‘Actually existing’ right-wing populism in rural Europe: insights from eastern Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Ukraine

ABSTRACT

This study depicts various manifestations of what we call ‘actually existing’ right-wing populism. Based on empirical insights from eastern Germany, Spain, the UK and Ukraine, we explored how nationalist tendencies unfold in different contexts and what role agriculture and rural imageries play in this process. We analyse contextual factors (rural ‘emptiness’, socio-economic inequality, particularities of electoral systems, politics of Europeanization) and citizens’ perceptions of social reality (selective memory, subjective experiences of democracy, national redefinition, politics of emotions). We conclude that resistance and alternatives to right-wing populism should be context-specific, grounded in the social fabric and culture of the locale.

KEYWORDS:

• ‘Actually existing’ right-wing populism
• crisis of capitalism
• representative democracy
• rural emptiness
• politics of emotions
• European countryside

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Olena Borodina and Dr. Andrii Martyn for their valuable insights on the contemporary developments in Ukraine. We thank Dr. Ramona Bunkus, Prof. Dr. Insa Theesfeld and Dr Bernhard Forchtner for sharing their opinions and recent literature on the far-right movements in eastern Germany. We would also like to thank Fernando Fernández, Paul Nicholson, Pep Riera and the team of Soberanía Alimentaria for sharing their views on political developments in Spain. We are also grateful to the Journal’s chief editor Prof. Jun Borras and other colleagues from the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) for initiating the Forum on ‘Authoritarian populism and the rural world’, of which this paper is a part.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Translated from German by the authors.

2 Besides that, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers’ special issue on ‘Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era’ included several contributions that addressed the link between populism and the rural (McCarthy 2020).

3 The term ‘actually existing’ emerged in the critical studies of capitalism and neoliberalism but became widely used in other fields to emphasise discrepancies between theoretical conceptualisations of a phenomenon and its veritable manifestations (Konings 2012; Brenner and Theodore 2002).

4 Dzenovska (2020) introduces the concept of ‘emptiness’ to study the abandonment of remote rural areas in post-socialist Eastern Europe, however, it may be applied to all areas that became abandoned by capital and the state. She understands the ‘emptiness’ as a discursive framework (used by its inhabitants to describe their lives), a complex historical formation (that has emerged in transition to capitalism) and an analytical lens (that captures the reconfiguration of relations between capital, the state, people, and place).

5 Primarily, proponents of Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism in the USA.

6 ‘Food empires’ have emerged through takeovers, facilitated by the unlimited availability of credit and the global corporate and government ‘marriage’. Among the most powerful food empires are Nestlé, Unilever and Monsanto that continue expanding. Besides that, there are relatively new empires such as Ahold, Parmalat and Vion, the recently created north-west European meat empire. For further discussion read van der Ploeg (2010).

7 The decline was especially severe in Romania (983,000 jobs lost), Poland (616,000), Bulgaria (387,000) and Greece (189,000).

8 This share is higher in post-socialist member states, where farming contributes up to 20% of total employment (Eurostat 2020).

9 The communist governments were aimed at achieving full employment for all citizens, including the Roma population, who were commonly employed as unskilled industrial workers (Škobla and Filčák 2020).

10 German expression, which means ‘those who foul their own nest’ and used to describe a person who criticizes or abuses their own country or family.

11 This video can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaSIX4-RPAI

12 Yet there is a higher-than-average support among those who work in the agrarian sector.

13 The referendum result in Wales was tipped towards support for Brexit by the votes of resident English retirees (Dorling 2016).

14 ‘First-past-the-post’ is the form of plurality/majority system which uses single member districts and candidate-centred voting.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalia Mamonova

Natalia Mamonova is a researcher in the Russia and Eurasia Programme of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) and an affliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) of Uppsala University, Sweden. She is also the principal coordinator of the European team of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI Europe: https://www.facebook.com/groups/235539647275100/). Her research interests focus on contemporary rural politics in post-socialist Europe. Natalia received her PhD degree in 2016 from the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University, the Netherlands. Since then, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, the New Europe College in Bucharest, and the University of Helsinki. Email: [email protected]

Jaume Franquesa

Jaume Franquesa is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The State University of New York at Buffalo. He writes on rural politics and livelihoods, and on natural resources and the commodification of nature, and is co-coordinator of the European team of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative. His latest book is Power struggles: Dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in rural Spain (Indiana University Press, 2018). Email: [email protected]

Sally Brooks

Sally Brooks is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work and a member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at the University of York. Her research centres on critical examination of global development imaginaries, interventions and institutions. Much of this work has focused on efforts to bring about agrarian modernisation as part of what Raj Patel has called the ‘long’ Green Revolution. Recent publications include Brexit and the Politics of the Rural (Socialogia Ruralis, 2020). Email: [email protected].