Far-Right Parties in EU Coalition Politics. Isolation, Convergence, Polarisation

Parties to the right of the European People’s Party now occupy about a quarter of the seats in the European Parliament, and may grow further. Does their rise condemn the Union to paralysis precisely when external threats demand coherent collective action? Or can some of these forces be integrated into European decision-making? Why has Fratelli d’Italia become, in less than five years, a demanding but reliable partner of the European mainstream, while the AfD has radicalised behind its Brandmauer? Why does the Rassemblement National pursue «normalisation» without ever having been tested by national office? What pushes Vox to oscillate between cooperation with the Partido Popular and the harder register of the Patriots for Europe? What does the «Russia test» – the stance taken on sanctions and on military aid to Ukraine – reveal about each party’s real distance from the Euro-Atlantic consensus? How far apart, on the issues that matter most, are their voters from those of the mainstream right? And under which conditions does each of the three patterns evoked on the cover of this book – isolation, convergence, two-bloc left–right polarisation – come to prevail? Drawing on case studies of Germany, France, Italy and Spain written by an international team of experts, and on an original analysis of roll‑call votes in the European Parliament and on survey data, the volume shows that the parties to the right of the EPP do not form a single, undifferentiated «radical right»: their trajectories depend less on a fixed ideology than on the structure of incentives each of them faces.