ABSTRACT
This contribution develops an analytical model to understand the populist mobilization of discontented citizens and the way they reconfigure the political field. Through in-depth interviews with voters from the far-right ‘Vlaams Belang’ in Antwerp (Belgium), we reconstruct the process of political radicalization. People feel threatened by the multicultural city and drift away from traditional parties who no longer seem to protect them. Ethnocentrism and political cynicism merge, and support for the dissident party gradually develops. Opposing inferior migrants and the superior political establishment, the protest of isolated voters aligns itself with the populist party, feeding into the idea that its supporters are numerous and therefore embody ‘the people’. Accordingly, a circumstantial alliance or chain of equivalence is forged that conceives itself as a populist axis able to reclaim the idea of democracy, to the detriment of its opponents who constitute an axis of evil.
