My survey of radical right parties begins with failure. Specifically, it begins with parties that tried to build on a small extremist culture in the face of a highly repressive political and social environment. Since they possessed neither the means nor the opportunity for sustained electoral success, it is no wonder that of the four parties this chapter analyzes, only the British National Party might be familiar to nonspecialists. The Dutch Center Democrats are now a historical footnote, while the Belgian National Front has been perpetually irrelevant. The Sweden Democrats have recently shown signs of escaping from the margins but have yet to win more than 6% of the vote in national elections. Once we begin to look inside these parties, we are immediately reminded of Karl Marx's well-known epigram: “History always repeats itself twice: first time as tragedy, second time as farce.” Indeed, it would be tempting to describe activists within these parties as harmless eccentrics were it not for the fact that some of them were involved in hate crimes against foreigners and Holocaust denial. It is also important to bear in mind that things could have turned out differently had history not provided them with such poor resources for party building and had the costs of activism not been so high.

There are several advantages of looking at the failures first. For one, they highlight the fact that neither socioeconomic conditions nor favorable electoral institutions automatically produce a successful radical right party.