In the May European elections, the immigration issue will continue to play a role in the expected success of radical right parties. The initial success of radical right parties such as the French Front National (FN) in the mid-1980s coincided with concerns about immigration flows into countries across Europe. Although the post-WWII guest-worker era had… Continue reading “The radical right, immigration and the future of the EU”
While racism and xenophobia are central to radical right ideology, there is a wave of gender discrimination sweeping radical right groups around the globe. The electoral success of the radical populist right in Western Europe is almost exclusively associated with one policy field – (im)migration and the various issues tied in with it (such as… Continue reading “The New Assault On Gender By The Radical Right”
It’s become clear that racism isn’t a side effect of far-right ideology, it is a foundational quality of radical right parties in the US and Europe. Is racism a necessary component of the radical right’s appeal? When I was conducting my research on the radical right in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I tried… Continue reading “Racism Is A Core Component Of The Radical Right”
The 2019 European elections are set to see an unprecedented number of far right parties enter the European Parliament. These parties are for the most part rabidly anti-EU, and widely seen as presenting a danger for its future. However, far right parties have a complex relationship with ‘Europe’ that the label ‘eurosceptic’ does not fully… Continue reading “Pro-Europe and anti-EU? Reviewing the far right’s view of Europe”
What does the rise of a radical-right party like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) have to do with anti-discrimination policy in Europe? In the year 2000, after the FPÖ became part of the government in Austria, the EU passed the Racial Equality Directive (RED) as a response to the party’s anti-immigrant position. In 2015, I… Continue reading “Legislating Equality: Anti-Discrimination Policy in Europe”
In a recently published article in European Political Science, my colleague Sarah Valdez and I show that nationalism not only increasingly characterizes contemporary radical right parties but also increasingly distinguishes them from other major party families in Western Europe. To demonstrate this, we relied on data from the Manifesto Project, a cross-national, longitudinal database of… Continue reading “From radical right to neo-nationalist: A research note on the Danish case”
The assimilation policy of integration, actively practiced across Europe, is one of the main prerequisites of xenophobia. The latest measurements in Europe show that after a sharp spike in xenophobia and radicalism in 2015 caused by the migration crisis, the situation has improved slightly, but in some respects it has become even worse. In 2017, for… Continue reading “Europe Is Caught in a Wheel of Xenophobia”
Adhering to a nostalgia for a more stable time, many observers see in the end of Merkel’s era the beginning of a dystopian future of political turmoil. Six years ago, in November 2012, Angela Merkel was at the height of her domestic and European power. At the domestic level, Germany was perceived as an “island… Continue reading “The End of the Merkel Era”
The October 2018 issue of The Atlantic , the venerable American monthly, is titled “Is Democracy Dying?” and contains a series of articles which, by and large, answer this question in the affirmative. Their authors though come to the rescue by suggesting ways the demise of democracy might be prevented. These accounts of democratic decline… Continue reading “Sound an Alarm?”
He punched a Polish nationalist with a rainbow-coloured Pride-flag. When superhero The Phantom(‘Fantomen’) in a recent Swedish episode of his comic-adventures (“The Golden Eagle”, 9:2018) made a bold statement against the European radical right and its ideological positions, the makers were accused of disseminating ‘left-wing extremist ideas’. Social media activism temporarily boiled over, lamenting that The… Continue reading “Pride Against Prejudice: Swedish Superhero Episode Strikes Against the Radical Right”