 up right-wing populists with warnings of "foreign infiltration" and "Islamization" and made them useful for themselves.
Anti-Islamic populism benefits from existing fears that have grown from the series of Islamist terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001. Muslim communities are often perceived as "parallel societies" that refused to integrate. Populism can certainly point to real problems here, such as growing religious radicalization or the difficulties Muslim migrants have on the labor market. The perfidious thing is that its representatives exploit these problems by stirring up distrust of the "strangers" and placing Muslims under general suspicion. The right-wing populists warn against the takeover of the "Christian West" by an aggressive Islam, as a rule, not on the basis of a racist, but rather a Eurocentric worldview. Instead of understanding and promoting an enlightened, liberal Islam, they rely on isolation and demarcation from the supposedly non-belonging cultural outgroup up to the open demand for mass deportation.
The social modernization process, which is accelerated by globalization, is accompanied by massive structural changes: Employment relationships are changing, entire branches of the economy are disintegrating, traditional ties (e.g. to the family or to institutions such as trade unions, parties, churches, etc.) are loosening. Modernization not only produces objective losers who live permanently in unemployment and / or poverty. Even people who are not directly affected, but simply fear their own social decline, can be unsettled by the process.
The already mentioned first "real" populist party, the Populist Party that emerged in the USA at the end of the 19th century, saw itself in this sense as the mouthpiece of the farmers in the south and west of the country, whose economic position and cultural way of life were driven by industrial development was threatened. In other countries, too, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe, populism initially developed as an agricultural populism that wanted to defend the rural world against industrialization and urbanization.
Whereas it was the decline of the primary sector at the end of the 19th century, Western societies have been shaped by the decline in the importance of the industrial sector since the second half of the 20th century; the classic service industry, in turn, has been affected by increasing digitalization since the turn of the millennium. Here, too, the structural change means that certain professional qualifications are no longer in demand; At the same time, the nation-state's ability to shape its economy is coming under pressure in view of the globalized economy. The individual countries are forced into a competition for the best location conditions, which tends to depress wages and social standards. The consequences are unemployment, welfare state benefits and a widening of the gap between rich and poor.
The electoral successes of right-wing populists are also related to the cultural change that we have been observing in Western societies since the 1960s. This is driven, on the one hand, by the influx of migrants, who, especially in the urban agglomerations, appear as religiously and culturally delimitable groups. On the other hand, traditional notions of order that prevailed earlier have been replaced by a new variety of lifestyles and post-materialistic value orientations (individualization).
So-called "modernization losers", who are directly affected by the negative effects of economic progress, make up a relatively high proportion of the electorate of right-wing populist parties. However, the explanation for their electoral approval cannot be reduced to this. It is above all subjective deprivation, i.e. the fear of social decline, paired with the feeling of being politically powerless and not represented by the established parties and politicians, that makes certain groups in society receptive to the populist messages.The electoral successes of right-wing populist parties therefore do not stem directly from economic and cultural modernization, but from the fact that the moderate parties of the left and right mainstream fail as the transmission belts of the political system during the crisis: On the one hand, they will always ideologically compete for the majority of the electorate more similar, so they can no longer credibly convey that they stand for different political concepts. On the other hand, both the social democratic and the conservative or Christian democratic parties have evacuated economic and cultural positions that have shaped their programs and ideology for decades.
These party problems are in part homemade; in part, they are also based on structural changes that make it more difficult for them to fulfill their traditional functions as representative bodies and carriers of democratic competition. The transfer of decision-making responsibilities to transnational and supranational bodies - such as the European Union - is leading to ever longer chains of legitimation and growing lack of transparency. The political actors react to this by decoupling the representation and media-appropriate staging of politics from its technocratic reality. The voters in turn notice or suspect the contradiction. It is therefore not surprising that the image of a powerless political class lost in phrases has largely become compatible.
The populist challengers also have their own organizational characteristics that set them apart from representatives of the political mainstream. In party research today, the latter are mostly subsumed under the type of "professional voter party" - so called by Angelo Panebianco - which represents a modernized form of member and functionary party. In the case of right-wing populists, three different types of organization can be distinguished, some of which merge into one another: The first type could also be referred to as Panebianco following Panebianco charismatic party describe. The majority of today's right-wing and left-wing populists fall under him. Such parties are grouped around a single person who, as leaders, are usually also the originators of the party. Institutionalized structures and democratic procedures take a back seat to the authority of the leader in the organization; the principle of loyal allegiance applies. Examples are the French Front National under its former chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen or the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), which has its only member in its chairman Geert Wilders.
In the second type, exemplified by Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia or the Czech ANO of the oligarch Andrej Babiš, the organization is founded by a single entrepreneur, financed largely from their own resources and managed according to the principles of a commercial enterprise. This type of Business party is less ideologically shaped than the populist type to which he otherwise resembles; it represents a specific form of the electoral party. What both types have in common is that there is a rather loose institutional connection between the party leadership and the members; the parties are organizationally less differentiated than established parties.
The third type is formed by Move or frame party. Their organization consists of a loosely connected network of activists emerging from society. Examples are the pirates, the German Greens in their development phase or the five-star movement by Beppe Grillo in Italy, which also overlaps with the charismatic type. In the United States, there is a long tradition of populist movements that have done without dominant leaders. One example is the right-wing populist tea party movement.
The movement character of populism can be determined, on the one hand, from the fact that its representatives are mostly not split offs from existing parties, but rather of social origin. On the other hand, it follows from the ideological understanding of an anti-party party. The criticism of the power system of the representative institutions and the advocacy of more direct decision-making rights of the people are sides of the same coin in the populist conception of democracy Point seems to be best represented. The movement's dependency on this person remains precarious, however, because sooner or later their aura will fade. The importance of the charism for populism has to be put into perspective. It is particularly evident in the establishment phase - in the founding and breakthrough of the parties in elections, which in fact almost always owe to individual outstanding leaders. Most of these parties, however, managed to survive and remain successful even after they left. In the course of this institutional stabilization, they weakened their movement character and adapted their organizational form to the mainstream parties.
In some countries, the institutionalization is already predetermined by the legalization of the party system. For example, in the Federal Republic of Germany it would not be possible to set up a party based on the "Führer principle", since the Basic Law and Party Law make strict democratic demands on their "internal order". The fact that the grassroots' participation claims generated in this way make it more difficult to build up the party organization in a controlled manner can be seen from the escalation of the personal and power conflicts in the AfD that preceded the split in July 2015. In this respect, the requirement of intra-party democracy is a greater obstacle to success for the populist challengers than the right to vote or the rules of party funding. The problem is exacerbated by the plebiscitary understanding of democracy that they themselves propagate, which they must consequently also accept in their own organization. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the AfD often lets members' assemblies decide instead of delegates. With its model of an equal triple or double leadership in leadership, it also has organizational elements that were previously only known from the left-wing parties (Greens and Die Linke) in the Federal Republic.
Recourse to common sense arguments. A typical figure of argument consists in equating individual and collective morality according to the motto: What has proven itself in the private sector and proven to be correct cannot be wrong in the public sector! This logic follows z. B. a large part of the populist statements on economic policy (demands for frugality, greater personal provision, individual liability in case of corporate bankruptcies and the like).
Preference for radical solutions. Populists do not believe in a policy of small steps, but always demand courageous action, the big hit. Because they