Nationalism in Far-Right Party Agendas: Europe and Latin America in Comparative Perspective

Far right parties are garnering momentum across different regions of the globe. Although much of the burgeoning supply-side research on the far right agrees that ‘nativism’- a form of exclusionary xenophobic nationalism- is a key discursive feature of these parties, cross-regional comparisons of how they utilise the nation in their narratives remain rare. As the far-right gains support beyond Europe, this gap in our understanding is pertinent. While the concept of ‘nativism’ may be applicable in the European context of increasing immigration salience, in Latin American countries, which face significant emigration, the far-right places little focus on out-group exclusion. Is the nation central to the discourse of the far right beyond Europe, and if so, how may we understand the ways in which far right parties across different regions employ this discursive feature in their programmatic agendas? This paper addresses these questions by comparing the speeches of a range of European and Latin American far right leaders in ten countries including Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, France, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, and Peru. Specifically, we employ a theoretical framework that draws on the ethnic-civic distinction in the study of nationalism and use the ASR OpenAI’s model Whisper and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model for discourse analysis to identify the ways in which these leaders seek to promote and defend the nation in their discursive toolkits. Our results point to clearly identifiable regional patterns as overall, European leaders centre the discourse on nationalism more than Latin American ones. When they do make nationalist claims, all leaders across both regions use predominantly civic nationalist frames while by contrast ethnic nationalism framing is uniformly low. Our paper adds value to the far right literature by arguing theoretically and showing empirically that the broader term ‘nationalism’, which extends beyond the concept of anti-immigrant exclusion based on ascriptive criteria, to an emphasis on voluntaristic and deliberate commitment to the nation, is better suited than ‘nativism’ for understanding the key discursive tenets of the far right globally. This allows us to offer a systematic and generalisable framework for theorising, operationalising and empirically measuring the ways in which far right parties across different regions frame the nation in their discursive toolkits.