglehart and Norris 2016; Rydgren 2002, 2007;
cf. Ignazi 1992). These unique characteristics are (1) left-leaning positions
on the economy, (2) linkages between identity and political reforms, which
leads to the association of minority policies with democratization, and (3)
the coexistence of radical right parties with radicalized mainstream parties.

RADICAL RIGHT, BUT LEFT ON THE ECONOMY

Notwithstanding their label, East European radical right parties are left-
leaning on the economy when compared to other parties in their respective
political systems (Allen 2017; Bustikova and Kitschelt 2009). Their policy
platforms stand for protection against the volatility of markets, more social
spending, and greater state control over the economy, which precludes for-
eign involvement in free markets and ownership. Despite their overwhelm-
ing lean to the left, it does not follow that these parties have a clear social
base among lower-income people (Tucker 2002). There are three reasons
why economic and other sociodemographic profiles (with the mild excep-
tion of gender) do not map onto the economic policy platforms of parties
(cf. Bornischer and Kriesi 2013). The first reason is the diffuse nature of
economic risk, which obscures the link between voting, income levels, and
occupational profiles (Buštíková and Kitschelt 2009). The second reason
relates to the fact that economic grievances are tied to identity issues, such
as concerns about the loss of national sovereignty and about the perceived
unfairness of the economic system, which undermines the legitimacy of
wealth acquired by the winners of the economic transformation. Third,
shifts in ethnic group hierarchy due to the process of democratization also
undermine purely economic considerations by “ethnicizing” economic
grievances (Olzak 1992; Siroky and Cuffe 2015). These three factors ob-
fuscate the direct link between economic deprivation and radical right vot-
ing.
Diffusion of the risk obscures the link between voting and pocketbook-
related grievances, and it precludes the possibility of finding an equivalent
of the disenchanted blue-collar worker voting for the radical right in the
East. Market distortions blur the risk profiles of voters. For example, ac-

802
cess to a rent-controlled apartment or the ability to purchase an apartment
at below market value in the early transition years was a better indicator of
economic security than income or sectoral employment. Due to these dis-
tortions, it is more difficult to capture exposure to risk associated with edu-
cational levels or self-declared levels of income. Exposure to risk is more
diffuse and more related to access to high-quality health care, educational
opportunities, and protection in retirement (Greskovits 2007).
The second reason is that economic grievances are tied to identity is-
sues. Economic concerns are intertwined with identity concerns because,
ultimately, economic concerns are related to issues of national sovereignty
and not the particular day-to-day economic expectations of policies. There-
fore, at the aggregate level, surges in support for the radical right might
follow after an upsurge in aggregate levels of wealth, such as was the case
with the rise of Ataka in Bulgaria in 2008, LPR in Poland in 2005, and
SNS in Slovakia in 2006. At the individual level, opposition to fiscal aus-
terity is related to the perceptions of fairness. Individual voter profiles are
thus poor predictors of radical right voting because improvements in an in-
dividual’s pocketbook are compatible with dissatisfaction associated with
the loss of national sovereignty in a country’s fiscal affairs. This is espe-
cially true when the country is subjected to austerity policies or privatiza-
tion that is perceived as benefiting foreign companies, despite any overall
positive, individual-level effects on voters. Voters may also be dissatisfied
with policies that put minorities at an advantage, either via programs spon-
sored from abroad or via domestic programs. The relative balance of bene-
fits between the titular majority and the minority might therefore tilt away
from the titular majority, despite the overall benefits for all citizens.
The third reason individual-level economic profiles do not map to left-
right platforms of parties is related to the shifts in ethnic group hierarchy
that result from the process of democratization. This means that economic
concerns are related to concerns about policy changes in the status quo as
it applies to minorities, rather than objective concerns about poverty. The
reason why economics, on the surface, explains little is due to its relational
nature. Sensitivity to economic issues is not rooted in individual profiles
tied to objective grievances but to sensitivity about the status quo. The ex-
perience of having the status quo shifted in an unfavorable way is at the
core of support for radical right parties in Eastern Europe (Bustikova 2014,
2017). In Eastern Europe, this shift in the status quo of ethnic relations
proceeded in parallel with the process of democratization, which brings us
to the second distinction between the East European and West European

803
radical right: in Western Europe, the resurgence in radical right mobiliza-
tion that came about in the 1980s did not happen in the context of a regime
change and political liberalization.

DEMOCRATIZATION AND MINORITY RIGHTS

Democratization in Eastern Europe had empowered minorities and politi-

cized the protection of minority rights. In some instances, the backlash
against diversity and inclusiveness was immediate, and reflected the grow-
ing pains of post-authoritarian polities. In other cases, after being preoccu-
pied with the establishment of basic electoral institutions, resentment to-
ward opportunities that the new liberal democratic order opened up for mi-
norities resulted in the countermobilization of the radical right. The dis-
tinctiveness of Eastern Europe’s development stems, in part, from its con-
current transitions: the economic transformation, the democratic transition,
and the redefinition of both the state and ethnic boundaries (Brubaker
1997).
The primary targets of radical right parties and groups are minorities,
but in some important ways political parties as well as domestic and inter-
national organizations that are associated with the promotion of minority
rights and minority accommodation are also targeted. Democratization and
political transformation free ethnic and social minorities to pursue their de-
mands, but they also unleash the mobilizational capacity of actors to pur-
sue hostile acts against minorities (Kopecký and Mudde 2003; Chambers
and Kopstein 2001; cf. Ekiert and Kubik 1999; Giddens and Case 2014).
Democratization allowed minority groups to organize, to form political
parties, to engage in civic life, and to create pressure from below to expand
the rights of ethnic groups and their access to state resources. This pressure
resulted in the diversification of public education by opening up possibili-
ties for the bilingual education of children and young adults. The process
of accession to the European Union and the Council of Europe facilitated
the opening up of a political discourse to minorities, and diversity in gen-
eral. For example, countries that signed the Council of Europe’s Charter
for Regional or Minority Languages are required to pledge to protect his-
torical (non-immigrant) regional and minority languages. This charter was
signed by seventeen out of twenty-two post-communist regimes and re-
sulted in the expansion of minority schooling and an increase in budget al-
location for minority cultures (Bustikova 2015, 67). Compliance with the
Copenhagen criteria, which determine eligibility to join the European

804
Union, resulted in the improvement of the rights of ethnic and social mi-
norities, but at the same time politicized issues of diversity and inclusion.
This created an opening for radical right parties to campaign against issues
of minority accommodation.
Political radicalism and extremism are often studied in the context of
racism. By examining the politicization of minority accommodation,
Bustikova (2014) challenges a widely held assertion that prejudice and
xenophobia fuel radical right support (also Rydgren 2008). Instead, she ar-
gues, electoral extremism originates in dissatisfaction with the ascension
of minority groups to political power, rather than in xenophobia. This has
potentially important implications for our understanding of the effective-
ness of certain accommodative arrangements to mediate ethnic tensions,
especially in new democracies. Although accommodative arrangements
can sometimes be effective barriers to the outbreak of large-scale violent
ethnic conflict, in periods of normal politics they can also have unexpected
adverse effects that exacerbate rather than soothe ethnic tensions.
Democratization does not mix well with nation-building. While this in-
sight may be accurate for the onset of democratization, it overlooks the
possibility that ethnic relations might sour after the transition period as a
result of an increase in domestic minority demands or due to external pres-
sures to expand minority rights. It is perhaps surprising that the highest
volume of radical right mobilization is observed not in countries with un-
resolved ethnic boundaries but rather in polities with institutionally delin-
eated boundaries between titular majority and minorities. In fact, radical
right parties are often quite weak in states where national boundaries have
not (yet) been firmly established. Countries such as Albania, Georgia,
Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ukraine either have failed to produce radical
right parties at all or have experienced radical right political mobilization
very recently.
Although it might be tempting to associate support for radical right par-
ties with worsening economic conditions, rampant corruption, or voter ap-
athy and prejudice, these factors do not explain why specifically a radical
right party, and not an anti-corruption party or another niche party,
emerges in response. Bustikova (2014) proposes that support for radical
right parties originates in policy hostility, which is defined as an opposi-
tion to policy changes in the status quo of ethnic relations, and that such
parties succeed when they compete politically on a platform that seeks to
counterbalance or roll back the political gains of minorities (see also Dan-
cygier 2010; Rydgren 2008). The claim that radical right parties are not

805
fond of minorities is of course an old one, but we should not be blinded by
the inflammatory nature of party rhetoric into concluding that voting for
radical right parties originates in hatred against minorities, since xenopho-
bia is something that many non-radical-right voters in Eastern Europe
openly express. What differentiates radical right voters in Eastern Europe
is their vehement opposition to policies that accommodate minority de-
mands and elevate their status. This implies that variation in minority ac-
commodation, rather than differences in xenophobia, should predict
change in electoral support for radical right parties across countries and
time. Radical right mobilization, on this account, is rooted in policy hostil-
ity rather than in group hostility.
The process of building a liberal democracy resulted in paying special
attention to the socioeconomic well-being of minorities and politicizing
their rights. Policies that expand minority rights induce powerful griev-
ances in the electorate when small ethnic and social groups are viewed as
being accommodated and when mainstream parties appear to be helping do
that. The political rights and benefits achieved by minorities irritate some
voters, and it is these voters who are attracted to radical right parties that
seek to reverse those gains.
This relates to another major difference between West and East Euro-
pean democracies. Dissatisfaction with policies undertaken during the
process of democratization, such as the expansion of ethnic and social mi-
nority rights, by politicians who are viewed as unaccountable is increas-
ingly linked to anti-democratic attitudes in Eastern Europe (Minkenberg
2015). Although corrupt political practices are certainly present in Western
Europe at the highest levels, they are not associated with calls to question
the core rules of democratic governance. In Eastern Europe, responsive-
ness to the demands of minorities and democracy are bundled together, so
the backlash against establishment politicians and parties feeds off the in-
tensity of an identity-based cleavage. Given the relatively higher levels of
aggregate xenophobia in the East (Enyedi and Erős 1999; Kopecký and
Mudde 2003), attempts to modify ethnic relations, which are wrapped in
populist calls for a more direct relationship between voters and leaders,
can be interpreted as covert appeals to revisit inclusive democracy as a
form of political representation. The ability of new liberal democracies to
survive hinges on their ability to contain this backlash against the expan-
sion of minority rights.
Nationalism and sour attitudes toward liberal democracy have three in-
terconnected sources. The first is the European Union, which is associated

806
with rights for ethnic, social, and sexual minorities along with restrictions
of national sovereignty. Opposition to these principles of liberal democ-
racy in Europe conveniently provides a pathway to increasing sovereignty
in domestic affairs. Second, opposition to liberal democracy is often dis-
guised as opposition to diversity, and goes hand in hand with advocating
further restrictions on civic life. Third, since the democratic and economic
transitions proceeded simultaneously, voters associate the introduction of
free markets with democratization. The corrupt nexus of politics and eco-
nomics, which was born in this dual transition, has cast a dark shadow on
democratic institutions, which have often failed to establish adequate regu-
latory oversight institutions to curb political corruption.
Corruption and anti-establishment attitudes engage economic issues and
are enhanced by feelings of economic unfairness. For the most part, how-
ever, economic issues are bundled with identity issues, where “us vs.
them” is associated with rage against the political elites who sold national
interests to outsiders, foreigners, and ethnic minorities. Calls to rearrange
ethnic relations and empower groups that benefit from equalizing social is-
sues and ethnic power relations are de facto challenges to the very founda-
tions of the entire liberal democratic project.
The European Union, by its design, limits national sovereignty. Eu-
roskepticism and Eurorealism (Kopecký and Mudde 2003) are an acquired
taste for the East European radical right, however. After the collapse of
communism, radical right parties started off with an anti-communist
agenda.3 Sovereignty was initially associated with the Western Europe se-
curity umbrella, its cultural supremacy, and freedom from Soviet rule.
Being vassals to Moscow compromised the deposed communist rulers un-
less they discovered nationalism in time to become leaders of newly sover-
eign polities. The anti-communist cleavage was still relevant in the third
wave of post-communist elections, around the time of the EU accession,
when anti-establishment parties, including radical right parties, exploited
dissatisfaction with the first wave of reform politicians and their second-
wave replacement. Political corruption, clientelism, volatility, and state
capture drove voters away from mainstream parties (Ceka 2013; Hanley
and Sikk 2016; Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2015; O’Dwyer 2014; Pop-
Eleches 2010; Powell and Tucker 2014; Rovny 2015; Tavits 2007). More
important, voters were upset that the representatives of new democratic
parties allowed former members of the Communist Party to capitalize on
market liberalization and state-led privatization and lapsed in creating in-
stitutions of market oversight (Grzymala-Busse 2007; O’Dwyer 2006).

807
This anti-establishment sentiment was fed by the idea that new political
representatives sold out national interests by allowing former communists
to convert their social capital into an economic capital and by not prosecut-
ing former communists for participating in a repressive political regime
that constrained state sovereignty.
With time, the post-communist cleavage faded away and the danger to
national sovereignty turned from the East to the West. Radical right parties
are acutely aware of the benefits of membership in the European Union,
which brings subsidies as well as developmental funds to the East. None of
the radical right parties in Eastern Europe has, so far, called for a referen-
dum or a petition that would call for an exit from the European Union
comparable in scale to the efforts of the British Euroskeptic parties. On the
other hand, the second generation of radical right parties, such as Hungar-
ian Jobbik and Marian Kotleba’s People’s Party–Our Slovakia (LSNS),
have not rejected the possibility of leaving NATO and the European
Union. Both parties rose to prominence after Hungary and Slovakia joined
the EU in 2004, and both have been actively involved in attempts to create
paramilitary units that protect “public order.”
Radical right parties therefore found new and unexpected friends among
their Western counterparts in the European Parliament. Euroskeptic views
bridge many East-West differences. The first East-West bloc in the Euro-
pean Parliament, established in 2007, was called Identity, Tradition, and
Sovereignty and capitalized on the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to
the EU. The bloc was short-lived, however, when significant tensions
erupted between the Italian and Romanian radical right. Once the Roman-
ian representatives left, the bloc was dissolved because it did not have the
twenty required members. The French and Dutch radical right parties lead
the current bloc, called the European Alliance for Freedom, which relies
on three weak members from Poland and Romania and has suspicious pro-
Russian leanings. After the EU Eastern Europe enlargement, Euroskeptic
attitudes have become powerful predictors of radical right voting across
Western and Eastern Europe. Yet it is not a fear of technocrats from Brus-
sels and their investigations of fraud in disbursing European funds that
fuels radical right support, but irritation with EU reports that criticize vio-
lations of Roma rights, demand the expansion of minority language rights
and praise gender equality in the workplace. This comes at a time when the
EU is losing credibility due to its democratic deficit and its failure to avert
and resolve the post-2008 economic crisis (Grittersová et al. 2015; cf.
Guasti 2016).

808
 Until 2015, the East European radical right never effectively mobilized
against new minorities arriving from non-European countries. This sug-
gests that issues of immigration and mobilization against Islam due to the
refugee crisis and to terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016
could unify Eastern and Western radical right movements more than Eu-
roskepticism. However, it is not clear whether the fear of Islamic refugees
and terrorism will benefit radicalized mainstream parties, radical right par-
ties, or both. If the threat to national sovereignty is perceived as so severe
that only a large party can restore security, by embracing a more hawkish
position mainstream parties might subdue radical right parties because
they are seen as more competent to deal with the issue (Meguid 2008).
Large radicalized parties have more credibility when they claim to be
able to avert a severe threat posed by the European Union’s policies. In
Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán successfully mobilized fear by claiming
that half a million Syrian refugees would be moved from Turkey to the
EU. In 2015, the Slovak government filed a lawsuit against the European
Union at the European Court of Justice because it feared a new EU manda-
tory quota system to allocate asylum seekers. Fear of Muslim asylum seek-
ers led to mass demonstrations in Eastern Europe, despite the fact that
there are almost no migrant communities from the Middle East. The pro-
posed EU quotas on how many asylum seekers each of the East European
countries was expected to absorb were tiny relative to the size of the popu-
lation, and few of the migrants actually wanted to go to Eastern Europe
(even before they knew how unwelcome they were). The prime ministers
of Poland and Slovakia, Ewa Kopacz and Robert Fico, explicitly asked for
Christian refugees from Syria. Similar sentiments against Muslim refugees
were echoed in Estonia, Hungary, and Bulgaria.4 Celebrations of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1989 Velvet Revolution were marked by
large anti-government and anti-migrant demonstrations in Prague during
November 2015.5 The refugee crisis and counter-Islamic mobilization re-
sulted in a great variety of radical right mobilization.
Eastern Europe is an interesting laboratory in which political parties ex-
periment with three core strategies to tackle the radical right: delegaliza-
tion as a form of a cordon sanitaire, radicalization that weakens the radical
right, and radicalization that leads to outbidding. Andrea Pirro (2015) and
Bartek Pytlas (2016) have shown that in Eastern Europe, strategies of in-
clusion and exclusion yield mixed results, and no single strategy can be
identified to suppress the radical right party vote. Recent elections in

809
Poland in 2015 and Slovakia in 2016 reflect this schism. In Poland, the
radicalized mainstream right-wing Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS, Law and
Justice Party) won elections in a landslide. In Slovakia, elections were
marked by the implosion of mainstream parties and strengthened both the
radical right (which received 8.6 percent of the vote) and the extreme right
(which got 8 percent of the vote). Although the refugee crisis was not the
sole focus of the electoral campaigns, both the Slovak and Polish main-
stream parties used it to stir up nationalistic sentiment before the elections.
The informal leader of the PiS, Jarosław Kaczyński, has claimed that
refugees bring cholera to Europe. Robert Fico’s campaign to “protect Slo-
vakia” against refugees cost him a comfortable majority in the Slovak par-
liament. The strategy badly backfired and made the task of forming a
durable governing coalition after the elections a challenge. In Poland, by
contrast, the nationalist sentiment gave PiS an unprecedented majority in
the parliament that has allowed it to weaken core institutions of democratic
governance such as the Constitutional Court and free media. This suggests
that rhetorical radicalization of the mainstream parties is a double-edged
sword for the mainstream parties.

RADICALIZED MAINSTREAM PARTIES

The third common aspect of radical right mobilization is the presence of

radicalized mainstream parties. They are typically left-leaning on the econ-
omy and advocate greater involvement of states in the economy. Some
originated in anti-communist movements prior to the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989. The most prominent examples are Fidesz in Hungary, PiS in
Poland, and in Slovakia the social democratic parties of former and present
prime ministers Vladimír Mečiar (Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko
[HZDS, Movement for a Democratic Slovakia]) and Fico (Smer–sociálna
demokracia [Smer, Direction–Social Democracy]) in Slovakia. Although
many West European mainstream parties embrace tough policies on immi-
gration and home-grown terrorist networks, East European mainstream
parties are, comparatively speaking, much more comfortable with their
radical right cousins. Radical right parties thus operate in a much more
permissive environment and are often incorporated into governing coali-
tions.
Far right parties have been successful in steadily attracting some voter
support since the early 1990s in Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Serbia,
Slovakia, and Slovenia. In these countries, the far right was able to attract

810
between 5 percent and 40 percent of the popular vote at various points in
time. Furthermore, in Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, and Slova-
kia, far right parties have been present in governing coalitions since the
founding elections and have significantly shaped minority policies. In the
East, the boundaries between the “radicalized right” and “radical right” are
especially blurry and it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine
whether prominent mainstream parties, such as Fidesz (led by Victor
Orbán) in Hungary, PiS (unofficially led by Jarosław Kaczyński) in
Poland, and Smer (led by Robert Fico) in Slovakia, can be considered as
not radical right parties.
The weakening of the radical right can be perhaps attributed to the wide
presence of radicalized mainstream parties that siphon away their true
electoral potential. On the surface, radical right parties in the East are a
rare phenomenon (Bustikova 2014) and on average are less electorally suc-
cessful than their Western counterparts. But higher aggregate levels of
xenophobia in the East (Kopecký and Mudde 2003), which contributes to
the permissiveness of radical rhetoric, indicates a weakness of liberal de-
mocratic consolidation. Paradoxically, the historical legacies of authoritar-
ian fascist interwar regimes are more relevant after more than twenty-five
years of democratic consolidation than they were in 1989, because radical-
ized mainstream politicians are now looking for new forms to organize po-
litical systems. The nostalgic association with past glory ultimately bene-
fits both the radical right and the radicalized mainstream right, since both
claim to be the political successors of previous nationalistic movements,
often associated with state independence and territorial unity.
Voters and politicians have begun to contemplate possible substitutes to
replace liberal democracy. Eastern Europe is experiencing democratic fa-
tigue, low levels of trust in deliberative institutions, and dissatisfaction
with democratic governance (BTI 2014). Unlike in 1989, when democracy
was the only game in town, there is no agreement on how the alternative
form of governance might look like this time around. Liberal democracy,
with its appeal to inclusiveness, has its opponents. Since the Communist
Parties that preceded the democratic experiment have been discredited as
well, some voters and some parties are looking to the distant past of the in-
terwar period and resurrecting nationalistic heroes with dubious democra-
tic credentials.
Hence the explosion of T-shirts featuring the image of the Polish inter-
war authoritarian statesman Pilsudski, who unified Poland (and protected
minorities); of the controversial interwar leader of the Ukrainian National-

811
ists, Stepan Bandera; and of the similarly controversial leader of the Ro-
manian Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu. A newly elected member of the
Slovak parliament, Marian Kotleba, occasionally wears symbols of the
Hlinka guard, associated with the clerofascist Slovak state during World
War II. The third-largest political party in Hungary, Jobbik, uses symbols
similar to those of the authoritarian and anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party
from World War II.
The narrative that rejects both communist rule, which diminished na-
tional sovereignty, and botched democratic rule, which increased the
power of ethnic and social minorities at the expense of the titular national-
ity, is compelling because fascism is an alternative to democracy and was
also antagonistic toward communism. Countries with a nationalist legacy
of communist rule are in a unique position. Mainstream or extreme politi-
cal mobilization can evoke interwar authoritarianism and, to a certain ex-
tent, fascism (Bustikova and Kitschelt 2009). If there is a reversal in liberal
democratic governance in Eastern Europe, it will most likely be initiated
not by a small radical right party but by a large radicalized mainstream
party that will move the country into new and uncharted territory. Whether
the presence of a radical right party will facilitate such a turn, by introduc-
ing new issues and ideas into the mainstream, or will block democratic
sidelining, by offering an alternative channel for discontent, needs to be
explored further. Most of the research on Eastern Europe has treated post-
1989 radical right parties as a Western equivalent of pathological nor-
malcy. But if radical right parties contribute to the dismantling of democ-
ratic governance by undermining constitutional checks and balances, such
an approach would be imprudent.
Radical Right Parties in Eastern Europe
Albania PBK, BK—Balli Kombëtar [National Front Party]; PBKD—
Balli Kombëtar Demokrat [Democratic National Front Party]
Bul- BNRP—Bălgarska Nacionalna Radikalna Partija [Bulgarian
garia National Radical Party]
NSA—Nacionalen Sayuz Ataka [National Union Attack, which
includes BNRP (Attack Coalition)]
Croatia HDZ—Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica [Croatian Democratic
Union]

HSP—Hrvatska Stranka Prava [Croatian Party of Rights]

812
 HSP-ZDS—Hrvatska Stranka Prava–Zagorska Demokratska
Stranka
HSP-HKDU—Hrvatska Stranka Prava–Hrvatska Kršcanska
Demokratska Unija

Czech SPR-RSČ—Sdružení Pro Republiku–Republikánská Strana

R. Československa (Sládek)
RMS—Republikáni Miroslava Sládka [Republicans of Miroslav
Sládek]
NS—Národní Strana [National Party]

NDS—Národně Demokratická Strana [National Democratic

Party]
DSS/DS—Dělnická Strana/Dělnická Strana Sociální Spravedl-
nosti [Workers’ Party]

Estonia ERSP—Eesti Rahvusliku Sõltumatuse Partei [Estonian National

Independence Party]
EK—Eesti Kodanik [Estonian Citizens]
ERKL—Eesti Rahvuslaste Keskliit [Estonian Nationalists Cen-
tral League]
PE—Parem Eesti [Right Estonia]
EIP—Eesti Iseseisvuspartei [Estonian Independence Party];
Isamaa—Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit [Pro Patria and Res Publica
Union]
Hun- MIÉP—Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja [Hungarian Justice and
gary Life Party]

MIÉP-Jobbik—[MIÉP-Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom

(Movement for a Better Hungary)]
Jobbik—Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom [Movement for a
Better Hungary]

Latvia TB—Tēvzeme un Brīvībai [For Fatherland and Freedom]

TB/LNNK—Apvienība Tēvzeme un Brīvībai [Alliance for
Homeland and Freedom]/ Latvijas Nacionālās Neatkarības

813
 Kustība [Latvian National Independence Movement]
Lithua- LKDS/LTJS—Jaunoji Lietuva Susivienijimas uz Vieninga Li-
nia etuva [Young Lithuania for United Lithuania]
LNP-JL—Lietuviu Nacionaline Partija [Lithuanian National
Party]/Jaunoji Lietuva [Young Lithuania]
LlaS—Lietuvos Laisvės Sąjunga [Lithuanian Liberty Union]
LNDP—Lietuvos Nacionaldemokratu Partija [Lithuanian Na-
tional Democratic Party]
Mace- VMRO-DPMNE—Vnatreška Makedonska Revolucionerna Or-
donia ganizacija–Demokratska Partija za Makedonsko Nacionalno
Edinstvo [Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity]
VMRO-DP—Vnatreška Makedonska Revolucionerna Organi-
zacija–Demokratska Partija
Poland SN—Stronnictwo Narodowe [National Party]
Partia X—Party X
PWN-PSN—Polska Wspólnota Narodowa–Polskie Stronnictwo
Narodowe [Polish National Commonwealth–Polish National
Party]
ROP—Ruch Odbudowy Polski [Movement for the Reconstruc-
tion of Poland]
LPR—Liga Polskich Rodzin [League of Polish Families]
LPR—Liga Prawicy Rzeczypospolitej [League of the Right of
the Republic
(League of Polish Families (LPR) + Real Politics Union + Right
of the Republic)]
Roma- PUNR—Partidul Unităţii Naţionale a Românilor [Party of Ro-
nia manian Unity]
PRM—Partidul (Popular) România Mare [Party for Greater Ro-
mania]

PNG—Partidul Noua Generaţie–Creştin Democrat [New Gen-

eration Party]
PP-DD—Partidul Poporului–Dan Diaconescu [People’s Party—

814
 Dan Diaconescu]

Serbia SRS—Srpska Radikalna Stranka [Serbian Radical Party]

NS—Nova Srbija [New Serbia]
SPO—Srpski Pokret Obnove [Serbian Renewal Movement]

Slova- PSNS—Pravá Slovenská Národná Strana [Real Slovak National

kia Party]

SNS—Slovenská Národná Strana [Slovak National Party]

LSNS—Ľudová Strana Naše Slovensko; Slovenská Pospolitosť
—Národná Strana

Slove- SNS—Slovenska Nacionalna Stranka [Slovenian National

nia Party]
Ukraine KUN—Kongres Ukraiins’kikh Natsionalistiv [Congress of
Ukrainian Nationalists]
Rukh—Narodnyi Rukh Ukrajiny [People’s Movement of
Ukraine]
Svoboda [Freedom]
Source: Buštíková 2017

815
NOTES

1. Studies of the radical right in Eastern Europe have focused on the ide-
ological roots of radical parties dating back to the interwar period and
the role of legacies in party competition (de Lange and Guerra 2009;
Held 1996; Hockenos 1993; Mesežnikov, Gyárfášová, and Smilov
2008; Mudde 2005; Ramet 1999; Shekhovtsov and Umland 2014),
ideological foundations, anti-establishment and populist appeals (Dee-
gan-Krause and Haughton 2009; Ishiyama 2009; Kopecký and Mudde
2003; Minkenberg 2015; Mudde 2005, 2007, 2016; Ramet 1999), the
agency of radical politics (Minkenberg 2015); attitudes toward democ-
racy (Allen 2017), territorial disputes (Mareš 2009; Siroky and Cuffe
2015), European Union conditionality and Euroskepticism (Kelley
2004; Kopecký and Mudde, 2002, 2003; Polyakova 2012; Taggart and
Szczerbiak 2004; Vachudova 2008), the effect of mainstream parties’
behavior and party systems (Pop-Eleches 2010; Vachudova 2008), and
the interaction between the radical right parties and both their main-
stream competitors and their ideological competition (Pirro 2015; Pyt-
las 2016).
2. Eastern Europe was home to refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina
who were of Muslim faith. Yet there was never rallying against
refugees from the former Yugoslavia comparable to the mass demon-
strations of the summer of 2015 against Islam that swept Eastern Eu-
rope and mobilized both mainstream and fringe parties against settle-
ment policies for migrants.
3. A notable exception was the Romanian radical right party led by Cor-
neliu Vadim Tudor, a celebrated poet, associated with (post-)commu-
nist nostalgia.
4. In Hungary, harsh reaction to non-Christian refugees followed after
the 2013 constitutional annulment of the law on churches adopted in
2011. The annulment was issued by the Orbán government, which fa-
vored Christian churches and politicized the registration process for
religious organizations.
5. The Czech president, Miloš Zeman, a mainstream politician, cele-
brated the anniversary by singing the national anthem with Martin
Konvička, an advocate of concentration camps for Muslims and the
leader of the Bloc Against Islam, on the same university campus

816
 where student protests began in 1989.
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CHAPTER 29

822
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA

RICHARD ARNOLD AND ANDREAS UMLAND

EVEN before the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, some crucial players
within the post-Soviet spectrum of Russian radical right-wing parties,
groups, and networks had become active in politics.1 Among others, Rus-
sia’s leading post-Soviet fascist theoretician Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1961; see
below) started his political career in 1988 by way of briefly entering the
governing body of Pamiat’ (Memory), the most important late Soviet ultra-
nationalist group (Solovei 1991; Umland 2010a). In late 1989, the notori-
ously misnamed Liberal-Democratic Party, or LDP (then of the Soviet
Union, later of Russia) was founded by veteran Russian parliamentarian
Vladimir Zhirinovskii (b. 1946; see below) in Moscow. Almost thirty
years later, Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement and Zhirinovskii’s
LDPR as well as their youth and other front organizations are still among
the most important components in Moscow’s extreme right-wing scene.
Since the emergence of the Russian Federation, these organizations have
been joined by dozens of other parties, groupuscules, and circles—some of
them only temporary, others of a more long-term importance.
Twenty-five years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian
Federation’s political regime, public discourse, domestic and foreign poli-
cies, and intellectual life have become deeply infected by radical right-
wing ideas such as ultra-nationalism, homophobia, rabid anti-American-
ism, Orthodox fundamentalism, et cetera (Shlapentokh 2001, 2007; Gud-
kov 2002; Dubin 2014). Nevertheless, post-Soviet Russia’s extreme right
milieu remains understudied. To be sure, it has—unlike recent Serbian or
Ukrainian ultra-nationalism—received some attention by a slowly growing
circle of scholars.2 Within Russia, the Panorama Agency and SOVA Cen-
ter have, in dozens of reports and handbooks, been meticulously collecting
data on hundreds of various racist, fundamentalist, ethnocentric, imperial-
ist, and similar groups, their leaders, and their activities across Russia
(Arnold 2010b; Umland 2012).3 In Western academia, a number of survey
monographs,4 collected volumes,5 and journal special sections,6 as well as
several dozen research papers,7 have highlighted the origins and rise of
post-Soviet Russian radical nationalism and imperialism.8
Nevertheless, the entire spectrum of radical right-wing phenomena has,

823
since the USSR’s disappearance, become so broad that there is still a lack
of in-depth research on several relevant leaders, thinkers, parties, associa-
tions, publishing initiatives, outlets, clubs and projects, as well as detailed
outlines of some crucial episodes in, and comparative interpretations of,
the emergence and development of the post-Soviet Russian far right. Al-
though it is one of the most important sub-fields within international right-
wing extremism studies (Griffin, Loh, and Umland 2006; Minkenberg
2010), the academic investigation, classification and interpretation of the
contemporary Russian radical right remains, as of 2016, surprisingly un-
derdeveloped and internationally isolated (Umland 2015).
Under President Vladimir Putin’s rule since 2000, Russia’s political
order has gradually developed into a more and more restrictive authoritar-
ian regime within which nationalism, imperialism, and traditionalism have
come to play an increasing role (Gorenburg, Pain, and Umland 2012b).
This development has led some observers to classify Putin’s regime itself
as “fascist” (e.g., Motyl 2016)—an unnecessary stretching of the concept
of generic fascism, as argued elsewhere (Luks 2009; Umland 2015; Kailitz
and Umland 2017). In Putin’s electoral authoritarian regime, elections are
conducted regularly, but not fairly and freely, while more and more gov-
ernment-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs) largely
displace and replace genuine civil society.
Against this background, two separate components of the Russian radi-
cal right need to be distinguished, with the help of the following ideal
types: systemic proto-political, political, and meta-political actors pur-
posely included by the authoritarian regime in the official public sphere
(i.e., national and regional parliaments, major media, state institutions,
etc.), and a broad spectrum of non- or extra-systemic activists, organiza-
tions, and networks that often have connections and sponsors within the
Russian state (though these forces are only tolerated, occasionally used,
and/or sometimes persecuted, rather than incorporated, by the regime).
The most prominent systemic radical right forces include the LDPR,
some of the various “Rodina” (“Motherland”) organizations (Titkov 2006),
and the Izborskii Klub (Izborsk Club) of far right intellectuals (Laruelle
2016b). They are part and parcel of the Kremlin’s system of “managed
democracy,” with its para-totalitarian traits (Gorenburg, Pain, and Umland
2012b). The extra- or non-systemic forces are those that lie ostensibly out-
side the official political system and mostly consist of small radical right
proto-parties, publication series, and social networks. Both components of
Russia’s far right are connected in numerous ways. The borders between

824
them are fluid, with individual actors moving from the systemic to the ex-
tra-systemic realm and vice versa.

POST-SOVIET RUSSIA’S SYSTEMIC PARTY-POLITICAL FAR

RIGHT

It is difficult to be certain which groupings exactly fall under the ideal type
of the systemic far right and which not, nor can it be easily established
which groups should be labeled “far right.” The most complicated case
concerning the latter issue is the comparative classification of the Commu-
nist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In spite of its name and his-
tory, many tenets of the ideological texts, cultural traits, domestic behav-
ior, and foreign demands of the CPRF could be labeled ultra-conservative,
restorationist, nationalistic, revanchist, or reactionary. While there are thus
arguments for regarding Russia’s post-Soviet communists as right- rather
than left-wing, the CPRF will be ignored here. It has been extensively re-
searched elsewhere.9
Post-Soviet Russia’s most prominent unequivocally far right party is
Zhirinovskii’s misnamed Liberal-Democratic Party (Eatwell 2002). The
LDP was originally a minuscule political-technological project of the late
Soviet ancien regime, and in 1989–1991 it constituted one of several
pseudo-democratic groups specifically created by the USSR authorities to
confuse, undermine and discredit the emerging genuinely liberal-democra-
tic movement (Umland 1994; Klepikova and Solovyov 1995). In June
1991, Zhirinovskii came in third in Russia’s first presidential elections,
and in December 1993 his LDPR was by far the most successful party in
Russia’s first post-Soviet multiparty parliamentary election. Since then, his
party has been constantly present in the State Duma as well as in a number
of regional parliaments. It has grown from about a dozen activists in late
1989 to more than two hundred thousand official members in 2016—a
number that is probably inflated.
Zhirinovskii’s initial central political idea, outlined first in the 1992–
1993 LDP newspaper Liberal and extensively introduced in his September
1993 autobiographical pamphlet The Last Dash to the South, was that Rus-
sia has to incorporate Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iran into its territory,
alongside most former Soviet republics (Koman 1996). This unprece-
dented extension of her empire would save Russia from eroding infiltration
by “southerners” (iuzhane) and would “soothe” the notoriously unstable
“South.” By implementing this neo-imperial plan, Russia would return to

825
its historical form of development via territorial expansion (Umland
2010b). However, following the LDPR’s entry into the State Duma in
1993, Zhirinovskii has, in his public appearances, gradually moved away
from publicizing his plan for a southern military advance by Russia.
The LDPR’s 2001 official party platform claimed a changed focus, with
interest in “the South becoming our good neighbor,” and instead depicted
the United States as Russia’s main enemy (LDPR 2001). Its central official
domestic demand is Russia’s transformation from a bicameral (pseudo-
)federation into an officially unitary state with a unicameral parliament.
While Zhirinovskii has toned down his expansionist imperialism since the
early 1990s, he remains one of the most bellicose, scandalous, and promi-
nent anti-Western politicians as well as one of the most senior members of
the parliament of Russia (Umland 2009c, 2010b).
Russia’s most highly placed state official with radical right connections
is the former nationalist activist Dmitry Rogozin (b. 1963), who was ap-
pointed deputy prime minister in charge of defense and the space industry
in 2011. Like Zhirinovskii, Rogozin merges ethnic and imperial Russian
nationalism in his public statements. He asserted, for example, in his 2006
book Enemy of the People that “Crimea, Little Russia [i.e., most of main-
land Ukraine], Belarus, the Cossack Steppes of Kazakhstan, Transnistria,
and the Baltics are the core territory of the Russian nation [rodovaia terri-
toriia russkoi natsii],” thereby presaging Russia’s annexation of Crimea
and covert intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014 (Rogozin 2006). During
the early and mid-1990s, he was on the fringes of mainstream Russian pol-
itics, and one of the leaders of the Kongress Russkikh Obshchin (KRO,
Congress of Russian Communities)—an ethnonationalist organization es-
tablished in 1993 claiming to represent ethnic Russians left outside the
Russian Federation after the Soviet Union broke up (Ingram 1999). Ro-
gozin was first elected to the State Duma in 1997, and rose to national
prominence as a result of the surprisingly strong showing of the newly es-
tablished nationalist umbrella organization, the People’s Patriotic Union,
“Rodina” (Motherland) in the State Duma elections of 2003 (Titkov 2006).
Along with his equally prolific faction colleagues Sergei Baburin (b. 1959)
and Sergei Glaz’ev (b. 1961), a former presidential candidate and current
advisor to President Putin (Aslund 2013), Rogozin was one of the most
visible younger Rodina MPs, quickly gaining a sharp public profile and
emerging as a possible future national leader. The unexpectedly strong
electoral support for Rodina and growing popularity of some of its leaders
led the Kremlin, however, to instigate the dissolution of this organization

826
in 2006. Rogozin’s sudden rise to prominence may have also been a reason
that he was appointed Russia’s ambassador to NATO at Brussels for the
period 2008–2011, thereby cutting short his possible further independent
political development (Eijkelenberg 2015), before including him in the po-
litical establishment as deputy head of government.

RUSSIAN RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST PUBLICISM

Under conditions of an increasingly government-manipulated mass media

landscape, political party system, and national electoral competition, espe-
cially since Putin’s rise to power in 1999, the organizational development
of, public support for, and election results (see Table 29.1 below) obtained
by, Russia’s radically nationalist parties have, by themselves, become less
and less reflective of the impact of far right ideas on society (Umland
2009c). Instead, various radically anti-liberal and ultra-nationalist semi-po-
litical, intellectual, and social tendencies in Russia’s “uncivil society” have
gained relevance, thereby increasing a trend that had already been observ-
able against the background of the pluralistic yet continuously weak party
system under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin from 1991 to 1999 (Umland
2002a, 2009b). Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, far right ideas have
become more and more prevalent in Russia:
Table 29.1 Vote Shares of the Far Right in Presidential and Parlia-
mentary Elections or Proportional Parts of the Parliamen-
tary Elections of Russia, 1991–2014 (in percent)
Party or Al- KRO/“Ro-
liance Na- Zhiri- dina”
tional Elec- novskii/LDPSU/LDPR/Zhiri- (Mother-
tions year novskii Bloc land) Other
1991 (pres.) 7.81 3.8
(Makashov)
1993 (parl.) 22.92
1995 (parl.) 11.18 4.31 2.57
(KRO) (“Derzhava”
et al.)
1996 (pres.) 5.80 0.2 (Vlasov)
1999 (parl.) 5.98 0.61 0.37 (ROS

827
 (KRO) et al.)
2000 (pres.) 2.7 0.1 (Pod-
berezkin)
2003 (parl.) 11.5 9.0 (“Rod- 1.9 (PVR-
ina”) RPZh)
2004 (pres.) 2.0 (Malyshkin) 4.1
(Glaz’ev)
2007 (parl.) 8.14 0.89 (PR)
2008 (pres.) 9.5
2011 (parl.) 11.67 0.97 (PR)
2012 (pres.) 6.22
2016 (parl.) 13.15 1.50 (“Ro- 0.59 (PR)
dina”)
Abbreviations: LDPSU/R: Liberal’no-Demokraticheskaia Partiia Sovet-
skogo Soiuza/Rossii (Liberal-Democratic Party of the Soviet
Union/Russia); KRO: Kongres Russkikh Obshchin (Congress of Russ-
ian Communities); PR: Patrioty Rossii (Patriots of Russia); PVR-RPZh:
Partiia Vozrozhdeniia Rossii–Rossiiskaia Partiia Zhizni (Party of the
Rebirth of Russia–Russia Party of Life); ROS: Rossiiskii Ob-
shchenaraodnyi Soiuz (Russian All-People’s Union).
• In religious life, whether within the various Orthodox churches or as
part of the neo-pagan movement10
• In literature, in the visual arts, on the Internet, and in youth culture, as
well as in cinematography11

• In academia and popular science12

• In political punditry and intellectual discourse.13

Among the most significant of these trends has been the rise of so-called
neo-Eurasianism as a new comprehensive anti-Western Russian world-
view.14 In spite of its suggestive name, this intellectual movement is only
partly related to the classical Eurasianism among Russian émigré circles of
the 1920s and 1930s,15 and it also has other, arguably more important

828
sources.16 Various forms of “neo-Eurasianism” are communicated via
hundreds of more or less influential pseudo-academic publications, some
of which are used in higher (and sometimes even secondary) education and
are regularly referred to in mass media discussion on Russia’s domestic
and international affairs (Umland 2004). Among the most influential of
them have been the biopolitical ideas of Lev Gumilev (1912–1992) and the
geopolitical doctrine of Dugin (mentioned above). The impact of these two
extremely anti-Western and anti-liberal authors is noteworthy in that their
writings have become “systemic” to Putin’s regime, that is, they have en-
tered official academia and public discourse as seminal contributions and
thus become factors in Russian “metapolitics.”17
Gumilev’s numerous books, in particular, have had a critical influence
on the emergence of post-Soviet Russian humanities and social sciences
(Shirel’man and Panarin 2001; Bassin 2016). This is in spite of the fact
that Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis proposes a radically ethnocentric, if
not crypto-racist, worldview and constitutes an amateurish mixing of ideas
from social and natural sciences (Naarden 1996; Paradowski 1999; Igna-
tow 2002; Bassin 2016). Gumilev sees ethnic groups as natural or even bi-
ological phenomena whose life cycles determine the course of human his-
tory, and whose rise results from micro-mutations triggered by extraterres-
trial emissions. In spite of such manifest dilettantism and the sometimes
undisguised anti-Semitism in his voluminous writings, in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, during the last years of his life, Gumilev became one of
Russia’s most revered historians (Kochanek 1998; Bassin 2016; Clover
2016). His numerous, often extra-academic writings have since been
reprinted in large editions, and have shaped the outlook of the first genera-
tion of post-Soviet Russian graduates in such disciplines as history, cul-
tural studies (kul’turologiia), anthropology, political science, international
relations, and geography.
Because of his openly affirmative references to Nazism (Umland
2010c), Dugin is less widely respected within mainstream academia and
intellectual life than Gumilev. Dugin’s influence is limited to various na-
tionalist circles and audiences. In spite of his openly fascist sympathies,
Dugin has, under Putin, managed to become a continuously frequent com-
mentator on world politics in Russian mass media, often taking the most
extreme anti-Western position in public debates (Dunlop 2001; Mathyl
2002; Umland 2010a). He played a crucial role in the transposition of non-
Russian extreme right-wing ideas into post-Soviet Russian anti-Western

829
discourse, and helped to network the Russian extreme right with far right
activists in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Hungary, Greece, and other coun-
tries (Laruelle 2015a; Shekhovtsov 2017). Among the West European
ideas popularized by Dugin in Russia are:
• Pre- and interwar geopolitical theories (e.g., those of Rudolf Kjellen,
Halford Mackinder, and Karl Haushofer)
• The interwar German so-called Conservative Revolution (featuring,
e.g., Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,
and Ernst Jünger)
• Inter- and postwar National Bolshevism (as in the works of, e.g., Ernst
Niekisch, Otto and Gregor Strasser, and Jean-François Thiriart)
• Inter- and postwar Integral Traditionalism, paganism, and occultism
(as put forth by, e.g., Herman Wirth, Aleister Crowley, Rene Guenon,
and Julius Evola)
• The post-1968 European New Right (e.g., theorists such as Alain de
Benoist, Robert Steuckers, and Troy Southgate)
In his numerous publications as well as frequent audio and video state-
ments, Dugin freely mixes these and other non-Russian anti-liberal ideas
with various forms of traditional Russian anti-Westernism, such as
Slavophilism, Orthodox fundamentalism, classical Eurasianism, Stalinism,
Gumilev’s ideas, et cetera. By doing so, he creates a highly eclectic, some-
times contradictory, curiously fluctuating, thoroughly conspiratological,
and rabidly Manichean narrative.18 Dugin paints the picture of an eternal
existential struggle between age-old Atlanticist “thalassocracies” (sea-
based powers) and Eurasian “tellurocracies” (land-based powers), and of
an imminent final battle between Atlantis and Eurasia—a story partially
reminiscent of a Tolkien novel. After transcending the lunatic fringe of
Russia’s extreme right in the late 1990s, Dugin gradually turned into a
mainstream political pundit (Umland 2010a). He has now for several years
been teaching at, among other schools, Russia’s top institution of higher
education, Moscow State University named after Mikhail Lomonosov
(Umland 2011; Laruelle 2015a), and is a frequent contributor to influential
Russian mass media outlets under the direct or indirect control of the
Kremlin.

