Conceptualising Sidestreaming: How Populist Radical Right-Wing Parties Reach Out to Minority Voters

While the populist radical right-wing parties are often seen as a monist, appealing to a homogeneous and nativist “people”, their actual supporter base seems to be increasingly diverse (see e.g. Rooduijn 2018, Damhuis 2020, Vasilopoulou and Halikioupoulou 2023). This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon through the novel concept of sidestreaming. We presume that the growing electoral success of populist radical right-wing parties is not just attributable to their mainstreaming, i.e. the normalisation of the far-right agenda by other actors, but also their sidestreaming, or how the populist radical right-wing parties themselves reach out to increasingly diverse audiences. The concept of sidestreaming draws on populism, the public sphere and political marketing scholarship, explaining the strategy of the populist radical right-wing parties toward minority groups. Based on the diverse cases of EKRE (Estonia), the Sweden Democrats, and VOX (Spain), the paper explores which channels and campaign methods do populist radical right-wing parties use to reach out to minority groups and outlines also the varieties in how the strategy is employed in empirical settings. The paper demonstrates that while the sidestreaming strategy may have a politically empowering impact on some minorities, it still constitutes a negative-sum game for minority rights more generally.