Contemporary Far-Right Racist Populism in Europe

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• Islamophobia
• far right
• populism
• anti-Immigration
• Europe

A spectre is haunting Europe. Not for the first time, right-wing racist movements are on the march across that continent, with parliamentary beachheads in a number of nations, as well, of course, as the possibly disintegrating European parliament. These troubling processes were under way when this special issue was planned in 2014, arising from a session, on right-wing racist populism, of the Research Committee on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations (RC05) of the International Sociological Association at its congress in Yokohama. The session had been proposed in 2012, and already the signs were there that nationalist, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic movements and political parties were on the rise, from the upsurge of Golden Dawn in economic crisis-ridden Greece, to the arrival of English Defence League (EDL) thugs on British streets. As yet then, Brexit was inconceivable, however, and indeed it failed to be conceived by the British elite until they were surprised by the 2016 referendum and the effectiveness of its anti-immigration campaign. The crisis of refugees fleeing from war in Syria and other devastation from the Arab Winter had not been imagined – at least not in the scale that eventuated, with its impact and reaction in Europe. We are currently confronted by all of these realities; can we make sociological sense of the bigger picture? The EDL, the mainstreaming of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) that claimed victory in the Brexit vote, the rehabilitation and popularity of the National Front in France, the advent of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD – which has, as we write, just won the second-largest party share of the vote in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election), the ‘protest’ phenomenon of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA) in Germany (and somewhat beyond), the continued interventions of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands and their gains in the national and European parliaments, the very close-run Austrian presidential election in 2016 (to be re-run in October) with far-right-wing populist Austrian Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, gaining almost 50 per cent of the vote, in Sweden the rise in support for the far-right populist anti-immigration party the Swedish Democrats, and in Greece the popular and electoral surge of the aforementioned Golden Dawn: this is by no means a comprehensive listing, even for Europe. Nor is the growth of right-wing populist, nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-asylum seeker, anti-Muslim politics confined to Europe. Donald Trump’s phenomenal successes in the US presidential primaries have been demonstrative and unexpected, and far from Europe and North America, the dramatic return to parliament of Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigration and xenophobic One Nation party in Australia’s federal election of 2016 has referenced European anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideology in equal measures with Trump’s. This special issue confines itself to Europe, but the commonalities are not so confined. To what extent is there a shared history in all of this, with common underlying causes?

History tells us that economic crisis, with the casualties of attendant restructurings, provides conditions favourable to the rise of right-wing populism, with the scapegoating of Others being a key populist strategy. Indeed these circumstances are among the necessary conditions of fascism. The nationalism inherent in fascism serves to engender a sense that ‘we’ are all in the crisis together. While these appearances are superficially real, their presentation to us in this way obscures the underlying reality that not all sectors of society (classes, class fractions, ethnicities, genders) are affected to the same extent by the crisis – as in the case of contemporary austerity measures. One form of Marxist theory of ideology dubbed this manoeuvre ‘masking’ – perhaps a more contemporary metaphor would be ‘veiling’! – in which deep structural causes are covered by the presentation of the immediate.

The ‘othering’ and blaming of out-groups is another ideological manoeuvre that obfuscates the real causes of economic crisis that lie within the tendencies towards periodical crisis within the social relations of capital itself. In a sense, those responsible are capitalists (though not all capitalists equally) and the beneficiaries are capitalists (though not all capitalists). Right-wing nationalist populism scapegoats the Other instead as the putative cause of the crisis. ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (‘The Jews are our misfortune’), for example, in the case of German Nazism in the 1930s. Communists, socialists and traitors were objects of blame in the case of the proto-fascism of 1920s Germany. Radical intellectuals and what would these days be derided as ‘cosmopolitan elites’ were represented as enemies (in place of class enemies) and blamed for the decline of the nation and (the welfare of) its people in both cases. This is an ideological function that has been described as akin to ‘fetishism’, whereby the perception of real social relations is distorted by a form of displacement or projection, such that causality (blame) is attributed so something or someone else – such as a scapegoat. These forms of structuralist explanation of right-wing nationalism and racism became deeply unfashionable among western intellectuals, and derided as ‘false consciousness’ theories, during the brief florescence of poststructuralism in the late 1970s and the 1980s, coinciding with the political exposure of Soviet socialism and its gradual economic decline that led to its eventual sudden collapse. The global financial crisis has changed all that. Social scientists can – indeed must – once again attempt the task of explaining ideology and its functioning, rather than mistaking the commonality of common sense for some sort of authenticity to be valorised in the culture of ordinary people.