NON-SYSTEMIC FORCES

830
The non-systemic radical right forces in Russia are numerous, yet frag-
mented and often competing with each other for hegemony in the non-offi-
cial political and cultural sphere. While there is overlap between various
members of non-systemic radical right parties and party-like groups, on
one hand, and adherents to the skinhead subculture, on the other, they are
treated here separately.

Russia’s Skinhead Subculture

In 2006, Russia had about fifty thousand skinheads, or approximately half
of the world’s total (United Nations 2007, 15). The popularity of the skin-
head idiom in Russia was overdetermined by historical and cultural
forces.19 First, the post-industrial decline of Soviet industry and absence
of an official ideology at the political level left a mass of alienated youths
susceptible to racist ideas. Second, mass immigration to Russia from for-
mer Soviet countries such as Kazakhstan and Tajikistan peaked in 1994
and has remained at high levels since then. Russia is the second-largest re-
cipient of migrants in the world, after the United States. Their sudden eth-
nic mixing with Russians took place against legacies of Soviet planning,
which had sought to limit migration of peoples. In 1989, for instance,
Moscow—which today has a large immigrant population—was still less
diverse than the country of which it was the capital, being almost 90 per-
cent ethnic Russian. Third, the war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996 saw
many soldiers from Russia’s mostly conscript army returning home to
relay stories of their experience throughout Russia. Finally, many Western
racist groups—including the Ku Klux Klan, Combat-18, Schultz-88, White
Wolves, White Bears, et cetera—sought to promote their ideas in Russia
(Arnold 2015; Shnirel’man 2007).
In the early 2000s, a Russian sociologist identified four distinct groups
of skinheads:
• Young friends who live in the same locality
• Groups centered around an “old” (mid- to late-twenties) skinhead
• Organized groups
• Propaganda enthusiasts (Belikov 2002).
The better-organized groups are secretive and reluctant to give information
about themselves. While skinhead gangs are an important component of
the radical right in Russia, often they are detected only through their ac-

831
tions, such as violent attacks and other hate crimes. Though having de-
clined since their zenith in 2008, hate crimes in Russia remain at high lev-
els. Since 2000, more than four thousand people have been killed or in-
jured by skinheads (a number comparable to the Irish Republican Army’s
campaign of terror on the British mainland). As not much official data
have been made available, the most comprehensive source on hate crimes
remains yearly overviews written by the non-governmental SOVA Center.
Table 29.2 gives summary statistics of the number of these hate crimes.20
The main ethnic minority groups that skinheads targeted were people
from the Central Asian former Soviet republics and from the Caucasus.
The latter category comprises not only Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, and
other south Caucasian ethnicities but also peoples who are legally Russian
citizens but represent ethnic minorities of the northern Caucasus, such as
Chechens, Kabards, Balkars, Avars, and others.
Attacks on cultural minorities such as Russian anti-fascist groups and
fans of rap music spiked in 2007–2008 but remained relatively constant
from about 2009 onward. There were relatively few attacks on homeless
people. Notable attacks on sexual minority or LGBT groups, though re-
ceiving much publicity in the West, did not begin until 2007 and remained
at a comparatively low level until 2013. During the peak year for these,
2013, there were twenty-five attacks involving wounding and two murders
—far fewer than the number of racist incidences of violence.
The steep decline in racist crimes after the year 2014 mirrors a simulta-
neously ongoing fragmentation among non-systemic radical right parties
(see below). In connection with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Putin
came out more overtly than before as a Russian ethnic nationalist. He justi-
fied the annexation of Crimea on grounds of the ethnic identity of the ma-
jority of Crimeans, and used the ethnically-tinted term russkii (referring to
ethnic Russians) rather than the more inclusive rossiisskii (referring to
Russia as a country) in the speech announcing the annexation. Russia’s
covert invasion of Ukraine led to a decline in racist violence inside the
Russian Federation because, among other reasons, some of those tending
to commit such crimes went to fight in Ukraine’s eastern Donets Basin as
volunteers, on the side of the Kremlin-instigated separatist movement.21
Table 29.2 Racist Violence in RUSSIA, 2004–2015
Year Killed Wounded Total

832
 2004 50 219 269
2005 49 419 867
2006 66 522 588
2007 94 625 719
2008 116 501 617
2009 94 443 537
2010 44 421 465
2011 26 212 238
2012 20 196 216
2013 24 206 230
2014 36 133 169
2015 11 82 93
Source: SOVA 2016, 140–141. Note: The 2015 data were, at the mo-
ment of writing, still subject to further revision.
Beyond the more easily explicable temporal patterns in skinhead vio-
lence, expert opinions are mixed as to whether and how much Russian
racist violence is patterned. Some analysts (e.g., Larys and Mares 2011)
claim that right-wing violence is ad hoc in nature and without meaningful
structure. Others claim that right-wing violence contains nascent patterns,
indicating that these acts are meaningful in the eyes of their perpetrators.
Arnold (2009, 2016) argues that racist violence in Russia, in certain ways,
mirrors the representation of the respective ethnic minority in the under-
standing of the broader public, and that hate crimes are thus closely linked
to wider racist trends in society. Markowitz and Arnold (2017), on the
other hand, claimed to find patterns in radical right violence related to the
position of a violent event within a broader cycle of societal mobilization
by the regime.
The most significant instances of skinhead violence were apparently de-
signed to provoke broader race riots in Russian society. An organizational
pattern that has become routine is that far right leaders call a public meet-
ing around some purported crime committed by an ethnic minority. At the
meeting, a hard core of participants seeks to provoke generalized violence
by leading violent disruptions. The prototypical such riot took place in the
Karelian town of Kondopoga in 2006, and for this reason was dubbed the

833
“Kondopoga technology” by an Ekspert magazine correspondent (Silaev
2007). Efforts to provoke violence along the lines of the “Kondopoga tech-
nology” continued frequently through 2013, with the largest happening on
Moscow’s Manezh Square in 2010.
The patterns of incidents of skinhead violence correspond, in some way,
to the fortunes of the non-systemic radical right parties. The clearest such
pattern is that hate crimes have declined since 2010. In particular, they de-
clined precipitously after 2014, when the Kremlin stole many of the radical
right’s ideas in connection with its evolving hybrid war against Ukraine
and increasing rhetorical confrontation with the West.

Non-Systemic Political Parties and Movements

There are numerous, mostly minuscule, extra-systemic nationalist groups
in Russia, among which are the Natsional-Bol’shevistskaia Partiia (Na-
tional-Bolshevik Party)22 as well as Russkii Obraz (Russian Image) and
its terroristic wing Boevaia Organizatsiia Russkikh Natsionalistov (BORN,
Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists).23 These groups have re-
ceived some attention in Russian and foreign mass media and academia.
While such groups are numerous and active, a brief look at even the largest
entities still existent today reveals deep splits in this milieu. The depth of
these divisions is paradoxical insofar as many of these groupuscules’ lead-
ers were, during the 1990s, involved in the same organization, the notori-
ous and by now largely defunct neo-Nazi Russkoe Natsional’noe Edinstvo
(RNE, Russian National Unity). The RNE used a swastika as well as the
Roman (fascist) salute and was led by the former Pamiat’ co-leader Alek-
sandr Barkashov (b. 1953).24 Through most of the 1990s, the RNE was
the largest demonstratively fascist extra-parliamentary movement in Rus-
sia. In October 1993, it helped to defend the building of Russia’s anti-re-
formist parliament Congress of People’s Deputies (“White House”) against
army forces sent by President Boris Yeltsin during a brief civil war-like
armed conflict in Moscow. In its heyday, RNE could reportedly call on the
allegiance of between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand Russians
(Laruelle 2016a). While the well-organized paramilitary organization
ceased to exist by the end of the 1990s, several movements have since
claimed to be the heirs of RNE.
One of them was the non-systemic radical right movement Dvizhenie
Protiv Nelegal’noi Immigratsii (DPNI, Movement Against Illegal Immi-

834
gration). The DPNI was officially banned in 2011 but continued to exist in
an underground format. Its most well-known leader is Aleksandr Potkin (b.
1976), who calls himself “Belov” (belyi, “white”) and was the press secre-
tary of Barkashov’s organization. In 1992, Belov and a number of others
participated in a raid on the offices of the daily Moscow newspaper
Moskovskii Komsomlets, which they accused of making derogatory state-
ments about Russians. In 1997, Belov was convicted under Article 222 of
the Russian criminal code (illegal possession of a firearm) and received a
year’s suspended sentence. He formally founded the DPNI together with
his brother Vladimir Potkin (b. 1980, who uses the name “Basmanov”) in
2002.
Since 2005, the DPNI has played an important role in orchestrating the
yearly so-called Russian March (ultra-nationalist demonstrations) on No-
vember 4. Belov also played a role in fomenting the riots in Kondopoga in
2006 before being investigated by the Karelian prosecutor for inciting in-
terethnic hatred (a violation of Article 282 of the Russian criminal code).
Despite the televised performances of his oratory in which he denigrated
ethnic minorities, the prosecutor dropped the case in 2007 for lack of evi-
dence. Belov passed the formal leadership of DPNI over to his brother
Vladimir (who at the age of just thirteen participated in the 1993 RNE de-
fense of the White House [Rusnat 2012b]) in 2008 and moved himself into
senior-level administrative positions within the organization. In 2009, the
Moscow Dorogomilovskii Court gave Belov a one-and-a-half-year sus-
pended sentence for “making insulting remarks in a speech about Jews and
peoples of Transcaucasia and Central Asia” (Rusnat 2012a).
In December 2010, Belov was also involved in provoking a violent ul-
tra-nationalist meeting on central Moscow’s Manezh Square that received
wide attention in the international press. There he addressed a crowd say-
ing, “In case of conflict, be the first to attack—better to have three [court
judges] judge you than four people carry you. Talk is useless with animals
—a beast only understands force. . . . To walk without a knife or a gun is
criminal negligence” (as quoted in Verkhovsky and Kozhevnikova 2011).
One analyst wrote, “If we generalize the practice of ‘Kondopoga technol-
ogy’ over the few years, we can easily observe that the organization was
most successful in situations where, in the first place, they were able to
arrange for the prompt arrival of their charismatic leader, Aleksandr Belov,
to the scene of the conflict” (Kozhevnikova 2010). Partially because of
this, the DPNI was outlawed as an organization in 2011.
Another relatively visible non-systemic radical right movement was

835
Dmitrii Demushkin’s (b. 1979) Slavianskii Soiuz (SS, Slavic Union), until
it was banned in 2010. SS had branches in almost every major Russian city
and appealed to youth through music, mixed martial arts training, and
meetings. Demushkin joined the RNE in 1995, and quickly gained notori-
ety because he was “much more radical than the bulk” of his fellow party
members. Because of his dissatisfaction with the RNE, Demushkin
founded the Slavic Union in 2000, and by 2001 he was making media ap-
pearances on its behalf. Demushkin was also one of the organizers of the
November 4 Russian Marches from 2005 to 2012. Although numerous in-
cidences of racist violence have been connected to Demushkin—for in-
stance, members of his organization were convicted in the 2008 killing of
a Kyrgyz man in Moscow—none of them resulted in his conviction.
Demushkin’s extreme racism makes him “odious even in nationalist cir-
cles” (Lenta.ru 2016). He has described the ideology of his group as “mys-
tical national socialism” and a willingness “to fight an uncompromising
struggle with those who are preparing an Orange revolution in Russia”
(Lenta.ru 2016). There have been allegations that Demushkin is working
with the Kremlin, and Demushkin has been quoted as saying that “yester-
day I was drinking beer with employees of the Presidential administra-
tion.” The liberal newspaper Novaia Gazeta claims that Demushkin was
expelled from the RNE because of his links with the secret services (Lenta.
ru 2016).
Yet Demushkin took a leading role in the protests against Vladimir
Putin’s return to the presidency in 2011–2012 and, along with
Potkin/Belov, entered the opposition coordinating council and then formed
the so-called ethno-political organization “Russians.” This high point of
cooperation between various fringe groups also saw the beginning of state
attempts to deflate the non-systemic radical right. Demushkin’s organiza-
tion SS was banned in 2010 for “spread[ing] the ideology of national so-
cialism, which is in its ideological basis, similar to Nazi Germany.”
The Russkoe obshchestvennoe dvizhenie (ROD, Russian Social Move-
ment) led by Konstantin Krylov (b. 1967) is more moderate than the DPNI
and SS. Krylov worked as a faculty member at two Moscow universities
before creating ROD in 2005 and leading it since. Krylov represents a
more intellectual face of minor far right parties and organizations in Rus-
sia, styling himself as a human rights defender and not an overt ultra-na-
tionalist. Thus, in 2006, ROD participated in the meeting “Russians
Against Drugs” and later that year created the Anti-Russophobia League.
The League constructed its own website for monitoring “news on the

836
theme of Russophobia and ethnic crime in Russia, and counteractions to
Russophobia on the side of Russian nationalist-oriented organizations and
civil society.” (Kozhevnikova, Shekhovtsov, and Verkhovskii 2009, 134)
Krylov has opined that nationalism and democracy are one and the same
thing, and stated as his aim that “Russia should be a country where [ethnic]
Russians can live well and conveniently.” Russians should be privileged in
“the sphere of education, culture, the financing of Russian culture” and
even “in support of breeding.” (Kozhevnikova, Shekhovtsov, and Verk-
hovskii 2009, 136)
A regular unifying event on the radical right’s calendar was the so-
called Russian March annually held on 4th November. The march takes
place on Russian National Unity Day, a holiday instituted in 2005 and
brings together, among others, the DPNI, SS, ROD, and the Russian Impe-
rial Movement. The first march saw also participation from the more intra-
systemic Evraziiskii soiuz molodezhi (ESM, Eurasian Youth Movement),
the youth wing of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, although
they quickly fell out with the DPNI. The march usually consists of ultra-
nationalist parades through various towns in Russia. The marches gained
steadily in popularity from 2005 to 2009 and roughly plateaued until 2013,
mirroring the fortunes of the non-systemic radical right generally. Still, the
march remains one of the rare joint political actions by the otherwise frag-
mented non-systemic extreme right.
The DPNI, SS, and ROD were cooperating among themselves when, in
2011, protests against the falsification of election results in the parliamen-
tary elections began. The protesters hailed from two different back-
grounds, the nationalists and the liberals with their combination personi-
fied in the person of Aleksei Naval’nyi (Popescu 2012; Laruelle 2014). On
the nationalist wing, the main supporters were Belov, Basmanov, Krylov,
and Demushkin. Belov and Demushkin went on to form the above-men-
tioned umbrella organization “Russkie” (“Russians”) which announced its
intention to build a political party in 2012 and promoted a platform at-
tempting to unite non-systemic nationalists of various different stripes.
The ROD and the DPNI came together in 2012 to form a new political
party, the Natsional-demokraticheskaia partiia (NDP, National Democratic
Party). The NDP styles itself as a “classic, European national-democratic
party” and one which represents an alleged nationalist silent majority in
Russia. The NDP also claims it is free of skinhead neo-Nazi elements and
that it is competing in elections as an alternative route to power (Sputnik
News 2012b). Notably, Demushkin and his SS did not participate in the

837
formation of the new party, claiming instead that “it will be good if there
are lots of nationalist parties [as] that way it will be harder to fight us”
(Sputnik News 2012b).
In any case, the new-found partial unity on the radical right was not to
last for long. In particular, the Kremlin’s Ukrainian adventures were a new
cause of fracture. Following the annexation of Crimea, the non-systemic
radical right split along the issues of
• whether or not to support the pro-Russian unrest in the Donbass re-
gion of Ukraine,
• whether to bring the so-called “Russian Spring” (i.e. an ethno-nation-
alist uprising) from eastern Ukraine to Moscow and to unseat Putin, as
well as
• Novorossia (New Russia), i.e. whether there is or should be a signifi-
cant part of eastern and southern Ukraine included in Russia (Laruelle
2016a).
In particular, the issue of whether the “Russian Spring” in russophone
Ukraine should eventually also lead to a regime change in Moscow be-
came divisive: Supporters of such a plan included Russkoe Imperskoe
Dvizhenie (RID, Russian Imperial Movement), “Velikaia Rossiia” (“Great
Russia”), “Novaia sila” (“New Force”), and the Narodnoe opolchenie
imeni Minina i Pozharskogo (NOMP, People’s Militia named after Minin
and Pozharskii), among others. The opponents were the movement “Rus-
sians” (encompassing Demushkin, Basmanov, and Belov), the NDP, the
Radical Right Party, and the National Democratic Alliance, among others
(Alperovich et al. 2015). Thus, the Ukraine issue drove a wedge in be-
tween the different parties. The state has also created new official national-
ist organizations such as the youth movement “Tigry Rodiny” (“Tigers of
the Motherland”)25 and the “Russkii Mir” (“Russian World”) network.
The Russian authorities have tried to subdue the movement using a vari-
ety of legal tactics to repress whichever extra-systemic nationalist move-
ments it has been unable to co-opt. In August 2015, the prosecutor’s office
filed a motion to brand the “Russkie” organization as extremist and its ac-
tivity was suspended shortly afterward. In 2016, Demushkin was being
tried for inciting ethnic hatred under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal
Code (SOVA 2016). Likewise, the legal pressure against Potkin/Belov in-
creased and in August 2016, Belov was convicted of trying to organize
anti-government protests in Kazakhstan and handed a seven and a half

838
year sentence (Vashchenko 2016). While a couple of organizations have
emerged to replace “Russians,” among them the Nation and Freedom
Committee and the group “For Honor and Freedom” (Alperovich et al.
2016), none has so far united the opposition forces.
The plight of the non-systemic radical right is embodied by the Russian
March in Moscow, which once had been a unifying event. Since 2013, un-
official marches have been banned. In 2015 there were four separate
marches in Moscow held simultaneously by different organizations: the
traditional march in the Lyublino district; the “For Russian Revenge”
march on Oktyarbr’skoe Pole (October Field); the Russkii Mir–organized
“For the Russian World” march; and the Tigers of the Motherland march,
which was joined by non-radical right groups and thus had a diminished
stature. The two pro-regime marches were significantly better attended
than any extra-systemic radical right march, underlining the regime’s suc-
cess in co-opting and repressing the nationalist opposition.
The non-systemic radical right in Russia remains fractured among a
myriad of organizations and with its most successful and charismatic lead-
ers under arrest. Although the extent to which the extra-systemic radical
right posed a genuine threat to the political regime in Russia is debatable,
the authorities were concerned enough to disrupt this movement. Yet in
2015 hate crimes remained at high levels by comparative standards (even
when excluding those committed by Russian ultra-nationalists in eastern
Ukraine). This suggests that the sentiments that power Russia’s ultra-na-
tionalist movement will continue to last independently of the degree of po-
litical repression.

839
NOTES

1. See Carter 1990; Solovei 1991; Hielscher 1992; Orttung 1992;

Ganelin and Vite 1992; Parland 1993; Dunlop 1993; Laqueur 1993;
Korey 1995; Yanov 1995; Dadiani 1997; Messmer 1997; Allensworth
1998; Brudny 1998; Devlin 1999; Kochanek 1999; Duncan 2000; Shi-
raev and Zubkov 2000; Cosgrove 2004; O’Connor 2006;
Kostyrchenko 2013; Mitrokhin 2014; Vujačić 2015; Laruelle 2015b.
2. Critical summaries of various parts of the older literature include Otto
1990; Solovei 1993; Rowley 1994; Umland 1997; Yanov 2001.
3. Pribylovskii 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; Pribylovskii and Verkhovskii 1995,
1997; Papp, Pribylovskii, and Verkhovskii 1996; Mikhailovskaia,
Pribylovskii, and Verkhovskii 1998, 1999; Verkhovskii 2002, 2003,
2005, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2014; Kozhevnikova, Shekhovtsov, and
Verkhovskii 2009; SOVA 2010; Alperovich et al. 2015, 2016.
4. Apart from the abovementioned books, the more informative mono-
graphs include Simonsen 1996a; Shenfield 2001; Likhachev 2002,
2006; Rossman 2002; Shnirel’man 2004; Parland 2005; Kozhevnikova
2007; Kozhevnikova, Veklerov, and Verkhovsky 2008; Laruelle
2009a; Kuz’min 2011.
5. The seminal English-language essay collections include Laruelle
2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2008b, 2009c, 2012; Blakkisrud and Kolstø
2016.
6. See, for instance, these four special issues containing English transla-
tions of originally Russian papers: Umland 2008, 2009a; Gorenburg,
Pain, and Umland 2012a, 2012b.
7. Broad survey papers include Tolz 1997; Gregor 1998; Hanson and
Williams 1999; Mathyl 2000; Verkhovsky 2000; Vujačić 2001; Si-
monsen 2001; Umland 2002a, 2002b, 2006a, 2009c; Gabowitsch
2003; Mitrokhin 2003; Laruelle 2010, 2016a; Dubin 2014; Arnold and
Romanova 2013.
8. For instance, there is an ongoing series of special sections—with so
far eleven issues containing dozens of papers—on Russian anti-West-
ernism in the Russian-language Web journal Forum for East Euro-
pean Contemporary History and Culture (Antizapadnye 2009–2015).

840
 9. Krotow and Luchterhandt 1994; Timmermann 1995, 1996a, 1996b,
1997; Vujačić 1996; Ishiyama 1996; Solovei and Urban 1997; David-
heiser 1998; Flikke 1999; Otto 1999; March 2001, 2002.
10. On the Orthodox churches, see Verkhovsky 2002; Verkhovskii 2003;
Mitrofanova 2005; Suslov 2016. On the neo-pagan movement, see
Shnirel’man 1998, 2001; Moroz 2005; Aitamurto 2016.
11. E.g., Parthé 1996; Mathyl 2000; Eismann 2003; Mey 2004; Ro-
gachevskii 2004; Schmidt 2004; Hagemeister 2004; Höllwerth 2010;
Kriza 2014.
12. E.g., Tsygankov 1998; Shnirel’man 2004; Brown and Sheiko 2014;
Østbø 2015.
13. E.g., Hielscher 1992; Tsymburskii 1995; Znamenski 1996; Torbakov
2015; Laruelle 2009b, 2016b.
14. Hielscher 1993a, 1993b; Laruelle 2004a; Antizapadnye 2009–2015;
Clover 2016; Suslov 2016.
15. Luks 1986; Schlacks and Vinkovetsky 1996; Laruelle 2004b;
Wiederkehr 2007; Bassin 2008; Bassin, Glebov, and Laruelle 2015;
Clover 2016.
16. Luks 2000, 2002, 2004; Sedgwick 2004; Umland 2006c; Laruelle
2008a.
17. Umland 2002a, 2006a, 2006b, 2006b, 2009c, 2010c; Laruelle 2004a,
2006, 2007a, 2016b; Clover 2016.
18. Ingram 2001; Laruelle 2006; Höllwerth 2007; Shekhovtsov 2008,
2009; Shekhovtsov and Umland 2009.
19. Tarasov 2001; Belikov 2002; Arnold 2009, 2010a, 2015, 2016; Pilk-
ington, Omel’chenko, and Garifizianova 2010.
20. Using a network of regional monitors, the SOVA Center collects data
from local newspapers around the country and publishes, on this basis,
its statistics on hate crimes. SOVA’s researchers are at pains to stress
that their figures are almost certainly underestimates, as many crimes
escape detection because they are never reported or because the re-
ports do not become public. Their figures also do not include instances
of vandalism, graffiti, or public slander, which are also excluded in the
below table for reasons of space.
21. To be sure, neo-Nazis have been fighting on both sides in the Ukrain-

841
 ian conflict, some joining ultra-nationalist volunteer units of Ukraine’s
armed forces, and others fighting with the Russia-supported sepa-
ratists. See Likhachev 2016; Likhachov 2016; Gritsenko 2016.
22. Mathyl 1997/1998, 2003; Shenfield 2001; Likhachev 2002.
23. Horvath 2014; Coynash 2015; Gritsenko 2016.
24. Simonsen 1996b; Dunlop 1996; Jackson 1999; Likhachev and
Pribylovskii 2005.
25. The Russian word for “tiger,” tigr, is also meant to signify an abbrevi-
ation of the slogan “Traditsia—Imperia—Gosudarstvo—Rodina”
(Tradition—Empire—State—Motherland). See Shestov 2015.
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CHAPTER 30

860
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN POST-SOVIET UKRAINE

MELANIE MIERZEJEWSKI-VOZNYAK
FOLLOWING the 2004 Orange Revolution, the Russian government and
media started to label Ukraine more and more frequently a “fascist state.”
This happened although historically those Ukrainian integral nationalists
who can—from a comparative point of view (Umland 2015)—indeed be
labeled “fascist” have not been part of Ukraine’s governing elite.1 On the
contrary, radical right-wing parties in post-Soviet Ukraine have remained
relatively weak because, among other reasons, they failed to find common
ground amongst themselves. They have been continuing to split the small
ultra-nationalist vote instead of allying to form a viable electoral rival to
the national democrats and pro-Russian parties whose battles dominated
Ukrainian national politics from 1991 until 2014. The weakness of
Ukraine’s far right was one of the reasons the particular post-Soviet ultra-
nationalist groups constituting this spectrum remained—unlike the ex-
treme right-wing organizations of interwar and wartime Ukraine—excep-
tionally understudied until a few years ago (Umland 2013a).2
The subject of the far right’s alleged influence in Ukraine became espe-
cially politicized during the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity or “Euro-
maidan” (European Square) protests, as the Vseukrayinske Obyednannya
“Svoboda” (All-Ukrainian Union “Freedom”), a radical right-wing parlia-
mentary party, and Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector), a small radical nationalist
extra-parliamentary umbrella association composed of conservative and
revolutionary right-wing groupuscules, received disproportionate media at-
tention not only in Russia but also in the West. The impact of these and
similar organizations on both Ukrainian politics and society has since been
greatly exaggerated in Russian state media and also in some West Euro-
pean journalistic accounts. With the brief exception of “Svoboda’s” pres-
ence in Ukraine’s legislature, the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), in
2012–2014, the radical right has remained on Ukraine’s political periphery
and been largely excluded from national politics since independence in
1991. So far, Ukrainian right-wing extremist groups have failed to develop
strong and stable party structures; as a result, they have had a notable lack
of representation in the national parliament and a lack of substantial influ-
ence on the executive.3
To be sure, in Ukraine, ultra-nationalism as a social and political phe-

861
nomenon had already emerged during the decline of the Soviet empire,
prior to its fall (Rudling 2012, 2013). During the following twenty-five
years, most of Eastern Europe saw extreme nationalist groups become per-
manent fixtures in their countries’ political landscape, as illustrated pri-
marily by the relative successes of the radical right in national parliamen-
tary elections as well as, more recently, by their increasing presence in the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and European Parlia-
ment (Umland and Shekhovtsov 2013, 36). However, since Ukraine’s dec-
laration of independence, its radical right’s national electoral support only
rarely exceeded 3 percent of the popular vote. Radical right parties typi-
cally enjoyed just a few wins in single-mandate districts, and no far right
candidate for president has ever secured more than 5 percent of the popular
vote in an election. Moreover, only once in the 1994–2014 period was a
radical right-wing party elected to the parliament as an independent orga-
nization within the proportional part of the voting: “Svoboda,” with 10.44
percent of the vote in 2012 (Table 30.1). While the combined electoral
support for “Svoboda” and Right Sector in presidential, parliamentary, and
local elections since 2014 has been somewhat higher and more stable than
before, it needs to be taken into account that Ukrainian voters from the
Crimean peninsula and Donets Basin could mostly not cast their votes be-
cause of Russia’s military occupation of these territories. These regions are
generally unsupportive of the radical right, meaning that their full partici-
pation in the elections would have reduced the national share of votes for
Ukrainian extreme nationalism.
Traditionally, radical right-wingers in Ukraine present themselves as
“liberationist, anti-Tsarists, anti-Soviet, anti-Muscovite and often ethno-
nationalists” (Umland 2015, 1). Despite remaining unpopular with the
Ukrainian electorate over the past twenty-five years, radical right-wing po-
litical parties and groups have managed to become socially entrenched,
have displayed a potential for violent protest actions, and have maintained
a strong local presence in some regions, especially in western Ukraine
(Polyakova 2014). Over the years, the visibility of nationalist radicals in
Ukrainian political affairs has been increasing, particularly since (and in
connection with) the Revolution of Dignity and Russian-Ukrainian war in
the Donbas region.
The slow and stunted development of the far right in Ukraine has led
radical right-wing organizations to develop in two different ways: as for-
mal political parties and as radical right-wing groups, networks, and volun-
teer militias outside the party system. This chapter presents an overview of

862
the emergence and development of the radical right in post-independence
Ukraine. It further explores how the overall lack of political success of the
far right is predominantly the outcome of peculiar structural-historical fac-
tors, the cultural context, and the political space or opportunity structures
in Ukraine.
Table 30.1 Vote Shares (in Percent) of the Major Post-Soviet, Pro-
Ukrainian Far Right Parties in Ukrainian Presidential
and Parliamentary Elections (or Proportional Parts),
1991–2014
Menshe Sliv
Party or Al- Natsionalnyi Front (Na- UNA/Pravyi (Fewer Words)
liance Year tional Front) bloc: KUN, Sektor bloc: VPO-DSU
and National UKRP, and URP (URP (Right Sec- and SNPU)
Election and KUN) tor) (VOS)
1991 (presi- 4.5 (Lukyanenko)*
dential)
1994 (presi-
dential)
1998 (parlia- 2.71 (NF) 0.39 (UNA) 0.16 (MS)
mentary)
1999 (presi-
dential)
2002 (parlia- 0.04 (UNA)
mentary)
2004 (presi- 0.02 (Kozak, OUN) 0.17 (Ko-
dential) rchynsky)**
2006 (parlia- 0.06 (UNA) 0.36 (VOS)
mentary)
2007 (parlia- 0.76 (VOS)
mentary)
2010 (presi- 1.43 (Tyahny-
dential) bok)
2012 (parlia- 0.08 (UNA- 10.44 (VOS)
mentary) UNSO)

863
 2014 (presi- 0.70 1.16 (Tyahny-
dential) (Yarosh)*** bok)
2014 (parlia- 0.05 (KUN) 1.81 (PS) 4.71 (VOS)
mentary)
Source: Umland 2014.
* Levko Lukyanenko ran as a former dissident in Ukraine’s first presi-
dential elections. He only later came out as a manifestly anti-Semitic
politician. While Lukyanenko is, for this reason, counted here as be-
longing to Ukraine’s radical right, there are good grounds to exclude
him and especially his electoral support in 1991 from the above table.
** It needs to be added that Dmytro Korchynsky is a flamboyant
Ukrainian political figure who has been suspected of being a Russian
agent-provocateur. For some relevant references, see Umland 2016.
*** In the 2014 presidential election, Dmytro Yarosh was formally run-
ning as an independent candidate, yet he was publicly known as the
leader of Pravyi Sektor.
Abbreviations: KUN, Konhres Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv (Congress
of Ukrainian Nationalists); UKRP, Ukrayinska Konservatyvna Respub-
likanska Partiya (Ukrainian Conservative Republican Party); URP,
Ukrayinska Respublikanska Partiya (Ukrainian Republican Party);
VPO-DSU, Vseukrayinske Politychne Obyednannya “Derzhavna
Samostiynist Ukrayiny” (All-Ukrainian Political Union “State Indepen-
dence of Ukraine”), SNPU, Sotsial-Natsionalna Partiya Ukrayiny (So-
cial-National Party of Ukraine); OUN, Orhanizatsiya Ukrayinskykh
Natsionalistiv (Organization of Ukrainian Nationaists); UNA, Ukrayin-
ska Natsionalna Asambleya (Ukrainian National Assembly); UNSO,
Ukrayinska Narodna Samooborona (Ukrainian National Self-Defense);
VOS, Vseukrayinske Obyednannya “Svoboda” (All-Ukrainian Union
“Svoboda”).

THE BIRTH OF THE RADICAL RIGHT IN INDEPENDENT

UKRAINE

Nationalist groups existed in communist Ukraine, though they were gener-

ally more national democratic than ultra-nationalist in their ideological ori-
entation (Shekhovtsov 2011). Radical right-wing organizations began to
go public or emerge first in western Ukraine during the late 1980s. Many

864
were founded by former political prisoners who sought independence and
refused to work within the newly established political system, which com-
prised much of the old Soviet elite. Such individuals included Hryhoriy
Prykhodko (1937–2015), one of the founders of the Ukrayinska Natsion-
alna Partiya (UNP, Ukrainian National Party) in 1989; Ivan Kandyba
(1930–2002), head of Vseukrayinske Politychne Obyednannya–Derzhavna
Samostiynist Ukrayiny (DSU, All-Ukrainian Political Union–State Inde-
pendence for Ukraine), founded in 1990; and Yuriy Shukhevych (b. 1933),
son of Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander in chief Roman Shukhevych
(1907–1950), who became the chairman of the Mizh-Partiyna Assambleya
(MPA, Inter-Party Assembly) in 1991 (Nahaylo 1994, 44).
The MPA was founded on June 30, 1990, and elected Yuriy
Shukhevych as its chairman in December of that year. Following the dec-
laration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the MPA changed its name to
the Ukrayinska Natsionalna Asambleya (UNA, Ukrainian National Assem-
bly). The UNA nominated Shukhevych as its candidate in the December
1991 presidential election. However, it failed to obtain the necessary
100,000 signatures for candidate registration (Nahaylo 1994; Kuzio 2015).
In the 1994 parliamentary elections, the UNA was able to gain one deputy
out of the Supreme Council’s 450 MPs, and thus remained on the political
periphery.
While the UNA achieved only marginal importance politically, its para-
military arm, Ukrayinska Narodna Samooborona (UNSO, Ukrainian Peo-
ple’s Self-Defense), increased the group’s notoriety throughout the 1990s.
The UNSO participated in political demonstrations and was a self-pro-
claimed defender of patriotism and of law and order. It also took part in
external military conflicts such as backing Georgia against Russia-sup-
ported Abkhaz separatists during the 1993 conflict, and fighting in Chech-
nya against Russian troops.
The UNA-UNSO grew increasingly extremist and chauvinistic in the
mid-1990s. The 1994 UNA-UNSO party platform declared opposition to
the existing political order and the intention to achieve power largely by
extra-parliamentary means (Nahaylo 1994, 45). The party depicted itself as
the “nationalist savior,” and at the ninth session of the UNA in July 1993
declared itself “the only luminous thing that Ukraine has given birth to in
the second half of the twentieth century,” denouncing all other parties (Na-
haylo 1994, 45). Oles Babiy (1897–1975), upon whose thought the UNA-
UNSO drew for much of its ideology, wrote in 1938, “Political, economic,
and moral chaos, which we have grown accustomed to call ‘democracy,’

865
can only be stopped with clear hierarchy. The only outstanding question is
whether this hierarchy be of local origin or be brought from abroad”
(Ruban 1992, 103). The radical behavior of the party resulted in its loss of
party status in 1995 when its official registration was revoked, though it
regained it two years later, in 1997. Despite changes in party leadership in
1998, the party was unable to reform its extremist image in time for that
year’s fall parliamentary elections. The UNA-UNSO captured less than 1
percent of the national vote (0.39 percent) and did not receive any seats via
single-mandate district (SMD) elections.
Another important radical right party that emerged with independent
Ukraine was DSU. Ivan Kandyba, a former political prisoner and member
of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, was elected the head of the organization
(Shekhovtsov 2011). The group was originally supported by the émigré
Orhanizatsiya Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN, Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists), and it maintained a radical right ideology based
on traditional authoritarian nationalism.4 The OUN withdrew its support
for DSU when OUN founded the Konhres Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv
(KUN, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) in 1992, after which Kandyba
left as head of the organization. DSU was officially registered as a political
party on March 23, 1993, and Roman Koval (b. 1959) took over leadership
of the group. Under Koval, the DSU radicalized, though its fascist and
racist principles crippled it politically. It refused to accept as members
anyone who was not an ethnic Ukrainian, and it attacked both the commu-
nists and democratic groups such as the moderately nationalist Rukh
(Movement). DSU was against mixed marriages and immigration of non-
Ukrainians, and it called for the “deportation” of Jews, Roma, and Armeni-
ans who resided in but were not permanent residents of Ukraine.5 The
DSU refused any cooperation with democratic organizations and declined
to work with other nationalist groups on most occasions, which left it elec-
torally weak and with low membership levels—amassing just over one
thousand members, in comparison to the UNA-UNSO’s several thousand
members (Kuzio 1997). In the 1994 and 1998 parliamentary elections,
DSU failed to win any seats.
Whereas DSU soon ceased to exist, the KUN proved to be more re-
silient, though it remained marginal. KUN’s close ties to the émigré OUN
were clearly established, with Yaroslava Stetsko (1920–2003), widow of
former OUN faction leader Yaroslav Stetsko (1912–1986), becoming
briefly the head of both organizations (Kuzio 1997; Nahaylo 1994). The

866
party was officially registered in January 1993, and while it was part of the
radical right, KUN was, in the 1990s, the least sectarian of the far right po-
litical groups in this period of Ukrainian post-Soviet history (Shekhovtsov
2011, 2013). During a visit to Lviv between March 24 and April 1, 1993,
Stetsko stressed the importance of stopping the bickering among the vari-
ous democratic organizations and their leaders, noting the need to put per-
sonal ambitions second and instead to unite their efforts in the name of the
development and strengthening of independent Ukraine (“Perebuvannya
Holovy . . .” 1993).
The more tempered political approach of KUN was largely a result of
the moderating influence of its émigré leadership, influenced by life in
Western-style democracies (Shekhovsov 2011). For example, Roman
Zvarych (b. 1953), son of Ukrainian immigrants to the United States and
later (infamous) minister of justice of Ukraine during the Yushchenko
presidency, became KUN’s deputy head in charge of ideology. He led
KUN down a more democratic path than its extreme right-wing peers,
knowing that de-radicalization was a necessary prerequisite for electoral
viability. Additionally, he posited that “Ukrainian nationalism” was not
akin to fascism and was neither racist nor xenophobic in nature. “Ukrain-
ian nationalism,” Zvarych asserted, had always “stood on a democratic
basis” (quoted in Kuzio 1997, 216).
The pragmatic politics of KUN—manifestly nationalistic while neither
extremist nor centrist—allowed it to enjoy more electoral success than
other radical right parties. In 1994, it won five SMD seats, rallying the
electorate with the slogan “You will obtain a Ukrainian state or die in the
struggle for it!” (“Vyborcha Plyatforma . . .” 1994). KUN cooperated with
political forces from various positions along the political spectrum. In
1998, the party formed an electoral bloc, the Natsionalny Front (National
Front), with two even smaller parties—Stepan Khmara’s Ukrayinska Kon-
servatyvna Respublikanska Partiya (Ukrainian Conservative Republican
Party) and Bohdan Yaroshynskyi’s Ukrayinska Respublikanska Partiya
“Sobor” (Ukrainian Republican Party “Sobor”) (Kuzio 2015). While the
bloc received only 2.71 percent of the popular vote, it won five seats in
SMD wins; three of these were won by KUN members.
What eventually became the most prominent Ukrainian radical right-
wing party, Sotsial-Natsionalna Partiya Ukrayiny (SNPU, Social-National
Party of Ukraine), later All-Ukrainian Union “Freedom,” was established
in Lviv in October 1991 by the Movement’s Guard (Varta Rukhu) leader
Yaroslav Andrushkiv (b. 1953), Organization of Ukrainian Youth “Her-

867
itage” leader Andriy Parubiy (b. 1971) (who became Speaker of the
Ukrainian Parliament in 2016), and Lviv Student Fellowship (Studentske
Bratstvo) leader Oleh Tyahnybok (b. 1968). Andrushkiv was appointed the
first head of the party. In 1993, the SNPU established so-called People’s
Guard detachments, made up of members of the Lviv Student Fellowship,
for the purpose of risky mass actions such as blocking railroads or protest-
ing outside the Verkhovna Rada (Shekhovtsov 2011). These detachments
would later form the Patriot of Ukraine group as a subdivision of the
SNPU.
The SNPU’s ideology and symbols could be seen as betraying neo-fas-
cist leanings. The party’s logo consisted of the Latin letters “I” and “N”
superimposed on each other, and standing for the slogan “Idea of the Na-
tion,” with the nation seen as a “community bound by blood and spirit”
(Vseukrayinske obyednannya “Svoboda” 2016). Whether intended or not,
this SNPU symbol was reminiscent of a mirror image of the so-called
wolf’s hook (Wolfsangel) once used by certain SS units, and a common
symbol among European neo-Nazi organizations (Olszański 2011;
Shekhovtsov 2013). Furthermore, the official ideology of the SNPU was
called “social nationalism”—a reference to an ideological formula used by
the interwar and wartime OUN, but also reminiscent of the infamous Ger-
man classical fascist formula of “national socialism” (Umland and
Shekhovtsov 2013, 41). While none of these was by itself an unambiguous
reference to historical fascism, their combination was taken by many ob-
servers as indicating the fascist character of the SNPU.
The SNPU was officially registered as a party on October 16, 1995, yet
they had already managed to participate in a parliamentary election in
1994.6 The party slogan was “We, the Social Nationalists, belong neither
to the old communist, nor to a new democratic nomenclature” (All Ukrain-
ian Union-Svoboda 2016). The SNPU produced an official party platform
for the 1994 elections consisting of thirty-one points including, among oth-
ers, that the party “aimed at assuming power in Ukraine in order to build a
new state and a new society” (quoted in Shekhovtsov 2011, 213). While
the party received no seats in the national parliament, the SNPU saw better
results in the regional elections in western Ukraine where it took four seats
in the Lviv oblast council (regional parliament).
In 1998, the SNPU formed the Menshe Sliv (Fewer Words) electoral
bloc in coalition with the DSU. The bloc’s election program was particu-
larly critical of the direction of Ukraine’s development at that time, with

868
SNPU leader Andrushkiv calling Ukrainian and world society “sick” be-
cause of their lack of values and their problems with drugs, crime, corrup-
tion, and sexual deviance (quoted in Iovenko 2015, 232). While collec-
tively the bloc won only 0.16 percent of the national vote, ranking twenty-
ninth out of the thirty participating parties, the SNPU did receive one sin-
gle-member district mandate from Lviv for its co-leader Oleh Tyahnybok.
The results of the 2002 parliamentary elections were even more dismal
for Ukraine’s participating radical right parties. The UNA-UNSO gained
0.04 percent of the proportional vote, though it did win one seat in a sin-
gle-member district in Lviv. The DSU chose not to contest the 2002 parlia-
mentary elections, and in May 2003 the Supreme Court of Ukraine an-
nulled the DSU’s registration for failure to meet regulations of Ukrainian
law. The SNPU also did not participate in the proportional part of the elec-
tions, while Tyahnybok won again a seat via SMD elections in the Lviv re-
gion. The KUN further distanced itself from right-wing fringe groups in
the 2000s. In the 2002 and 2006 elections, the KUN took part in electoral
coalitions with the national democrats, joining Viktor Yushchenko’s
Nasha Ukrayina (Our Ukraine) bloc.

