Introduction
Two years ago ISPI published its Report Populism on the Rise. Democracies under Challenge?. In that book, we looked at how the rise of populist parties and movements had taken the world by storm. In the United States and in Europe, populism was being rediscovered as a loose ideology that could empower opposition parties and movements through a strong, appealing anti-elite message. Yet, despite the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, at that moment in time many wondered whether populism would be no more than a passing fad.
In the short span of time between 2016 and today anti-establishment parties in the EU and abroad have made substantial strides. The tactical tool in the hands of opposition parties to bolster their chances against any governing majority by claiming that the latter was the establishment and that the oppositions represented the people, has morphed in a few instances into a full-fledged governmental force. To accomplish this transformation, populist parties had to mix their loose, thin ideology with stronger ones: in many cases, the ideology of choice was nationalism.
Today, a number of national-populist parties is in power, in Europe and abroad. Two examples are the League and the Five Star Movement in Italy, or Jair Bolsonaros rise in Brazil. This is not to say that national-populist parties were not in government before. In Hungary, Viktor Orbn has been in power nonstop since 2010. In 2015, PiS won the election in Poland by adding populist, anti-elite elements to its strand of identitarian politics. And, in 2017, the far-right Austrian Freedom Party joined the government coalition after having moderated its message thus giving it a much wider appeal by committing to defend the common man.
At the same time, one should not infer that national-populist parties today are reaching the levers of government everywhere. In many countries, despite strengthening their electoral support, national-populist parties have been kept effectively at bay by more traditional formations. In Germany, the appeal of the far-right Alternative fr Deutschland is on the rise, but still limited in a country that retains vivid memories of its Nazi past. In France, the Front National was contained by a two-round electoral system that discriminates against extremist parties. In the Netherlands, the Party of Freedom was excluded from any workable majority, and the same appears to be happening to the Sweden Democrats after this Septembers election in the country.
Despite all this there is no denying that, today, a larger amount of countries in Europe and abroad is governed by national-populist parties. This rise and consolidation of national-populist parties in the West has given rise to a trend in which the national-populist label tends to be applied in a very loose way. Indeed, it is tempting to see all nationalist movements today through the prism of a single, international national-populist wave. But this would not properly mirror a much more nuanced and complex scenario, with no one-size-fits-all model clearly available.
This Report aims to answer precisely these questions: to what extent can nationalist governments in power in different places in the world be labelled national-populist? What are the key ingredients of their success? What kind of policies are to be expected from these governments? Ultimately, what common elements do they share, and in what do they differ?
In the first chapter Alberto Martinelli, the editor of this Report, elaborates on the peculiar features of populist and nationalist ideologies, showing what is likely to happen when the two are mixed together. The March 2018 election in Italy had two clear winners, the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvinis League. The ideology of the League is a mix of the three classical components of the political right (nationalism, neo-liberalism, and moral/religious conservatism), whereas Di Maios Five Star Movement seems a manifestation of populist politics, only moderately nationalist. Currently, both parties, are still undergoing an internal transformation. On the one hand, the League is striving to become a fully national party, not so concentrated in the north of the country. On the other, the Five Star Movement is in search of ways to institutionalise its platform and revamp itself, changing from being a movement into a full-fledged political party.
Looking at the United States, Eliza Tanner Hawkins and Kirk A. Hawkins argue that Donald Trump embodies a specific form of national-populism. Namely, through a textual analysis of speeches and debates they find that Trump seems to express an incomplete form of populism that lacks a belief in popular sovereignty. The lack of this element may explain why Trumps popular support has not expanded since the US president came to power (as his most fervent supporters remain based among Republicans), and why it has fostered a radicalisation within the republican party itself. But, at the same time, Trumps strand of national-populism appears to share a common element with other national-populist parties in the world, in that Trumps rhetoric and ruling style did not moderate once he was elected, reflecting the need to be in a permanent electoral campaign mode. Trumps attacks on the media and assertion of executive powers have had a negative impact on American democracy, although not as severe as his worst critics feared.
In other cases, as Radoslaw Markowski puts it in his chapter, national-populist leaders and political parties shift their stances from populism, during the electoral campaign, to a higher degree of nationalism once in power. This is what happened in several Central and Eastern European countries. Markowski analyses national-populist parties in Poland and Hungary, also taking into account political developments in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. He argues that intransigent nationalism is on the rise everywhere, and that a shift from populist to nationalist rhetoric is visible in most instances, be it in the Bulgarian Simeon II Movement, the Polish PiS, or the Hungarian Fidesz.
A deep insight into a properly far-right, nationalist party is offered by Karin Liebhart, who retraces the history of the Austrian Freedom Party (FP), which is now in the ruling coalition with the Austrian Peoples Party led by Sebastian Kurz. Liebhart claims that the FP underwent many changes depending on whether it was in government or in the opposition. She also argues that the FP finds itself in a better position to influence Kurzs government towards more nationalist stances due to a general shift to the right in Austrian politics.