Radical analyses of fascism that emerged among the new generation of post-war scholars in the late 1960s found that another common precondition for the rise of fascism was the defeat of the organised labour movement. With the transatlantic rise in the late 1970s and early 1980s of what was then called the ‘New Right’, spearheaded by Thatcher and Reagan, the labour movement suffered crushing defeats, and the post-war welfare state, the basis for epochal social-democratic settlements, was progressively dismantled through the instituting of what was then termed ‘economic rationalism’. The result was neoliberalism. The global rise of populist, right wing, nationalist, xenophobic movements is in large part a reaction to the insecurities and displacement of neoliberalism in the context of global financial crisis. These movements are not the same as fascism, yet they share many features in common. We must see the success of the Thatcherite project in rendering unions insignificant as part of the context of contemporary right-wing racist populism. In their absence, who is going to stand up for the ‘little person’? Why Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Hofer, Trump, et al.? All of these populists project themselves by definition as anti-elite. They portray liberal intellectuals as out of touch with ordinary people, and they invoke the racialised Other as a threat to ‘our’ way of life, while blaming urban elites for ignoring or even indulging this threat, and banishing popular fears about it to the realm of the unsayable. This ideological rhetoric has unmistakable resonances of historical populisms such as fascism.

Speaking from Europe, with its history of fascist populism and indeed the Holocaust, the return of ‘whitewashed’ contemporary far-right populism poses a particular challenge. The global financial crisis, and the unequal burden caused by neo-liberal austerity measures in response to it, undoubtedly underlie the wide spread of nationalist and populist reactions. For many, unified policy developments seen as imposed from beyond the nation, are viewed as problem rather than solution; the EU28’s lack of social integration feeds the rising tide of populisms. The project of supranational governance of the European Union (EU) has reflected the role of national and transnational elites. This must be recognised in comprehending the nationalist and xenophobic reaction of Brexit and the possibly multifold ‘exits’ to come. The need for deep-rooted democratic and egalitarian reform in matters of social and economic policy must be considered urgently, if alternative, global, visions of social solidarity are to be convincingly offered.

Thinking through historical experience is crucial as we face the puzzlement of the speed of what is unfolding in the UK, across the Continent, and elsewhere. Thirty years ago, ‘populism’ appeared as a scary narrative of the post-1930s economic, and political crisis in Europe. Far-right populism was identified with Fascism (Italy, Spain) and National Socialism (Germany); racist and anti-Semitic ideological populism came to power in Germany with the (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) being voted into parliament in 1932. Likewise in Italy, Mussolini’s dictatorship was attained initially by constitutional means, with the elected (1922) government under the National Fascist Party being similarly backed by organised extra-parliamentary militias. In that period, and with the background of parliamentary, economic and social crisis, power was formally ‘handed over’ by state representatives, the king (Italy) and the Reichspräsident (Germany), but this formalised a reality achieved on the streets.

Since the end of World War II, and the death of the fascist leader, Franco in Spain in 1975, the period of fascism in Europe seemed to be ended. In the 1980s, however, far-right parties returned to the political party system in different nation states across Europe. Slavoj Žižek ([2001] 2002) commented aptly ([2001] 2002: 236–7) on the rise of extreme right-wing parties, and their leaders and the democratic outcry against it, at that time.

The first thing to do here is to recall the well-concealed but nonetheless sigh of relief in predominant democratic political fields, when, a decade ago, the Rightist populist parties became a serious presence (Haider in Austria, Le Pen in France, Republicans in Germany, Buchanan in the US). The message of this relief was: at last an enemy whom we can properly hate all together, whom we can sacrifice – excommunicate – in order to demonstrate our democratic consensus! This relief is to be read against the background of what is usually referred to as the emerging ‘post-political consensus’: the only political force with the serious weight which does still evoke properly political antagonistic response of US against Them is the new populist Right.

