ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION DURING THE last 20 or so years, a variety of extreme right political parties have leapt to electoral prominence across Western Europe.1 Consider the four most cited examples. The first major breakthrough came in France, when JeanMarie Le Pen’s FN won 10 per cent of the vote in the 1984 European Parliament elections. By 1995 Le Pen was supported by 15 per cent of French people in the first round of the French presidential elections. In Italy, the AN (the reborn neofascist MSI) won 15 per cent of the vote in the 1994 elections, and together with the LN briefly entered government with Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia. In 2001 the same parties again formed an administration under Berlusconi. In Austria, the FPÖ won a record 27 per cent of the poll in 1999 and entered government early on in 2000, in coalition with the conservative ÖVP (although its controversial and media-genic leader, Jörg Haider, was forced to relinquish hopes of immediate national office in the face of a wave of international protest). In Belgium, by 2001 the VB enjoyed the allegiance of 33 per cent of voters in its Antwerp heartland, and more like 20 per cent in Flanders as a whole. However, the general European pattern of extremist voting is by no means one of evergrowing support-nor is the pattern of such support amenable to simple explanation.2
