Word: mainstream
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vote tumbled, reducing its tally of seats from seven in 2004 to three. "Times of unhappiness tend to favor extremist parties," says Dominique Reynié, director of Paris-based think tank Foundation for Political Innovation. "This time people judged the crisis as sufficiently grave that they stuck with mainstream parties they felt best placed to move things ahead." (Read: "Europe's Voters Reward the Right...
...help cut through this muddle, TIME looks at four parties - the BNP, France's Front National (FN), Hungary's Jobbik and the PVV - their sometimes clashing ideologies and policies, and the misjudgments of mainstream opponents that have helped boost their extremist appeal...
...cultures they describe are often mythic. It is amid the rubble of discarded beer cans and the bleakness of northern English housing estates that never knew a genteel past that the BNP finds its most enthusiastic support. It is also in exactly such areas that disenchantment with mainstream politics - intensified in Britain by the recent scandal over MPs' expenses - is at its most profound...
Without big national platforms and regular media access, far-right parties rely heavily on door-to-door campaigning and local meetings. The bigger parties ignore such old-fashioned techniques at their peril, says Eric Pickles, chairman of Britain's Conservative Party. "You've got a kind of [mainstream politician] representing those estates who didn't grow up on them, doesn't know them well and visits like a political tourist." Mainstream parties have "got to re-engage the population," he says. "You can't write the people off who voted BNP as all being Nazis. It's neglect...
Jobbik may look different to its corporatized Western European counterparts, but it's being lifted by the same underlying forces: fears of invasive foreign cultures and of global competition, and a profound disaffection with mainstream politics. The excitement with which Hungarians embraced multiparty politics after the fall of Communism has curdled, with confidence in mainstream parties damaged by their perceived failure to tackle the country's economic woes. "It is a kind of vacuum," says Attila Pok, a historian with the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. "A great number of voters do not believe...