Is the Far-Left Nationalist? Comparative Evidence from Europe and Latin America

Parties on the fringes of the party system are garnering momentum world-wide. While this development has attracted increasing scholarly attention, most studies focus on parties that originate from the far-right end of the political spectrum, which explicitly utilise nationalist narratives that emphasise sovereignty and support policies that place the nation first. While less studied, however, the mobilising narratives of far-left parties constitute a puzzle: internationalist in theory, many of these parties engage with nationalism to attract popular support. Is the far-left nationalist and, if so, to what extent do far left parties across different regions of the world employ comparable nationalist narratives? This paper addresses these questions by employing a theoretical framework that draws on the civic-ethnic distinction in the study of nationalism and comparing the use of nationalism in far-left party narratives across four countries from Europe and Latin America including Cyprus, Greece, Bolivia and Venezuela. Specifically, we use the ASR OpenAI’s model Whisper and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model for discourse analysis to compare speeches of the leaders of SYRIZA (Greece), AKEL (Cyprus), MAS (Bolivia) and PSUV (Venezuela) which we complement with an analysis of a series of manifestos from each party. Our results confirm that nationalism constitutes an integral part of far-left party narratives in both regions; and that all parties utilise predominantly civic nationalist frames. Our article contributes to the literature on party politics by developing a generalisable framework for understanding how far-left parties frame their programmatic agendas that centres on nationalism.