The Meaning of the Mainstream Right’s Convergence to the Radical Right: Same Challenge to Liberal Democracy and Established Policy Paradigms?

This article investigates how the radical right populist Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) constructs the claim of a new national sovereignty and how the mainstream right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) responds to this claim. Theoretically, these claims are directed at recovering the people’s sovereignty rights from ‘bad’ national, European and global elites as well as ‘harmful’ outsiders like immigrants. However, such claims can be made with varying policy content, challenging different deep-seated policy paradigms like universal welfare and education or social partnerships. Furthermore, these claims can be connected with different ideas of the ‘ideal’ democratic regime. Thus, using content analysis, this article first analyses the 2013 and 2017 FPÖ election manifestos and leader speeches to gauge how exactly the party argues for the need of reclaiming national sovereignty and which reforms of policy paradigms and democratic processes are proposed in conjunction with these claims. Second, the Austrian case seems to be a case where mainstream right parties ‘parrot the pariah’. However, a general adoption of sovereignty claims by mainstream right parties does not necessary mean that the proposed policy and democratic reforms are the same. By comparing the characteristics of the sovereignty claims of the ÖVP to those by the FPÖ, we will thus analyze whether the general shift of the ÖVP towards more sovereignty-based positions went hand in hand with an increasing congruence between the two parties on these policy and democracy aspects. This analysis will provide a more detailed account of what ‘parroting the pariah’ means and whether mainstream right national sovereignty claims are necessarily as endangering for liberal democracy as these claims of their radical right populist counterparts are argued to be.