16 January, 2024 | Sabine Volk, Léonie de Jonge, and Lars Rensmann
How did Populist Radical Right Parties Politicize COVID-19?
While the COVID-19 pandemic first and foremost constituted a public health crisis, it quickly turned into a political crisis in European democracies: across the continent, governments struggled to reconcile lockdowns with liberal constitutions, and vaccine policy with democratic freedoms.
Europe’s populist radical right parties were key actors in this pandemic crisis. Before the outbreak of the coronavirus, these parties had strongly shaped political and societal discourses in Europe, reinforcing and constructing novel political and social cleavages between “the true people” and “liberal elites”. From March 2020 onwards, populists fashioned themselves as principal opposition forces.
Our recent research paper Populism and the pandemic: The politicization of COVID-19 and cleavage agency among populist radical right parties asks how, why, and to what effect European populist radical right parties politicized COVID-19: did they adapt disinformation and conspiracy narratives, and did they instrumentalize the pandemic to reinforce existing cultural and political divides in European societies?
The politicization of COVID-19 in three European countries
We compare populist radical right parties in three European countries over the period 2020-21, namely Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, and Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the Netherlands. Our findings indicate that in all three cases, populist radical right parties played an important role in politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic. However, our research also reveals some noteworthy differences.
In the Polish case, at the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, the governing PiS first underwent a short period of discursive moderation: it depoliticized the pandemic, aiming to project an image of professionalism and responsible crisis management. But already from late March 2020, in the run-up to the controversial Polish presidential elections, PiS returned to a more familiar populist radical right discourse, marked by mobilization against the liberal opposition, the European Union, and minorities such as LGBT groups. Such discourse was in line with ultraconservative and Church actors, who spread a conspiratorial framing of the pandemic as a “punishment” for the spread of “LGBT ideology” in Poland and Europe.
In Germany, AfD made COVID-19 a central campaign issue in the run-up to the German federal elections, scheduled for September 2021. In its election platform, AfD fundamentally opposed the government’s COVID-19 measures, bridging this new issue with previous core themes, such as immigration and euro politics. The AfD platform conjured a continuation of allegedly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional policies by the government, from the 2008 European financial crisis to the 2015 migration and integration crisis, all the way to the 2020-21 pandemic crisis. Accordingly, AfD politicians referred to the government’s pandemic measures as a “totalitarian” attempt to oppress and control the people, taking up the international conspiracy discourse on the “plandemic”.
The Dutch FvD also and strongly radicalized vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic. By January 2021, which marked the official start of the electoral campaign for the Dutch parliamentary elections, FvD openly and wholeheartedly embraced a wide range of conspiracy myths to criticize the Dutch government. Conspiracy narratives included not only the mysterious origins of the coronavirus and the alleged effects of the vaccinations, but extended to a wide range of (at times bizarre) topics such as allegations of electoral fraud in the United States and the Netherlands, conspiracies surrounding the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, questions about the authenticity of the moon landing, speculations about being ruled by reptiles, and narratives suggesting that 9/11 was an inside job. FvD leader Thierry Baudet even introduced the “Great Reset” conspiracy in the Dutch House of Representatives.
Towards a new super cleavage?
Despite differences in the ways PiS, AfD, and FvD politicized the pandemic, our findings indicate that all three radical right populists parties contributed to consolidating a new politico-cultural “super cleavage” between liberal pluralism and authoritarian populism.
This super cleavage subsumes a whole range of longstanding issues, spanning (anti-)feminism and (trans-)gender politics, climate change, and migration. Our analysis of populist discourses shows that the COVID-19 issue was incorporated into binary patterns of ideological antagonism and issue politicization, reflecting the anti-pluralist, authoritarian-populist and nationalist-exclusive side of the value-based, politico-cultural super cleavage, which is driving a large-scale realignment of European party systems. While it is clear that by politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic, populists contributed to the construction of a new politico-cultural super cleavage, what remains to be seen (and researched) is whether the pandemic represented a typical and illustrative case of populist performance of crises or, on the other hand, it stands as a unique scenario.
This article highlights some of the findings in the REGROUP paper “Populism and the pandemic: The politicization of COVID-19 and cleavage agency among populist radical right parties”.
