Populist Parties across Europe

In this chapter the aim is to identify the populist parties in Europe that have gained parliamentary representation at least once between 2000 and 2013. As discussed in the previous chapter, I assume that certain parties have populism at the very core of their appeal; these parties cannot be properly characterised without considering their populist discourse. These populist parties (1) portray ‘the people’ as virtuous and essentially homogeneous; (2) advocate popular sovereignty, as opposed to elitist rule; and (3) define themselves against the political establishment, which is alleged to act against the interest of ‘the people’. The previous chapter has already indicated that there are certain challenges when it comes to identifying a clearly circumscribed set of populist parties. This chapter will confirm that there are a substantial number of parties that can be seen as borderline cases of populism. As will be shown, one of the difficulties of using the concept as a tool of classification is that populism is not always a stable core attribute of certain political parties only. Populist rhetoric can in theory be voiced by all parties, and political actors may also modify their degree of populism over time. Particularly in post-communist countries, furthermore, antiestablishment rhetoric tends to be a feature of many (new) parties, making a distinction between populist and non-populist parties arguably less meaningful. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.