2016
These days we expect elections in East Central Europe to be bad news for liberal democracy.
Professor Tore Bjørgo, C-REX UiO, and professor Michael Minkenberg chairs a section on Right-Wing Extremism Beyond Party Politics, in the forthcoming ECPR Conference in Oslo, 6-9 September 2017.
I know what you are thinking... no, of course not. After all, the Republican Party, or Grand Old Party (GOP), is a party of the right, conservative, but square within the political mainstream.
The Founding Fathers of the European Union (EU) believed that economic integration was the key to political prosperity in Europe.
Germany is one of the few countries in the world that has a very effective and transparent registration of politically motivated crimes. Sadly, this often leads to the impression that such crimes are more common in Germany than in other countries, just because they are more conscientious in collecting and publishing these data.
“Right-wing extremism has been smouldering below the surface since the Second World War. It was ignited by the influx of refugees in the 1980s and 1990s, and now the same thing is happening again,” says Tore Bjørgo, Director of the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX).
C-REX presents a RTV Dataset (available to researchers upon request) covering the volume of right-wing terrorism and violence in post-1990 Western Europe. The Dataset is developed by Jacob Aasland Ravndal.
In summer 2016, we experienced an epic populist moment in one of the world’s oldest democracies: Brexit. As will be well known to readers of this newsletter, this British referendum on whether or not to leave the EU resulted in a small, but clear, majority in favor of leaving.
Most of the main individuals and organizations that are described as part of the “alt-right” by the media do not self-identify as such. While they use all kind of other neologisms, like “racial realists” and “white nationalists,” they are, and always have been, white supremacists!
While the “AfD versus Merkel” provides a comfortable media frame, reducing a complex multiparty system to a two-horse race, it is simplistic and wrong.
Journalists and pundits had been waiting for it for months: a win for Sanders and Trump in the same primary.
Today is a special day in Dutch political history: it is the birthday of the Party for Freedom (PVV), a party known mostly for its "firebrand" leader, Geert Wilders.
One year is a long time in politics. Few know this better than German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who went from champion of the right and villain of the left in the Greek crisis to champion of the left and villain of the right in the refugee crisis in 2015.