Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

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Politics against Democracy 31 immigration and security, the new party proposes measures which are incongruent with democratic norms. More complex is the case of Forza Italia (FI) which is a member of the European People’s Party and which, in a careful division of labour, tends to leave racist rhetoric to its two abovementioned junior partners. Nonetheless, in addition to its ambiguous position on Europe and marked anti-Islamic stance, FI also viscerally opposes what it condemns as old, professional politics and is highly intolerant of liberal democratic principles and rules. To what species do parties like these belong? And to what species do the Norwegian Progress Party, the Danish People’s Party, the Belgian Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang), and the Lijst Pim Fortuyn in Holland belong? How should we view those heirs of Fascism which have emerged from complex recycling processes such as the Front National in France, the Republikaner in Germany, and the BNP in Britain? And what should we make of those movements such as the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) or the Swiss People’s Party (SVP/UDC) which at earlier points in their histories were far more moderate? It is particularly difficult to catalogue these parties within a single political family and, consequently, there has been much disagreement on which label should be used to describe them. In particular, what we have lacked is a convincing theory explaining their success. This chapter will seek to tackle these two questions. In doing so, it will put forward two theses. First, it will argue that what these parties have in common is that they embody the divorce of democracy from politics. Second, it will show that what stand out among the reasons behind their success are the profound changes which have occurred in democratic theory and practice. In the next two sections, we will discuss the terms currently used to catalogue these parties. Labels are not neutral and each reflects a theory on the actors to which it is applied. The remainder of the chapter will examine the factors which have allowed populist parties to take root and will call into question the explanations most frequently offered. As we will see, while these tend to focus on social, economic and cultural transformations, they overlook the transformations in political theory and practice which have affected advanced democracies. Labels There are three main labels used to classify these parties. The first is that of ‘extreme Right’ which has been adopted by various scholars (Ignazi, 2003; Eatwell and Mudde, 2004; Carter, 2005). The use of ‘extreme Right’ in these cases, however, seems to be straining a category invented to designate parties which embraced violence, a hierarchical conception of society and the idea that all spheres of collective and individual life should be subordinate to the state. A less coloured label is that of ‘radical right’ (Kitschelt and McGann, 1995), which is often combined with others to create cocktails
32 Twenty-First Century Populism such as ‘radical right-wing populist’ (Betz, 1994). This brings us to the third label, which is that of ‘populist’ (Mény and Surel, 2000; Taggart, 2000; Panizza, 2005), a label which seeks to capture the ambiguous nature of these actors. This relates first of all to their political discourses which are often racist, intolerant, anti-political and delivered in violent and vulgar tones. Second, it highlights the exaltation in these discourses of the people as a single, united entity, with any internal divisions characterized as artificial and false. Third, although it acknowledges the adaptation of these actors to democratic rules, ‘populism’ also underlines the paradoxical use they make of democracy and their clear aversion to official politics − demonstrated by their self-promotion as champions of the people against the Establishment. While, as the editors of this volume explain in the introduction, ‘populism’ has often been used, and misused, in vague ways (see also Collovald, 2004) and as a receptacle for new phenomena which are difficult to classify, the inflationary spiral affecting the term does not exclude a more sober use (for example, Canovan, 1981). Aside from its application to cases in Russia and the United States in the nineteenth century, until recently when we spoke of populism, we tended to think first of all of South America and the vast range of movements there which disdained class warfare, but acted in the name of the people and advocated the social and political integration of the poorest members of society (Germani, 1978). Still today, populism reappears in South America from time to time, most recently in Venezuela with Hugo Chávez and in Bolivia with Evo Morales. Characterized by the Pentagon as ‘radical’ populists, dangerous for democracy and comparable to Fidel Castro, these leaders have relaunched some of the themes and aspects of the political styles which were the hallmarks of Juan Perón and Getúlio Vargas such as personalized leadership, the absence of ideology, plebiscitary ceremonies, visceral opposition to elites (also at international level), redistributive paternalism and so on. However, what do these manifestations of populism have in common with those such as the Front National, the Lega Nord and the Danish People’s Party which have appeared in recent decades in established Western European democracies? If we leave to one side the rhetoric about ‘the people’, what else does the label ‘populism’ indicate? In fact, if we look at the trajectory of populist parties in Western Europe, we find few similarities with their purported South American relatives. They have different histories and different types of public. Even if both speak of ‘the people’, they do not do so in the same manner. Indeed, when the new populist vanguard appeared in Scandinavia at the end of the 1960s, the main issue it raised − in the name of the people − was that of welfare waste in order to attract the attention of the middle classes. It was a type of protest in many ways symmetrical with that of the movements of the New Left in the late 1960s which, rather than focusing on ‘the people’, preferred to juxtapose the authoritarian and oppressive paternalism of institutions − the state, parties, trade unions, the
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11 France: The FRONT NATIONAL, Ethn
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Bibliography Akkerman, T. Anti-immi
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226 Bibliography BNP (2005) Rebuild
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228 Bibliography Dahl, R. A. (1999)
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230 Bibliography Germani, G. (1975)
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232 Bibliography Ivaldi, G. Le Fron
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234 Bibliography Lehingue, P. (2003
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238 Bibliography Pelinka, A. (2005)
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240 Bibliography Schedler, A. Anti-
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242 Bibliography Trechsel, A. H. (2
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246 Index Chirac, Jacques 58, 168,
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