Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 22, Issue 3, 2023

Although the populist radical right (PRR) has become a global phenomenon, research about it focuses much more on Europe than on other regions. To counter this imbalance, this special issue provides comparative evidence on the discourse elaborated by the PRR on six non-European countries: Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Turkey, and the United States. As we will show, non-European PRR forces articulate authoritarian, nativist, and populist ideas in different ways than their European brethren and they employ specific ideological elements (e.g., neoliberalism and religion) to advance discourses that resonate with the social grievances that are preponderant in the context wherein they operate. This reveals that part of the success of the PRR is related to its discursive flexibility and capacity to adapt itself with the aim of constructing frames that connect with the anxieties experimented by segments of the voting public across different national and regional settings.

This article examines one of the longest-standing populist radical right parties outside of Europe: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The article outlines the party’s development and position in the Australian political landscape, before explaining how it articulates the ideological features of the PRR (nativism, authoritarianism and populism); how these interact; and in what ways this differs from European PRR parties. It shows that the party has steadfastly remained focused on targeting outgroups – immigrants, asylum seekers, Asians, Muslims, and First Nations Peoples, amongst others – rather than clearly defining its ingroup – ‘ordinary Australians’ – and considers the role of Australia’s settler-colonial history and geographical context in this. It then analyses how the party has broadened its platform in recent years by engaging with gender identity, vaccine mandates, climate change scepticism and sovereign-citizen issues; before explaining the factors that have prevented it from achieving the success of many European PRR parties.

The presidential candidacy of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018 was the Populist Radical Right’s (PRR) first one to be electorally successful in Latin America. Although it is possible to assert that Bolsonaro belongs to the PRR given his political career, few studies have focused on the supply-side and Bolsonaro’s ideas and discourses. This article analyzes the relevance of the three defining attributes of the PRR – nativism, authoritarianism, and populism – in Bolsonaro’s ideological and programmatic platform. Based on an analysis of the 2018 electoral manifesto, campaign and government speeches, and social network posts, three arguments will be made: (i) authoritarianism is the primary defining attribute of Bolsonaro; (ii) populism only exists in the country associated with a solid negative political identity, an anti-Workers’ Party sentiment known in Brazil as antipetismo; and (iii) neoliberalism must be considered a fourth ideological element of the Brazilian PRR.

Despite the increasing influence of populist radical right (PRR) forces at the global level, they have been absent in Chile until very recently. Today, however, the conditions seem to be ripe for the consolidation of the PRR in the country. As we show in this contribution, José Antonio Kast and the Partido Republicano advance a programmatic agenda that emphasizes authoritarian, nativist, and populist ideas. We also demonstrate certain peculiarities of this political project, which differentiates it from its European brethren. In fact, the party has adopted very clear neoliberal positions and puts much more emphasis on outgroup distinctions within rather than outside the nation. Moreover, given that José Antonio Kast and the Partido Republicano maintain a very fluid relationship with the mainstream right, collaboration between the two seems much simpler and more feasible than in most European cases.

This article situates the largest political party in the world, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, within the literature on the populist radical right. After providing a brief overview of Hindutva ideology and organizations, with a particular focus on the BJP, it analyzes how nativism, populism, and authoritarianism are key defining elements in both theory and practice for the BJP. It further examines two important ideological tenets that go beyond these three defining attributes of the (European) populist radical right – anti-colonialism and neoliberalism – which lend towards the success of the BJP. Since holding a majority in national government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP has been able to implement its vision of creating a Hindustan, or Hindu ethnostate. Like other populist radical right parties in power, the BJP is more radical in deeds than in words, but the future of the party without Modi’s leadership is uncertain.

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one of the longest ruling among contemporary populist radical right parties (PRR). For nearly two decades, the AKP has shown tremendous success in achieving electoral dominance and political control. This article argues that AKP’s success lies in its ability to reconfigure the issue salience in Turkish politics by bringing the secular-conservative cleavage into the center of political competition. However, as this article shows, while the government’s framing of conservative/religious values was initially populist, as the Party consolidated its power, populism became secondary to nativism. This nativist turn is characterized by an emphasis on the foreignness of “the elites” and is shaped by secularization of the public sphere and antiwesternism. Overall, AKP has not presented a fundamental opposition to the “establishment” but brought together many components of Turkey’s institutional and cultural structure and radicalized patterns already present in earlier eras.

This article investigates how the Populist Radical Right (PRR) in the United States has, under the leadership of Donald Trump, reshaped the Republican party and American Politics more broadly. With a platform built on anti-immigrant nativism (“Build the wall”), anti-elite populism (“Drain the swamp”) and authoritarian rhetoric (“The election was stolen”), “Trumpism” neatly matches the definition of the PRR, observed in Europe. Based on evidence gathered from survey data and over a dozen elite interviews with American political and civil society leaders, this article explores common features between Trumpism and Europe’s PRR as well as breaks and continuities with America’s own traditions of populism, nativism, and authoritarianism. Overall, rather than an Americanisation of global politics, this article finds evidence for a Europeanisation of American politics as faith-based culture wars are replaced by a new brand of nativist right-wing identity politics.