12 - The Mainstream Right in Western Europe in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

This concluding chapter assess if the general argument of the book holds true for all the country cases included in our analysis. It then turns its attention to the three party families of the mainstream right – Christian Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals – and examines the ways in which all of them have found it a challenge to cope with the tension between the silent and silent counter-revolutions. The third section looks at the four policy dimensions that have been and will continue to be key for the electoral profile of the mainstream right, namely, European integration, immigration, moral issues and welfare. The chapter closes by advancing three suggestions on the future research agenda on the mainstream right in Western Europe and beyond: that scholars monitor the extent to which the ‘winning formula’, which some parties have hit upon, proves to be successful in the long term; that, in the light of the programmatic changes some of them have made, scholars continually re-evaluate their classification as members of particular party families; and, finally, that scholars explore the impact of negative partisanship on both the mainstream right and the far right.