Friends or Foes? Different Paths of Far-Right Party-Movement Coalitions in the UK and Germany

With a dark history of close collaboration in the rise of interwar fascism and the post-war transformation, the interactions between far-right parties and the broader movement are usually portraited as secret collusion or leadership quarrels and fierce power struggle and research on these exchanges is hard, if not impossible due to their secrecy. In the aftermath of 9/11, some emergent trends in far-right politics have revitalized this topic. 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 (the cost of which is getting too many extremists in the parties), and a ‘credible’ actor in the parliament, coalitions and government (the cost of which is 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 the effort to move beyond the largely exclusive focus on party politics and to explore the rationale behind the diversity of far-right party-movement interactions by comparing two country cases, UK and Germany. From a perspective of coalition-building, although a party-movement coalition was initiated in both cases between a major far-right party (UKIP and AfD) and the broader movement sector, the coalition was short-lived in the UK while it endured in the German case. Following a quasi-process tracing approach, this paper shows how the role of leadership, intra-party unity and a shared collective identity influence the initiation, the maintenance and the end of the coalition. By comparing similar coalitions with different results, this paper aims to offer important insights on how far-right parties respond to far-right movements and how intraparty factors might explain their varied responses.