From picket to parliament – The blurring boundaries between far-right party politics and grassroots mobilization in Germany and Spain

In recent years, scholars have asked to what degree, and how, the growing electoral strength of the radical right is associated with far-right mobilization outside of institutional politics, for example in the form of racist and anti-immigration violence or grassroots protest politics. Overall, it has become increasingly clear that the line between far-right grassroots activism and party politics is fading, and that the former play an important role in mobilizing popular support for far-right parties and policies. This article explores the evolution of far-right protest mobilization from 2008 to 2020 in Spain and Germany, two large European democracies that saw the sudden electoral breakthrough of a far-right party in national politics (VOX in 2019, and Alternative für Deutschland in 2013, resp.). Due to their activity in the electoral and protest arena, both VOX and AfD present could hence be conceptualized as hybrid ‘movement-parties’. Consequently, they are expected to affect the dynamic between far-right politics and grassroots mobilization in both contexts, and present relevant cases to study the blurring of boundaries between the far-right party politics and mobilization in the streets. This article will answer the following three research questions. First, building on political opportunity structure theory, it asks whether the emergence of a prominent far-right actor in the national political sphere of Spain and Germany is associated with increased mobilization of far-right grassroots mobilization (the so-called congruence thesis) or whether the presence of a prominent far-right party in fact leads to a decrease of far-right mobilization outside of institutional politics (the counterweight thesis). Second, it will quantitatively and qualitatively explore the dynamics of far-right street mobilization, hereby asking if and how the breakthrough of a prominent far-right party coincides with changes in far-right protest tactics (e.g. more or less violent forms of protest), protest actors, countermobilization, police intervention, and issues mobilized by far-right protest actors. Finally, it asks to what degree the evidence presented does indeed point towards a blurring of the boundaries between far-right electoral politics and grassroots activism, by exploring the ways in which far-right parties and movements coordinate mobilization activities in Germany and Spain. This article will answer the main research questions by using the first data outputs of the Comparative Far-right Protest (CFP) project. The dataset used in the article is comprised of 1688 protest events of Spanish and German far right actors between 2008 and 2020. Data has been collected by means of protest event analysis (PEA), a form of quantitative content analysis that details key features of specific protests and allows for the systematic comparison of protest across time and place. The data collection was based on a semi-automated process and actor-centred approach, from the Spanish broadsheet newspaper El Pais and the German broadsheet Tageszeitung.