Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe

"We’re talking about the radical right as if it only started recently. Much of the analysis is linked to Trump, as if everything just began with him and with Brexit . And yet, here is a book that’s 25 years old that already describes a Front National in France and an FPÖ in Austria that are gaining around 15% of the vote. This book is a good reminder of how old the phenomenon is. More importantly, this book—which I believe is the best book ever written on the topic—started the modern study of the radical right, particularly in political science. Until Betz’s book, almost all the work written on radical right parties and politics was quasi-historical. It treated them as neo-fascist and looked at what they had in common with the former fascists. Betz looked at them as a new party. He approached them not from the viewpoint of the fascists of the 1930s, but of the green parties of the 1980s. He said, ‘Okay, to understand the rise of the far right, we shouldn’t look at the Second World War, but at developments in society that have given space to new parties—with the greens on the left and the far right on the right.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This was a much more distant and neutral academic approach to the far right, which massively increased our insight, because for a long time it had been very hard to understand how a party that was seen as the modern version of Hitler could win 15% of the vote. How could 15% of the French support the Holocaust ? Because that would be the logic of seeing the far right as neo-fascist. So seeing the far right as a new group of parties that, to a large extent, acted the same as other types of contemporary parties—rather than the fascist parties of the 1920s, 30s—massively changed our view. The book also introduces a few important themes. It was one of the first to speak about populism and the politics of resentment. He focused on the resentment that people who voted for these parties felt. It was a protest, a frustration over immigrants coming in. It was connected to immigration, but these weren’t the old-school racist ideas. So the book is foundational in that way as well. Yes, and actually one of the weaknesses of Betz’s study is that it focuses only on the countries where the far right was successful. Almost all of these countries were the wealthiest ones, with the best functioning economies and the lowest unemployment rates—like Austria, Denmark and Norway. France would be one of the outliers, but even France wasn’t doing too badly at that time. He identifies two subtypes and distinguishes between neoliberal populism and national populism. The neoliberal populists are the progress parties of Denmark and Norway. They are against the establishment, but mostly they’re against the welfare state. The national populists—what we normally call the radical right—are the ones who are against the establishment but, moreover, against immigration. This distinction is still relevant today. I personally exclude neoliberal populists from the radical right because nativism isn’t central to them. But other scholars still include these types of parties. What we find in many studies is that they’re just different types of parties. They have different electorates and they act differently in government. And so Betz already notes that. “When people are frustrated, they like to see someone rattle the establishment.” The other way in which Betz is foundational is that he is the first to see what he calls a ‘proletarianization’ of the electorates of national populist parties. The old school interpretation of the far-right voter is that it’s small, independent business owners, farmers etc. Betz notices in the 1990s that particularly the Front National and the FPÖ are getting increasingly working class electorates. As a consequence, the parties also shift to more centrist, pro-welfare state politics. So the far right parties follow their electorate. Initially they were more pro-market, pro-small business, but as their electorate becomes more working class, they start to adopt welfare chauvinism, where you support the welfare state but only for your “own people”. All of these things are still highly relevant today. The electorates are now so big that by definition the working class can only be a small part of it. The people’s parties have moved towards more cross-class coalitions. The working class is still disproportionately represented within the electorate, but it’s only a minority. For many parties only about a third of its electorate is working class. It’s almost comical to read that, given how small these parties were then, compared to now, and yet how alarmed he was about them. That’s something I touch upon in my own book as part of the mainstreaming. We’re now happy when a far-right party wins only one third of the vote. In the 1990s, we were in the streets when they won seven per cent. But I think that position plays very little role in the book as a whole. It bumped up the sexiness of the topic, but throughout the book he is very clear that this is not a modern fascism. The threat is different and the circumstances are different."