ABSTRACT
Racist organisations and individuals adopt symbols drawn from a complex symbolic system in order to realise discourses that coincide with their particular ideological stances. Recently, the political branding of more populist European nationalist 1 parties has diverged and moved towards that of mainstream politics—a move to legitimate nationalist party ideologies in mainstreamed political systems. Shah et al. (2007: 8) observe that ‘[political campaigns are now grounded in marketing principles, with branding of political candidates and issues, targeted political advertising, staged media events, and market segmentation strategies all commonplace’. Globalised (more specifically, European-wide) trends in political branding have influenced the branding and racist symbolic practices of European nationalist political parties in localised contexts; that is, nationalist political branding is undergoing a process of glocalisation. Glocalisation is the process ‘in which increased homogeneity of brands, products and practices around the globe is countered by heterogeneous local adaptations and meanings’ (Koller 2008: 446); in other words, it refers to ‘localizing the global as well as globalizing the local’ (Mitsikopoulou 2008: 353).