THE 2000S AND “SVOBODA’S” RISE

After years of a marginal presence in Ukrainian national politics, the

SNPU entered into a period of reorganization in the mid-2000s. The party
had lost most of its members, having fewer than one thousand in 2004,
which seemingly helped prompt a radical change of its structure and self-
presentation (Shekhovtsov 2013). The SNPU underwent a deliberate party
image makeover, renaming itself Vseukrayinske Obyednannya “Svoboda”
(All Ukrainian Union “Freedom”). It transformed itself into a more pop-
ulist right-wing party demonstratively modeled on those in Western Eu-
rope such as the French National Front or Austria’s Party of Freedom.7
This transformation proved politically successful, and “Svoboda” became
gradually the strongest as well as best-known far right party in Ukraine.
The main changes occurred in the party’s public appearance. First, the
party changed its name from the “Social-National” designation to the more
neutral “Svoboda” (“Freedom”) label. Second, its leadership was trans-
ferred from the hapless Andrushkiv to the charismatic Tyahnybok, who
had twice proven his electoral potential in parliamentary elections. Third,
the party abandoned its fascist-looking I-N logo in favor of a more neutral
and Ukraine-specific three-finger symbol meant to mimic simultaneously

869
the victory sign and the tryzub (trident) of the minor coat of arms of
Ukraine. The party’s new flag uses the blue and yellow colors of the
Ukrainian national flag. Fourth, the party formally disbanded its paramili-
tary wing, Patriot of Ukraine,8 and cut ties with some especially radical ul-
tra-nationalists (though not with all). While it softened its radical right-
wing rhetoric markedly, some crucial ideological positions nevertheless re-
mained unchanged (Shekhovtsov 2011).
Not all SNPU members agreed with this makeover, however. Founding
member Andrushkiv exited the organization (Iovenko 2015, 235). Parubiy
soon followed, citing differences in the “development of the party” (Vho-
los 2005).
At first the transformation of the SNPU into “Svoboda” did not have no-
ticeable electoral effects. In the 2006 parliamentary elections, “Svoboda”
captured a mere 0.36 percent of the popular vote—though this was still
much more than the UNA-UNSO’s result of only 0.06 percent. These fig-
ures illustrated the continuing inability of the radical right’s ultra-national-
ist ideas to resonate with the majority of the public. “Svoboda” did fare
better in the local elections of March 2006, receiving ten seats on the Lviv
regional council, nine seats on the Lviv city council, and four seats on the
Ternopil city council (Shekhovtsov 2011).
The early parliamentary election in 2007 saw some changes in terms of
the participation of right-wing radical parties. The UNA-UNSO chose not
to contest the elections. Following Stetsko’s death in 2003, KUN began a
slow decline. The party’s ties to the émigré community shrank, and the
new party head, Oleksiy Ivchenko (b. 1963), embattled the party in a scan-
dal, indirectly resulting in the party’s abstention from the elections (Kuzio
2015). “Svoboda” was the only far right party to participate, though it gar-
nered just 0.76 percent of the popular vote.
In spite of this unimpressive prehistory, “Svoboda” scored significant
electoral successes, at the local, regional, and national levels between 2009
and 2012 (Umland 2013a). In March 2009, “Svoboda” was victorious in
the Ternopil regional elections, receiving 34.69 percent of the vote, with
the closest runner-up United Center amassing only 14.2 percent. “Svo-
boda” won 50 of the 120 oblast council seats, and one of their members,
Oleksiy Kaida (b. 1971), became head of the council’s presidium (Umland
and Shekhovtsov 2013, 34). The 2012 parliamentary elections saw, for the
first time, a Ukrainian radical right party independently winning seats in
parliament in the proportional part of the voting. Tyahnybok’s party won

870
10.4 percent of the popular vote, leading to twenty-five MPs, and another
twelve single-member district mandates, altogether totaling 8 percent of
the parliament’s seats (36 out of 450). The only other radical-right organi-
zation to run as an individual party was the UNA-UNSO, which received
0.08 percent of the vote. KUN again contested the elections, though as part
of Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc, which won only 1.11 percent
of the national vote.

THE RADICAL RIGHT DURING AND AFTER THE

REVOLUTION OF DIGNITY

During the Revolution of Dignity in the winter of 2013–14, the radical

right represented a small though highly active and disproportionally visible
minority of the protesters on Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Neza-
lezhnosti). All right-wing extremist organizations participated in the
protests, but their function was not that portrayed by the Russian media,
which made claims of a “fascist coup” led by the ultra-nationalists
(Ishchenko 2016). According to analysis of protest events from November
2013 to February 2014, “Svoboda” was the most frequently reported par-
ticipant in the Maidan protests. The extra-parliamentary group Right Sec-
tor (Pravyi Sektor) was the most frequently reported participant in Maidan
violence and confrontations (Ishchenko 2016).
The Maidan protests brought to the fore, for the first time, a number of
ultra-nationalist activists, organizations, and social networks that hitherto
had been operating outside of the electoral political system. While “Svo-
boda” participated in the revolution as part of the political opposition,
which consisted also of the parliamentary parties Batkivshchyna (Father-
land) and Ukrayinskyi Demokratychnyi Alyans za Reformy (UDAR,
Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform), Right Sector arose as a
prominent ultra-nationalist force representing the extra-parliamentary radi-
cal right movement. It was a small coalition of groupuscules that consisted
of activists from organizations such as Tryzyb (Trident), Patriot of
Ukraine, UNA-UNSO, Social-National Assembly, C-14 (or Sich), and
White Hammer (Shekhovtsov and Umland 2014). The extent to which
these groups can be considered neo-Nazi, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic
varies. A commonality among all of them, though, is that they were na-
tionalist paramilitary organizations that had previously ignored or were un-
able to enter Ukraine’s mainstream political life (Likhachev 2015b, 261).
Right Sector began as a coalition between ultraconservative fringe

871
groups in November 2013; it registered as a political party in May 2014.
The initial core group of Right Sector was Trident, a nationalist paramili-
tary group founded in the early 1990s by the Stepan Bandera Sport-Patri-
otic Association. Prior to 2014, it largely ignored politics in favor of work-
ing closely with social communities, particularly with youth groups, as it
organized sports clubs and summer camps (Kuzio 2015; Likhachev
2015a).
Trident leader Dmytro Yarosh (b. 1971), who assumed the position of
head of Right Sector, is critical of Western liberalism and advocates a non-
aligned Ukraine (Haines 2015; Stern 2015). Furthermore, Yarosh has criti-
cized the ineffectiveness of the democratic process, specifically of parlia-
mentarianism, in bringing about a Ukrainian nation. In 1999 Yarosh (2004,
13) had posited: “We are convinced that the only path to build the Nation
and the State can be through a National Revolution, implemented by the
efforts of the entire Ukrainian people under the leadership of the national
revolutionary order—the OUN.”
The active participation of right-wing extremist groups in the Revolu-
tion of Dignity demonstrated a critical dimension of the radical right’s po-
litical power—their ability to mobilize and their network of activist re-
sources. However, protest activity did not transfer, for the far right, into
electoral success. Tyahnybok and Yarosh received together less than 2 per-
cent of the votes in the presidential elections of May 2014. The October
26, 2014, parliamentary election also saw the radical right-wing vote split
between the newly formed Right Sector and “Svoboda,” with neither sur-
passing the five percent threshold. Tyahnybok’s party came close to pass-
ing the barrier, with 4.71 percent of the popular vote, and it won six seats
in the SMD part of the elections. Right Sector received a mere 1.8 percent,
and party leader Yarosh won, in his home region of Dnipro, the party’s
only seat via SMD. The UNA-UNSO did not run independently in the
2014 parliamentary elections, as it briefly merged with Right Sector from
May 2014 until August 2015.
Since 2014, Ukraine’s radical right has thus returned to the political pe-
riphery. As during much of Ukraine’s post-Soviet history, it wields little
influence over national politics. On the other hand, another facet of the
radical right has concurrently gained momentum in Ukraine—right-wing
extremist volunteer militias fighting, along with non-extremist volunteers
and regular armed forces, in the Donets Basin against Moscow’s covert in-
vasion. The volunteer battalions became parts of the Special Purpose Pa-
trol Police of Ukraine and the National Guard of Ukraine. These initially

872
paramilitary and later properly military units have grown in prominence
since the Revolution of Dignity and continue to garner media attention for
their role in defending Ukraine in the war with Russia. Various radical
right-wing groups have assembled armed units such as Right Sector’s
Ukrainian Voluntary Corps, “Svoboda’s” Ukrainian Legion, the Sich Bat-
talion, and most notably the Azov Battalion (Ishchenko 2016). Azov was
founded by members of two neo-Nazi groups, Patriot of Ukraine and the
Social-National Assembly. Azov is officially patriotic, militarily decisive,
and socially active, but also xenophobic, and its leadership consists of for-
mer or current neo-Nazis (Gorbach and Petik 2016; Likhachev 2016).
Though not a part of the party system, these militia groups have seen of-
ficial inclusion in the power structures of Ukraine, and some individuals
from Azov are now trying to assume political roles (Umland 2016). In
2014, for instance, the leader of Azov, Andriy Biletsky (b. 1979), ran as a
pro-Euromaidan candidate and was elected to parliament via a SMD in the
Obolon district in Kyiv. Furthermore, an Azov deputy commander, Vadym
Troyan (b. 1979), was appointed head of the Main Directorate of the Min-
istry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in the Kyiv region in 2014 and became
acting head of the national police in November 2016. With such individu-
als managing to become part of Ukrainian political life, there has been
concern over the direction of the radical right in Ukraine and whether this
could mean a rise in neo-Nazism. Gorbach and Petik (2016) argue that if
the current democratic regime in Ukraine fell and if a radical right-wing
group such as Azov seized power, it is likely that this would lead to estab-
lishment of a real fascist junta, as distinct from the “fascist junta” label ap-
pearing every week in Russian propaganda against Ukraine’s post-revolu-
tionary government.

NATIONALISM(S) IN A STRUCTURAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The radical right in Ukraine—both political parties and extra-parliamen-

tary groups—is intertwined with, but not identical with, general Ukrainian
nationalism. The direction and development of Ukrainian nationalism re-
sulted not only from the tragic historical legacy of Ukraine, a nation di-
vided and ruled by others for centuries, but also from the structural rela-
tionships within the nation and other peculiar circumstances. These have
led to a Ukraine that is home to two nationalisms—ethnic Ukrainian na-
tionalism, with its core electorate in western Ukraine, and pro-Russian/So-
viet nationalism, found in russophone eastern and southern Ukraine. The

873
political weakness of the radical right in Ukraine is in part a product of the
divides concerning Ukrainian national identity and interests related to
these dueling nationalisms and to more general cultural as well as geopo-
litical orientations.9
Radical right-wing parties in Ukraine suffer from a heavy geographical
concentration of their core electorate in the west—specifically in Haly-
chyna or Galicia, that is, the Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts
(Polyakova 2014). To be sure, some western European right-wing groups
are based on similarly regional rather than national support, the most well-
known cases being Flemish Interest in Belgium and Northern League in
Italy. What makes them different from “Svoboda,” however, is that those
parties have a more or less consistent separatist agenda, whereas the
Ukrainian radical right preaches pan-Ukrainian national unity despite its
“ethno-centric understanding of politics” (Umland 2013a, 90).
While some of its core ideas were initially developed and spread in
Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other russophone cities, Ukrainian nationalism (espe-
cially the ultra-nationalist variation) has a particularly strong tradition in
western Ukraine. There, Ukrainocentrism radicalized itself in opposition to
mostly (though not always) repressive Polish rule during the interwar pe-
riod, and as a reaction to Ukraine’s failure to establish an independent state
between 1917 and 1920 (Nahaylo 1994, 42–43). Some founding ideas of
Ukrainian revolutionary ultra-nationalism were developed by the ideologi-
cal theoretician and literary critic Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973) in the
1920s, especially in his seminal works Foundations of Our Politics (1921)
and Nationalism (1926). He proposed a potent brand of integral national-
ism that was adopted by Ukraine’s first radical right-wing organizations,
which was both ethnocentric and authoritarian, as it borrowed from both
the fascists in the West and the Bolsheviks in the East (Nahaylo 1994, 43).
Ukrainian nationalism first became organized with the Ukrayinska
Viyskova Orhanizatsiya (UVO, Ukrainian Military Organization) and then
the Orhanizatsiya Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN, Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists) in 1929, initially headed by Yevhen Konovalets
(1891–1938) (Nahaylo 1994; Shekhovtsov 2013). In 1940, OUN split into
two groups, the more radical of which was led by Stepan Bandera (1909–
1959), OUN-B. The other faction, OUN-M, was led by Andriy Melnyk
(1890–1964). In 1942, the OUN-B established a broader paramilitary orga-
nization, the Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA, Ukrainian Insurgent
Army), which fought against both Nazi and Soviet forces (Shekhovtsov

874
2011). The OUN-B was a revolutionary radical right-wing organization
with a distinctly Ukrainian palingenetic ultra-nationalist agenda amounting
to a variety of fascism (Rossolinski-Liebe 2014; Umland 2015).
Political success of the radical right is dependent on, among other
things, the domestic political environment and its openness or closedness
to the nationalist cause (Shekhovtsov 2011). Not only right-wing radicals
but also many liberal patriotic Ukrainians proudly refer to the members of
the OUN and UPA as heroes who fought against the Soviets and the Ger-
mans. The radical right glorifies these organizations especially intensely,
and treats them as a source of inspiration (Umland 2013a). Kyiv’s official
post-Euromaidan stance toward Ukrainian history tends to ignore or mini-
mize their mass killings of Polish civilians, Ukrainian civilians, and in-
volvement in anti-Jewish pogroms (Zhukov 2007; Rossolinski-Liebe 2014;
Katchanovski 2015). Moreover, since independence, diverging attitudes
toward the OUN and UPA in different regions have contributed to shaping
political divisions in contemporary Ukraine (Katchanovski 2015).
A 2009 survey carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociol-
ogy (KIIS) found that only about 6 percent of Ukrainians expressed very
positive attitudes toward OUN-B and UPA, with only another 8 percent
expressing mostly positive attitudes (Katchanovski 2015). Conversely, 45
percent of respondents expressed very negative or mostly negative atti-
tudes toward these organizations. Following the Revolution of Dignity,
opinions on OUN and UPA have been changing rapidly, however. A 2015
public opinion survey conducted by Ratings Group Ukraine found that, for
the first time since they began conducting their survey in 2010, more re-
spondents supported than rejected official government recognition of
OUN-UPA’s contribution to the struggle for Ukraine’s independence—41
percent versus 38 percent, respectively.10
Thus, OUN and UPA remain highly controversial, particularly outside
the Galicia region of Ukraine. The 2009 KIIS survey found that opinions
toward OUN and UPA are highly dependent on geography. While the ma-
jority of respondents in Galicia had positive perceptions of OUN-B and
UPA (63 percent and 59 percent, respectively), only a minority of respon-
dents in the rest of western Ukraine (Volhynia, Bukovyna, and Tran-
scarpathia) as well as in the east, south, and center shared this attitude
(Katchanovski 2015).
The results of these polls highlight a larger historical division within
Ukraine, particularly between the center-west and south-east. This “ethno-

875
cultural” geographical cleavage is based on ethnicity and language.11
There is a divide between Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speak-
ing Ukrainians, and ethnic Russians—a cleavage highly sensitive to ex-
pressions of ultra-nationalism (Shekhovtsov 2011). For the latter two
groups, the radical right’s nationalist rhetoric and demonization of Russia
was, at least until 2014, largely unacceptable due to familial ties in the east
and historical legacy (Shekhovtsov 2011). Contemporary Ukraine is a mul-
tilingual, multicultural nation that found itself territorially torn between
various other states in the first half of the twentieth century, among them
the Soviet Union and Poland. Thus, as a result of geography and depend-
ing on which government laid claim to that land, relatives of modern-day
Ukrainians found themselves fighting on different sides during the Second
World War.
As a result of being historically divided between various imperial pow-
ers, Ukraine is a country with competing nationalisms based on two dis-
tinct cultural orientations—ethnic Ukrainian versus a Russian/Soviet iden-
tity (Umland 2013a; Kuzio 2015). Ukraine’s radical right enjoyed only a
three-year period of notable political presence during the first twenty-five
years of independence, when “Svoboda” was in parliament between 2012
and 2014. However, according to Kuzio (2015), Russian-nationalist-
backed parties such as the Communist Party of Ukraine and Party of Re-
gions held seats in Ukraine’s first seven freely elected parliaments from
1994 until 2014, placing first in four of those elections (1998, 2006, 2007,
and 2012), as well as winning one presidential election (when Viktor
Yanukovych became head of state in 2010). Kuzio concluded that it was
not that nationalism was unpopular in Ukraine; Soviet and Russian nation-
alism was simply more popular than right-wing ethnic Ukrainian national-
ism.

ULTRA-NATIONALISM VS. CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Apologetic discourses concerning the radically nationalist ideology and ac-

tions of the OUN and UPA have been particularly popular with the
Ukrainian diaspora, as many members of these organizations settled in the
West following World War II (Katchanovski 2015). This gave rise to what
Benedict Anderson calls “long-distance nationalism.”12 Rudling (2011,
737) finds that “in exile, the nationalists produced a self-serving historical
mythology” glorifying OUN and UPA while ignoring their war crimes.
However, the popularity of Ukrainian nationalism abroad was not shared

876
back home, where radical right-wing groups remained relegated to the po-
litical periphery after independence. Ultra-nationalist myths grounded in
anti-Russian, anti-Jewish, and anti-Polish attitudes were not compatible
with the political reality of post-Soviet Ukraine. Yuriy Shukhevych, for-
mer UNA head and son of the legendary UPA commander Roman
Shukhevych, noted that while people who try to usurp the Ukrainian nation
are regarded as enemies, this sentiment does not apply to entire nations or
peoples, be they Russians, Hungarians, Poles, or Jews (Los 2003).
The unpopularity of pro-Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups stands, ac-
cording to Kuzio (2015), in contrast to the ease with which nationalist pro-
Russian groups were able to establish a presence in Ukraine, capitalizing
on decades of Soviet propaganda and Russification (Kuzio 2015). Contem-
porary radical right parties have sought larger legitimation by proving they
are a part of the nationalist tradition going back to the OUN-UPA’s fight
for “liberation.” At least four organizations claim to be heir to OUN and
are officially banderivtsi (Banderites)—the KUN, the émigré OUN, Tri-
dent, and “Svoboda” (Kuzio 2011).
Kuzio (2002, 45) posits that in newly independent states such as post-
Soviet Ukraine, elites had to undertake the process of nation- and state-
building as well as to unify a diverse society through constructing a unified
political culture. In contrast to this aim, from the beginning of indepen-
dence the radical right was working not to unite society but to divide it
with aggressive anti-Russian and anti-Jewish rhetoric—which may have
been one reason for the ultra-nationalists’ surprising marginality. The eth-
nocentric tactics of the radical right proved politically unpopular as,
among other factors, levels of social alienation between Ukrainians and
ethnic Russians and Jews are relatively low (Paniotto and Khmelko
2005).13 According to KIIS surveys conducted annually between 1991
and 2005, which gauge xenophobia and tolerance levels of Ukrainians to-
ward various ethnic/racial groups, both Ukrainians who primarily speak
Ukrainian and Ukrainians who are mostly Russian-speaking are more
likely to welcome Russians and Jews into their family and social circles
than they are to be welcoming toward Poles, Germans, Americans, blacks,
or Roma, who are much less present in Ukrainian public life.
Despite relevant cultural divides in Ukraine, ethnic polarization is thus
relatively low. Ukrainians in general did not despise Russians or Russia for
the majority of the time since independence, until the start of Russia’s
covert invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Even after the start of the Russian-

877
Ukrainian war, Russophobia did not become a political platform for radi-
cal right parties to attract voters. According to twenty-three surveys con-
ducted in Ukraine between 2008 and 2016, which measure the attitudes of
Ukrainians toward Russia, on average approximately 70 percent of
Ukrainians had positive feelings toward their neighbor to the east while, on
average, approximately 22 percent expressed negative attitudes (Paniotto
2016).
While anti-Semitism has been a dominant feature in their political
rhetoric, the ultra-nationalists’ anti-Jewish stance only relatively rarely
finds expression in respective actions (Buštíková 2015). Between 2004 and
2014, there were 112 anti-Semitic violent attacks, with a decrease over
time, in Ukraine (Table 30.2). In general, Ukraine has seen a decrease in
both the frequency and the severity of hate crimes since their high in the
mid-2000s (Table 30.3). Between 2006 and 2012, there were 295 reported
violent hate crimes and 13 hate-crime-related deaths, the last reported
death—before the start of the war with Russia and thus under peaceful
conditions—being in 2010 (Likhachev 2012).
Table 30.2 Violent Attacks Motivated by Anti-Semitism, 2004–2014
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Sum
8 13 8 8 5 1 1 0 4 4 4 112
Source: Likhachev 2015a.
Table 30.3 Hate Crimes in Ukraine, 2006–2012
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 um
Attacked 14 88 84 37 18 48 6 295
Killed 2 6 4 0 1 0 0 13
Source: Likhachev 2012.
To place these numbers in a regional context, during its worst year (in
peaceful times) for hate crimes, 2007, Ukraine had 88 registered assaults
with 6 fatalities due to racially motivated violence, while in Russia during
the same year there were a reported 625 casualties with 94 deaths attrib-
uted to assaults by ultra-nationalists.14 Even accounting for the disparity
in population between the two countries, this is a substantial difference.
Among other factors, the small size of neo-Nazi activism in Ukraine is
thought to be one reason for the lower number of hate crimes than in Rus-

878
sia, with its large racist youth scene. According to one estimate, organized
neo-Nazi skinheads in Ukraine in 2008 did not exceed two thousand, while
in Russia the estimates range from twenty thousand to seventy thousand
members of fascist skinhead groups (Umland and Shekhovtsov 2013, 47).
Which parts of Ukraine’s population compose the radical right’s elec-
torate? In a case study of “Svoboda,” Lenka Buštíková (2015) found that
the party’s voters are exclusively ethnic Ukrainian. Party sympathizers,
too, are predominantly ethnic Ukrainian (94 percent).15 According to sur-
vey results, group hostility against Jews is not a predictor of pro-“Svo-
boda” voting or sympathies—despite the party’s anti-Semitic leanings.
Certainly, “Svoboda” supporters demonstrate relatively higher levels of
anti-Semitism. Yet it is mediated by sociodemographic and economic fac-
tors, and therefore not a predictor of voting patterns (Buštíková 2015,
253). Where “Svoboda” voters differed from those who voted for the na-
tional democrats, on one side, or pro-Russian parties, on the other, is in
their combination of “policy hostility towards Russians, group hostility
against Russians, and a high degree of economic anxiety” (Buštíková
2015, 251).
The results of this survey suggest that while anti-Semitism is present in
Ukraine, it is not a prime political motivator. “Svoboda’s” success between
2009 and 2012, however, may have been due in part to successful mobi-
lization of underlying Russophobia or anxiety (which later turned out to be
justified) about Moscow’s intentions toward Ukraine among part of the
population. Given these results, Buštíková (2015, 255) warns against
claims suggesting that “Svoboda” represents an “extreme xenophobic and
‘fascist’ force in Ukraine,” as there is no direct link between anti-Semitism
and voting for “Svoboda.” As in other countries, xenophobia, sexism,
racism, and homophobia are not particular to voters for right-wing parties.
In Ukraine, for instance, those voting for pro-Russian parties also demon-
strate such attitudes. Moreover, these supposedly left-wing parties are
themselves in some ways radically right-wing, as illustrated, for example,
by Communist Party of Ukraine MP Evhen Tsar’kov (b. 1974) and Party
of Regions MP Vadym Kolesnichenko (b. 1958), who authored and intro-
duced anti-homosexual legislation in parliament in 2012 (“Kolesnichenko .
. .” 2012; Kuzio 2015, 32).

A PROBLEM OF SPACE AND OPPORTUNITY

Since independence, the Ukrainian radical right has faced the challenge of

879
carving out a place for itself in mainstream politics. The high degree of po-
larization of the party system between liberal national democrats and pro-
Russian anti-liberals has left little to no space for radical right-wing na-
tionalists (Shekhovtsov 2011). Despite this, the radical right did achieve a
major moment of success with the 2012 election of “Svoboda” to parlia-
ment. However, “Svoboda’s” victory should be understood in the larger
political context. The win was less due to a shift to the right in the Ukrain-
ian population than to voters’ desire to express discontent with the ruling
forces—Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Region, Viktor Yushchenko’s Our
Ukraine, and the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc. Voters do not always cast their
votes for ideological reasons; votes can be also expressions of protest, or
they may be strategic and/or tactical (Umland 2013a). Thus, a vote for
“Svoboda” in 2012 may not have necessarily been cast in support of radi-
cal right ideas; it may have been an expression of dissatisfaction with the
“Orange” democratic forces, an anti-establishment appeal by voters who
wanted to see a third opposition party cross the 5 percent threshold and
represent consistently Ukrainian interests, or a display of disappointment
with economic and political corruption.16
To understand the Ukrainian radical right and its place in the larger po-
litical landscape today, it is important to address the Revolution of Dig-
nity. With the exception of “Svoboda,” other radical right-wing groups and
movements remained at the margins of social processes in post-indepen-
dence Ukraine until the Revolution of Dignity. “Svoboda” entered govern-
ment, and Right Sector became prominent only as a result of Euromaidan.
This presents a paradox: why would radical right-wing organizations that
have traditionally distanced themselves from mainstream liberal Ukrainian
political life join the 2013–2014 protests in favor of greater political inte-
gration with the West, specifically with the European Union? The most ob-
vious explanation for the participation of the radical right in Euromaidan
may be found in the primary goal of all Ukrainian right-wing nationalists,
which was—and continues to be—to “liberate Kyiv from the Kremlin’s
hegemony” (Shekhovtsov and Umland 2014, 60). Many far right activists
(though of course not all) saw, at least in 2013–2014, Ukraine’s associa-
tion agreement with the EU as a move toward greater independence, away
from Russian tutelage.
Kostiantyn Fedorenko (2015) argues that during the Revolution of Dig-
nity, there were two ideologically separate protest movements—the liberal
movement, focusing on European integration and civil rights and liberties,
and the nationalist movement, focused on bringing down the Yanukovych

880
regime. “Svoboda” straddled both camps: it protested Yanukovych’s re-
fusal to sign the EU association agreement, and later voted in parliament
for ratification of that agreement, while also proclaiming in 2013 the goal
of a “national revolution” (Fedorenko 2015). The radical right-wing group
that stood ideologically most visibly apart from the main opposition parties
—Batkivshchyna, UDAR, and even “Svoboda”—when it came to protest
motivations was Right Sector, which openly opposes globalization, the
EU, and NATO and is socially ultra-conservative (Fedorenko 2015).
While the purpose of Right Sector was also to overthrow Yanukovych, its
aims went beyond the officially pro-Western agenda of Euromaidan
(Likhachev 2015b, 266).
Yet the radical right accounted for only a minority of the protesters. The
partly nationalist imagery of the revolution thus resulted not from an over-
whelming presence of the radical right but from the nationalist origins of
some of the slogans of the largely pro-liberal protests. All leaders of Euro-
maidan—not only “Svoboda’s” Tyahnybok—popularized a greeting once
used by the OUN-B and UPA: “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”
(Katchanovski 2015). The proliferation of some originally ultra-nationalist
symbols and slogans, however, happened spontaneously, had mostly no
extremist underpinnings, and did not imply a spread of ethnonationalism
(Umland 2013b). Mass protest dynamics are such that small, well-orga-
nized forces—like the radical right—can play a role far greater than the
percentage of their supporters would suggest (Ishchenko 2016). While
many protesters were subject to certain propaganda tactics used by radical
right-wing groups during the revolution, most Ukrainians did not politi-
cally support these parties’ ethnocentric agenda during the following presi-
dential and parliamentary elections.

CONCLUSION

By the end of 2014, the radical right had fallen back to the periphery of the
political landscape, where it had been for most of Ukraine’s post-Soviet
history. However, between 2009 and 2014, the previously marginal “Svo-
boda” demonstrated that a minor radical right-wing group can turn into a
mainstream party, capable of coexisting with the established political elite
and joining a government coalition. This indicates that Ukraine’s radical
right may, in the future, regain its political momentum, and its 2014 loss
could then appear as being a natural part of fluctuations in its support.
Between 2014 and 2016 there was a marked increase in the social role

881
of previously marginal right-wing radical groups such as Azov, in connec-
tion with their participation in military operations. The continued Russian
aggression in eastern Ukraine has presented them with an opportunity to
characterize themselves as defenders of the homeland and thus expand
their public authority beyond the lunatic fringe. The future impact of the
radical right on Ukrainian political affairs is likely to be measured not only
by electoral performance but also by the activities of radical right-wing ex-
tra-parliamentary groups.
To be sure, a split of Right Sector into two movements and the estab-
lishment of a political party wing of the Azov brigade in 2016 may mean
that stronger electoral competition between ultra-nationalist parties will
prevent them from passing the 5 percent threshold in Ukraine’s future par-
liamentary elections. Yet, in connection with the ongoing low-intensity
war in eastern Ukraine, the far right will continue to command consider-
able human resources. Some radical right-wing organizations and paramil-
itary groups that lie outside the party system are penetrating state institu-
tions and political life (Ishchenko 2016). As in other countries, a future
rise in the popularity of the ultra-nationalist right-wing extremists, such as
Azov, could become a hindrance to the development of Ukraine’s nascent
democracy.

882
NOTES

The preparation of this chapter benefited from editing and comments by

Andreas Umland.
1. On the context and particulars of the Kremlin’s portrayal of Ukraine
as “fascist,” see Horvath 2011; Gaufman 2015; Likhachev 2016.
2. Moreover, this chapter excludes from consideration pro-Russian, pan-
Slavic and Eurasian groups in Ukraine, and focuses only on different
versions of Ukrainian anti-Moscow and mostly ethnic ultra-national-
ism. Some of the former groups, like for instance, the so-called Pro-
gressive Socialist Party of Ukraine led by Nataliya Vitrenko, may also
—in spite of their left-sounding names—be classified as permutations
of (Greater Russian) radical nationalism, yet are not considered here
for reasons of space. See, on this issue, Umland 2013a, 2015; Kuzio
2015.
3. Shekhovtsov 2011, 2014; Umland 2013b, 2015; Umland and
Shekhovtsov 2013; Shekhovtsov and Umland 2014; Likhachev 2013a,
2013b, 2013c; Polyakova 2014, 2015b.
4. The OUN was a descendent organization of the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists, an ultra-nationalist, right-wing political orga-
nization founded in 1929. Specifically, this émigré OUN was an off-
shoot of OUN-B, the main OUN faction led by Stepan Bandera and
later Yaroslav Stetsko.
5. Kuzio 1997; Nahaylo 1994, 45–46.
6. The SNPU was able to participate in the 1994 parliamentary elections,
prior to receiving official party registration, for a variety of reasons.
Most notably, the elections operated according to a unitary majoritar-
ian system with single-member districts—which not only did not re-
quire party affiliation/membership but in part deterred it, as there were
stricter requirements placed on political party nominees for registra-
tion as candidates. For a comprehensive discussion of the 1994
Ukrainian parliamentary elections, see Bojcun 1995.
7. Shekhovtsov 2011, 2014; Likhachev 2013b, 2013c; Rudling 2013; Be-
litser 2014; Polyakova 2014, 2015a; Umland 2015.
8. Later on, Patriot of Ukraine reconstituted itself as an independent

883
 minor neofascist association (also calling itself Social-National As-
sembly)—a groupuscule that would in 2014 become the kernel of the
leadership of the Azov volunteer battalion/regiment. See below and
the references in Umland 2016.
9. It should be added, though, that somewhat similar regional and ideo-
logical divisions have—for instance, in the Belgian and Italian con-
texts—not prevented Flemish and Padanian radical nationalism, that
is, Vlaams Belang and Lega Nord, to become far more sustainable
party-political phenomena than the Ukrainian far right (Umland
2013a).
10. This survey did not include Russia-occupied Crimea. See Rating
Group 2015.
11. Wilson 1997, 198; Kubicek 1999, 43; Umland 2008, 34.
12. For more on “long-distance nationalism” and the Ukrainian diaspora
in Canada, see Rudling 2011.
13. The Xenophobia Index survey measures social distance between
Ukrainians and other ethnic/racial groups. Here social distance is
being used as a proxy for tolerance.
14. Likhachev 2012; Umland and Shekhovtsov 2013, 47; Kozhevnikova
2009.
15. Whether someone is a sympathizer is determined by whether that per-
son would consider voting for Svoboda if given a second ballot.
16. Belitser 2013; Kuzio 2007; Likhachev 2013a; Polyakova 2014;
Shekhovtsov 2011, 2015; Umland 2013a; Umland and Shekhovtsov
2013.
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CHAPTER 31

890
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CHRISTOPHER SEBASTIAN PARKER

UNTIL very recently, the Tea Party animated the reactionary right in
America. It helped the GOP regain the House in 2010. Further, from the
debates over the debt ceiling to immigration reform, the Tea Party has
forced the GOP to take very conservative positions and caused a rift in the
Republican Party. The success of the Tea Party movement has roused
media types and academics alike to better understand whence it came.
They wonder how and why it’s come to dominate the political landscape.
These are worthy, even necessary questions. However, I believe that gain-
ing traction on those questions requires placing the Tea Party in historical
context, because I don’t believe the Tea Party is something new.
What, exactly, is a reactionary movement? According to sociologist
Rory McVeigh (2009, 32–33), it is “a social movement that acts on behalf
of relatively advantaged groups with the goal of preserving, restoring, and
expanding the rights and privileges of its members and constituents. These
movements also attempt to deny similar rights and privileges to other
groups in society . . . [something that] distinguishes right-wing movements
from progressive movements.” Who are the “advantaged groups” to which
McVeigh refers?
Historically, people who identify with reactionary movements tend to be
overwhelmingly white, predominantly male, middle-class, native-born,
Christian, and heterosexual. Taken together, this is the classical cultural
and racial image of American identity (Canaday 2009; Devos and Banaji
2005; Smith 1997). Further, this stratum of the population is also more
likely than other people to favor strong military presence, support stricter
moral codes, back free-market capitalism, reject government policies that
give minorities a shot at equality, and prefer to maintain the advantaged
status of native-born whites over any other social group (Diamond 1995).
As middle-class white males with a stake in America—both cultural and
economic—members and supporters of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the John
Birch Society (JBS), and the Tea Party committed to fighting what they
perceived as tyrannical forces. Moreover, they defended freedom in the
face of what they argued were unjust laws and court decisions, ones they
cast as oppressive. Each, moreover, suggested that sometimes intolerance
is necessary to protect liberty (Broyles 1966; Epstein and Forster 1967;
McClean 1995; Parker and Barreto 2013; Welch 1961).

891
 Beginning with the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, clear through the
Tea Party of today, reactionary movements are motivated by a belief that
America is in rapid decline, something that is associated with perceived
social and cultural change (Parker and Barreto 2013). Indeed, thanks to in-
terpretive work relying on historical accounts, I have a firm grasp of the
macro historical forces that provoke the emergence of right-wing move-
ments. At the individual level, however, beyond race, ethnicity, class, and
religious orientation, we know relatively little about why people are drawn
to right-wing movements. We know even less about whether or not sup-
porting right-wing movements can explain social and political attitudes
and preferences beyond the influence of other factors, including ideology,
partisanship, and racial group membership.
In this chapter, I examine the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of the reac-
tionary right. By the time the present chapter closes, if I’ve done my job,
the reader will emerge with a better understanding of what motivates the
reactionary right in the United States, and how such motivations inform
the policy preferences and behavior of its constituents. Right off the bat,
however, I must be clear about the limits of this examination, the largest of
which is its scope. The paucity of data restricts my analysis of the reac-
tionary right to a fifty-year span, from the 1960s through the Tea Party. I
begin with an overview of reactionary thought, something that includes a
brief history of reactionary movements through the mid-twentieth century.
I then conduct an assessment of what I believe is the immediate predeces-
sor of the Tea Party: the John Birch Society. This is followed by an analy-
sis of the contemporary reactionary movement in the United States: the
Tea Party, and the movement responsible for the election of Donald
Trump. In the conclusion, I will also briefly touch upon the continuities
(and discontinuities) between the Tea Party, and its European counterparts.

TOWARD AN EXPLANATION OF THE REACTIONARY RIGHT

So, what is the reactionary right? How, if at all, does it depart from the
“establishment” right? The reactionary right is commensurate with what
Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab (1970) called “preservatism,” or
what Clinton Rossiter (1982) identified as “ultraconservatism.” Unlike es-
tablishment conservatism that tolerates change as a means of maintaining
social, political, and economic stability, reactionary conservatives are will-
ing to undermine stability in service to maintaining the social prestige as-
sociated with their stratum: white, male, middle-class, relatively old, het-

892
erosexual, native-born Americans. Anytime the dominance of this stratum
comes into question, as happens when it is threatened by rapid, large-scale
social change, it provokes a “reaction” from the dominant group. This re-
action includes violating the rule of law, something to which establishment
types as far back as John Adams would take exception (Allitt 2009). Fur-
ther, the “reaction” will, more often than not, include one or more scape-
goats to which the group under siege ascribes an ongoing conspiracy (Hof-
stadter 1965; Lipset and Raab 1970). In other words, the principal way in
which the in-group explains its loss of relative prestige is by way of a con-
certed campaign of displacement directed by the out-group(s).
Many years ago, noted historian, Richard Hofstadter (1965) offered
what I believe is an organic framework in which we may better understand
the reactionary right. In his seminal work The Paranoid Style in American
Politics, he wrote that the far right wing practices a style of politics consis-
tent with paranoia. For him, there was no other way to explain the “heated
exaggeration, suspiciousness, and the conspiratorial fantasy” associated
with the Goldwater movement. He is careful to distinguish paranoid poli-
tics, or the “paranoid style,” from the clinical version. However, he cites
important similarities between political and clinical paranoia in that “both
tend to be overheated, over-suspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and
apocalyptic in expression” (Hofstadter 1965, 4). The key difference, as he
sees it, is that the clinical paranoid perceives himself to be the object of the
conspiracy. The paranoid politico, on the other hand, perceives the con-
spiracy to be “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate
affects not himself but millions of others . . . His sense that his political
passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling
of righteousness and his moral indignation” (Hofstadter 1965, 4).
Hofstadter also outlined a belief system on which the paranoid style
rests: pseudo-conservatism. The pseudo-conservative is a person who is
quick to use the rhetoric of conservatism, a belief system that prizes tradi-
tions and institutions and has an appreciation for the history of both. Yet,
according to Hofstadter, the pseudo-conservative fails to behave like a
conservative in that “in the name of upholding traditional American values
and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers,
consciously or unconsciously [he] aims at their abolition” (Adorno et al.
1950, 675–676, quoted in Hofstadter 1965, 44.). Furthermore, the pseudo-
conservative “believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied
upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for ruin” (Hofs-
tadter 1965, ch. 2). This state of mind pushes him to attack a way of life

893
and institutions he purports to revere, pressing his representatives to insist
upon a rash of constitutional amendments, including abolishing the income
tax, cutting spending on welfare, and charging with treason people who try
to weaken the government.
Hofstadter believes such a person is attempting to get a fix on his posi-
tion in the rapidly changing social system in which members of this group
believe their material and/or cultural status to be in decline. Moreover, as
Hofstadter suggests, they no longer have something to which they may an-
chor their American identity. Indeed, the pseudo-conservative has lost his
bearings amidst a raft of social changes, much as someone suffering from
paranoid social cognition does upon induction into a new social order—be
it at school, in a neighborhood, or new job. In this environment, the
pseudo-conservative in the paranoid style is simply trying to maintain his
social status.
Consider the twentieth century. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s pro-
vides the first example. Founded in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915, the
second version of the “Invisible Empire” was truly a national movement,
spreading beyond the South to the states of Washington, Oregon, New
York, Indiana, and Michigan, to name but a few (McVeigh 2009). Accord-
ing to a well-researched documentary, by the mid-1920s national member-
ship in this secret organization clocked in at 4 million.”1 The modal Klan
member was white (of course), male, middle-class, heterosexual, and na-
tive-born.
To maintain the dominance of the stratum to which they belonged, the
Klan stopped at almost nothing. Frequently they relied upon violence to
keep “uppity” blacks in their place, as well as Jews and Catholic immi-
grants. All of this is well known. What’s not so well known is the fact that
the Klan also used violence to police white men. White men who beat their
wives, were chronic drunks, or cheated on their spouse, among other
things, were subject to beatings by Klansmen. In short, the Klan enforced
the moral standards of the community. Regardless of the purpose for
which it is used, extra-legal violence is, by definition, a violation of the
rule of law.
Law and order, of course, is something by which conservatives typically
swear. The fact that the Klan employed lynchings and beatings as a means
of maintaining social order isn’t news. What is new, though, is the theoret-
ical reason behind them doing so: to maintain the group’s social prestige.
It’s abundantly clear now that the Klan perceived their way of life to be

894
under siege. Blacks posed a threat socially, Jews economically, and
Catholics politically. In other words, all three threatened the America with
which Klan members identified: white, male, middle-class, older, Christ-
ian, native-born, and heterosexual. In the absence of the social-scientific
methods and measures to which we now have access, it’s difficult to say
what, from an empirical perspective, drove people to identify with the
Klan.
Social histories of the KKK suggest the complicity of racism and xeno-
phobia, among other things, in the mobilization of the Klan. Unfortunately,
we cannot adjudicate this issue for the Invisible Empire. However, if I’m
correct in that the KKK of the 1920s represents a pattern of social change
followed by the formation of reactionary movements, I remain confident
that we can eventually assay the correlates of the reactionary right. We
now turn to this task.

THE REACTIONARY RIGHT OF THE 1960S

Some thirty years after the Klan’s renaissance, another reactionary move-
ment emerged. Retired candy manufacturer Robert Welch founded the
John Birch Society. Founded in 1958, the organization was born of the
anxiety associated with the perceived spread of communism at home and
abroad: they believed the “American” way of life threatened by communist
subversion (Diamond 1995; Parker and Barreto 2013). During its heyday,
the JBS enjoyed a membership that stood at eighty thousand, with six to
eight million sympathizers (non-members who nonetheless identified with
the organization) (Grupp 1969). By the mid-1960s the movement had
spread beyond California and Arizona to the remainder of the country, rep-
resented by approximately five thousand local chapters (Grupp 1969). Like
the Klan, its members were firmly middle-class. For instance, approxi-
mately 33 percent of them completed college, with another 32 percent hav-
ing attended though not completed college. The comparable numbers for
the general public were 10 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Further,
only 14 percent of Birchers belonged to the manual-labor class versus 49
percent of the general public (Grupp 1969).
Welch was a big believer in small government. This is no surprise given
his business background. But he is best known for his belief that the
United States was being torn asunder by communism. He accused Presi-
dent Dwight D. Eisenhower of being in cahoots with the communists, and
attempted to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren for his support of civil

895
rights for blacks. In fact, he suggested that the civil rights movement was,
among other things, a means by which communism might gain traction in
the United States. Indeed, communism did a lot of heavy lifting for
Birchers: anything they perceived as a deviation from the “American” way
was labeled “communist.” This included racial and gender equality, what
they believed was the moral “decay” of American society (e.g., homosexu-
ality, pornography, and the lack of deference to authority), and rising
crime rates (Rohter 1969).
At this point, even the skeptical reader must concede the emergence of a
strong, consistent pattern. However, as a social scientist, I remain vulnera-
ble on at least one count, for our evidence rests, in the main, on interpre-
tive claims. I have no way of identifying what really underpins identifica-
tion with reactionary movements, much less assessing the political conse-
quences associated with them. After we account for education, age, and in-
come, does religion remain a factor? What about racism, nativism, or ide-
ology? Does any of the latter group of possible determinants affect the
likelihood of someone sympathizing with reactionary movements? Finally,
does membership in or identification with a reactionary movement influ-
ence individual-level attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior beyond
competing, more established explanations?
To answer these questions I turn to a group best known as supporters of
the late Arizona senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. After
losing a close election in 1960 when John F. Kennedy bested Richard M.
Nixon, right-leaning factions of the GOP wished to run a “real” conserva-
tive instead of a “me too Democrat” (a moniker akin to today’s “RINO,”
or “Republican in name only”). In Goldwater, the GOP at last had a candi-
date who would completely dismantle the New Deal by shrinking govern-
ment. On foreign policy, the senator promised to roll back the spread of
communism instead of simply containing it, as President Eisenhower had
chosen to do. In 1964, Goldwater’s fidelity to small government resulted
in his failure to support the Civil Rights Act, a maneuver that won him
support in the South. He had also won the support of Strom Thurmond,
Goldwater’s Senate colleague from South Carolina, and the leader of the
Dixiecrat revolt of 1948.
These are all important reasons I have chosen to draw on Goldwater
supporters as proxies for reactionary conservatism in the 1960s. But the
most important—if not dispositive—factor for us is the fact that members
of the JBS were the senator’s most fervent supporters. In fact, some have
even ventured that in the absence of the JBS (including JBS sympathizers),

896
Goldwater might have failed to secure his party’s nomination (Kabaservice
2012; Perlstein 2001). Demographically, Goldwater supporters were very
similar to the JBS’s constituency: well educated, all white, older, predomi-
nantly male, and members of the white-collar crowd (McEvoy 1971).
Until now, my analysis has been limited by a lack of attitudinal data.
Now, however, we can press forward and assay the individual-level under-
pinnings of reactionary movements, and the extent to which identification
with these movements shapes attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior.
We begin with the attitudes believed conducive to identification with the
reactionary right. We turn to Christopher Towler’s (2014) work on the re-
actionary right in the 1960s for the bulk of the following analysis. He hy-
pothesized that anxiety about communists infiltrating America, and he was
right: as anxiety increased among people in the electorate, the probability
of identifying with the reactionary right, indexed by support for Goldwa-
ter, increased by 33 percent. This effect is above and beyond that which he
found for alternative explanations, including racism, anti-communism, par-
tisanship, and a preference for small government, each of which increased
the likelihood of identifying with the reactionary right by 21 percent, 11
percent, 52 percent (Republican versus Democrat), and 11 percent, respec-
tively.
Now that we have pinned down what promotes identification with the
reactionary right, it is time to examine the consequences of attachment to
the movement. I turn first to intergroup relations. Net of the effects of
racism, anti-communism, partisanship, and ideology, support for Goldwa-
ter dampened the way people felt about blacks and Jews. Further, identifi-
cation with the reactionary right also militated against positive attitudes to-
ward the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), two prominent
civil rights organizations. We observe similar but stronger results when the
analysis moves to race-related policies in the 1960s.
Towler examines the ways in which reactionary conservatism informed
the electorate’s views concerning the government’s role in school integra-
tion, whether or not busing was necessary, and the extent to which they
supported integration of their neighborhoods. Conventional wisdom sug-
gests that racism should provide most of the explanatory power we should
find once we specify a model. Likewise, in the context of the 1960s, com-
munism and racial equality were often linked in the minds of Goldwater
supporters via their association with the JBS. Therefore, anti-communist
attitudes must also be taken into account if the results on race-based policy

897
preferences are to be taken seriously.
As it turns out, even after correcting for racism and anti-communism,
Towler shows that reactionary conservatism continued to animate people’s
views on racial policy preferences in the 1960s. Net of the effects of
racism and anti-communism, among other things, reactionary conser-
vatism dampened support for government-backed school integration by 11
percent, and by 9 percent for busing. Yet for neighborhood integration, the
impact of reactionary conservatism dissolves. Given the size of the effect
of racism, which reduced support for integration by 52 percent, reactionary
conservatism appears bound up with the negative way in which many
whites viewed blacks. This is no big surprise insofar as the prospect of one
of “them” moving next door significantly decreases the social distance be-
tween blacks and whites to which many whites had become accustomed.
Most would agree that the 1960s were one of the most volatile periods
in the relatively short existence of the United States. Many believed, with
some justification, that the Soviet Union threatened American security in-
terests. But there were others who subscribed to a way of thinking in
which the communist threat—from without and within—was existential: it
threatened the “American way of life.” Among the ways in which this
menace became manifest was through the civil rights movement. But as
the analysis makes clear, reactionary conservatism—indexed by support
for Goldwater—discriminated between the fear of a communist takeover
and the anxiety related to the perception that social change (i.e., the civil
rights movement) was happening too fast. Needless to say, this is roughly
the same scenario we observed with the Klan and the JBS. Concern with
change also had behavioral implications. Even upon correcting for the
usual cast of characters that account for political engagement, reactionary
conservatism remained an important predictor. This finding indicates that
the negative affect associated with change successfully motivated mobi-
lization.
The totality of the work I’ve reviewed so far suggests continuity on the
reactionary right from the 1920s through the 1960s, something that, with
Matt Barreto, I’ve argued elsewhere. But times have changed since then.
After all, we now have had a black president, same-sex rights are on the
march, and the demographics of America are rapidly changing. Surely
there’s no place for the reactionary right in the United States now, is it? Of
course there is. The next section presents what I think is irrefutable evi-
dence to that effect.

