This article offers comparative findings of the nature of populist Euroscepticism in political parties in contemporary Europe in the face of the Great Recession, migrant crisis, and Brexit. Drawing on case studies included in the Special Issue on France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the article presents summary cross-national data on the positions of parties, the relative importance of the crisis, the framing of Euroscepticism, and the impact of Euroscepticism in different country cases. We use this data to conclude that there are important differences between left- and right-wing variants of populist Euroscepticism, and that although there is diversity across the cases, there is an overall picture of resilience against populist Euroscepticism.
The literature on the far right is trying to connect with social movement studies. Scholars from different social scientific backgrounds are increasingly acknowledging that extra-parliamentary grassroots activism is part of the alliance and conflict structure of nativist collective actors. The recent rise in far-right street politicsor, precisely, its re-emergence with seemingly different clothesshould encourage the study of the inter-relations between party and non-party collective actors. As a case in point, the far right not only includes political parties geared towards elections and public office but also social movements or 'networks of networks' that aim to mobilise public support, and a conglomeration of subcultural groups and groupuscules. By putting forward a three-part metric to analyse mobilisation factors at the macro, meso, and micro levels, this piece and the Special Issue it introduces bring the (inter-)relations between far-right parties, movements, and subcultures frontstage, and elaborate on nativist collective action across different arenas of contention.
The scholarship on the far right has often interpreted nativist organizations as straddling the conceptual space between party and movement. These groups contest elections in order to gain representation in office, yet they also seek to mobilize public support to engage contentious issues like social movements. Despite theoretical commonalities, very little empirical research has focused on far-right “movement parties” as collective actors operating both in the protest and the electoral arenas. The article redresses this inconsistency by exploring the organizational and strategic configuration of two far-right collective actors—the Hungarian Jobbik and the Italian CasaPound. Deploying original interviews with high-ranking officials, the analysis enhances our understanding of the internal “supply side” of the far right as well as empirical knowledge on hybrid organizations that emerge from grassroots activism and successively organize to pursue the electoral option.
Populist radical right (PRR) parties are typically critical of European integration. They deem the EU an elitist project and consider European integration a threat to national sovereignty. Our article assesses whether, and how, PRR parties have changed their 'EU-pessimist' discourse following the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis. The crisis has ostensibly provided scope for PRR parties across Europe to bolster their EU-pessimism and place more emphasis on socioeconomic frames. We analyse the evolution of the PRR's discourse in five countries. The article shows that, although PRR parties have generally brought the crisis into their discourses, they have responded to it in different ways, displaying varying degrees of EU-pessimism. These responses were partly informed by the opportunities provided by their contexts, but ostensibly more so by the strategic considerations of PRR party leaderships.
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