This book is about people who join radical right parties in Western Europe. Its central claim is that the qualities of these individuals determine whether such parties develop into major players or remain marginal forces. In contrast to most studies of the radical right, and indeed of political parties in general, it focuses on agency rather than structure and demonstrates that political choices – sometimes choices that seem insignificant at the time – can produce radically different outcomes in societies that are all facing the same basic set of large-scale transformations. That a micropolitical turn provided the key to understanding the development of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe first occurred to me as I was conducting interviews with radical right politicians in Austria and Germany. So it is appropriate to begin with them.

In 2000, the editor-in-chief of the left-liberal weekly Falter, Armin Thurnher, coined a new term for some members of the radical right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) that combined the German Faschisten (fascists) with the Austrian-German fesch (good looking): the Feschisten. The thirty-one-year-old FPÖ finance minister, Karl-Heinz Grasser, always dressed to the nines, was the unofficial leader of this new breed of Freedom Party politician. A number of highly educated, ambitious, and capable people had entered the party since Jörg Haider had come to power in 1986. Members of the older cohort remained as well, but these were generally respectable people in their communities.