Globalising to Own the Globalists: How the Populist Radical Right Combines Nationalism and Transnationalism

Over the past five years, populist radical right (PRR) parties and leaders from Europe and the Americas have increasingly forged links with one another, both within and beyond their own continents. These are not merely strategic connections, designed solely to aid each party or leader in their own country, but are explicitly cast as necessary global alliances to pursue global goals. In this paper, we ask: how can PRR parties at the same time be both nationalist and transnationalist? We argue that, rather than treating national and transnational populism as mutually exclusive, we should see the two as co-existing in a parallel and complementary relationship. Hence, the three key building blocks of PRR ideology – the people, the elites, and the others – are simultaneously both national and transnational. Having set out our model of transnationalist nationalist populism, we then use interviews conducted across Europe, Latin America, and the United States between 2023 and 2025 to illustrate how key PRR actors conceive of this. Finally, in the conclusions, we discuss how the global attack on liberal democracy is dangerous precisely because it is not ‘just’ national, but transnational. Research which only considers the national dimension of the PRR thus risks missing its wider implications.