Understanding the Populist Shift

Othering in a Europe in Crisis

Gabriella Lazaridis, Giovanna Campani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317326052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

During the European elections of 2014, one of the main issues raised by the media was the electoral performance of so called 'populist parties'. The electorate confirmed its deep dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties, voting for far right parties in parliamentary elections in Northern Europe (Austria, Denmark, Sweden), Eastern Europe (Hungary, where the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik party gained votes) and in France (where the French National Front won about a quarter of the vote), while in the Southern European countries, battered by austerity policies, it was the radical right and left in Greece (Golden Dawn and Syriza) and the radical left in Spain (Podemos) that obtained excellent scores.

This book examines the growing trend towards far and extreme right populism that has emerged prominently in Northern (Finland), Western (Austria, Denmark, France, the UK), Southern (Greece, Italy) and Central/Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Bulgaria) since the 1990s. Providing a critical understanding of current European trends and analysing the complex phenomena covered by the notion of populism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching right-wing politics, as well as European politics more generally.

1
Introduction

The concept and its definitions

Giovanna Campani and Gabriella Lazaridis

‘Populist insurgency’ in Europe?

During the European elections of 2014, one of the main issues raised by the media concerned the electoral performance of so-called ‘populist parties’.

Dansk Folskeparti reached 26.6% of the votes and won 4 MP’s (on 13), Slovenska demokratska stranka 24.9% and 3 MP’s (on 8), while the Front National gained 24 seats (24.85%). 26.6% was reached by UKIP (24 MPs), 21.16% by Beppe Grillo’s M5S (17 MPs); the FPÖ won 2 extra MPs compared to 2009.

(Benveniste et al. 2016: 1)

The electorate confirmed its deep dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties, voting for far-right parties in parliamentary elections in Northern Europe (Austria, Denmark, Sweden), Eastern Europe (Hungary, where the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik party gained votes) and France (where the French National Front won about a quarter of the vote), while in the Southern European countries, battered by austerity policies, it was the radical right and left in Greece (Golden Dawn and Syriza) and the radical left in Spain (Podemos) that obtained excellent scores.

The rise of a European ‘populism’ is the object of a huge amount of debates and academic research. This book aims to contribute to it with some original ideas. Based on the findings of a research project entitled ‘Hate Speech and Populist Othering in Europe through the Racism, Age, Gender Looking Glass’, funded by the Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Programme of the European Union through the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs (Grant Number Just/2012/FRAC/AG/2861), the book throws a critical glance at the political discourse of the far and extreme right populist movements and parties in Northern (Finland), Western (Austria, Denmark, France, the UK), Southern (Greece, Italy) and Central/Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Bulgaria). At the same time, the book challenges, where appropriate, the use of the term ‘populism’, as differences between Northern, Eastern and Southern Europe are a sign that the political variety of the anti-establishment and Eurosceptic forms cannot be understood under the label ‘populism’ any longer.

How can a unique definition embrace all the heterogeneity of the movements and parties labelled as ‘populist’? Here are some examples of this heterogeneity:

• parties in government (for example, the Hungarian Fidesz, currently in government since winning the April 2014 elections; the Danish People’s Party, which supported the conservative coalition government between 2001 and 2011; the Northern League, in government from 2001 to 2006 and then again from 2008 to 2011; ANEL in Greece; the Austrian Freedom Party);
• far-right opposition parties like the National Front or Vlaamsblok not in government – they are excluded from power, because, both in France and Belgium, mainstream parties agree to reject any political collaboration with an extreme right that is accused as close to fascism;
• parties of the left in opposition, such as the Front de gauche of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France or Podemos in Spain;
• radical left parties in government, such as Syriza in Greece;
• parties nostalgic for authoritarian regimes (such as the Bulgarian Ataka);
• autonomists – federalists or independents (such as the Northern League or the Vlaamsblok);
• neo-fascists hypernationalists (like Forza Nuova in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary);
• homophobes and so-called defenders of the traditional family (such as the Hungarian Jobbik, Forza Nuova in Italy, Golden Dawn and Laos in Greece);
• islamophobes and defenders of gay marriage (such as the party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands);
• the Italian Five Star Movement, difficult to categorise because of the novelty of its political message: direct democracy through the network; environmental sensibility and de-growth; fight against corruption.

Challenging the definition ‘populist’, the book joins a recent trend among political analysts. For example, before the European elections of 2014, some journalists introduced terms such as ‘rebellious outsiders’ (Higgins 2014) or ‘insurgents’¹ that focus less on the characters of the parties than on the opposition to the political establishment and the EU governance. Nava (2015), a journalist of the Italian Il Corriere della Sera, took it a step further, arguing that the media and politicians should abandon the term populism as a political stigmatisation and address the structural socio-economic and political causes that create new dynamics for anti-establishment parties. ‘Continue to call them just “populist”, with the contempt of political correctness or the technocratic snobbery, it is stupid and pointless. They will walk on the errors and overwhelm the ideals’ (Nava 2015).

