The right-wing populist parties, which began to establish themselves firmly on the political terrain of Western Europe since the late 1980s, are characterized by their reliance on charismatic leadership, the pursuit of a populist strategy with its str...
The right-wing populist parties, which began to establish themselves firmly on the political terrain of Western Europe since the late 1980s, are characterized by their reliance on charismatic leadership, the pursuit of a populist strategy with its stress on voter orientation and the appeal to vague anxieties, prejudices, and resentments of the common people. They pursue also exclusionary ideology, which in the form of ‘cultural nativism’ aims in fact at restriction of the notion of citizenship. This paper examines the characteristics and phenomena of the populism of Western Europe at the examples of the Austrian Freedom Party and the Italian Northern League. It reflects then on the basic conditions for the emergence of the phenomena, the discussion of which is especially focused on the impacts of capitalist globalization and the function of neoliberal ideology.