How Populist is the Populist Radical Right? Examining Right-Wing Populist and Nationalist Discourses in the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament Elections

The close affinities between populism and nationalism have created conceptual confusion between the two terms, often leading to erroneously describing far- and radical-right parties as populist. Within the context of the European Parliamentary elections of 2014 and 2019, this paper examines and compares the discourse of the Danish People's Party, the German Alternative for Germany, the Greek Independent Greeks, the Italian Lega Nord, the French Rassemblement National and the Sweden Democrats, and assess if the European Union is articulated and perceived through a populist or nationalist frame. By applying a discourse theoretical framework to interviews and keynote speeches, we provide an empirical contribution into these parties’ discursive structure and assess if they are better categorised as populist (people vs elites) or nationalist (people as a national community vs. others). In doing so we identify how the populist and nationalist discourses co-exist and the potential prevalence of one over the other. Results from the 2014 EP election suggest that although most parties combine both discourses, there is a general disposition to construct the people, not primarily through staging an antagonism between a ‘people’ and an ‘elite’ (populism), but rather through articulating the people as an ethnic community in need of protection from the EU (nationalism). In view of this, we argue that it is crucial to consider the other discursive features of the radical right-wing parties and that the label of populism should be used more sparingly- as a conditional qualifier- and not as a defining feature of those parties.