Radical Right Populism and the Orthodox Church. Comparing Bulgaria, Cyprus and Greece

The paper aims to elaborate both theoretically and empirically on the radical right (RR) populism and its relation to the Orthodox Churches of Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria. The addressed research questions are: a) how religion is conceptualized to serve the parties’ ends? b) Has the religious discourse contributed as a cultural factor to the RR growth? and c) What is the relation at a micro-level between religiosity and nativist, xenophobic, Eurosceptic, and authoritarian attitudes? The data for analysis derives from: a) Party documents; b) church documents; and c) all round of the European Social Survey dataset. The Essex School paradigm of discourse analysis is employed to explore the theoretical part. With regard to the empirical analysis, the research uses OLS estimation techniques. The paper suggests that these parties equate Orthodoxy with the collective subject, using it as a criterion of exclusion; reinforcing, thus, the political agenda of mono-culturalism, anti-minority, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. The paper also argues that the religious officials by mediating nativist, authoritarian, populist, and xenophobic ideological features, as well as by avoiding to participate in the cordon sanitaire, work as a legitimizing factor for the RR political platform. On the other hand, it should be noted that there is not a homogenous religious discourse, but acquires diverse formulations depending on the context. Moreover, it is argued that populism in its fundamentalist version is ‘faux populism’. As regards the empirical part, the paper’s findings are: a) religiosity is positively correlated with more authoritarian and anti-immigrant attitudes; and b) Religiosity is positively correlated with more trust towards the local and the EU institutions; thus, the religious people are less populist and Eurosceptic. These findings, in turn, indicate the partial differentiation between the theoretical and the empirical evidence. While anti-westerism is an integral part of the Orthodox milieu, and the religious discourse has taken in some instances an anti-establishment form, religiosity is negatively correlated both with Eurosceptic and populist politics.