Gender, innovation strategies, and the rise of the populist radical right

Innovation strategies have been described as a crucial component of PRRPs success in Western Countries (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020). The (re)introduction of disruptive policy issues with potential to divide political opponents and the use of populist rhetoric are at the core of these supply-side approaches. They help understand how PRRPs successfully challenged the dominant position of mainstream parties. Gender equality has been at the periphery of those concerns. Issue innovation has been addressed mainly through the lenses of immigration policies and Eurosceptic stands. Similarly, despite their common anti-feminist discourses, gender ideas have been considered secondary in regard to their ideological framework, also within the populist dimension. This paper draws on the recent feminist literature on PRRPs and proposes to explore the following hypothesis: Ideas about gender can also be a relevant component of PRRP’s innovation strategies. To do so, I explore the case of Vox in Spain. This is one of the last PRRPs to flourish in Southern Europe, one of the regions where we particularly lack gendered studies on the subject. The argument in this paper holds that, in this context of an influential and highly mobilised women’s movement, Vox had strong incentives to incorporate gender issues as a central component of their innovation strategies to challenge Spanish dominant parties –and particularly the hegemony of the PP in the right of the political spectrum-. Following De Vries and Hobolt two-fold dimension I argue that: 1) Discourses and actions fostering the dismantling of highly consensual equality policies were at the center of their route to make their position more distinctive vis a vis the mainstream right; 2) Populist narratives were fuelled with women’s representative claims aim at showing how the Spanish political establishment –including political parties- was co-opted by the feminist movement, leaving (allegedly) most Spanish women unrepresented. This analysis will contribute to shed light on the role of gender in understanding the innovation strategies of PRRPs, expanding former supply factors oriented studies. In particular, the findings of the analysis will dialogue with existing literature on feminist politics, populism, and the radical right.