Populism in Europe - a comparative study of 9 populist parties

The AfD is a rather peculiar member of the right-wing populist party family. Until recently, there was no right-wing populist party in the German Bundestag. The situation changed in 2017 when the AfD won 12.6% of the vote and became the third-strongest faction in parliament. The party was founded in 2013, by Bernd Lucke, a professor of economics, and a group of former and disillusioned CDU members. In the same year, the party won 4.7% of the vote in the Bundestag election and failed to reach the five per cent threshold. However, the fact that this was the best result of any new party since 1953 and several regional successes have already revealed a dormant potential for right-wing populism in Germany.

Scholars came to different conclusions regarding the possibility of labelling  the “early” 2013-AfD as a populist party. Although some elements of populism were already present in the party’s agenda, the party did not use them coherently over time. In 2015, Frauke Petry, the leading figure of the national-conservative wing, gained control over the party and re-orientated it towards its current course of nationalist populism. In the following period, the party’s emphasis was on a national(ist) and anti-establishment discourse. Examples of the latter include attacks towards Altparteien (old parties), which was already present in its early years but became much more prominent after 2015.

The populism dimension

From a comparative perspective, the AfD is now one of the most populist parties in Europe, as the Figure shows. With regard to the statements on which the party coding is based, the AfD agrees with all populist statements and disagrees with all non-populist ones. The party is strongly anti-elitist when it comes to the political elite (especially other parties) but sometimes also uses anti-elitist rhetoric to criticise the economic (e.g. car manufacturers manipulating Diesel cars) or media elite (e.g. the public broadcast service). Furthermore, the AfD is also strongly people-centrist, trying to appeal to the “whole” German population. The AfD makes frequent references to the “Volk”, sometimes even “völkisch”, terms that other parties try to avoid given their right-wing connotation due to misuse by the Nazis. The party is also in favour of introducing referendums at the federal level, arguing that they can function as an instrument to express the People’s Will.

The economic dimension

In terms of their socio-economic positions, the party is a centre-right party. However, the standard deviation of their position is large since the party does not have coherent economic positions. The party supports welfare policies such as unemployment benefits and the minimum wage, and rejects privatisation in the health sector. In some aspects, the AfD shifted from more neo-liberal, market-friendly positions to centre-left positions or is at least emphasising these policies now. Nevertheless, the party is still strictly against higher taxes and additional   market regulations. The party is especially critical towards the inheritance tax, arguing that this is a private matter, and increases the income tax. The party’s positioning on introducing a basic income is not entirely clear; a group of members tried to write such a suggestion, restricted to all Germans, in the 2021 manifesto, but did not succeed doing so.

To solve the “demographic crisis”, the party suggests reducing taxes for families and increasing the birth rate. One proposal to increase the birth rate among other measures makes abortion counselling “more transparent and with an open outcome”. In terms of the labour market, the party is firmly against labour immigration and suggests focusing on training unemployed Germans instead. In terms of workers’ rights, the AfD supports the minimum wage (although an increase is not discussed) and wants to extend the rights of temporary workers. On the other hand, the party propagates that the bureaucratic burden of economic regulation should be reduced for companies to allow economic growth. The status as a public servant (Beamter) should only be granted to “real” responsibilities of public administration, suggesting that there are currently too many “Beamte”. The main argument is that state-funded public servant pensions have become too expensive.

The overall socio-economic positioning of the AfD is neither radical nor coherent. The party mixes the classic neo-liberal idea of a deregulated economy and minimal taxation with a selection of centre-left welfare policies, often combined with nativism. Compared to 2013, the party has already adopted more centrist or leftist social policy proposals; nevertheless, there are different internal party wings. It is possible that the party will move even further to the left, closer to right-wing populist family members such as Rassemblement National or ELAM, or “back” to the right towards parties such as Vox or Chega. The moderate and radical wings could also seek to split, although it is more likely that the party would break up due to differences in the party’s course of nativism and authoritarianism, not socio-economic issues. Nevertheless, another aspect to keep in mind is that the party strongholds in Saxony, Saxony Anhalt and Thuringia are all within the economically weakest areas in Germany. The influential branches of these three states may seek to steer the party’s agenda towards more centre-left positions to put a stronger focus on the socially disadvantaged electorate.

Welfare chauvinism

The AfD is a party that strongly supports welfare chauvinist ideas. Regarding citizenship, the party wants to return to the principle of ‘Jus sanguinis’, meaning that only those with German parents should be allowed to become German nationals. Consequently, the AfD aims to make it more difficult to become a German national, including drastically limiting double citizenship possibilities. As many welfare measures are connected to the German nationality, this means that the party wants to limit the number of non-native welfare recipients of drastically.

Generally, the party distinguishes between refugees and immigrants but sees both as a threat to the German economy and welfare system. In the logic of the party, a very limited number of refugees should be allowed to come to Germany, only to be sent back to their home countries at the earliest opportunity. Since refugees from countries with a lower standard of living, such as Afghanistan or Syria, are seen as a threat, the party warns that refugees must not become permanent residents. Additionally, AfD suggests that welfare benefits for asylum seekers should be based on their German language skills. The party emphasises that it is the responsibility of immigrants to adapt to the German culture and norms. The AfD is openly sceptical that a shortage of skilled workers (Fachkräftemangel) exists. Instead, the party suggests training unemployed Germans and limiting labour force recruitment from foreign countries to highly qualified experts.

The party portrays immigrants as pressuring the crisis-ridden German welfare state, labour market, and economy. Generally, it sees immigrants as an additional burden on the state and its scarce resources. The AfD states that the German welfare system works like a magnet for people from EU and Non-EU states, challenging the free movement of people policy. Here, the party speaks of ‘poverty immigrants’ from countries with a lower living standard, including East European countries such as Bulgaria or Romania. Regarding welfare benefits, it is important for the party that asylum seekers get lower benefits than unemployed Germans. Surprisingly, the AfD does not address the preferential treatment of natives regarding housing, although many German cities suffer from a housing shortage. On this issue, the party seeks to increase taxes for foreign buyers who are not based in Germany.

Written by Jan Philipp Thomeczek, University of Münster

Chega (Enough) is a right-wing populist political party founded in April 2019 by André Ventura, a former member of the main Portuguese centre-right political party, the Social-Democratic Party (PSD – Partido Social-Democrata). Ventura gained national notoriety as a polemic and assertive football television commentator, but especially as a PSD candidate to the presidency of the municipality of Loures in the local elections of 2017, running on xenophobic campaign against Romani people, considered by Ventura undeserved welfare recipients and a threat to public security. In 2018 Ventura and a small group of supporters left PSD and formed Chega, which rapidly congregated the leaders and memberships of dispersed small and fringe conservative and extreme right parties and the ultra-conservative, anti-abortion catholic movement. Under the leadership of Ventura, in the national elections of 2019, Chega won 1.3% of the vote and gained a seat in the national parliament, with Ventura himself becoming MP. In the subsequent presidential election of January 2021, Chega won 11.9% of the vote, with Ventura running as presidential candidate. In the local elections of September 2021, the party won 4.16% of the vote, a significant achievement, considering its young age, surpassing the much older conservative Portuguese party CDS, Centro Democrático e Social (Social Democratic Center), founded in 1974, which only gained 1.5% of the vote, as well as the radical left party Left Bloc (BE - Bloco de Esquerda), with 2.75% of the vote. Journalistic reports and other testimonies have pointed out that Chega has been successfully creating a robust party machine and a wide network of local branches all over the country. In July 2020 Chega became member of the European party federation of right-wing populist parties, Identity and Demoracy, joining Germany’s AfD and France’s Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen. In a joint rally with Marine Le Pen in Lisbon, Ventura went on to assert that immigrants only intend to benefit from the European economic and social security systems without accepting any type of integration, defending a Europe of cultural and Christian matrix and identity, against uncontrolled immigration.

