Movements of crisis, parties of protest: Far-right contentious politics in hard times

How do far-right parties and movements (henceforth, collective actors) behave during periods of crisis? While the electoral performance of the far right has been frequently associated with crisis-ridden contexts, the non-institutional politics of the far right – and especially its engagement in the protest arena – have received remarkably little attention to date. This is quite surprising given the far right’s recurring origins in the movement sector, their injection of contentious performances into contemporary politics, and their use of grassroots penetration activism as a gateway to institutional representation. With this article, we set out to provide an unprecedented overview of far-right differential engagement in contentious politics across the crises that punctuated European politics in recent years – i.e. the sovereign debt crisis of the late 2000s, the EU asylum policy crisis and, more recently, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We elaborate on how these crises affected far-right participation in the protest arena, in terms of intensity and issue content; and specifically address whether nativist collective actors are turning to non-institutional politics in hard times. We map the evolution and characteristics of far-right protest mobilisation drawing on novel data from the Far-Right Protest Observatory (FARPO), covering over 4,000 far-right protest events in ten European countries (2008-2021). While evidencing patterns of convergence and divergence across time and space, we ultimately suggest that the far right’s engagement in institutional and non-institutional politics is a positive-sum game likely to project nativist politics into a new phase of collective action.