ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter revisits the main themes, offering some comparative reflections on the drivers, methods and grammar of exclusion of the populist radical right (PRR) and how these differ across national contexts. Contrary to research that claims that ‘it’s not the economy’, I have argued that economy and material conditions do matter. Moreover, I suggest that cultural identity cannot neatly be separated from economic conditions. While the local material and cultural specificities for hatreds or intolerance might be local, the discursive expression of exclusion is strikingly similar across national contexts. The jargon of populist parties, as expressed both online and offline, continues to use age-old rhetoric and violent imaginaries of difference. The parties claim to provide better futures modelled around a romanticized past and the ‘good old days’. The PRR parties pledge to reinforce territorial boundaries, to stand up for ‘the little people’ against the elites, and to protect them against threatening others who are often defined in religious or racial terms. At the same time they project on migrants and selected minorities the total sum of fear, discontent and insecurities associated with fast, accelerated change. Historically, Jews, Muslims and Roma have been subjected to distinct, but interrelated forms of exclusion, namely anti-Muslim racism, antisemitism and antiziganism. As I have shown throughout the book, these categories of belonging are still marked in different PRR discourses as enemy strangers, partly as a projection surface to imagine the pure insiders, those who rightfully belong to the nation. This appeared as a powerful formula to my interlocutors who felt battered by processes of globalization and anxious in a fast-changing world.
