# International right-wing parties and internal democratic innovation — a gap worth flagging

**Update, same day:** after this note was drafted, the PVV case below was
judged well-documented enough (unusually clean, dramatic sourcing — see
below) to add as a real scored entry after all. It's now in
`party-governance.json` and on the comparison page. Reform UK and AfD
remain unscored research leads only — see "Why this isn't in
party-governance.json" below, which now applies to those two rather than
all three.

## What was asked

Following the addition of three international comparators to the
[Party Governance Comparison](../docs/projects/au-party-governance-comparison.md)
(Podemos, Five Star Movement, Pirate Party Germany — alongside the
existing Your Party, UK), a DOD member noted we still don't have an
international example of a right-wing party built around a genuine
democratic-innovation mechanism, mirroring the same question raised
earlier about the Australian side (see the
[Community Strong watch item](2026-08-02-community-strong-watch.md)
and the Libertarian Party addition it references). Framed explicitly as
"vibes research for now" — not a request to add a scored entry, but to
log the gap for possible deeper (academic) research later.

## What was found (light Wikipedia-sourced pass, not full scoring rigor)

Three cases worth naming, because they don't all point the same
direction:

**Party for Freedom (PVV, Netherlands)** — the starkest anti-example.
Geert Wilders deliberately structured the party to have exactly one
formal member: himself. Per Wikipedia, after founding the party as an
association in 2005–2006, "Wilders disabled new member registration,
resulting in him remaining the sole member of the party." It has no
public party conferences, no local departments, no youth wing, no
research institute. Wilders' own stated reasoning: avoiding the
factional infighting that destroyed the Pim Fortuyn List after its
founder's murder, and later a more principled claim that membership
parties are "old-fashioned." Multiple MPs and provincial
representatives have quit the party citing "lack of democratic
structure" and Wilders' "autocratic leadership" (Hero Brinkman, 2012;
Marcial Hernandez and Wim Kortenoeven, 2012); Brinkman specifically
pushed for party democratisation from inside and got nowhere. This is
about as close to a documented zero on internal governance as any party
across either the AU or international parts of this dataset.
[Party for Freedom (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Freedom)

**Reform UK** — a genuinely live, unresolved case, not a clean
anti-example. Founded as the Brexit Party in 2018, Farage explicitly
described its original model as "running a company, not a political
party" — registered supporters rather than members, no internal votes.
But in September 2024 Farage promised to hand control to members, and
on 20 February 2025 party ownership was transferred to "Reform 2025
Limited," a company limited by guarantee with no shareholders, under a
new constitution that reportedly gives members the ability to vote on
the constitution and motions, and to remove Farage as leader if over
50% of members petition for it. This is a real, recent, and formally
significant shift away from personalist ownership — but as of the
sourced extract it is untested: Farage remains leader, no removal
petition has been attempted, and the party's practical culture (e.g.
banning a local newspaper from council communications in one Reform-run
council in August 2025, defended by the deputy leader) doesn't read as
especially participatory in practice yet. Worth revisiting once the
new constitutional mechanism has actually been exercised or tested.
[Reform UK (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK)

**Alternative for Germany (AfD)** — not investigated in depth this
pass, but flagged for context: German party law (Parteiengesetz)
mandates delegate congresses and certain internal-democratic structures
for *all* registered parties, AfD included, so its internal governance
looks more like "standard German party democracy" (comparable to what
we've scored for other delegate-congress parties) than either a novel
mechanism or a PVV/Reform-style centralization. Worth a proper sourced
pass if a right-wing comparator is ever added for real, since it may be
the most "normal" data point of the three rather than the most
interesting one.

## Why Reform UK and AfD aren't in party-governance.json (PVV now is)

Per the user's original framing, this started as a research note, not a
scoring decision — and Reform UK and AfD stay that way for now: neither
has been verified to the depth the rest of this dataset holds itself to
(dated history entries, per-dimension sourced notes, logo licensing,
left-right positioning cross-checked), and both are live, unresolved
cases (Reform UK's member-removal mechanism untested; AfD not
researched in depth at all this pass).

PVV was the exception: the sourcing turned out to be unusually clean
and dramatic on its own terms (a party that structurally cannot have
more than one member, confirmed by multiple named ex-members' own
stated reasons for quitting), so it was added as a full scored entry —
see its `scoring_note` and `history` in `party-governance.json`, and the
"Party for Freedom (Netherlands)" section on the comparison page. The
concern about cherry-picking the most striking anti-example without
comparable treatment for Reform UK/AfD still applies to *those two* —
which is exactly why they're logged here as leads rather than added.

## The research question, for whoever picks this up

Across both the Australian dataset and this international pass, every
right-of-centre party scored or reviewed so far is low-to-middling on
internal governance, and the international right-wing cases surveyed
here lean toward personalist/centralized control more explicitly than
any left-wing or populist-left case in the dataset (Podemos and Five
Star Movement both have real, if imperfect, documented member-vote
mechanisms; PVV and pre-2025 Reform UK explicitly avoided having any
member base to vote at all). Is this a structural feature of right-wing
populism specifically — leader-brand parties are harder to run through
a membership democracy because the electoral appeal *is* the leader —
or is it a sampling artifact of which parties happen to be
well-documented in English-language sources? That distinction is
exactly the kind of question worth handing to an actual political
science researcher rather than resolving from a handful of Wikipedia
pages.

**Revisit when:** someone wants to do the full sourced write-up for a
real dataset entry (Reform UK once its member-removal mechanism has
been tested one way or another is probably the most interesting
candidate), or when an academic collaborator picks up the broader
question above.
