European anti-immigration parties mirror Islamist parties in structure and appeal.

Evidence

These European parties opposing Muslim immigration were in large part the mirror image of Islamist parties in Muslim countries. Both were outsiders denouncing a corrupt establishment and its parties, exploiting economic grievances, particularly unemployment, making ethnic and religious appeals, and attacking foreign influences in their society. In both cases an extremist fringe engaged in acts of terrorism and violence. In most instances both Islamist and European nationalist parties tended to do better in local than in national elections. Muslim and European political establishments responded to these developments in similar fashion. In Muslim countries, as we have seen, governments universally became more Islamic in their orientations, symbols, policies, and practices. In Europe mainstream parties adopted the rhetoric and promoted the measures of the right-wing, anti-immigration parties. Where democratic politics was functioning effectively and two or more alternative parties existed to the Islamist or nationalist party, their vote hit a ceiling of about 20 percent. The protest parties broke through that ceiling only when no other effective alternative existed to the party or coalition in power, as was the case in Algeria, Austria, and, in considerable measure, Italy. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 536

Categorization

• XREF: The 20-percent ceiling on protest-vote capture connects to electoral-systems scholarship on Duverger’s law and protest-vote limits; also to later work on populist breakthrough conditions.
• SEED: An essay comparing how establishment co-optation of fringe rhetoric works symmetrically in European anti-immigration parties and Muslim-world Islamist parties.