VARYING TRAJECTORIES OF MAINSTREAM RIGHT RADICALIZATION (MRR) IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN DEMOCRACIES

Abstract

Abstract

The political science literature heavily focused on the phenomenon of the far right, its ideological tenets, and electoral fortunes. This has come at the expense of neglecting the party family that was tasked with gatekeeping the liberal democracy: the mainstream right. Existing research on mainstream right demonstrates that this party family is currently stuck between two diverging groups of voters. On the one hand, there are members of the progressive middle class, supporters of “the silent revolution.” On the other hand, there are conservative, nativist, and authoritarian voters who support ‘the silent counter-revolution’ and increasingly vote for the far right. The existing empirical research suggests that mainstream right responds to this electoral threat by radicalizing to the right and departing from liberal democratic norms. However, this radicalization is by no means uniform. By conceptualizing mainstream right parties as active agents of change, this article explores varying trajectories of mainstream right radicalization (MRR) in contemporary European democracies. As such, the article lays out three different trajectories: issue-specific mainstream right radicalization, mainstream right radicalization into a far-right illiberal actor, and far right as a breakaway from the mainstream right. Eventually, the article demonstrates that even though trajectories diverge, all three of them blur the boundaries between the mainstream right and the far right, erode the cordon sanitaire, and most importantly, normalize the far right within the wider society.