How the traumatic past influences the vote of the populist radical right parties in Germany, Poland, and Spain

ABSTRACT

Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) often mobilize referring to the past. This aspect is not commonly included amongst the characteristic elements of these parties and, more importantly, we do not know much about the electoral returns of this strategy. In this article, we focus on three PRRPs – AfD in Germany, PiS in Poland and VOX in Spain – to argue that the conflicts of the past play a prominent role in their recent mobilizing strategies. By analysing comparative survey data gathered in early 2020 as part of the H2020 REPAST Project we show that opinions about the past that are in consonance with the parties’ discourses have a positive influence on the support they get in elections. These effects are independent of other factors associated with populist voting, but they are contingent on the internal/external nature of the conflicts of the past that each of the parties appeals to. Our findings lead us to think that the use of the past is a key component of the electoral success of more parties of this kind.

KEYWORDS:

• Populist radical right parties
• electoral behaviour
• uses of past
• survey analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Populist Radical Right Parties are ‘political parties with a core ideology that is a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism’ (Mudde 2007, 26). They represent a populist form of the radical right where nativism (a combination of nationalism and xenophobia), not populism, is the ultimate core feature (idem).

2. For another account of the relationship between victimhood and populism, see Al-Ghazzi (2021).

3. This is not to say this is the only division important for explaining party competition in Poland. A divide between the so-called ‘social solidarism’ and ‘liberal’ camps has also been structuring Polish politics for some time now and it can be related to the anti-elite dimension of populist voting (Cześnik and Kotnarowski 2011). Nevertheless, regarding the politics of memory as the subject of this article, arguably, it is still the post-Communist and post-Solidarity division that stands out as the crucial one.

4. The full name of the project is ‘Strengthening European integration through the analysis of conflict discourses: revisiting the past, anticipating the future’.

5. The survey was carried out also in other countries: Bosnia Herzegovina, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, the UK (Northern Ireland) and Kosovo. However, only in Germany, Poland and Spain the number of PRRP voters is large enough to conduct a meaningful analysis. The samples were 1005 respondents in Germany, 1003 in Poland, and 1000 in Spain. In the final models these were reduced to 598, 627, and 571, respectively, due to the missing cases (mainly on the dependent variable). In the full sample, supporters of Vox represent roughly a 9.1% of the sample, AfD voters make 14.7, and there are 34.7 supporters of PiS. Without missing cases, these numbers are: 9.3, 16.4, and 30.8.

6. These two categories were coded 1 and 0 respectively. Abstainers, those who do not know, and those who don’t answer the question, are omitted from the analysis. In the case of Poland, we focus exclusively on PiS, although Kukiz’15 is also classified as PRRP by most scholars (Rooduijn et al. 2020). Kukiz’15 lost most of the anti-establishment appeal it had in the 2015 elections when in 2019 it joined the Polish Coalition (Koalicja Polska) with the traditional right-wing agrarian Polish Peasant Party. In any case, the survey included only 32 respondents that declared having voted for Kukiz’15, and we decided to drop them out of the analysis for the sake of clarity. We have replicated the analyses after removing the voters of left-wing parties such as Podemos and En Comu Podem in Spain, and the results are robust to excluding those parties (see Table A3 in the Online Appendix).

7. See Table A1 the Appendix for descriptive statistics and coding of all variables.

8. It could be argued that this variable operates distinctively in East and West Germany. Including a control for East Germany and an interaction term with blame attribution do not alter these results substantially.

9. Additionally, as Table A2 in the Online Appendix shows, the effects of the main independent variables are consistent independently of the inclusion of controls – at least in the case of VOX and PiS (see models 5–12). With AfD, the effect of one-sided responsibility becomes significant only in the full model. This puts some constraint on the findings for Germany and more research is needed to elucidate the relationship between attitudes toward the responsibility for the post-unification conflict, populist attitudes, and voting for AfD. Importantly, not excluding missing observations in the models with less controls (up to 714 observations in Germany, 720 in Spain, and 750 in Poland) render the same results for the key independent variables’ effects (results available upon request).

10. The evaluation of EU membership is a variable that measures attitudes towards the EU through the perception of benefits brought by the EU. Given that in Poland the material benefits are still direct and very large, this result is not inconsistent with the strong effects of Euroscepticism and detachment from Europe on PRRP voting in this country found elsewhere (Santana, Zagórski, and Rama 2020).

11. Although previous work has emphasized nativism as a characteristic of VOX (Ferreira 2019; Turnbull-Dugarte 2019; Turnbull-Dugarte, Rama, and Santana 2020; among others), it is not clear empirically if concerns over immigration are a determining factor in the Vox vote. While Turnbull-Dugarte (2019) finds no association between concerns over immigration and voting for VOX, Mendes and Dennison (2021) show that individuals point to Vox’s rhetoric on immigration as the most commonly stated motivation for voting for the party.

12. Ferreira (2019) considers that VOX does not fit well the PRRP category given that its most preeminent rhetoric is nationalist rather than populist. We follow other scholars, who, following Mudde (2007), do classify it as PRRP due to its nativist and authoritarian discourse (Rooduijn et al. 2020; Turnbull-Dugarte, Rama, and Santana 2020).

13. A recent exception is Couperus, Tortola and Rensmann (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by EU’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement (No. European Commission 769252) through the H2020 REPAST.