The populism dimension

In terms of populist identity and frames, Chega is clearly a populist party, frequently espousing black and white reasoning and anti-elitist declarations, opposing multiculturalism and defending a single national and religious culture instead. Chega also defends stricter border controls, the expulsion of illegal immigrants, chemical castration of sexual offenders and the death penalty. According to the expert survey, the party supports positions like the will of the people is the highest principle in politics, that people with different political opinions are misinformed, that the system is stacked against ordinary people, that politics is ultimately a struggle between good and evil, and that the political class and professional politicians are usually opportunistic and corrupt, despising the political culture based on pluralism, compromise, and conflicting. At the same time, in comparative terms with the other European right-wing populist parties, and together with SD in Sweden, Chega is not as vehement as other parties in supporting the above-mentioned topics. In fact, Chega comparatively ranks the lowest on the populist scale, although this might be a reflection of its young age, or the fact that it is a party still in the process of elaborating his main ideological principles. The very few items that receive the maximum support (strongly agrees) by Chega are mainly related to the corruption of the established elite and nationalist pride (the people running governments are crooked and governments are run by a few big interests looking out for themselves; pride in being a Portuguese), while at the same time it espouses a neutral position in topics like “political parties do more harm than good to society” and “major government decisions must be approved by referendum”. Still, recent developments, taking place after this survey was implemented, indicate that Chega might be moving towards a stronger populist and authoritarian position, as shown by Ventura’s adoption of the motto of Salazar’s dictatorship “we are the party of God, Fatherland, Family, and Work”.

The economic dimension

Regarding the socioeconomic identity of the party, Chega is a European populist party on the economic right. When analysing the party’s positioning in the left-right dimension, Chega is highly supportive of unconstrained market freedom, deregulation, labour market flexibilization and welfare state retrenchment. Chega disagrees strongly with issues such as increasing in government spending, higher taxation, a stronger state role in regulating the economy, wealth redistribution, higher taxation of bank and stock market gains, adoption of basic income and stricter rules to fire employees. It also disagrees with economic policies like stronger financial support to unemployed workers and increase in pension benefits, while espousing free market competition in health care and education. Chega has argued that health and education should be privately run, with the state having only a regulator role, and supported the implementation of a voucher system in housing, schools and hospitals, as well as a radical reduction of taxes, the end of progressive taxation and the adoption of a single-bracket tax, arguing that the main source of state revenue should come from taxes on consumption.

In this regard, Chega is very similar to Vox in Spain, both being ultra-liberal in terms of economics and conservative in terms of social affairs, something that could be explained by the fact that these parties were founded and grew electorally in a context where the national governments were occupied by left-wing progressive socialist governments. In Portugal, this was the so-called contraption government, a minority socialist government that ruled Portugal between 2015 and 2019 with the support of the Portuguese communist party and the Left Bloc.

Welfare chauvinism

Within the landscape of European right-wing populist parties, the Portuguese Chega (Enough), formed in 2019, is not only one of the parties leaning furthest to the right in terms of socioeconomic issues, defending a full marketization of society and profound welfare-state retrenchment, it also comparatively ranks quite high in terms of welfare chauvinism. According to Chega’s political programs and manifestos, not only the welfare-state should be small, the services it provides should also almost exclusively be reserved for Portuguese citizens. With regard to the degree of welfare chauvinism, Chega is only surpassed by ELAM (Cyprus), EL (Greece), and RN (France). Moreover, Chega's position is unique in the Portuguese democratic party system where, since its foundation in 1974, there has been a consensus on the necessity of expanding the welfare state and establishing open and generous migration policies.

Chega shares the set of prejudices and stereotypes about immigrants typical for the European xenophobic radical right. In the party's documentation there is a clear association between immigration and increased security risks and instability in everyday life. It is also considered that salaries are generally brought down by people coming from abroad. The arrival of immigrants, Chega argues, harms the overwhelming majority of individuals belonging to the middle and lower classes, who end up bearing the costs of immigration. Thus, it also advocates a severe restriction of the social and civic rights of immigrants. An immigration program must give priority, in terms of access to employment and professional and salary development, to Portuguese people, including members of the diaspora who wish to return, and foreigners legally residing in the country. The party argues that there must be strong limitations on the acquisition of nationality by children of immigrants born in Portugal; and only immigrants who have a clear potential for social and cultural integration should be admitted, with access to social benefits being reduced if immigrants do not speak Portuguese.

In order to put these ideas into practice, Chega proposes that there should be a annual public list with the professions and number of people that the country lacks. Every foreign citizen who wants to apply for a work visa for Portugal must register and wait for the selection tests, one of the requirements being adaptability to the national language and culture. The same criteria would also apply to housing access. Chega also proposes creating a system of short-stay visas for economic sectors that attract low-cost seasonal immigrant labour flows. Finally, extreme coercive measures should be a prerogative of the Portuguese State, with the possibility of immigrants being forced to leave the country in periods of rising unemployment.

Written by Tiago Fernandes, Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science and Public Policy & Center for International Studies, University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE)

Greek Solution, founded in 2016 and activate mostly after the acceleration of legal procedures against the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn and the spread of civil actions fighting against right-wing extremism, is self-portrayed as a political party, whose mission is to provide “solutions for Greece”.

EL secured its maiden parliamentary representation in the 2019 European elections sustaining its electoral dynamic with slight losses in the ensuing national elections of July 2019. The collapse of the extreme right Golden Dawn as well as the populist radical right Independent Greeks in conjunction with the cultivation of a hostile rhetoric against the Prespa Agreement – a bilateral treaty between Greece and North Macedonia for the settlement of their differences mainly for the use of the name “Macedonia”- mobilised deeply entrenched nationalistic attitudes in both countries. As far as Greece is concerned, the electoral breakthrough of Greek Solution particularly in Northern Greece, where the party created its electoral strongholds, was achieved in the political context of fierce opposition to the agreement.

Ideological motives that are related to the core features of the populist radical right party family can be discerned in Greek Solution’s party manifesto and the party’s public manifestations: disaffection with political parties and rejection of the political establishment, glorification of the Greek people and speaking out against the elites, national priority and public condemnation of parliamentary democracy as “static” are positions that encapsulate party’s central claims.

The populism dimension

EL is distinguished for its warm embrace of right-wing populism. The party made the distinction between the “pure” but weak and inefficacious people versus the powerful, egoistic and paternalistic elites the focus of its party platform and narrative. It adopted a nativist people-centric orientation admiring the honest ordinary (Greek) people, who are more trusted than experts, technocrats and scientists. Despite frequent references in party’s manifesto and party leader’s discourse to the necessity of technological knowledge, EL does not prioritize science in developing solutions for important problems facing modern societies. At first sight, this seems contradictory. However, it is consistent with party’s anti-establishment position; low trust in science is an indicator of anti-elitist attitudes, as well as an outcome of party’s strong propensity for conspiracy theories and simplistic explanations of economic and socio-cultural phenomena. Support for plebiscitary decision-making processes on the one hand and denial of consensual forms of politics on the other hand, linked with ideas of strong leadership that contradict the type of parliamentary controlled party leader demonstrate the perception of democracy EL has and the challenges that such positions pose to liberal democracy.