898
 THE TEA PARTY

Around 2009, shortly after President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, a

group of loosely organized, highly motivated individuals, organizations,
and political action committees coalesced to form what has come to be
known as the Tea Party. In 2010 the Tea Party boasted major electoral
wins in the U.S. House and Senate, defeating both incumbent Republican
and Democratic lawmakers alike. These results should come as no great
surprise, given the widespread support the movement enjoyed back in
2010. During its height in 2010, the Tea Party claimed a core membership
of approximately 550,000 who signed up to be members of at least one of
the national Tea Party groups: 1776 Tea Party, ResistNet (Patriot Action
Network), Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, and Tea Party Patriots.
Beyond this core group were two additional constituencies. One consists
of the people who attended at least one rally, donated money, or purchased
Tea Party literature: an estimated three million people.2 Another layer
consisted of Tea Party sympathizers, people who approved of the Tea
Party. According to data from a 2010 University of Washington study, 27
percent of the adult population, or sixty-three million Americans, strongly
approved of the Tea Party.3
Given this level of support, what did the Tea Party want? From at least
one account, the Tea Party believed in a reduced role for the federal gov-
ernment, more fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, a free market, and a com-
mitment to states’ rights.4 Indeed, these are core conservative, even liber-
tarian, principles, very much in keeping with traditional American political
culture (see, among others, Smith 2007; Rossiter 1982). What’s more,
commitment to these values is widely considered patriotic. Yet, time after
time, supporters of the Tea Party seemed to be united by something be-
yond a belief in limited government. Specifically, Tea Party sympathizers
appeared united in their fervent disdain for President Barack Obama, and
seemed to be squarely opposed to any policies that might benefit minority
groups.
In the preceding sections we sought to illustrate a pattern we associate
with the rise of reactionary movements. From the Klan to the JBS, individ-
uals appear to react to what they perceive as rapid social change in which
the social prestige of “real Americans” is under siege. In this section, we
take up the question of the Tea Party’s emergence and common Tea Party
attitudes in the age of Obama. We argue that the Tea Party represented a

899
right-wing movement, distinct from mainstream conservatism, that reacted
with great anxiety to the social and demographic changes in America over
the past few decades. Through a comprehensive review of original data we
show that Tea Party sympathizers held strong out-group resentment, in
particular toward blacks, immigrants, and gays. Briefly, we then assess
public opinion data to determine if the findings can be generalized to the
population of Tea Party sympathizers at large.
Contemporary observers and Tea Party events gesture toward concerns
that transcend limited government and fiscal conservatism. For instance,
the NAACP charged the Tea Party with promoting racism, and Tea Party
Express leader Mark Williams was chastised by other Tea Party leaders for
penning an overtly racist letter poking fun at the NAACP. Their activists
were a driving force behind the Arizona state statute SB1070, a bill that,
among other things, proposed to empower local authorities to interrogate
the immigration status of people who “looked like” immigrants—some-
thing that many said would result in the targeting of Latinos for racial pro-
filing. They may be best known for their many caricatures of President
Obama, often depicting him as a primate, African “witch doctor,” and
modern-day Hitler, among other things. Consider, moreover, the constant
references to President Obama as a socialist. In fact, a study issued by
Democracy Corps reported that 90 percent of Tea Party supporters be-
lieved President Obama to be a socialist; as such, they viewed him as the
“defining and motivating threat to the country and its well-being” (Green-
berg et al. 2010). Perhaps the fact that the movement harbored members of
white nationalist groups helps to explain the apparent intolerance of the
movement (Burghart and Zeskind 2010). However, beyond a perception of
intolerance, we think there is something deeper in the emergence of the
Tea Party that is more in line with studies of paranoia, conspiratorial be-
liefs, and out-group suspicion—in short, a right-wing reactionary move-
ment.

Demographic Change and the Emergence of the Tea Party

We have already mentioned what we believed triggered the emergence of
the Tea Party: the election of the country’s first black president. However,
it was not just the election of Obama that triggered the Tea Party, but also
the changing demographics and political debates in America over the past
forty years. In 1970, 83 percent of the U.S. population was non-Hispanic
white, and in 2010 63 percent was non-Hispanic white—a 20 percentage
point decline in one generation. Accompanying this change has been an in-

900
crease in the black, Hispanic, and Asian populations in the United States
and a vigorous debate about civil rights and immigration. Whether we’re
talking about blacks or immigrants, the Tea Party and its followers appear
to reject the presence of racial “others.”

Racial Resentment
For many, the election of the nation’s first African American president is
evidence of the end of racism in America. Yet the emergence of the Tea
Party in the months following the inauguration of Barack Obama, along
with the racially charged antics exposed at many of the group’s events and
rallies, warrants a closer look at the immediacy of racism in America
today. As research has shown, racism and racial resentment play an impor-
tant role in determining not only support for Obama but also support for
black candidates in general (Parker, Sawyer, and Towler 2009; Tesler and
Sears 2010). The influence of modern-day racism is most known for its
place in opposition toward affirmative action and other race-conscious
programs (Bobo 1999; Bobo and Kluegel 1993; Feldman and Huddy
2005). The racism that commonly guides contemporary white attitudes has
been labeled “racial resentment” and relies upon anti-black affect, or a
“pre-existing negative attitude toward blacks” (Feldman and Huddy 2005,
169). In other words, racial resentment is fueled by the gains and growing
demands of black Americans (Kinder and Sanders 1996), a resentment that
acquired a new level of fuel with the country led by an African American
president for the first time in its history.
Old-fashioned racism, based on biological differences between blacks
and whites, is no longer acceptable, supplanted by a new, more subtle
racism, one that works to predict political attitudes and behaviors (Parker
et al. 2009; Sears and Henry 2003). This new form of racism relies on
stereotypes surrounding African Americans, stereotypes that suggest that
blacks fail to observe treasured American values such as hard work, hon-
esty, and lawfulness (Kinder and Sanders 1996; Sears 1993). In addition,
ascribing these stereotypes to blacks allows for whites to continue justify-
ing their privileged position in society (Bobo and Kleugel 1997, 93–120).
The centrality of American values in racial resentment links American in-
dividualism to expressions of prejudice (Feldman and Huddy 2005). The
attributes (or stereotypes) assigned to blacks—laziness, preference for wel-
fare, predisposition to crime—place them in opposition to the values
American society rests upon, isolating and alienating blacks from the
ideals that go hand in hand with being a good citizen in America.

901
 The timing behind the emergence of the Tea Party in American politics
begs for a further examination of a group that was determined to “take
back” their country and fight against a government absorbed by socialism.
The Tea Party movement’s emphasis on American values and individual-
ism placed many of their policy stances and positions in opposition to mi-
nority policies, such as an increase in social programs, including spending
for the poor and health care reform. Also, the rhetoric of the Tea Party
placed its members in opposition to minority groups in America as well as
the new leadership of the country.
The Tea Party’s focus on individualism and American values alone are
not enough to validate claims of racial resentment. In addition, accusations
of racism within the Tea Party existed since its beginning. A 2010 report
by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR)
chronicled the involvement of white supremacy groups in the Tea Party
since the movement’s first events on April 15, 2009; if nothing more, it
speaks to the Tea Party’s availability as a vehicle for white supremacist re-
cruitment and thought. Other watchdog groups, such as Tea Party Tracker,
made it a point to highlight acts of racism and extremism within the Tea
Party and at their rallies and events. Beyond the consistent chronicling of
individual acts of racism and bigotry, much of the resentment in the Tea
Party boiled over at the height of the health care debate. As Congress came
together to vote on the proposed health care bill in March 2010, a Tea
Party protest boiled over as racial epithets were launched at Rep. John
Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat
from Missouri, was spat upon while trying to make it through the crowd at
Capitol Hill (Rasmussen and Schoen 2010).
These instances, among others, led to the denunciation of racism and
bigotry in the Tea Party movement on a national stage. Although making it
clear that the NAACP was not condemning the entire Tea Party as racist,
the following reaction from one of the movement’s prominent leaders
brought racial resentment to the forefront. Mark Williams, a leader of the
Tea Party at the time, released a satirical commentary in response to the
NAACP resolution. The response was a letter to President Lincoln from
“colored people” and not only insinuated ignorance on the part of blacks in
America but also reinforced many of the stereotypes central to racial re-
sentment, such as that blacks are lazy and lack a work ethic.
Even as the evidence consistently found the Tea Party rampant with
racial resentment and extremism, the movement’s members argued that
they were following their conservative principles, centered on small gov-

902
ernment and limited spending—stances that, by their political nature, do
not favor minorities or people of color. This position, though, is not new:
ideological conservatism is often invoked as a means of avoiding accusa-
tions of racism (Sniderman and Piazza 1993).
To date, scholars have worked hard to separate the influence of conserv-
ative principles from racial resentment. Whites’ disapproval of affirmative
action and social welfare programs has been justified by claiming a viola-
tion of norms central to conservative principles, such as hard work and
self-reliance. The group dominance approach stands in opposition to prin-
cipled conservatism, explaining that groups will use ideology and political
symbols to “legitimize” their claims over resources (Sidanius and Pratto
1999). Furthermore, scholars have shown not only that racism works in
conjunction with the individual values associated with principled conser-
vatism—Kinder and Mendelberg suggest that individualism becomes part
of racism—but also that racism goes beyond individualism to predict nega-
tive attitudes toward race-conscious policy and politicians of color (Feld-
man and Huddy 2005; Kinder and Mendelberg 2000; Tesler and Sears
2010). When specifically examining negative attitudes toward President
Obama, racism was found to play a major role regardless of ideological
preference (Parker et al. 2009). The emergence of the Tea Party allows for
a closer examination of the racial attitudes held by this unique group of
Americans, who emphasize the principles of individualism over all else.

Anti-Immigrant Attitudes
Statements about immigration from Tea Party politicians and groups
largely portrayed immigration as a threat to Americans or American cul-
ture. One glaring example of this is Sharron Angle’s 2010 campaign ad
“Best Friend,” which features a voice-over that ominously states, “Illegals
sneaking across our borders putting Americans’ jobs and safety at risk,”
while showing video of dark-skinned actors sneaking around a chain-link
fence.5 Angle was a darling of the Tea Party movement in Nevada and at-
tacked incumbent senator Harry Reid on immigration both in the “Best
Friend” ad as well as in a second ad called “At Your Expense” that
charged that Reid supported special college tuition rates for undocumented
immigrants, which would be paid for by Nevada taxpayers.6 Both ads jux-
taposed the dark-skinned actors portraying illegal immigrants with white
Americans working or with their families on the same screen. The implicit
racism in Angle’s ad was reminiscent of the now notorious “White Hands”

903
ad of Jesse Helms and the “Willie Horton” campaign ad run by George W.
Bush in 1988.
Sharron Angle was not the only Tea Party candidate who tried to use the
threat of Latino immigration to capture votes in the 2010 election. In Ari-
zona, J. D. Hayworth, John McCain’s Republican primary challenger, sim-
ilarly made immigration one of the central planks of his campaign. Hay-
worth (2005) had actually written a whole book on the subject of undocu-
mented immigration, called Whatever It Takes, in which he argued in favor
of increased immigration enforcement and noted that while immigration
was clearly good for the country, the proportion of immigrants coming
from Mexico was too high because it could lead to American becoming a
bicultural nation. In Hayworth’s own words, “Bicultural societies are
among the least stable in the world” (2005, 30). Hayworth was a strong
supporter of Arizona’s SB1070 but believed that even more steps had to be
taken against undocumented immigrants, stating at a 2010 rally in Mesa,
Arizona, that “there is a whole new term: birth tourism. In the jet age there
are people who time their gestation period so they give birth on American
soil.”7 In an effort to prevent this, Hayworth argued that the state of Ari-
zona should stop birthright citizenship, a view echoed by Russell Pearce, a
state senator from Arizona and the architect of SB1070.
Tea Party organizations also sought to portray immigration as a threat to
America in the lead-up to the 2010 general election. The Tea Party Nation
emailed its roughly thirty-five thousand members in August and asked
them to post stories highlighting the victimization of Americans by illegal
immigrants. The group specifically asked for stories about undocumented
immigrants taking the jobs of members, committing crimes, or undermin-
ing business by providing cheap labor to competitors.8 The Americans for
Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) assisted two Tea Party groups, Voice
of the People USA and Tea Party Patriots Live, in coordinating rallies in
support of Arizona’s SB1070. ALIPAC was supported by the Federation
for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization designated a
hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its links to
white supremacist organizations (Tomasic 2010).
The Tea Party, while denying that its anti-immigrant rhetoric was based
on racism, has continued to portray immigration in starkly threatening
terms, which, while not explicitly racist, has strong undercurrents of im-
plicit racism, with Sharron Angle’s campaign videos being the most obvi-
ous example of this. A New York Times/CBS News poll released in August

904
2010 unsurprisingly found that 82 percent of self-identified Tea Party sup-
porters believed illegal immigration was a “serious problem.”9 In the soci-
ology, psychology and political science literatures, the perception of
threats from immigrant groups has been shown to be a powerful predictor
for approving of immigration restriction and for anti-immigrant attitudes.
It’s plain to see that the Tea Party and its followers were concerned with
more than small government and fiscal responsibility. But why was this
the case? What do blacks and immigrants have in common? Race. More
specifically, the ways in which blacks and immigrants (especially the un-
documented) represent a departure from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
(WASP) representation of American identity with which the United States
has become identified. “Real Americans,” in other words, are neither black
nor born elsewhere. As Parker and Barreto demonstrate to great effect, Tea
Partiers were anxious that the America to which they had grown accus-
tomed was under siege from non-WASP groups. For this reason, Tea
Partiers were loath to extend rights and benefits to these “others.”

FROM THE TEA PARTY TO TRUMP

Six years into its political existence, many now wonder, where is the Tea
Party headed? Are they still influential after the 2012 election, when Tea
Partiers failed to help the GOP capture the White House? But failing to se-
cure the executive branch of government, as the Tea Party has shown, isn’t
the end of the world. In fact, they’ve shown that holding half of the legisla-
tive branch suffices to arrest the change sought by the president and his
party. Indeed, the fifty or so Republican members of the House aligned
with the Tea Party in some way have managed to frustrate not only Presi-
dent Obama and his agenda but also the conservative establishment.
Since 2010, pundits have declared the Tea Party dead at least eighteen
times. Yet their membership continues to climb. For instance, in 2013
IREHR reports that since 2010, card-carrying members of the insurgent
group increased from 185,000 to approximately 550,000—a threefold in-
crease. The number of Tea Party sympathizers, however, has recently de-
clined from a high of around 30 percent of the adult U.S. population in
2010 to 20 percent as of the last quarter of 2013, during the federal gov-
ernment shutdown, though more recent polling data suggest a slight uptick
in 2014, with 24 percent identifying themselves as supporters of the move-
ment.10 In raw numbers, assuming the movement never recovers its pre-

905
shutdown popularity among sympathizers, it still means that 36 million
Americans identify with the Tea Party.
If the level of Tea Party sympathizers is subject to periodic dips, the fi-
nancial backing of the reactionary movement resembles the steady growth
we see in the ranks of membership. As of February 2014, the New York
Times reported that fundraising efforts of Tea Party–affiliated organiza-
tions outstripped those associated with establishment conservative groups
by a three-to-one margin. During the early stages of the Tea Party insur-
gency, questions were asked about the authenticity of the movement inso-
far as the Koch brothers and other big-money donors bankrolled Tea Party
organizations. As a result, some on the left derided the Tea Party as a
movement funded by wealthy business interests as opposed to the grass-
roots phenomenon many in the movement claimed it was.
If this represented even a sliver of truth in the early stages of the move-
ment, the same cannot be said now. IREHR reports that 82 percent of indi-
vidual donors’ contributions to Tea Party organizations did not exceed
$200. We see a similar pattern as it pertains to Tea Party–related super
PACs (independent political action committees capable of raising large
sums of money), in which 97 percent of their contributions did not exceed
$1,000. If this information is even remotely accurate, and we believe it is,
Tea Party fundraising is relatively democratic, buying itself a measure of
independence from big-money, special-interest patrons.
So, what keeps the Tea Party thriving? Why does it continue as a major
force in American politics? To answer these questions, and many others,
we conducted a national survey of one thousand adults in December 2013.
As a way of demonstrating that fear and anxiety are the driving force be-
hind Tea Party intransigence, we contrast the attitudes and preferences of
Tea Party conservatives with those of non–Tea Party conservatives. If Tea
Party resistance is really about fidelity to conservative principles such as
law and order, small government, and fiscal responsibility, we should ob-
serve no difference among conservatives. If, however, differences do
emerge, we can attribute them to fear and anxiety.
As it turns out, the data suggests important fissures among conserva-
tives. I begin with immigrants. Consider the following: 40 percent of non–
Tea Party conservatives believe that “restrictive immigration policies are
based on racism,” while only 18 percent of Tea Party conservatives agree.
Perhaps this is why we see such a large gap among conservatives when it
comes to supporting comprehensive immigration reform: 80 percent of

906
mainstream conservatives want to see a comprehensive solution to immi-
gration, versus 60 percent of Tea Party conservatives. Again, if resistance
were really about conservative principles—law and order, in the case of
immigration—these findings would have revealed no differences between
the rival conservative camps, but they did. Piecing together what is im-
plied from the questions, this leads us to conclude that Tea Partiers, rela-
tive to establishment types, believe the current policies are adequate.
Another race-related issue encountered by the American public for
which I gathered evidence is the controversial Supreme Court decision on
the renewal of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In June 2013, in a 5–4 deci-
sion, the Court released several states with a record of violating the voting
rights of blacks and other minorities from federal oversight, in which the
covered jurisdictions were required to clear any changes to their voting
laws with the Department of Justice. This ruling paved the way for states
to effectively enact legislation that may have the effect—if not intent—of
discriminating against some voters in ways that inhibit their ability to vote.
An establishment conservative would object to the continuing necessity of
the VRA’s preclearance provision as a violation of state sovereignty. In-
deed, this constituted a major part of the conservative majority’s opinion.
However, we have reason to believe that something beyond conservatism
informs the Tea Party’s opinion on the issue.
Our theory suggests that Tea Party conservatives’ support for ruling on
the VRA has less to do with the federal government violating states’ rights
and more to do with the ways in which the ruling will ultimately impede
the ability of people of color to vote. We examined our claim by asking
people whether or not they believe discrimination remains a problem when
it comes to voting rights. As it turns out, roughly 50 percent of establish-
ment conservatives believe discrimination remains a problem, versus just
37 percent of Tea Party conservatives. We acknowledge that the difference
isn’t especially striking: a mere 13 percentage points. The point, however,
isn’t the size of the difference. Rather, the point is that there’s any differ-
ence at all.
This assessment of the Tea Party suggests that reports of its death have
been overblown. If the Tea Party were truly on its way out, would its
membership continue increasing? Would its fundraising be so robust?
Would it continue to enjoy such influence on the Republican Party? We
don’t think so. In addition to the organizational strength it continues to
demonstrate, and the political clout it continues to wield, we have also
documented the enduring cleavage that exists between establishment con-

907
servatives and reactionary conservatives. Our theory indicates establish-
ment conservatives are committed to conventional conservative principles,
whereas reactionary conservatives are motivated more by the fear and anx-
iety associated with the perception that “real” Americans are losing the
country.
Having discussed the continuing strength of the Tea Party, and its ani-
mating forces in the present, I now take a moment to touch on the Tea
Party’s prospects in the near future. While the Tea Party as a movement
with organized chapters, and a caucus in the House of representatives, no
longer exists given its absorption by the Republican party, it’s not unrea-
sonable to suppose that its supporters were in some way responsible for the
way the 2016 presidential election turned out, with the election of busi-
nessman turned reality show star Donald Trump. Pushed by the anxiety
and anger felt in the aftermath of Obama’s election, the Tea Party can
claim credit for the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives in the
2010 midterm election cycle, when they won sixty-three seats—a land-
slide. As it turns out, Tea Party conservatives were more politically en-
gaged than other conservatives, and far more so than progressives (Parker
and Barreto 2013, ch. 6). The Tea Party, it seems, lives on: they’re Trump
supporters.
For instance, in a recent study I conducted in the state of Washington,
83 percent of Tea Party supporters also supported Donald Trump. Further,
when compared to establishment Republicans, Trump supporters were
more extreme on a range of race-related issues. When asked whether or
not race played a role in recent police killings of unarmed blacks, 72 per-
cent of Trump supporters believed race had nothing to do with it, versus 47
percent of more mainstream Republicans. In a related question, one that
asked whether race had anything to do with the use of deadly force against
blacks, 82 percent of Trump supporters denied that race was an important
factor, while 63 percent of establishment Republicans agreed with that
sentiment. Shifting gears to immigration, we find similar results. Trump’s
proposal to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico was wildly
popular among his supporters: 87 percent of them strongly agree with it.
Only 37 percent of more mainstream Republican partisans thought this
was valid. When one considers the relative suspicion with which Trump
supporters view “immigrants,” the preference for a wall is easier to see: 59
percent of Trump backers believed that immigrants refuse to abide by
American laws, versus only 20 percent of their mainstream counterparts in
the Republican Party.

908
 The movement saw—and continues to see—Obama as a vessel for the
hitherto ignored claims for equality from marginalized groups. While not
new, the push for equality by these groups appears to have gained currency
on Obama’s watch. The simultaneity, suddenness, and force with which
marginalized groups pressed their claims during the Obama presidency no
doubt contributed to the fear, anxiety, and anger felt by Tea Partiers. If
there were any doubt that such sentiments would survive Obama, Trump’s
ascendance to the White House should remove them. Two reasons dictate
this: (1) the data suggest that Tea Party support has shifted to support for
Trump, and (2) Trump supporters’ intolerance is in line with similar senti-
ments associated with Tea Party supporters.

CONCLUSION

My review of the reactionary right in the United States is now complete.

At least two things are very clear. First, from the Klan to the Tea Party and
now Trump, there is a certain segment of the country that remains anxious
and angry when it perceives rapid social change: white, male, native-born,
middle-class, Christian, and middle-aged. This is not to say that every per-
son in this group is reactionary. This is patently untrue. Instead, I invite
you to think of it in the following way: someone from this group is more
likely to harbor reactionary sentiments than, say, someone who is a black,
female, working-class, young Jamaican immigrant. Second, reactionaries
hold beliefs that lead to policy preferences different from both “liberals”
and establishment conservatives. That their preferences depart from estab-
lishment conservatives belies reactionaries’ claims that they’re merely
simple—if angry—conservatives.
Moving beyond sympathy for the Klan, for which we have no hard pub-
lic opinion data, we see these themes play out in the 1960s as well as in the
present moment. Similar to the ways in which the Tea Party and its sup-
porters fail to embrace social change now, as it pertains to racial and sex-
ual minorities (Parker and Barreto 2013, ch. 4), the JBS and its supporters
failed to embrace change if it involved racially progressive policies. In
both cases, even after ideology is taken into account, our theory of reac-
tionary conservatism remains a valid alternative explanation for what I
(and Towler) observe. What this suggests is that more than fifty years after
the height of the civil rights movement, the event that helped spawn the
JBS, reactionary forces once again mobilized, this time in the guise of the
Tea Party, to thwart change. The only difference this time is that a single

909
—albeit powerful—person mobilized reactionary forces: the president of
the United States.
The discerning reader may ask why it took the prospect of progress for
an entire race to jump-start a reactionary movement fifty years ago but a
single man is capable of doing so now. As we have discussed elsewhere, it
is really quite simple. As the commander in chief, chief law enforcement
officer, head of government, et cetera, the president of the United States
wields enormous power. However, perhaps more important is what the of-
fice represents: the leader of the American people, the titular head of the
country. For reactionary conservatives, a black man in the White House is
simply too much to bear. It’s an affront to their identity as Americans. For
them, Barack Obama’s “occupation” of the Oval Office symbolizes too
much change. They believe the America in which they grew up, the Amer-
ica to which they’ve become attached, is no more. In like fashion, the reac-
tionaries of an earlier era believed the civil rights movement would ulti-
mately result in the undoing of the country.
Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight for reactionary movements. One is
always around the corner, waiting to issue a call to arms in response to
what its adherents believe is too much change. Apparently these senti-
ments aren’t confined to the United States. Indeed, over the last twenty
years or so, this reactionary impulse has swept across Western Europe
(Rydgren 2007). To the extent that reactionary impulses may be captured
by support for right-wing parties in Western Europe, there is some overlap
between American reactionaries and what I believe are their European
counterparts. Whether they are labeled populist or nationalist,11 they share
at least one key characteristic with American reactionaries: resistance to
social and cultural change, not economic anxiety.12 Put differently, on
both sides of the Atlantic, reactionaries are concerned about perceived
threats from social and cultural “others.” Even so, the sources of perceived
threat differ. For Europeans, it’s primarily about immigrants.13 For Amer-
icans, the threat is more capacious, in that American reactionaries are leery
of racial and sexual “others” and fear that “real Americans” are losing their
country to these “outsiders” (Parker and Barreto 2013).
So it seems that the United States isn’t the only democracy afflicted
with such reactionary sentiments. Having said that, we scholars may won-
der, where do we go from here? One direction is to try to better understand
why, in spite of progressive value shifts over several decades conducive to
the spread of democracy (Inglehart and Welzel 2004), we continue to wit-

910
ness the persistence of anti-democratic beliefs in the mass public. We can
examine whether reactionary predispositions are products of political so-
cialization. Research now under way by Parker and Towler reveals that re-
actionary conservatism is passed down from one generation to the next.
Even so, as the demographic segment from which reactionary conserva-
tives are drawn—white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian, heterosexual, and native-
born—diminishes, so too should their political influence. Of course, as that
group’s influence continues to wane, the influence of marginalized groups
such as racial and sexual minorities, as well as immigrants and women,
will continue to rise. As the legendary crooner Sam Cooke said so elo-
quently: “a change is gonna come.” It’s just a matter of time.

911
NOTES

1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/klansville/
2. Data compiled by Devin Burghart, Institute for Research on Education
and Human Rights.
3. Multi-State Survey on Race and Politics (MSSRP), 2010.
4. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ourvision/.
5. “Sharron Angle TV Ad: ‘Best Friend.’ ” YouTube, posted by sharro-
nangle, September 14, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-
zZM9-vB0.
6. “Sharron Angle TV Ad: ‘At Your Expense.’ ” YouTube, posted by
sharronangle, September 23, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=uJC_RmcO7Ts.
7. Paul Harris, “JD Hayworth’s Republican Challenge to John McCain
Grows as Anti-Immigrant Anger Spills onto Arizona’s Streets,”
Guardian, July 24, 2010.
8. “Tea Party Seeks to Spotlight the ‘Horrors’ of Illegal Immigration,”
Fox News, August 3, 2010.
9. Randal C. Archibold, “Immigration Bill Reflects a Firebrand’s Im-
pact,” New York Times, April 19, 2010.
10. NBC News/Wall Street Journal monthly tracking poll, n = 1,000 each
wave; http://pollingreport.com/politics.htm.
11. The scholarship that identifies these parties as populist is too extensive
to catalogue here. In no particular order, the following have been most
helpful: Mudde 2007; Kriesi 2014. For a contrasting view on what
motivates the reactionary parties in Europe, as well as the appellation
“radical right,” see, e.g., Eger and Valdez 2014. Other work questions
the theoretical validity of populism as a means of explaining the “radi-
cal right.” For this point of view, see Aslandis 2015.
12. For the European side of the Atlantic, see Ivarsflaten 2008. On the
American side, see Parker and Barreto 2013.
13. Among others, see Rydgren 2008; Berning and Schlueter 2015; Eger
and Valdez 2015.

912
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CHAPTER 32

917
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN AUSTRALIA

ANDY FLEMING AND AURELIEN MONDON

THE history of the radical right in Australia, while different from its Euro-
pean counterparts for obvious geographical and historical reasons, pro-
vides an insightful account in the way nativist populism can be main-
streamed. While the contemporary radical right remains marginal in its
electoral form in the country despite a recent resurgence, it played a key
role in legitimizing a negative, exclusivist, and emotionally charged dis-
course on issues such as immigration, asylum seekers, and nationalism.
Despite the current lack of unity necessary to gain ground electorally, Aus-
tralia found in Pauline Hanson in the 1990s an unlikely pioneer in the de-
velopment of a prototype of modern radical right party, allying right-wing
populism and nativism to appeal to an increasingly resentful electorate.
Compared to its European counterparts, Australia was for the most part
spared the rise of powerful extreme right movements, and at times ap-
peared immune to their appeal (Mondon 2012, 356). However, rather than
immunity, the absence of extreme right politics can be explained by the
ability and willingness of mainstream politics to readily, openly, and offi-
cially absorb such values. For most of the country’s history, Australian
mainstream politicians suffocated the extreme right, not merely by borrow-
ing some key ideas of the extreme right, but by negating entirely its ability
to appear as an alternative to the power in place.
Therefore, to understand the role and place of the contemporary radical
right in Australia, it is essential to first grasp its historical development.
After understanding the exclusivist basis upon which Australian identity
was built after its independence, this chapter provides a short contextual
and historical analysis to explain why Australia was spared strong radical
right movements and parties in the postwar era, up until the 1990s. The
third part offers an account of the rise of Hansonism and its impact on
mainstream politics, particularly on the Howard government. Finally, the
last part of the chapter is dedicated to the current state of radical right poli-
tics.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: IMMUNIZATION OR

CONTAMINATION?

From its inception, the fear of its surroundings was one of the cornerstones

918
in the construction and development of the feeling of Australianness and
was crucial in binding a population that by the end of the Gold Rush had
become partly “native.” For Gwenda Tavan (2005, 30), the Australian
community was “founded upon three distinct yet interrelated components:
racial whiteness, ‘Britishness’ and ‘Australianness.’ ” As a consequence,
all positive aspects of Australian identity were derived from a fear of inva-
sion. For John Hirst (2000, 15–16), natural boundaries and social unifor-
mity were key in the portrayal of the nation in the lead-up to federation;
both elements deeply interconnected with the threat posed by immigration
and invasion. For Tavan (2005, 18), the “White Australia” policy aimed to
create unity amongst the Australian people with race as the cement, forg-
ing “a white and British-Australian as well as cohesive, conformist, lib-
eral-democratic, and egalitarian” society. Race came first; the rest would
follow.
Key to binding the Australian national identity to race and exclusion
was the White Australia policy, officially enacted after federation in 1901.
As Paul Kelly noted (1992, 2), this founding piece of legislation was a re-
sponse to Australia’s “hostility to its geographical location, exhibited in
fear of external domination and internal contamination from the people of
Asia/Pacific.” At the time, the idea of a white Australia was hegemonic
and accepted as the only way forward, even on the left (Irving 1999,
110).1 For many Australians, it became natural to believe that industrial
competition from Asian workers would be unfair to the white population
and would in turn impede the development of an “industrial democracy”
(Markey 1978; Willard 1967, 197–198). This argument closely resembles
that of the contemporary populist radical right: instead of an egalitarian
universal solution to a system engendering growing inequalities and inse-
curities, the Australian labor movement preferred an exclusivist answer,
portraying the Asian working class as its enemy.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that concern over conditions of work
were the crux of the exclusionary policies that developed in Australia. As
Gianni Zappalà and Stephen Castles (2000, 76) argued, this went beyond
hostility: Australia had from its inception in 1901 a “racist definition of be-
longing” and the “constitutional vacuum with regards to citizenship rights
was designed to legitimise racial discrimination.” Racial politics were em-
braced widely by Australian mainstream politicians (Lake and Reynolds
2008, 149), as well as the Labor movement (Curthoys and Markus 1978;
Jupp 1998, 79–81, 114–117).

919
 From a racial standpoint, the policy was very successful until the Sec-
ond World War. In 1947, the population was more homogeneous than it
had been at the beginning of the twentieth century. Anglo-Celtics repre-
sented 90 percent of the population, while another 6 percent were of
Northern European origin. Southern Europeans accounted for 2.4 percent.
Finally, the Aboriginal and Asian population represented just over 1 per-
cent (Markus 1994, 152; Tavan 2005, 26). While such figures must be
taken with caution, as the categorization is subject to debate, the feat re-
mains nonetheless impressive at a time when globalization encouraged the
mix of populations and wars led to thousands being displaced the world
over. For Raymond Evans (Evans 2004, 114), this homogenization was the
“quintessence of racism.”
Despite the mainstreaming of many issues key to fascist movements in
Europe, Australia was not entirely immune from a rise in extreme right
politics in the interwar period. This was largely due to the paranoid fear of
a communist uprising, despite the constant weakness of the movement
(Moore 1995, 18–31). Organizations such as the Australia First Movement
and its magazine The Publicist grew increasingly close to the European
fascist and Nazi movements, in their anti-Semitism in particular (Winter
2005). However, while they had a certain impact in intellectual circles,
such groups remained marginal, and “secret armies” which were the clos-
est Australia got to a proto-fascist uprising.
Contrary to the fascist movements in Europe, which attracted predomi-
nantly the lower middle class, Australian organizations derived their mem-
bership from the upper classes. According to Andrew Moore, most were
“solicitors, dentists, doctors, engineers, accountants, businessmen and gra-
ziers.” Their reach was impressive, and these groups assembled as many as
130,000 men in the early 1930s (Moore 1995, 40). Of the flourishing se-
cret paramilitary organizations present in Australia, the short-lived New
Guard can be argued to have been the closest to fascism. As they were in
Europe, the times were auspicious for Australian would-be fascists. The
election in 1930 of Jack Lang as premier of New South Wales, following
that of the Scullin federal Labor government a year before, was the spark
necessary for the creation of the New Guard and many other similar orga-
nizations. The recession, working-class unrest and a series of moderate
left-wing reforms had already installed a climate of suspicion in the ranks
of the right. In reaction, the New Guard was founded on February 18,
1931, by eight men; less than a year later, the organization comprised
87,000 members and hundreds of thousands of supporters (Amos 1976).

920
Despite Campbell’s claims that the constitution of the organization was a
model of “practical democracy,” the New Guard ran along typically fascist
lines, and recruits were divided into classes and organized in a military
style. By September 1931, the New Guard had the capacity to take over
the state and was ready to move. Yet the organization eventually fizzled
out under the increased pressure and scrutiny of the police, with its only
claim to fame being the opening of the Sydney Harbor Bridge by one of
the guardsmen disguised as a soldier (Moore 2005a). With the dismissal of
Lang and the Labor defeat in 1932, the scope for such movements to thrive
became narrower and their support dwindled as conservative forces were
back in power.
The Second World War was a turning point in the fate of White Aus-
tralia. The fear of invasion, coupled with the demands of industrialization,
provided incentives for the Chifley Labor government to loosen its immi-
gration policy. From the 1950s onward, conditions of entry were relaxed
for “Europeanised minorities and the highly qualified,” and the infamous
dictation test was removed in 1958. For Ien Ang (Ang 2003, 61; see also
Ang 1999), however, this change in policy was not a positive step toward a
more inclusive society and future; instead “post-war immigration was pri-
marily negatively motivated, inspired by fear and an urgent sense of neces-
sity.”
With racial theories being discredited after the end of the Second World
War, it became ever more difficult for any country to openly base its poli-
cies along such lines. Australia had little choice but to slowly liberalize the
White Australia policy so as not to suffer the brunt of international
reprisal. Therefore, to appease the international community, gradual
changes were made throughout the 1960s (Brawley 1995). Economic ties
with Asia had become increasingly central to Australia’s future prosperity;
at the end of 1970, Japan was the country’s largest trading partner. This
growing economic involvement with Asia made the stakes too high for
Australia to pursue its discriminatory policies. Tolerance was further en-
couraged by the combination of postwar economic prosperity, full employ-
ment, and industrialization, which allowed large intakes of immigrants to
be seen neither as competition nor as threatening, but rather as a necessity
for Australia’s continuing prosperity (Lopez 2000).
It is in this context that the League of Rights, the longest-lasting ex-
treme right organization in Australia, was born under the leadership of Eric
D. Butler. A report on racist violence in Australia declared that the League
was “undoubtedly the most influential and effective, as well as the best or-

921
ganised and most substantially financed, racist organisation in Australia”
(Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1991). During the
1960s, the League opposed communism, supported the Vietnam War, was
loyal to the monarchy and empire, and opposed “liberalism” and moral
permissiveness. It mainly targeted rural areas, since they were the most
touched by economic problems (Campbell 1978). Even though its website
is still live and updated (alor.org), the League of Rights has only had mini-
mal impact on the country’s policy and politics, finding no original space
to occupy in the postwar context.

