The Populist Radical Right in Europe A Xenophobic Voice in the Global Economic Crisis Dietmar Loch and Ov Cristian Norocel 1.
Introduction
Since the mid-1980s, populist radical right parties have established themselves in the party systems of several Western and Eastern European democracies. The examples reach from the French National Front (Front National, FN) to the populist parties in the Nordic countries and the Hungarian Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom, Jobbik) to finally, in the context of the economic and financial crisis, the Greek Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή, GD). The European Parliament elections of 2014 confirmed the electoral success of these Eurosceptic parties, though their impact on the European political agenda remains to be assessed. They stand for a protectionist ‘national-populism’, which can also take the form of separatist regionalism in the case of the Italian Northern League (Lega Nord, LN), or the Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang, VB) in Belgium. Meanwhile, the populist radical right has also temporary shared governmental responsibilities (Delwit & Poirier 2007). Beside other symptoms like high rates of voters abstention, populist radical right parties point to fundamental problems in modern (West-)European, globalized and urban segregated societies. These are linked to social exclusion and inequalities, to cultural differences and to the transformation of the nation state including its crisis of political representation. In this context, the populist radical right parties stand for nationalism and racism (Islamophobia/ /antiziganism), increasingly for ethnicized social welfare provisions (‘welfare chauvinism’), for the defence of national sovereignty (in relation to international institutional frameworks, such as the European Union) and finally for populist criticism of the political elites and representative democracy. While these parties had for a long time mobilized their voters around cultural issues, they have, in the context of in the global and the European economic and financial crisis, increasingly emphasised issues linked to economic protectionism and social security and so they have become attractive for an electorate in real social downward mobility or in fear of it. Indeed, the crisis appears to be the magic moment for populism, especially for rightist populism. We consider that populism entails a specific political style which has a function of mediation particularly in times of crisis (Taguieff 2002), when the integration capacity of intermediary institutions within a polity is decreasing. We do not attribute a particular ideology to populism, since we deem it a ‘thin ideology’ at best (Stanley 2008). Nevertheless, we prefer an ideological definition, not via populism, but via the radical right whose main ideas lie in nativism (at the intersection of ethnic nationalism and updated forms of racism) and authoritarianism (Mudde 2007), in an economic ambiguity between capitalist liberalism and protectionism, and in a populist approach to democracy. Populism and the radical (or extreme) right are overlapping and their mix constitute the populist radical right, whose main organisation form is - beside the social movement and the ‘subcultural milieu’ - the political party. Consequently, we share the opinion that populist radical right parties constitute a new party family. Finally, one of the most important reasons for the fact that in contemporary Europe the populist radical right is more prominent than populist radical left parties is
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