The Brexit Party’s forecast success in the European Elections appears incontrovertible – it is currently polling at 27 per cent, knocking the Conservatives into third place. What remains unclear is whether it could be described as a party at all. According to the typical definition of a party as a voluntary membership organisation that competes for state power via elections, the Brexit Party is an anomaly: it is registered as a company, The Brexit Party Limited, headquartered at 83 Victoria Street, and counts 100,000 registered supporters, but not a single party member.
In a groundbreaking 1999 paper, political scientists Jonathan Hopkin and Caterina Paolucci coined the somewhat clunky term “business firm parties” to describe a new political formation that began to emerge in southern Europe during the mid-1970s.
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