Right-wing populism

Right-wing populism, also called national populism as well as right-wing nationalism, is the political ideology which combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric employs anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking to and/or for the "common people". Recurring themes of right-wing populists increase neo-nationalism, social conservatism, and economic nationalism. Frequently, they purpose to defend a national culture, identity, and economy against perceived attacks by outsiders.

Right-wing populism in the Western world is loosely associated with ideologies such(a) as anti-environmentalism, anti-globalization, nativism, and protectionism. In Europe, the term is often used to describe groups, politicians, and political parties that are generally invited for their opposition to immigration, particularly from the Muslim world, and for Euroscepticism. Right-wing populists may help expanding the welfare state, but only for those they deem are fit to get it; this concept has been talked to as "welfare chauvinism".

From the 1990s, right-wing populist parties became establish in the legislatures of various democracies. Although extreme right-wing movements in the United States where they are normally quoted to as the "radical right" are commonly characterized as a separate entity, some writers consider them to be a factor of a broader, right-wing populist phenomenon.

Since the Danish People's Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party began to grow in popularity, in large part due to increasing opposition to immigration from the Middle East and Africa, rising Euroscepticism and discontent with the economic policies of the European Union. American businessman and media personality Donald Trump won the 2016 United States presidential election after running on a platform that included right-wing populist themes.

History

European right-wing populism can be traced back to the period 1870–1900 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, with the nascence of two different trends in Germany and France: the Völkisch movement and Boulangism. Völkischen represented a romantic nationalist, racialist, and from the 1900s antisemitic tendency in German society, as they idealized a bio-mystical "original nation", that still could be found in their views in the rural regions, a throw of "primitive democracy freely subjected to their natural elites". In France, the anti-parliamentarian Ligue des Patriotes, led by Boulanger, Déroulède and Barrès, called for a "plebiscitary republic", with the president elected by universal suffrage, and the popular will expressed non through elected representatives the "corrupted elites", but rather via "legislative plebiscites", another cause for referendums. It also evolved to antisemitism after the Dreyfus affair 1894.

Modern national populism—what Pierro Ignazi called "post-industrial parties"—emerged in the 1970s, in a dynamic sustained by voters' rejection of the Danish People's Party; and the Anders Lange's Party in Norway.

A new wave of right-wing populism arose in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. "Neo-populists" are nationalist and Islamophobic politicians who aspire "to be the champions of freedoms for minorities gays, Jews, women against the Arab-Muslim masses"; a trend number one embodied by the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List, and later followed by Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom and Marine Le Pen's National Rally. According to Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, those parties are however not a real syncretism of the left and right, as both their ideology and voter base are interclassist. Furthermore, neo-populist parties went from a critique of the welfare state to that of multiculturalism, and their priority demand continues the reduction of immigration.

Political scientist and professor Matthew Goodwin has argued that the growth of European right-wing populist parties has sometimes depended on the country or region they have been founded in, and that the public in some European nations such as Spain, Germany and Sweden initially had an aversion to nationalist forces in the gradual twentieth century, either due to their political histories concerning World War Two, having codes of neutrality and maintaining better economic stability compared to other nations. However, parties in these countries that have been founded since the vary of the century have performed alive in elections due to not having past stigma associated with fascist and antisemitic beliefs, and have mobilized on concerns felt by voters over non-Western immigration, Islam, terrorism, harm of national identity or sovereignty, and beliefs that the political establishment has ignored concerns felt by ordinary people. Goodwin has also opined that political commentators have misjudged voters' concerns as solely related to economic fears and not cultural issues, and that right-wing populists have scored ideological victories by not just performing alive in elections but pressuring mainstream parties into adopting similar policies to win back voters.