PAULINE HANSON’S ONE NATION: RADICAL RIGHT

EXPERIMENTATION DOWN UNDER

In 1972, Australia became multicultural when Gough Whitlam officially

abolished the White Australia policy and a consensus was created between
the mainstream left and right to abandon the “race card” on both sides. Just
as the consensus over race had played a major part in stifling the extreme
right in the first part of the century, the bipartisanship around multicultur-
alism created a gap for the radical right to fill. It only took a decade for the
first cracks to appear. While the early attempts to bring ethno-exclusivist
politics back to the fore were uncoordinated, isolated, and seemingly un-
successful (Mondon 2013, 92–98), they paved the way for the return of ex-
clusionary policies to the center stage of Australian political life. In 1985,
John Howard, in his first stint in the Liberal leadership, was vilified, even
within the ranks of his own party, for uttering what was considered neo-
racist comments about Asian immigration (Markus 2001, 89–90). By
1996, on his return to the leadership, he was merely speaking “common
sense.” In the meantime, “a fish and chip shop lady” claimed to have given
their voice back to downtrodden white Australians in a right-wing populist
manner that would become commonplace across the Western world.
It is no surprise that the rise of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation
Party took place in Queensland. The state had already proven to be fertile
soil for right-wing populist politics during the reign of “hillbilly dictator”
Johannes Bjelke-Peterson from 1968 to 1987 (Whitton and Australian
Broadcasting 1989; Wells 1979; Moore 1995, 89–94), who became infa-
mous for his curtailing of civil liberties to allow the Springboks, the South
African national rugby team, to tour the state amidst anti-apartheid demon-
strations in 1971. Between 1996 and 2001, Hanson and her party became
major actors in Australian politics. One Nation’s rise to popularity and

922
prominence was as brisk as its downfall, and within five years, the party
went from being potentially decisive in the country’s fate to complete
oblivion. While One Nation never approached the strength of prominent
European radical right parties in terms of organization, support, or
longevity, its role in shaping contemporary Australian politics cannot be
ignored. Hanson became the unlikely “hero” of the 1996 federal election
when she was elected in the then safe Labor seat of Oxley with 48.61 per-
cent of the first preference vote and 54.66 percent after the full distribution
of preferences. Her campaign had been marked by the publication of an in-
flammatory letter in the Queensland Times (Hanson 1996a) and her late
and clumsy disendorsement from the Liberal Party. The letter contained all
the elements usually found in radical right propaganda, the most obvious
being the stigmatization of an already stigmatized minority (indigenous
people in this case) and the supposed victimization of the well-off majority
(white Anglo-Saxon Australians). Hanson believed that the targeted mi-
nority was not alone in its dark deeds. It was with the help of politicians
and the elite—the loathed intelligentsia—that indigenous people were con-
spiring against hardworking Australians. Hanson’s rhetoric was based on
typically neo-racist assumptions (Balibar 1997; Barker 1982): to deflect
accusations of crude racism, she first admitted that minorities might have
suffered in the past, but then she swiftly demonized the minority into a
possibly unwilling enemy of her “people” manipulated by the multicultur-
alist elite. Her claims were supported by “common sense,” and all she
asked for was equal treatment for everyone. Hanson operated a reversal of
the situation whereby those discriminated against and asking—often un-
successfully—for recognition and reparation were deemed to be privileged
and demanding of discriminatory actions for their own benefit. Conve-
niently ignoring systemic discrimination and the historical legacy of ex-
ploitation, segregation, and vilification, Hanson asked for nothing more
than “equality”:
The indigenous people of this country are as much responsible for
their actions as any other colour or race in this country. . . . I would
be the first to admit that, not many years ago, the Aborigines were
treated wrongly, but in trying to correct this they have gone too far.
. . . Until the governments wake up to themselves and start looking
at equality not colour then we might start to work together as one.
(Hanson 1996a)
On September 10, 1996, Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech in Parliament
was for Andrew Markus (Markus 2001, 155) “one of the most memorable

923
of [Australia’s] parliamentary speeches, its opening words almost immedi-
ately elevated to legendary status.” It was also a masterpiece of right-wing
populism. The speech was written by Hanson’s advisor John Pasquarelli,
who later admitted to being one of her so-called “sinister puppeteer[s]”
(Pasquarelli 1998, 228). For Markus (2001, 154), the advisor was key in
transforming the Oxley event into a more durable political adventure, as he
“maximised Hanson’s appeal as anti-politician and was able to broaden her
concerns while keeping her firmly within the New Right’s form of racial
nationalism.” Reminiscent of the contemporary radical right, parts of the
speech were dedicated to simplistic and imprecise economic propositions,
while the bulk targeted minorities such as indigenous people and Asian
migrants. However, it is the elite who occupied a central position in the
conspiracy against the Australian people and their dream for a just and
equal society.
Hanson’s speech was strikingly similar to that of other contemporary
radical right populists. She stood in opposition to the political class born
and bred to lead, and she came to Parliament not as “a polished politician
but as a woman who has had her fair share of life’s knocks.” In the post-
democratic context, Hanson portrayed her election as a break from the
technocratic leadership of both major parties and claimed to represent the
voice of the people: she was the ultra-democratic champion (Hanson
1996b). Common sense was central to her rhetoric—her program was
drawn from what “we” all knew deep down was the right thing. In a neo-
racist manner, Hanson constantly affirmed she was not racist. She did “not
consider those people from ethnic backgrounds currently living in Aus-
tralia anything but first-class citizens, provided of course that they give
this country their full, undivided loyalty.” What she demanded from immi-
grants and minorities was undefined, and yet it was assumed that these mi-
norities would not be able to achieve these goals unless they became “us.”
Yet this apparently reassuring and inclusive narrative implies that the
“other” is ultimately one and different, and that this original difference will
be held against them no matter what. Their potential attempts at becoming
“us” would be doomed to fail, as our “us,” our “imagined community,” is
constructed in opposition to them, and they are therefore necessary for
“our” existence.
With this speech, Hanson became one of the five most cited personali-
ties in the Australian media in 1996.2 In line with the media’s reaction to
the early rise of the radical right in Europe, most articles that referred to
Hanson were critical and yet offered her the coverage and hype necessary

924
to grow. While her election might have been a short hostile reaction to the
establishment, constant and disproportionate coverage allowed her to reach
an audience far beyond her practical power in the Parliament. Therefore,
the media played a crucial role in the subsequent rise of One Nation, as
they provided not only free advertising for Hanson’s ideas but also, and
more important, a form of legitimacy in confirming her solitary battle
against the elite. By being derided and ridiculed by the loathed “political
class,” Hanson was made part of “the people.” She was the defender of
“ordinary Australians [who] were kept out of the debate on so-called sensi-
tive issues like immigration and multiculturalism.” She would be the
slayer of the “political correctness” monster and “its ugly head” (speech
quoted in Pasquarelli 1998, 170).
In December 1996, David Oldfield, former advisor to Tony Abbott, re-
placed Pasquarelli. This shift was crucial in the creation of One Nation in
April 1997 and possibly hastened its demise. For Markus (2001, 162–163),
Oldfield’s influence created a “narrowly focused, . . . more abrasive” form
of politics and led Hanson to “openly embrace the politics of paranoia.”
Hanson, Oldfield, and David Ettridge formed a troika that made every de-
cision. The power was placed in the hands of the “two Davids”; Hanson’s
role became limited to her appeal as a leader. On the back of the party’s
launch came the publication of Pauline Hanson: The Truth (Hanson and
Merritt 1997). The conspiratorial tone of the book often bordered on the
ridiculous in its extremist claims, and Hanson admitted later that the book,
which she herself launched and copyrighted, was “written by some other
people who actually put [her] name to it,” highlighting further the ama-
teurism of the party (Hanson 2004). Despite displaying disturbing behav-
ior, One Nation continued to receive a semblance of support from the Lib-
eral and National Parties for the 1998 Queensland state election. Contrary
to the strategy put in place in some European countries, there was no cor-
don sanitaire placed around One Nation. Instead, the coalition reinforced
the party’s legitimacy by positioning it higher than the Australian Labor
Party (ALP) on its preference list in every seat but one.
As a result, in June 1998, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party received
22.7 percent of the first preference vote and sent eleven candidates to the
state parliament, becoming the second-largest party in Queensland, behind
the Australian Labor Party. While only one of its candidates was elected in
the federal election of October 1998, the party managed a substantial na-
tional average of 8.43 percent of the first preference vote for the House of
Representatives and 8.99 percent in the Senate. Yet the amateurism of the

925
party was already proving insurmountable and made it impossible for Han-
son to sustain increased scrutiny. By December 1999, the party had lost all
its representatives in the Queensland Parliament, many over disagreements
on how the party was run or after demanding the party’s democratization
(Markus 2001, 184). In 2000, Ettridge resigned and Oldfield was sacked
for attempting a leadership takeover, leaving of the three leaders only Han-
son. By the 2001 Queensland state election, One Nation had lost its mo-
mentum and received “only” 8.7 percent of the vote, losing eight of its
eleven seats. That same year, the federal election confirmed the trend
when the party received 4.3 percent in the House of Representatives and
5.5 percent in the Senate, losing its sole senator in the process. Three years
later, the party barely managed to remain above the 1 percent mark in the
federal election, failing to reach any meaningful result ever since despite
changes of leadership.
From early on, it was clear that One Nation and the Hanson phenome-
non would not last. However, just as its brisk fall could be predicted, the
rise of such a movement also appeared inevitable in the Australian context
in the 1990s, a time that Kelly termed “the end of certainties” (Kelly
1992). It is no coincidence that One Nation’s breakthrough took place once
it had become clear that neoliberalism was consensual in both government
and opposition, and with Labor responsible for implementing most of the
deregulatory reforms during its thirteen years in power. Hanson’s pop-
ulism directly touched those within the electorate who had once been priv-
ileged and were now increasingly resentful of their abandonment by politi-
cians, having witnessed a growing gap between their own day-to-day pri-
orities and the elite’s central concern with the supranational. This was ac-
centuated by the ALP’s change of priorities and its new focus on the mid-
dle class and what soon came to known as “special interests.” This shift in
priorities translated into the perception of the governing elite no longer
representing the people, and ultimately no longer caring. By speaking the
way she did, Hanson provided the illusion of bridging the gap between
politics and a particular section of the people. In Margaret Canovan’s
words (1999), it was the redemptive side of democracy resurfacing.
While Hanson’s political project and offer were superficial and often
impracticable, they proved enough to reach part of those who felt excluded
and give them a semblance of representation. This revolt against the in-
creasingly technocratic running of liberal democracy was exemplified in
the choice of candidates who ran for the party. As Judith Brett noted
(1998, 30), all but two of the One Nation candidates in the 1998 Queens-

926
land election were from the lower classes of society; the other two were
veterinarians, in constant contact with farmers. Hanson was the antithesis
of the political class and of “the cosmopolitan elites symbolised most
clearly by Keating and who stood to gain most from Australia’s new inter-
nationalised economy” (Brett 1997, 17). The fantasized vision promoted
by One Nation was a return to better days, a nostalgia for simpler and
fairer times when every “bloke” could have “a fair go”—something that
John Howard was quick to capitalize upon.
While the popularity of One Nation was short-lived, the impact of the
return of ethno-exclusivist politics in the 1990s continues to be felt today
in Australian politics. Yet more than Hanson, it was John Howard’s long
leadership that played a key part in normalizing and entrenching a type of
discourse based on right-wing populism and nativism.

JOHN HOWARD AND THE MAINSTREAMING OF RIGHT-

WING POPULIST POLITICS

Adding to the neoliberal economic “revolution” of the 1980s was a cul-

tural one: change was dramatically accelerated under the Keating govern-
ment and the “big picture” vision he had for Australia. Paul Keating’s rela-
tive progressivism on cultural matters provided the right with the perfect
scapegoat to divert the attention of the discontented away from economics,
and allowed them to appeal to all those who considered themselves worse
off by the mid-1990s. In the face of an increasingly elitist Labor govern-
ment, Howard appeared as the man of the people. He was able to manipu-
late Keating’s “big picture” and portray it in opposition to the well-being
of the silent majority, who felt “utterly powerless” to compete with “the
noisy, self-interested clamour of powerful vested interests with scant re-
gard for the national interest” (Howard 1995).
Borrowing from the radical right, Howard’s attacks were concentrated
against the elite and the “progressives.” In opposition to them, Howard
portrayed himself as the “common bloke,” the politician in touch with his
mainstream. This stand was crucial in providing his radical economic poli-
cies with a veneer of social conservatism. As Paul Kelly (2009, 331) ar-
gued, Howard “defined what he was against rather than what he was for—
against the Aboriginal apology, the republic, gay marriage, Kyoto, boat ar-
rivals, multiculturalism.” However, while Kelly saw this as “one of
Howard’s blunders,” it allowed Howard to fill a void created by the aban-
donment of ideological battles and the so-called end of history. Instead of

927
class struggle as a response to the economic situation, the right-wing pop-
ulist channeled attention into resentment and exclusion, into what became
more akin to a race struggle.
In his cultural struggle, Howard was assisted by the rise of radical right
politics in Australia. It was not until Hanson had made her breakthrough in
the 1996 federal election that Howard was able to benefit fully from a
right-wing populist agenda. The swings in favor of such divisive personali-
ties were for Howard a sign that Australia was ready for a more radical
style of politics. Hanson’s political adventure, while certain not to last, al-
lowed Howard to make important headway in his cultural “counterrevolu-
tion.” After One Nation’s rise, not only was it harder for Howard to be
portrayed in a radical manner, as he appeared far less extreme than Han-
son, but it was also far more difficult to deny the potency of ethno-exclu-
sivism or to stereotypically restrict such ideas to marginal groups. In a
strategic move, instead of denouncing the elected member from Oxley, the
new prime minister showed his satisfaction that the “pall of censorship” of
the Keating years was finally being lifted (Howard 1996). He “welcome[d]
the fact that people can now talk about certain things without living in fear
of being branded as a bigot or a racist.” This strategy was highly effective,
as it portrayed Howard as the defender of the “silent majority” whose
voice had been stifled by years of a “political correctness” dictatorship. In-
deed, Howard’s own voice would no longer be censored by the “politically
correct” elite.3
By 2001 Howard had succeeded in shifting the political sphere right-
ward. As his vision gained incredible “popularity” and quasi hegemony,
the Labor Party increasingly toed the line. As One Nation quickly disap-
peared from the political radar and the radical right collapsed in Australia,
Howard continued to reshape Australian politics along right-wing populist
and ethno-exclusivist lines, as exemplified by the heated and often racial-
ized debate about refugees and asylum seekers that began in 2001 (Bren-
nan 2003; Clyne 2005; Manne and Corlett 2004; Marr and Wilkinson
2004). Fifteen years later, the extremely harsh treatment of asylum seekers
and their indefinite detention has become normalized in Australian poli-
tics, where the Labor Party has long stopped opposing Howard’s vision of
fortress Australia (Mondon 2013).

THE RADICAL RIGHT, THE FAR RIGHT, AND THE GHOST OF

HANSONISM

928
In this context, the contemporary Australian far right was shaped until the
2016 elections by three significant domestic political factors: the effective
collapse of the One Nation Party as an electoral alternative, bipartisan po-
litical and widespread popular support for an increasingly punitive system
of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and the emergence of Islamo-
phobia as a framework for the articulation of xenophobic sentiment.
The collapse of One Nation in the early 2000s left the radical right with
few electoral alternatives. One important, albeit minor, exception is the
Australia First Party (AFP). Founded in 1996 by Labor MP for Kalgoorlie
Graeme Campbell, following his expulsion from the party “for persistent
attacks upon Labor policy,” Campbell was elected in 1996 as an indepen-
dent but lost office when standing under the AFP banner in 1998 (Jupp
2002, 136–137). He later blamed his loss on One Nation splitting the vote.
Campbell left AFP in 2001 and ran, unsuccessfully, as a One Nation candi-
date for the Senate in the same year (Weber 2001). Of Hanson herself,
Campbell has stated: “Pauline Hanson’s speech made her. But in fact that
speech came from my office, it was written by John Pasquarelli of my staff
—I lent him to Pauline Hanson, then she took him full-time” (Destiny
2009).
Campbell and Pasquarelli were two especially prominent figures among
the many hundreds of right-wing activists to be attracted to One Nation.
As Danny Ben-Moshe (2001, 24) noted, “Almost every racist group en-
dorsed One Nation and their members joined the party and sought to exert
influence over it, both at a leadership and grassroots level,” although these
ties were largely informal. After Campbell’s departure, effective leader-
ship of AFP was and continues to be assumed by Dr. Jim Saleam, a vet-
eran far right activist. Formerly associated with the group National Action
(NA)—which was, along with Jack van Tongeren’s Australian Nationalists
Movement (ANM), one of the two principal far right groupings of the
1980s and early 1990s—Saleam is one of very few intellectuals that the
movement has produced, having completed a doctorate on the far right in
Australia and produced many writings for the party on Australian national-
ism (Moore 2005b). Like contemporary neo-Nazi and fascist groupuscules,
the membership of both NA and the ANM was tiny, but “the propensity of
the various groups to engage in violent crime has given them a prominence
beyond their mere numbers” (James 2005m 105). A white supremacist or-
ganization, the AFP’s “major platform is that white Australian ‘heritage,
identity, independence, and freedom’ are under attack and must be pre-
served, protected and defended” (Mason 2007, 49). So far, the AFP has

929
achieved desultory results in federal and state elections and marginal suc-
cess in local council elections. Saleam’s own trajectory, which has in-
cluded imprisonment for organizing a shotgun assault in 1989 upon the
home of an African National Congress representative, reflects the precari-
ous position of far right activists in Australia (cf. Greason 1994; Bradbury
1993; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1991).
One key moment in the development of the post-Hanson far right was
the “Cronulla riots” of December 2005. On December 11, an estimated
crowd of five thousand people gathered at North Cronulla beach in order
to “Take Our Beaches Back.” Men of “Middle Eastern appearance” were
assaulted amid clashes with police, reprisal attacks were undertaken by
youth from southwest Sydney over the ensuing days, and eventually more
than a hundred people were charged with offenses. The “riots” were trig-
gered by an altercation several days before December 11 between local
lifeguards and a group of Middle Eastern men. Following the incident, a
text message was widely circulated, appealing for others to attend in order
to participate in a “Leb and wog bashing day,” something fueled further by
Alan Jones, a popular local radio host (Daley 2013). While hardly uniform
nor long-lasting in its effects, for some on the right the riots were a catalyst
for a racial reawakening, a “white civil uprising”—with many historical
precedents. For Angela Mitropoulous (2006), the riots should be linked to
the political climate created in the 1990s:
The vulgar calls to reclaim ownership were merely the coarse, vol-
unteerist expression of, most notably, [John Howard’s] civic decla-
rations of sovereignty (“We will decide who comes here and the
circumstances under which they come”), the more than decade-
long policy of the internment of undocumented migrants by succes-
sive governments and, more recently, a war that is legitimated on
racist grounds.
While not uncommon, violent incidents associated with the far right have
been sporadic and rarely assumed a mass form, though elements did partic-
ipate in the Cronulla riots of December 2005 (Ben-Moshe 2006). Some re-
portage has also documented the participation of Australian Defence
League (ADL) members and supporters as guards in migration detention
centers and in the military (cf. Stewart 2000; Hannan and Baker 2005;
Anon. 2011; Hall 2014; Robertson 2015). In the 2010s, far right move-
ments have also been responsible for a series of violent racially motivated
attacks: in 2010, members of the neo-Nazi organization Combat 18 shot at
a mosque in Perth; in 2012, a Vietnamese student in Melbourne was se-

930
verely beaten by a gang of neo-Nazis calling themselves the Crazy White
Boys; in 2014, members of the ADL were involved in a brawl with Mus-
lims in Lakemba (ABC 2010; Petrie 2012; Levy 2014). However, most
such incidents have been confined to lesser crimes, and typically racial vi-
olence is performed by non-aligned individuals. Nonetheless, the Aus-
tralian Security Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO) Annual Reports for
2010–2011 and 2011–2012 took note of the possibility of more serious and
extensive violence on the far right, as well as the possibility of Islamopho-
bic networks giving rise to lone wolf terrorists (ASIO 2011, 7; ASIO 2012,
4; Zammit 2012).
A proliferation of micro-parties joined the AFP in the 2000s, including
the Australian Protectionist Party (APP, a split from the AFP), the Party
for Freedom (a split from the APP), and most recently the Australian Lib-
erty Alliance (ALA), which has won the endorsement of and was officially
launched by Dutch MP Geert Wilders in Perth in October 2015 (McLean
2012). The ALA evolved from the Q Society, which describes itself as
“Australia’s leading Islam-critical movement” and understands Islam as a
totalitarian ideology that aims at the “Islamification” of Australian society
(Q Society 2011). The Q Society, formed in Melbourne in 2010, is closely
linked to local conservative organizations and has strong links to similar
bodies overseas (Byrne 2015). As well as producing propaganda and pro-
viding support and advice to the numerous community campaigns in oppo-
sition to the construction of mosques, the Q Society organized a confer-
ence in 2014 under the banner “Stop Islamisation of Our Nations” (SION).
Speakers included both locals and prominent US activists Pamela Gellar
and Robert Spencer (Fleming 2014a). The Q Society is averse to public
demonstrations and much of its activity is Internet-based, forming part of a
much wider network of online activists on the rise across the Western
world. As Mattias Ekman (2015, 1986–1987) points out:
The idea that the Western world is “under attack,” “silently occu-
pied” by, or even at “civil war” with Islam, is widespread among
actors in the populist far right. The suggestion that an ongoing
“jihad” is being fought at the heart of “European civilization” prob-
ably sounds like an implausible conspiracy to most people. How-
ever, the concept is just a click away as it has permeated into public
discourse . . . the Internet has facilitated a space where xenophobic
viewpoints and racist attitudes towards Muslims are easily dissemi-
nated into the public debate.
The social networks that have been created through the activities of the Q

931
Society and related groups have until recently failed to find expression at
the ballot box or on the streets. Formed within a year of its English coun-
terpart, the Australian Defence League (Fleming 2014b) struggled to at-
tract support, but it was quickly joined by a proliferation of other anti-
Muslim, anti-immigrant and especially anti-refugee projects. The first real
fruits of this online activity appeared in early 2015 with the emergence of
a movement calling itself Reclaim Australia.
On April 4, 2015, more than a dozen rallies were held in capital cities
and country towns under the Reclaim Australia banner. They attracted the
participation of several thousand people; the most significant mobilization
of the far right since the Hanson years. As it had been with Hanson’s rise,
the attitude of the Australian government was equivocal, with one Queens-
land MP, George Christensen, addressing the rally in Mackay, stating: “I
want to support people who seek to defend our Australian way of life, our
culture and our freedoms from the threat of radical Islam” (Hunter 2015).
Further rallies were held on July 18/19 and November 22, 2015. Writing
about the November 22 rally in the Melbourne suburb of Melton (the site
of a proposed Islamic school), Shakira Hussein notes: “It’s a measure of
how deeply anti-Muslim hate speech has saturated Australian public dis-
course that the foaming-at-the-mouth rants of the Reclaim Australia rally
did not sound particularly out of the ordinary” (Hussein 2015). This was
confirmed by the 2014 Scanlon Foundation Report on social cohesion,
which demonstrated that around one-quarter of Australians surveyed held
“somewhat” or “very” negative attitudes toward Muslims, almost five
times higher than negative attitudes toward Buddhists or Christians
(Markus 2014, 4). Reclaim Australia was soon given a more straightfor-
wardly radical, right-wing edge by the formation of the United Patriots
Front, a coalition of neo-Nazis and Christian fundamentalists that under-
took as its mission combating the spread of Islam and stopping the subver-
sive effects of “cultural Marxism” on Australian society, of which “multi-
culturalism” is understood as being one symptom (Bachelard and McMa-
hon 2015; McMahon 2015).
Confined to the fringes of popular debates and only occasionally enter-
ing popular consciousness at times of crisis, in the post-Hanson era, the
radical right has continued to struggle to occupy a place in Australian poli-
tics. Subject to continual organizational and political fracturing, capable of
mounting only sporadic, semi-popular mobilizations, its chief domain is
now the Internet, with social media having almost completely eclipsed the
role of the radical, and principally rural, right-wing press. The anti-Semi-

932
tism that formed the ideological ballast of previous articulations of radical
right-wing dissent has been largely replaced by anti-refugee and anti-im-
migrant rhetoric, coupled with an especially virulent anti-Muslim senti-
ment. Expressions of white nationalism almost invariably assume cultural-
ist rather than racial forms, while multiculturalism continues to function as
a political bête noire. For the most part, the partisans of radical right-wing
politics in Australia occupy the role of enthusiastic but redundant forces
defending fortress Australia.

HANSON’S RETURN AND THE FUTURE OF THE AUSTRALIAN

RADICAL RIGHT

In May 2016, Pauline Hanson declared she would run in the upcoming
election “because our voting system is corrupt and I have been cheated”
(McKenzie-Murray 2016). Taking an anti-establishment approach not un-
like that of their European counterparts and shifting its attacks toward the
fear of Islam, One Nation received 4.3 percent of the vote in the Senate
election (a 3.8 percent swing), which, while significant, remained much
lower than most radical right parties in Europe. The election of four One
Nation senators has since created some unease in the Australian media and
on the political landscape, and allowed the party to gain disproportionate
coverage through its inflammatory statements. Compared to the unani-
mous condemnation of Hanson’s first foray in politics two decades ago,
the response has been mixed, and some have argued that rather than out-
right rejection of One Nation’s politics, a more conciliatory approach is re-
quired. Prominent commentators such as Margo Kingston, a staunch One
Nation opponent in the 1990s, have declared that “this time we should lis-
ten not lampoon” (Kingston 2016). This line is strikingly similar to
Howard’s in 1996 and demonstrates further his success in imposing his vi-
sion on those who once opposed him virulently. While it is unclear what
the impact of the “new” version of One Nation will be on Australian poli-
tics, the reaction to Hanson’s return already demonstrates that outright de-
nunciation of her politics is no longer the mainstream position.

933
NOTES

1. Only two members of Parliament spoke out against the policy (Lake
and Reynolds 2008).
2. Along with prime minister John Howard, U.S. president Bill Clinton,
New South Wales premier Bob Carr, and former prime minister Paul
Keating.
3. In reality, in a country where the media is owned predominantly by
Rupert Murdoch (Knight 2007), Howard’s voice had not been stifled,
nor had the New Right been prevented from spreading its ideas. Only
the racist bias, which had been prevalent under White Australia and
abandoned in a bipartisan effort at the end of the 1960s, had been
dropped. As Markus (1997) highlighted, Howard willingly confused
“censorship” with the “lack of respect accorded to certain ideas.”
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CHAPTER 33

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 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN ISRAEL

ARIE PERLIGER AND AMI PEDAHZUR

ON March 17, 2015, at 10:00 p.m., the ballot boxes of the elections to the
twentieth Knesset were sealed. A few minutes later, Binyamin Netanyahu
addressed his supporters. The sixty-five-year-old leader of the Likud, who
secured his third consecutive term as Israel’s prime minister, seemed ex-
cited. “Against all odds we secured a victory to the national camp under
the leadership of the Likud,” he said to the enthusiastic crowd. He contin-
ued by expressing his commitment to the citizens of Israel, both Jews and
non-Jews. “You are all important, and you are all important to me.”1
Less than ten hours earlier, Netanyahu had released a twenty-seven-sec-
ond video clip. The short footage seemed to have been filmed haphazardly
by an amateur camera crew. The lighting was poor and the editing was
sketchy. Netanyahu seemed like an insurgent candidate rather than the in-
cumbent prime minister. With a military-made map of the Middle East and
the flag of Israel in the background, he reported that his right-wing camp
was coming under attack and that a coalition of foreign and domestic
forces was about to win the elections. According to Netanyahu, a group
known as Victory 2015, or V15, was transporting thousands of Arab voters
to the polls with a single goal in mind: to remove him from power. Ne-
tanyahu pleaded with his supporters to mobilize and vote for his party, the
Likud. This, according to him, was the only way to mitigate the anti-Zion-
ist onslaught.2
When the central elections committee released the official results and
unveiled the magnitude of the Likud’s victory, journalists in Israel and
abroad attacked Netanyahu’s call for mobilization. Some indicated that he
had broken Israeli election law by campaigning on election day. Others
highlighted his ethnocentric and populist message and emphasized the se-
riousness of the fact that it was the leader of Israel’s main conservative
party and the incumbent prime minister who had delegitimized the Arab
citizens of Israel.
However, a close examination of the dynamics of the Israeli party sys-
tem in the last few years indicate that Netanyahu’s act was a reflection of
more systemic changes. Ideas and practices that in the past characterized
the Israeli radical right have gradually proliferated to vast areas of the Is-
raeli political landscape. Thus, Netanyahu’s plea was anything but un-

941
precedented. In the following sections, we will illustrate the evolution of
these dynamics, and underscore the causes and mechanisms that made na-
tivist, populist, and authoritarian sentiments so prevalent within the Israeli
party system. In the concluding section, we will highlight how the Israeli
radical right parties were impacted by these dynamics, and some broader
lessons that we learned from the Israeli case.
It should be noted that we decided in this chapter to focus mainly on the
parliamentary arena, while restricting the time frame of our analysis to the
last decade or so. Several considerations guided this decision. First, the Is-
raeli extra-parliamentary radical right has already been intensively covered
in previous studies. Moreover, as will be illustrated later, we believe that
the Israeli right, more than at any time in the past, has shifted its center of
activity from the streets to the halls and meeting rooms of the execu-
tive/legislative institutions. Second, focusing on the parliamentary arena
allows us to identify changes in ideological emphasis more efficiently,
without the need to resort to public polling or more elusive indications of
public opinion.

THE CHALLENGES OF STUDYING ISRAEL’S RADICAL RIGHT

Nuance and context are imperative to explaining the diffusion of the radi-
cal right in Israel. Over a decade ago, we put forward the argument that the
“Greater Israel” ideology should not serve as the sole criteria for defining
right-wing radicalism in Israel (Pedahzur and Perliger 2004). However, to
this day, journalists and scholars alike identify right-wing radicalism ex-
clusively with the settlers’ movement.
In our 2004 article “An Alternative Approach for Defining the Bound-
aries of ‘Party Families’: Examples from the Israeli Extreme Right‐Wing
Party Scene,” we used the works of European researchers who have been
following the resurgence of radical right-wing parties for close to three
decades as our stepping-stone. From the onset, these parties presented the
researchers with labeling and conceptual challenges. Early studies main-
tained that the emerging radical right was reminiscent of Europe’s fascist
past. However, most scholars found significant differences between the
fascism of the beginning of the twentieth century and the new radical right.
Therefore, they rejected labels such as “neofascism” or “neo-Nazism” and
offered alternatives that included “extreme right,” “far right,” “populist
right,” and most notably “radical right” (Betz 1994; Hainsworth 2000;
Pedahzur and Avarham 2002; Ramet 1999).

942
 Additionally, much like in Israel, pundits used the single issue of anti-
immigration positions to label the new radical right. In response, Cas
Mudde (2007) devised frameworks for delineating the ideological bound-
aries of the phenomenon. His most recent conceptualization is parsimo-
nious and consists of three elements: nativism, authoritarianism, and pop-
ulism (Table 33.1).
This typology is anchored in the context of contemporary liberal democ-
racies. In applying it to Israel we had to exercise caution. Most scholars
agree that Israel meets the procedural qualifications for a democratic
regime, yet they do not consider Israel a liberal democracy. Referring to its
self-description as a Jewish state, some scholars refer to it as an “ethnic
democracy” or an “ethnocracy” (Smooha 2002). Other scholars have em-
phasized the intertwined relations between the state and the religious es-
tablishment, which is uncommon in liberal democracies (Cohen 2001). A
third group focused on the perpetual state of conflict between Israel and
the Arab world and the subsequent centrality of the military in the public
sphere, and described the country as a “nation in arms” (Ben-Eliezer
1995).
Table 33.1 Core Elements of the Populist Radical Right
Cate-
gory Definition
Na- States should be inhabited exclusively by members of the
tivism group native to the nation. Non-native elements, individuals,
and ideas are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous
nation-state.
Au- Society must be founded on and ruled by a stringent set of laws
thori- that shape the entirety of an individual’s life.
tari-
anism
Pop- Politics should reflect the general will of the pure people.
ulism
Source: Mudde 2007
In a landmark article, Sammy Smooha (2002), a prominent scholar of
Israel’s regime, argued that as an ethnic democracy, Israel was unlikely to
witness the emergence of “European-style” radical right-wing populism.
The gist of the argument was that in ethnic democracies the state already

943
occupies the ideological spaces that radical right-wing parties fill in liberal
democracies. Thus it leaves such ideologies with no room to evolve. In
contrast to Smooha, we consider ethnic democracies as fertile ground for
the growth of radical right politics. We maintain that such regimes facili-
tate the entrenchment of radical right sentiments within significant parts of
the population and political system, and consequently further facilitate the
radicalization of radical right parties that seek to distinguish themselves
from other political actors.
In the following sections we will illustrate our argument through the
three ideological pillars of the radical right (presented in Table 33.1).
However, before that, we would like to provide a brief historical overview
of the evolution of the Israeli radical right.

SHORT HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL RADICAL RIGHT

The Israeli radical right in its modern form emerged following the 1967
war, as the Israeli political system and society grappled with different ap-
proaches regarding the newly occupied territories. While the center-left
parties saw these territories mainly as temporary assets that eventually will
be used to promote some resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the
Israeli right pushed to ensure permanent Israeli control over the territories.
The multiple parties and social movements that emerged on the margins of
the Israeli right in order to realize this goal emphasized different reason-
ing. Some of them focused on security considerations and argued that the
territories provide necessary strategic depth to the vulnerable Israeli state.
Other parties and movements emphasized the historical connection of the
Jewish people to various historical and religious sites in the territories.
Some Religious Zionist3 movements, especially Gush Emunim (Bloc of
the Faithful), further developed a theological doctrine arguing that the Is-
raeli victory in the 1948 and 1967 wars and the return of the Jews to their
historical homeland are part of a holy redemption process that will end
with the coming of the Messiah and the creation of a Jewish kingdom that
will be run in accordance with Jewish religious law (halakha). They be-
lieve that this redemption process can be expedited via the settling of Jews
in the West Bank (and, according to some, also via the rebuilding of the
Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). Gush Emunim was one
of the most successful social movements that operated in the Israeli arena.
During the 1970s and 1980s, it was able to mobilize most of the Religious
Zionist sector (around 10 percent of Israeli society), as well as smaller

944
parts of the secular sector, to support the settlements project in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip.
In the political arena, Gush Emunim and its ideology were represented
by several parties that focused specifically on ensuring Israel’s control
over the territories. And while these parties never were able to gain more
than 5 to 10 percent of the votes of the Israeli electorate, they were able to
further legitimize the idea that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should be
perceived as part of the future Israeli state. The emergence of these radical
right parties also provided an important entry point into formal politics for
many of the leaders of the extra-parliamentary radical right. Eventually
most of the leaders of Gush Emunim became members of the Israeli parlia-
ment. This in turn led to the growing influence of the settlers and their ide-
ology within the public administration and policy realms. Thus, eventually
the extra-parliamentary radical right declined in favor of formal political
activity.
Since the 1980s it has also been possible to identify a gradual ideologi-
cal expansion of the Israeli radical right and the embrace by more-main-
stream political parties of some traditional radical right ideological senti-
ments. In 1984 the Kach Party gained representation in the Israeli parlia-
ment and promoted extreme nativist and xenophobic legislation. Parties
such as Shas further pushed to undermine the liberal foundation of the Is-
raeli state by promoting a rhetoric that delegitimized values and practices
that contradicted Jewish Orthodox principles, or in the views of its mem-
bers the Jewishness of Israel.
In the following sections, as we mentioned above, we will analyze how
these sentiments eventually proliferated to the mainstream of the Israeli
political system.

NATIVISM

On May 23, 2012, several members of the Israeli Knesset (MKs) attended
a demonstration/rally in southern Tel Aviv. The protesters, mostly local
residents, expressed their anger at the influx of African illegal workers to
their neighborhoods, which in their view had a severe impact on quality of
life, safety, and real estate values. The most memorable moment of the
event was when Knesset member Miri Regev described the illegal workers
as a “cancer in our body” and added, “We will do everything to return
them to where they came from, we will not allow people to seek work in

945
Israel.” She also blamed left-wing politicians and groups for the situation,
arguing that “with all due respect to the left and ‘Peace Now,’ they are the
reason that our country is in its current condition.” Not surprisingly, the
demonstration eventually led to several violent attacks against foreign
workers who stumbled into the area (Berner and Filer 2012).
Miri Regev, at that time, was not considered a radical politician. Noth-
ing in her past hinted that she might engage in such rhetoric. As a former
spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a member of the
center-right Likud Party, she tended to avoid the use of toxic and blunt na-
tivist oratory. However, following the demonstration, while left-wing
politicians criticized the language she used, within large segments of the
Israeli electorate she became a folk hero, enjoying vocal support and soar-
ing popularity. Regev learned a valuable lesson and continued to express
similar nativist sentiments in later opportunities, lifting her public visibility
and continuing to garner support from Likud’s electorate. The result of her
new branding was evident when she astonished most experts by coming in
fifth in Likud’s primaries in 2015 (Azulay 2015). This level of support left
Netanyahu no choice but to appoint her as minister for cultural affairs in
his new cabinet.
The case of Miri Regev is just one example of the spread of nativist sen-
timents within mainstream political parties in Israel. But before delving
into this process further, we would like first to provide a brief conceptual-
ization of nativism in the Israeli context.
In general, nativist ideas are reflected in two major ways in the Israeli
political discourse. The first is via territorial nativism, the origins of which
can be traced back to the early days of the Zionist movement, when some
of the movement’s segments provided historical, theological, and security
justifications for the absolute and exclusive right of the Jewish people over
Greater Israel (Naor 2001; Shelef 2010). The contemporary version of ter-
ritorial nativism promotes Israeli control of the sovereign State of Israel as
well as the territories that were occupied in 1967: the West Bank, the
Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and the jewel in the
crown, East Jerusalem. While in the early days of Zionism socialist and
nationalistic groups were the main promoters of territorial nativism, today
its most devoted supporters are the settlers’ movement and more generally
the Religious Zionist sector.
The second major way in which nativist ideas are manifested in Israel is
via the aspiration for ethnic/religious homogeneity. This ethnic nativism is

946
closer to the European version and has as an aspiration that all individuals
living within the borders of the State of Israel would be Jewish, at least in
the cultural/national sense if not in the religious one. This kind of nativism
was first introduced by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who asserted that native
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, refugees, foreign workers, and other
individuals who do not belong to the Jewish collective should not be enti-
tled to full citizenship rights (L. Kahane 2008; M. Kahane 2012). Some
extreme versions of Israeli nativism even challenge the idea that non-Jew-
ish individuals should be allowed to live in the State of Israel.
Both types of nativism, which initially were restricted to particular radi-
cal right parties and movements, eventually spread into larger segments of
the Israeli party system. This is reflected both in the actual practices pro-
moted by parties via their policy initiatives and legislative efforts and in
their public rhetoric.
Despite the fact that the governing coalitions in Israel in the last decade
were dominated by (new) centrist parties that aspired to provide more
pragmatic and moderate solutions to Israel’s security challenges, and that
radical right parties were a minority within these coalitions, sentiments of
territorial nativism were virtually consensual and never actually tested.
As can be seen in Figure 33.1, the number of settlers residing in the
West Bank continued to increase regardless of the actual composition of
the governing coalition. Despite the fact that between 1996 and 1999 a
center-left government was in power, and that between the years 2009 and
2015 the governing coalitions included various center and center-left par-
ties such as Hatnua, Yesh Atid, and the Labor Party, their commitment and
willingness to maintain the continued expansion of the settlements never
wavered.
Moreover, in the last few years, Israeli center-left parties made a signifi-
cant effort to emphasize that territorial concession is not a practical policy
that they are interested in supporting. For example, in an interview with
the New York Times, the leader of Yesh Atid, Yair Lapid, asserted that
East Jerusalem must stay under Israel’s control and that he opposed any re-
strictions on the continued natural expansion of Jewish settlements in the
West Bank (Rudoren 2013). Shelley Yehimovitz, who led the Labor Party
during the 2013 elections, emphasized Labor’s opposition to attempts to
delegitimize the settler community, as well as to link the major Israeli in-
vestments in the West Bank to the difficulties of the Israeli economy
(Wietz 2011). Finally, in early 2016, even the current leader of the Labor

947
Party, Itzhak Herzog, admitted that in his view a two-state solution is not a
realistic policy objective, de facto legitimizing Jewish settlements in the
West Bank by arguing that the focus needs to be on separation between the
Jewish and Palestinian populations rather than on actual ending of Israeli
control over (parts of) the West Bank (“Herzog Admits” 2016).

FIGURE 33.1 Number of Jewish Settlers in the West Bank

While center-left parties seem to adopt Likud’s traditional caution re-
garding territorial concession, Likud itself appears to embrace the tradi-
tional radical right narrative that delegitimizes not just any attempt to con-
sider Israeli territorial concession but even law-and-order policies that
seem to delay expansion of the settlements. For example, when the IDF
destroyed a couple of illegal buildings in the settlement of Beit-El in July
2015, some of the more critical voices against the operation, which also in-
cluded a violent confrontation between settlers and IDF troops, came from
the Likud Knesset members, and Netanyahu himself expressed his opposi-
tion to the destruction of the illegal buildings (Ravid and Liss 2015).
The spread of support for ethnic nativism is visible first and foremost in
the widespread support for recent legislative coalitions that aims to under-
mine the civilian status of non-Jews in Israel. Table 33.2 illustrates some
major examples of such legislation. The overall impression is that prac-
tices that in the past were supported by the fringe of the Israeli right be-
came legitimate among most of the Israel center and right-wing parties.
Additional similar legislative initiatives were promoted, but for various
reasons either they never really materialized or the legislative process is
still ongoing.
To conclude, while radical right parties such as Habait Hayeudi, Israel
Beiteinu, and the Ultra-Orthodox parties are still the core source of nativist

948
ideology in Israel, it is possible to identify further consolidation of nativist
sentiments in other segments of the Israeli party system, thus reflecting
that the construction of ethnic democracy, rather than discouraging the
spread of nativism, provided fertile ground for its spread.
Table 33.2 Ethnic Nativism in the Knesset’s Legislation, 2006–2016
Date
Legislation Specifics Passed
Amendment The “Knesset Law” was amended to raise the March
to the electoral threshold to 3.25 percent. This legisla- 2014
“Knesset tion forced the various parties representing the
Law” re- Arab population to unify, since separately they
garding elec- were less likely to surpass the threshold.
toral thresh-
old
Law for the Asylum seekers who enter Israel can be incar- Janu-
Prevention cerated without due process or trial for a mini- ary
of Illegal mum of three years. 2012
Entrance to
Israel
Amendment Allows the minister of interior to revoke the cit- March
to the “Citi- izenship of individuals convicted of terror- 2011
zenship ism/espionage.
Law”
“Nakba Revokes public funding for any organization March
Law” that commemorates the Palestinian “Nacba.” 2011
Amendment Allows admission committees of settlements to March
to the Public reject candidates based on their political views 2011
Associations (“lack of compatibility with the values pro-
Law moted by the community”)

AUTHORITARIANISM

Authoritarianism, as Mudde (2007) defined it, is the belief that society

must be founded on and ruled by a stringent set of laws that shape the en-
tirety of an individual’s life. Insubordination results in severe sanctions.
Contemporary European authoritarianism is rooted mostly in modern secu-

949
lar ideas. Thus it demands full subordination of every part of society to the
authority of the state or leader and seeks to reinforce the notion of “law
and order” in its strictest sense.
In Israel as well, authoritarianism is reflected in attempts to emphasize
the superiority of national values and practices over individual ones. In ad-
dition, like in many other non-Western European countries, right-wing
radicalism and religious fundamentalism in Israel tend to intertwine. More
specifically, religious authoritarianism in Israel is mostly reflected in the
attempts to expand the reach of the Jewish legal and penal frameworks,
known as halakha, within the constitutional structure of the State of Israel
as well as in the quotidian life of its citizens. In the extreme version, adher-
ents to religious authoritarianism aspire to transform the state into a theoc-
racy (Bermanis, Canetti-Nisim, and Pedahzur 2004).
While until the early 2000s most authoritarian sentiments were re-
stricted to Ultra-Orthodox and Religious Zionist parties (i.e., far right po-
litical entities), in the last few years there has been a clear tendency among
members of more mainstream parties to promote such ideas as well, thus
further enhancing the legitimacy and consensual nature of authoritarian
notions in Israeli political discourse.
One of the more extreme examples of this trend was the passage in the
Knesset of what was known as the “Boycott Bill” in July 2011. MKs from
the Kadima and Likud Parties joined efforts to pass legislation that allows
imposing a financial penalty on any Israeli citizen who publicly supports
any boycott of the state of Israel, thus dramatically limiting freedom of
speech in favor of what was perceived by the Israeli legislature as national
interest (Herman and Liss 2011). While some MKs, such as Zipi Livni, at
that time the leader of the Kadima Party, argued that this bill was anti-de-
mocratic and something that might characterize fascist regimes (Walla
News 2011), the fact is that many of her party’s MKs voted to approve the
bill. Another legislative initiative that attracted similar scrutiny was what
is known as the “Nation Bill,” which further emphasized the Jewish na-
tionality of the state of Israel via various formal practices. Again, as with
the Boycott Bill, this legislation didn’t originate within the Israel far right
but was initially promoted by MKs from the Kadima and Likud Parties.
One of them, Avi Dichter, was a high-ranking official in the General Secu-
rity Service (also known as Shin Bet) and definitely not someone who was,
or is, identified with the Israeli far right (Wolf 2011).
Concerning religious authoritarianism, similar trends are visible. While

950
in the past Ultra-Orthodox parties were the ones fighting to undermine
practices that in their view might threaten the Jewish nature of the state,
especially as it relates to religious traditions, in recent years an increasing
number of MKs from mainstream parties have been involved in such ini-
tiatives. For example, new legislation that recently gained the support of
Netanyahu’s cabinet would promote stronger restrictions and more severe
punishments for commercial enterprises that are active on the Sabbath.
More important, this initiative was promoted by a secular MK, Michael
Zoar, of the Likud Party. When Zoar was asked to explain the initiative, he
said that in a Jewish state there is a clear need to ensure a rest day on the
Sabbath (Nahmias and Yarkazi 2015).
But probably the issue that most effectively exposed the degree to which
authoritarian sentiments have taken roots in mainstream parties is the ac-
tivity of civil rights organization in the West Bank. Even parties that al-
ways claimed a commitment to liberal values were willing to use extreme
rhetoric against organizations whose actions seemed not to align with what
those parties perceived as Israeli interests. For example, Yair Lapid, the
head of Yesh Atid (a center party whose platform supports the promotion
of a constitution based on contemporary liberal views, along with an edu-
cational system based on acceptance and tolerance), argued that the orga-
nization Shovrim Shtika, which collected and disseminated information on
IDF’s human rights violations in the West Bank, was undermining Israel’s
foundations and crossed the line between criticism and subversion (Hadad
2016). Israel’s minister of defense until recently, Moshe Ya’alon, went so
far as to accuse members of the organization of treason. Moreover, many
MKs of other center-right and left parties publicly support legislation that
would enforce restrictions on the activities of such human rights organiza-
tions. These sentiments eventually spilled over to the Israeli public bureau-
cracy. In August 2014, the director of the authority for national civilian
service (a program that allows Israeli youth to substitute voluntary civilian
service for military service), announced that B’tselem, an organization that
documents human rights violations by all parties in the West Bank, would
no longer be eligible to recruit volunteers through the program. His expla-
nation was that B’tselem was providing active assistance to a global anti-
Israeli campaign that also facilitated anti-Semitism (Yosi 2014).
We can conclude that with the active support of many centrist elements
in the Israeli political system, sentiments that place Israel’s interests above
democratic principles and individual civil rights became more predominant
and legitimate within Israeli political discourse. It is no wonder that even

951
figures who are part of some of the most consensual institutions in Israel,
including the IDF, alluded to the erosion in Israel of the commitment to
democratic ideals (Maco News 2016).

