National Populism

While left-wing populist movements were gaining at best relative ground in Europe, their right-wing equivalent not only become vital coalition partners or even created their own governments, they even indirectly triggered such major events as Brexit. Though it is perhaps better we speak in the plural—right-wing equivalents. As a Spanish historian puts it, we cannot speak of a “homogeneous alternative across Europe,” only “various social, cultural, political, and economic contexts.”² This concerns such themes broadly connected with the right wing as skepticism toward the European Union, LGBT groups, and abortion. Groups categorized as national populist take a variety of stances to these issues.

The term national populism was coined in the 1980s as an attempt to pin down Jean-Marie Le Pen’s group,³ to which “neo-fascism” did not apply, as this more aptly described Italian groups drawing directly from Mussolini’s legacy. The national populists, like the leftist populists, oppose globalization and a neoliberal socioeconomic model. Yet unlike their equivalents on the other side of the fence, they put the most emphasis on the identity side of politics.⁴ The national community is meant to be threatened by international corporations and cosmopolitan pop culture, but also by immigrants, above all from the Muslim countries, but also from the eastern outskirts of the EU (such as Poles in Great Britain).

The national populists’ success comes not only from stoking fears (some absurd, and some partly legitimate), but also from borrowing left-wing economic ideas—this explains why they take part of the electorate that previously supported the social democrats or communists.⁵

Can right-wing populism be equated with fascism? Most serious scholars of fascism have serious doubts.⁶ Emilio Gentile notes: “can you imagine any populist leader of our day publicly declaring that he sees the nation as degenerate and corrupt and that it will have to be fixed with iron discipline, to be regenerated and adapted to a vision of humanity invented by that populist leader, whether this is Berlusconi or Renzi, Salvini or Di Maio, Orban or Trump?”⁷ Racism, which often grows out of an anti-immigrant discourse, is not unique to fascism—populists, in turn, do not make reference to imperialism, which was a crucial part of the ideology of the interwar years.

National populists are also not officially against democracy as such; on the contrary, they often call for introducing elements of direct democracy, seen as a good tool for combating the out-of-touch elite. Critics point out that concepts of this sort could be less pro-democratic than anti-systemic.⁸ Thus, for example, referendums need not mean greater civic participation in governments, they can also be tools for consciously wrecking liberal democracy in its present form. Even sporadic xenophobic slogans as a political practice could cause anxiety—for can they be stopped when the populists’ aim, like limiting immigration, has been reached, or do they become entrenched in public life?