Far-right contentious politics in times of crisis: between adaptation and transformation

The far right is often seen to thrive in times of crisis. The unfolding of the Great Recession, the migration crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic provide an unprecedented opportunity to delve into far-right collective actors’ relationship with ‘crisis’. With our study, we are interested to explore whether far-right mobilisation in the protest arena is indeed linked to short-term periods of crisis or part of a broader, longer-term process of societal transformation from the ground up. We deploy a new dataset on far-right protest events – part of the Far-Right Protest Observatory (FARPO) – covering 10 European countries and the period 2008–2021 (N = 4,440) to elicit and characterise nativist mobilisation at the non-institutional level. Although farright collective actors have reacted to periods of crisis, the rate, size, and interactions surrounding their protest mobilisation have been steadily on the rise, their repertoire of action has been overwhelmingly conventional, and their claim-making dominated by trademark issues like immigration and multiculturalism. Instead of simply adapting to crisis, we contend that the far right is prompting a broader process of transformation and increasing its penetration of civil society.