Moving to the Extremes: Party Political Support for the Populist Radical Right – A Northern Ireland Perspective

In March 2007 the Reverend Dr. Ian Paisley announced that he was prepared to lead his Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) into a power-sharing government with Sinn Féin, a party he has previously promised to “smash”. The announcement, followed by the establishment of the government the following May, represented a major change of electoral fortunes for a party that until 2003, was largely confined to the fringes of Northern Ireland politics due to its extremist rhetoric and often anti-Catholic and anti-Irish outlook. This paper will analyse the electoral transformation of the DUP within the context of the current rise in support for populist radical right parties across Europe. Although rarely viewed as a populist radical right party, the DUP has shared many of the traits of this political family since its foundation in 1971. The party, for example, has represented a particular brand of British nationalism with a limited conceptualisation of “the people”; it has espoused a nativist form of politics that opposed any legitimisation of Irish identity in Northern Ireland and opposed membership of the European Union; it has historically rallied against established political elites who it claimed were willing to “sell out” “Ulster”. Although the party has compromised elements of its values in order to share power with Sinn Féin, its electoral growth was based on a “no compromise” stance that started to appeal to certain unionist voters as the peace process bedded down. Many who had strongly opposed what the party was seen to stand for gradually became willing to not only vote for the party but also to join it. The paper will analyse how and why larger sections of the unionist population became willing and able to switch allegiance to a party that had, throughout its history, been labelled extremist. In so doing, the paper will offer insights into how the narratives of more extremist political groupings can come to appeal to a broader audience and how its historical baggage can be reconstructed in such a way as to lend legitimacy to its current political standing.