The Past in Today's Political Attitudes and Voting Behaviour: Greece and Spain in Comparative Perspective

Authors: Irene Martín, Marta Paradés, Magda Fytili The construction of narratives about the past provides justification and legitimacy to new populist parties that shape new understandings of ‘the people’ (De Cesari, Bosilkov, and Piacentini 2020). Despite the great interest of literature in populism in recent years, the connection between populism and the past remains underexplored. 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 (Castanho Silva et al, 2019), vote, and attitudes towards the troubled past in 2 South Euroupean countries (Greece and Spain). We contextualize the two cases, and compared them to other European countries with a conflictual past (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Kosovo, and Poland). In each country, the conflicts of the past have been managed in a rather different way, due to the time when transitions took place, the international juridical context, the internal political balances, and political choices. Since the transitions to democracy in Greece and Spain took place during the same period, it will be interesting to see to what extent the international context at that foundational moment was more determinant than internal political balances and choices. We also expect to find cross-national differences in the way the populist attitudes nowadays are related to different conceptions of national identity, truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition, and their impact on populist voting.