All the attention has been on Europe’s neo-Nazi fringe groups, when it’s those in national governments who should be scrutinisedI have been studying radical right politics for almost 25 years. When I started, the Berlin Wall had just come down and only a handful of radical right parties were represented in national parliaments. That one of them would one day be part of a national government in Europe was considered impossible. Today, radical right parties, or parties many would have considered as such in the early 1990s, are part of governments in Finland, Greece, Latvia, Norway, and Switzerland – while the Danish minority government depends on support from the right.Despite the electoral and political successes of radical right parties, they are not as important as mainstream media and politicians make out. I have spent my career arguing this and still believe it – on average, radical right parties gain less than 10% of the vote in national elections in EU member states, while the parties that do get into government rarely get any of their priorities fully implemented. Continue reading...
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