New Cleavages in Old Europe: Cartel Parties Vs Anti-Establishment Parties

The European political systems are affected by a long process of transformation of the actors of the traditional cleavage politics, in terms of identity and organization. The weakening of the ability of mainstream parties to represent the issues that come from new social groups has gradually fostered the rise by a sentiment of opposition to the political class and the traditional parties, which may takes the forms of apathy, increasing abstention at the elections, and the form of protest, encouraging the emergence of anti-establishment parties. Within this context, the paper deals with the relationship between the crisis of representative democracy in European political systems during twentieth century and the increasing politicization of the anti-political sentiment. It will therefore be themed the prospect of a new cleavage politics on the basis of social and economic processes that affects international European societies, and at the same time will be analyzed the ideological trends of the parties of the new populist right and of the new left populist. To understand the nature and the development of anti-establishment parties is necessary to investigate how these are bearers of a challenge to democracy itself, or how much they represent the light of the failure to redefine the contents and forms of political representation in European advanced democracies. In the first case the parties would be anti-establishment as the traditional anti-system parties described by Sartori (1976), in the second case they would express rather a selective rejection of the actors of traditional politics, placing itself at the "periphery" and not "outside" of representative democracy.