European political arena can be characterized by political innovation and change. New actors have emerged across the political spectrum, from the greens on the left to neo-nationalists on the right. Parties face structural challenges due to a changing institutional system at the domestic level and the exigencies of European Union at the supranational. The traditional role of grassroots activism seems eclipsed by the growth of high-tech campaigning. As the fundamental link between individual constituent and representative is increasingly called into question, voting rates have dropped across Europe.
Some observers even fear for the survival of party-based democracy.
Yet sudden transformations in the European political fabric are nothing new. From the last decades of the nineteenth century, the party political landscape was fundamentally changed by the arrival of mass suffrage, new kinds of parties and new forms of party organization. Socialists, clericals and right-wing populists riding waves of resurgent nationalism established themselves across the contintent after 1870. Then, after the watershed of the First World War, Communist and Fascist parties were able to challenge the very legitimacy of the European parliamentary system. In the wake of the Second World War, the party political spectrum was again reshaped, if not as violently, by the emergence of powerful Christian Democratic Parties and more recently by varying constellations of environmentalists, regionalists and territorialist xenophobes.