Uniting through Opposition: The ‘Chains of Equivalence’ Politics of the Populist Right and its Use of Religion

This paper explores the specificity of illiberal politics from the perspective of Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory. The discourse theory assumes that political identity formation in general requires the creation of ‘chains of equivalence’, where a multiplicity of actors unites to one collective identity through jointly opposing an ‘other’. The paper develops a theoretical model of illiberal politics that specifies this idea in the light of the distinctive political qualities of the populist right. One thing that is distinctive about the populist right is that it claims to represent “the only real alternative to those that it opposes as ‘corrupt elites’” (Mouffe 2005). It thus articulates a fundamental critique of the status quo of liberal democracies that addresses not only this or that specific political rule or political actor, but the political discourse of liberal democracies considered more broadly. This implies that the populist right articulates two ‘chains of equivalence’ simultaneously – not only their own political identity (the ‘only real alternative’) but also that of its ‘other’ (the current discourse of liberal democracy). The political rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is then used as an example to illustrate these considerations. By tracing the AfD’s references to a natural order and to religion, it is demonstrated how the uses of these notions do not only express a specific ideological content but also serve the strategic purpose of creating political ‘chains of equivalence’: the notions belong to the discourses of separate political struggles in different policy fields, which enable a ‘chain’-building with different actors respectively. Regarding the task of articulating the current discourse of liberal democracy as the shared ‘other’, the populist element of the AfD’s rhetoric plays an essential role. It is by framing the separate political struggles as elements of one broader political struggle of the ‘people’ against the ‘elite’ that the populist right presents its various policies as unified in their belonging to the political project of the allegedly ‘only real alternative to the status quo’.