ABSTRACT
AMONG MAJOR political developments in established Western-style democracies, few have provoked as much interest and raised as much concern as the revival of different forms of right-wing radicalism and extremism in recent years. And for good reasons. In the past few years, new parties on the right have made advances at the polls, the scope and impact of which are unprecedented in the postwar period. The best-known case has been the Austrian FPÖ, which, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, within little more than a decade, managed to triple its popular support at the polls. Even more spectacular was the advance of the Norwegian FRPn, which within a span of only a few months saw its popularity in monthly surveys soar from 14 per cent in February to 34 per cent in September 2000, surpassing all other Norwegian parties. Even where these parties have done less spectacularly, the result was still often nothing short of a minor political earthquake. But the radical right has not only been increasingly successful in national and subnational elections. In a growing number of cases the new parties and movements of the right have also managed to gain positions of real power, on several levels. And this not only in Austria, where the FPÖ has shared power nationally, regionally and locally. Thus, in Italy, the LN as well as the AN were partners in the short-lived Berlusconi coalition government; at the same time both parties have held numerous executive positions in towns and cities as well as, on occasion, on the regional level. In France, in the late 1990s, the FN captured four city halls before splitting up into two competing movements. Finally in Norway, in 1999, the FRPn gained control of the mayoral office in the small town of Os. In most cases, the assumption of real power would not have been possible without the complicity of the established parties. As a result, the politically organized radical right has made considerable progress in moving ‘from the margins to the mainstream’ of political life.1
