Riding the Populist Wave
Europe's Mainstream Right in Crisis

In spite of the fact that Conservative, Christian democratic and Liberal parties continue to play a crucial role in the democratic politics and governance of every Western European country, they are rarely paid the attention they deserve. This cutting-edge comparative collection, combining qualitative case studies with large-N quantitative analysis, reveals a mainstream right squeezed by the need to adapt to both 'the silent revolution' that has seen the spread of postmaterialist, liberal and cosmopolitan values and the backlash against those values ? the 'silent counter-revolution' that has brought with it the rise of a myriad far right parties offering populist and nativist answers to many of the continent's thorniest political problems. What explains why some mainstream right parties seem to be coping with that challenge better than others? And does the temptation to ride the populist wave rather than resist it ultimately pose a danger to liberal democracy?

Preface; 1. The mainstream right in western europe: caught between the silent and silent counter-revolutions Tim Bale and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser; 2. The demand side: profiling the electorate of the mainstream right in western europe since the 2000s Eelco Harteveld; 3. The supply side: mainstream right party policy positions in a changing political space Tarik Abou-Chadi and Werner Krause; 4. Austria: tracing the Christian democrats' adaptation to the silent counter-revolution Reinhard Heinisch and Annika Werner; 5. France: party system change and the demise of the post-gaullist right Jocelyn Evans and Gilles Ivaldi; 6. Germany: how the Christian democrats manage to adapt to the silent counter-revolution Sarah E. Wiliarty; 7. Italy: the Italian mainstream right and its Allies, 1994-2018 Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio; 8. The Netherlands: how the mainstream right normalised the silent counter-revolution Stijn van Kessel; 9. Spain: the development and decline of the popular party Sonia Alonso and Bonnie N. Field; 10. Sweden: the difficult adaptation of the moderates to the silent counter-revolution Anders Ravik Jupskås; 11. The UK: the conservatives and their competitors in the post-thatcher era Richard Hayton; 12. The mainstream right in western europe in the 21st century Tim Bale and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser; References; Index.

Tim Bale is an expert on European politics and political parties. He won the UK Political Studies Association's W.J.M. Mackenzie prize for his book The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron (2010) and is a frequent contributor to broadcast, print and social media in both Britain and beyond.
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is an expert on populism, who has held visiting appointments at Nuffield College, Sciences Po, the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB) and Uppsala University. He is the co-author of the book Populism. A Very Short Introduction (with Cas Mudde, 2017) which has been translated into more than ten languages.