Here in a special interview with the Discourses & Society journal, CARR Senior Fellow Professor Ruth Wodak talks about her research into right-wing populism and the radical right and how ‘discursive shifts’ have enabled this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0957926519889109
Finding commonalities and differences between far right parties has been a long-standing challenge for scholars of the party family. In recent years, ‘Euroscepticism’ has emerged as one shared feature of far right parties in Europe, both in virtue of their peripheral position in party systems, and in virtue of their ‘nativist’ ideology which leads them… Continue reading “Europe from the far right”
This article is based on extracts from the following book: The politics of fear. What right-wing populist discourses mean (extracts). Ruth WODAK, 2015, Los Angeles / London / New Delhi / Singapore / Washington DC, SAGE. Are not all politicians populists? Don’t other politicians sometimes construct scapegoats and use similar rhetorical tropes as do… Continue reading “Analysing the Micro-Politics of Right-wing Populism”
In this second part of Pragya Rai’s blog on political globalisation and the populist radical right, Rai looks at the strengths and weaknesses of globalist and anti-globalist arguments – critically assessing the role of the latter in populist radical right ideology. You can find the first part here. Discussion: Strengths and Weaknesses of Globalist and… Continue reading “Political Globalisation and the Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe (Part II)”
Tracing the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in interwar Romania reveals a number of key factors that are too familiar for comfort. Almost every state in Europe had a parliamentary democracy in 1919, but within twenty years more than half had become fascist, authoritarian, or communist dictatorships. In most cases, the collapse of democracy was not… Continue reading “How Democracies Collapse: Lessons From Interwar Romania”
The Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has recently announced his resignation after 14 months of the so-called Government of change. This political crisis offers us the opportunity to turn our attention towards the parties forming ‘the first populist government of Western Europe’ – the Five Star Movement (5SM) and the (Northern) League (NL) – and,… Continue reading “Populism in Power: The Italian Case”
Electoral Breakthroughs Following the electoral breakthrough of the populist radical right (PRR) in continental Europe in both recent national parliamentary elections covering the 2015–2018 refugee crisis period and the 2019 European Parliament elections, many of these parties are no longer on the periphery and have become influential. Furthermore, a number of mainstream parties have avowedly… Continue reading “From ‘Challengers’ to ‘Incumbents’: The Populist Radical Right in Government”
One of the most unsettling ways in which postwar Europe used its alleged Christian identity was to normalize modern totalitarianism. Illustratively, by the end of the Second World War active efforts began to be made throughout the continent to prove that Spanish dictator Francisco “Franco was not really a ‘fascist’, but was in fact an… Continue reading ““Christian Europe” and the normalization of the radical right”
The vision of a fascist Europe proved to be a chimera. Today’s watchers of the radical right must hope that things will be no different when the heirs of ‘classic fascism’ meet in Milan next week. It was reported on 5 April that Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s League Party (formerly the Northern League) and the country’s… Continue reading “A pan-European radical right – contradiction in terms?”
Populist parties on both the radical right and left of the political spectrum in Europe have made considerable electoral gains over the last decade, but they have done so using notably different approaches. We draw on recent election data to show the extent to which the radical right has tended to outperform the radical left since the… Continue reading “Why has the populist radical right outperformed the populist radical left in Europe?”