POPULISM

While some scholars refer to populism as a type of political rhetoric/dis-

course, others argue that it also has some clear ideological features. Mudde
(2007), for example, defines populism as an ideology that depicts society
as polarized between two homogeneous yet antagonistic groups: the pure
people and the corrupt elite. Politics, according to the advocates of pop-
ulist ideology, should express the general will of the pure people. In Israel,
especially in recent years, far right discourse promotes populist world-
views arguing that the will of the people is being ignored or manipulated
as a result of the control of certain left-wing elite groups in the media, in
parts of civil society, in the higher education system, and in the judiciary.
More specifically, this narrative asserts that left-wing elites are using their
control over social institutions in order to block the enhancement of the
particularistic Jewish nature of the state, the adoption of more hawkish se-
curity policies, and the continued implementation of the idea of greater Is-
rael (Filc 2010).
Two interesting trends seem to characterize populist rhetoric in the Is-
raeli context lately. First, the more the control of the so-called left wing
elites over social institutions appears to erode, the greater the rhetoric
about their influence. Second, and unlike in the cases of nativist and au-
thoritarian policies, populist rhetoric and initiatives still seem to be pro-
moted mainly by far right parties rather than also by more mainstream par-
ties.
Several examples can illustrate these two dynamics. The most popular
daily newspaper in Israel is Israel Hayom, which is highly supportive of
Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli right, to the point that some crit-
ics challenge its journalistic integrity. In addition, while the Ultra-Ortho-
dox and settler communities enjoy their own conservative-oriented radio
networks, there are no similar networks that promote a left-leaning agenda.
It also should be noted that in the last couple of years a new TV network
(Channel 20) started to operate in Israel, broadcasting conservative, right-
leaning programming. Finally, right-wing media figures are continuing to
increase their visibility within the mainstream media platforms. Despite all
the above, and the fact that the Israeli media market is probably more di-

952
verse than it was ever before, the right-wing populist discourse continue to
emphasize the media’s hostility toward the Israeli right.
And while processes of change within the judicial system are harder to
identify, various scholars recognize a growing reluctance of the judiciary
to deviate from what it perceives as consensual. Thus, despite the rhetoric
regarding the activism of the Israeli Supreme Court and its promotion of
liberal, left-leaning practices, the reality is that on issues related to national
security, church-state relations, and similar issues that divide the political
landscape, the Supreme Court and lower courts prefer to limit their in-
volvement or to avoid power struggles with the legislative and executive
(Coen and Coen 2014).
Populist initiatives within the legislature are usually manifested by far
right parties (Israel Beiteinu, Habait Hayeudi) and some extreme elements
of the Likud Party, while centrist parties are more reluctant to promote
such policies. The only center party in the current governing coalition, Cu-
lanu, actually represents itself as the sole protector of the Supreme Court
within the current right-leaning coalition (and occasionally also justifies its
decision to join the coalition on that basis). Other centrist parties tend to
assume a similar role, whether they are part of the opposition or the gov-
erning coalition. In recent years, rhetorical attacks from far right elements
against the judiciary triggered an immediate response from centrist parties
such as Yesh Atid (in the current Knesset) and Kadima (in previous ones).
Moreover, in Netanyahu’s previous government, Zipi Livni, who was the
justice minister and headed a centrist party named Hatnua, was considered
by many on the Israeli right as the main obstacle to legislative efforts
aimed at reforming the judicial system.
The reluctance of centrist parties to adopt populist rhetoric even while
embracing nativist and authoritarian policies can be explained in several
ways. The first is that they may feel that while authoritarian and nativist
sentiments are becoming more consensual and can provide electoral bene-
fits, this is not the case with populist views. A second possibility is that
centrist parties in Israel feel that changes in the judicial, media, and educa-
tional landscape may eventually benefit parties on the margins of the polit-
ical spectrum rather than political forces that represent a more pragmatic
agenda. For example, the politicization of the media market and the cre-
ation of ideological media platforms will probably be more beneficial for
political actors with clearly distinct political leanings, rather than centrist
parties. Also, most centrist parties in Israel include former members of the
specific social institutions that populist rhetoric tends to attack, and this

953
may play a role in the parties’ tendency to avoid such rhetoric. Finally, the
focus of most centrist parties in Israel on the fight against politicization
and corruption of the state bureaucracy makes them more reluctant to pro-
mote policies that might encourage further intrusion by political actors in
various aspects of the bureaucracy.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The adoption by centrist parties of rhetoric and policy agendas that in the
past were exclusive to the Israeli radical right has had some direct implica-
tions for the contemporary Israeli far right. To begin with, far right parties
lacking an identifiable and distinct ethnic/religious electoral base disap-
peared. All contemporary far right parties do not just advocate a far right
policy agenda but also aspire to promote the specific interests of particular
ethnic/religious segments of the Jewish population in Israel. In other
words, when the Israeli far right lost its monopoly over specific ideological
notions, it had to rely on identity politics in order to survive. Thus Israeli
Beiteinu strives to represent the interests of close to 1.5 million Israelis
who emigrated from the former Soviet republics since the 1990s, while
Habait Hayeudi represents the Religious Zionist and settler communities.
The attempt of the latter to expand beyond these sectors failed miserably in
the last elections, as Netanyahu and Likud aggressively adopted hawkish
rhetoric and basically deprived Habait Hayeudi of its monopoly on strong
nativist and authoritarian sentiments.
Another development that was facilitated by the move of centrist parties
to the right was the need for far right parties to resort to more extreme
manifestations of nativism, authoritarian policies, and rhetoric in order to
maintain their distinct ideological identity. Several legislative initiatives
that were promoted by Israeli far right parties are illustrative of this dy-
namic. Israeli Beiteinu was looking to promote bills that would (1) link ac-
cess to social and welfare benefits to the signing of a “loyalty oath,” (2)
strip individuals charged with terrorism or subversion against the state of
Israel of the right to vote in national elections, and (3) provide preference
to IDF veterans in hiring for government jobs.4 MKs from Habait Hayeudi
promoted legislation that (1) required Israeli filmmakers to sign a loyalty
oath in order to receive funding from the state-run Israel Film Fund, (2)
provide Orthodox rabbis with immunity from criminal charges related to
their religious activities, and (3) outlaw the evacuation of illegal Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories.

954
 The need to facilitate ideological distinction may also explain the deci-
sion of Israeli Beiteinu not to join Netanyahu’s government until recently,
as it felt that it must distance itself from Likud and Culanu. Indeed, the
leader of Israeli Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, consistently attacked Ne-
tanyahu for what he argued was lack of commitment to hawkish policies.
The movement of centrist parties toward the right also seems to con-
tribute to the continuing decline in popularity and influence of the extra-
parliamentary Israeli far right. While between the late 1960s and mid-
2000s the Israeli far right was characterized by vibrant, active, and highly
influential extra-parliamentary mass movements, which in many ways
shaped the policies and ideological framework of the Israeli far right, in
the last decade these movements disappeared or lost much of their influ-
ence. The fact that the ideological themes of these movements are increas-
ingly manifested in the legislature presented significant challenges to fur-
ther justifying the movements’ existence and work outside the political
system. Thus, the extra-parliamentary far right of today consists mainly of
groups of professionals who promote conservative agendas via their
unique professional skills or by focusing on specific domains.

955
NOTES

1. A video of the speech can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=Gcl_sJa-Ep4.
2. The video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2c
UoglR1yk.
3. Religious Zionists are an ideological segment of the Israeli population
that historically have made efforts to reconcile Jewish Orthodoxy with
secular Zionist ideology. Thus while they serve in the military and
take an active role in various spheres of the Israeli state, they maintain
an Orthodox lifestyle and strive to instill Orthodox practices within
various dimensions of the Israeli state and society.
4. The website of the Coalition Against Racism in Israel offers an article
on this: http://www.fightracism.org/Article.asp?aid=70.
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CHAPTER 34

959
 THE RADICAL RIGHT IN JAPAN

NAOTO HIGUCHI
IN the late 2000s, Japan encountered a series of unfamiliar spectacles of
the radical right: hundreds of demonstrators walked around big cities
shouting “Kill both good and bad Koreans!” Most of them belonged to a
group named Zaitokukai (Civic Group Against Privileges of Koreans in
Japan), which was established in 2007 and enjoyed rapid growth until
2010. Although Japan has been regarded as a country closed to migrants,
there have been few nativist organizations so far. While the group’s targets
include Chinese migrants, neighboring countries including China and
South and North Korea, and the Democratic Party of Japan, their primary
enemy is Korean residents (Higuchi 2016a).
This is somewhat embarrassing, because we can regard Koreans in
Japan as a “model minority.” It is true that they have been discriminated
against, as migrants from a former colony, but Koreans achieved upward
mobility by establishing their own businesses (Higuchi 2016b). In addi-
tion, they are less visible than other ethnic minorities such as Filipinos and
Brazilians, because Koreans are ethnically similar to Japanese and most of
them use Japanese names as a kind of alias. These characteristics should
make Koreans less likely to be victims of organized racism.
This chapter presents an overview of the radical right in Japan by an-
swering the question of why contemporary radical right groups hate Kore-
ans. This is the key to understanding features of Japan’s radical right and
how it has changed during the last half century. Unlike its predecessors,
Zaitokukai seems quite similar to European radical right groups in the
sense that it targets ethnic minorities with violent attacks. Is it a sign, then,
that Japan’s radical right is converging with its European counterparts?
The answer is partly yes but mostly no.
It is historical revisionism, rather than nativism, that characterizes the
core ideology of the radical right in Japan. In the Japanese context, histori-
cal revisionism seeks to justify and glorify war and aggression against
other countries by the Japanese Empire (1868–1945). Defeat in World War
II led to the demilitarization and democratization of Japan, but the radical
right is irritated by the postwar settlement, which is based on denial of the
prewar regime, in which the emperor and Shinto, the state religion, were
primary principles of national integration. This is why the main interest of
the postwar radical right has been to resurrect the glorious history of the

960
Japanese Empire and its reign in East Asia. Nativism is also a variant of
historical revisionism.
In the following sections, I will first illustrate the three-layered structure
of Japan’s radical right organizations and explain the recent rise of radical
right parties. Then I will clarify why historical revisionism produced na-
tivist violence.

IDEOLOGIES AND SOCIAL BASIS OF JAPAN’S RADICAL

RIGHT

Mudde (2007) listed ideologies of European radical right parties, including

nationalism, nativism, a strong state, welfare chauvinism, traditional
ethics, and revisionism. He concluded that their core ideology includes na-
tionalism and nativism. Although Japan’s radical right has much in com-
mon with its European counterparts, nativism is far from a core ideology.
While nationalism is the common denominator, other ideologies vary in
the three-layered structure of Japan’s radical right. As shown in Figure
34.1, the radical right in Japan can be defined as societal groups or parties
that adopt nationalism and some combination of nativism, historical revi-
sionism, traditionalism, and anti-communism, placing them far to the right
of mainstream conservatives.
The first layer of the Japanese radical right is composed of survivors of
prewar fascist organizations, which are characterized by strong faith in
emperor-centered nationalism and anti-communism (Hori 1993). Members
of such organizations who held public office were purged in the process of
postwar demilitarization by the U.S. occupation power, but they kept close
relationships with the conservative national political leadership
(Szymkowiak and Steinhoff 1995). They also include quasi-outlaw cadres
with connections to the mafia, making mass mobilization impossible
(Smith 2014). Instead, they have taken on unpleasant tasks behind the
scenes as well as terrorism targeting politicians, mass media, trade unions,
and leftist social movements. For example, they have persistently harassed
the Japan Teachers Union, which they believe to have promoted commu-
nism and criticized Japan (Lawson and Tannaka 2010). However, their pri-
mary enemy was the Soviet Union, not only because of their anti-commu-
nism but also because of their nationalism: a territorial dispute between the
two countries was the main obstacle to concluding the Russia-Japan peace
treaty. This first layer of radical right organizations has been on the decline
since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

961
 The religious right and groups of war veterans (and their families) make
up the second layer. They are characterized by strong political influence
and insistence on historical revisionism as well as traditional ethics and
emperor-centered nationalism. The religious right is composed of Shinto
and Buddhist organizations, including a considerable number of related
cults. War veterans and their families established three associations, in-
cluding the very influential Izokukai (Association of War-Bereaved Fami-
lies), with the original aim of demanding pensions and other welfare provi-
sions. But they soon became committed to the ideological struggle to re-
claim the honor of the imperial army dead, demanding a subsidy for the
Yasukuni Shrine, built to memorialize the war dead. Because it recalls
Japanese aggression and imperial conquest as well as past suffering caused
by Japanese invasions and occupation, worship at the shrine usually raises
conflict between Japan and neighboring countries (Shibuichi 2005).

FIGURE 34.1 Three-Layered Structure of Japan’s Radical Right

The common aim of the second-layer organizations is anachronistic:
they glorify the prewar polity, which occupation policies dismantled after
the war, and struggle to resurrect it (Seraphim 2006, 11). In 1951 they
began organizing a campaign to demand revival of a prewar holiday cele-
brating the birthday of the legendary first emperor Jinmu (February 11).
This was accomplished with the declaration of National Foundation Day in
1967 (Ruoff 2001). It was followed by the reign-name legalization move-
ment, started in 1968, which aimed at using the imperial era name instead
of the Christian era to mark the passage of time. This, too, succeeded, with
the passage of the Reign-Name Law in 1979.

962
 These campaigns resulted in the establishment of umbrella organizations
for the radical right. The religious right founded the Association to Protect
Japan in 1974. Izokukai and other war veterans groups also set up the As-
sociation to Answer the Departed War Heroes in 1976. Moreover, the Na-
tional Conference to Protect Japan was established in 1981 by various rad-
ical right groups, businesspeople, and celebrities, setting its sights on re-
vising the constitution, which they believed had been imposed by the
United States.
In 1997, the Association to Protect Japan and the National Conference
to Protect Japan merged into the Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi) to serve
as the national center for the radical right. It has quite successfully orga-
nized a series of campaigns, such as to revise the Basic Law of Education,
urge politicians to worship at the Yasukuni Shrine, bash gender equality,
and oppose voting rights for foreigners (Higuchi 2016a; Shibuichi 2005;
Yamaguchi 2014). On one hand, their political power comes from a close
relationship with conservative politicians: the Japan Conference has effec-
tively lobbied through its Diet Member Council, who are mostly from the
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). On the other hand, they also have what it
takes to promote mass movement: Izokukai boasted the political clout of
its one million votes (Shibuichi 2005, 200). This is why they prefer institu-
tionalized and conventional repertoires of action such as petitions, lobby-
ing, gatherings, and signature collecting.
Another feature of the second-layer organizations is their capacity for
grassroots mobilization. In all forty-seven prefectures these organizations
have local branches that are closely linked with the local assembly mem-
ber councils of the Japan Conference. During the campaign to enact the
Reign-Name Law, they succeeded in passing resolutions in all prefectural
assemblies save one, and more than half of the local councils requested
that the Diet take action on this matter (Ruoff 2001, 183–184). In this cen-
tury, too, some religious right organizations lobbied for local assemblies to
pass ordinances against mainstreaming gender policies (Yamaguchi 2017).
The third layer is exemplified by nativist groups such as Zaitokukai. It is
the most recently established among the radical right and the least depen-
dent on existing social groups such as religious organizations and associa-
tions of war veterans. In other words, newly emerging radical right groups
have succeeded in mobilizing citizens unaffiliated with existing groups.
The Japan Society for History Textbook Reform (Tsukurukai) took the ini-
tiative for this kind of mobilization. It was established in 1996 and aimed
to publish revisionist history textbooks. The founders were celebrities (in-

963
cluding famous cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi) strongly backed up by
existing organizations, especially the Japan Conference (Saaler 2005). But
Tsukurukai also attracted attention among the general public, enabling the
group to recruit ordinary citizens who did not belong to any radical right
organizations. Such a tendency is taken even further by Zaitokukai, which
relies solely on the Internet to recruit core activists as well as rank-and-file
members.
Relationships with political and economic elites vary greatly among the
third-layer groups. Although internal disputes took the shine off Tsuku-
rukai’s reputation, conservative politicians have been exerting pressure on
municipalities to choose the group’s revisionist history textbook for their
schools. The nativist movement was also eager to build connections with
politicians. However, political figures tried to distance themselves from
that movement once some of its activists were arrested for hate crimes.

THE RADICAL RIGHT IN PARTY POLITICS

Radical Right Politicians Within the LDP

Although many small radical right parties (the successors of prewar fascist
parties) stood for national elections (mostly for the Upper House), they
never gained any seats (Szymkowiak and Steinhoff 1995). Long-term con-
servative rule is largely responsible for the absence of successful radical
right parties: the conservative LDP has been ruling since 1955 except for
short periods in 1993–1994 and 2009–2012. De facto one-party rule pre-
vented the rise of radical right parties because of the much greater benefit
of belonging to the ruling LDP. This is why radical right politicians be-
longed to the LDP instead of establishing their own parties.
There are two types of radical right LDP politicians: agents and ideal-
ists. On one hand, the second-layer radical right groups have been keen to
send their agents to the Diet. On the other hand, the LDP needed their
votes to strengthen its own constituency when it was facing heightened
competition from leftist parties (Nakano 2003). Consequently, the reli-
gious right has backed about ten LDP candidates in the Upper House elec-
tions since the 1960s. Izokukai also encouraged its own leaders to stand
for elections, although the aging of its members weakened its power as an
electoral machine. Elected MPs worked hard to accomplish what their
principals desired, such as nationalizing the Yasukuni Shrine.

964
 Unlike agents, idealists are not explicitly backed by radical right organi-
zations, but they are ideologically committed. The most iconic and typical
group of idealists is Seirankai (the name literally means “a group of a sum-
mer storm”), which was formed in 1973 by thirty-one LDP MPs across
factions to oppose establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China
in preference to Taiwan (Babb 2012). We can regard it as a forerunner of
contemporary radical right parties in the sense that it adopted nationalistic
education policies, populist discourse criticizing the corruption of then
prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, and anti-communism. It was different from
factions because members of Seirankai were linked by their radical right
ideologies.
After Seirankai became inactive a few years later, several idealist
groups were founded but were generally short-lived. Neither agents nor
idealists have ever formed a faction, which is the basic unit of intra-party
politics within the LDP. Factions are interest groups competing for the po-
sitions of ministers and party officials as well as for the prime minister-
ship. It is true that there are liberal and right-leaning factions, but they are
not organized on the basis of ideologies. Ideological disputes have not
been major concerns for factions, which in turn made ideological matters
rather minor issues for the LDP.
However, coalitions of agents and idealists have been influential in pro-
moting their policies. Instead of factions, they have usually acted through
MP policy groups that have close relationships with the aforementioned
radical right organizations. The weakening power of factions as a result of
electoral reform in the 1990s contributed to the increasing influence of MP
groups in this century. The conservative shift of the LDP (Park 2015) also
facilitated the rise of ideological issues supported by these groups. Groups
have been formed around issues such as historical revisionism, the em-
peror, the Yasukuni Shrine, diplomacy with neighboring countries, educa-
tion, and gender equality. Two groups are worth mentioning to see how
radical right groups influence politics: the MP Group to Help Japanese Al-
legedly Abducted by North Korea (Rachi Giren) and the MP Council of
the Japan Conference.
The abduction issue came about because North Korean agents kid-
napped scores of Japanese beginning in the 1970s. In 1997, families of al-
leged abduction victims founded an association, followed by establishment
of the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by
North Korea (Sukuukai) and then Rachi Giren in 1998 (Williams and Mo-
brand 2010). Sukuukai and Rachi Giren, led by idealists, are radical right

965
groups motivated by anti–North Korea sentiments rather than sympathy
with victims. However, they have been working hand in glove to urge the
government to adopt hard-line policies toward North Korea. They gained
political clout when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang
in September 2002 and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il apologized for
the abductions. Because this stirred up strong nationalistic sentiments
among many Japanese, the abduction became one of the top-priority issues
for Japanese diplomacy, allowing Sukuukai and Rachi Giren to, essen-
tially, exert veto power regarding policies that involved North Korea.
The MP Council of Japan Conference has about two hundred members,
mostly from the LDP. It usually maintains a low profile compared with
Rachi Giren, but it has enjoyed more and more influence on a variety of is-
sues. Leaders of the council belonged to anti-mainstream factions of the
LDP, because liberals had been leading the party in the last century. It was
the establishment of the Koizumi cabinet in 2001 and its successful gover-
nance that brought about the conservative shift in the LDP. Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe enjoyed the benefit of this conservative turn, distinguishing
himself as a hard-liner on the abduction issue when he was a deputy chief
cabinet secretary in the Koizumi administration in 2002 (Babb 2013). In
fact, members of the council hold a majority of ministerships in the second
Abe cabinet, inaugurated in 2012.

Emergence of Successful Radical Right Parties in the Twenty-First

Century
In addition to the LDP’s conservative shift, the last decade saw the estab-
lishment of new radical right parties. Under the 1955 regime (which lasted
until 1993), urbanization resulted in the establishment of new parties, such
as Komeito, the Democratic Socialist Party, and the New Liberal Club,
which were centrist and located left of the LDP. Frequent changes of
alignments have occurred since then, but no significant radical right party
was launched until the late 2000s.
However, the defeat of the LDP in the 2009 Lower House election re-
sulted in the emergence of several parties, including some that are part of
the radical right (see Table 34.1). The least successful is the Happiness Re-
alization Party, which was established by a cult named Happy Science.
Amply funded by Happy Science, the party put up candidates for almost
all single-seat constituencies in national elections but obtained less than 1
percent of the proportional representation vote and never gained a seat.

966
Other parties repeatedly merged and split. But three parties are worth men-
tioning in order to analyze the support base of Japan’s radical right: Sun-
rise Party of Japan (SP, renamed the Party for Japanese Kokoro after
2015), the Japan Restoration Party (JRP), and Your Party (YP), all of
which were established after the defeat of the LDP.
Table 34.1 Vote for Radical Right/Neoliberal Parties in National
Elections
% of Proportional Representation Vote
Year
of
Es-
Type tab- 2009 2010 2012 2013 2014 2016
of Name of lish- Lower Upper Lower Upper Lower Upper
Party Party ment House House House House House House
Rad- Happi- 2009 0.7 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.7
ical ness Re-
right alization
Party
Sunrise 2010 2.1 Merged 2.7 1.3
Party of with
Japan JRP
(Kokoro)
Rad- Japan 2012 20.4 11.9 15.7 9.2
ical Restora-
right tion
and Party
ne- (JRP)
olib-
eral
Ne- Your 2009 4.3 13.6 8.7 8.9 Partly
olib- Party merged
eral with
JRP
Note: The rate is the vote for proportional representation.
Kitschelt’s theory clarifies why these newly established radical right

967
parties experienced different degrees of success. His famous formula for
the emergence of radical right parties is twofold: (1) more and more voters
are located close to an axis ranging from left-libertarian to right-authoritar-
ian positions instead of the left-right axis, and (2) the right-authoritarian
end of the axis, created by the convergence of moderate conservatives and
social democrats, will become the niche for the radical right (Kitschelt
1995, 14–15).
It is also the case for Japan that a combination of economic and sociopo-
litical policies is the “winning formula” for radical right parties. The emer-
gence of radical right parties in the last decade can be explained in the fol-
lowing way. Although the LDP included radical right politicians, the main-
stream factions were liberal clientelists that put emphasis on economic
growth and pork-barrel politics rather than ideological issues. However,
public outrage about corrupt clientelistic practices helped Junichiro
Koizumi ascend to the prime ministership in 2001 (Scheiner 2007).
Koizumi’s market-liberal policies, such as privatization of the postal sys-
tem, as well as his populist performances brought about a dramatic victory
for the LDP in the 2005 general election. In short, the LDP expanded its
support base by shifting its economic policies rightward.
However, subsequent cabinets under Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe,
Yasuo Fukuda, and Taro Aso were short-lived: all of them were unpopular
and forced to resign within a year. In addition, the largest opposition party,
the Democratic Party (DP), won the 2007 Upper House election due to its
emphasis on social democratic redistribution policies. Following its defeat
in that election, the LDP changed its economic policies to converge with
those of the DP but shifted its sociopolitical position rightward, claiming
that the DP government would endanger the nation. The result was a
change of government after the historic victory of the DP in the 2009 gen-
eral election.
LDP’s fall from power led to a party realignment on the right (Reed
2013). This is partly because it was less attractive to stay behind an LDP
on the wane and partly because of the failure of the DP government. But it
should be emphasized that new parties on the right competed for the un-
covered electoral space created by the LDP’s shift in policies. New parties
looked for their niche in the space that the LDP abandoned. The first chal-
lenger was the YP, which broke away from the LDP and is characterized
by its market-liberal policies. We cannot regard it as a radical right party
because it is not explicitly sociopolitically right.

968
 The second is the SP, established by former LDP MPs expelled by
Koizumi in 2005 because they were opposed to privatization of the postal
service. We can safely consider the SP an “authentic” radical right party,
with its openly nationalist and traditionalist orientation. The SP increased
its radical right orientation after Shintaro Ishihara joined it in 2012. Ishi-
hara was one of the founders of Seirankai, the governor of Tokyo, a novel-
ist, and the most well-known radical right politician in Japan (Higuchi and
Matsutani 2016).
The third and most successful one is the JRP. The founder was Tôru
Hashimoto, a lawyer and mayor of Osaka. Hashimoto was the wonder boy
of his age, with his populist media savvy, and many climbed on his band-
wagon when he established the JRP (Weathers 2014). Although its policy
emphasis was on thorough market liberalism, it also favored nationalistic
policies. It was joined by the SP just before the 2012 general election.
While they agreed on electoral cooperation in small member districts
(Reed 2013), the YP refused to merge with the JRP, claiming that its plat-
form was too anachronistic. This suggests that the JRP should be regarded
as a radical right party rather than a market-liberal party.
These new parties experienced different degrees of success in elections,
which is in accordance with Kitschelt’s formula. His basic premise is that
radical right parties will draw different electoral coalitions and will have
different “yield ratios” within the electorate depending on where they lo-
cate themselves (Kitschelt 1995, 18). He expected that two types of parties
would be electorally successful: (1) populist anti-statist parties and (2) rad-
ical right parties with a pro-market and authoritarian bent. Each of these
fits the cases of the YP and the JRP.
Table 34.1 shows the ratio of proportional representation votes gained
by newly established parties on the right. The case of the YP shows the po-
tential support for market-liberal parties. Its share of the proportional rep-
resentation vote was relatively modest (4.3 percent) in the 2009 general
election, but the party captured 13.6 percent of the vote in the 2010 Upper
House election. Although internal disputes and scandals involving the
leader led to dissolution of the YP in 2014, it showed that market-liberal
parties could compete in the electoral market.

969
FIGURE 34.2 Mapping Ideologies of Parties on the Right
Note: SP: Sunrise Party; YP: Your Party; JRP: Japan Restoration Party
The JRP achieved a major success when it first entered the Lower
House election in 2012, gaining 20.4 percent (the second-largest share,
next to the LDP) of the proportional representation vote. Because this
spectacular debut owes much to Hashimoto’s popularity, his improper re-
marks caused a loss of support (down to 11.9 percent) in the 2013 Upper
House election. But it absorbed some of the YP’s MPs after that party’s
dissolution, and its vote share went back up to 15.7 percent in the 2014
general election, although the SP broke away from the JRP. It also got 9.3
percent of the vote in the 2016 Upper House election even after
Hashimoto’s retirement from the world of politics and the subsequent split
in the party. Relatively robust support for the JRP can be explained by
Kitschelt’s “winning formula” of the radical right, as he argued that the
combination of market liberalism and authoritarianism would develop the
most promising market for the radical right (Kitschelt 1995).
The SP is the least successful of the three. It received only 2.1 percent of
the proportional representation vote and failed to win seats other than sin-
gle-seat constituencies in the 2010 Upper House election. Although it
joined with the JRP, discord between leaders resulted in the split of the SP
in 2014. Nineteen MPs left the JRP for the SP, but the party took a shel-
lacking in the 2014 Lower House election. It lost proportional representa-
tion seats (getting 2.7 percent of the total vote) and gained only two seats
from single-seat constituencies. The SP could not win any seats in the
2016 Lower House election.
The SP misunderstood the demand in the electoral market, especially
among young voters. The salient feature of SP’s electoral campaign in
2014 was its anti-immigrant policies. Its platform opposed welfare provi-

970
sions for foreigners, opposed voting rights for foreigners, pledged to re-
view the legal status of Koreans, and said it would implement more restric-
tive naturalization policies. It was the first time that anti-immigrant poli-
cies were put forth during a Japanese election campaign, but they did not
appeal to the electorate. As Kitschelt (1995, 23) notes, the SP lost votes
because it emphasized nativism but neglected market liberalism.
In terms of similarities to the European radical right, lessons from
Japan’s radical right parties in the last decade are ambivalent. On one
hand, the success of the JRP shows that the combination of authoritarian-
ism and market liberalism has great potential for popular support. On the
other hand, the failure of the SP suggests the limited potential of anti-im-
migrant policies to appeal to voters. Unlike European and North American
countries, the immigration issue seldom attracts public attention in Japan,
while nativist movements have emerged in the last decade.

DISCURSIVE OPPORTUNITIES FOR NATIVIST MOVEMENTS

The rise of the nativist movement has little to do with the political realign-
ment that led to the establishment of radical right parties. Although some
nativist activists support their favorite politicians, even radical right parties
have ostracized the movement. They are reluctant to take the risk of being
criticized for partnership with it. Therefore, the Japanese political opportu-
nity structure is closed to the nativist movement, and it is difficult to ex-
plain the emergence of the movement in relation to shifts in party politics.
However, most of the discourse of the nativist movement has been ap-
propriated from the discourse of the second-layer radical right organiza-
tions and radical right parties. It has taken advantage of discursive oppor-
tunities created by the changing concerns of the established radical right. A
discursive opportunity refers to “the aspects of the public discourse that
determine a message’s chances of diffusion in the public sphere” (Koop-
mans and Olzak 2004, 202). It provides visibility, resonance, and legiti-
macy for social movement claims, thereby encouraging movement actions.
Unlike the second-layer Japanese radical right organizations, which have
been closely associated with institutional politics, discursive opportunities
greatly influenced the trajectory of the nativist movement.
Figure 34.3 illustrates the shifting discursive opportunities for the radi-
cal right in Japan. It plots the frequency with which the Soviet Union (Rus-
sia), China, South Korea, North Korea, and history appear in articles in

971
three major right-wing journals from 1982 to 2012 (Higuchi 2016a). It re-
flects which countries Japan’s radical right has looked on as enemies. This
figure shows that three broad changes emerged in the 1990s and the 2000s.
First, throughout the 1980s, the frequency for the Soviet Union re-
mained at a high level. Conversely, the proportion for China, South Korea,
and North Korea remained low. As previously mentioned, the Soviet
Union was by far the most important hypothetical enemy, in terms of both
anti-communism and nationalism (territorial disputes). This changed in the
1990s. Although the Soviet Union continued to be of interest until its dis-
solution, after that point its frequency dropped dramatically and failed to
return to its former levels. This resulted in a striking closure of discursive
opportunities for the first-layer radical right organizations, leading to their
decline.

FIGURE 34.3 Proportion of Articles Regarding Each Topic in Right-

Wing Journals
Note: Calculated by the author from articles on journals Shokun!, Se-
iron, and WiLL.

972
 East Asian countries took the Soviet Union’s place in the late 1990s,
and even surpassed it with the advent of this century. While articles related
to East Asian countries made up 4.7 percent of articles in the 1980s (lower
than the 6.5 percent earlier devoted to the Soviet Union), they skyrocketed
to 9.6 percent in the 1990s and then to 18.8 percent in the period 2000 to
2012. Although the Japanese radical right had looked favorably on South
Korea as an anti-communist ally, after the Cold War ended it began to re-
gard all other East Asian countries (China, North Korea, and South Korea)
as “anti-Japanese” enemies.
Three factors lie behind the strong hostility of Japan’s radical right to-
ward neighboring countries. Among them, the rise of China is the most im-
portant, with escalating and wide-ranging (historical, military, territorial,
and economic) tensions between the two (Smith 2015). Next comes
heightened hostility toward North Korea. Although Japan’s radical right
rather neglected North Korea during the Cold War era, the abductions and
the nuclear development issue around the turn of the century completely
changed the situation. The last is the rise of historical issues, following the
democratization of South Korea in 1987. Democratization made it possible
for South Korean victims of Japanese colonialism, such as the “comfort
women,” to accuse Japan of war responsibility, which turned history into
one of the most important problems between the two.
Third, the frequency of history-related articles increased beginning in
the second half of the 1990s. It reflects a backlash against statements by
non-LDP prime ministers Morihiro Hosokawa (in 1993) and Tomiichi Mu-
rayama (in 1995) acknowledging Japan’s war responsibility. The second-
layer radical right organizations, in association with related MPs, fought
back hard against the progressive turn in terms of historical issues. The ris-
ing awareness of Japan’s aggression in South Korea and China also con-
tributed to intensification of conflict over war memories.
Although the nativist movement was not able to establish points of con-
tact with institutional politics, it did link itself with the changing discursive
opportunities surrounding “history” and “East Asia,” which serve as the
entrance point into nativism. In fact, most activists of the nativist move-
ment were not interested in “migration problems”: they were first attracted
to historical revisionism or indignant about the “anti-Japanese behaviors”
of neighboring countries (Higuchi 2016a). The movement converted these
sentiments into nativism: the credibility of the nativist’s groundless claims
is secured by acceptance of the adjacent items of hostility toward neigh-
boring countries and of historical revisionism.

973
 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NATIVIST MOVEMENT

In addition to discursive opportunities favorable to the nativist movement,

the Internet served as its incubator. Widespread use of the Internet enabled
the movement to mobilize various resources, ranging from fundraising to
the recruitment of members. But more important is that nativist ideas and
frames would not have arisen without the Internet. While the first- and sec-
ond-layer radical right organizations were rather indifferent to the “migra-
tion problem,” it is the central concern for the nativist movement. This is
because nativist ideas were brought up in online communities, where they
took advantage of discursive opportunities created by the established radi-
cal right.
Therefore, the emergence of Japan’s nativist movement is closely linked
to the spread of the Internet. The diffusion of new technology around the
turn of the century that allowed users to be online virtually twenty-four
hours a day at a low cost allowed for the emergence of nativist opinion
leaders and followers. The former began their activities around 2001: at
first they just wrote anti-Korean comments on bulletin boards, but soon
they set up their own webpages. Sharin Yamano, the author of a million-
selling series of anti-Korean comics, put his first comic on his webpage in
2002. A short while later, in 2003, Makoto Sakurai, the founder of Za-
itokukai, also created his own site. The nativist discourse, which was used
with abandon in places such as Internet bulletin boards in this period, was
systematized on individual sites in the early 2000s. Since then, the Internet
has served as a “free space” for nativists, in which they communicate with
one another, openly express their extremist beliefs, and coordinate their ac-
tivities (Simi and Futrell 2010, 2). The virtual free space resulted in the es-
tablishment of nativist groups such as Zaitokukai in 2007.
While the spread of broadband access was essential for the establish-
ment of nativist groups, the use of video sharing sites such as YouTube
(launched in 2005) was crucial to their expansion. Nativist groups started
to upload video clips of their events in 2007, which was extremely useful
in turning many Net surfers who watched those videos into supporters of
the movement. They also offer live broadcasting of their events, enabling
supporters’ online participation across the country.
Another factor that brought about the expansion of nativist groups was
related news that aroused nativist sentiments. Figure 34.4 gives a numeri-
cal representation of the changes in Zaitokukai’s membership numbers.
The trigger for a relatively sustained increase in popularity was provided

974
by the spring 2009 demonstrations harassing an undocumented Filipino
migrant family who applied for legalization. Membership in the group in-
creased rapidly after this. Other news, such as the DP government’s plan to
grant voting rights to foreigners in January 2010 and the crash of a Chi-
nese fishing boat into a Japan Coastal Guard boat in September 2010, also
benefited nativist groups.
However, these groups’ thoughtless behaviors have cost them signifi-
cantly since late 2010. The police were criticized for letting nativist groups
go unchecked, but more than ten activists were arrested several months
later at harassment events aimed at a Korean school in Kyoto and a branch
of the Japan Teachers Union that donated to a Korean school. Most of
them were found guilty. The court also ruled that Zaitokukai activists had
to pay a total of $180,000 compensation for victims. These incidents
slowed down growth of the nativist movement. Moreover, the movement
found itself surrounded by larger numbers of anti-racism activists begin-
ning in 2013 (Shibuichi 2016). Especially spectacular were repeated
clashes between nativists and anti-racists in Tokyo’s Koreatown, drawing
media attention. The nativist movement’s behaviors were also labeled as
hate speech, which led to the enactment of an anti-hate-speech law in the
Diet in May 2016.

FIGURE 34.4 Changes in Zaitokukai Membership Numbers

At first the mass media were reluctant to cover nativist events because
they said that even critical reports would publicize their activities. Many
believed that ignoring the nativists would be the best way to deal with
them. However, anti-racist struggles proved to be effective in weakening
the nativist movement. Anti-racist mobilization reduced the number of par-

975
ticipants who showed up at nativist events because it increased the costs
and risks of participation. Social control measures such as arrests of na-
tivists also contributed to the stagnation in membership growth (shown in
Figure 34.4).

CONCLUSION

Research on Japan’s radical right is still in the embryonic stage, and thus
its actual conditions are mostly unknown to the academic world. But as I
have illustrated, each of its three layers has something in common with
Western counterparts. While the first layer is similar to Italian fascist orga-
nizations in terms of its ideologies and continuity from the prewar era, the
second layer has a resemblance to the American Christian right in the
sense that it has great influence on politics. The third layer seems much the
same as European xenophobic movements in terms of hostility toward eth-
nic minorities. Moreover, radical right parties also appeared in national
politics. This indicates that research on Japanese radical right can be fitted
into broader comparative matrices.
Nevertheless, there is a basic point of difference between Japan and
Western countries: the importance of historical revisionism. Japan’s defeat
in World War II fundamentally transformed the country’s regime, which
has long irritated the radical right who glorify and justify the prewar
Japanese Empire. The second-layer organizations steadily worked to re-
store some prewar symbols, such as National Foundation Day, reign name,
and the prime minister worshipping at the Yasukuni Shrine. However, it
was the end of the Cold War and the democratization of South Korea that
triggered the surge of historical issues in East Asia. Enemies of the radical
right shifted their target from the Soviet Union and communism to East
Asian countries, which greatly changed Japan’s radical right in the several
ways.
First, Japanese nativism reflects relations with Japan’s nearest neighbors
rather than an influx of migrants, and it is based on colonial settlement and
the Cold War. The nativist movement primarily hates Koreans because
they remind the Japanese of a disgraceful period in their history, which re-
quires redress of rights lost in the process of decolonization. As the Euro-
pean radical right has been taking advantage of wars in the Middle East
and the influx of refugees from there, Japan’s nativism uses tensions with
neighboring countries for its own ends.

976
 Second, a few survey results indicate that the support bases for radical
right politicians in Japan are different from those seen in European coun-
tries (Higuchi and Matsutani 2016; Jou and Endo 2016). Contrary to con-
ventional wisdom, such as the “losers of modernization” theory or the
competition theory, demographic variables were poorly related to support
for Japan’s radical right politicians. While anti-immigrant sentiments were
significantly related to that support, the effect of nationalism was much
stronger. These differences make it difficult to believe the cliché that
working-class people favor the radical right because of their precarious
economic conditions or job competition with migrants. Instead, radical
right supporters prefer nationalist politicians who seem to be able to de-
fend Japan against “anti-Japanese” countries.
Lastly, Japan witnessed the growth of the third-layer nativist organiza-
tions after the first-layer fascist organizations declined. Although the na-
tivist movement soon lost ground, due largely to the arrests of its activists
and to countermobilization by anti-racist forces, its potential proved to be
relatively great. In a comparative study of Germany and Austria, Art
(2006) pointed out that behind the rise of the Austrian radical right lies a
political culture tolerant of Nazism. In the same vein, the nativist move-
ment in Japan took full advantage of deep-rooted support for historical re-
visionism and hostility toward neighboring countries. These geopolitical
conditions will provide fertile terrain for future revival of nativist move-
ments as well as radical right parties.
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 INDEX

Page references for figures are indicated by f and for tables by t.

