Populist parties often mobilize through politics of historical memory, offering a nostalgic and sometimes reinvented vision of the past. However, the connection between populism and the past remains underexplored in the literature. In this article, we aim at filling this gap by analysing original comparative survey data, gathered in early 2020 as part of the H2020 RePast Project. More specifically, we investigate the links between populist attitudes, vote, and attitudes towards the troubled past in 8 European countries in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Kosovo, Poland and Spain. We expect to find a link between the memories of the conflicts of the past, national identity, populist attitudes and voting for populist parties in all these countries. In each country, the conflicts of the past have been managed in a rather different way. This is due to both the time when transitions took place, the international juridical context, the internal political balances, and political choices. That is why we also expect to find differences in the way the populist attitudes are related to different policies on truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition.
This proposal builds on, and tries to build bridges between, previous literature in Political Science on the origins and implications of populist attitudes (references), attitudes towards the past (Aguilar et al, 2011; Humlebæk, 2013; Oto-Peralías, 2015; Santana et al, 2016; Dinas and Fouka, 2018; Hall et al, 2018), and the links between historical memory and party politics (Bakiner, 2013; Raimundo, 2015; Costalli and Ruggeri, 2019).
