The Populist Radical Right

A Reader

Cas Mudde, Cas Mudde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315514550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The populist radical right is one of the most studied political phenomena in the social sciences, counting hundreds of books and thousands of articles. This is the first reader to bring together the most seminal articles and book chapters on the contemporary populist radical right in western democracies. It has a broad regional and topical focus and includes work that has made an original theoretical contribution to the field, which make them less time-specific. The reader is organized in six thematic sections:

(1) ideology and issues;

(2) parties, organizations, and subcultures;

(3) leaders, members, and voters;

(4) causes;

(5) consequences; and

(6) responses.

Each section features a short introduction by the editor, which introduces and ties together the selected pieces and provides discussion questions and suggestions for further readings. The reader is ended with a conclusion in which the editor reflects on the future of the populist radical right in light of (more) recent political developments – most notably the Greek economic crisis and the refugee crisis – and suggest avenues for future research.

Part I
Ideology and issues

All scholars define the populist radical right as essentially an ideology and link it to specific political issues. There is significant debate about what exactly defines the core features of (what I call) the populist radical right ideology, and what the best term to denote it is. However, whether explicitly or implicitly, virtually everyone makes a connection to historical fascism of the early twentieth century (in its German or Italian form). Roger Griffin discusses the similarities and differences between historical fascism and the contemporary populist radical right, arguing that the latter is, in part, a consequence (and proof) of the post-fascist era.

Elisabeth Carter identifies the core features of (what she calls) ‘right-wing extremism’ and outlines the dividing lines between the ‘extreme right’ and the ‘mainstream right.’ In line with many other authors (see several chapters in Part IV), she argues that there are different types of ‘right-wing extremism’ and that there is a relationship between the type of ideology and electoral success. Hans-Georg Betz and Carol Johnson focus on the essence of the contemporary populist radical right ideology, and its complex relationship to liberal democracy, while Sarah L. De Lange questions the so-called ‘new winning formula’ (of Herbert Kitschelt and Anthony McGann, see Part IV), which has informed much research into the radical right, particularly among US(-trained) scholars.

Populist radical right politics is related to a specific set of issues, which have remained relatively stable. Immigration has always been at the core of the populist radical right program, but the type of immigrant has changed in time. At least since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 Muslims have become the prime target of radical right parties. José Zúquete looks into the phenomenon of ‘Islamophobia’ and how the new focus on Islam and Muslims has changed the populist radical right and its relationship with the political mainstream.

Finally, Sofia Vasilopoulou discusses another core issue of populist radical right politics: European integration. She shows that, as the European Union (EU) has changed, the position of the populist radical right parties has changed. Today, different populist radical right parties hold different positions on European integration in general and the EU in particular.

Revision questions

Griffin

• What are the key differences between historical fascism and the contemporary populist radical right?
• What does Griffin mean with the term ‘ethnocratic liberalism’?
• What are the two main strategies to keep fascism alive in the post-fascist era? Where do these two strategies come together?
• What ideological purpose does Revisionism, and in particular Holocaust Denial, serve for fascists in the post-fascist era?

Carter

• What are the two anti-constitutional and anti-democratic elements that define right-wing extremism?
• What are the two features that constitute the dividing line between the extreme right and the mainstream right?
• What are the three bases of division for Carter’s typology of right-wing extremism? Which five types does she distinguish?
• What is the relationship between party ideology and electoral success?

Betz and Johnson

• What did Jean-Marie Le Pen mean when he said that he wants to ‘return the word to the people’ who live under ‘a totalitarian yoke with a democratic mask’?
• What does the populist radical right mean with ‘true’ or ‘real’ democracy? What is the essence of this form of democracy?
• What is ‘the ethnocratic alternative’?

De Lange

• What are the two main dimensions of West European party politics?
• What is ‘the new winning formula’ according to Kitschelt and McGann? What is De Lange’s main critique of that formula?

Zúquete

• What are the key consequences of the populist radical right’s new focus on Islam and Muslims?
• What do the terms ‘Eurabia’ and ‘Dhimmitude’ mean?
• How has the issue of Islam led to the mainstreaming of the populist radical right in Europe?

Vasilopoulou

• Why do populist radical right parties have ‘increased incentives’ to oppose the European Union?
• What are the four aspects of European integration?
• What are the populist radical right’s three ‘patterns of opposition’ to European integration? Why do different parties have different patterns of opposition?

Discussion points

1. Are we today in an ‘interregnum’ or an ‘endgame,’ according to Griffin? Do you agree with his position?
2. Is Carter’s (full) typology of ‘right-wing extremism’ still relevant today? Does her established relationship between party ideology and electoral success still hold true in the twenty-first century?
3. What constitutes a bigger threat to contemporary liberal democracy, the ‘post-fascist’ New Right or the ‘ethnocratic’ radical right?
4. Does the European populist radical right have a distinct economic program?
5. Zúquete argues that Islamophobia is ‘indistinctive’ and ‘moralistic’ and should therefore not be used in academic debates. Do you agree?
6. Has there been a shift in the populist radical right’s opposition to European integration during the Great Recession?
7. Are populist radical right parties ‘anti-European’?

Further reading

Almeida, Dimitri. “Europeanized Eurosceptics? Radical Right Parties and European Integration”, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Vol.11, No.3, 2010, 237–253.

Betz, Hans-Georg and Meret, Susi. “Revisiting Lepanto: The Political Mobilization Against Islam in Contemporary Western Europe”, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol.43, Nos.3–4, 2009, 313–334.