Moving on, and more than 15 years later, Jörg Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen, who represented the far and extremist right previously, are succeeded by other names. In the case of France, we are confronted with a kind of Front National ‘family tradition’ revealing some of the troubling aspects of the transmission of generational norms and cultural prejudices: Marine Le Pen, and even more recently, her niece, Marion Marèchal-Le Pen, carry on with far-right party leadership in France, notwithstanding conservative gender paradigms of far-right parties.

As we have seen, populist far-right parties have gained considerable percentages of democratic votes and in some cases entry to parliamentary representation in national and regional elections across Europe. With billionaire showman Donald Trump running as the Republican Party candidate for the US presidency, the international wave of mainstreaming far-right politics, policy and white supremacy as an everyday-vernacular monoculturalism has reached a new stage of normalisation across different parts of the (‘western’) world.

This introduction sketches a discursive frame for the papers presented together here. First, we review positions and perspectives on the phenomena of ‘new populism’ (Taggart 2000) or what some call ‘neo-populism’ (Jansen 2015). We reflect on the characteristics of twentieth-century far-right populisms, and ask: what are the dynamics of contemporary, twenty-first century, far-right racist populism? Though the focus of the papers is on Europe, particularly West European countries of the EU, we discuss briefly in the end, and before introducing each paper, a more global perspective on the rise of far-right populism sketching some gaps in current research and the need to link distinctive regional outlooks to a comparative analysis.

As we argue, right-wing racism has plunged into a more common populist project as an everyday phenomenon in numerous countries. The previously banned or blamed extremist views of far-right parties and their racist programmes have entered the core of societies: this populism as the right of the ‘native’ and self-proclaimed ‘indigenous’ Christian Europe, for example, takes discourse and action onto the streets ‘fighting’ extremist fundamentalist Islam and claiming to ‘save our women’, particularly, if sexual violence against women is seen to be exercised by non-white and non-Christian men. There are new puzzling paradoxes to be noticed as the conservative gender regime of far-right parties is not the rule any longer, and some parties (such as the Dutch Party for Freedom – PVV) play the gay-friendly and ‘feminist’ progressive card. Increasingly, it has become difficult to draw the line exactly between centre-right and far-right political parties as anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and anti-EU rhetoric are intertwined in populist views, and seem to signify common ground of mainstream national(istic) politics. Is populism the voice and face of media democracy in the twenty-first century? Does the concept of populism help to make sense of the rise of far-right racism?

The term ‘populism’, in principal, captures radical left wing as well as far-right politics – of parties or movements. Taggart (2000) and other authors (see, e.g. Jansen 2015; Mudde 2015; Zùquete 2015) agree that foremost, populist mood is driven by strong anti-elite anger; and further, there is a claim to be nativist, and nativism here means, to have an inherited entitlement to the common good of a society.

Until very recently, left-wing radical populism was identified with political movements in South and Central America (De La Torre 2015; López Maya 2015). Only with the ΣΥΡΙΖΑ (SYRIZA) electoral victory in Greece; and the rise of PODEMOS in Spain, do we have two South West European EU Member states where populist anger against national and EU transnational elites rather steered a radical left vision of a democratic polity.

The majority of new populist movements, however, adhere to the far right. Jansen (2015: 201, referring to Lipset 1960) stresses that ‘status loss is one of the most important drivers for the emergence of the radical positions within the electorate’. Triggered by processes of globalisation and Europeanisation, ‘status loss’ and the fear of it, is what draws increasingly larger scales of populations, in particular, of male and working-class background, to far-right populism.

All populist rhetoric shares the fundamental distinction between ‘we’ the pure people, and ‘them’, the corrupt elite. Having said that; far-right populism, further picks an enemy figure on whom real insecurities may be projected: the Other, the Muslim: the Jew.

