Welfare Chauvinism and Socio-economic Positions among West-European Radical Right-wing Populist Parties. A Comparison between the French Front National and the Swiss People’s Party

This article sets out to explore the socio-economic positions of Western European radical right-wing populist parties, with a specific focus on Welfare chauvinism and how those parties’ social policies relate to their anti-immigration agenda. The current literature on the political economy of the radical right highlights two diverging ideological formulas. While some radical right parties show a neo-liberal pro-market orientation, others have endorsed protectionist and redistributive policies, moving further to the left of the economic axis. There is little research however into factors that influence radical right economic policy preferences, the extent to which these are persistent or mutable, and the reasons behind radical right parties adopting specific socio-economic stances. Moreover, while scholars of the radical right tend to assume a strong link between protectionism and welfare chauvinism, we should examine further the more complex way in which free-market orientations interact with welfare chauvinism, as well as the relationship between nativist social policies and the broader egalitarian economic framework within which some radical right parties are operating today. To address these questions, this paper looks comparatively at the French Front National (FN) and Swiss People’s Party (SVP), and their evolution since the 1990s. The FN and SVP represent two prominent cases of institutionalized radical right parties which assume divergent positions in their respective party systems, and which are currently located at the opposite ends of the economic axis. With a focus on both exogenous supply-side dimensions such as the national economic culture, political opportunities and the impact of the global crisis, and endogenous variables of leadership change and party strategy, we will seek to explain why and how those parties’ socio-economic policies, as reflected by national electoral manifestos, change and/or persist over time. In doing so, we will address crucial issues that concern the role played by welfare-chauvinism in the mobilization strategies by the radical right amidst the current economic crisis.