Religion and Party Politics in Today's Europe

Despite a growing literature on the role of religion in party politics has developed in the past decades, works trying to analyze in a systematic way the relations between religion and party politics in today’s Europe are still quite rare. This paper tries to contribute to fill the gap by building on the knowledge developed in the research for the book "The Masks of the Political God" (ECPR Press / Rowman and Littlefield 2021), to try to understand the current situation and the ongoing trends in the European Union. The first section of the paper will summarize the model adopted, based on the concept of “religiously oriented party”, and the idea that in the global landscape we can find five models of religiously oriented parties (conservative, progressive, fundamentalist, nationalist and camp) which differ because of their ideology, organization, relations with interest groups, and goals. The second part of the paper will use this model to analyze the party systems of the 27 EU states, to try to understand which model of religiously oriented party, if any, predominates, and what are the observable trend. The conclusions will highlight the rise, since at least the 2010s, of a new family of religiously oriented right-wing populist parties (often based on an identity-driven and civilizational Christian identity), which have often taken the place of the more ‘traditional’ centrist and conservative ones.