A faltering element in the anti-elite discourse is the different layers of ‘elite’ interest and positions. Future research could usefully investigate how and to what degree established national elites influence far-right populist views of their national ‘people’ with respect to new transnational entity-elites such as those of the EU. As Jansen (2015: 197) notes ‘(t)he rise of populist far right parties in Europe is linked to the expansion of the European Union’.

Another element of the populism question is the notion of ‘representation’: does representative democracy and the political party spectrum, with all its middle-class standpoint, still speak to the needs and interest of the ‘ordinary’ people? Finally, of course, who are ‘the people’? In far -right imagination, ‘people’ is without ‘race’, class and gender distinction. It is, however, ethnicity, ‘race’ and religion as social divisions and identity containers that matter most in populist debate – religion when ascribed as culturally different (Ghorashi 2006). In consequence, societies that are more heterogeneous – culturally diverse – and poly-national seem to be less prone to the ‘uniting’ far-right rhetoric. Kaltwasser (2015: 208) argues that the UK, for example, but also Spain, do offer ‘negative’ cases, as in those countries, different nations compete (Scotland/Wales/Ireland; Catalonia/Basque-Euskadi) for the ‘we’/people, thus ‘hindering the appearance of populism’. According to Kaltwasser even the English UKIP and British National Party do not offer this compelling populist narrative to engage a larger scale of society. Another relevant ‘negative’ case is Germany, according to Kaltwasser, who argues (2015: 212) ‘The shadow of the Nazi past is so pervasive that populist discourse faces a very hostile environment, particularly when it appears to be combined with the topic of anti-immigration.’ Just how hostile to populism this environment will remain has yet to be seen.

Be it the neo-fascist Golden Dawn in Greece, the anti-EU and anti-Islam new party AfD in Germany, the EU-sceptical UKIP in the UK, headed by Nigel Farage, or Geert Wilders and the PVV in the Netherlands, it seems that the core nationalistic and xenophobic elements are strikingly similar. At one level, that is borne out by the papers collected in this issue. Yet together they also demonstrate the importance of the specific national, regional and even local histories and cultures in which these common ideological elements are brought into play. These are here shown to be crucial not only for understanding the contemporary phenomena of right-wing populist and racist movements, but for developing politics that can effectively contest them: the necessary counter-hegemonic movements can only be built from the ground up, and that means on the existing ground of the local, regional and national, where interests to sustain genuinely global solidarities can be found.

Fabian Virchow’s article, which follows, traces the advent in Dresden in autumn 2014 of PEGIDA, its limited spread to other German cities, and the context for this. The peculiarities of Saxony and Dresden are here seen to be crucial. Might it be that, in the Eurosceptic moment, the electoral politics of AfD prove to be more capable of mobilising across Germany than the street-protest politics of PEGIDA? Certainly the making respectable and ‘normal’ of nativism and Islamophobia is of central interest in this special issue, and reasons for disruption and breakdown in such projects are vital.

In order to illustrate the characteristic social complexity of national or movement case studies on contemporary populisms in Europe, we present here in some cases two perspectives dealing with the same country or movement (for example the Netherlands, or the PEGIDA movement). The chequered success of PEGIDA’s transfer beyond Germany – in this case to Austria, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland – is the subject of Lars Erik Berntzen and Manès Weisskircher’s instructive contribution, whose use of comparative method points up both the ingredients of successful mobilisations where they have occurred, and effective barriers to them. They show where state sanctions against far-right racist street ‘protest’ and thus the social and political ostracism which this reinforces, have halted its spread beyond pockets of success stemming from Dresden. They also show how and where the movement was allowed a foothold. There is an important lesson here.

Östen Wahlbeck’s piece studies populist far-right politics in the case of Finland, with an analysis of the rhetoric of the Finns Party, from the party’s public documents and pronouncements of its leading spokespeople. Here we see the workings of the ideological repudiation of purported ‘special privileges’ for minorities, with a nativist narrative that portrays the (ethnicised) ‘true’ Finns as victims, discriminated against in their own land by accommodation of cultural diversity. If the formally equal benefits of citizenship are distributed by the state, what are the consequences for ethnic minorities when the state becomes captive to populist politics that devalue the citizenship of racialised others?

