Right‐wing Populism and Populist Movements

Abstract

Right‐wing populism (RWP) refers to a populist form of the right. If the political right broadly identifies those actors and ideologies that, according to Norberto Bobbio's classic definition, consider that inequalities between people are natural and that the state should not intervene to curb them, populism is still a contested concept. While disagreement exists on whether it constitutes an ideology, a style, or a communication strategy, a minimalist definition qualifies populism as a Manichean distinction between the “good people” and the “corrupt elites,” and the belief that politics is about respecting the general will of the people. Hence, right‐wing populism can be understood as a belief in a political order with natural inequalities not only between the “people” and the “elites,” but also between the “people” themselves. RWP includes but it is not limited to the populist radical‐right, which can be distinguished because its core ideological features are nativism (or ethnocentrism) – a combination of nationalism and xenophobia – and authoritarianism, the belief in a strictly ordered society where infringements to the radical right's moral standards must be punished. RWP politicians may also present religion and religious identities as a constitutive feature of the native culture (like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland).