Getting Active in Populist Radical Right Politics in Poland and Czechia: Members' Histories and Views in a Comparative Perspective

My paper focuses on populist radical right-wing political parties (Mudde, 2007) in contemporary Poland and Czechia and offers comparative insights into the views of those parties' members. Based on one-on-one interviews with members of Konfederacja (Confederation) in Poland and Svoboda a přímá demokracie (Freedom and Direct Democracy) in Czechia, I seek to understand personal and ideological reasons to join such parties and the members' views on current social and political affairs. In addition to one-and-one interviews, I draw from on-site observation and extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses of social media and other textual and audio-visual sources. Through biographical interviews, I try to trace back the path that has led to political involvement, with a particular emphasis on the Central and Eastern European context, i.e. the respondents' family and personal stories and views on the former regimes and their personal experiences with post-1989 changes. I argue that narratives on the former state socialist regimes and the 'post-socialist transformation' are key to understand support for – and involvement in – populist radical right-wing politics. In both countries, the past plays a key role for populist radical right-wing parties, but not in the same way, with a clearer rejection of pre- and post-1989 institutions in Poland and a more ambiguous relationship in Czechia. Moreover, I explore the party members' views on current issues, with a particular emphasis on gendered and sexualised – in addition to racialised and classed – representations of national belonging and foreignness (Mosse, 1985; Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1989; McClintock, 1993). I argue that focusing on the gendered and sexualised aspects of discourses and practices is crucial to understand the way in which these parties mobilise the public through moral panics (Cohen, 2002) to bolster support and defend particular gendered and sexualised power hierarchies (Kováts & Põim, 2015). Despite the similarities, the gendered and sexualised tropes are very much context-dependent (Akkerman, 2015), as I show with the Polish populist radical right taking a hard stance against LGBT+ rights and their Czech counterparts focusing more on 'gender ideology'. I link the topics of gender and sexuality with other analytical categories such as race and class to interrogate the ways in which the four categories are articulated and rearticulated together, i.e. the mutually reinforcing links between racism, neoliberal capitalism, misogyny, and homo- and transphobia. I argue that these themes are intertwined with a national historical narrative on the distant and recent pasts that comes to create a strong ideological ground for radical right-wing politics. Those narratives are different between and within countries and my research reasserts the importance of context for scholarship on this political family.