Unemployment and the Radical Right in Scandinavia: Beneficial or Non-Beneficial for Electoral Support?
- PDF / 189,679 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 158 Views
Unemployment and the Radical Right in Scandinavia: Beneficial or Non-Beneficial for Electoral Support? Tor Bjørklund Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1097, Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: [email protected]
A new family of political parties has emerged in Europe, emphasizing the need for a radical change in immigration policy. Their success has been accounted by various hypotheses. One hypothesis is that they appeal to marginalized voters, or more specifically, to unemployed voters, losers of modernization. Joblessness also has a connection to voters’ discontent with immigrants. The argument is that immigrants take jobs from native voters. Altogether, this sways towards the expectation that unemployment is related to the success of these parties. I question if this is the case in Scandinavia. The empirical evidence presented leads to the opposite conclusion. Low unemployment seems to give fertile soil to the growth of the radical right. When high unemployment is removed from the political agenda, a political space can be opened for questions of immigration, or more generally, issues related to the socio-cultural cleavage. Comparative European Politics (2007) 5, 245–263. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110110 Keywords: radical right; unemployment; immigration; political party; election
A New Family of Political Parties During the second half of the 1980s, a new family of political parties emerged in Europe. Some of the parties were newly launched.1 Others had existed for several years for the most part without electoral success. The two most famous of these parties are the National Front (Front National, Le Pen) in France and the Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Østerreichs, Haider) in Austria. There are some less extreme Scandinavian members of this political family as well, the Norwegian Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet) and the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti). The Swedish counterpart to these parties was the shortlived New Democracy (Ny Demokrati). A newly launched Swedish party, the Sweden Democrats, is currently the closest relative. Historically, this party has its roots in the extreme right and has a much more extreme position than the Norwegian and Danish parties. The Sweden Democrats are still without
Tor Bjørklund Unemployment and the Radical Right in Scandinavia
246
parliamentary representation, but the threshold of 4 percent has gradually been approached through a 2.9 percent result in the last 2006 general election. The new party family has been characterized as the third wave of the extreme right in post-war Europe. According to Klaus von Beyme (1988, 11), this ‘third phase of right-wing extremism was caused by unemployment and xenophobia at the end of a long prosperous period’. Its predecessor, the second wave, emerged in the 1950s and was nurtured by resentment over taxes and regulations. In France, Pierre Poujade gave name to tax revolt ‘poujadism’, a petite bourgeois movement among small retail shopkeepers. After some years, the movement disappeare
Data Loading...
