European anti-immigration parties rarely exceeded fifteen percent nationally in the 1990s.

Evidence

Public opposition to immigration and hostility toward immigrants manifested itself at the extreme in acts of violence against immigrant communities and individuals, which particularly became an issue in Germany in the early 1990s. More significant were increases in the votes for right-wing, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. These votes were, however, seldom large. The Republican Party in Germany got over 7 percent of the vote in the European elections in 1989, but only 2.1 percent in the national elections in 1990. In France the National Front vote, which had been negligible in 1981, went up to 9.6 percent in 1988 and thereafter stabilized between 12 percent and 15 percent in regional and parliamentary elections. In 1995 the two nationalist candidates for president captured 19.9 percent of the vote and the National Front elected mayors in several cities, including Toulon and Nice. In Italy the votes for the MSI/National Alliance similarly rose from about 5 percent in the 1980s to between 10 percent and 15 percent in the early 1990s. In Belgium the Flemish Bloc/ National Front vote increased to 9 percent in 1994 local elections, with the Bloc getting 28 percent of the vote in Antwerp. In Austria the vote in the general elections for the Freedom Party increased from less than 10 percent in 1986 to over 15 percent in 1990 and almost 23 percent in 1994. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 535

Categorization

• XREF: Antwerp’s Flemish Bloc at 28 percent presages later Flanders politics; connects to current scholarship on the Vlaams Belang’s continued strength.
• SHARE: The specific vote trajectories (especially Austria’s Freedom Party rising from under 10% to 23% in eight years) are worth sending to someone tracking European populist vote histories.