Concluding Remarks

During the last three decades, the Front National (FN – National Front) has been the most successful PRR party in Western Europe. Notwithstanding the predictions of this PRR party’s imminent collapse, since 2007 the FN has managed to reverse its slump and has attained new peaks of electoral support at both the 2002 and 2012 ballots. Within this context, the chapter explores the potential inter-relationship between the French mainstream’s strategic choices regarding immigration control and integration, and the FN’s subsequent electoral fortunes. The chapter identifies a growing discrepancy between increased levels of salience during the electoral campaigns and contracting levels of public concern and hostility towards immigration and integration. This trend reflects the mainstream parties’ departure from the dismissive strategies adopted during the 2002 election and throughout the presidential election that followed, while the FN, on the other hand, maintained its anti-immigration discourse

Getting ethnic questions on the agenda: Party formation as a strategy for social movements

The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, to examine party formation as an option for social movements; secondly, to explore in more detail the reasons and conditions as to why a party with an explicit ethnic agenda and with an aim to represent various migrant communities emerged in the Swedish but not in the Dutch context. The article argues that this type of mobilization should be viewed as a strategy adopted by social movements rather than as a traditional party and as such should be related to the prevailing political opportunity structures. The Swedish context offers more favourable conditions for this type of mobilization than the Dutch, although structural arrangements and dominating cleavage lines influence the type of success this type of option has in the long run