Far-right parties and protest dynamics: Street protest in Spain and Germany after the electoral breakthrough of AfD and Vox

Conventional wisdom holds that post-war far-right collective actors, unlike the far-left, are characterized by a "political paradox" in which street activism only takes place if these actors have been unable to get into parliament. In other words, for the far right, there is an inverse relationship between mobilization in the protest arena and the electoral arena. Building on protest event analysis and network analysis of an original dataset covering 1197 protest events in Germany and Spain between 2008 and 2021, this article challenges this conventional wisdom. The article demonstrates that the recent electoral breakthrough of far-right parties in these two countries – AfD and Vox, respectively – did not result in lower levels of protest mobilization, more fragmented networks, and less radical forms of protest repertoires. On the contrary, the overall level protests remain the same, networks have become more unified or stronger, and protest repertoires have become even more confrontational. Moreover, in both cases, the far-right parties themselves played a crucial role in this unexpected transformation of the protest arena. The findings provide strong empirical support for the congruence rather than counterweight thesis showing how the distinction between the electoral arena and protest arena has become increasingly burry, also for the far right. This increasing blurring boundary between the protest mobilization and electoral politics seems to be the case regardless of whether the electoral breakthrough takes place in a context characterized by strong (Germany) or weak (Spain) protest networks.