A new series of papers presented as an objective guide to populist parties adds fuel to the panic over the rise of the ‘far right’ in Europe. Still reeling from June’s election results, the academics behind a Europe-wide political blacklist have updated their terms of engagement by claiming to offer clear and workable language for understanding recent trends—while completely wedded to a Brussels-based and centrist view of politics.
Punning its way to ignominy, The PopuList (get it?) “offers academics and journalists an overview of populist, far-left and far-right parties in Europe from 1989 until 2022.” Composed of eight “comparativist” researchers from different European universities, the group uses a single WordPress site to distribute PDF profiles of the different political parties it sees as beyond the pale.
So with the 2024 Brussels election results in and the Parliamentary party groups horse-trading, the time is now to profile the state of the ‘far-right’ in, er, 2023. Noticeably, the project has an absent centre, where middling, technocratic parties are never scrutinised—regardless of the frequent extreme consequences of their real-life policies.
When UK-based left-liberal Guardian got hold of the latest out-of-date datasets—“Populist, nativist, neofascist? A lexicon of Europe’s far right”—its Europe correspondent Jon Henley queried “it is worth examining what some of the terms routinely used to describe Europe’s wide array of far-right parties mean—and whether they are always the right ones?” Asking around his own workplace would have been a start; The PopuList homepage lists The Guardian as a supporter.
As for the definitions themselves, expect the following notions to soon start influencing the Guardian style guide:
* Radical right
* Extreme right
* Far right
* Populist
* Hard right
* Conservative, Eurosceptic, climate-sceptic
On this spectrum, the ‘radical right’ is nativist (committed to a homogenous society) and authoritarian (pro-law and order). The ‘extreme right’ has similar politics, but with a commitment to overthrowing the existing order—resorting to violence if necessary.
Confusingly, ‘far right’ is used as a catch-all, with the Guardian and by implication The PopuList asked not to use it: even though contributors to the latter do. Populist parties “argue that politics should be ‘an expression of the will of the people,'” the fiends! (This definition is complicated here by such left-wing populists as Robert Fico’s Smer in Slovakia). As with ‘far right,’ leading The PopuList writer Matthijs Rooduijn advises people not to use ‘hard right’ as it’s imprecise.
As for ‘Conservative, Eurosceptic, climate-sceptic’ parties, it reads like a laundry list of things Eurocrats dislike. Eurosceptic beliefs, as summarised by The Guardian, range from “outright rejection of the entire project of European political and economic integration” (and of European Union membership), to “contingent or qualified opposition.”
The PopuList project has the merit of taking a (retrospective) glance at actual party manifestos and programmes before shunting them into the various unhelpful categories. With the Brussels mainstream characterised as the political norm, any straying from the script is opened up to hostility, albeit with an academic gloss. Once The Guardian got a hold of 2023’s update, we’re back in the familiar territory of journalists defaming national conservatives and—by extension—their voters.
To fully understand the populist turn of 2024 (and before), we will need to look elsewhere—starting by unpicking the confected panic about the ‘Far Right.’
Beware The PopuList: Academic Blacklist Targets Conservatives
A new series of papers presented as an objective guide to populist parties adds fuel to the panic over the rise of the ‘far right’ in Europe. Still reeling from June’s election results, the academics behind a Europe-wide political blacklist have updated their terms of engagement by claiming to offer clear and workable language for understanding recent trends—while completely wedded to a Brussels-based and centrist view of politics.
Punning its way to ignominy, The PopuList (get it?) “offers academics and journalists an overview of populist, far-left and far-right parties in Europe from 1989 until 2022.” Composed of eight “comparativist” researchers from different European universities, the group uses a single WordPress site to distribute PDF profiles of the different political parties it sees as beyond the pale.
So with the 2024 Brussels election results in and the Parliamentary party groups horse-trading, the time is now to profile the state of the ‘far-right’ in, er, 2023. Noticeably, the project has an absent centre, where middling, technocratic parties are never scrutinised—regardless of the frequent extreme consequences of their real-life policies.
When UK-based left-liberal Guardian got hold of the latest out-of-date datasets—“Populist, nativist, neofascist? A lexicon of Europe’s far right”—its Europe correspondent Jon Henley queried “it is worth examining what some of the terms routinely used to describe Europe’s wide array of far-right parties mean—and whether they are always the right ones?” Asking around his own workplace would have been a start; The PopuList homepage lists The Guardian as a supporter.
As for the definitions themselves, expect the following notions to soon start influencing the Guardian style guide:
* Radical right
* Extreme right
* Far right
* Populist
* Hard right
* Conservative, Eurosceptic, climate-sceptic
On this spectrum, the ‘radical right’ is nativist (committed to a homogenous society) and authoritarian (pro-law and order). The ‘extreme right’ has similar politics, but with a commitment to overthrowing the existing order—resorting to violence if necessary.
Confusingly, ‘far right’ is used as a catch-all, with the Guardian and by implication The PopuList asked not to use it: even though contributors to the latter do. Populist parties “argue that politics should be ‘an expression of the will of the people,'” the fiends! (This definition is complicated here by such left-wing populists as Robert Fico’s Smer in Slovakia). As with ‘far right,’ leading The PopuList writer Matthijs Rooduijn advises people not to use ‘hard right’ as it’s imprecise.
As for ‘Conservative, Eurosceptic, climate-sceptic’ parties, it reads like a laundry list of things Eurocrats dislike. Eurosceptic beliefs, as summarised by The Guardian, range from “outright rejection of the entire project of European political and economic integration” (and of European Union membership), to “contingent or qualified opposition.”
The PopuList project has the merit of taking a (retrospective) glance at actual party manifestos and programmes before shunting them into the various unhelpful categories. With the Brussels mainstream characterised as the political norm, any straying from the script is opened up to hostility, albeit with an academic gloss. Once The Guardian got a hold of 2023’s update, we’re back in the familiar territory of journalists defaming national conservatives and—by extension—their voters.
To fully understand the populist turn of 2024 (and before), we will need to look elsewhere—starting by unpicking the confected panic about the ‘Far Right.’
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