At the time this study was initiated, in early 2007, radical right populist parties across Europe hovered somehow below the radar of wider public attention, being mainly under the scrutiny of several scholars whose works were considered as the field’s theoretical cannon (cf. Betz, 2002; 2005; Betz & Immerfall, 1998; Canovan, 1981; 2002; 2005; Eatwell, 2000; 2005; Ignazi, 2003; Kitschelt & McGann, 1997;
Mudde, 2000; 2004; 2005; Norris, 2005; Ramet, 1999; Rydgren, 2002; 2006;
Taggart, 2000). The electoral performance of these parties differed dramatically from the present situation. In Romania the PRM had a total of 48 representatives (MPs) in the Romanian Houses of Parliament. The PRM was a significant political actor in Romanian politics and an important member of the parliamentary opposition. The PRM, like other Romanian parties, was preparing for the first Parliamentary elections decoupled from the Presidential ones, which were
15 To enable a seamless line of reasoning, in the main body of the text I have provided the English translations of the Romanian and Swedish original empirical material. I have performed these translations myself, if not stated otherwise, and I then had them checked by two native speakers of Romanian and Swedish respectively – to ensure the correctness of the translation. In so doing, I have attempted to convey, as much as possible, the various nuances of original language, thereby opting for providing rich and nuanced English translations. This notwithstanding, I have at times opted to relay certain words in their original form whenever I have considered they had a strong connection to the cognitive structures under investigation.
scheduled to take place on 30 November 2008. The party appeared to have a devoted core electorate and researchers considered the PRM to be a typical example of radical right populism in the region with a discourse characterised by anti–Semitic, anti–Hungarian, and anti–Romani appeals (cf. Andreescu, 2005;
Chen, 2003; Gallagher, 2005; Mudde, 2005; Shafir, 2008).
In Northern Europe, in contrast, the radical right populist parties did not enjoy such strong numbers. For example, from the 2007 Finnish Parliamentary elections the PS/SF had only 5 MPs; the lowest number of elected representatives of any party in the national Parliament. Similarly in Sweden, the SD had not even managed to go past the 4 percent electoral threshold, and consequently had no representatives in the Swedish Parliament. Some researchers even deemed Sweden to be an exceptional case of having immunity from the rising radical right populist presence across Europe by indicating the previously failed attempt of a party with a similar political agenda to take root in mainstream Swedish politics, and the extensive media embargo against the SD, coupled with a strong opposition from the political establishment as the main explanations for such a development (cf. Hannerz, 2006; Dahlström & Esaiasson, 2013; Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2002;
2006; Taggart, 2000; Widfeldt, 2000; 2007).
Presently, the situation differs dramatically. Just months before the 2008 Parliamentary elections in Romania, Law no. 35/2008 introduced an elaborate mixed majoritarian electoral system and, subsequently Governmental Ordinance no. 802/2008 established the single–candidate electoral colleges within the existing administrative units, some of them varying significantly from the earlier introduced legal stipulations. The PRM had vociferously opposed these developments accusing the governing coalition of gerrymandering; alas, the Supreme Court rejected their claims. In the ensuing elections, only 39.2 percent of the Romanian population with a voting right cast their ballot. The PRM performed poorly, polling only 3.4 percent for the two Chambers of Parliament, significantly below the 5 percent electoral threshold and thereby lost its parliamentary seats (cf. Downs, 2009; Marian & King, 2010; Stan & Vancea, 2009). However, it appears that the PRM succeeded in maintaining part of its loyal electorate; in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, the PRM polled 8.6 percent of the votes and sent three representatives to the European Parliament (Sum, 2010: 21). In the Presidential elections the same year, the PRM leader received 5.6 percent of the votes in the first round, insufficient to allow him to progress into the second round (Muntean, Pop–Eleches, Popescu, 2010: 756).
In contrast to the downward evolution of the PRM in Romania, in Sweden it appears that the SD is no longer the exceptional failed case confirming the rise of such parties elsewhere across Europe. Indeed, at a closer look, the SD has registered a constant albeit very slow–paced increase in its electoral support among Swedish voters. Although in the 2006 Parliamentary elections the SD has polled only 2.9 percent, this entailed a more than a doubling of their vote from the
previous elections in 2002 (Agius, 2007: 586; Mattsson, 2009: 35; Widfeldt, 2007: 823–823). Following this pattern, in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections the SD received the support of 3.3 percent of the Swedish voters – still below the electoral threshold. Eventually, in the 2010 Swedish Parliamentary elections, the SD achieved its parliamentary breakthrough, polling 5.7 percent of the votes – safely past the 4 percent threshold, and slightly above the results of two other established parties in Swedish politics (Hellström, Nilsson & Stoltz, 2012: 186; Widfeldt, 2011: 586).
