Friends or Foes? Understanding Far-Right Party-Movement Interactions in Western Europe

Despite differences in functions and goals, political parties and social movements both play important roles in the process of democratic representation. Notably, the interactions with social movements provide a channel for parties to anchor themselves in society and to build their social support. Different from in Central and Eastern Europe, where parties and movements are less differentiated and the boundaries are more blurred, parties in Western Europe are widely believed to engage less with movements. Even fewer connections will be expected for far-right parties as they are generally considered as a strong substitute for their counterparts mobilizing on the street and their right-wing supporters are more inclined towards more conventional political participation. Contrary to previous theoretical expectations, however, recent years have seen a more intense and complicated landscape of far-right party-movement interactions in Western Europe, such as a nearly concomitant rise of a far-right party, AfD, and a strong far-right movement, PEGIDA, and more frequent and open party-movement interactions in a growing transnational anti-Islamic network, especially online. These developments challenge the overemphasis on the electoral arena (the so-called "electoralism") in current far right studies and call for a perspective treating far-right parties and movements as different but equal actors in the multiorganizational field and exploring their diverse forms of interactions with conceptual and methodological tools from both party politics and social movement studies. On the one hand, the new momentum from far-right activism on the street pushes their counterparts in the parliaments for more and closer interactions; on the other hand, as a growingly important political force, far-right parties need to strike a delicate balance between two different but maybe equally important roles: a 'true' representative of the movement and the ideology behind it (risking getting too many extremists in the parties), and a 'credible' actor in the parliament, coalitions and government (risking distancing itself from its activists, electorate and supporters). Facing this dilemma, far-right parties adopt largely different patterns in their interactions with far-right movement organizations, whose choices are not only constrained by historical structures and compositions of far-right networks and institutional/societal responses to far-right actors in the respective countries, but can also be largely shaped by the strategies and the perceptions by the leaders and the elites of a specific party. This paper contributes to this exploration in two ways. First, it maps different patterns of far-right party-movement interactions in Western European countries by identifying main far-right actors and locating their mutual roles in an incorporated typology. This paper develops a six-model typology to identify different party-movement interactive patterns along different levels of compatibility and different dominant roles. All 15 countries in western Europe with the presence of at least a "strong" far-right party are located in this typology and the dominant interactive patterns between parties and movements in personnel networks (leaders and elites), joint events (e.g., co-sponsored demonstrations) and identity building are discussed. Second, it presents some valuable findings from comparative observation on potential factors to explain the variations as a basis for a more comprehensive framework.