The Extreme Right (or Radical Right, New Right, Populist Right) is one of my main research interests. Here is a collection of blog posts on the Extreme Right (i.e. parties, voters, policies) that I have written over the years. If this is relevant for you, you might also be interested in the 400+ titles bibliography on the Extreme Right that I maintain and in this page, which summarises much of my work on the Extreme Right.
Extreme Right buffs rejoice, right-wing populist anoraks exult: The summer (?) 2013 edition of the Extreme Right Bibliography is out. Since its last instalment, I have added 19 new titles (mostly journal articles), bringing the total count up to 437. As always, please do remember that this is one man’s obsession. If you think that there is something missing, please drop me a line.
These are the slides for my Oxford talk on competition between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right (aka Working Class Parties 2.0) for the working class vote in Western Europe. The presentation is based on
The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This “proletarisation”" is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups.
@InCollection{arzheimer-2012c,
author = {Arzheimer, Kai},
title = {Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties},
booktitle = {Sociology of the Extreme Right},
publisher = {Routledge},
year = 2012,
pages = {75--90},
editor = {Rydren, Jens},
abstract = {The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This "proletarisation"" is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups.},
url = {http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/working-class-parties-extreme-right.pdf},
html = {http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/extreme-right-working-class-centre-left-competition/},
address = {London, New York}
}
Thanks to colleague Kyriaki Nanou and the generosity of the Anglo-German Programme, I’m taking my paper on the election between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right for the working class vote to Academic Wonderland (TM). Needless to say that I’m looking forward to this in the extreme (pun intended, but I largely failed?). Click here to read the full paper on “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between the Centre Left and the Extreme Right in Western Europe“.
German political parties enjoy a special constitutional protection. Only the Federal Government, the Bundestag (parliament), and the Federal Council can apply for a ban, and only the Federal Constitutional Court can declare a party unconstitutional and subsequently dissolve it. Over more than six decades, the court has banned two parties: the neo-Nazi SRP in 1952 and (slightly more controversially) the communist KPD in 1956. In both instances, it was the government who initiated the process.
Back in 2001, the then Red-Green government sought to ban the NPD. The attempt failed spectacularly because a qualified minority of the judges raised procedural concerns about the very large number of informers within the party, and the unwillingness of the state to provide the names of these people. While the whole thing was ill-advised, it is best seen as part of a larger symbolic drive against right-wing extremism, which was rampant after unification and fuelled a whole host of violent hate crimes. Back then, the government cajoled the CDU/CSU and FDP into supporting the cause, and all three institutions jointly applied for a ban, thereby raising the stakes and putting a lot of pressure on the court.
This time round, the Federal Council (dominated by the SPD and Green, but with support from the centre right-led state governments) pushes for a ban, while the government has long dragged its feet and finally came up with a statement saying that they would not co-sponsor the bid but still provide assistance. While this sounds half-baked, it might actually be a sensible position, given what sort of evidence against the NPD has been collected.
The most bizarre performance, however, was delivered in today’s debate in the Bundestag. CDU/CSU and FDP tabled a motion not to support the ban and won with their majority, while the opposition voted against. Then the SPD table a motion in favour of a ban. The government parties voted against, the Left and some Greens supported the move, of course to no avail. Next came the Left with their own motion, which was supported by the SPD while the Greens abstained. Finally, the Greens argued that issue should not be rushed through parliament. Now the government and the SPD voted against, while the Left abstained. Throughout the day, everyone agreed that the NPD (which, although bankrupt and electorally battered beyond recognition held their party conference last weekend) was indeed a very nasty party. Five months to go until election day.
Gerhard Frey, one of the most colourful characters of the German Extreme Right, has died one day after his 80th birthday. Frey, a famously rich businessman and right-wing journalist, began building his empire in the late 1950s. Over the decades, he published two rightist weeklies (which he was later forced to merge in a declining market), countless revisionist and openly racist books, and ran a mail-order service for Nazi memorabilia. He was one of only four persons who ever stood trial under a procedure called “Grundrechtsverwirkung”. Basically, the Federal Government tried to strip him of his right to freedom of speech (and also his right to vote, to stand in elections and to take public office) because – according to the government – he had abused these rights to incite racial hatred and glorify Nazism (the Federal Constitutional Court squashed this and all similar cases on the grounds of these measures being disproportionate).
Frey made various forays into politics, but was repeatedly rejected by Germany’s oldest relevant Extreme Right party NPD (although sat on the party’s leadership committee for a short while). Over the years, many a right-winger has accused him of being only in it for the money.
In the 1980s, he converted his German People’s Union DVU (“Deutsche Volksunion, essentially a right-wing book club) into a political organisation that during the decades successfully contested various land elections, only to tank abysmally once they had entered another land parliament. The DVU was never a proper party. Leaving the DVU immediately after assuming office, embezzling money or getting caught while downloading child porn in their parliamentary office was more or less de rigeur for its MPs.