It is no mystery that behind the spectacular rise of the ‘insurgency’, there is the management of the euro and the sovereign debt crisis by the European Union – headed by Germany – that has created a division between the North and the South of the continent – as creditors and debtors – and revives the nationalist competition between the countries. The result is the loss of cohesion among Europeans and a major challenge to the idea of a ‘European people’. The rejection of the European Union grows among the European people who turn towards parties that were traditionally Eurosceptic, because of their ideology, in favour of sovereignty and the nation state. This trend has clearly appeared during 2015, when nationalism and Euroscepticism – two main characteristics of ‘populists’ – became mainstream in Poland, where, in the parliamentary elections of 25 October 2015, the victory – with 37.6 per cent of the votes – went to the party of Law and Justice (PiS). The political approach of Law and Justice combines traditional, conservative positions – clericalism (it is anti-abortion), identity policies – with measures aimed to improve the living conditions of the poorest cohorts of the population – the ‘losers’ of the transition towards a competitive capitalist economy. It rejoined the political programme of Victor Orban’s Hungary, deeply criticised by the mainstream pro-EU media and parties.

However, the fact that European movements and parties labelled as populists oppose the current governance of the European Union and want to get back sovereignty does not make them a homogeneous front, as they have very different ideological positions – from the extreme right to the radical left – or just want to overcome left and right (Movement Cinquestelle).

This difference concerns their economic proposals as well, which have little in common. For example, Marine Lepen and Jean-Luc Melenchon have opposite views on how to fight against unemployment in France. In order to understand why both are called ‘populists’, we must remember that, since 2000, the term populism has seen a further metamorphosis: it has been adopted by the mainstream press and become part of the political debate – with the backing of some scholars – as prosecution for all those who do not accept the current neo-liberal political–economic world order. The Financial Times, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal – just to mention some titles that represent the business elite of the West – define as ‘populist’ all the politicians which oppose the neo-liberal dominant economic model – that is, in short, predominance of the market, financial liberalisation and reduction of state duties. The label ‘populist’ is given to Hugo Chavez, the Kirchner (Nestor and especially Cristina) and Evo Morales – the ‘black sheep’ of the press, who does not consider them ‘business friendly’ enough.

Taking into account all these ambiguities, the book aims to provide a critical understanding of current European trends and considers the complex phenomena covered by the notion of populism, focusing especially on right-wing populism. It recommends ways these can be challenged, both in theory and in practice, by using the gender–race–ethnicity–sexual orientation intersectionality approach.

The variations of a concept and a changing political landscape

The book builds its arguments beginning with a historical review of the literature on populism – a very complex field. The sheer variety of political parties and movements labelled ‘populist’ has led some scholars to call the phenomenon itself a ‘chameleon’. Karin Priester, for instance, chose the subtitle ‘approaching a chameleon’ for her 2012 book, in which she references Paul Taggart (2004), who writes of the ‘chameleon-like quality’ and the ‘empty heart’ of populism; a concept, ‘able to ‘suggest’ without imposing too much precise and definitive meaning. In fact, ‘it does not define, but evokes’ (Diamanti 2010). Yet others, like Pels (2012: 31f.–32) for example, argue that it would be dangerous to regard modern populism as merely a ‘frivolity of form, pose and style…. It is precisely through its dynamic mix of substance and style that populist politics has gained an electoral lead position in current media democracy’. As Wodak (2015: 3 [emphasis in original]) put it:

[W]hen analysing right-wing (or, indeed, left-wing) populist movements and their rhetoric, it is essential to recognize that their propaganda – realized as it is in many genres across relevant social domains – always combines and integrates form and content, targets specific audiences and adapts to specific contexts. Only by doing so we are able to deconstruct, understand and explain their messages, the resonance of their messages and their electoral success.

The common populist thread mentioned by Wodak can be found in countries that have experienced authoritarian regimes in their recent history, as is the case not only in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, but also in the Southern European countries that experienced dictatorship until the 1970s (Spain, Portugal, Greece). However, it can also be identified in countries where there is no historical legacy of authoritarianism, such as in the Netherlands and Denmark. As already underlined, the so-called populist forces, far from being a homogeneous ‘block’, can be categorised by various typologies and may be found in different positions in the political scene, with respect to their representation in national parliaments, national institutions and local and national governments.

As Campani and Pajnik write in Chapter 2, the populist experiences had been quite marginal in Europe in comparison with the USA or Latin America until the 1980s, when the Front National started to rise as a main political force. It is during the 1980s that the French scholar Pierre André Taguieff (2002) incorporated the concept of populism from the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American literature to describe the growth of the National Front in France, which had been defined as a far-right party or, generically, ‘fascist’ – a definition which is still used against the party and its leader, Marine Lepen, by some political forces. Taguieff proposed the term ‘national populist’ to overcome the ambiguities of the definition ‘fascist’ and to highlight the modernisation process initiated by the Front National, in order to mark its distance from strongly ideological fascist parties, such as, for example, the MSI (Italian Social Movement) in Italy, the NPD (National Democratic Party) and DVU (Deutsche Volksunion) (far-right neo-Nazi parties) in Germany or the National Front in Britain. These parties still kept an ‘extremist’ dimension, for which we can use the definition of Midlarsky: ‘the will to come to power by a social movement, for which individual freedoms may be curtailed in the name of collective goals, until the assassination of those who disagree’ (Midlarsky 2011: 7). The difference between fascism and populism was measured, therefore, through the acceptance of the limits imposed by democracy.

