Abstract
Anti-establishment parties have been entering contemporary European Democracies with sizeable vote shares. During the Great Recession, the Greek and the Italian party system could be perceived as convergent case-studies for the formation and breakthrough of anti-establishment parties. Given the fact that ideologically diverging anti-establishment parties – the Coalition of the Radical Left - Social Unionist Front (SYRIZA) and the Independent Greeks (ANEL) in the Greek case, as well as the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League in the Italian one – came to power and formed coalition governments, the primary goal of this article is to enquire into supply-side parameters, exploring potential associations along a range of programmatic stances and policy dimensions that effectuated these governing alliances. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project dataset, our findings confirm the existence of expected programmatic differences as well as a converging policymaking basis between the anti-establishment coalition partners of both governing alliances.
