LEI_F_10 Right-wing Populism and Extreme Right-wing Political Movements in France and their Relation to Developments in the Maghreb and Eastern Europe

Objectives/ Research Questions

This project first examines the history of French right-wing populism, which goes back more than 30 years and was tied to the Le Pen family for a long time. This populism experienced special mobilization first from the authoritarian traditions of the Vichy regime and then from conflicts over decolonization (especially in connection with the Algerian War), in turn feeding on the conflicts of post-colonial migration movements and since 1989/1991 profiting from the dissolution of the traditional party landscape and the attachment of certain milieus to specific parties. Only very recently, moreover, can connections be observed with conservative responses to the Arab Spring in the Maghreb and with the flourishing of nationalist populism in Eastern Europe. By reconstructing this history of the various bases of right-wing populism in their post-colonial and transnational entanglements, it is possible to first identify the specificity of the French case within a broader spectrum of populisms.

By doing so, the specifics of the French political system as a breeding ground for right-wing populism are made visible while a contribution can be made at the same time to answering the question under which conditions right-wing populism is successful or not. This allows the project to answer the question of different factors at work in challenging and reconstructing social cohesion in different countries and historical configurations, which is the focus of Cluster 3.

The project is specifically interested in French right-wing populism and its position on “globalization”. In this context, a great contradiction stands out: criticism of globalization coincides here with a nationalistically shaped exceptionalism that wants to reserve a pioneering role in the world order and in the world economy for the French nation. More explicitly than in many other variants of populism, we find in this case a political movement that accepts the challenge of formulating its own globalization project and mobilizing parts of the population (and international partners) for it while at the same time arguing in nationalist and protectionist terms. This in turn invites us to identify similar processes in other countries by making comparisons with the French case.

Thematic relation to social cohesion

The project contributes to the planned global mapping of populism. The focus is on the promises of the different varieties of populism to re-establish social cohesion by emphasizing the curbing of immigration and by criticizing a globalization perceived as neo-liberal, thus overcoming older attempts anchored in the liberal constitutional and legal state. It is interesting to observe how populisms in different regions of the world communicate with or learn from each other. The space of the Francophonie, which is particularly shaped by the colonial past, offers a first framework for this; the Europeanization of right-wing populism after 2015 (with such diverse partners as the Brexit-oriented UK Independence Party; the xenophobic Wilders party in the Netherlands; the governments in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary; and the German Alternative für Deutschland party) forms a second framework, which is finally followed by relations with Putin's Russia. The project thus not only contributes to the development of a typology of global variants of populism, but also asks about the drivers, motives, and formats of this transnational and transregional entanglement. It belongs to Cluster 3, in which the conceptualization of social cohesion and its empirical investigation on the basis of an international body of research are equally in focus and require a corresponding mix of methods.