Mudde - The far right today

To my readers,

in the hope that this book

will educate and empower you

Cas Mudde

polity

Copyright Cas Mudde 2019

The right of Cas Mudde to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2019 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3683-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3684-9 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Throughout my career, I have had the great fortune of receiving generous support from many wonderful colleagues and friends in the academic field of extremism and democracy. For this particular book, which has a much broader geographical and topical scope than my more narrow academic work, I called upon an exceptionally broad range of them for feedback and was yet again humbled by their response. Aurelien Mondon, Caterina Froio, Cristbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Duncan McDonnell, George Hawley, Jan-Werner Mller, Kathleen Blee, Lonie de Jonge, Matthew Feldman, and Uwe Backes all read the first full manuscript and provided me with many smaller and bigger suggestions. I was able to include several of them, but was forced to ignore some, because of the practical constraints of this relatively short book.

Special thanks go out to four more people. Alex DiBranco was able and willing to read over the later added chapter on gender and provided me with crucial feedback within a week. My amazing wife Maryann Gallagher not only facilitated my writing but also read an earlier draft of the gender chapter and helped me reshape and rethink it. My fantastic graduate student Jakub Wondreys did vital research assistance for the book and helped me construct the chronology and the glossary. He also read through the full manuscript and provided me with helpful comments. I thank him for all his work and cannot wait to repay it, by editing his dissertation. Finally, a shout out to my friend and publisher Craig Fowlie, who made time in his extremely busy schedule to provide me with great feedback on the full manuscript, despite the fact that it is published by a competitor. Perhaps he is right after all: Scousers are special.

I have written several books before, some purely academic, some mostly non-academic. In most cases, I acted quite quickly on the initial idea, but it then took me a (very) long time to turn it into a book. This book is the exact opposite. I have been brooding over this idea for more than a decade, returning to it each time I was asked for a recommendation for a relatively short, non-academic book after giving a public lecture. But once I approached Polity with the idea, the book almost wrote itself if I could find time for it in between family, lectures, meetings, teaching, and travel. I want to thank the three anonymous referees for their constructive and encouraging reviews and my editors at Polity, Louise Knight and Sophie Wright, for their quick and hands-on editing style. It confirmed my long-held feeling that Polity is indeed the perfect publisher for this book.

On a grey and drizzly day in January 2017, on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, the newly elected president of the United States gave a speech unlike any of his predecessors. It had the anger and frustration of the political fringes, but it came from the political mainstream. In his inaugural speech, the new Leader of the Free World said:

For too long, a small group in our nations Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nations Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.

The election of Donald Trump is in many ways illustrative of what this book is about: the mainstreaming and normalization of the far right in general, and the populist radical right in particular, in the twenty-first century. As I finish this manuscript, in May 2019, three of the five most populous countries in the world have a far-right leader (Brazil, India, and the US) and the biggest political party in the world is the populist radical right Indian Peoples Party (BJP). Within the European Union (EU), two governments are fully controlled by populist radical right parties (Hungary and Poland), another four include such parties (Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, Slovakia), and two are held up with support of a populist right party (Denmark and the United Kingdom). And in the latest European elections, far-right parties increased their presence in the European Parliament yet again, albeit modestly, as they had done in the previous elections in 2014 and 2009.