The Welfare Agenda of Populist Radical Right in Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands: Deservingness, Egalitarianism and Exclusion

In recent years, extensive attention has been given to the rise of parties of the populist radical right (PRR), and their xenophobic anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic message in particular. Furthermore, an increasing number of scholars show that Western European PRR parties are converging around, what has been called, a ‘welfare chauvinist’ position (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990; De Koster et al. 2013; Lefkofridi and Michel 2014; Ivaldi 2015). However, the welfare agenda of this party family is still weakly conceptualised. For one, the term ‘welfare chauvinism’ remains ambiguous, as it is often unclear whether it denotes merely a prioritisation of the native population, or rather an all-out exclusion of non-nationals from welfare provision, and whether segments of the local population are targeted as well. Also, the debate about the PRR’s position on social issues is not very well informed by the academic literature on the welfare state. Finally, most existent studies consider calls to exclude immigrants from welfare provisions primarily as a facet of the PRR’s nativist cultural agenda, although often the arguments as to why immigrants should be excluded have an unmistakable economic character—for instance relating to the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state. This paper therefore aims to fill these lacunae by means of an in-depth comparative study of the PRR welfare agenda in four countries: Belgium, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. It takes a longitudinal as well as a cross-national approach, assessing variation in the parties’ discourses between these countries, and across time. The analytical approach used is based on Van Oorschot’s (2000; 2006) distinction between different ‘criteria of welfare deservingness’ (control, need, identity, attitude, reciprocity), which lie at the basis of the question of who is morally entitled to social support, and under which conditions. The paper thus strives to identify the main criticism of each party against the current functioning of the welfare state and the principles that should inform it. More specifically, the paper focuses on the so-called pathologies of ‘mistrusting the recipients’ and ‘mistrusting the system’ (Mau, 2003). The first refers to the social contract among citizens concerning social sharing. Here, Van Oorschot’s criteria are used as a coding scheme to guide the examination of PRR discourses about welfare. The analysis is structured around the four policy areas of health, social assistance, pensions and unemployment (see Mau, 2003: 88-184). The ‘mistrusting the system pathology’ refers to the second social contract between citizens and the state, in which the former entrust the latter with the authority to organise and coordinate social provisions (Mau, 2003; Bommes, 2012). The paper thus looks at the diagnostic and prognostic frames used by the parties to denounce the welfare state’s ‘suboptimal functioning’ and at whom they blame for it. This should hopefully allow us to obtain a better understanding of the PRR’s position on the welfare state and the frames that these parties use to mobilise people around welfare issues.