While scholars are often still enthralled by and engaging in debate about a ‘populist hype’, the populist radical right (PRR) have become increasingly normal and every day in political landscapes across the world, from Brazil to India to France. As they have ‘normalized’, PRR political movements have matured and sought more power from mainstream political institutions. Often, they have also sought to alter those mainstream institutions to their liking. In doing so, they have faced backlashes against racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, among other types of discriminatory beliefs expressed in PRR discourse and ideology.
In this blog and in a recently published article (available open access here), I show that populist radical right parties in Europe use discursive ‘doublespeak’ to walk a thin tightrope between radicalism and acceptability as they grow in power. I conclude the blog by considering how as scholars, we ourselves also walk a tightrope in researching the PRR.
My co-author Adrian Favero and I find that the populist radical right has particularly sought to fight claims of racism by euphemising its anti-migration and anti-migrant rhetoric. In our case studies, the Flemish Vlaams Belang and the Swiss People’s Party, party representatives argue that they are not wholly ‘anti-migrant’ because they can identify some ‘good’ migrants. This division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrant is developed in part because the PRR wants to both be ‘outside’ the mainstream with radical credentials and inside it, with governing power or potential to achieve it.
The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrant discourse is pervasive in society. It employs elements of doublespeak, that is, as Lutz wrote: “language which pretends to communicate but really does not. It is language which makes the bad seem good, something negative appear positive, something unpleasant appear attractive, or at least tolerable.” In this case, the identification of ‘good’ migrants allows the PRR to portray tolerance, despite the continued and often damaging denigration of ‘bad’ migrants.
The Case of the Vlaams Belang
The Vlaams Belang claims it is not racist. In fact, the party’s manifesto emphatically states: “People of foreign origin who are loyal to Flanders, who observe our laws and are prepared to learn our language, are fully fledged Flemish people for the VB. The VB rejects racism” (p. 30). Some VB representatives parrot this discourse…with a notable exception that Muslim migrants are never acceptable Flemish migrants. One MP explained, “Why was it so easy to integrate Portuguese and Italian people in Limburg? Because there is a common descent and European ideas … those Muslims have a completely different starting point.” Even at the party’s highest levels, Islamophobia is seen as an ‘acceptable’ way of discriminating between migrants.
Local party members are less likely to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, highlighting the way that discursive changes in the party’s upper levels don’t radiate downwards. Many ordinary activists promote exclusionary narratives against all migrants. For example, a local councillor explained: “[migrants] can be here to a point but they can’t come be the boss here.” Another member argued, “Even if foreigners integrate themselves well, you can never make them 100% Flemish.” A provincial councillor argued: “We don’t have any problems with religion, except one religion” (VB R12). These statements are reminiscent of doublespeak—some tolerance, or possibility for integration, is expressed but then immediately retracted.
The purpose of euphemising is clear: to combat political exclusion and social stigma. One local councillor explained that the negative side of party membership was “the stigma of fascist, racist, every negative word possible.” An MP explained: “You still have people who are scared off by [the stigma], by being associated with the Vlaams Belang.”
Leader Tom Van Grieken has led the party to recent successes, and he particularly encourages doublespeak. Van Grieken projects a moderate rhetorical face publicly but privately remains ideologically radical. A party representative explained: “People think [Van Grieken] is more moderate than he is…but the programme literally did not change. How the programme was being communicated was the problem.” From the leader down to individual members, Vlaams Belangers thus try to walk a tightrope between radical beliefs and roots and a more socially and politically acceptable face.
Conclusions
Our wide-ranging data (the article draws on 100 interviews) makes explicit the implicit contradictions in PRR discourses. We found that the PRR identify very few ‘good’ migrants while continuing to reject most others. We conclude our paper by arguing that PRR discourse has power in its own right, and quote Brown, Mondon and Winter, who wrote: “Politics and political shifts [towards the mainstream] have violent and real effects for those at the sharp end of these discourses.”
Despite this real harm, scholars themselves have often used euphemistic terms. A recent article by Aurelien Mondon argues that the term nativism, one of three ideologies underpinning studies of the PRR, can ‘invisibilise’ whiteness and racism. Newth has previously shown that nativism is often used as a more euphemistic term that obscures racist discourses. As such, in some ways like the PRR, scholars ourselves have been euphemising the nature of the populist radical right. I believe that critical approaches, promoted by these excellent recent articles, are well complemented by our empirical application in which we seek to make a more detailed analysis of PRR discourse. We go beyond the ‘populist hype’ and discussions of nativism to specifically analyse the sometimes-slippery euphemistic discourses adopted by the PRR to obscure racist and discriminatory beliefs while remaining radical to their base.