Giorgos Kandylis and Michalis Petrou present a close-up ethnographic investigation of the neo-Nazi ‘Golden Dawn’ in a Greek rural community, especially in relation to myth-making about ‘foreign criminality’ and the symbolic effects of violence against immigrants. This research is exemplary in showing the value of fine-grained examination of populist and racist ideological processes as they are lived as experience. These authors argue that, rather than being a barrier to popular acceptance of their politics, the deployment of an appeal to violence by neo-fascists is what worked to the advantage of recruitment to their cause, and they show how this plays out in a particular local culture and environment.

The first of our two articles on populism and ethno-nationalism in the Netherlands, by Guno Jones, argues against the grain of the conventionally accepted commonsense that the politics of racism are a surprising innovation in this hitherto successfully multiculturalist, socially just and tolerant nation. Jones takes us through an instructive history of Dutch colonialism and its racialised conferral of different degrees of citizenship. The taken-for-grantedness of the privileging of white Dutchness in state immigration and citizenship policies needs to be challenged, argues Jones, if we are to understand the appeal of contemporary racist populism, such as that of Geert Wilders and the PVV.

The second case study of the Netherlands, by Ulrike Vieten, offers a much-needed feminist standpoint in analysing European far-right populist discourses through a focus on Dutch society. So much of Islamophobic ideology recruits politics of gender and sexuality to its populism, attempting to present itself as progressive. This is a key part of the invidious normalisation of nativist nationalism by the far right, and the operation of forms of racism that ‘other’ certain cultures as irreconcilably alien, with their purportedly endemic misogyny and homophobia being prime examples of this. As well as unpacking this ideology and demonstrating its contradictions, Vieten presents some insightful interview research that heeds the voices of Moroccan-Dutch women citizens, showing the superficiality of the far-right claims to progressive gender politics, and how these women are Othered, as Muslim women, by the gendered politics of populist ethno-nationalism.

Finally, Kevin Braouzec’s systematic comparison of the two street-based far-right ‘protest’ movements, the EDL and the French Bloc Identitaire, points up the commonalities of ideological and political approach in quite different national cultures, especially with respect to British multiculturalism and French assimilationism, and the safeguards of freedom of religious practice vis-à-vis the secularity of the state. It is as well to be reminded of these common ideological elements, and how, despite local and national peculiarities, the same species of populist far-right nationalism can take root in different soils.

While historical and institutional anti-Semitism as well as political party and populist National Socialism are central to the horrors and experiences of the twentieth century, the contemporary world faces Islamophobia, institutional anti-Muslim racism and the emergence of trans-nationalistic populist far-right parties and their simplistic messages of racialising and othering a religious minority once again. Though the reach and make-up of populisms, racisms and anti-elite anger in a digital age is of course profoundly different from the twentieth century, there are some striking common threats which seem almost surreal in their rotten redolence. Though more than seventy years ago though ‘the world  … stood up and stopped the bastard’, as Brecht starkly puts it in ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’, it may be that the same belly is preparing to whelp once again: ‘die Hündin, die ihn gebar, ist wieder läufig’.

The rise of far-right racist populism is indeed resistible, but we need to understand in their complexity and their depth the awful alignment of forces that we are resisting. To that end, the excellent contributions to this special issue are intended collectively to advance international debate on the depth and spread of far-right racist populism. That depth and spread is, of course, larger than our focus in this special issue. We need further investigation beyond Europe, also looking more closely at legacies of colonial crime, whiteness and its exercise of entitlement in the many parts of the world where it is equally populist far right and racist harms are currently perpetrated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Ulrike M. Vieten is Queen’s University Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice’, Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interest include critical cosmopolitanism studies, intersectionality and Feminist Theory, migration and the construction and shift of racialised group boundaries.

Scott Poynting is Adjunct Professor, School of Social Sciences and Psychology at the University of Western Sydney and is recently retired Professor of Criminology at the University of Auckland. His areas of interest include the criminalisation of ethnic minorities and the racialisation of crime, state terrorism, hate crime and racialised moral panic.