New Anti-Establishment Parties in the Mainstream

Abstract

New anti-establishment parties in the mainstream Mobilization against Europe’s political establishments is on the rise. The political fallout of recession and the Eurozone crisis have brought protest parties to the attention of academics and policymakers, with much attention devoted to the populist radical right or left. Alongside such conventional radical populists, however, a important new party phenomenon has appeared which so far has been overlooked or incompletely understood: successful parties combining a mainstream ideology with fierce anti-establishment rhetoric and demands for political reform, transparency and new ways of ‘doing politics’. Such parties, which have been variously termed anti-establishment reform parties or ‘centrist populist’ parties, have made electoral breakthroughs in Western and Eastern Europe with a recent accelerating trend. Important examples include New Era (Latvia), Res Publica (Estonia), Ordinary People (Slovakia), Public Affairs (Czech Republic), and the emerging Five Star movement (Italy) and Pirate parties in Sweden and Germany. Such parties have achieved spectacular overnight success in elections at both national and sub-national level, and unlike more radical parties have generally been acceptable coalition partners, and often proved capable of entering government. The success of such parties has potentially far-reaching consequences for party systems and party-based representative democracy, both because of their often ephemeral nature and because their reform demands touch directly on the citizen-politician relationship at the heart of the malaise afflicting newer and established democracies (Mair 2006, Roberts 2009, Norris 2011). The panel invites both comparative and case study papers on successful new ‘centrist populist’ parties in contemporary Europe reflecting on the nature of such parties; the reasons for their electoral success; and assess their impacts party systems and party-based democracy.

Title	Details
Online and Offline: Mobilisation and Movement Organisation in the Movimento Cinque Stelle	View Paper Details
Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: Anti-Party as Transient Aberration or a Trendsetter in Slovakia’s Party Politics?	View Paper Details
Anti-Establishment Reform Parties in Bulgaria: A Decade of Dominant Rhetoric	View Paper Details
A Populist Challenge to Czech Party Politics? The Public Affairs Political Party and the 2010 Parliamentary Elections	View Paper Details
Understanding the Electoral Rise of the Five Star Movement in Italy	View Paper Details