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Can you explain the success of far-right parties in Western Europe with an increasing number of immigrants? In your answer, consider countries with a smaller and with a larger share of immigrants.
The year 2014 can be recognized as the beginning of the migrant crisis in Europe when thousands of immigrants crossed European borders (Metcalfe-Hough, 2015). Also during last few years, many far-right-parties in Europe has been successful. While some persuasive explanations are used to explain that growing support for far-right parties, with growing migration problems, some atypical country units drew my attention. In my work, I focus on country units (states, and constituencies) with a small number of immigrants to check why the support is so …show more content…

Although the first solution seems to be the most reasonable, in practice is very risky. People tend to blame ruling for ineffective policies rather than objects of these policies’ interests, here immigrants (Karapin, 1998: p. 49-51). Their disappointment is usually expressed in voting (Karapin, 1998: p. 49-51). Thus, according to the last migrant crisis, most of the Western European countries with the biggest wave of immigrants faced the growing salience of far-right issues followed by their reinforcement. That was because mainstream parties and governments had to respond to that new situation. Consequently, that strengthen the position of these parties, because the importance of their arguments was proven. For instance, in Germany, which had in 2015 476,620 asylum claims (Eurostat, 2017) in last parliamentary elections (2017) CDU/CSU gained only 32.9%, whereas AfD, founded in 2013(???), gained 12.6%(Clarkes, 2017: pp.???). In France which has 76,165 asylum claims(Eurostat, 2017), relatively high support can be observed even in last presidential elections, when Le Pen gained 33.9% (loemond). At the same time, in counties where the share of immigrants was smaller, there was no need, for mainstream parties to touch upon far-right issues. It has led to smaller support for radical parties. In Portugal, where in 2015 were only 895 asylum claims (Eurostat, 2017), as well as in Luxembourg - 2,505 (Eurostat, 2017) far-right parties

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