National Corps in the context of "Radical right (Europe)"

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⭐ Core Definition: National Corps

The National Corps (Ukrainian: Національний корпус, romanizedNatsionalnyi korpus), also known as the National Corps Party, a far-right political party in Ukraine, was founded in 2016 and then led by Andriy Biletsky. Biletsky had previously founded and led two far-right groups, the Patriot of Ukraine (2006) and the Social-National Assembly (2008) and played a key role in the Azov Battalion. The National Corps was created by veterans of the Azov Battalion and members of the Azov Civil Corps, a civilian non-governmental organization emerging from the Battalion.

During its campaign for the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, the party formed a united radical right nationwide-party list with the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh, the Right Sector, and Svoboda. This coalition won a combined 2.15% of the nationwide electoral list vote but ultimately failed to win any seat in the Verkhovna Rada. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, it suspended its political activities.

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National Corps in the context of Far-right politics in Ukraine

During Ukraine's post-Soviet history, the far-right has remained on the political periphery and been largely excluded from national politics since independence in 1991. Unlike most Eastern European countries which saw far-right groups become permanent fixtures in their countries' politics during the decline and the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the national electoral support for far-right parties in Ukraine only rarely exceeded 3% of the popular vote. Far-right parties usually enjoyed just a few wins in single-mandate districts, and no far right candidate for president has ever secured more than 5 percent of the popular vote in an election. Only once in the 1994–2014 period was a radical right-wing party elected to the parliament as an independent organization within the proportional part of the voting: Svoboda in 2012. Since then far-right parties have failed to gain enough votes to attain political representation, even at the height of nationalist sentiment during and after Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The far-right was heavily represented among the pro-Russian separatists with several past or current leaders of the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk linked to various neo-Nazi, white supremacist and ultra-nationalist groups. The importance of the far-right on both sides of the conflict declined over time. In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, the coalition of Svoboda and the other extreme-right political parties in Ukraine―National Corps, the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh, and the Right Sector―won only 2.15% of the vote combined and failed to pass the 5% threshold. As a result, no party was able to win a proportional seat. One party – the Svoboda party – was able to secure a single constituency seat.

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