Nationhood Vs. Statehood?: Comparing Populism and Religion in France, Germany and Poland

This paper compares how the French ‘Rassemblement National’ (RN), the German ‘Alterna-tive für Deutschland’ (AfD) and the Polish ‘Prawo i Sprawiedliwość’ (PiS) have constructed a Christian identity along religious- and especially Islam-related statements since the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. Although scholars on right-wing populism and religion have found similarities across European member states identifying a dichotomized rhetoric -dividing the good but harmed Christian Europeans and the bad but harming Muslim immi-grants as well as the careless cosmopolitan elite-, different rhetorical patterns have occurred among right-wing parties. Thus, this paper wants to disentangle different ideological under-pinnings that show not only diverging notions of Christianity and Islam but reveal varying stances towards secularism as well as Jewry. Taking into account differing discursive oppor-tunity structures, the paper highlights historically-rooted peculiarities along the conceptual division of ethnic nation- and civic statehood between France, Germany and Poland. Identi-fying diverging frames on religious references between the populist RN, AfD and PiS, the empirical approach of this paper is based on a qualitative frame analysis examining manifes-tos, public documents, press releases, and official websites of these three parties.