The varied electoral success of green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties across Western Europe is the result of mainstream party strategies. This is the thesis introduced in Chapter 1. Contrary to the dominant literature, I argue that the electoral trajectories of niche parties are not mere reflections of the institutional or sociological characteristics of a country. These successes and failures are rather the result of deliberate attempts by center-left and center-right political actors to quell new political threats and bolster their own electoral competitiveness. Niche party fortunes are, in many respects, the by-products of competition between mainstream parties.

And yet existing strategic theories of party competition prove ill-suited for understanding the nature of interaction between mainstream parties and their neophyte competitors. Unlike their mainstream party opponents, niche parties refuse to compete within the given policy dimensions, instead promoting and competing on new issues that often cut across existing partisan lines. Consequently, mainstream party reactions are not limited to the standard spatial tools of policy convergence and divergence – i.e., movement toward and away from a competitor – on an established issue dimension. Rather, mainstream parties can also alter niche party electoral support by manipulating the salience and ownership of the neophyte's new issue for political competition.

In this chapter, I challenge the standard spatial approach to party interaction by developing a theory of party competition based on this expanded conception of party strategies.

In 1970, calling for the protection of “our British Native stock” against “colored immigration,” the National Front fielded candidates in its first parliamentary election. Formed four years earlier by a merger of the League of Empire Loyalists and the British National Party, the National Front criticized the absence of the immigration issue from mainstream party political debate. Over the next decade, this xenophobic niche party would try to force the issue onto the political agenda with its repeated calls for the immediate cessation of immigration to the United Kingdom and repatriation of all nonwhite foreigners.

Although it garnered an average vote of less than 4 percent across contested districts, or a scant 0.3 percent average nationwide during the 1970s, the National Front did not go unnoticed by the British mainstream parties. The Conservative Party reacted with intense accommodative tactics to the defection of some of its voters to the niche party. Adopted by the Heath government as early as 1973, the Tories' accommodative proposals included the strengthening of immigration controls and the retraction of British citizenship obligations to immigrants from former Commonwealth nations. Conservative politicians, including party leader and future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, even invoked the National Front's xenophobic imagery of Britain as “a crowded island” being “swamped” by foreigners to try to win (back) anti-immigrant voters.

Since the 1970s, the political systems of Western Europe have undergone a major transformation. Competition between mainstream parties has been interrupted by the emergence of niche parties, actors that are fundamentally different from their mainstream opponents. The new parties' rejection of the economic focus of politics and their introduction of new and controversial issues have threatened the content of the political debate and the very partisan alignments that ensure mainstream parties' electoral and governmental dominance.

Yet, although they have transformed political arenas across the region, niche parties have experienced wide variation in their electoral success. Hoping to explain why some green, radical right, or ethnoterritorial parties floundered while others flourished, scholars have turned to the institutional and sociological characteristics of the particular political environments. According to these theories, parties fail under restrictive electoral rules or unfavorable economic and societal conditions. Niche party success, therefore, occurs under the opposite conditions: for example, when PR rules are in effect or, in the case of radical right parties, when unemployment and immigrant populations are high.

As the analyses in this book suggest, however, the electoral successes and failures of green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties are not merely the reflection of the institutional and sociological environment. Rather, this study finds answers to the puzzle of niche party performance in a factor that has been largely ignored in this literature: party competition. To the extent that institutional and sociological variables underlie a party's success, they are not neutral, exogenously determined variables.

Running under the slogan “defend the French,” a new political party known as the Front National (FN) first fielded candidates in the 1973 French national legislative elections. Over the next three decades, the FN, fearful of the contamination and erosion of the French national identity, advocated a ban on further immigration and called for the (forced) repatriation of immigrants and the restoration of traditional French family values. Initially, the FN's promotion of this new set of issues was met with little electoral enthusiasm; in its first decade of existence, the party received less than 1 percent of the national vote per legislative election. Its charismatic leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, also fared poorly, capturing a mere 0.7 percent in the 1974 presidential election.

Although political observers and scholars at the time discounted the prospects of this minor party – especially in an electoral environment thought to disadvantage nonmainstream parties – the FN emerged as one of the strongest radical right parties in Western Europe by 2000. Even though large-scale immigration to France had been banned officially since 1974 and the percentage of foreign citizens had been stabilizing and even falling, the anti-immigrant FN won an average of more than 9 percent of the vote across national legislative elections in the 1980s and 1990s and ended the millennium with a peak vote of 14.9 percent in 1997. Once on the margins of the French political scene, the Front National would surpass the Communist Party to become the number three party in France.

