European party politics in times of crisis Introduction Our key question in this book is how the multiple crises that Europe faced in the aftermath of the Great Recession influenced the intensity and structuration of political conflict in national party systems.In particular we ask how the cultural integration demarcation divide that had been shaping up in north western Europe before the onset of the Great Recession was affected by these multiple crises and whether this divide was traveling to the European south and east. Figure 1.1: Theoretical framework Embedding the economic crisis in a long term perspective As outlined we first introduce the three long term structural factors that we consider to have had a decisive influence on the structuration of party competition in the long run.As shown in Figure 1.1 these are long term processes of societal change regime legacies and the ever more important multi level system of European governance. or fascist regimes.Only in Italy did the fascist right survive the fall of the regime and was able to organise itself openly.But paradoxically the Italian neo fascists started to decline at the very moment when the radical right began its rise in NWE precisely because of their solid neo fascist lineage (Ignazi 2003: 52).Only by distancing themselves from this legacy could they make a fresh start. Third the relevance of the multi level structure of the EU polity to national politics is likely to vary not only between member states and non member states of the EU but also among member states.During the Great Recession it was arguably more important for Eurozone members and among the latter for the debtor states which became the object of supranational crisis management. The structuration of party competition at the onset of the Great Recession