Conclusion

This book focuses on how party competition has adjusted to the success of populism in Western Europe, whether it is non-populists dealing with their populist competitors, or populists interacting with each other. In this concluding chapter, we take a comparative approach and highlight the main findings emerging from the individual case studies. Firstly, we provide an overview of the main strategies employed by non-populist right-wing and left-wing parties responding to populists. A clear pattern emerges from our final overview. While right-wing non-populists have mainly relied on cooperation or co-optation strategies when dealing with right-wing populist competitors, left-wing non-populists have tended to clash with them. Right-wing non-populists resort to clashing only when they face a populist left-wing competitor. Thus a left-right ideological divide clearly drives non-populists’ responses to populists. At the same time, we note that the same ‘ideological proximity’ logic does not seem to explain interactions between populists. Indeed, we find many instances of clashing between populist parties with similar policy positions. The main examples of populist co-operation have occurred between populist actors with different left-right orientations. We link this last finding to the growing salience of a dimension of conflict resulting from increasing mobilization against (cultural and/or economic) globalization and current governance structures at the domestic and EU levels.