Aarhus Against the Mosque, 374, 377t
Aberhart, William, 92
Achterberg, P., 215
Action Française, 434
action repertoire, 334–337
activism. See also specific types and organizations
male predominance, 9
media on, 271–272
Adams, James, 190n5
Adams, John, 632
adjusting positions, to voters and competitors, 186–187
Adorno, T. W., 62, 64, 70, 72, 218, 262
Akkerman, T., 24
Albanese, Matteo, 109
alignments
dealignment, 224–225
existing, strength, 225–226
Aliot, Louis, 440–441
Allardt, E., 214
Alleanza Nazionale (AN), 24, 507
Alliance Républicaine pour les Libertées et le Progrès (ARLP), 435
Almeida, D., 398
Alonso, S., 509–510, 511

980
Altemeyer, Bob, 147–148
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 225–226, 455–457
current situation, elections and seats, 455–456
framing, 340
ideology and programs, 457
impact, current, 322
Islamophobia, 43
organization, 458
popular support, 314f
Protestants, 380, 380t
religiosity, 380, 381t
American Enterprise Institute, 288
Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), 641
Anders Langes Parti til Sterk Nedsettelse av Skatter, Avgifter og Of-
fentlige Inngrep (ALP), 547, 554t
Anderson, B., 20, 368, 620
Andrushkiv, Yaroslav, 613–614, 615
Ang, I., 652–653
Angenot, Marc, 89
Angle, Sharron, 640
Annemans, Gerolf, 484
antebellum nativism, 91
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 413
anti-democratic outlook, 413
anti-establishment populism, 2, 5
anti-immigration. See immigrant threat
Anti-Islamic English Defence League, 526
anti-modernity/globalization, 394

981
anti-partly outlook, 413
anti-postmaterialism, 150–151, 394
electoral support, 150–152
antisemitism, 4, 23, 61–82, 376, 395, 413
1930s Europe, vs. Islamophobia, 43–45
Australia First, 652
authoritarian syndrome, 62–63
definitions, 63–65
European right-wing populism, 66–70, 68t
examples, 73–80
caricatures, secondary-antisemitism, and FPÖ’s strategy, 74–79, 74f,
75f
Jobbik, identity construction and victim-perpetrator reversal, 79–80
overview, 73
France, 434
ideology, coherent, 80–81
Israel and Zionism related, 64
Judeus ex Machina, defined, 64–65
Judeus ex Machina, rhetoric strategy
blaming and denying, 72–73
syncretic antisemitism, 70–71
language behavior, 70–71
Marine Le Pen’s opposition, 440–441
National Front, 524
populism, 92
prevalence, current, 61–62, 63
as racism sub-form, 61–62
secondary, 64, 72

982
 Social Credit Party of Alberta, 92
stereotypes, common rhetorical, 65–66, 73
transformation, 61
Ukraine, post-Soviet, 621–622, 621t
violence and, 425–428, 426t–427t, 427f
Arnold, R., 582, 588, 590
Art, D., 24, 152, 191n17, 240, 243, 246, 339, 479, 480, 485, 486, 488, 489,
695
Arter, D., 552
Aryan Warriors, 423
Arzheimer, K., 4, 7, 145–146, 147, 150–156, 159, 332
Association to Protect Japan, 683
Ataka, 568
Australia, 650–663. See also specific parties
antisemitism, 652
Australia First Movement, 652
Australia First Party, 659
Australian Defence League, 660–661
Australian Liberty Alliance, 660
Australian Nationalists Movement, 659
Crazy White Boys, 660
Hanson, Pauline, 251, 252, 255, 321, 650, 653–657, 659, 661–662
historical context, 651–653
League of Rights, 653
mainstreaming
fascist issues, 652
nativist populism, 650
racial politics and racism, 651–652, 653

983
 right-wing populism, John Howard, 653–654, 657–658
National Action, 659
New Guard, 652
One Nation Party, 321, 653–657, 659–660
Q Society, 660–661
radical right and far right, 658–662
White Australia, 652–653
Australia First Movement, 652
Australia First Party (AFP), 659
Australian Defence League (ADL), 660–661
Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA), 660
Australian Nationalists Movement (ANM), 659
Austria, 452–453, 458–462. See also Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs
(FPÖ)
1947 Prohibition Act, 467
context, 452
vs. Germany and Switzerland
actor capabilities, 470–472
cultural, political, economic, and social framework, 466–469
opportunity structures, 469–470
Nationaldemokratische Partei, 459
Österreichische Volkspartei, 315, 322, 458–462
Verband der Unabhängigen, 458
authoritarian and exclusionary positions, 184–185
authoritarianism, 147–148, 262, 668, 669t
definition, 674
gender differences, 201
Israel, 674–675

984
 Putin’s regime, 583
Russia, post-Soviet, 583
sociocultural, 2
authoritarian syndrome, 62–63
Auto-Partei, 463
Azov, 617, 624
Baburin, Sergei, 585
Bachman, Lutz, 317
Bachner, H., 69
Backes, U., 453, 454, 456, 458, 467, 470
Baldoli, Claudia, 402
Bale, J., 109
Bale, T., 23, 227
banal nationalism, 23
Bandera, Stepan, 575, 618
Bardèche, Maurice, 114, 115
Barkashov, Aleksandr, 591
Bar-On, T., 5, 17, 19–20, 22, 23, 27, 33, 113, 117, 406
Barreto, M., 631, 634, 636, 640, 641, 644–646
Bartolini, S., 214, 215, 221, 223, 225
Bay, A.-H., 351–352
Beam, Louis, 418
Bean, John, 399
Beck, Glenn, 273
Belgium, 478–497. See also Vlaams Belang (VB)
burqa ban, 51
contemporary radical right, 481–494
elections and electoral support, 492t, 494

985
 ideological profile, 483–484
party organization and membership, 487t, 489–490
historical background, 480–481
the Netherlands and, 478
political and societal context, wider, 494–497
Vlaams Blok, 481, 483–485, 492t, 494
Vlaams Nationaal Verbond, 480–481
Volksunie, 480–481
Bell, D., 23–24
Benford, R. D., 338
Bengtsson, Å, 553–555
Ben-Moshe, D., 659
Berlet, C., 414
Berlusconi, Silvio, 259, 414
center-right coalition, 507, 509
charisma, 251, 254, 255, 261
Forza Italia, 254, 507, 517
image, 261
language, “like the people,” 255
media control, 273, 278
Besluit Ontbinding Landverraderlijke Organisaties, 479–480
Betz, H.-G., 8–9, 18, 25, 93, 94, 98–99, 108, 111, 155, 156, 201, 216, 300,
394
Bevara Sverige Svenskt (BSS), 549
Beyens, S., 245
Biletsky, Andriy, 616
Billiet, J, 147, 379
Billig, M., 23

986
Bjelke-Peterson, Johannes, 654
blaming, antisemitism, 72–73
Blank, T., 26
Bleksaune, M., 351–352
Blocher, Christoph, 463–464, 466
Blog Éléments, 289
blogging, 276–277
Boevaia Organizatsiia Russkikh Natsionalistov (BORN), 591
Bolin, N., 246
Bolleyer, N., 242, 244, 245
bonding vs. bridging, 292
Boomgaarden, Hajo G., 157, 158
Bornschier, S., 214, 216–220, 222–224, 228
Bos, Linda, 158
Bosma, Martin, 488–489
Bossi, Umberto, 18, 46, 93–94, 251, 508
centripetal charisma, 266
as charismatic leader, 252
coteria charisma, 264
foundation myth, 254
image and associations, 261
Manichean demonization, 256
symbiotic hierarchy, 255
Boulanger, General Georges, 434
Boulangism, 92–93, 434
Bourdieu, P., 357
Bowyer, Benjamin, 158
breakdown theory, 327, 328, 334–335

987
Breivik, Anders, 3, 117, 418–419
Brett, Judith, 657
Brewster, C., 357
Brewster, K., 357
Brexit, 323
Britain. See British National Party; UK independence Party (UKIP);
United Kingdom (UK)
Britain First, 526
British National Party (BNP), 31, 522–526, 527t
cross-national links, 399
Euroskepticism, 124
football hooliganism, 292–293
gender and leadership, 208
local mobilization, 260
media coverage, 276
nationalism, 31
small area studies, electoral support, 158
Bruce, S., 371
B’tselem, 675
Bubolz, F., 359
Budge, Ian, 180
Bulgaria, 34, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
Ataka, 568
Bulgarian Attack Party, 34
Bull, A. C., 116
Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ), 311, 315
Bunzl, Matti, 45
Burger, Norbert, 459

988
Bürgerbewegung pro NRW, 457
Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei (BDP), 464
burkini ban, 52
burqa (burka) bans, 51–52
Burris, V., 405
Buštíková, L., 10, 21, 566, 568–570, 575, 576t–577t, 622
Butler, Eric D., 653
Bytzek, E., 244
Caiani, M., 328, 332–336, 394, 397–401, 403–406
Caldiron, G., 333
Calvinism, democracy and, 370, 371, 372t
Camelots du Roi, 434
Campbell, A., 144, 652
Campbell, Kalgoorlie Graeme, 659
candidates, electoral support, 146
Canetti, D., 331
Canovan, M., 657
Carter, E., 24, 145–146, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 172, 227, 240, 332, 522
Carvalho, J., 309
CasaPound, 400
Castles, S., 651
Catholic countries, 385–386
Catholicism, democracy and, 370–372, 372t
causality, complex vs. linear, 310
centripetal charisma, 265–266
Centrum Democraten (CD), 242, 377t, 480, 487t, 492t
Centrumstroming, 490
charismatic leaders, 251–266. See also specific individuals

989
 centripetal charisma, 265–266
conceptualizing, 253–256
Manichean demonization, 256
personal presence, 254–255
radical mission, 253–254
symbiotic hierarchy, 255–256
coteria charisma, 264–265
debased, popular usage, 263
definition, 252–253
discursive opportunity structures, 261
foundation myth, 254
methodological problems, 252
vs. personalization of politics, 251
vs. pseudo-charisma, 255
relevance, doubts/lack, 146, 243, 248, 252
rise, claims, 251
significance and examples, 251–252
theorizing support, 256–263
cultural legitimation, 260–262
few followers, 256–257
few supporters followed by breakthrough, 257
political opportunity structures, 259–260
psychological affinities, 262–263
socioeconomic change and crisis, 257–259
thesis formulation problems, 263–264
voting and, empirical link, 252
Charlie Hebdo attacks, 53–54
Chesterton, Arthur, 522–523

990
Chiang, C., 405, 407
Chistensen, George, 661
Christian Democratic parties, 382
Christians
churches, democracy and, 370–373, 372t
Judeo-Christian identity, 4
religiosity, on attitudes toward immigrants, 202–203
Chzhen, K., 537–538
Ciudadanos, 510, 515
civic nationalism, 21–22
Clarke, H., 534–535
cleavages, 212–230
approach explained, 213–214
future research, 212–213
mainstream parties’ strategies on, 212
new, 214–224
economic and cultural modernization, 216–220
education cleavage, 214–216
globalization, 220–224
party strategy, 224–228
baseline, strength of existing alignments, 225–226
challengers and mainstream parties, 227–228
critical elections, 225
dealignment, 224–225
dynamic cleavage theory, 224
political conflict between parties, 225–226
religious, 379–386, 380t–381t, 384t–386t (see also religion)
social divisions, 214

991
 social transformations from, 212
top-down processes, 225–226
Codreanu, Corneliu, 575
Coffé, Hilde, 154, 156, 157, 201–206, 209
cognitive mechanisms, 337–338
Cohen-Bendit, Daniel (Danny the Red), 418–419
collective identities. See also specific types
frames, 396
collective phenomenon, 327
collectivist-authoritarian positions, 185
Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 88, 90
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), 584
Comparative Manifesto Project dataset, 170–171, 183
comradeship
NDP, Germany, 334
youth, 356–358
conflict
group conflict theories, 148–149
political, between parties, 225–226
sociocultural, 7–8
socioeconomics, 7–8
conservatism
establishment, 631
pseudo-conservative, 632–633
reactionary, 631–632, 635–636, 645, 646
ultraconservatism, 631
conservative think tanks, 288
conspiracism, 414

992
constitutional system, U.S., 421
contact hypothesis, 150
contextual characteristics, 327
co-optation, 312, 315
Copsey, N., 5, 116
cordon sanitaire, 154, 187, 470, 482, 495, 496, 573, 656
coteria charisma, 264–265
counter-jihadist movement, 3
countermovements, 330, 337. See also specific types
counterrevolution
to Front National, France, 433–435
silent, 150–151, 373, 436, 468
Crazy White Boys, 660
crime, 151
electoral support, 156–157
media on, 270–271
Vlaams Belang on, 156
critical elections, 225
Croix de Feu, 434
cross-national links, 333. See also internationalization
European parliament, right-wing group, 395
Internet role, 404–407
Cruz, Ted, 248
cultural factors. See also specific types, countries, and organizations
globalization, 223
hegemony, 3
identity, protecting, 2
legitimation, 260–262

993
 modernization, 217–220
polarization, 227–228
sociocultural conflict, 7–8
youth, 355–356
with structural conditions, 359–360
cultural relativism, Ukraine, 620–622, 621t
culture, Americanization of, 223
Czech Republic, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
Dahl, Kristian Thulesen, 207, 254
Dahlström, Carl, 154
Dansk Folkeparti (DF), 26
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
female leadership, 207
on gender equality, 203
ideology, 550–553
impact, 557–558
leadership changes, 560
nongovernmental participation, 560–561
origins, 547t, 548, 550
popular support, 313, 314f
Protestants, 380, 380t
religiosity, 380, 381t
Davis, James H. “Cyclone,” 88
dealignment, 224–225
de Benoist, Alain, 17, 26–27, 28, 114, 261, 289–290, 374, 514. See also
nouvelle droite
Dechezelles, S., 356
dédiabolisation (de-demonization) strategy, Front National, 86, 252, 433,
440–441, 449n29

994
Deegan-Krause, K., 214
de Graaf, N. D., 225–226
de Koster, W., 222
De Lange, S. L., 17
de la Rocque, François, 434
del Hierro, Pablo, 109
della Porta, D., 328, 329, 331–339
demand-side factors
definition, 505
Southern Europe, 505
UK Independence Party, 534–536
demand-side theories, 144–145, 166
political demand for right-wing radicalism, media and, 270–272
demarcation, 394
Democracia Nacional, 509
democracy, 2
churches and, 369–373
Calvinism, 370, 371, 372t
Catholicism, 370–372, 372t
Christian, 370–373, 372t
Lutheranism, 370, 371
Protestants, 370, 371, 372t
ethnic, Israel, 669
Jeffersonian, 88
right-wing extremism on, 2
transitions to, Southern Europe, 514
Western vs. Eastern Europe, 571
democratization

995
 minority rights, 569–574
nation-building, 570, 571
demographics. See also specific countries and parties
electoral politics, 7
youth, 352–354
demonizing, 414
Demushkin, Dmitrii, 592–594
denial
antisemitism, 72–73
Holocaust, 66
racism, 72
Denmark, 545. See also Dansk Folkeparti (DF); Fremskridtspartiet (FP)
Aarhus Against the Mosque, 374, 377t
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
ideology, 550–553
impact, 557–558
origins, 547–548, 547t, 550
refugee assets, seizing, 305
Dennison, J., 536–540
deprivation
relative deprivation thesis, 352
school, 330–331
theories, 148
Déroulède, Paul, 434
Deschouwer, K., 245
De Sio, Lorenzo, 173, 181, 191n10
Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), 453
de Waardt, Van, 192n24

996
Dewinter, Filip, 30, 46, 313, 484
Diani, M., 332–333
Dichter, Avi, 674
Die III. Weg, 458
Die Rechte, 458
Dinas, E., 157, 246
directional theory, 190n3
discounting models, 190n3
discursive opportunity structures, 261, 271, 329
dogmatism, 148
Dontsov, Dmytro, 618
Downs, Anthony, 169–170
Dreyfus, Alfred, 434
Drumont, Edouard, 434
Dugin, Aleksandr, 582, 587–588
Duncan, F., 307
Dunn, K., 26, 309
Durso, R. M., 353
Duverger, Maurice, 177
Dvizhenie Protiv Nelegal’noi Immigratsii (DPNI), 591–594
dynamic cleavage theory, 224
Eastern Europe, 565–578. See also specific parties
anti-establishment, 571–572
corruption, 571–572
economics, left-leaning, 567–569
electoral support, 566, 567f
ethnic nationalism, 29–30, 566, 568
Euroskepticism and Eurorealism, 572–573

997
 historical legacies, 565–566
mainstream parties, radicalized, 574–576, 576t–577t
minorities
democratization and rights, 569–574
immigrants and refugees, 319–320, 566
mobilization against, 567, 573
refugees, Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims, 578n2
sexual, 566
nationalism, 566
origins and causes, 565
permissive environment, 10
Poland
Greater Romanian Party, 566–567
Liga Polskich Rodzin, 566, 568
Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, 380, 380t, 381t, 574
Radio Maryja, 366, 372
racism and xenophobia, 319
Slovakia, 574
People’s Party–Our Slovakia, 572
Slovenská Národná Strana, 32–33, 566, 568
Smer, 574
strategies tackling radical right, 573–574
studies, 577–578n1
unique characteristics, 567
Easton, D., 306, 307
Eatwell, R., 24, 251–253, 257
Eco, U., 106, 109
economics

998
 distribution, 175
as dominant, 178
established parties converge on, 175
expansion, cross-national links, 395
globalization, 219–222
modernization, 216–217
protectionism, 222
socioeconomics
charismatic leaders, 257–259
conflict, 7–8
strain, on youth, 351–352
education
cleavage, 214–216
collective identities, 215
cultural value preferences, 215
higher, 214–216
European institutions, 289–290
egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian, 3
Egan, Patrick J., 181, 182
Ekman, M., 661
electoral politics, 7. See also specific countries and parties
electoral support, 143–159
funnel of causality metaphor, 144
macro-level factors, 155–158
crime, 156–157
immigration and unemployment, 155–156
institutional, 155
media, 157–158

999
 meso-level factors, 152–155
party ideology, 152–153
party strength, 152
party system factors, 153–154
social capital, 154–155
micro-level factors, 145–152
anti-immigrant and unemployment, 147–150
anti-postmaterialism, etc., 150–152, 394
candidates and charismatic leaders, 146
party identification, 145–146
pure protest voting, 146–147
motives for analyzing, 143–144
multilevel explanation, 145
small area studies, 158–159
supply-side vs. demand-side factors, 144–145, 166 (see also party sys-
tems, radical right-wing parties and)
electoral systems
as enablers, 176–177
France, gender parity, 448n15
single-member-district plurality, 177, 179
electorate. See also specific groups
New Left, 218–219
Eley, G., 117–118
Ellinas, A. A., 8, 27, 228, 241, 246, 247, 274–276, 278, 510–511
emancipatory politics, 8
embeddedness, transnational, 399
Enyedi, Z., 214
Erlingsson, Gissur, 152

1000
Esping-Anderson, G., 216
Estonia, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
Eternal Fascism (Eco), 106
ethics, traditional, 413
ethnic competition theories, 148–149
ethnic democracy, Israel, 669
ethnic exclusion, 3–4
ethnic ghettos, 22
ethnic nationalism, 5, 17–18, 21–22, 25, 26–30
Central Europe, 29–30
vs. civic nationalism, 21–22, 26
definition, 26
Eastern Europe, 29–30, 566
immigrants and Muslims, 28–29
multiculturalism fears, 29
vs. nativist nationalism, 27
organic, 28
vs. regionalism and pan-Europeanism, 26–27
religious group, politically dominant, 28
“right to difference,” 28
ethnic nativism, Israel, 671–673, 673t
ethnocentrism, 413
ethnocracy, 2
Israel, 669
Southern Europe, 514
ethnocratic liberalism, 112
ethnonationalism, 1, 2
Italy, 516, 518n1

1001
 Southern Europe, 514–515, 516
Spain, 516–517
ethnopluralism, 3–4
nouvelle droite, 374, 532
radical, 17
Ettridge, David, 656
EU referendum, 540–542
Europe. See also specific countries, regions, and parties
integration, cross-national links, 394–395, 404
radical right parties, 421–424, 422t
European Alliance for Freedom, 572–573
European Freedom Alliance, 30
European New Right (ENR), 113–116, 288–289
European Parliament
cross-national right-wing group, 395, 572
East–West bloc, first, 572
European Alliance for Freedom, 572–573
Front National, 1984 election, 436–438
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, 422t
political opportunities, 397
radical right parties, 421–424, 422t
European Union, 2
cross-national links, 394–395 (see also internationalization)
party groups as meeting place, 10
politicizing, 122
Europe of a hundred flag, 26–27
Eurorealism, Eastern Europe, 572
Eurorejects, 124

1002
Euroskepticism, 122–137, 151–152, 396–397
argumentation, 124
between-group differences, 124–125
cross-national links, 394–397, 403
cultural views, of Europe, 124
definition and use, 123
Eastern Europe, 572–573
Eurorejects, 124
hard, 123
hard-soft, 123–124
history, 123
intention, of analysis, 136
issue ownership, 126–135
Chapel Hill Expert Survey, 126–127
issue entrepreneur exploitation, 126
issue salience, GAL-Tan dimension, 134–135, 135t
mainstream party politicization, lack, 126
niche parties, 126
radical right positions over time, 127–131, 128f, 130t
nationalism vs., 124
nation-state sovereignty, 124
politicizing European Union, 122–123
polity-policy distinction, 136–137
soft, 123
sovereignty, 125, 136
UK Independence Party, 531 (see also UK Independence Party (UKIP))
Evans, G., 225–226, 228, 537–538
Evans, R., 652

1003
Evraziiskii soiuz molodezhi (ESM), 593
exclusionary rhetoric, 4
exclusionism, 413
exclusive nationalism. See ethnic exclusion
extreme right vs. radical right, 2–3
extremism, political, 2. See also right-wing extremism; specific countries
and groups
Ezrow, Lawrence, 186
families, 297–298
family values, 2
Farage, Nigel, 528–530, 531, 533, 537–540, 542. See also UK Indepen-
dence Party (UKIP)
Farlie, Dennis J., 180
far right, defined, 349–351
fascism, 6, 105–119
activist cultures and organizational histories, 116–118
Australia, 652
European New Right, 113–116
“fascism lite,” 106, 118
“fighting new and different battles,” 107–109
history, 105–107
interwar, 108
Le Pen, Marine, 105–106, 115, 118
multi-fascism, 107–108
mono-fascism vs., 106–107
neofascism, contemporary post-1945, 110–113, 118–119
Putin’s regime, 583
radical right
new, 107–109

1004
 then and now, 109–110
rebirth myth, 5
Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism, 106
“fascism lite,” 106, 118
Faye, Guillaume, 32, 46
Fazzi, L., 508
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), 641
Fedorenko, K., 623
Félix, A., 208
Fella, S., 507, 513, 516, 518
Fenneman, M., 18, 29, 398, 499n7
Ferraresi, Franco, 117
Fico, Robert, 574
Fidesz, 566, 574
anti-immigrant, 23, 54
Catholics, 380, 380t
Christians, 376, 377t, 380
religiosity, 380, 381t
Fini, Gianfranco, 507
Finland, 545. See also Perussuomalaiset (PS); True Finns
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
ideology, 550–553
impact, 559
origins, 546–547, 547t, 550
Suomen Maaseudun Puolus, 546–547, 547t, 554t, 559
Fitna (Wilders), 48
Fitzgerald, Jennifer, 154–155
Fleischer, R., 106–107

1005
Fleming, A., 661
Flemish Movement, 481
fluidity, party vs. social movement, 310–312, 311f
Fontana, M.-C., 205
football hooliganism, 292–293
Ford, R., 526, 528, 530–532, 536, 537
Fortuyn, Pim
early history, 480, 489
elections and electoral support, 491–493, 492t
ideological profile, 219, 229n3, 482–483
image and appeal, 261
Islamophobia, 43
Manichean demonization, 256
nationalism, 23
Forza Italia (FI), 254, 507, 517
foundation myth, 254
Fox News, 269
Tea Party movement, 273, 275
frames and framing
analyses, 338–339
concept, 338
cross-national links, 402–404
definition, 396
by media, 8, 270–271
social movement organizations, 337–341
France, 433–449. See also Front National (FN)
counterrevolution (1789–1981), 433–435
Action Française and Camelots du Roi, 434

1006
 Alliance Républicaine pour les Libertées et le Progrès, 435
antisemitism, 434
Boulangism, 92–93, 434
Croix de Feu, 434
Front National pour l’Unité Française, 435
Ligue des Patriotes, 434
Ligue National Antisémitique, 434
nationalism, 434
Ordre Nouveau, 435
Parti des Forces Nouvelles, 435
Poujadists, 434
ultras, 434
Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 435–440
1971–1984, 435–440
1984 European Parliament election, rebirth (1984–1998), 436–438
founding and early days, 433, 434–435
history, early, 435–436
post-1998 decline, 438–439
succession, 439–440 (see also Le Pen, Marine)
Front National, Marine Le Pen, 440–446
2017 French presidential election, 446–447
dédiabolisation reinvention, 86, 252, 433, 440–441, 449n29
glass ceiling?, 443–446
rising tide (2007–2015), 441–443
turning point, current, 447
hijab ban, 51–52
Islamophobia, 53–54
Franzmann, S. T., 175, 228

1007
Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), 507–508
Free Congress Foundation, 288
Freedom Party of Austria. See Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ)
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), 192n32, 458–462
antisemitism, 67, 74–79, 74f, 75f
Catholics, 380, 380t
centripetal charisma, 265
cryptofascism, 113
current situation, elections and seats, 459–460
government participation, 192n32
historical overview, 458–459
ideology and program, 460–461
impact
current, 322
goal attainment, 314f, 315
legislative seats and support, 311–312
media exposure, 274
nationalism, 18, 31
organization, 461–462
popular support, 313, 314f
populism, 93
demonstrations, resumption of, 316
pro-Israel stance, 44
religiosity, 380, 381t
Fremskridtspartiet (FP, Denmark), 545, 547–548, 547t
electoral support, 553–557, 554t, 556t
ideology, 550
impact, 557–559

1008
 nationalism, 24
populism and success, 94
welfare chauvinism, 550
Fremskrittspartiet (FrP, Norway)
anti-immigrant, 24
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
gender gap, 206
government offices, 315
ideology, 550–552
impact, 558–559
leadership changes, 560
origins, 547–548, 547t
political responsibility, burdens, 560
populism and success, 94
racists and neo-Nazis, 117
on women’s and gay and lesbian rights, 203
women’s role, 207
Freud, Anna, 72
Front d’Opposition Nationale pour l-Europe des Patries, 436
Front National (FN), 4
anti-immigrant, 18, 19, 317
antisemitic hate crimes, 67
breakthrough, 114–115, 313
Catholics, 380, 380t
centripetal charisma, 265
cross-national influences, 402
cultural matrix, 433–434
Euroskepticism, 124, 127

1009
founding and early days, 433, 434–435
Front d’Opposition Nationale pour l-Europe des Patries, 436
Front National-Mouvement National, 439
Gollnisch, Bruno, 439–440
historical periods, early, 433–435
historical periods, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 435–440
1971–1984, 435–440
1984 European Parliament election, rebirth (1984–1998), 436–438
founding and early days, 433, 434–435
history, early, 435–436
post-1998 decline, 438–439
succession, 439–440 (see also Le Pen, Marine)
historical periods, Marine Le Pen, 440–446
2017 French presidential election, 446–447
current challenges, 443–446
dédiabolisation reinvention, 86, 252, 433, 440–441, 449n29
political credibility, 446
rising tide, 441–443
turning point, current, 447
impact, current, 322
intellectuals, 290
Islamophobia, 42, 50–51
Islamic women’s dress bans, 52
“Le Projet du Front National,” 33
master frame, 114–115
media exposure, 247, 271, 273–274, 278
Mégret, Bruno, 51–52, 437–439, 443
Mouvement National Républicain, 439

1010
 Movimento Sociale Italiano and, 290–291
nationalism, 23, 32, 33
political opportunity structures, 259
popular support, 313, 314f
populism, 93, 94
positions over time, 127
pro-Israel attitude, 44
radical right-wing plus populist idealists, 25
religiosity, 380, 381t
social change, loss of identity after, 258
women’s leadership, 207
Front National-Mouvement National (FN-MN), 439
Front National pour l’Unité Française (FNUF), 435
fundamentalism, religious, 382–383
funnel of causality, 144
Furrow, Buford, Jr., 418
Gabriel, T., 354
Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 88, 90
Gameson, W. A., 273
Garland, J., 293
Gauchon, Pascal, 435
Gellar, Pamela, 661
Gellner, E., 20
gender. See also women entries
gender, radical right voting, 200–210
cross-national differences, 205–206
gender-specific explanations, 204–205
Männerparteien, 200, 207

1011
 underrepresentation, 208
gender attitudes
on authoritarianism, 201
on class, 204–205
on immigrant threat, 201, 203–204
on law and order, 204
political interest and activity, 202
religiosity, 201–202
gender equality
Dansk Folkeparti on, 203
French electoral systems, 448n15
Vlaams Belang on, 203
gender gap, 200–204
Le Pen on, on Marine, 443–444
party organizations and women’s role, 207–208
radical right, 443
gender membership
British National Party, 208
Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, 9, 208
Generation Le Pen, 439
Georgiadou, V., 246
Germany, 453–458. See also Alternative für Deutschland (AfD); Nation-
aldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)
vs. Austria and Switzerland
actor capabilities, 470–472
cultural, political, economic, and social framework, 466–469
opportunity structures, 469–470
Bürgerbewegung pro NRW, 457

1012
 context, 452
current situation, elections and seats, 454–456
Deutsche Volksunion, 453
Die III. Weg, 458
Die Rechte, 458
historical overview, 453–454
ideology and programs, 456–457
nationalism, 35
Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, 454
organization, 457–458
popular support, 313, 314f
Republikaner, 453, 458
Gerstenfeld, P. B., 405, 407
ghettos, ethnic, 22
Gidengil, E., 201, 354, 357
Gijsberts, M., 154, 156, 240
Gilligan, C., 201
Giordano, Ralph, 49–50
Givens, T., 29, 201, 205, 533
Glaz’ev, Sergei, 585
Glistrup, Mogens, 254, 547–548
globalization. See also internationalization; specific topics
cleavages, 220–224 (see also cleavages)
cross-national links, 395
cultural, 223
economic, 7, 219–222
losers of, 341, 493, 505, 512, 515, 518, 540
mobilization legacy hypothesis, 223–224

1013
 political, 222–223
global white identity, 395
goal attainment, party impact, 306, 314f, 315
case against, 309
case for, 307–308
Golden Dawn, 510–511
antisemitic hate crimes, 67
EU position distance, 129, 130t
Euroskepticism and radical right positions over time, 127
Internet, 276
Islamophobia, 43
local mobilization, 246–247, 260, 275
media assistance, 275
media coverage, 276
reemergence, 72
salience, vs. EU, 130t, 131, 135t
women’s sub-organizations, 208
Golder, Matt, 153, 155, 156
Goldsmith, Sir James, 528
Goldthorpe, J. H., 221
Goldwater, Barry, 634–636
Gollnisch, Bruno, 439–440
Goodwin, M. J., 208, 518, 524–526, 530–532, 536–540
Gorbach, D., 617
governance, political, radical right parties on, 175
government participation, 187–188
Graham, M., 395
Gramsci, Antonio, 285

1014
Grande, E., 223
Grant, D. R., 405, 407
Greater British Movement (GBM), 523, 524
“Greater Israel” ideology, 668
Greater Romanian Party, 566–567
Greece, 510–511, 517–518. See also Golden Dawn; Southern Europe
Green parties, female electorate, 209
Gregor, A. J., 108, 111
Griffin, Nick, 261, 276, 279, 399, 525–526
Griffin, R., 6, 20, 21, 26, 110, 111–114, 341, 356, 360, 402
Grittersová, J., 226
Grizzard, N., 523–524
group conflict theories, 148–149
group dominance approach, 640
Groupement de Recherche et D’études pour la Civilisation Européenne
(GRECE), 289–290, 373–374
group-oriented voting, 192n30
groupuscules, extreme-right, 294–295
Gumilev, Lev, 587
Gush Emunim, 670
Habait Hayeudi, 673, 676, 677–678
Hagen, Carl I., 548
Hagendoorn, L., 219
Hague, William, 529
Haider, Jörg, 24, 46–49, 93, 251, 459
Bündnis Zukunft Österreich, 311
media coverage, 276
media exposure, 274

1015
 media support, 260
personal presence, 254
Halikiopoulou, D., 28
Hallo-Aho, Jussi, 560
halo effect, 158
Hamilton, R. F., 291
Han, Kyung Joon, 186
Hanson, Pauline, 251, 252, 255, 321, 650, 653–657, 659, 661–662
Happy Realization Party, 686, 687t
Happy Science, 686, 687t
Hardman, A., 359
Hardmeier, S., 205
Harmel, R., 242
Harteveld, E., 204
Hashimoto, Tôru, 688–689
hate crimes. See also Islamophobia
antisemitic (see also antisemitism)
Front National, 67
Golden Dawn, 67
Jobbik, 67
Ukraine, post-Soviet, 621–622, 621t
hate groups, U.S., 413, 421
Hayworth, J. D., 640–641
Hebdige, D. D., 360
hegemony, 3, 285
Heitmeyer, W., 394
Hellwig, T., 221
Heritage Foundation, 288

1016
Herzog, Itzhak, 672
Heyndels, Bruno, 154, 156, 157
higher education, 214–216
European institutions, 289–290
Higuchi, N., 681, 684, 688, 691, 692, 695
hijab bans, 51–52
Hirst, J. B., 651
Hobsbawn, E., 368
Hofstadter, R., 632
Holbrook, D., 415
Holland. See Low Countries; the Netherlands
Holocaust denial, 66
Holsteyn, J. J. M. van, 480, 483, 486, 490–493, 495
Holz, K., 34
homogeneity, idea of, 368
Hooghe, L., 397
hooliganism, 337
Horowitz, D., 417
Hosokawa, Morihiro, 692
Hossay, P., 327
hostility, policy, 570
Houtman, D., 215
Hövermann, B., 63, 66–67, 69–70
Howard, John, 653–654, 657–658
Hug, Simon, 190n2
Hungary, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe; Jobbik
anti-immigrant, 578n4
antisemitism, 69

1017
 Fidesz, 566, 574
anti-immigrant, 23, 54
Catholics, 380, 380t
Christians, 376, 377t, 380
religiosity, 380, 381t
Islamophobia, 54
Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártj, 35
nationalism, 35
Huntington, Samuel, 47
Husbands, C., 522
Hussein, S., 661
hyper-masculine subculture, 293
identity
collective
education, 215
frames, 396
global white, 395
Judeo-Christian, 4
loss of, after social change, 258
national
radical right parties on, 175
voter attraction, new, 173–174
party, 145–146
social identity theory, 149
youth, 356–358
ideology. See also specific parties
political, 340–341
political program and, 1–3

1018
 social basis and, 682–684, 683f
Ignazi, P., 150, 173, 218, 421, 468
Immerzeel, Tim, 151, 201, 202, 205–206
immigrant threat, 2
Eastern Europe, 319–320
electoral base, expanding, 173
electoral support, 147–150
ethnic nationalism, 28–29
Fidesz, 23, 54
framing, 4
Fremskrittspartiet, 24
Front National, 18, 19, 317
gender differences, 201, 203–204
Hungary, 23, 54, 578n4
Lega Nord, 516–517
Lijst Pim Fortuyn, 271
media, 270–271
Muslims, 2
Nordic countries, 550
Pegida, 468
populism, 94, 95–97
radical right support, 7
Tea Party, 640–641
UK Independence Party, 317, 532–533, 537–538, 538f
unemployment, 155–156
voting by poor, 190n4
youth, 353
impact, party, 10–11, 305–323. See also party impact

1019
Independent American Party, 413
infotainment, 277–278
Inglehart, R., 382
institutional factors. See also specific institutions
competitiveness, 176–180
electoral laws as enablers, 176–177
salience, convergence, and polarization, 177–180
electoral support, 155
institutional party impact, 306
case against, 309
case for, 307
Western Europe, 312–315, 313t
integration-demarcation divide, 223
intellectualism, stereotypes and prejudices, 65
intellectual schools, 288–290
International Eurasian Movement, 582
internationalization, 333, 394–404. See also globalization
common positions/visions, 403
European integration, 394–395, 404
frames, 402–404
globalization and economic expansion, 395
global white identity, 395
political opportunities, 396–402, 401f
development over time, 401, 401f
European Parliament elections, 397
Euroskepticism, 396–397
historical trans-European institutions, 397–398
mobilization and transnational events, 400–401

1020
 non-party, 399
political parties, 399
transnational embeddedness, 399
youth structures, 399–400, 402
processes, 394
Internet, 276–277
alternative online-based news, 8–9
cross-national links, 404–407
Golden Dawn, 276
importance, 9–10, 299
interwar fascism, 108
Ishihara, Shintaro, 688
Islam, in Western societies, 383–385
Islamophobia, 2, 4, 42–55. See also Patriotische Europäer gegen die Is-
lamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida)
9/11 and, 43, 46–49
1930s Europe, 43–45
Alternative für Deutschland, 43
anti-Muslim and anti-Islam discourse (1980s and 1990s), 42
vs. antisemitism, 1930s Europe, 43–45
burqas and burkinis, 51–52
definition, 43
Europe, 124
Fortuyn, Pim, 43
France, 53–54
Front National, 42, 50–51, 52
Golden Dawn, 43
history, modern, 42

1021
 Hungary, 54
labor market equilibrium (1970s), 42
Lega Nord, 51
Le Pen
Jean-Marie, 46–48
Marine, 50–51, 54
mainstreaming, 52–55
mosques and minarets, 49–51
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, 375
nouvelle droite, 46
othering, 42, 44
Partij voor de Vrijheid, 28, 48, 51
Pegida, 43, 374
Pim Fortuyn, 43
populism and, 98
pre-9/11, 44–46
Schweizerische Volkspartei, 50
September 11, 4
Switzerland, Schweizerische Volkspartei, 50
terminology, origins, 43
Trump, Donald, 375
Vlaams Belang, 42
Wilders, Geert, 31–32, 34, 43, 48, 51, 53–54
youth, 353
Israel, 667–678
2015 election, Netanyahu’s plea, 667–668
authoritarianism, 674–675
Boycott Bill, 674

1022
 B’tselem, 675
as ethnic democracy (ethnocracy), 669
ethnic nativism, 671–673, 673t
“Greater Israel” ideology, 668
Gush Emunim, 670
Habait Hayeudi, 673, 676, 677–678
historical background, 669–670
Israel Beiteinu, 673, 676, 677–678
Kach Party, 670
Nation Bill, 674
nativism, 670–673, 672f, 673t
populism, 675–677
Religious Zionists, 670, 674, 677–678, 678n3
Shovrim Shtika, 675
study, challenges, 668–669, 669t
Ultra-Orthodox parties, 673–676
Yesh Atid, 672, 675, 676
Israel Beiteinu, 673, 676, 677–678
issue appeals. See also specific issues
salience and domain, 183–186
issue ownership, 180–182
charismatic leaders, 253–254
Euroskepticism, 126–135 (see also Euroskepticism)
valence and, 180–182, 192n21
Italy, 506–509, 516–517. See also Lega Nord (LN); Southern Europe; spe-
cific parties
Alleanza Nazionale, 24, 507
ethnonationalism, 516, 518n1

1023
 Forza Italia, 254, 507, 517
Fratelli d’Italia, 507–508
La Destra, 507
Movimento 5 Stelle, 508, 509, 515
Movimento Sociale Italiano, 24, 290–291, 435, 506–507, 514
Nuovo Centrodestra, 509
Popolo della Libertà, 507
Ivarsflaten, E, 219, 549
Ivchenko, Oleksiy, 615
Izborskii Klub, 583
Izokukai, 683
Jackman, Robert W., 155, 156, 177
Jacobs, D., 353
James, Diane, 542
Janmaat, Hans, 48, 480
Jansen, Robert, 87
Japan, 681–695
anti-Korean sentiment, 681
Association to Protect Japan, 683
Happy Science and Happy Realization Party, 686
ideologies and social basis, 682–684, 683f
Izokukai, 683
Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), 683–694, 683f
Japan Innovation Party, 321–322
Japan Restoration Party, 321, 683f, 686, 687t, 688–690, 689f
Koreans as model minority, 681
MP Council of the Japan Conference, 685, 686
MP Group to Help Japanese Allegedly Abducted by North Korea (Rachi

1024
 Giren), 685–686
National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North
Korea (Sukuukai), 683f, 686
National Conference to Protect Japan, 683
nativism as historical revisionism, 682
nativist movements, 690–694
discursive opportunities, 690–692, 691f
rise and fall, 692–694, 694f
Party for Japanese Kokoro, 683f, 686
radical right in party politics, 684–690
within LDP, 684–686
successful parties, 21st c., 686–690, 687t, 689f
Seirankai, 685, 688
Sunrise Party of Japan, 683f, 686, 687t, 688, 689f, 690
Tsukurukai, 683f, 684
Your Party, 686, 687t, 689, 689f
Zaitokukai, 681, 683f, 684, 693–694, 694f
Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), 683–694, 683f
Japan Innovation Party (JIP), 321–322
Japan Restoration Party (JRP), 321, 683f, 686, 687t, 688–690, 689f
Jaspers, Eva, 151
Jeffersonian democracy, 88
Jensen, Siv, 207, 548, 551, 558
Jewish Bolshevik, 65–66
Jewish collective, 64. See also antisemitism
Jews. See antisemitism
Jobbik, 566, 572, 575
antisemitism, 79–80

1025
 hate crimes, 67
Catholics, 380, 380t
Euroskepticism, 125
Gábor Vona, 22
identity construction, 79–80
media coverage, 276
nationalism, 22, 31, 35
paramilitary uniforms, 29
religiosity, 380, 381t
victim-perpetrator reversal, 79–80
women’s sub-organizations, 208
Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom. See Jobbik
John Birch Society (JBS), 630–631, 633–634, 635
Jones, Alan, 660
Jordan, Colin, 399
Judeo-Christian identity, 4
Judeus ex Machina
definition, 64
rhetoric strategy
blaming and denying, 72–73
syncretic antisemitism, 70–71
stereotypes, 65–66, 73
Judt, Tony, 64
Jungar, A.-C., 553
Junge Nationaldemokraten (JN), 337
Jupskås, A. R., 552, 553
Kach Party, 670
Kaczyński, Jarosław, 574

1026
Kahane, Rabbi Meir, 671
Kaida, Oleksiy, 615
Kallis, A., 10–11, 42, 50
Kaltwasser, C., 203, 509–510, 511
Kandyba, Ivan, 611, 612
Karlsson, Bert, 547t, 548–549
Katsourides, Y., 352
Katz, R. S., 241
Keating, Paul, 657
Kelly, Paul, 651, 656, 658
Kestilä-Kekkonen, E., 552
Key, V. O., Jr., 247
Kilroy-Silk, Robert, 529, 542n1
Kimmel, M. S., 359–360
Kinder, D. R., 640
Kingston, M., 662
Kitschelt, H., 19, 24, 107, 150, 153, 169, 172, 177, 179, 185, 192n25, 28,
33, 215–217, 219, 223, 227, 228, 300, 414, 521, 540–541, 549, 568,
688, 689, 690
Kjærsgaard, Pia, 207, 251, 252, 254, 256, 548
Klandermans, B., 11, 208
Knapman, Roger, 529
Knigge, Pia, 156
Know-Nothing Party, 631
Koch brothers, 642
Köhler, D., 356
Kohn, H., 20, 21, 26
Koizumi, Junichiro, 688
Kondopoga technology, 592

1027
Kongress Russkikh Obshchin (KRO), 585, 586t
Konhres Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv (KUN), 612–613, 615
Konovalets, Yevhen, 618
Konvička, Martin, 578n5
Koopmans, R., 8, 157, 331–332, 334, 335
Kopecky, P., 123–124
Koreans
Japan sentiment against, 681
as model minority, 681
MP Group to Help Japanese Allegedly Abducted by North Korea (Rachi
Giren), 685–686
National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North
Korea (Sukuukai), 683f, 686
Koroļeva, I., 353
Koshar, R. J., 291
Kosmin, B., 523–524
Kotleba, Marian, 572, 575
Kovács, A., 69, 79, 80
Koval, Roman, 612
Krejčí, Jaroslav, 111
Kriesi, H., 216, 218, 222, 223, 224
Kröll, P., 400–401, 405–406
Krylov, Konstantin, 593
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 630–631, 633
Kulturkampf, 3, 530
Küpper, B., 61, 63, 66–67, 69–70
Kurer, T., 217
Kurz, Sebastian, 322
Kuzio, T., 620–621

1028
La Destra, 507
Lang, Jack, 652
Lange, Anders, 547–548
Lange, S. de, 479, 480, 483, 485, 488, 489, 491
Lapid, Yair, 672, 675
Laquer, Walter, 110–111
Latvia, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
law and order, 2, 204. See also crime
Lawrence, Duncan, 154–155
leaderless resistance, 405, 418
League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), 522–523
League of Rights, 653
Lease, Mary, 87–89
“left-behinds,” 258
left vs. right, 3
Lega Nord (LN), 506–508
anti-immigrant, 23, 516–517
centripetal charisma, 265
Euroskepticism, 517
goal attainment impact, 314f, 315
intellectuals, 290
Islamophobia, 51
nationalism, 18, 32
regionalist, 27
popular support, 314f
populism, 93–94
success, 516
Le Pen, Jean-Marie. See also Front National (FN)

1029
 apolitical, appeal to, 263
charisma, 251, 437
coteria charisma, 264
cross-national links, 399
dédiabolisation strategy, 86, 252, 433, 440–441, 449n29
ethnopluralist neo-fascist doctrine, 115–116
Frenchness, manipulating conceptions of, 261
Front National, 93, 433 (see also Front National (FN))
Front National pour l’Unité Française, 435
image and associations, 261
Islamophobia, 46–48
media exposure, 273–274, 278
mission and foundation myth, 253–254
personal presence, 254, 255
political opportunity structures, 259
socioeconomic change and crisis, 257
symbiotic hierarchy, 255
voter view, 263
Le Pen, Marine, 25. See also Front National (FN)
charisma, 251–252
coteria charisma, 264–265
fascism, 105–106, 115, 118
vs. father, 107
as female leader, 207–208
Generation Le Pen, 439
Islamophobia, 50–51, 54
issue co-optation, 315
on media, 269

1030
 mission, 254
normalization strategy, 207–208
political opportunity structures, 259
popular support, 316
Rassemblement Bleu Marine, 442
as successor to Jean-Marie, 439–440
women’s economic independence, 203
Levitsky, S., 241
Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPSU/LDPR), 582–585, 586t
libertarian-authoritarian values, 183–184, 215
occupation and, 217–218
Lieberman, Avigdor, 678
life cycle approach, 242
Liga Polskich Rodzin (LPR), 566, 568
Ligue des Patriotes, 434
Ligue National Antisémitique, 434
Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF)
anti-immigration, 271
elections and electoral support, 491–493, 492t
gay libertine founder, 150
goal attainment impact, 315
government coalition, 479
historical background, 479
ideological profile, 482–483
party organization and membership, 485–488, 487t
political and societal context, wider, 495
populist support, 560
religious agenda, 375, 377t

1031
Lipset, S. M., 2, 208, 213–214, 631
Livni, Zipi, 676–677
local mobilization
British National Party, 260
Golden Dawn, 246–247, 260, 275
party organization strategy, 246–247
lone wolves, 412, 416–419
losers of globalization, 341, 493, 505, 512, 515, 518, 540
losers of modernization, 201, 212, 218, 258, 352, 557, 695
Low Countries, 478–497. See also Belgium; the Netherlands; specific par-
ties
contemporary radical right, 481–485
elections and electoral support, 490–494, 492t
ideological profile, 481–484
party organization and membership, 485–490, 487t
definition, 478
Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid, 478
history
contemporary radical right, 479–481
shared, 478
political and societal context, wider, 494–497
Vlaams Belang, 478–479 (see also Vlaams Belang (VB))
Loxbo, Karl, 152, 246
Lubbers, M., 151, 154, 156, 201, 202, 240, 361
Lucardie, P., 245
Lucassen, G., 361
Lucke, Bernd, 458
Lutheranism, democracy and, 370, 371

1032
Lynch, P., 531
Lyons, M., 414
Madison, James, 421
Madsen, D., 262
Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártj (MIÉP), 35
mainstreaming
Australia, 650–654, 657–658
of Islamophobia, as security threat, 52–55
of niche parties, 183
mainstream left, reaction to, 227
mainstream parties. See also specific countries and parties
challengers, 227–228
on cleavages, 212
Eastern Europe, radicalized, 574–576, 576t–577t
politicization, lack, 126
on radical right success, 227
Mair, P., 214, 215, 241
male activists, predominance, 9
Mammone, A., 109, 115, 402
Manichean demonization, charismatic leaders, 256
Mann, M., 105
Männerparteien, 200, 207
Mareš, M., 399–400
Margalit, Y., 222
Marin, B., 62
Markowtiz, L., 587
Marks, G., 397
Markus, Andrew, 655

1033
mass protest dynamics, 624
mass society theories, 154, 291
master concept, 17–18
master frame, 17, 24, 114–115
Mauroy, Pierre, 437
Maurras, Charles, 434
Mayer, N., 11, 202, 206, 208, 379, 438, 444–445
McVeigh, R., 630
McVeigh, Timothy, 417–418
media, 269–280
on activist behavior, 271–272
as agenda-setting, 8, 270–271
alternative online-based news, 8–9
audience size and commercial drive, 277–278
autonomy from political system, 278–279
behavior, factors, 277–279
cynicism and distrust, 271
discursive opportunities, 271
effects, 269, 274–277
Internet, blogging, and online, 276–277, 299
political challenges to systemic actors, 274–275
stronger and newer actors, 275
type of coverage, 275–276
on voters, 270
electoral support, 157–158
framing, 8
future research, 279–280
immigration and crime, 270–271

1034
 impact, 247
personalizing, 8
political demand for right-wing radicalism, 270–272
on political parties and social movements
established, 272
legitimacy, 273
outsiders, 272–273
validation effect, 273
political supply of radicalism, 272–274
“populism,” 271
refugee crisis, Europe, 271
right-wing radicals and critics on, 269
role, debate on, 269
Mégret, Bruno, 51–52, 437–439, 443
Meguid, B. M., 174, 175, 226, 308
Meinecke, F., 368
Melnyk, Andriy, 618
Meloni, Girogia, 507
Melzer, R., 66–67
Menard, G., 10, 292
Mendelberg, T., 640
Mense Sliv, 614
meso-level factors
analysis, limited, 327–328
electoral support, 152–155
metamorphosis, party vs. social movement, 310–312, 311f
Meyer, Thomas M., 183
Michael, G., 357

1035
middle class, new, 219
Mieriņa, I., 353
migrants. See immigrant threat
Milibrand, Ed, 530
militia, American, 295–296
Miller-Idriss, C., 292, 297, 356–357, 358
minarets, bans, 49–51. See also Islamophobia
Minkenberg, M., 11, 29–30, 36, 218, 319, 367, 373–375, 379, 382–384,
384–386t, 394, 533–534
minorities. See also specific types
Eastern Europe, 566
immigrants and refugees, 319–320, 566
mobilization against, 567, 573
refugees, Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims, 578n2
rights, democratization and, 569–574
sexual, 566
Japan, Koreans, 681
rights on, New Left, 218
Mitropoulous, A., 660
Mizh-Partiyna Assambleya (MPA), 611
mobilization
cross-national links, 400–401
populism, history, 87–88
resource mobilization approaches, 328
theories, 327
mobilization, local
British National Party, 260
Golden Dawn, 246–247, 260, 275

