From Pariah to Policy-Maker? The Radical Right in Europe, West and East: Between Margin and Mainstream

This article addresses the question of the role of the radical right in the political process and the porosity of borders between it and the mainstream right and puts it in an all-European context. The argument is that next to the behavior of other key actors (parties, elites) national context, especially cultural factors such as predominant national traditions, along with the ideological nature of these parties, matter in determining how far these parties' mainstreaming goes once they leave their political niche. In Western Europe, efforts by conservative parties to co-opt the electoral rise and relative pragmatism of the radical right led to even greater legitimacy for these parties. While these tactics did indeed ‘tame’ the parties, it came at the cost of a hardened anti-immigrant policy, evidence of the radical right's most direct policy impact. In the East, no ‘taming’ can be observed—instead of a mainstreaming of the radical right, we observe a radicalization of the mainstream.