Chapter 1 outlines why we wrote the book, namely, to provide a clear-cut account of the EU’s ‘silent revolution’ leading to a much more vertical new economic governance (NEG) regime after the crisis of 2008 and its effects on European employment relations, public services, welfare states, and democracy; to develop a new analytical paradigm capable of capturing the interplay between the supranational formulation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions, their country-specific deployment, and their effects on labour politics and democracy; to empirically assess the policy orientation of EU interventions in two policy areas (employment relations and public services), three public service sectors (transport, water, and healthcare), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), during the pre-NEG (1957–2008), the NEG (2009–2020), and the post-Covid-19 (2020–2022) period; to analyse the responses of unions and social movements to these NEG interventions since 2009, and their feedback effects on the EU’s post-Covid NEG regime; to show that labour politics matters, as unions and social movements are essential in framing the struggles about the policy direction of EU economic governance along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU politics axis – a direction that may lead to the EU’s disintegration.

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.

This chapter analyses Spain’s mainstream conservative party, the Popular Party (PP). Of the two revolutions analysed in the book – the silent and silent counter-revolutions – the Popular Party only confronted the former for several decades. In general, it adapted to a more liberal society by moderating to capture centrist voters in the 1990s without losing far right voters, thereby remaining hegemonic on the right. Midway through the subsequent decade, Spain’s two main parties, the Socialist PSOE and PP, moved further apart on post-materialist and centre–periphery issues. Today, PP is severely weakened and ideologically sandwiched between two right-wing party challengers, the more centrist Citizens and the far right Vox. This political fragmentation is due to a favourable opportunity structure for the rise of new parties after 2010 – related to the Great Recession, political corruption and the push for independence in Catalonia. In this context, PP was unable to retain its diverse electorate. It now confronts dilemmas similar to those of many of its European counterparts, and the party’s initial response to the rise of Vox was to move rightward and accommodate it as an ally.

The 2018 general elections marked a major defeat for the mainstream right in Italy. Scoring a mere 14 per cent, Forza Italia (Go Italy, FI) lost its primacy over the centre-right coalition. Excluded from the national government, the mainstream right finds itself – for the first time since 1994 – in a minority position within Italy’s political right. To understand whether this transformation reflects the tension faced by the mainstream right in coping with the silent revolution and counter-revolution, and with the migration policy challenge, this chapter reconstructs the relationship between the different components of the Italian centre-right over the past twenty-five years (1994-2018). Focusing on Berlusconi’s personalistic parties, its right-wing (populist) partners and Christian democratic allies, the chapter accounts for the demand-side and supply-side evolution of the Italian centre-right. The analyses point to the crucial role played by the issue of migration in shaping right-wing politics in Italy.