In his book 'The Far Right Today', published in 2019, Cas Mudde analyses the increasing popularity of far right parties in the EU by looking at the number of parties and voteshare in national parliamentary elections.
Accepting that the EU went through enlargement during the period, in the decade 1980 to 1989 there were 8 far-right parties in 17 countries earning an average voteshare of just 1.1%.
In the following decade (1990 to 1999) that increased to 24 parties in 28 countries and voteshare went up to 4.4%.
The new millenium (2000 to 2009) saw voteshare increase again to 4.7% with parties and countries remaining stagnant.
Up to its publication (2010 to 18) voteshare had increased significantly once more, then standing at 7.5%, once again parties and countries stood still.
There is every likelihood if such an academic exercise were to be conducted once again that voteshare percentage would increase once again. In the UK by 2024 Reform UK's voteshare was 14.3% and polling shows that by the end of this decade that may grow significantly once more.
I'm not comfortable about identify Reform UK as a far-right party, in some ways they are not, but from an academic perspective they certainly conform with the categorisation.
Incidentally I'm not arguing about the merits of Reform UK either, there is a time and place for that, but we can be in no doubt that for the first time in eighty years the far right have been resurrected in Europe and are now a major electoral force. There is no getting away from that fact.
The exponential rise of the far-right
In his book 'The Far Right Today', published in 2019, Cas Mudde analyses the increasing popularity of far right parties in the EU by looking at the number of parties and voteshare in national parliamentary elections.
Accepting that the EU went through enlargement during the period, in the decade 1980 to 1989 there were 8 far-right parties in 17 countries earning an average voteshare of just 1.1%.
In the following decade (1990 to 1999) that increased to 24 parties in 28 countries and voteshare went up to 4.4%.
The new millenium (2000 to 2009) saw voteshare increase again to 4.7% with parties and countries remaining stagnant.
Up to its publication (2010 to 18) voteshare had increased significantly once more, then standing at 7.5%, once again parties and countries stood still.
There is every likelihood if such an academic exercise were to be conducted once again that voteshare percentage would increase once again. In the UK by 2024 Reform UK's voteshare was 14.3% and polling shows that by the end of this decade that may grow significantly once more.
I'm not comfortable about identify Reform UK as a far-right party, in some ways they are not, but from an academic perspective they certainly conform with the categorisation.
Incidentally I'm not arguing about the merits of Reform UK either, there is a time and place for that, but we can be in no doubt that for the first time in eighty years the far right have been resurrected in Europe and are now a major electoral force. There is no getting away from that fact.