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The radical right’s uneasy relationship with religion has a long history. Is the FN really Catholic, or are its anti-immigrant politics incompatible with Christian universalism? Yet the FN’s views on religion have not been sufficiently explored. Whereas some critics of the FN, such as Nigel Copsey, have focused on whether the FN represents a threat to democracy or a new type of fascism, Cas Mudde has shown that the FN is populist, advancing the “voice of the people” over established parties. Thus Bernard-Henri Lévy, a critic of the FN, has argued that Marine Le Pen represents “a far right with a human face.” For it was ND leader Alain de Benoist who first advanced a “right-wing Gramscianism”-seizing the “laboratories of thought”-as prelude to the conquest of the state. The FN has steadily become more electorally viable by abandoning its connections to the terrorism of the “old” radical right, focusing instead on populist “direct democracy” and a “cultural war” against liberal-left political and cultural elites-the latter strategy inherited from the French intellectual Nouvelle Droite (ND). (Ironically, Marine Le Pen herself recently claimed that the French state was not responsible for the 1942 roundup of 13,000 Jews who were then sent to Nazi death camps.) By 2015, the elder Le Pen was expelled from the FN because of his controversial remarks on the Holocaust and persistent anti-Semitism, which made it harder for his daughter to create a “new,” more “respectable” radical right. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, stunned the French political scene when he reached the second round of the 2002 presidential elections. Le Pen’s rise to political prominence comes as little surprise. Most polls predict she will lose in the second round. In one poll ahead of the upcoming French presidential elections, The Telegraph had the FN’s Marine Le Pen in first place with 25.3% of the popular vote. Farther east, a radical nationalist named Viktor Orbán is the Prime Minister of Hungary.įounded in 1972, France’s Front National (FN) is an inspiration for the entire radical right, having invented the electorally successful formula that holds immigrants (in particular Muslims) responsible for all the ills of the nation, from unemployment to an overburdened welfare state to terrorism. Geert Wilders, a Dutch nationalist firebrand who once compared the Qur’an to Mein Kampf, finished third in Holland’s recent parliamentary elections. That same year, the anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria under Norbert Hofer finished second in the Austrian presidential elections with a whopping 46% of the popular vote.
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The UK Independence Party played a key role in 2016’s Brexit result. Sarah de Lange notes how, since the 1990s, radical right-wing parties have joined coalition governments in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The radical right is increasingly mainstream throughout Europe.