Nordic Populism: Conjoining Ethno-Nationalism and Welfare Chauvinism

Populist parties in the Nordic countries part to a significant degree from most nativist populists in Western Europe by not being clearly positioned on the right-wing of the socioeconomic spectrum. Rather than being established around traditional right-wing neoliberal rhetoric, they rose on a new sociocultural master frame of combining ethno-nationalism and anti-elite populism with welfare chauvinism. The Nordic populists skillfully played on a nostalgic wish of going back to a simpler and happier time. The Sweden Democrats, for example, reached real tactical breakthrough by shrewdly adopting the traditional social democratic notion of the People’s Home (Folkehemmed). This was a classical dis- cursive creation of a Golden Age when the close connection between the ethnic people, democracy, and welfare are emphasized in an exclusionary understanding of the nation abandoning their long-asserted promise of the People’s Home, the all-embracing welfare society. In this chapter, I will explore how the Nordic populist parties presented immigration as a threat to the promise of universal welfare for the native population. Rather than primarily referring to the social-economic situation of the ordinary people they, instead, adopted a new populist winning for-mula of combining socioeconomic left-wing views with hard-core right-wing conservative sociocultural ideas.