The economic dimension

The findings demonstrate that EL is situated at a centre-left position on the left-right axis, balancing between an economic interventionist direction and social-protectionist policies, surrounded by welfare chauvinism criteria. However, taking into account the party’s programmatic agenda, we ascertain that EL cultivates a mixed economic narrative with pro-market components rejecting state intervention in regulating the economy and fostering lower tax rates for the purpose of investments, whereas it endorses the imposition of heavier taxation for the banks and the stock market gains. At the same time, the party’s economic rhetoric and positions encompass a range of redistributive policies aimed exclusively at the natives with the purpose of restoring social protectionist and welfare benefits. Oscillating between wealth redistribution and market freedoms, EL is characterized with the general lack of a specific economic agenda within the far-right party family that allows it to disseminate messages blurring the lines between pro-market and state interventionist stances. The split of the aggregate left-right dimension into two sub-dimensions associated with macro-economic and micro-economic issues on the one hand and the context of social protectionist policies on the other hand might validate EL’s hybrid, yet blurred economic profile which is a mixture of right-wing and left-wing oriented economic proposals.

The aggregate two-dimensional map of far-right parties confirms their salient convergence on the vertical populist vs. non-populist axis. Overall, we observe that far-right parties tend to be bounded by homogeneous viewpoints on a variety of issues associated with the exclusionary variant of populism aiming at the advocacy of ‘people’s interests’ – with ethnic-cultural criteria – against the “corrupt elites”. On the other hand, far-right parties are characterized by a striking discrepancy vis-à-vis their positions along the horizontal left-right axis. Most of the parties are located within the centre-right and right-wing spectrum of the economic dimension representing a more pro-market orientation – according to their narrower amount of standard deviation – whilst EL and ELAM seem to adopt a social protectionist economic agenda which incorporates pro-market components, as evidenced by their wider level of standard deviation. Far-right parties tend to be surrounded by an ambiguous economic narrative consisting of right-wing as well as left-wing oriented stances. Despite ambiguities and/or divergencies on socio-economic issues, far-right parties focus on the salience of their core ideological issues and are converging around authoritarian as well as exclusionist socio-cultural policy perspectives.

Welfare chauvinism

Figure 6a displays the placements of far-right parties on the horizontal left-right axis along the vertical welfare chauvinism dimension. The findings indicate that EL is placed almost at the top of the welfare chauvinism axis, confirming that the party’s social protectionist claims are exclusively restricted to the native Greek majority. EL’s socio-economic policymaking agenda seems to be surrounded by a purer welfare chauvinist slant – compared to the other far-right parties – signified by its narrower standard deviation on that dimension. Taking into consideration the party’s manifesto and its leader’s narrative, we ascertain that EL accentuates the interrelationship between immigration and the restricted efficiency of the social welfare system. In this regard, EL endorses a complete removal of social allowances for immigrants as well as the restriction of free access to healthcare services exclusively to legal immigrants who provide tax and insurance contributions to the Greek state. Moreover, the party underpins the adoption of equally restrictive redistributive policies vis-à-vis ‘second-generation’ immigrants - a fact that explicates EL’s placement along the welfare chauvinism dimension. At the same time, EL emphasizes natives’ priority in employment opportunities and attributes the reduction of average wages and salaries to the presence of foreigners. As implied above, immigrants are not exclusively depicted as an ethnocultural threat by far-right parties, but as an economic burden as well. As such, far-right parties argue that the reduction of the domestic unemployment rate and natives’ access to decent social benefits entail the entire exclusion of foreigners from welfare state allowances and/or the deportation of immigrants to their countries of origin. In the case of EL, its positions on welfare state issues justify the party's clear nativist orientation, revealing its complete exclusionist views in social policy stances. This finding may partly clarify the blurred party image - a mixture of right-wing and left-wing oriented economic policies.

Written by Vasiliki Georgiadou and Jenny Mavropoulou, Centre for Political Research, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

The National Popular Party (ELAM) was founded in 2008 as the Cypriot sister party or annex of the Golden Dawn neo-Nazi party in Greece, a name that they also asked for, with no success. They portray themselves as fighters for a Greek Cyprus, inheritors of the Greek and Byzantine history.

ELAM appears to pass through a transitional period, during which it is shaping a new public face in the political landscape. This phase of change started with the conviction of its sister party, Golden Dawn, for being a criminal organisation, with steps that extend beyond the relations of the two parties. The above had followed an earlier phase of changes: the advertised relations of the party with the NPD (Germany), Forza Nuova (Italy), NPDI (Russia) and other parties of similar ideologies, the links to their websites and even translations of the ELAM website into their respective languages were gradually wiped out of sight.  As from 2013, only the relations with Golden Dawn were visible, until the conviction and imprisonment of its officials. The link to GD’s website and every single element testifying the relations  between the parties disappeared from ELAM’s website some months after the European Parliament elections in May 2019, in which officials of the Greek party offered their support to the Cypriot candidates.

Along with the changes above, a variety of documents, mostly reproduced from the GD’s website and constituting the foundations of the Cypriot party’s ideology, about nationalism, the theory of races, patriotism and others, were also removed from the website. As a result, no document in the form of a comprehensive ideological manifesto, or even an outline of ELAM’s positions is currently available. The party’s positions are set in the form of a multitude of slogans, as disperse bullet points under nine themes, not necessarily sectors of activity. This explains to some extent its clearly distinctive features from the other parties of this study: Lack of or limited cohesion of positions, whether on the populist or the left-right dimensions, and a kind of “catch-all” populism, independent of clear ideological parameters.

In an environment where ELAM’s positions appeared to also transcend mainstream parties, it appeared very difficult for it to make a quick breakthrough in politics. The economic crisis of 2011 and the hard terms imposed by the creditors of the Republic in 2013, along with the budget cuts and corruption, for which the mainstream parties were deemed responsible, allowed ELAM to rise quickly. From 663 votes in the 2009 EP elections, it climbed to 4056 in the parliamentary elections of 2011, to 13040 in 2016 and to 24255 in May 2021, becoming the fourth largest party.

The populism dimension

ELAM adopts a narrative embracing family, young people and vulnerable groups, as well as employees and pensioners and proposes measures to assist them. It does not necessarily place these various groups against elites and the rich; In some cases, care for these groups is confronted with the assistance reserved to Turkish Cypriots, migrants and asylum seekers. Ignoring or arbitrarily interpreting laws or even European directives it asks for exclusionist policies to the benefit of the natives - “the Greeks”.

The main axes of exclusionist policies are anti-migratory, anti-Turkish and anti-communist, where the dominant narrative, endorsed to a great extent by large groups of Greek Cypriots, combines racism and conspiracy theories, including the belief that the inflow of migrants is part of a plan by Turkey to change the demographic profile of Cyprus by sending Muslim population to the island. The stigmatization of migrants, undocumented migrants and asylum seekers on which ELAM and other political forces base their arguments ignore the fact that 20% of the labour force are other-EU and third countries’ citizens, while Cyprus faces a shortage of labour.
While ELAM points to the other political parties as corrupt and responsible for the problems facing the country, its anti-systemic character blurs with the role it is called to play after entering the House of Representatives since 2016: It has joined votes with the governing party of the Democratic Rally (DISY) for the adoption of the Budget, but also for electing DISY’s candidate as Speaker of the House. In a political environment where mainstream parties, including DISY, and the government, adopt anti-migratory positions and sometimes a racist rhetoric, ELAM appears to pull attention from them and also benefit as the authentic representative of these stances.

The economic dimension

ELAM is clearly in favour of left wing economic proposals for the redistribution of wealth with the adoption of policies of assistance for various groups, but also an increased role to the State in market regulation. It proposes measures for social protection on the one hand and is in favour of the reduction of enterprise taxes in rural areas, special incentives for technology and innovation, and other types of business assistance on the other hand. The economic actions required are to be targeted according to needs identified. This protectionist policy, with an ‘intelligent’ plan and specific measures in support of Cypriot businesses and products seems to ignore or sideline the rules of the European unified market.

