Europe versus Islam?: Right-wing populist discourse and the construction of a civilizational identity

Abstract

This article reveals the ways in which five populist parties in Europe (AfD in Germany, FN in France, PVV in the Netherlands, M5S in Italy, and Golden Dawn in Greece) employ the fear of Islam as a political instrument to mobilize their supporters and to mainstream themselves. The study is conducted through a discourse analysis of the speeches and manifestos of the aforementioned parties. Following the depiction of each political party, the article displays some of quotations from the fieldwork conducted in the Spring of 2017 to be able to explicate their common tropes about their Islamophobic, migrant-phobic, and diversity-phobic discourses of the supporters of populist parties. The main premise of the work is to claim that these parties have recently generated a civilizational discourse in order to expand their electorate.