Positional deprivation and support for radical right and radical left parties

摘要

The rise of radical right and radical left parties surely rates among the most important I developments in recent European political economy. Such radicalism has long sim-; mered in Europe's post-War electoral politics, but the gains for radical parties and programmes have in recent years broadened and deepened. The broadening has touched countries that long resisted the radical tide, like Germany and its radical right Alternative for Germany. The broadening goes further, as many mainstream parties of the centre right and left have in recent years adopted some of the programmatic positions and rhetoric of radical parties (Van Spanje, 2010; Abou-Chadi, 2016). The deepening, meanwhile, involves the sustained electoral gains achieved by parties of both the radical right and left. On the right, this includes the Danish Freedom (DF) Party, the Dutch Party of Freedom (PW), and Italy's League [formerly known as the Lega Nord (LN)]. On the left, radical left parties like Greece's Syriza and Spain's Podemos have become as influential as, or fully overshadow, both mainstream and radical right parties. There are major differences between and among radical left and radical right parties, such as on issues of migration and redistribution (Ivarsflaten, 2008; Rooduijn et al., 2017), but the radical parties share a focus on economic and political nationalism, euro-scepticism, and anti-system/anti-elite positioning (Hooghe et al., 2002; March and Mudde, 2005; Hopkin, 2019). The broadening and deepening of such radicalism pose major challenges to economic and political policies long denning the Western democratic order, and may have unleashed potentially deeper challenges to the integrity of democracy itself.