On the social protection front, the coincidence of the onset of the party’s existence during the 2008 economic crisis that reached Cyprus with some delay, but critically affected it, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, offered opportunities for ELAM to develop its strategy. The main axes were assistance to those in need and the clear distinction between the native, and the ‘other’. The sources of assistance would be aid from the State treasury, but also shifting assistance and subsidies from migrants or asylum seekers or even Turkish Cypriots. The party tried to be everywhere to assist ‘Greeks only’, gaining points as the supporter of vulnerable groups. These circumstances may explain, to some degree, why ELAM stands out from the group of other populist parties in terms of economic stances. While the systemic parties were considered responsible for the crisis, the number of those in need was high enough to allow ELAM to play the role of the good Samaritan.

Specific issues such as the payment of non-performed loans or back payments to those who lost money from the banks allowed for a narrative in favour of groups affected by the crisis and against letting the banks to seek their dues. No proposal was made for taxing banks that were already facing difficulties. Instead, ELAM proposes to tax international companies, such as Airbnb, Amazon and others.

Welfare chauvinism

The Cypriot extreme right-wing National Popular Party – ELAM, an annex of the Greek Golden Dawn neo-Nazi party, distinguishes itself from other Cypriot parties with its extremely chauvinist and anti-immigrant positions. Its rigid positions aimed at denying rights to non-natives are not ascribed in any coherent policy framework or documentation but thrown in the public sphere as loose slogans.

When put on a left-right axis, ELAM’s positions appear to reflect values considered core for the political left. By adopting such stances, the party embraces a combination of populist policies aimed at appealing to large sections of society. By means of defining every non-native as an illegal migrant – lathrometanastis, ELAM is institutionally excluding not only those in a precarious position (e.g. asylum seekers) but also foreign labourers that the authorities invite to the island to fill job positions. Through selection, the party targets exclusively religious minorities (such as Muslims), refraining from mentioning other groups. When examining the welfare dimension in terms of the results derived by ELAM’s positions, the denial of rights is clearly apparent: social and welfare rights are only reserved to natives, rather than aimed at establishing social egalitarianism. The party actually favours the reallocation of aid and rights to natives by depriving ‘others’. The second dimension, measuring the degree of welfare chauvinism, reveals that the policy positions of ELAM cannot be considered genuinely left-wing since they are aimed only at benefitting the native population, rather than being egalitarian and universalist.

ELAM’s positions on the Populist – Non-Populist dimension put the party close to the populist end of the axis. This is the result of a process of adopting welfare chauvinist positions, emphasising citizens’ national and religious background when it comes to welfare provision. There is no variation of positions:  ELAM favours every policy proposal that would lead to the denial of rights of certain groups and reallocation of benefits to natives. The party’s rhetoric covers many subjects while narrowing its goals. Some of ELAM’s positions have been approved of or even adopted as policies by the Cypriot authorities, with other political forces and very large parts of society backing them.

ELAM’s aggregate position places the party at the heart of populist positions, covering a broad area of subjects, albeit with a narrow array of targets. In the same way, the party’s policy proposals stretch over a set of leftist values, but are limited in terms of the achieved or pursued results. In both cases, the strong chauvinist positions of the party bring it close to the very extreme point of welfare chauvinism, at par with the French RN. Why is that? What puts ELAM in this position? A general social climate of hostility towards the ‘other’ is re-enforced by the existence of the Cyprus Problem - the ages-old Greek-Turkish enmity is further deepened by governmental anti-immigrant policies and narratives against Turkey, while the belief that Turkey sends non-documented Muslim migrants to Cyprus to undermine its security and alter its demography is publicly promoted.

Written by Christophoros Christophorou, Political Analyst

Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) was founded in 2012 by se4veral right-wing politicians led by Giorgia Meloni, a former young activist of the post-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and then representative of Alleanza Nazionale (AN), a party originating  from the transformation of the MSI (1994). After the merger of AN with Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, Meloni entered the new party (PdL, Popolo della Libertà), also performing the role of minister in Berlusconi's government (2008-2011). Born from a split within Berlusconi's party, the new movement obtained very low scores until the 2019 European elections, when it won 6.5 per cent of the votes. Since then, FdI has shown a gradual increase in its electoral support, eventually reaching (according to the polls) a national consensus of around 20 per cent and becoming the largest Italian party. Moreover, since its birth and until Meloni's refusal to join the grand coalition supporting the current Mario Draghi government (February 2021), FdI has always been an opposition party.

The populism dimension

Meloni's party keeps important organisational and ‘sentimental’ links with the MSI, which – following Cas Mudde – can be defined as an extreme right party. Notwithstanding, it shows many features typical of the contemporary radical and populist right. Figure 1 confirms such a placement in the Italian political space: FdI is clearly situated on the populist upper-side of the graph. Its populist leaning lies above all on significant anti-elitist attitudes. The challenge against the ‘system’ clearly emerges from the expert survey and the party coding. Meloni's discourse also confirms it. Indeed, continued accusations against domestic powers (media, members of the government, government parties) and international and global institutions (from the EU ‘bureaucrats’ to the international high finance) pervade her rhetoric and often evoke conspiracy theories. The people's will as the source of legitimation for political leadership also characterises the populist trait of Brothers of Italy. In turn, the ‘people’ is usually depicted both as the collective expression of the ‘ordinary people’ (often described as victims) and the national community. However, according to the party coding, FDI places less emphasis on people's ‘rightness’ and on the wrongness of those who do not share the party's opinions than other populist parties (particularly the AfD). This aspect partly explains why FDI – according to Figure 1 – has a lower populism score compared to other populist parties. Another reason for this positioning may be traced to Meloni's and other party representatives' efforts to moderate their rhetoric as a means of avoiding political extremism accusations. As a matter of fact, among the items measuring general populist attitudes, very few are coded with the “strongly agree” position. Finally, FDI does not have an anti-party stance.

The economic dimension

As to the economic, left-right dimension (state intervention vs market deregulation), Meloni's party appears on the expected (right) side of the horizontal axis, almost in the middle of the quadrant and approximately in the same position as the German populist party AfD. Only two other populist parties have a more rightist position: the Spanish Vox and the Portuguese Chega, while one party, the French Rassemblement National, appears at the centre of the continuum and two parties, the Cypriot ELAM and the Greek EL, are on the left side. We can explain the FdI's clear rightist position through some of its positions regarding economics, the welfare state and the labour market. In particular, the party does not seem interested in resorting to public spending as an instrument for state intervention, wealth redistribution, or reinforcing the support for unemployed workers. For example, regarding the unemployment issue, Meloni has expressed her preference for government incentives for entrepreneurs instead of an unemployment assurance system improvement. At the same time, FdI strongly opposes tax rate increases, including for the highest incomes, and has a favourable view of private actors in the healthcare system. Finally, its harsh criticism of the basic income program conducted in Italy evokes the so-called ‘welfare producerism’, that is “an ideological frame advocating redistributive social closure on the basis of the deservingness criteria of control, attitude and reciprocity”. Meloni's and FdI's rhetoric also recall another kind of welfare state position, which, likewise, has been considered a typical frame of many populist agendas, namely, the so-called ‘welfare chauvinism’. It emerges from the hard criticisms against government policies aimed to support immigrants, contrasted with the perceived weak attention dedicated to ordinary people’s needs.