Taking into account the controversies that the definition of populism presents and considering that neo-fascist parties are often defined as populists and some right-wing populist parties like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) have contacts with explicitly neo-fascist parties such as the Italian Forza Nuova, it is important to clarify the specificity of neo-fascism, neo-Nazism and the respective links with right-wing populism. In Chapter 3, Campani and Sauer historically contextualise the emergence of right-wing populist parties in Austria and Italy. The chapter analyses how European right-wing populist parties and neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups re-elaborate the heritage of the past (fascism and Nazism), how the Nazi and fascist heritage is on the one hand denied in order to fit into the democratic party spectrum, but on the other hand is integrated by right-wing organisations in recent ideologies. In following these (historical) traits, the chapter shows how right-wing populist parties are part, if not organisers, of a differentiated network of neo-Nazi and neo-fascist organisations.

With the abandonment of a fascist-inspired ideology, the acceptance of representative democratic systems, the commitment to the electoral dynamics rather than to extra-parliamentary activism and the renunciation (at least formally) of some ideologically entrenched positions in fascism (for example, anti-Semitism or biological racism), extreme-right or fascist parties became ‘populist’. Part of this ‘modernisation’ was also the shift from biological racism to cultural racism, where the arguments against immigration were no longer based on racial difference, but the risk of a collective loss of identity and the alleged excessive financial burden that immigration represented for the welfare regimes. The political proposal ‘priority to national’ is a consequence of this discourse: welfare systems cannot survive given the burden immigrants and refugees represent. The construction of ‘otherness’ focused on culture. Thus, biological racism was replaced by racism ‘differentialist’² – a concept broadly debated in academic research (Das Gupta et al. 2007).

A rich and interesting literature states that populism, with its naturalistic, essentialist and restrictive depiction of the people, is a by-product of the re-affirmation of a ‘deeply, culturally ingrained perception of social belonging, and of the foundations of the polity, in which the social whole is considered prior to the individual’ (Blokker 2005: 371) and thus is linked to nationalism.

The Herderian concept of the nation as a naturally ordained and homogeneous whole – a national individuality (Blokker 2005: 382) with its specific and unique characteristics – supplies its members with norms of behaviour, as well as forms of identity. This understanding of nationalism clearly discloses its exclusivist features and, moreover, the essentialisation and naturalisation of the nation results in the construction and refusal of the nation’s non-members. Within this framework, even though it allows for the emergence of such concepts as democracy, there is no concern for the consequences of this claim for those who are not members of the majority, because boundaries are defined ethnically. Therefore, whether as an ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1991) or ‘invented’ (Gellner 1983) national identity, or as the privileging of a ‘natural’ community (Smith 1991), the promotion of a monolithic, homogenous group legitimises a sense of territoriality within the polity’s borders.

The nationalist interpretation of populism equates the people with the ethnic nation and thus strengthens the eternal value of the organic community and reinforces its exclusionary nature (Canovan 2002: 34; Mudde 2004: 546). Analyses of such populist manifestations underline the marginalisation of those not belonging to the majority group, which can easily lead to ethnic cleansing, ‘a latent possibility once the discursive construction of the community proceeds along purely ethnic lines’ (Laclau 2005: 197). In other words, in order to safeguard internal cohesion, populist nationalism not only excludes others, but in fact rejects all forms of pluralism and difference in the community of the people, relegating all uncertainties or conflicts beyond the borders of the nation state (Chiantera-Stutte and Petö 2003). Given the diversity of populist forces that are present in Europe, the ‘people’ do not coincide with the nation as bounded by the territory of the nation state.

In Chapter 4, Benveniste, Lazaridis and Puurunen explore how the discourse of ‘othering’ by far right-wing parties or movements is related to the ‘ethnical’ conception of the nation. A comparison between the different constr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the concept and its definitions
• 2 Populism in historical perspectives
• 3 Neo-fascist and neo-Nazi constellations: the cases of Italy and Austria
• 4 Populist othering and Islamophobia
• 5 Networks and alliances against the Islamisation of Europe: the case of the Counter-Jihad Movement
• 6 Exclusive intersections: constructions of gender and sexuality
• 7 Men’s parties with women leaders: a comparative study of the right-wing populist leaders Pia Kjærsgaard, Siv Jensen and Marine Le Pen
• 8 Re/De/constructing far-right youth: between the lost generation and contestatory citizenship
• 9 Democracy, post-democracy and the populist challenge
• Index