And pounce it did. By the time Alistair Smith issued this warning to his fellow members of the Conservative Party in 1976, the Scottish National Party had already emerged as an unexpected and almost unstoppable force. Although it never gained a national average of more than 3 percent, its true menace is revealed in the vote percentages it obtained in Scottish seats – the seats in which it competed. Between 1970 and 1997, the SNP consistently captured more than 11 percent of the vote in Scotland, with an average vote of 18.8 percent. In the October 1974 General Election, it achieved its peak vote of 30.4 percent, just 6 percentage points shy of Labour's electoral plurality. In this same election, the ethnoterritorial party surpassed the Conservatives to become the second most popular party in Scotland. Although support for the SNP would decline somewhat in the 1980s, the party reasserted its strength on the Scottish electoral scene in the 1990s.

In 1989, the British Green Party surprised the political establishment by capturing 14.9 percent of the vote in the European Parliament (EP) elections. Green Party candidates attracted more support than Labour candidates in six constituencies and challenged the Conservatives' hold of two of its safe seats. With its phenomenal electoral score, the Green Party surpassed the Liberal Party to become the number three party in the country.

While some scholars have downplayed the importance of the 1989 victory, this election was seen by the British mainstream parties as a warning. Concern about the environment – and, with it, the membership of the Green Party – had grown in recent years. The level of postmaterialism in Great Britain had increased by 75 percent since the Green Party, at that time named the People's Party, first contested Westminster elections in 1974. By 1989, the environment had surpassed unemployment, the perennial favorite, as the most important problem facing the United Kingdom according to MORI survey respondents (MORI polls).

More importantly for the mainstream parties, this growing public interest in the issues of pollution and nuclear power was influencing voting decisions. Even before the June 1989 EP elections, Green Party candidates were capturing an average vote of 8 percent and peak votes of 14 percent in the May 1989 local county elections (O'Neill 1997: 288). Although supporters of environmental parties are often first-time voters, the British Green Party was stealing voters from the established parties.

Tales of electoral disparity characterize the niche party experience. Across Western Europe between 1970 and 2000, niche parties promoting the same issues achieved wildly different levels of support. In Germany, the Grünen captured a peak vote of 8.3 percent and rivaled the centrist Free Democratic Party (FDP) for the title of the third largest party, whereas in equally environmentally friendly Denmark, the Green Party cobbled together a mere 1.4 percent of the vote in its most auspicious electoral performance. Similar tales can be told about the divergent fortunes of different niche parties within a given country. The strength of Spanish ethnoterritorial parties stands in sharp contrast to the electoral marginalization of their environmental compatriots, Los Verdes. Variation in niche party fortunes has also been witnessed across party life-spans. Voter support for the Greek green party peaked early and faded away, while the attractiveness of the Austrian Freedom Party continued to increase over the decades.

The goal of this chapter is to account for the variations in niche party fortunes across Western Europe. In Chapter 2, I argued that the solution to this puzzle of varying neophyte support can be found in the behavior of the mainstream parties. Rather than being solely or even primarily determined by the permissiveness of the electoral system or the rate of unemployment or economic growth in a country, the competitiveness of a niche party is largely a function of mainstream party strategic interaction.

Rallying to the cry of “France for the French” and “One million unemployed, one million immigrants too many,” the Front National burst into the French political limelight in the 1980s. Despite the fact that there had been a moratorium on immigration to France for almost a decade, this single-issue, anti-immigration party captured almost 10 percent of the vote and thirty-five seats in the 1986 legislative elections. Its support did not flag over the next decade, with the radical right party gaining increasingly larger shares of the vote with every election. By 1997, the Front National had surpassed all expectations of its success; in that election, it earned 14.9 percent of the vote and the title of the third most popular party in the French political system.

The electoral success of the Front National was made all the more threatening – especially to the dominant Socialist (PS) and Gaullist (RPR) parties – by its cross-party appeal. A 1981 SOFRES poll reveals that 70 percent of all respondents were opposed to the arrival of further immigrants to France and that between 15 and 22 percent of survey respondents favored the expulsion of all immigrants, policy positions espoused by the Front National. Seven years later, and several years after the start of the Socialists' pro-immigrant campaign, the percentage of survey respondents still preferring the repatriation of immigrants was more than 20 percent.