Nationalisms in the European Arena by Margarita Gómez-Reino

Author:Margarita Gómez-Reino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Territorial and Electoral Presence of Nationalisms in the European Arena

The geographical presence of minority and populist nationalist party families in the EU is limited to some states. The center-periphery cleavage is firmly rooted in some European countries such as Belgium or Spain, but totally absent in many others (Scandinavia, Germany, Portugal, Greece and most of Eastern Europe). This uneven territorial presence of minority nationalist parties across the EU—a total of five countries in Western Europe and three in Eastern Union—including ethnic parties—limits the extent to which it can be treated as a truly Europeanized cleavage and a European party family in electoral terms. Caramani argues that this is not a Europe-wide party family, but one confined to a few countries (Belgium, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Finland).13 Moreover, the structure of the center-periphery cleavage is fundamentally different in multinational contexts such as Belgium or Spain where differentiated regional party systems exist and therefore competition among different minority nationalist parties takes place (Elias et al. 2015). Overall, minority nationalist parties have a very fragmented presence across European national party systems. The minority nationalist party family is among the least ‘Europeanized’ party families, while populist nationalist parties show a more homogeneous support (Caramani 2015: 93).

The territorial presence of the populist nationalist party family, although also circumscribed to some countries within the EU, has increased over the past three decades (Mudde 2012). The populist nationalist party family only covers half of the 17 countries of Western Europe (see Mudde 2012: 3), 12 countries plus Switzerland, according to Alonso and Rovira Kaltwasser (2015: Table 1). The absence of populist nationalist parties includes the cases of Portugal and Spain. Over the past two decades, electoral support for populist nationalist parties increased and became more homogenous across Europe (Caramani 2015: 94). The impact of the different enlargements on both nationalist party families has also influenced the territorial presence of both nationalist party family within the EU. The 1986 enlargement to Portugal and Spain boosted the political representation of minority nationalist parties since Spain contributes the most to the minority nationalist party family. However, the impact of successive enlargements in 1995 and 2004 on minority and populist nationalist parties was more significant and heterogeneous. In 2004, enlargement to ten new countries in Eastern Europe weakened the territorial presence of the minority nationalist party family in the EU. It diminished the absolute size of the minority nationalist party family and opened up a limited expansion with parties representing linguistic minorities but not the ethnoregionalist parties of Western Europe (De Winter and Gómez-Reino 2009; De Winter and Lynch 2008).14 The populist nationalist parties have benefited more in the 2004 enlargement, with the inclusion of additional parties in Eastern Europe in Romania, Bulgary and Hungary. Neither minority nor populist nationalist parties are fully Europeanized in their territorial presence.

As mentioned above both variants of minority and populist nationalist parties expanded in European elections but their electoral trends in the European arena differ. While the minority nationalist party family obtained

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