In light of the political developments in Romania and Sweden described above, the aim of the present study has been to document the genealogical articulations across time – the aforesaid repositioning and (re)interpretations – that the conceptual metaphors of interest here – the NATION IS A FAMILY, respectively the STRICT FATHER – reveal across radical right populist discourses. The focus in this context has been put on the discourses of the leaders of those parties espousing such an ideological stance. As such, the ambition has been to undertake a feminist genealogical analysis of the conceptual metaphors that underpin radical right populist ideology. With this in mind, the present study has been structured as follows.
Chapter two has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, I provide a comprehensive overview of the radical right populist scholarship, fleshing out the field’s theoretical diversity. I then evidence what I deem to be the main tenets of radical right populism that various canonical theoretical approaches appear to agree on. On the other hand, I challenge the silence of this theoretical canon about gender when defining the ideological apparatus that underpins radical right populist manifestations. The stance I thereby introduce at this point is that not being aware of men’s own gendered identity and not researching the power binary hierarchies between men and women at work within radical right populist parties, in fact projects men in a normative position rendering white ethnic majority middle–class heterosexual masculinity invisible. This places the burden of intelligibility on all those falling off the normative spectrum, in other words all those individuals that are different from this norm in terms of gender, ethnicity/‘race’16, social class, and sexual orientation.
Chapter three consequently brings gender into the study of populism. Such an approach is enabled by exploiting productively the contact points between theories of populism and those of nationalism, especially the commonalities shared by the building block of radical right populist ideology – the people – with that of nationalism – the nation. More clearly, I make use of the feminist
16 Employing the scare quotes when referring to matters related to alleged distinctions between people based on racial classifications, I follow in the footsteps of Anthony Appiah Kwame who has contested the reality of ‘races’ and unveiled it to be socially constructed and historically contingent (Kwame, 1993). I am nonetheless aware of the critique of such practice raised by Jaqueline Stevens, who has argued that by the same measure scholars should employ scare quotes for such concepts as gender, nation, and ethnicity or run the risk of ascribing them an ontological status (Stevens, 1999: 23).
theorising of nationalism, being particularly interested in the ideological interconnectedness between nationalism and gender. In relation to this, I consider the symbiotic relation between patriarchal gender binary structuring – that postulates women’s submission to men – and the construction of the nation – that celebrates men’s power as leaders and defenders of the national construct and sanctifies women’s motherhood – of key importance for the present study. I thereby argue that the people is envisioned as a family construction that contours a heteronormative worldview ordering the society according to a paternalist logic that contains women in an inferior and dependent position – even when temporarily and conditionally allowed in politics. The representative of sovereign people appears invested masculine attributes – people’s pride needs to be restored and their insecurities in the rapidly changing environment of the new millennium need to be dispelled by a (male) leader.
Chapter four revolves around the tasks of designing a suitable methodology and explicating the choice of empirical material for the present academic undertaking. In this context, I argue that metaphor – the crucial concept of this study – is actively enforcing a specific understating of how social relations are to be perceived, of how certain political issues are to be discussed, and brings to the top of the political agenda specific issues while concomitantly obscuring some others. Put simply, I maintain that the use of metaphor by political actors is ideologically motivated. As such, I underline the essential difference between conceptual and surface realisation of metaphor, defining metaphorical concepts in contrast to metaphorical expressions. Furthermore, I make explicit metaphorical clusters to represent a cohesive system of metaphorical concepts, and their subsequent discursive articulations that depart from a common condition or image to transmit a specific experience or idea. Then I introduce the two key conceptual metaphors at work in this study: the NATION IS A FAMILY and the
STRICT FATHER, which, I argue, articulate a distinctive metaphorical cluster that structures the intelligibility of right–wing conservative discourse and thereby provides it with a specific ideological consistency. Considered from a feminist perspective, the two conceptual metaphors appear constrained to a compulsory family–centred heterosexuality. This engenders the entrapment of both women and men into patriarchal heteronormativity, which posits the family’s head as the source of authority and guardian of the ‘natural order’. In my attempt to broaden the analytical scope of metaphor research to account for the wider discursive context and inherent ideological transformations across time, I develop a genealogical perspective that enables a cyclical argumentation of the analysis.
