1987 poster of the political wing of ETA, Batasuna.Extreme, populist and anti-systemic parties are on the rise! Only this year elections in the Netherlands and Bulgaria and Germany returned excellent results for radical right parties (e.g. Party of Freedom, Alternative for Germany or Ataka). Even in usually quiet Liechtenstein The Independents (DU), a right-wing populist party, managed to obtain more than 18 percent of the votes. In France, Marine Le Pen came second in the presidential elections. Last Sunday the Freedom Party of Austria got more than 20 percent of the vote, and in countries like Greece or Slovakia support for neo-Nazi parties (i.e. Golden Dawn or People’s Party Our Slovakia) reach a notable 7 percent of the electorate.
We learn from the “Who Governs Europe” project, that the average percentage of votes for anti-establishment (both right and left) parties in 20 western European consolidated democracies stands currently at 24.2, when less than fifty years ago it was 13.2 percent. Indeed, the success of populist/anti-systemic parties so far this decade almost doubles the average percentage of votes obtained at the height of the inter-war period (14.3 in the 1930s).
Even if we were to disregard this trend in the levels of electoral support for those parties, the pattern is clear: almost 50 percent of the elections in western Europe with a record high polarization since 1900 have taken place in the last 15 years, the other 50 percent spreads across the 10 preceding decades. Given these general trends/patterns, and notwithstanding important nuances, scholars and practitioners alike seem to agree on the “threat” these types of parties pose for liberal democracy.