1036
 party organization strategy, 246–247
mobilization legacy hypothesis, 223
modernization
cultural, 217–220
New Left, 218–219
economic, 216–217
losers of, 201, 212, 218, 258, 352, 557, 695
theory, 367
modularity, 295
Monday Club, 522
Mondin, A., 650, 653, 658
monism, political, 2, 19, 413
mono-fascism, 107–108
Moore, A., 652
Moreau, P., 30–31
mosques, bans, 49–51
Mouvement National Républicain (MNR), 439
Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), 508, 509, 515
Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), 24, 435, 506–507
Front National and, 290–291
survival, 514
MP Council of the Japan Conference, 685, 686
MP Group to Help Japanese Allegedly Abducted by North Korea (Rachi
Giren), 685–686
Mudde, C., 19, 20, 23–25, 27, 110, 123–124, 151, 153, 191n19, 202, 203,
207–208, 216, 309, 331, 348, 367, 413, 478–482, 484–485, 490, 497,
498n1, 531–532, 551, 553, 668, 674, 675, 682
Mughan, Anthony, 146
Muis, Jasper, 157

1037
Müller, W., 218
multiculturalism
to divide opponents’ electorate, 174
ethnic ghettos, 22
ethnic nationalist fears, 29
fears, 29
New Left, 218
multi-fascism, 107–108
Murayama, Tomiichi, 692
Muslims. See also immigrant threat; Islamophobia
ethnic nationalism, 28–29
September 11, 4
Nagel, J., 359
Nanou, K., 28
nation
definitions, 368
state vs. cultural, 368
Nationaal Europese Sociale Beweging (NESB), 480
Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (NSB), 480
National Action (NA), 659
National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North
Korea (Sukuukai), 683f, 686
National Conference to Protect Japan, 683
Nationaldemokratische Partei (NPD, Austria), 459
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, Germany), 453–457
actor capabilities, 470, 471
antisemitism, 375
cross-national links, 397, 398, 399, 400, 402–403

1038
 current situation, 454–455, 467
elections and seats, 455
Eastern Germany, 454
on European integration, 128f, 130t, 132t, 133t
in European Parliament, 397, 422t
ideology and programs, 456–457
Islamophobia, 375
master frame, 402
opportunity structures, 469–470
organization, 457–458
parliamentary decline, 333
popular support, 313, 314f
religious agenda, 377t
violence, 415
vote percent, 453
youth organization, 337
Nationale Aktion gegen die Überfremdung von Volk und Heimat (NA),
463
National Front (NF), 522–524, 527t
national identity
radical right parties, 175
voter attraction, new, 173–174
nationalism, 3–4, 17–37, 124, 413
banal, 23
characteristics, 21
civic, 21–22
contemporary, 368
defining, 20–23

1039
 ethnic, 5, 18, 21–22, 25, 26–30
Europe
Eastern, 33–36, 566
Southern, 515
Western and Central, 33–36
France, 434, 437 (see also Front National (FN))
future research, 36–37
history, recent, 17
integral, 434
Lega Nord, 32
master concept, 17–18, 26–30 (see also ethnic nationalism)
nativist, 27
principal arguments, 18–20
radical right, defining, 23–26
radical right discourses, 30–33
British National Party, 31
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, 31
Front National, 32, 33
Jobbik, 31
Partij voor de Vrijheid, 31–32
Slovenská Národná Strana, 32–33
UK independence Party, 33
radical right vs. mainstream right, 18
religion and, 368, 373–377, 377t–379t
as surrogate religion, 368
Ukraine, post-Soviet, 617–620
nationalist myth, 368
National Party, 524

1040
national populism, 115
National Socialist Movement (NSM), 523
Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU), 454
nativism, 26–30, 95–99, 668, 669t. See also ethnic nationalism
antebellum, 91
definition, 531
ethnic, Israel, 671–673, 673t
exclusion and justification, 95
Israel, 670–673, 672f, 673t
Japan, 690–694, 691f, 694f
radical right, 95–98
territorial, 671
nativist nationalism, 27
Natsional-Bol’shevistskaia Partiia (National-Bolshevik Party), 591
Natsional-demokraticheskaia partiia (NDP), 594
Natsionalny Front (National Front), 613
Naval’nyi, Aleksei, 593
Nazism, 587
Nederlandse Volks-Unie (NVU), 480
neo-Eurasianism, 587
neofascism, 110–113, 118–119
neo-Nazism
definition, 522
National Front, 523–524
the Netherlands, 478–497. See also Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF); Partij voor de
Vrijheid (PVV)
Belgium and, 478
Besluit Ontbinding Landverraderlijke Organisaties, 479–480

1041
 contemporary radical right, 481–494
elections and electoral support, 490–494, 492t
ideological profile, 482–483
party organization and membership, 485–489, 487t
Pim Fortuyn, 23, 43
political and societal context, wider, 494–497
historical background, contemporary radical right, 479–480
Nationaal Europese Sociale Beweging, 480
Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, 480
Nederlandse Volks-Unie, 480
Volkspartij voor Vrijdheid en Democratie, 483–484
networks and networking, 332–334, 402
Neue Rechte, 289, 290
New Guard, 652
New Left
cultural modernization, 218–219
electorate, 218–219
globalization, 222
multiculturalism, 218
radical right antagonism, 218–220
transformation, 215
women’s, gay, and minority rights, 218
New Politics divide, 215. See also cleavages
new radical right, 108–109
new realism, 97–98
New Right. See nouvelle droite
niche parties, 183. See also specific parties
issue salience, 183–184

1042
 mainstreaming of, 183
Nippon Kaigi, 683–694, 683f
Noel, H., 239
non-party sector, radical right, 9–10, 285–301
cross-national links, 399
families, 297–298
future research, 300–301, 301t
intellectual schools, 288–290
mapping, 286, 287t
parallel organizations, 290–291
party sector and, 1, 17
political sects, 294–297
publishers, 287–288
research review, 298–301, 298t, 300t
small groups, 292–294
voluntary associations, 291–292
Nordic countries, 545–561, 547t. See also Denmark; Finland; Norway;
Sweden
2010s, mid-, 545
challenges, 560
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
founders, 549–550
ideology, 550–553
immigration, 550
leadership changes, 554t
most similar systems design comparison, 545
origins, 546–550, 547t
political responsibility, burdens, 560–561

1043
 welfare chauvinism, 550
normal pathology, 367
normative mechanisms, 338
Norris, P., 24, 29, 308, 382
Norway, 545. See also Fremskrittspartiet (FrP, Norway)
Anders Langes Parti til Sterk Nedsettelse av Skatter, Avgifter og Of-
fentlige Inngrep, 547, 554t
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
ideology, 550–553
impact, 558–559
origins, 547–548, 547t
on women’s and gay and lesbian rights, 203
nouvelle droite, 3–4, 532. See also Front National (FN)
cultural framings, 514
ethnic nationalism, 26–27
ethnopluralism, 374, 532
European New Right, 113–116, 288–289
as inspiration to radical right, 218
intellectuals, 17
Islamophobia and, 46
origins, 114
NPD. See Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)
Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD), 509
Nuttall, Paul, 542
Ny Demokrati (NyD), 547t, 548–550, 554t, 560
Obama, Barack, Tea Party on, 636–638
occupation-shaped worldviews, 216
Oertel, Kathrin, 208

1044
Oesch, D., 7, 216, 219, 220
Öhrvall, Richard, 152
Oldfield, David, 656
Omaha Platform, 87–88
One Nation Party (ONP), 321, 653–657, 659–660
Orange Revolution, 608
Orbán, Viktor, 23, 54, 322–323, 566, 573
Ordre Nouveau, 435
organization. See also specific parties
formal, degree of, 310–312, 311f
party (see party organization)
in politics, 239
Orhanizatsiya Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv (OUN), 612, 618–619, 625n4
Österreichische Volkspartei (OVP), 458–462
cross-national alliances, 460
current situation, elections and seats, 459–460
government participation, 315
historical overview, 458–459
ideology and program, 460–461
impact, current, 322
organization, 461–462
othering, 42, 44. See also specific types
palingenetic myth, 5
Pamiat’, 582
Panebianco, A., 242, 247
pan-Europeanism, 26–27
Panizza, F., 91
parallel organizations, 290–291

1045
paramilitary uniforms, Jobbik, 29
paramilitary units, 295–296
Parker, C. M., 631, 634, 638, 640, 641, 644–646
Parliament, European. See European Parliament
parliamentary vs. extra-parliamentary options, 419–421
Parti des Forces Nouvelles (PFN), 435
Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV)
anti-immigration, 22
current success, 497
elections and electoral support, 478, 492t, 493–494
historical background, 479
ideological profile, 484
Islamophobia
Islamic women’s dress ban, 51
post- 9/11, 28, 48
nationalism, 23, 31–32
party organization and membership, 487t, 488–489
Pim Fortuyn, 23, 43
political and societal context, wider, 495–496
popular support, 313, 314f
size and growth, 143
on women’s equality and same-sex partnerships, 203
Party for Japanese Kokoro, 683f, 686
party identification, electoral support, 145–146
party ideology, electoral support, 152–153
party impact, 10–11, 305–323. See also specific parties
beyond Western Europe, 318–322
Australia, One Nation Party, 321

1046
 Eastern Europe, 319
Japan, 321–322
legitimacy, 320–321
populism, 319–320
case against, 309
case for, 307–308
Denmark, 305
direct vs. indirect, 309–310
party vs. social movement, fluidity, 310–312, 311f
research trajectory, 305–307
goal attainment, power in, 306
individual unit level of analysis, 307
institutional, 306
system responsiveness, 306
in Western Europe, 312–318, 313t, 314f
goal attainment, 313t, 315
institutionalist, 312–315, 313t
non-contender party level, 316–317
Pegida, 317–318
social movement level, 316–318
system responsiveness, 315–318
party interaction models, 308
party organization, 239–248
charismatic leaders, 243, 248
differentiation, 243
empirical evidence, 245
endogeneity concern, 246
as fuzzy concept, 241

1047
 government participation and incumbency, 245
“ground game,” 239
human capital pool, 243–244
importance, 239
life cycle approach, 242
local mobilization strategy, 246–247
media impact, 247–248
organizational dynamics across parties, 244
recent work, 244–245
research, 239–241
research challenges
data, 242, 246
formal vs. informal realms, 242
theoretical, 242–243
rooted vs. entrepreneurial hypothesis, 244–245
self-referential scholarship, 244
women
role, 207–208
underrepresentation, 208
party sector, non-party sector and, 1, 17. See also non-party sector, radical
right
party strength, electoral support, 152
party systems
electoral support, 153–154
polarization, 225–226
party systems, radical right-wing parties and, 166–192
conceptualizing, in party competition, 167–169
developmental stage, 168

1048
 performance attributes, 168–169
substantive appeal, 167–168
“established” parties, ongoing competition for votes, office, and policy
influence, 183–188
issue appeals, salience and domain, 183–186
position adjustments, voters and competitors, 186–187
temptations of political power, and government participation, 187–
188
institutional conditions of competitiveness, 176–180
electoral laws as enablers, 176–177
salience, convergence, and polarization, 177–180
short-term single-election measure, 169
spatial party competition, and rise of radical right parties, 169–175 (see
also spatial party competition, radical right parties’ rise and)
theoretical synthesis?, 188–190
valence and issue ownership, 180–182, 192n21
Parubiy, Andriy, 613
Pasquarelli, John, 655
Passmore, K., 115–116
pathological normalcy, 367
Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida)
antisemitism, 35, 67
framing, 340
gender membership, 9, 208
Islamophobia, 43, 374
media coverage, 272
organization, 340
public outrage and unemployment anxiety, 468
religious protection, 366

1049
 social movement impact, 317–318
unemployment and immigration, 468
violence, 415
Wilders support, 499n13
Patriot of Ukraine, 167, 613, 615, 616, 625n8
Payne, S. G., 109–110
Pearce, Russell, 641
Pearson, Lord, 529, 532
Pedahzur, A., 331, 668, 674
Pederson, M. N., 242
Pelinka, A., 18, 30
People’s Party–Our Slovakia (LSNS), 572
Perliger, A., 668
personality traits
authoritarianism, 147–148
dogmatism, 148
tough-mindedness, 148
personalization of politics, 251
personal presence, charismatic leaders, 254–255
Perussuomalaiset (PS, The Finns), 251, 314f
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
ideology, 550–553
impact, 557–559
leadership changes, 560
origins, 546, 547t, 550
political responsibility, burdens, 560
welfare chauvinism, 550–551
Pétain, Philippe, 434

1050
Petik, O., 617
Petry, Frauke, 252
phantom cells, 405
Pilsudski, 575
Pirro, A., 35, 573
Plataforma per Catalunya, 509
Podemos, 510, 515
Poland, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
Greater Romanian Party, 566–567
Liga Polskich Rodzin, 566, 568
Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, 574
Catholics, 380, 380t
religiosity, 380, 381t
Radio Maryja, 366, 372
policy hostility, 570
political attitudes. See also specific types
gender differences, 204
youth formation and persistence, 348
political demand, for right-wing radicalism, media and, 270–272
political governance. See also specific organizations and types
radical right parties on, 175
political impact. See party impact
political opportunity structures (POS), 259–260
cross-national links, 396–402, 401f
social movement organizations, 329, 330–332
political power, temptation of, 187–188
political sects, 294–297
Pollman, 398

1051
Popolo della Libertà (PdL), 507
populism, 1–2, 5–6, 86–100, 668, 669t. See also specific parties
agrarian
American, late 19th c., 87–88
postbellum, 91–92
antebellum nativism, 91
anti-establishment, 2
UK Independence Party, 533
appeal, 99–100
blame, 90
Canada, Social Credit Party of Alberta, 92
conceptual framework, 87
definition, 675–676
emancipation and progress, 88
Europe
Eastern, 319–320
Southern, 515
France
Boulangism, 92–93
Front National, 437 (see also Front National (FN))
history, 87–89
Islamophobia, 98
Israel, 675–677
Jeffersonian democracy, 88
media, 86, 271
migrants, 94, 95–97
mobilizations, history, 87–88
modern, later, 394

1052
 national, 115
nativism, 95–99
nature, debate on, 87
negative connotation, 86–87
Omaha Platform, 87–88
political narrative, 87
politics
of recognition, 91
of resentment, 89, 91
producerism, 90
of radical right, 93–95
American, 413–414
antimigrant rhetoric, 94
definition, 412–413
European, ideological core, 413
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, 93
Front National, 93
Lega Nord, 93–94
new realism, 97–98
Progress Parties, 94
resentment of political establishment, 93–94
ressentiment, 89–90, 100n1
sociological approach, 87
strategic and programmatic decisions, 86
terminology, origins, 428n2
post-materialism, reaction to, 150–152, 394
Potkin, Aleksandr (Belov), 591–592
Potkin, Vladimir, 592

1053
Poujade, Pierre, 447n3
Poujadists, 434
Poulton, E., 293
Powell, Enoch, 523, 534
Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS), 574
Catholics, 380, 380t
religiosity, 380, 381t
prejudice, racial, 298
preservatism, 631
priming, media, 157
Prior, M., 219
producerism, 90, 414
Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, 625n2
Progress Party
Denmark (see Fremskridtspartiet (FP, Denmark))
Norway (see Fremskrittspartiet (FrP, Norway))
promoter organizations, 244
protest
mass protest dynamics, 624
relational vision, 329
vote
pure, 146–147
unstructured, 262
Protestants
Alternative für Deutschland, 380, 380t
Dansk Folkeparti, 380, 380t
democracy and, 370, 371, 372t
Prowe, D., 107–108

1054
Prykhodko, Hryhoriy, 611
pseudo-charisma, 255
pseudo-conservative, 632–633
psychological affinities, 262–263
psychologically oriented theories, 327
publishers, 287–288
Pujos, Maurice, 434
pure protest voting, 146–147
push and pull factors, cultural, 356
Putin, Vladimir, 583, 589–590
Pytlas, Bartek, 572
Q Society, 660–661
Raab, E., 2, 631
Rachi Giren, 685–686
Racial Preservation Society (RPS), 522–523
racial resentment, 638–640
racism, 147, 413
Australia, 651–652, 653
denying, strategies, 72
Eastern Europe, 319
prejudice, 298
symbolic, 149
Tea Party, 637, 638–640
youth, 352–353, 354
radical mission, charismatic leaders, 253–254
radical right. See also specific countries, groups, and topics
components, 17
definitions, 23–26, 350, 452–453, 522, 532, 668

1055
 vs. extreme right, 2–3
vs. fascism, 5
vs. mainstream right, 18
nationalism, 30–33
party and non-party sector interactions, 1, 17
social movements, 1
term origins, 23–24
Radio Maryja, 366, 372
Ramet, S., 412
Rassemblement Bleu Marine, 442
Raunio, T., 552
reactionary conservatism, 631–632, 635–636, 645, 646
reactionary movements, 630–631, 637. See also specific types
realignment
processes, 7
theory, 226
realistic group conflict theories, 148–149
rebellion, youth, 358–359
Referendum Party, 528
refugees. See also immigrant threat
Denmark, seizing assets, 305
Eastern Europe, 319–320, 566
Regev, Miri, 671
regionalism, 26–27
Rehm, P., 219, 223
Reker, Henriette, 418
relative deprivation thesis, 352
relevance, threshold of, 275

1056
religion, 151, 366–387
antisemitism, 376
as beliefs vs. practices, 369
bringing back in, 367–369
concept and definition, 369
historical perspective, churches and democracy, 369–373
Catholicism, 370–372, 372t
Christian churches, 370–373, 372t
fundamentalism, 382–383
Lutheranism, 370, 371
Protestantism and Calvinism, 370, 371, 372t
as master frame, 374
nationalism, 368, 373–377, 377t–379t
Eastern Europe, 376
ethnopluralism, 374
European New Right, 375–376
New Right, 373–374 (see also nouvelle droite)
silent counterrevolution, 373
in U.S., 374–375
as political actor, 369
on the rise, 366
secularization, 369
summary, by country, 377t–379t
in U.S. vs. Europe, 414
religion cleavage, 379–386
Catholic countries, 385–386
Christian Democratic parties, 382
Islam, in Western societies, 383–385

1057
 religiosity and vote, 380–381, 381t
religious denomination and vote, 379–380, 380t
role and relevance, 382
Western democracies
Europe (2000), party strength, movement strength and context fac-
tors, 382–383, 384t
post-2000, confessional makeup and secularization, 383, 385t
religious diversity and pluralization, 385–386, 386t
religiosity
Christian, on attitudes toward immigrants, 202–203
gender differences, 201–202
radical-right voting, 380–381, 381t
vote, 380–381, 381t
Religious Zionists, 670, 674, 677–678, 678n3
Renan, E., 368
Rennwald, L., 220, 226, 228
Renzi, Matteo, 508–509
Republikaner (REP), 453, 458
resistance
leaderless, 405
youth, 358–359
resource mobilization approaches, 328
ressentiment, 89–90, 100n1
resurgence, radical right, 1
reverse affirmative action, 4
reverse new politics thesis, 218
reverse strategic votes, 447n6
Revolution of Dignity, 608, 615–617, 623

1058
“right to difference,” 17
right vs. left, 3
right-wing extremism. See also specific groups and topics
definitions, 2, 453
demands, 2
on democracy, 2
subtypes, 2
right-wing radicalism, 367–368. See also specific groups and topics
Riker, W. H., 171, 174, 178, 225
riots, 416–417
rumor in, 417
Roberts, D., 108
Robertson, R., 369
Rodina, 583, 585, 586t
Rodriguez-Aguilera de Prat, C., 19
Roemer, John E., 190n4
Rogozin, Dmitry, 585
Rokkan, S., 208, 213–214, 225
Romania, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
Rooduijn, M., 24, 28
rooted vs. entrepreneurial hypothesis, 244–245
Rossiter, C., 631
routine operatives, 217
Rudling, P. A. 1, 620
Rukh, 612
rumor, in riots, 417
Russia, post-Soviet, 582–596
authoritarianism, 583

1059
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 584
historical background, 582–583
International Eurasian Movement, 582
Izborskii Klub, 583
Kongress Russkikh Obshchin, 585, 586t
Liberal-Democratic Party, 582–585, 586t
migrants and ethnocentrism, 589
neo-Eurasianism, 587
non-systemic forces, 583, 588–595
Boevaia Organizatsiia Russkikh Natsionalistov, 591
Dvizhenie Protiv Nelegal’noi Immigratsii, 591–594
Evraziiskii soiuz molodezhi, 593
Kondopoga technology, 592
Natsional-Bol’shevistskaia Partiia, 591
Natsional-demokraticheskaia partiia, 594
political parties and movements, 591–595
Russkie, 593–594
Russkii Obraz, 591
Russkoe Natsional’noe Edinstvo, 591
Russkoe obshchestvennoe dvizhenie, 593–594
skinhead subculture, 588–591, 590t
Slavianskii Soiuz, 592–593, 594
Pamiat’, 582
research, 582–583
right-wing extremist publicism, 585–588, 586t
Rodina, 583, 585, 586t
systemic party-political far right, 583, 584–585
vote shares, 586t

1060
 Zhirinovskii, 254, 255, 265, 582, 584, 586t
Russkie, 593–594
Russkii Obraz (Russian Image), 591
Russkoe Natsional’noe Edinstvo (RNE), 591
Russkoe obshchestvennoe dvizhenie (ROD), 593–594
Ruth, Patrick, 158
Ruzza, C., 505–508, 513, 515, 516, 518
Rydgren, J., 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 24, 28, 114–116, 147, 154, 158, 219, 350,
354–355, 522, 532, 535, 545, 557
Said, Edward, 44, 45
Saleam, Jim, 659
salience, issue, 183–186, 226
Euroskepticism, 131–135, 135t
Salonfähigkeit, 308
Salvini, Matteo, 251, 254, 260, 508
Samuels, D., 221
Sartori, G., 214, 275
Scandinavia. See also specific countries
popular support, 313, 314f
scapegoating, 414
theories, 149–150
Schain, M., 327
Schattschneider, E. E., 225
Scheepers, P., 154, 156, 240
Schmidt, P., 26
Schmitt, Carl, 374
Schuppener, G., 356
Schweizer Demokraten (SD), 463

1061
Schweizerische Republikanische Bewegung (SRB), 463
Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), 23, 50, 463
current situation, elections and seats, 463–464
goal attainment impact, 314f, 315
historical overview, 463
ideologies and programs, 464–465
Islamophobia, 50
organization, 465–466
popular support, 313, 314f
religion, 366
sects, political, 294–297
segmented-decentralized structure, 333
Seirankai, 685, 688
Sektor, Pravyi, 614, 616–617, 623
self-categorization theory (SCT), 149
self-referential scholarship, 244
September 11, 4
Shakurai, Makoto, 693
Sheets, Penelope, 158
short-term single-election measure, 169
Shovrim Shtika, 675
Shukhevych, Yuriy, 611, 620
Siderov, Volen, 34
Sidler, A., 205
Siedler, T., 352, 354
silent counterrevolution, 150–151, 373, 436, 469
Simi, P., 356, 358, 359
Simon, J., 418–419

1062
Singh, S. P., 309
single-member-district plurality system, 177, 179
Skenderovic, D., 80–81
skilled workers, 217
skinhead subculture, 293–294
post-Soviet Russia, 588–591, 590t
Skocpol, T., 339
Slavianskii Soiuz (SS), 592–593, 594
Slovakia, 565–578, 574. See also Eastern Europe
People’s Party–Our Slovakia, 572
Slovenská Národná Strana, 32–33, 125, 566, 568
Smer, 574
Slovenská Národná Strana (SNS), 32–33, 566, 568
Euroskepticism, 125
nationalism, 32–33
small area studies, electoral support, 158–159
small groups, 292–294
Smer, 574
Smith, A., 368
Smith, E., 405
Smith, Jason Matthew, 156
Smooha, S., 669
Sniderman, P. M., 219
Snow, D. A., 338
Snow, P. G., 262
social capital
bonding vs. bridging, 292
electoral support, 154–155

1063
social cohesion index, 153
Social Credit Party of Alberta, 92
social-cultural specialists, 218
Social Democratic parties, centrist movement, 7
social divisions. See also specific types
cleavages, 214
social identity theory (SIT), 149
social movement organizations, 327–343. See also specific types
action repertoire (violence), 334–337, 341
vs. breakdown approaches, 327, 328, 334–335
cognitive mechanisms, 337–338
collective phenomenon, 327
countermovements, 330, 337
cultural and symbolic dimensions, 329
vs. discursive opportunity structures, 329
framing on, 337–341
model, 328, 328f
networks, 332–334
normative mechanisms, 338
political opportunity structures, 329, 330–332
protest, relational vision, 329
psychologically oriented theories, 327
vs. resource mobilization approaches, 328
vs. structuralist biases, 329
value of approach, 328
social movements. See also specific types
co-optation, 312
opportunity structures, 312

1064
 vs. party, fluidity, 310–312, 311f
radical right as, 1, 9
Social-National Assembly, 616, 617, 625n8
social network analysis, 332–334
social transformations, from cleavages, 212
sociocultural authoritarianism, 2
sociocultural conflict, 7–8
sociodemographics. See also specific topics
electoral politics, 7
socioeconomics. See also economics
charismatic leaders, 257–259
conflict, 7–8
Soini, Timo, 251, 546, 560. See also Perussuomalaiset (PS)
political opportunity structures, 260
socioeconomic change and crisis, 257
Sotsial-Natsionalna Partiya Ukrayiny (SNPU), 613–615, 625n6
Mense Sliv, 614
Svoboda from, 614–615
Soule, S. A., 300
Southern Europe, 505–518. See also specific countries
comparison, Italy, Spain, and Greece, 511–515
context, 511–512
ethnocracy, 514
nationalism, 515
populism, 515
transitions to democracy, legacy, 514
weakness, border control issues, and implications, 512–514
contextual factors, 515

1065
 demand-side factors, 505
Greece, 510–511, 517–518
Italy, 506–509, 516–517
radical right weakness, 515–516
Spain, 509–510, 516–517
supply-side factors, 505
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), 413, 424
Spain, 509–510. See also Southern Europe
Ciudadanos, 510, 515
Democracia Nacional, 509
ethnonationalism, 516–517
Plataforma per Catalunya, 509
Podemos, 510, 515
Spanje, Joost van, 157
spatial behavioral party competition theory, 170
spatial competition theories, 169–170, 191–192n20
spatial party competition, radical right parties’ rise and, 169–175
empirical sources, Comparative Manifesto Project dataset, 170–171
established parties converge
on economic distribution, but diverge on political governance and na-
tional identity, 175
on first economic dimension, 171–173
established parties diverge on second dimension
attract new voters with national identity appeal, 173–174
divide opponents’ electorate with multicultural appeal, 174
premises, 170
spatial behavioral party competition theory, 170
spatial competition theories, 169–170

1066
Spektorowski, A., 27
Spencer, Robert, 661
Speransky, C., 356
Spies, D., 228
Spies, E., 226
Spiess, Ennis, 175
Spohn, W., 368
Sprinzak, Ehud, 415–416
state nation vs. cultural nation, 368
statism, 413–414
status politics, 149
Steger, 459
stereotypes
antisemitic, 65–66, 73
intellectualism, 65
Stetsko, Yasoslava, 612, 615
Stirbois Jean-Pierre, 436
Stögner, K., 62
Stokes, Donald E., 180
Stone, D., 17–18
Stop Islamification of Europe, 406
Storace, Francesco, 507
Strache, Heinz-Christian, 30, 74–79, 74f, 75f, 255, 311, 316, 459, 461–
462. See also Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ)
Strahm, A., 405
structuralist biases, 329
Stubager, R., 215, 219
subcultures. See also specific types

1067
 hidden, 299–300
youth engagement, 348
Submaranian, Narendra, 91
Sukuukai, 683f, 686
Sundell, Anders, 154
Sunrise Party of Japan (SP), 683f, 686, 687t, 688, 689f, 690
Suomen Maaseudun Puolus (SMP)
electoral support, 554t
impact, 559
origins, 546–547, 547t
supply-side factors, 144, 166–167, 240, 505. See also party systems, radi-
cal right-wing parties and
definition, 505
Southern Europe, 505
UK Independence Party, 536–540, 537f, 538f, 539t
supranational entities, 2
Svåsand, L., 242
Sverigedemokraterna (SD), 545
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t
ideology, 550–553
impact, 559–560
origins, 547t, 549–550
Svoboda (Vseukrayinske Obyednannya “Svoboda”), 608, 609, 610t, 614–
615, 622
Swank, D., 155, 156, 300
Sweden, 545. See also Sverigedemokraterna (SD)
antisemitism, 69
Bevara Sverige Svenskt, 549
electoral support, 553–557, 554t–556t

1068
 ideology, 550–553
impact, 559–560
Ny Demokrati, 547t, 548–550, 554t, 560
origins, 547t, 548–549
Switzerland, 452–453, 462–466. See also Schweizerische Volkspartei
(SVP)
Auto-Partei, 463
Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei, 464
context, 452
current situation, elections and seats, 463–464
vs. Germany and Austria
actor capabilities, 470–472
cultural, political, economic, and social framework, 466–469
opportunity structures, 469–470
historical overview, 462–463
ideology and programs, 464–465
minaret ban, 50
Nationale Aktion gegen die Überfremdung von Volk und Heimat, 463
organization, 465–466
Schweizer Demokraten, 463
Schweizerische Republikanische Bewegung, 463
Schweizerische Volkspartei, 463
symbiotic hierarchy, charismatic leaders, 255–256
symbolic racism, 149
syncretic antisemitism, 70–71
system responsiveness, party impact, 306
case against, 309
case for, 308

1069
systems theory process model, Easton’s, 306
Szczerbiak, A., 123
Szilágyi, A., 69, 79, 80
Taggart, P., 123
Tajfel, Henri, 149
Tavan, G., 651
Taylor, M., 415
Tea Party, 288, 322, 421, 636–644
2010+, 641–642
anti-immigrant, 640–641
demographics, 638
fascism, 637
framing, 339
organization, 334
origins and early success, 636–637
racial resentment, 638–640
as reactionary movement, 630–631, 637
religion, 366, 374–375
Trump support, 644
white supremacy groups, 639
technical specialists, 218
temptations, of political power and government participation, 187–188
Teperoglou, E., 223
territorial nativism, 671
terrorism. See also violence, political
clandestine terrorist groups, 415
left- vs. right-wing, 415–416
The Finns, 546. See also Perussuomalaiset (PS, The Finns)

1070
 popular support, 314f
the Netherlands. See the Netherlands
theory of cultural and political hegemony, 285
Thor Steinar, 358
threshold of relevance, 275
Thurmond, Strom, 634
Tilley, J., 226
Tillie, J., 499n7
Tixier-Vignancour, Jean-Louis, 435
tough-mindedness, 148
Tournier-Sol, K., 531
Towler, C., 635
transnationalism, 402. See also internationalization
transnational radical right
events, 400–401
exchange and learning, 395
politics, 395
solidarity, 405
Traverso, Enzo, 45
Treadwell, J., 293
True Finns, 433, 545, 546. See also Nordic countries; Perussuomalaiset
(PS)
blogging and success, 276–277
charismatic leader, 251
Euroskepticism, 124, 127, 128f, 129, 130t, 132t, 134, 135t
history, 546, 547t
party organization, 243
Trump, Donald, 115, 414, 642

1071
 anti-Muslim and xenophobia, 375
apolitical, appeal to, 263
charisma, failure to benefit from, 263
“left-behind” supporters, 258
Manichean demonization, 256
on media, 269
media coverage, 273, 274
party organization theory, 248
socioeconomic change and crisis, 258
Tryzyb (Trident), 616
Tsatsanis, E., 223
Tsukurukai, 683f, 684
Tudor, Cornelium Vadim, 567, 578n3
Turner, John C., 149
Tyahnybok, Oleh, 613–616
Tymoshenko, Yulia, 623
Tyndall, John, 399, 523, 524
UK Independence Party (UKIP), 191n14, 528–542
anti-establishment populism, 533
as anti-European choice (1999+), 528–529
anti-immigration, 317, 532–533, 537–539, 538f, 539t
election results (1970–2015), 527t
EU referendum, 540–542
Euroskepticism, 124, 125, 127, 531
founding and early history, 526, 527t, 528
impact, current, 322
nationalism, 33
popular support, 314f, 315

1072
 positions over time, 125, 127
prominence, 521
as radical right?, 530–534
rise of, 1993–2013, 521, 528–530
rise of, explaining, 534–540
demand-side, 534–536
supply-side, 536–540, 537f, 538f, 539t
successes (2000–2016), 521
terrorism, home-grown, 53
Ukraine, 565–578. See also Eastern Europe
Ukraine, post-Soviet, 608–625
2000s and Svoboda’s rise, 614–615
antisemitism and hate crimes, 621–622, 621t
Azov, 617, 624
birth, independent Ukraine, 611–614
as fascist, labeling, 608
historical background, 608–609
Konhres Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv, 612–613, 615
mass protest dynamics, 624
Mense Sliv, 614
Mizh-Partiyna Assambleya, 611
nationalisms
competing, 619–620
structural-historical context, 617–620
Natsionalny Front, 613
Orhanizatsiya Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv, 612, 618–619, 625n4
Patriot of Ukraine, 167, 613, 615, 616, 625n8
peripheral role, 608–609

1073
 Pravyi Sektor, 614, 616–617, 623
Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, 625n2
radical right-winters, self-presentation, 609
Revolution of Dignity, during and after, 608, 615–617, 623
Rukh, 612
Social-National Assembly, 616, 617, 625n8
Sotsial-Natsionalna Partiya Ukrayiny, 613–615, 625n6
space and opportunity, 622–624
Tryzyb (Trident), 616
Ukrainocentrism, 618
Ukrayinska Narodna Samooborona, 611–612
Ukrayinska Natsionalna Asambleya, 611–612
Ukrayinska Natsionalna Partiya, 611
Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya, 618–619
Ukrayinska Viyskova Orhanizatsiya, 618
Ukrayinskyi Demokratychnyi Alyans za Reformy, 616
ultra-nationalism, 609
vs. cultural relativism, 620–622, 621t
UNA-UNSO, 611–612, 614, 615
vote share, 609, 610t
Vseukrayinske Obyednannya “Svoboda,” 608, 609, 610t, 614–615, 622
Vseukrayinske Politychne Obyednannya-Derzhavna Samostiynist
Ukrayiny, 611, 612
weakness and lack of support, 608, 609
Ukrainocentrism, 618
Ukrayinska Narodna Samooborona (UNSO), 611–612
Ukrayinska Natsionalna Asambleya (UNA), 611–612
Ukrayinska Natsionalna Partiya (UNP), 611

1074
Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA), 618–619
Ukrayinska Viyskova Orhanizatsiya (UVO), 618
Ukrayinskyi Demokratychnyi Alyans za Reformy (UDAR), 616
ultraconservatism, 631
ultra-nationalism, Ukraine, 620–622, 621t
Ultra-Orthodox parties, 673, 674–675, 676
ultras, 293
France, 434
Umland, A., 582–588
UNA-UNSO, 611–612, 614, 615
unemployment, 216–217
anxiety, Pegida support, 468
electoral support, 147–150
immigration and, electoral support, 155–156
youth, 352
Union de la Gauche, 437
United Kingdom (UK), 521–542. See also British National Party (BNP);
UK Independence Party (UKIP)
British exceptionalism, 521
EU referendum, 540–542
failure and radical right, 521
historical background, 522–527, 527t
1980s, 524–525
1999–2010, 525, 528–529
2015+, 526–527
anti-Islamic English Defence League, 526
Britain First, 526
general election results (1970–2015), 527t

1075
 Greater British Movement, 523, 524
League of Empire Loyalists, 522–523
Monday Club, 522
National Front, 522–524, 527t
National Party, 524
National Socialist Movement, 523
Racial Preservation Society, 522–523
Referendum Party, 528
UK Independence Party, 526, 527t
mainstream Conservative Party and, 521
United States (US), 630–647
Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, 641
Federation for American Immigration Reform, 641
John Birch Society, 630–631, 633–634, 635
Know-Nothing Party, 631
Ku Klux Klan, 630–631, 633
paranoid politics, 632
preservatism, 631
pseudo-conservative, 632–633
radical right parties, 421–424, 423f
reactionary conservatism, 631–632, 635–636
reactionary movements, 630–631
reactionary right
1960s, 633–636
explanation, 631–633
Tea Party, 630–631, 636–644 (see also Tea Party)
Trump, 642
ultraconservatism, 631

1076
 Voting Rights Act, 643
unskilled working class, 217
Ur-Fascism, 106
Usherwood, S., 541
valence competition theory, 180–182, 192n21
validation effect, 273
value infusion, 241
van der Brug, W., 146, 499n7
vander Lippe, T., 202, 205–206
van der Valk, I., 353, 358–359
van der Waal, J., 215, 222
van Dijk, T. A., 72
Van Dyke, N., 300
van Gogh, Theo, 417
Vanguard News Network (VNN), 406
van Herpen, M. H., 106
Van Spanje, J., 245
van Tongeren, Jack, 659
Vasilopoulou, S., 23, 28, 122, 124–126, 128, 136, 151
Vaugeois, Henri, 434
Veikko, Vennamo, 546
Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU), 458
Vermeir, Jan, 154, 156, 157
Veugelers, J., 10, 291, 292, 297, 300
Vial, Pierre, 117
vigilantism, 415
violence, political, 328, 328f, 412–428
antisemitism, 425–428, 426t–427t, 427f

1077
 causes
clandestine terrorist groups, 415
Islamization of Europe, fear of, 415
right-wing populist parties, 414–415
Eastern Europe, 413
European parliament, radical right parties, 421–424, 422t
forms, 416–417
lone wolves, 412, 416–419
most-similar-systems approach, 412
parliamentary vs. extra-parliamentary options, 419–421
radical-right populism
American, 413–414
definition, 412–413
European, ideological core, 413
riots, 416–417
skinhead, post-Soviet Russia, 588–591, 590t
social movement organizations, 334–337, 341
social support on, 330–332
terrorism, left- vs. right-wing, 415–416
Ukrayinska Narodna Samooborona, 611–612
U.S., radical right parties in, 421–424, 423f
vigilantism, 415
Vistbacka, Raimo, 546
Vitrenko, Nataliya, 625n2
Vlaams Belang (VB)
70-Point Plan, 46
breakthrough, initial, 313
crime, 156

1078
 current success, 498
elections and electoral support, 492t, 494
Front National, copying, 24
on gender equality, 203
historical background, 481
ideological profile, 484
independent Flemish republic, 27
Islamophobia, 42
nationalism, 17, 18, 32
party identification, 145
party organization and membership, 487t, 489–490
political and societal context, wider, 496
pro-Israel attitude, 44
pure protest voting, 147
rise and electoral success, 478–479
size and growth, 144
on women’s and gay and lesbian rights, 203
Vlaams Blok, 481, 484–485
elections and electoral support, 492t, 494
Vlaams Belang from, 483–484
Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV), 480–481
Vliegenthart, Rens, 157
Volkspartij voor Vrijdheid en Democratie (VVD), 483–484
Volksunie (VU), 480
elections and electoral support, 494
historical background, contemporary radical right, 480–481
Volpert, Karin, 155, 156, 177
voluntary associations, 291–292

1079
Vona, Gábor, 22, 254
Von Beyme, C., 24
von Beyme, K., 144, 557
Vossen, Koen, 484
voters, new, national identity appeal, 173–174
voting
group-oriented, 192n30
by poor, anti-immigrant and xenophobic, 190n4
protest
pure, 146–147
unstructured, 262
religiosity and, 380–381, 381t
Voting Rights Act (VRA), 643
Vseukrayinske Obyednannya “Svoboda,” 608, 609, 610t, 614–615, 622
Vseukrayinske Politychne Obyednannya-Derzhavna Samostiynist
Ukrayiny (DSU), 611, 612
Wagemann, C., 328
Wagnenaar, W., 358–359
Wagner, Markus, 183
Walter, S., 221
watchdog organizations, 413
Waters, Anne Marie, 542
Watson, Tom, 88
Watts, M. W., 294
Weber, M., 369
Weber, Till, 173, 181, 190n3, 191n10
Webster, Martin, 523
wedge issue move, 174

1080
Weinberg, L., 118
Weingast, Barry, 171–172, 178
Welch, Robert, 633–634
welfare chauvinism, 155, 550
welfare populism, 192n25
Westinen, J., 552
Whitaker, R., 531
White Aryan Resistance, 418
White Australia, 652–653
Whitlam, Gough, 653
Widfeldt, A., 551, 557, 559
Widmer-Schlumpf, Eveline, 464
Wilders, Geert, 47, 219
anti-Muslim, 31–32, 34, 43, 48, 51, 53–54
charisma, 251, 254
coteria charisma, 265
elections and electoral support, 492t, 493–494
foundation myth, 254
ideological profile, 483–484
image and appeal, 261–262
on LPF decline and fal, and membership parties, 482, 485–486, 488,
489
on media, 269
media support, 260
nationalism, 22
party organization and membership, 483, 485–489
personal presence, 254
political and societal context, wider, 495–496

1081
Williams, Mark, 637
Williams, M.-H., 18, 308, 310, 311, 318
Williams, Raymond, 285
Williamson, V., 339
Wilson, A., 245
Wilson, C., 397
Wippermann, W., 373
Witte, Hans, 147
Wodak, R., 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 71–72, 77
Wolfsfeld, G., 273
women. See also gender
economic independence, Marine Le Pen, 203
equality, Partij voor de Vrijheid, 203
Front National leadership, 207
in party organizations
Golden Dawn, 208
Jobbik, 208
role, 207–208
underrepresentation, 208
women’s rights
Fremskrittspartiet on, 203
New Left, 218
Norway, 203
Vlaams Belang, 203
working class
skilled workers, 217
unskilled, 217
xenophobia, 2, 147–148, 413

1082
 Eastern Europe, 319
Trump, Donald, 375
voting by poor, 190n4
youth, 352–353, 354
Ya-alon, Moshe, 672, 675
Yamano, Sharin, 693
Yanukovych, Victor, 623
Yarosh, Dmytro, 616, 617
Yaukovych, Viktor, 620
Yehimovitz, Shelley, 672
Yesh Atid, 672, 675, 676
Your Party (YP), 686, 687t, 689, 689f
youth, 348–362
background, individual, 354–355
belonging and comradeship, 356–358
CasaPound, 400
cross-national links, 399–400, 402
cultural factors, 355–356
definitions, 348, 349–351
demographic and social change, 352–354
economic strain, 351–352
engagement, subcultures, 348
far right, defined, 349–351
future research, 360–362
political attitudes, formation and persistence, 348
resistance and rebellion, 358–359
scholarship
challenges, 349

1083
 scarcity, 348
structural conditions, 351
with cultural factors, 359–360
violence, 348–349
Yuschenko, Victor, 623
Zaitokukai, 681, 683f, 684, 693–694, 694f
Zappalà, G., 651
Zaslove, A., 23, 27, 307
Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 582, 584, 586t
centripetal charisma, 265
foundation myth, 254
symbiotic hierarchy, 255
Zick, A., 61, 63, 66–67, 69–70
Zoar, Michael, 675
Zola, Emile, 434
Zolberg, A., 327
Zuckerman, A., 214
Zvarych, Roman, 612–613

1084
Table of Contents
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 5
Contents 6
Acknowledgments 9
List of Contributors 10
1. The Radical Right: An Introduction 22
Part I Ideology and Discourse 40
2. The Radical Right and Nationalism 42
3. The Radical Right and Islamophobia 75
4. The Radical Right and Antisemitism 102
5. The Radical Right and Populism 138
6. The Radical Right and Fascism 165
7. The Radical Right and Euroskepticism 188
Part II Issues 213
8. Explaining Electoral Support for the Radical Right 215
9. Party Systems and Radical Right-Wing Parties 247
10. Gender and the Radical Right 294
11. Globalization, Cleavages, and the Radical Right 310
12. Party Organization and the Radical Right 348
13. Charisma and the Radical Right 365
14. Media and the Radical Right 389
15. The Non-Party Sector of the Radical Right 411
16. The Political Impact of the Radical Right 439
17. The Radical Right as Social Movement Organizations 468
18. Youth and the Radical Right 497
19. Religion and the Radical Right 522
20. Radical Right Cross-National Links and International Cooper-
561
ation
21. Political Violence and the Radical Right 586
Part III Case Studies 612

1085
 22. The Radical Right in France 614
23. The Radical Right in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland 641
24. The Radical Right in Belgium and the Netherlands 678
25. The Radical Right in Southern Europe 716
26. The Radical Right in the United Kingdom 738
27. The Radical Right in the Nordic Countries 770
28. The Radical Right in Eastern Europe 798
29. The Radical Right in Post-Soviet Russia 822
30. The Radical Right in Post-Soviet Ukraine 860
31. The Radical Right in the United States of America 890
32. The Radical Right in Australia 917
33. The Radical Right in Israel 940
34. The Radical Right in Japan 959
Index 980

1086