However, in contrast to the FdI's standard deviation regarding the populist dimension, the one concerning the left-right continuum is rather broad. This result can be ascribed to two main reasons. First, the FdI's economic positions are often neutral (if not absent) or ambiguous. Secondly, a few of its stances appear to be rather leftist. This is the case, for example, with the relevance attributed to the state regulation of the economy, which in Meloni's rhetoric is strictly linked to the preservation of national sovereignty. Likewise, the party is in favour of increasing pension benefits. In this latter case, the ‘benefit’ regards the possibility of an anticipated retirement pension, regardless of its cost for the national budget. Therefore, as for the economic dimension, FdI's rhetoric shows a certain degree of inconsistency. This inconsistency can be explained by the often contingent nature of some positions, based on the competition with the governmental parties, rather than  consistent economic views. However, it is also probably due to the specific populist mentality of radical right populist parties. Indeed, as has been observed (ibidem), other parties belonging to this category look unfavourably at unemployment benefits and tend to emphasise the potential for abuse and unintended consequences of social welfare schemes (as FdI often does) and, at the same time, defend the rights of pensioners. This stance has to do with both the above-mentioned welfare producerism and the welfare chauvinism. In other words, it has to do with the preference devoted to the native (what pensioners are supposed to be), ‘good worker’ and active ordinary citizen.

Welfare chauvinism

Immigration has always been a central topic for the radical-right Brothers of Italy party agenda and the rhetoric of its leader, Giorgia Meloni. Since 2013, it has intensely exploited the increase of attention to the immigration phenomenon of the Italian public, starting precisely during the period of its birth and gaining relevance because of the 2014-2015 migration crisis. The party's hostility towards ‘uncontrolled immigration’ and the stress put on the danger of immigration for social cohesion partly explains the gradual but steady growth in the its electoral support. According to the polls, in July 2022, two months before the Italian general election (25 September 2022), FdI had about 24 per cent of the electorate's support, the highest among Italian political parties. Not surprisingly, since the start of the 2022 electoral campaign, immigration has been one of the party's propaganda workhorses, along with its ‘classical’ plan of blocking the Mediterranean Sea with the Italian navy to stop sea immigration, together with a general promise of fighting illegal immigration.

Consistent with the party's position on immigration is its welfare chauvinism. Indeed, Fratelli d'Italia has constantly reiterated the proposition of giving priority to Italian people when welfare benefits are concerned. For example, the document put forward at the 2017 Party Congress (Trieste's Thesis) stated the party’s will “to change the European rules and introduce the principle of Italians’ priority for access to social services, crèches, and social housing”. Similarly, the 2019 European elections programme reaffirmed that “in employment, allocation of social benefits, social housing and access to kindergartens, national preference must be given to those who have lived in Italy the longest and contributed to its growth”. Furthermore, the general well-being of Italians, in particular the poorest sector of the Italian society, is conceived to be in danger because of excessive immigration. In this regard, Giorgia Meloni, in her 2021 book, ‘Io sono Giorgia’, wrote: “Unregulated immigration impacts above all on the weakest, in the labour market, in social services, in the suburbs of large metropolitan cities”.
The aim of FdI and Meloni to conceive welfare benefits in a rather exclusive manner emerges from the graph. Meloni's party appears on the right side of the horizontal, left-right axis, measuring the economic positioning. At the same time, it is also situated almost at the top of the welfare egalitarianism-welfare chauvinism dimension, near the ‘chauvinist’ pole. Furthermore, the standard deviation of this latter dimension appears significantly lower compared to the one concerning the economic dimension. This result suggests that welfare chauvinism is a more defining topic of FdI’s ideology than economic matters.

Notwithstanding, as the graph shows, Brother of Italy has an intermediate position in comparison to the other populist right-wing parties. In this regard, it is worth observing that welfare chauvinism is only one element of the more general party view on immigration. Furthermore, among the different aspects of immigration, welfare chauvinism is not really in the focus of the party's rhetoric (in the last available party document, at the time of writing, end of July 2022, the theme is not even mentioned), probably due to the obvious accusations of racism and discrimination it can emanate.

Written by Marco Valbruzzi, Università degli Studi di Napoli, Federico II and Sofia Ventura, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna

Founded by Umberto Bossi in 1991, by 2008 the Northern League (Lega Nord) had become the oldest party group in the Italian parliament. In the March 2018 general elections, it gained over 17 per cent of the national vote, that is, 7 per cent more than its previous best result in a general election back in 1996. Lega Nord served national right-wing coalition governments led by Silvio Berlusconi from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2011. Moreover, from 2018 to the summer of 2019 the League formed, as a junior partner, a coalition government with the Five-Star Movement, at that time the largest populist party in the Italian political system. Lastly, after a long debate within the party, the League joined Italy’s current government—a broad coalition headed by the former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi.

The ‘Bossi era’ came to an abrupt end in April 2012. After a brief interim period, in December 2013, Matteo Salvini was elected leader by party members with 80 per cent of the vote. The election of Salvini to the party leadership completely changed the political and programmatic outlook of the party. If the distinctiveness of Bossi’s leadership resided in a form of ‘regionalist populism’, under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini regionalism (or, in some circumstances, overt separatism) has been replaced by a mixture of neo-nationalism, nativism and strong Euroscepticism. This process culminated just before the 2018 general election with Salvini’s decision to drop the term ‘North’ altogether from the party's electoral symbol. Now, the party is simply called ‘Lega’, with no reference to its geographical origins and, more importantly, its original regionalist nature.
In the 2019 European elections, the League obtained its most important electoral success, with 34.3 per cent of the vote. However, from that moment on, Salvini’s party underwent a steady decline of electoral support, and in November 2021 opinion polls indicated that FdI would electorally surpass the League.

If regionalism was replaced by nationalism in both the rhetoric and the party's manifesto, the element that remained constant during the evolution of the League was its adamant populism. This populist trait is evident in Figure 1, which is based on a survey conducted among country experts. As evident from the graph, Salvini’s party can be considered populist, in line with other European radical right parties, such as the Sweden Democrats (SD), Vox in Spain and Alternative for Germany (AfD). Here, it is worth noting that the placement of the League in the political space is very similar to that of FdI, especially in terms of populist rhetoric or ideology.

The populism dimension

Concerning the statements on which the party coding is based, the League agrees with all populist statements and disagrees with all non-populist ones. The party is strongly anti-elitist when it comes to the political elite but sometimes also uses anti-elitist rhetoric to criticise the European ‘technocracy’ or the intellectual elite. Furthermore, the League also has a strong ‘people-centrist’ attitude, trying to appeal to the ‘whole’ Italian population or, ever more frequently, to the nation or the ‘fatherland’ threatened by the influence of foreign powers, including multinational corporations, or by the uncontrolled inflows of migrants and refugees. In addition to these populist elements, the League also has a strong preference for the existence of a ‘strong leader’ who can quickly decide on policy issues. Even though strong leadership is not traditionally considered a defining element of populism, it nevertheless reveals an ambiguous position in terms democratic procedures and the compromise between different political actors.

The economic dimension

Regarding the economic, left-right dimension, the League has a position that lies inbetween the French Rassemblement National, with a centrist position in socioeconomic terms, and Vox in Spain, which has a more economically right profile. Compared to FdI, Salvini's party has a slightly less right-wing position in the political space. This indicates that the League is more positive towards state intervention, especially in the pension sector and the protection of certain sectors of the economy (agriculture, self-employed, traders, etc.). Nevertheless, the flagship proposals of the League have a clear right-wing connotation. On the one hand, the introduction of the so-called ‘flat tax’, which would strongly reduce the role of the state in the management of the economy as well as the space for social assistance. On the other hand, the more recent decision to repeal the basic income introduced in Italy for the first time in 2019 as financial support aimed at helping beneficiaries find a new job and promoting their social inclusion. Moreover, according to the party coding regarding the socioeconomic items, Salvini’s party appears to oppose wealth redistribution from the wealthiest to the poorest sectors of society and, accordingly, it disapproves the idea that the state should play a greater role in regulating the economy.
In any case, all the positions of the League on the socioeconomic issues are characterised by a strong nativist orientation. This means that welfare benefits and state protections should be applied exclusively to the members of the native group (‘the nation’), excluding non-native or foreign persons. This justifies the proposal of welfare chauvinist policies, which attract the support of blue-collar workers, and is the basis for the nativists’ claim that national cultures need to be preserved and protected. The only sector in which the state is expected to intervene more is the Defence, in both the domestic (with the adoption of law & order policies) and the international arena (more funds for the army and the police).

