Religion, Cleavages, and Right-Wing Populist Parties in Europe

The political science literature analysing the genetic profile of European political parties has mainly focused on the salience, for the identity of today’s parties, of four social cleavages rooted in the past European history: among them, a religious/secular cleavage created by the birth of the modern national state. However, in the past two decades, some contributions about new party types developed after the end of the Cold War have hypothesised the existence of new cleavages, based on materialist/post materialist points of view and on the acceptance or rejection of globalization and Europeanization processes. This contribution will work on this latter hypothesis, by highlighting how some European parties, previously secular or focused on the ‘traditional’ religious cleavage, are increasingly using religion-related arguments in the context of anti-globalization and anti-EU discourses. While the first part of the paper will develop this point under a theoretical point of view, the second section will focus on the new European right-wing populist parties family and its features, with a particular attention for the case of the Lega Nord party in Italy.