More clearly, I underline the importance of the context in which the analysed events are embedded, and of the minute documentation of the consecutive repositioning and (re)interpretation of the conceptual structures – accounting for the development and ramifications of the metaphorical cluster under scrutiny.
Subsequently, I detail and explain the choice of the two particular manifestations
of radical right populist discourses in Europe of interest for the present analysis, namely the PRM and the SD.
Chapter five explores the radical right populist ideology in the Romanian context. I analyse the genealogical articulations of the NATION IS A FAMILY
conceptual metaphor, at first identifying the alleged moral wholeness of the Romanian national family. On this matter, I underline the productive juxtaposition between ethnic ‘purity’ and Orthodox Christianity as its quintessential values. This, I argue, confirms the moral supremacy of the Romanian national family, and concurrently naturalises a gendered hierarchy with the figure of male ethnic Romanians at the top. Delving into the opportunity opened to women to participate in parliamentary politics and thereby represent the national family, I show the institutionalisation of masculinity in politics in general and the reification of aggressiveness as inherent to the political discourse in particular. This conceptual metaphor, I maintain further, is developed to position Romanian men as epitomes of political agency and financial supporters of their extended families. Additionally, it relegates women to the domestic sphere as ‘natural’ caregivers of other dependants – the offspring of their Romanian men, the elderly, the sick, and those socially disadvantaged – and a position of less–
than–men in politics. The genealogical expansion of the NATION IS A FAMILY also circumscribes those failing the conditions of being a part of the national family, either in the form of outside Others – the Jews, Hungarians, and Romani – or those internal Others not fulfilling the heteronormative expectations – particularly homosexual men. Connected to this, I identify the STRICT FATHER
conceptual metaphor, which constitutes the radical right populist chair as the providential leader to enforce a new moral order and bring about national redemption. I conclude that the heteronormative matrix appears to be safely secured in place and proves to be flexible enough to accommodate ever more categories of exclusion.
Chapter six, in turn, details the articulations of radical right populist ideology in the Swedish context. Focusing on the (re)interpretations of the folkhem (in translation, the home/house of [Swedish] people) – taken as demonstrating the
NATION IS A FAMILY conceptual metaphor in Sweden – I show the centrality of welfare chauvinism within this discourse. The identification of the folkhem’s true inhabitants with the disenchanted citizenry among the Swedish ethnic majority allows for the crystallisation of a critique of mainstream politics, espousing a strictly conservative heteronormative stance that thinly disguises a xenophobic attitude. Such a stance is articulated by defining the national family’s Others – either as the not–being Swedish migrant Other, or the less–than–perfect Swedish members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQI) community.
Additionally, it incorporates an ideal of patriarchal family structuring – in which women active in politics are criticised for being less–than–men (misgoverned by feelings, and incapable of rational thinking), and failing in their expected position of devoted mothers of Swedish offspring. Under these circumstances, I argue, the
claims that both the SD as well as its leader have reached ‘maturity’, and their delimitation from the antiquated political establishment is evidence of the crystallisation of a metaphorical construct centred on an ideal of masculinity underpinned by a combative political participation, youthfulness, and preoccupation with an idealised past. Such a construct however departs significantly from that of the STRICT FATHER employed by other European radical right populist parties and understood to surmount the national family construct.
These particularities notwithstanding, I conclude, the metaphorical cluster at work in Swedish radical right populism emphasises heteronormative hegemonic structuring, which is underpinned by deeply entrenched xenophobia, coupled with fear for miscegenation and homophobia.
Chapter seven assembles together the study’s principal arguments, presents the main conclusions and identifies some key issues that are to be considered for further research. The main findings of the detailed analyses in the two national settings are thus corroborated to synthesise a model for the critical evaluation of the metaphorical cluster centred on the conception of national family. In this context, I show that centrally located within this cluster lie specific masculinity performatives (in their diverse manifestation, either as a strict father figure, or a youthful challenger) that are unveiled to be in an intrinsic dynamic relation with certain femininity performatives (that negatively depict emancipation and equality as facets of alienation). The gender dyad thus in place is uncovered to be ideologically sanctioned as desirable ideals within radical right populist discourses. This notwithstanding, I underline the specificities that characterise the manifestation of the metaphorical cluster when comparing the ideological manifestations through discourse of selected radical right populist parties. On this matter I discuss the place of the political man in the national family, and indicate how this manifests in the form of a fatherly figure, or a youthful challenger, both underpinned by staunchly patriarchal understandings of the national construct. I eventually return to the ideological productivity of gendered conceptual metaphors and indicate several new avenues of research that may bring forth valuable insights on how the conception of structuring the national construct along family lines may be manifest in some other national settings within radical right populist discourses.