Welfare chauvinism

With the partial denial of its previous ethno-regionalist ideology, culminating in Matteo Salvini’s decision to drop the term ‘North’ from the electoral symbol and name of the party, the League developed a new policy agenda through the years, with a more nationalist focus and the inclusion of clear nativist and protectionist – in both cultural and economic terms – motifs. On the one hand, the Great Recession that severely hit Italy in 2011 and, on the other, the migration crisis which exploded in Southern European countries between 2014-2015, created an ideal context for the Salvini’s League to build a new policy agenda based on the increased salience of the immigration issue, oftentimes presented and framed, by Salvini himself, as a ‘migrant invasion’ funded or at least supported by the European Union and other supranational actors. To some extent, for Salvini, the focus on the migrant issue represented an effective way to combine his populist rhetoric, especially against the national and international elites, with strong anti-EU attitudes. This ideological mix, combining a populist message with a welfare chauvinist social agenda, clearly emerges from the analysis of the political space included in the Graph, in which the League, in line with most of the other European radical right parties, is positioned in the upper-right quadrant.

This ideological change imposed on Salvini on his party also implied a change in its main electoral constituency. If in the early 1990s the party aimed to represent, economically speaking, the most dynamic sectors of the Northern regions (especially among the small-and-medium sized enterprises), even sometimes recognising the advantages of immigration to the Italian job market, in the last decade the League has strongly emphasized its nativist, anti-immigrant stance, embracing the rejection of foreigners, the reduction in the number of immigrants and, finally, the limitation of civil and social rights for foreign residents.

In such a context, the key message of the League in 2018 (and also afterwards), in line with the slogans used by other radical-right parties in Europe and the US, was “Prima gli italiani” (‘Italians first’), which reflected its nativist attitude and, more importantly, its welfare chauvinist approach. Consistent with these premises and attitudes, the 2018 party programme clearly stated that one of the League’s main objectives is to deny access to essential benefits provided by the welfare state for third-country nationals, described as ‘extra-communitari’ (‘non-EU citizens’). Hence, in terms of social policies, the League took positions that embrace the principles and practices of welfare chauvinism, whereby the immigrants (which, in the rhetoric of the party, represent an unspecified universe of ‘foreign individuals’) are portrayed as undeserving of social benefits, thus stressing the distinction between the natives, who deserve the benefits, and the residual category of the ‘others’, who simply exploit such benefits. In Salvini’s own words, ‘Italians would do any kind of work if paid normally, without having unfair competition from undocumented, perhaps exploited immigrants.‘

In sum, residence and, eventually, ethno-cultural characteristics remain key elements in the League’s social agenda, which are complemented by other deservingness criteria looking at migrants’ behaviours or attitudes. This approach was taken by Salvini's party to oppose both the reform of the citizenship right (in favour of foreign minors born in Italy) and to revise the so-called reddito di cittadinanza (or citizenship income, that is, a peculiar form of basic income) in a more restrictive way toward immigrants/foreigners.

Written by Marco Valbruzzi, Università degli Studi di Napoli, Federico II and Sofia Ventura, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna

The Rassemblement National (RN) is a French political party, known as the most recognisable far right party in the country’s recent history. It was founded in 1972 by the Ordre Nouveau, a French far-right nationalist political movement. Since its founding, the party has been controlled by the Le Pen family, being led by Jean-Marie Le Pen until 2011, followed by his daughter Marine Le Pen, currently head of the party.
RN’s popularity increased considerably in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen received enough votes to participate in the second round of the presidential elections. That event constituted a major breakdown of the well-established dual-party French politics and was followed by series of electoral successes. In fact, the party keeps on proving its electoral relevance, evidenced by Marine Le Pen’s successful qualification to the second round of the last presidential elections of 2017, where she lost to Emmanuel Macron (La République en Marche). The party’s position is clearly on the far right of the spectrum: it is compared to national populist movements. In fact, one of the main traits of Marine Le Pen’s party is its fierce opposition to immigration, as well as notable expressions of nationalism and patriotism.

The populism dimension

The discourse of the party has been, according to scholars, increasingly populist (or even, according to some, national-populist) after the party was headed by Marine Le Pen in 2011. Previously, her father’s political discourse was generally associated with the traditional far-right. Marine Le Pen shifted the discourse to a more populist one, through the process of “dédiabolisation” (de-demonisation) of the party. In other words, she emphasized her departure from her father’s racist and antisemitic convictions as a means of enlarging the party’s electorate and creating an image of governability and moderation (rather than implying a clearly right-wing polemic). This process was also highlighted by the change of the party name from Front National to Rassemblement National, that clearly shows a discontinuation from the past. The two aspects of the populist rhetoric used by RN are the appeal to the “people” (a generic entity that is never precisely defined) against the elites. Indeed, given that it has never held a governmental role, the party commonly uses an “us versus them” rhetoric, and “the system versus the excluded” discourse. In addition, the party makes use of true populist demagogy, by addressing complex issues such as immigration, taxes or security with simple and straightforward solutions. From a comparative point of view, RN is, as can be observed in Figure 1, more populist than other European far right parties, such as SD, Lega and FdI. Indeed, RN’s this position resonates with its previously observed beliefs and ideas and use of populist rhetoric; in other words, the relatively high position of RN on the vertical axis shows and confirms its strong anti-elitist and people-centric rhetoric, as well as the party’s monocultural values, which are its the main populist manifestations. In fact, these views are explicitly displayed by the slogan RN chose in the last presidential elections; “Au nom du peuple” (in the name of the People), which directly relates to people-centric principles.

The economic dimension

From a more socioeconomic perspective, the statements used to construct the Figure show that RN’s platform  is particularly aimed at attracting the more moderate part of the electorate with the promise of numerous measures aimed at improving the lives of the poorer segments of the population. Examples of such measures include the decreasing of gas tariffs, or even the lowering of the legal retirement age.

On the fiscal level, the party is in favour of maintain the taxes on high incomes along with decreasing the income tax for the poor. Such propositions explain the centrist position of RN on the left-right economic axis. In fact, the populist rhetoric of the party aims at conquering more socially disadvantaged voters, making the centrist position of the RN more coherent with its novel moderate rhetoric and populist inclination.

Welfare chauvinism

According to experts and scholars, the centrality of nationalism and patriotism within the identity of the party has always been fundamental. That is to say, unlike populism - a tendency that has been sharply increasing since Marine Le Pen took over her father’s party presidency - chauvinism has always been part of the core values of the RN. Nevertheless, many argue that the historical and fundamental political and economic principles of RN have gradually moderating under Marine Le Pen: this has happened in a context in which the party works towards a more acceptable and less radical image (dé-diabolisation) in order to attract more voters. This process also happens while the party is slowly moving away from its historical neoliberal principles, for the benefit of social populist ideals (see the comparative study of Populism in Europe). Nevertheless, the priority of ethnic French citizens’ over immigrants when it comes to welfare issues remains a central point of RN’s 2022 platform.