Ennser, Laurenz. “The Homogeneity of West European Party Systems: The Radical Right in Comparative Perspective”, Party Politics, Vol.18, No.2, 2012, 151–171.

Feldman, Matthew and Jackson, Paul (eds.). Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far Right since 1945. Stuttgart: ibidem, 2014.

Halikiopoulou, Daphne, Mock, Steven and Vasilopoulou, Sofia. “The Civic Zeitgeist: Nationalism and Liberal Values in the European Radical Right”, Nations and Nationalism, Vol.19, No.1, 2013, 107–127.

Mudde, Cas. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Mudde, Cas. The Ideology of the Extreme Right. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Pirro, Andrea L.P. “Populist Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe: The Different Context and Issues of the Prophets of the Patria”, Government and Opposition, Vol.49, No.4, 2014, 599–628.

Prowe, Diethelm. “ ‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts”, Contemporary European History, Vol.3, No.3, 1994, 289–314.

Swyngedouw, Marc and Ivaldi, Gilles. “The Extreme Right Utopia in Belgium and France: The Ideology of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French Front National”, West European Politics, Vol.24, No.3, 2001, 1–22.

Wodak, Ruth, KosraviNik, Majid, and Mral, Brigitte (eds.). Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

1
Interregnum or endgame?

The radical right in the ‘post-fascist’ era

Roger Griffin

A charred corpse lying unrecognizable in an underground bunker in Berlin, a body hanging all too recognizably upside down from the gantry of a petrol station in Milan: if single images can be worth pages of historical analysis then the fates of Hitler and Mussolini in April 1945 certainly point to a dramatic watershed in the history of the radical right. The Duce’s prophecies that his regime inaugurated a ‘century of the Right, a Fascist century’, and the Führer’s claims to have founded a thousand-year Reich had proved catastrophic misreadings of unfolding political realities. The increasingly geriatric personal dictatorships of Franco and Salazar soon seemed grotesque anachronisms. In 1994 the oldest and most successful neo-fascist movement, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, became a ‘right-wing party’, declaring at its first congress held in Fiuggi that the collapse of actually existing socialism five years earlier had meant the end of an era characterized by the struggle between anti-fascism and fascism, and that parliamentary democracy now remained ‘the only solution without negative side effects to the problem of competition between political forces for the conquest of consensus’.¹ In the run up to the congress in December 1993 the MSI’s leader, Gianfranco Fini, had asserted that ‘Fascism was now irreversibly consigned to history and its judgement. . . . Like all Italians we are not neo-Fascists, but post-Fascists’.² Symbolically at least, Fiuggi was the Bad Godesberg of the European radical right. Liberal democracy had triumphed.

With its Faustian urge to probe beneath the surface of human phenomena to find ‘what holds together the world at its inmost level’,³ political science clearly cannot be content with such punchy story-lines and cinematographic dénouements. However, once it is asked to recount how things ‘actually have been’ for the radical right since 1945 a number of factors come into play which make it hazardous to offer any sort of script at all, even if only in the form of a rough treatment. For one thing, even if the scope of the question is restricted to Europe, the failure of the radical right to achieve hegemony has a different story in every country.⁴ Moreover, the conceptual problems involved compound those raised by the sheer quantity of empirical material. Apart from the increasingly contested nature of the fundamental term ‘the right’,⁵ the concept ‘radical right’ can be defined and delimitated in several conflicting ways,⁶ and in each case subsumes a number of distinct forms of organization and ideological rationale. Moreover, the specific connotations of the term in different languages (when it is possible to translate it literally) and its significance, both historical and contemporary, vary significantly from country to country and from one part of the world to another (e.g., in German ‘radical right’ is regarded as still within the bounds of legitimate political debate, while ‘extreme right’ is not). In some Anglo-Saxon usages it embraces thousands of individual groups, movements, and parties the world over, ranging from the vast and well-established to the ephemeral and minute.⁷ In addition, the subliminal political values, not to mention the historical assumptions and shadowy teleological imaginings, of the social scientist who attempts to sketch the ‘big picture’ cannot fail to influence the way it is composed, which empirical features are highlighted, and what inferences for the future are drawn from it.

Fortunately, three factors operate to bring the remit of this article just within the bounds of the manageable. First, it is written as one of a series of articles primarily concerned with general patterns of development discernible over the twentieth century within some of the major modern political ideologies, rather than with specific political formations and the events they helped shape. Secondly, the right–left dichotomy is a product of the French Revolution, and the term ‘radical right’ acquires its most precise connotations in the context of ideologically elaborated rejections of parliamentary liberalism of the type which first arose in late nineteenth-century Europe. Considerations of traditionalist forces operating outside Europeanized societies in a non-parliamentary context, such as Islamic fundamentalism, or of ideologically vacuous dictatorships, whether military or personal, thus need not detain us. Thirdly, one of the most significant events in the recent history of the radical right arguably concerns not the object of research but the lens through which it is seen. After several decades in which even the most rudimentary agreement over the definition of fascism was lacking, a significant pocket of consensus has emerged about its basic definitional contours. This conjuncture of factors enables an area of empirical data which poses irreducible definitional and taxonomic problems to be cut down to size, at least for heuristic purposes, by considering within a relatively uncontentious conceptual framework those aspects of the post-war radical right which can be seen as outlets or conduits for the same ideological energies which fed interwar fascism. Having cleared some of the terrain it will then be possible to suggest in a more speculative spirit that the most significant development that has taken place since the war in the radical right has occurred outside the parameters of fascism: the spread of ‘ethnocratic liberalism’. The anti-liberal currents of ideology it feeds may prove even more insidious than modernized forms of the interwar fascist right in their liberticide ...