2 THEORETICAL AND ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK (I):
CHALLENGING THE LACK OF GENDER IN THEORIES OF RADICAL RIGHT POPULISM
The people terminology is oftentimes used to denote a generic reunion of an indefinite number of human beings. Grammatically, the people appears as a multifaceted element, either as a collective noun for a plurality of individuals with specific unifying traits, as for instance in the phrase ‘these people are righteous’, or as the suppletive plural of the noun ‘person’. Rhetorically, the people can also be employed as a singular form for an indefinite ethnic group or nation in such phrases as ‘our people’ or ‘the Romanian people’. When used for political purposes, the people proves yet again its versatility. It can convey a meaning of solidarity – a nation for instance – when used in such phrases as ‘the Romanian people’ above. Alternatively, it can embody an allegedly legitimate segment of the population or a class, as for instance in the phrase ‘the common people are righteous’, which usually represents a presumably genuine and ‘normal’ people in a stark opposition to another fluid political entity – that is the ‘elite’. In this regard, Margaret Canovan has perhaps managed to capture most successfully the concept’s ambiguity. This versatility, in turn, represents a serious analytical challenge for those scholars who decide to analyse its shifting conceptual contents:
The great charm of ‘the people’ for a politician – and the fundamental source of exasperation for a political scientist – is that the term manages to be both empty of precise meaning and full of rhetorical resonance. When used to mean ‘everyone’, it is conveniently vague and sounds definite, conveying a sense of solidity and harmony. When used to mean a particular class or section of the population, it gains in definition but somehow manages to avoid losing its overtones of comprehensiveness and legitimacy.
(Canovan, 1981: 285–286) (Italics in original) With this in mind, the theorising of radical right populist manifestations in Europe unveils a high degree of diversity with numerous conceptual labels, which are rather similar in meaning, describing the same political ideology – that of radical right populism – and referring to the same political forces; the populist parties of the radical right. For the purpose of present study, radical right populism denotes the umbrella–concept that incorporates scholarship researching radical right parties (cf. Art, 2011; Kitschelt, 2007; Loch, 2001; Minkenberg &
Perrineau, 2007; Norris, 2005; Startin, 2010; Učeň, 2007), extreme–right parties (cf. Caiani & della Porta, 2011; Eatwell, 2000; Hainsworth & Mitchell, 2000;
Ignazi, 2003; Mudde, 2000; Newell, 2000; Rydgren, 2005), the new populist right parties (cf. Laycock, 2005; Mudde, 2004), far right parties (cf. Morjé Howard, 2010; Taggart, 2004), anti–immigration populist parties (cf. Morjé
Howard, 2000; Van Spanje & Van der Brug, 2007), right–wing populist parties (cf. Betz & Meret, 2009; Cuperus, 2003; Helms, 1997; Kriesi et al, 2008; Laclau, 2005), right–wing radical parties (cf. Luther, 2000; Williams, 2006), neo–
nationalist parties (Banks & Gingrich, 2006), national–populist parties (cf.
Hermet, 1997; Perrineau, 1997; Taguieff, 1997; Winock, 1997), radical right populist parties (cf. Betz & Immerfall, 1998; Hellström & Nilsson, 2010; Rydgren, 2003; 2006) and conversely the populist radical right parties (cf. Egedy, 2009;
Mudde, 2007; Zaslove, 2009), or simply the populist parties (cf. Abts &
Rummens, 2007; Canovan, 1999; Fella & Ruzza, 2009; Ghodsee, 2008; Jasiewicz, 2008; Ruzza & Fella, 2011). Rather unsurprisingly, researchers have been employing these terms interchangeably across time in a field that has expanded exponentially in the past two decades. Nonetheless, they seem to generally agree on the ‘family resemblance’ of these parties, which is underpinned by a shared
‘thin–centred ideology’ – a point that is addressed in the subsequent section. It is worth noting, in this context, that I review scholarship dealing with those parties espousing a radical right populist ideology that appear to accept – at least nominally – the basic rules of parliamentary democracy, thereby not focusing on scholarship analysing neo–fascist, or other such extreme fringe movements. This has been a cardinal criterion for selecting the scholarship for review.
On closer inspection, however, the wealth of scholarship addressing radical right populism commonly appears to disregard the gender implications of its
On closer inspection, however, the wealth of scholarship addressing radical right populism commonly appears to disregard the gender implications of its