This position is illustrated in the graph (figure 10a). The RN position is extremely high on the “welfare chauvinism” axis, due to Le Pen’s cherished principle of priorité nationale, i.e. priority of French citizens over immigrants when it comes to welfare. Indeed, the entire party platform and especially the section on immigration, is filled with national legitimacy and priority policy proposals, xenophobia, and economic governance proposals close to traditional left-wing ideas. An illustrative example of such proposals is the party’s proposition to organise a referendum aimed at restricting and reserving the measures of access to employment, housing and social benefits to people with French nationality. This central principle explains the position of the RN on the graph (figure 10a), both at the top of the welfare chauvinism axis and on the middle of the left/right economic axis.

Written by Livia Giannotti, Amsterdam University College

The Sweden Democrats (SD) was founded in 1988 by members of the ethnonationalist and white supremacist movement Bevara Sverige Svenskt. This history distinguishes it from other Nordic populist parties like Anders Lange’s Fremskrittspartiet in Norway and Mogens Glistrup’s Fremskridtspartiet in Denmark, rooted in discontent with the bureaucratic welfare state and high taxes. In accordance with Klaus Beyme’s classification scheme, SD can instead be classified in terms of the third generation of nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-multicultural populist parties like Jörg Haider's FPÖ and the Belgian Vlaams Belang. The history of the Sweden Democrats has been a frequent source of reproach and hostility from the left flank, and the party has tried to clean up its image and part with its history. In 2014, the party leadership adopted a zero-tolerance policy against racism and extremism. Yet the party has remained subject to frequent scandals. In the 2006 parliamentary elections, SD received 3% of the vote in, failing to pass the 4% threshold. In 2010 the party entered parliament with 5.7%, followed by 12.9% in 2014 and 17.5% in 2018. The establishment parties on the right and the left alike have tried to maintain a cordon sanitaire aimed at limiting the influence of what they considered an Islamophobic far-right party with connections to the neo-Nazi movement. This, however, has been a failure. Support for the party has only grown over the years, and several establishment parties have moved toward their positions on issues such as immigration, integration, crime, and law and order. It has also made the party system more unstable, and the government formation-process longer and more complicated. The so-called 2019 January-agreement between the Social Democrats, the Center Party, the Liberals, and the Green party, which was partly created to isolate SD, ended the centre-right Alliance which had been a stable feature of Swedish politics since 2006. In 2018, both the Moderate party (M) and the Christian Democrats (KD) announced that they would never cooperate with SD. One year later the KD party leader declared that they were open to negotiate with SD on all issues, and the leader of M declared that they would cooperate with SD on issues pertaining to crime, the energy supply, and immigration. In November 2021, the Liberals (L) officially followed suit. As of November 2021, KD, SD and M have just passed their first joint budget, thus for the first time giving SD real influence over government policy.

The populism dimension

SD party officials frequently accuse the public service of being biased and use derogatory terms like “folkförrädare” (traitors) and “sverigefientliga” (Sweden-hostile) to describe their opponents, while their supporters are called “sverigevänner” (friends of Sweden) thus underscoring the manichean friend-enemy distinction typical of populist parties. The concept of “Swedishness” is frequently used in an essentialist manner in the party’s rhetoric, and high party officials have repeatedly declared that members of national minorities are not “real Swedes.” The party also calls itself “Sweden’s fastest growing social movement.” The Swedish word for social movement is “folkrörelse,” which is historically associated with the Social Democrats, since it emerged from the worker’s and voting rights’ movements in the late 19th century. The term is deliberately used to imply that SD enjoys greater popular legitimacy than the establishment parties, which have grown increasingly distant from “ordinary people” according to SD. It is not the first time SD hijacks traditionally social democratic concepts. In Jimmie Åkessons (SD party leader) first book Satis Polito, for example, the preface is written in the voice of the Social Democratic party leader Per Albin Hansson. And his second book Det Moderna Folkhemmet directly references the concept used by Per Albin to describe the welfare state. In many ways, this use of language mirrors the way that Fredrik Reinfeldt's New Moderate Party repurposed traditionally left-wing words and concepts and styled itself as the “new worker’s party” in the early 2000s.

The parties that has suffered most damage due to the Sweden Democrats, are arguably the Moderate party who lost the largest percentage to Sweden Democrats and the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats have lost voters to SD among its core constituencies. A vivid example of this is how popular the Sweden Democrats have become among the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) members, where about one of four voted for the Sweden Democrats in the election 2018. The most popular party was still the Social Democrats, however, they no longer won a majority of the LO members vote. This has prompted an extensive internal debate on the positioning of the party, with the youth wing of the party as well as the LO for example encouraging cooperation with SD to push through improvements of the pensions system.

The economic dimension

SD’s economic policy can be described as inconsistent, which is a source of contention between the party and its prospective coalition partners, especially M. One the one hand, the party supports welfare policies such as higher unemployment benefits and higher pensions, which pulls it toward the left end of the spectrum. The party has also suggested that some welfare provisions (like child- and housing benefits and pensions) should be restricted to Swedish nationals and EU/EES citizens. But on the other, it is generally against higher taxes, especially those related to environmental regulations, and wants less corporate regulations in general. The party also explicitly styles itself as a pro-market liberal, free-trade friendly party, which pulls it towards the right end of the spectrum. This inconsistency is typical for populist parties, but can also partly be explained by strategic concerns. On the one hand, SD appeals to its own voter base with generous welfare provisions, but on the other it attempts to increase its coalition potential with the other parties on the right. This may explain its relatively centrist position in the political space.

Sverigedemokraterna (SD)

The Swedish Democrats (SD) place great emphasis on the importance of citizenship, along with employment and the degree of assimilation, when it comes to immigrants and their access to the Swedish welfare system. SD wants to tie welfare rights closer to citizenship. They want to limit voting rights to Swedish citizens, make it more difficult to obtain citizenship by introducing e.g. language proficiency and civic knowledge tests, and make it easier to strip immigrants of their Swedish citizenship. SD also has a communitarian understanding of citizenship, and sees the nation as a moral, holistic, quasi-organic community united by deeply rooted common traditions, language, values, identity and ways of life. This seemingly makes total assimilation in the community - and renunciation of any other source of identity - a precondition for "real" belonging to society. SD explicitly state that they would prefer most citizens to have a Swedish identity, since homogeneity - to them - is conducive to social cohesion and a sense of belonging. The party does argue that assimilation in the Swedish nation is possible for foreigners once they speak fluent Swedish; identify as Swedish; live according to Swedish norms and values, and feel stronger bonds of loyalty with Sweden than any other nation. But they also see it as a long and difficult process that often takes generations to accomplish, and that often fails and leads to different forms of segregation. This is especially true of immigrants from culturally and religiously different nations, which is why the party believes that immigration from such countries should be strictly limited.

This cultural essentialism is connected to the party’s conception of markets and economic behaviour. SD rejects the homo economicus-formalist view of economic behaviour, and sees the economy as embedded in a broad array of social- cultural- normative- moral- and political spheres unique to every society, which compose a coherent whole and which influence how the economy operates. A precondition for economic growth is, in SD’s view, that these elements harmonize and aren't disrupted by alien influences. According to the party, pluralism invites complexity, disorder, conflicts and erodes social trust. Distrust, in turn, invites corruption, tax avoidance, and fraudulent exploitation of the welfare system. To exemplify: SD explicitly frame Sweden's welfare system as a pull-factor for unqualified "economic migrants," who often fail to acquire gainful employment and live on welfare benefits in segregated enclaves with little to no interaction with Swedish society. This failure to assimilate is in itself sufficient reason for voluntary “repatriation”, according to SD. It also motivates limiting their rights to residence-based social insurance benefits (like child allowance, housing allowance, and pregnancy benefits). Structural unemployment also motivates exclusion from the public healthcare system and municipal income support. The party deems these infringements justified in terms of cost-saving and burden-sharing. SD argues that unemployed economic migrants' welfare entitlements are a burden on society - since such people don't compensate in the form of taxes - which risks undermining the norms of trust, fairness, reciprocity and responsibility that underlies the welfare system.

