The European radical right seems to have failed to develop coherent responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Europe’s radical-right parties have quickly understood the benefit they can derive from criticizing their respective governments in managing the COVID-19 health crisis. Their communication focuses on three main areas. First, they question the animal origin of the epidemic through… Continue reading “Europe’s Far Right Fails to Capitalize on COVID-19”
Drawing on an original database of party expulsions of radical right parties in Europe across twenty countries from 2000-2020, Felix Wiebrecht, James F. Downes, Edward Chan and Anna Kam devise a theoretical model that groups expulsions into two categories that comprise accountability mechanisms and political purges. They find empirically that within the modern far-right, expulsions… Continue reading “Disunity within the Ranks? Party Expulsions in the European Radical Right: 2000–2020”
Introduction In April 2020, the German radical right party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD) lost more than 4% in the opinion polls compared to January. Its popularity this month was at the level of 9-10% (down from a record of 18% nationally in 2018 and 25% in the eastern state polls). There are two reasons for… Continue reading “Will be the world more tolerant after the Covid-19 Pandemic?”
Almost four months after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in China, we can state with confidence that coronavirus pandemic has the potential to radically change the world and society that we live in. As part of mainstream narratives on the consequences of the pandemic has been the idea that globalisation will be reversed, and… Continue reading “The ‘other’ in a time of a crisis: Europe’s Populist Radical Right Response to Covid-19”
Is it reasonable to expect that the radical populist right is going to make somewhat of a comeback after the CoVid-19 crisis has passed? For those of us who have been following the radical populist right over the past couple of decades, one of the central questions today is whether the radical populist right is… Continue reading “Will France’s Marine Le Pen be a profiteer or victim of the pandemic?”
The EU needs to regain control of the political debate around social welfare, which has been masterfully monopolized by European populist parties in the last decade. The European economy is expanding for the seventh year in a row despite a slowdown at the global level. However, social and economic inequalities within EU member states have been increasing… Continue reading “It’s Time for a New European Approach to Social Policy”
In the last month, European countries witnessed a series of events that reinforce the surge of radical and extreme right movements, such as the rise of Vox as the third political force in Spain, the independence march of nationalism in Poland, or recent Italian polls predicting that radical right parties might reach 51.5% in the… Continue reading “The Role of Sovereignism for European Radical/Extreme Right Parties”
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”
