Minorities within the nation? Populism and minorities in Latvia

Cas Mudde famously brought together three phenomena to describe the nature of radical right populist parties: nativism, authoritarianism and populism. (Mudde 2007) The paradox of developing support for populist parties among minorities requires elites to decouple at least two of the three elements of Mudde’s definition: populism and nativism. Broadly speaking, this phenomenon can be broken down into four dimensions. The first is the decision by a populist party to develop some pivot toward ethnic minorities. The second dimension would relate to the exact content of that shift in terms of not only mitigating nativist stances, but also potentially making positive gestures on minority issues. Thirdly, one can assess the success of such an endeavor among minority voters. Fourthly, it would be intriguing to understand whether such pivoting toward minorities engenders either counter-debate within the party or even the loss of support among core party voters. This paper will focus on the first dimension, since this would require a research design that identified a clearly pivoting party. In the country case that will be examined here – Latvia – there has arguably not been any populist party, which has overtly decided to shift toward seeking minority support. There has been, however, a political party that attempted a purely populist ideology, but without a very nativist stance. Known by the interrogative name “Who owns the state?” (“Kam pieder valsts?” or KPV), the party stressed in its electoral rhetoric all of the classical populist themes of repudiating existing elites, radically downsizing government, providing greater social welfare and reforming the justice system. Yet, while the party also stressed the importance of the Latvian nation-state, it was not as patent on this topic as the overtly nativist National Alliance. A working hypothesis for this paper will therefore be that a populist party that wants to develop a following among ethnic minorities must not only tone down nativist stances, but also make even more tangible or universal its discourse against elites. It must double-down on what Mudde called “outside the state, outside the nation” enemies in a way that transcends ethnic issues or at least clearly steers attention toward other adversarial categories. As a result, this paper will undertake a discursive analysis of KPV, both across its original leaders, Artuss Kaimiņš and Aldis Gobzems, as well as the party’s documents and later parliamentary interventions. The focus of the empirical work will therefore be on the period 2016-2020, when the party was most active. It will aim to analyze the degree to which the party achieved the second dimension noted above, i.e. the precise nature of the party’s discursive construct with respect to populism on the one hand, but mitigated nativism on the other.