SD’s arguments are based less on economics and more on cultural, identity-related and moral issues. The purpose of the party's economic policy is as much about ensuring social coherence, stability, cultural integrity, and national identity as it is about economic growth, productivity or employment rates. The threat from migrant workers is, in SD’s view, not mainly to wages per se, but rather to the institutions that provide stability and social coherence, built on a reciprocal trust between employers and workers and closely associated with the Swedish development model: a type of corporativism that unites people across class, generational, geographical and political boundaries.

Written by Egil Struk

The origins of Vox stem from the disappointment of some factions within the Popular Party (PP) regarding Mariano Rajoy’s government that was in power from 2011 to 2018. These groups created a new party called Vox (‘voice’, in Latin) in December 2013 with the aim of forcing the PP to return to a clearly conservative ideology. Specifically, Vox sought to pull the PP further to the right on moral issues, towards tax reduction positions regarding fiscal policies, and closer to a heavily Spanish identitarian stance. After some initial electoral fiascos, Vox first became the fifth political party of Spain in April 2019 and then, in the following general elections of November 2019, surged to the third place in terms of votes and seats in the Spanish Parliament. In fact, the organization led by Santiago Abascal climbed from 0.20 per cent of the vote in the 2016 elections to 15.1 per cent of the vote in the last general elections to date, which resulted in 52 out of 350 seats. Hence, the increase in number of votes has been exponential: from 47,182 to 3,656,979 votes in only three years. The last electoral successes have allowed Vox to become decisive in the formation of centre-right minority governments led by the PP at the regional level (e.g., Madrid, Andalusia and Murcia).

When it comes to the party’s placement, the most striking fact of Vox’s position on the two dimensions is its clearly right-wing stance. In this regard, only the Portuguese Chega has such a similar right-wing profile. This ideological resemblance is difficult to explain, and its determinants deserve further investigation. Vox and Chega are born in two neighbouring countries strongly hit by the Great Recession and belong, jointly with Greek Solution, to the most recent wave of radical-right parties in Southern Europe (i.e., all of them were created in the last ten years). Moreover, all three made their electoral breakthrough when the countries were governed by left-wing prime minister (Pedro Sánchez in Spain, Antonio Costa in Portugal and Alexis Tsipras in Greece). However, unlike Greek Solution, Vox and Chega have typical right-wing economic traits.

The populism dimension

If we move to populist statements, Vox is clearly among the most populist parties in the study, together with ELAM, the Greek Solution, the French Rassemblement National and Alternative for Germany. Explaining these similarities and, above all, the differences with respect to Chega and the Italian parties is definitely challenging. The high populism score of Vox is remarkable because the word ‘people’ never appears neither in its speeches nor in its manifestos, and it is systematically replaced by the word ‘nation’. Similarly, the term ‘elite’ also seldom appears, apart from the references to the ‘nationalist elites’ in the Basque Country and Catalonia. An additional keyword of the populist rhetoric such as ‘corruption’ was relatively visible in its 2015 and 2016 electoral manifestos and public speeches but has virtually disappeared from Vox’s discourse since then.
If we focus on specific statements, we need to pay special attention to those items in which the populism of Vox looks a little bit weaker. Within this list, three types of items look particularly important. First of all, we find statements about people’s information. For example, according to the data collected for the project, Vox does not agree nor disagree with the following statements in this regard: “generally, citizens cannot understand which policies are right for them” and “the people with a different political opinion are just misinformed”. Even more importantly, Vox does not think that the “major government decisions must be approved by referendum”. This latter position (that is, mainly, non-populist) is largely explained by the position of the party on Catalan secessionism. Finally, Vox is indifferent on the issue of rich people controlling all political parties, implying that the predominantly right-wing position of the party is more salient than its alleged populism.

The economic dimension

Considering the two specific sub-dimensions in which economic statements in the study can be divided, it is clear that Vox is particularly right-wing when we only consider economic regulation items. In terms of redistribution statements, Vox has an intermediate stance between Chega and the Italian radical right parties (i.e., Fratelli [also a recent party born in a South European country] and Lega). Within the latter group of statements, it is noticeable that Vox does not agree nor disagree with the idea that the State should provide stronger financial support to unemployed workers. This position is probably explained by the party’s vote-maximization goals - Spain is characterized by high unemployment rates - but also by a long tradition among the Spanish far-right (including Franco) of heavily intervening in the labour market.

All in all, the right-wing position of Vox on economic issues does not come as a surprise because its proposals in this domain have always been a great coincidence with what Herbert Kitschelt called ‘economic libertarianism’ -i.e., the reduction of public expenditure and the adoption of tax cuts. For example, its 2015 manifesto promises the ‘elimination or reduction of all taxes’ and proposes to adopt a ‘flat tax that will be established at 21 per cent for all incomes’. In fact, the most prominent fiscal policy of Vox is the ‘elimination of the property tax’ as well as the ‘elimination of inheritance and gift taxes’. When it comes to social services, Vox focuses on freedom of choice, either in terms of education, health or pensions. Yet, Vox would have been even more right-wing in this sub-dimension if we did not take into account the item about government spending on defence.

Welfare chauvinism

Spain was one of the last European countries to join the club of democracies on the continent in which a radical right party has a strong presence in the national legislature. For decades, this lack of important political representation was attributed, at least partially, to the comparatively open attitudes towards immigration present in this country. Within this context, immigration was rarely seen as one of the three most important problems, according to the National Centre of Sociological Research. However, other scholars started to challenge this point and, by making use of data from the European Social Survey, argued that Spaniards are very similar to their European counterparts in terms of opinions towards immigration. This similarity was particularly important on the eve of the Great Recession, fading away afterwards.

Remarkably enough, the breakthrough of Vox has practically left these public opinion patterns unchanged. Despite the occasional references to this issue in the party’s discourse, mainly during the campaign of the recent regional elections in Andalusia, Vox has preferred to focus on other topics such as the defence of the unity of Spain or the fight against new social rights, such as abortion and euthanasia. The general context described above and the subsequent overall lack of attention paid by the party to this issue has largely determined the position of Vox on the welfare chauvinism dimension.

If we take a look at the figure 12a, the most striking fact is that, despite being one of the most right-wing parties of this family, Vox’s level of welfare chauvinism is comparatively low. Hence, Vox fundamentally departs from other radical right parties in Europe such as the French RN that have currently adopted the welfare chauvinism model in their political stances. Secondly, unlike other parties in the figure 12a with the only exception of ELAM, the position of Vox has quite a considerable variance in the two examined dimensions, evidenced by the large standard deviations of the party. The dispersion in the left-right dimension is probably due to the electoral incentives of the party to stay in the vicinity of the median Spanish voter, who has been traditionally considered to be centre-left. However, the motivations of the party to become ambiguous in the welfare chauvinism dimension are less clear in principle. In order to properly understand them, two ideas need to be brought forward. First of all, Vox highlights the need to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration in its discourse. Vox is not particularly against granting rights to legal immigrants. For example, the party stance is that once immigrants obtain a formal permission to stay, they should have access to social services. Secondly, in what can probably be explained by a common cultural heritage and a desire of electoral attraction on the basis of an allegedly shared moral traditionalism, Vox wants to prioritize Latin American immigration and is particularly belligerent against immigrants from other regions of the world.

Written by Pedro Riera, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University Carlos III of Madrid