Cooperating to Challenge Liberal Democracy: Nationalist Populist Transnational Advocacy Networks

While nationalist populist parties once used to shun one another internationally, they now increasingly parade their affinities. Their connections may be informal and fleeting, like Nigel Farage speaking at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies in 2016 and 2020 or Italy’s Matteo Salvini exchanging friendly tweets with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. But they are also increasingly formal and lasting, as shown by alliances between nationalist populist parties across Europe, and by the links the latter have established with likeminded parties and leaders in countries such as Australia, Brazil, India, and the United States. In this paper, I argue that some forms of national populist international cooperation can now be understood as “transnational advocacy networks”. While International Relations scholarship has tended to consider nationalism as a factor impeding the establishment of such networks and sees them as primarily relevant to progressive causes such as human rights, the environment, and Indigenous issues, the events of recent years call such beliefs into question. I illustrate my argument in the paper by drawing on interviews with nationalist populist youth wing and senior party leaders from a range of Western European countries about the origin and purpose of their international connections.