Regional development trajectories and the political geography of the far-right

How are long-term regional development trajectories associated with far-right electoral growth in Europe? Applying sequence analysis to national-relative economic, demographic and structural change across EU15 NUTS-3 regions (1982–2017), this paper classifies regions into six development trajectories and links them to far-right vote shares in European Parliament elections (1999–2024). Far-right growth is weakest in the securely incorporated high-income core and stronger across several historically distinct non-core trajectories. Comparable increases emerge from different regional histories that differ in timing and electoral composition, and are not reducible to static measures of left-behindness.