Competition or Cooperation?Different Paths of Far-Right Party-Movement Coalition-Building in the UK and Germany

With a dark history of close collaboration in the rise of interwar fascism and the post-war transformation, the interactions between far-right parties and the broader movement are usually portraited as secret collusion or leadership quarrels and fierce power struggle and research on these exchanges is hard, if not impossible due to their secrecy. In the aftermath of 9/11, some emergent trends in far-right politics have revitalized this topic. On the one hand, the new momentum from far-right activism on the street pushes their counterparts in the parliaments for more and closer interactions; on the other hand, as a growingly important political force, far-right parties need to strike a delicate balance between two different but maybe equally important roles: a ‘true’ representative of the movement and the ideology behind it (the cost of which is getting too many extremists in the parties), and a ‘credible’ actor in the parliament, coalitions and government (the cost of which is distancing itself from its activists, electorate and supporters). Facing this dilemma, far-right parties adopt largely different patterns in their interactions with far-right movement organizations. Their choices are not only constrained by historical structures and compositions of far-right networks, or institutional/societal responses to far-right actors in the respective countries, but can also be largely shaped by the agency and the internal dynamics of far-right parties. This paper contributes to the current research by adding an perspective of far-right agency and to explore the rationale behind the diversity of far-right party-movement interactions by a paired comparison of the UK and Germany. From a perspective of coalition-building, although a party-movement coalition was initiated in both cases between a major far-right party (UKIP and AfD) and the broader movement sector, the coalition was short-lived in the UK while it endured in the German case. Following a process tracing approach, this paper shows how the role of leadership, factionalism and organizational development influence the initiation, the maintenance and the end of the coalition. By comparing similar coalitions with different outcomes, this paper aims to offer important insights on how far-right parties respond to far-right movements and how intra-party factors account for their varied responses.