Explaining the emergence of the radical right in Spain and Portugal: salience, stigma and supply

Abstract

Spain and Portugal have long been considered exceptions when it comes to the electoral success of radical right-wing parties in Europe. This scenario changed for both countries in 2019, with the extraordinary rise of Vox in Spain and the comparatively more modest election of one representative of Chega in Portugal. Their emergence – and the stark difference in the extents of their success – provides researchers with an ideal ‘edge-case’ and can be explained via a theoretical model that builds on and fuses previous explanatory models for radical right success. The Iberian cases demonstrate that radical right parties succeed when they (i) avoid the stigma of extremism, (ii) benefit from a gap in political supply on the right and (iii) cater to an unsatiated demand of voters on a salient sociocultural issue. While both countries had long been home to marginal far-right political forces, the stigma of extremism prevented them from being considered credible political alternatives. The appearance of new parties that emerged as a result of splits from the mainstream centre-right, in both cases reflecting a beleaguered political supply, gave the radical right an opportunity to avoid stigma, as we demonstrate through a news content analysis. However, whereas in Spain Vox could profit from both the Catalan independence challenge and the uptick in salience of immigration, which had previously been anomalously low in Iberia, Chega has not (yet) benefited from a similarly ripe political opportunity structure in Portugal.

Keywords:

• Radical right
• Spain
• Portugal
• Vox
• Chega
• stigma
• issue salience

Acknowledgments

Mariana S. Mendes wishes to acknowledge that the research for this paper was conducted with the generous support of Mercator Forum for Migration and Democracy (MIDEM) at TU Dresden. James Dennison wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet; grant no. 2019/00504).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 PNR was created in 2000, which is why the news content analysis of Jornal de Notícias starts then. Due to data availability issues, the starting date for El País is the year 2001, which captures the early years of España 2000 (created in 2002), but unfortunately does not include the starting days of Democracia Nacional (founded in 1995).

2 Time period of news content analysis: Vox – January 2014 to November 2018 (prior to the Andalusian elections in December 2018); Chega – January 2019 to September 2019 (prior to the October 2019 general elections). Although Chega was only made official by the Supreme Court in April, its creation had already been announced in late 2018.

3 CIS Barometers.

4 CIS post-electoral survey General Elections 2019, May 2019.

5 Eurostat asylum statistics. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_statistics

6 ICS/ISCTE September 2019 survey, p. 3: https://sondagens-ics-ul.iscte-iul.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Sondagem-ICS_ISCTE_Setembro2019_parte2.pdf

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mariana S. Mendes

Mariana S. Mendes is a Research Fellow at MIDEM (Mercator Forum for Migration and Democracy) at TU Dresden. She holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute. Her research interests include migration issues and Spanish and Portuguese politics.

James Dennison

James Dennison is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, part-time Professor at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, and Researcher at the University of Stockholm. He holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute. His research interests include political attitudes and behaviour and the politics of migration.