parties increased significantly between the 1980s and 1990s. Second, the countries studied fall into two main categories. In seven of them – Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and Italy, plus Denmark and Norway – radical right-wing party support clearly can be considered strong by the late 1990s. In some of these countries, that strength dropped in the following decade due to changes in the nature of those parties (Italy), splits within those parties (Austria), or other parties’ reactions to them (France). However, with the exception of France, these are the countries in which the radical right has moved ever-closer to the center of power, and joined or supported and influenced government. By way of contrast, in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and – until recently – the Netherlands, the radical right has remained more extreme or was hardly visible in party form (see also Table 2). When looking at the cases with the most significant upswing of the radical right in terms of voter support, we notice that it is the new radical right – i.e., the newly formed or re-formed parties – that are ascendant. That is, they belong to the ethnocentrist or populist rather than to the extremist or fascist variant. As pointed out above, their rise is linked to an ideological and strategic renewal, along with changing cleavage patterns in party competition and the rise of the immigration issue. Together, these factors have opened the electoral gates for the new radical right. Still, more is involved here. As already established, there is no overall trend in regard to xenophobia. Figure 2 suggested that in some countries, like Germany, Austria and Portugal, xenophobia is on the rise.10 In others – most interestingly, in those where the radical right has been quite successful electorally, such as Belgium, France, and Denmark – xenophobia seems to have decreased significantly during the first decade of the 21st century. Scholarly studies11 have demonstrated that there is only a weak correlation between rates of immigration or the presence of
10 For recent data on Germany, see also Oliver Decker et al., Die Mitte im Umbruch: Rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Deutschland 2012 (Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2012). 11 See for example Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (cited in footnote 2), pp. 210 – 216, and Decker et al., Die Mitte im Umbruch (cited in footnote 10), pp. 31 – 39.
RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM IN EUROPE
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