Far-right contentious politics in times of crisis: Contingent adaptation or incremental transformation?

The far right is often seen to thrive in times of crisis. The close sequence of the Great Recession, the migration crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic provide an unprecedented opportunity to delve into far-right collective actors’ (i.e. political parties and social movements) relationship with ‘crisis’. With our study, we are interested to ascertain whether and how far-right collective actors mobilised in the protest arena during the recent crises. Did the far right adapt to the crises or was it rather part of a broader, long-term process of transformation? To answer these questions, we deploy a new dataset on far-right protest events covering 10 European countries and the period 2008-2021 (N=4,440) to elicit and characterise these collective actors’ mobilisation at the non-institutional level. Looking at four aspects of far-right protest mobilisation (i.e. numerical, performative, thematic, and synergetic), we evince the dominance of incremental over contingent effects: instead of merely adapting to changing opportunities, the far right’s engagement in street politics hints at a long-term process of social penetration.