The Media and the Far Right in Western Europe

Antonis A. Ellinas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Cyprus. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his BA from Hamilton College. He is the author of The European Commission and Bureaucratic Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), with Ezra Suleiman. His work has appeared in Comparative Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and West European Politics, among others.

'Antonis Ellinas transcends conventional accounts of the Far Right's success and failure in this lucidly written book. Many scholars have suggested that the media shapes the development of these parties, but Ellinas shows exactly why and how it does. His argument that mainstream parties, by first playing and later retracting the nationalist card, contributed to the success of the Far Right is novel, persuasive, and disturbing. And by taking a temporal perspective, Ellinas moves beyond the snapshot approaches that have dominated the subfield. This book – both rigorous and sensitive to historical context – will not only reshape our understanding of Far Right parties. By linking the Far Right phenomenon to broader issues in party politics, political communication, and nationalism and immigration, Ellinas demonstrates its relevance to students of comparative politics more generally.' David Art, Tufts University

• 1. Introduction; 2. Explaining far right trajectories; 3. Party and media politics in Austria: the rise of the FPO; 4. Competing over German identity: conservatives and the non-visible far right; 5. Greek nationalists: from mainstream to the margins?; 6. The growth, persistence and fall of the French National Front; 7. Conclusion.