For most of its existence, the DVU wholly depended on its party chair, Gerhard Frey, who had taken out considerable loans from Gerhard Frey, the publisher, to safeguard his position. As far as we know, there was never any meaningful political competition or genuine party life within the DVU, which has been dubbed a “virtual” or even “phantom” party. In 2009, Frey, already in his late 70s, finally stepped down from the leadership and dispensed with the money the party owed him, thereby paving the way for the eventual merger with its longtime rival NPD.
Once more, German authorities are pondering what to do with the extreme right NPD (officially “Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands / Die Volksunion” after merging with its longstanding competitor DVU). While the Federal Council (which represents the 16 federal states) has already applied for a ban, government and parliament have not yet decided whether they support this move. Only the Federal Constitutional Court can ban a party, only these three institutions can act as plaintiffs, and the hurdles are high, as a qualified majority of the eight judges sitting on the case would have to vote in favour.The last ban was issued in 1956, and the government is duly afraid of another failure after the 2003 disaster.
Interestingly, both the Federal Council’s activism and the other institutions’ reluctance are based on a confidential report by a joint working party compromised of security people from both tiers of government and led by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, i.e. one of the federal secret service agencies. In a shock move, the NPD has posted what appears to be a 140-page executive summary of this report on its website today. Apparently, the party leadership is of the opinion that they appear as mostly harmless in the dossier.
The three-part PDF, apparently a scan of a paper copy, looks genuine enough. Its style, diction and classic Word 95 typography are all in line with what one would expect from such a document, and so is its content. The 2003 disaster was due to the excessive number of activists who moonlighted for Germany’s many secret service. This time, the authors have gone to great pains to collate material that is both public and not produced bye “source”, i.e. paid informers within the party. Interestingly, the statements in the document are classified into two categories: “A” for people who were not informers after January 1, 2003 (but possibly before that date), and “AD” for people who were not on the payroll at the time they made the relevant statement.
Consequently, most of this stuff is disgusting but phrased so that it is right at the boundary of what is legally acceptable. Germany’s extreme right has decades of experience in crafting their statements in a way that remains just under the constitutional radar. Going through that material, one can see why the party published it on its website and gets the impression that it will be different to ban the party without relying on internal communications. 
One of the most interesting points is the recommendation. The paper suggests in rather strong terms that a ban feasible and proportionate and yet, the government dithers. This indicates that either the federal people on the working party were outvoted (which seems unlikely from the phrasing), or that there is a rift between the political leadership and the services.
A final point concerns the way through which the party got hold of the document. Today, the internet is rife with speculation: Has the NPD, for decades targeted by agents, in turn infiltrated the services? Given that relations between the services and the party have been too close for comfort in the past, that would not be entirely implausible. There is, however, a simpler explanation. The document is stamped “VS – nur für den Dienstgebrauch”, which is the lowest classification level. Such files are normally accessible by a large number of people within an office. Given the rather enthusiastic recommendation issued in the report and the reluctance of the government to act on it, it’s easy to imagine someone in an agency or a ministry leaking the paper to the press, where anyone could have passed it on to the party.
I’ve just completed a review of Gideon Botsch’s history of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany after 1945 for Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie. The book is good, but obviously, I have few quibbles, mostly with the (lack of) theoretical underpinnings. I also think that it is a bit too short (I seem never to get enough of this stuff). If you read German, go to the full review.
Radical Right buffs out there, have you submitted your paper proposal for Bordeaux yet? As you may or may not know, Liz Carter and I have put together a six-panel-section on the New Right for the 7th ECPR General Conference in September. The deadline is February 1, i.e. in just four days – submit your proposal now if you are interested at all (requires myECPR registration).
This panel aims to bring together papers on radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe, their voters, and/or their interaction. Papers that investigate the radical right in the region conceptually, empirically, and/or comparatively are solicited. Prominence will be given to contributions addressing the ideology of these parties; their organisation; their political opportunity structure; and those explaining their electoral performance. Papers employing new data and bridging qualitative and quantitative traditions will be especially welcome, but papers using either qualitative or quantitative methods will certainly be considered.
Every now and then, I spend a merry evening pulling half-forgotten manuscripts/preprints into this not-so-new website. So here is tonight’s potpourri:
Liz Carter and I are organising a rather large section on the New Right (aka Radical Right, Populist Right, Extreme Right) for the 7th ECPR General Conference that will run from September 4 to September 7 this year. With six quality panels, we can accommodate up to 30 papers, which is obviously great. More specifically, there will be separate panels on these topics:
Like our section for the Potsdam Coference in 2009, this should hopefully appeal to public opinion/electoral behaviour people as well as to those primarily interested in studying New Right parties. The conference will be held at Sciences Po Bordeaux (nice place, good food, and, in all likelihood, no hurricanes). While the website claims that the CfP will be “issued shortly”, you can (and should!) already submit your paper here. Don’t leave it too late – we’re looking forward to meeting you in September!
