New Challenger Parties in Opposition: Isolation or Cooperation?

IIn recent years, we have witnessed the fall of traditional parties and the rise of challenger parties in multiple European countries, with an escalation in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis. Examples are many and include both the success of new challenger parties and the rise in support for older radical right parties. Within the category of challenger parties, in fact, we find very different subjects from new politics (or niche) parties to extreme right or ethno-regionalist parties. Following Hobolt and Tilley, we define challenger parties as those parties that ‘seek to challenge the mainstream political consensus and do not ordinarily enter government’ (2016: 972). Extant research has analysed the challenger parties from different perspectives, but there is still little knowledge of the behaviour of these parties in parliament. The main purpose of this paper is to fill this gap, by analysing how they behave once crossed the representation threshold, checking if their behaviour is significantly different from that of the other opposition parties and, above all, if they start any kind of socialisation process or rather tend to remain isolated. We propose, in fact, a new dimension of analysis that should be taken into consideration when studying this type of parties, i.e. their relationship vis-à-vis the other opposition parties. We expect the new challenger parties to enter the parliament for the first time with two goals that are usually related to the different opposition status (temporary vs. permanent) in mind, leaving opposition and exploiting opposition; plus a further one: standing apart from the other opposition parties. We will test our expectations in six different countries which have experienced the appearance of new challenger parties in different periods – Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia – with a specific focus on their first term in parliament.