https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2174-6579
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this article, we explore radical right mobilisation beyond the electoral arena, looking at its characteristics and forms, as well as intensity and related factors (such as the preferred targets and issues). Within a comparative study of four country cases in Central and Eastern Europe the analysis is carried out by drawing on two novel datasets: i. a protest event analysis of RR street mobilisation (from 2008 to 2016; for a total of 1040 events collected) and, ii. formalised web content analysis of more than 200 radical right websites. We provide a comprehensive overview of the recent developments in the action strategies of (Eastern European) RR movements, activists and party actors-- comparing them with offline and online RR mobilisation in Western Europe. Common trends but also specificities of the Eastern European arena of RR contention are unveiled.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 We acknowledge the role that structural political, economic, and migration-related factors that have played in the revitalisation of parties and movements of the radical right, but a thorough examination of these causes is beyond the scope of this paper.
2 Here we understand political mobilisation (of the radical right) as the collective (or individual) political action beyond electoral behaviour. We provide evidence of that through protest event data (for offline mobilisation) and online data (for online mobilisation).
3 We would like to thank Daniel Platek, Grzegorz Piotrowski, and Pal Susánszky for the invaluable help with the data collection.
4 Although we are aware than one event can have multiple actors and issues, only the main one (e.g. ACTOR1, ISSUE1) has been coded.
5 In our study a “protest event” consists in a political event initiated by an extreme right actor (either collective or individual, even an anonymous one), regardless of the type of actor (e.g. political party, subcultural skinhead group, etc.) and regardless the form the event takes (e.g. heavy or light violence, unconventional symbolic and expressive actions, conventional actions etc.).
6 As for the sampling criterion, data have been collected from the Lexis Nexis database and or from CD Rom versions/online archives of the selected newspapers using several keywords (e.g. “extreme right”, “neonazi”, “white supremacis*”, “far right”, “skinhead*”, “nazi”, etc.). A reiterative process has been used by searching with all keywords for each year, and then eliminating redundant articles. Copies of original articles were stored to go back to qualitative information not captured by the variables of the codebook. Inter-coder reliability tests were undertaken for article selection and coding in order to ensure coherence among coders and countries.
7 We used Mlada Fronta, whose political orientation is different from the other newspapers, due to accessibility constraints.
8 Several studies have shown that taking two newspapers instead of one in general duplicate the time of coding, without however increasing the amount of events obtained adding a second source. The combination of two newspapers for example (e.g. of different ideological orientation) offer only one fourth of events more than each source individually.
9 In this category we include groups defining themselves as political parties that openly partake in elections and sometimes enter the national assembly (Minkenberg Citation2017).
10 This category includes less institutionalised actors that do not run for public office (but rather try to mobilise public support) or “party parallel organisations” (Veugelers and Menard Citation2018), associations relating to political parties (like the “64 county youth movement” in Hungary or the “movement of young intellectuals” in Poland). We also include journals and magazines close to political parties (e.g. Právo Národa in Slovakia).
11 Neo-Nazi organisations refer to German Nazis or their ideological cousins in the four cases (like the Hungarist movement in Hungary).
12 The main characteristics of the revisionist and “negationist” groups are historical revisionism and the denial of the Holocaust; aspirations of re-writing history; and the documentation of the crimes of communism. In the Hungarian case, these organisations refer to the Horthy Era between the two World Wars.
13 These extreme right organisations can be divided into traditional cultural associations, including Catholic ultra-traditionalist organisations, on the one hand, and “new age” and “neo-mystic” groups on the other. They play an important role in the radical-right”s non-party sector (Veugelers and Menard Citation2018).
14 Subcultural organisations refer to “small groups” such as football fan clubs, skinhead music bands, and graffiti or hooligan groups. They have their own lifestyles, characterised by specific clothing, clothing brands, and music styles.
15 Right-wing nationalist groups are close to “political sects”. This category includes military groupuscules as well as the Polish Defence League.
16 Tarrow, like many other social movement scholars, refers to these characteristics of the context as “political opportunities”: the set of “consistent – but not necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives [or constraints] for people to undertake collective action, by affecting their expectations for success or failure” (1994, 85).
17 Such as the 2018 Mayday parade (“Szturmowy Pierwszy Maja”) in Warsaw, organised by six groups, which gathered less than 50 people or the various “counter events” in Poland (grouping between 10–30 people each) against the progressive reaction to the LGBTs free zones (e.g. in 2019 the RR protest with the banner “Swidnik free from rainbow propaganda!”).
18 These are analytical categories, it is clear that in the empirical reality the boundaries among different action forms are sometimes blurred – even within the same ER protest event. This holds true also for the classification of radical right groups into different categories of actors, which are not mutually exclusive, as the increasing success of the recent concept of “movement-party” testifies.
19 As for example the various electoral campaigns organised during our timeframe for the Presidential or local elections in our four countries.
20 Our data stress significant level of RR violence in the four countries under analysis in our covered timeframe (around 15% of all events reported in newspapers). Poland is the only country which showed a decline in RR violence, although an increase in the overall intensity of its mobilisation.
21 Népszabadság Online, 3.08.201.
22 E.g. in 2014 in Liberec, 19.05.14, Mladá fronta Dnes.
23 E.g. by a group of skinheads in Poland in 2012, Gazeta Wyborcza, 15.05.12.
24 Hungarian RR groups assaulted a group of young homosexual men and women, beating them to death, during the Gay Pride demonstrations in 2010 (Népszabadság Online, 4.07.2010).
25 For example, in 2009, a Roma family was attacked at night in Tatárszentgyörgy, a village in Hungary. A father and his son were killed by radical right militants (Népszabadság Online, 23.02.2009).
26 Gazeta Wyborcza, 02.11.16.
27 Gazeta Wyborcza, 23.08.13
28 Mladá fronta Dnes, 11.03.10.
29 For example, see the website of the Slovak Neo-Nazi group https://vzdoruj.wordpress.com/.
30 Each index has been normalised, in order to vary between 0 and 1, and standardised to the 0–1 range by dividing the resulting score by the maximum possible value.
31 See, for example, the website Droga Legionisty.
32 We relied here on the FIFA and UEFA catalogue of hate symbols, which are symbols that are banned from stadiums and football games.
33 Banners are images (GIF or flash) usually in a high-aspect ratio shape, often employing animation, sound, or video.
34 For example, on https://aryanrebel.wordpress.com/.
35 For example, see the web site of the Slovak Neo-Nazi group https://vzdoruj.wordpress.com/.
38 In addition, 21.3% of the right-wing websites analysed also have an archive of the groups press releases.
39 Particularly in Poland and Czech Republic which are also those countries with the highest levels of radical right activism on the internet.
40 Particularly in Slovakia, and Hungary in recent years, which are also those countries more Internet oriented for mobilisation.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Manuela Caiani
Manuela Caiani is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa-Florence (Italy).