New Rightists or Simply Opportunists? The New Right Parties in Power in Latin America and Europe between 2010 and 2019: An Analysis of Their Ideological Dimensions

Abstract

There is a boom in the power of right-wing parties that are becoming government parties in Latin America and Europe. It has been pointed out that these are distinguished from traditional right-wing parties by their common ideology that transcends national contexts, which is why they have been grouped as New Right-wing parties. This article questions whether these parties share ideological themes or whether they are heterogeneous and obey national interests. This study systemizes the New Right-wing parties’ programs and classifies them to answer the question. This corpus is then studied through frequency, network, and principal component analysis. Two conclusions are reached from this. First, these parties agree on issues such as provider States and nationalist claims, and, second, their programs have diverse themes that do not show the formation of an identifiable transnational ideological agenda in their programs. Consequently, grouping these parties as an ideologically homogeneous phenomenon can make invisible the fact that they are parties that adjust to particular demands of their political environment, in a logic that obeys more catch-all parties than ideological and dogmatic parties.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the media have provided evidence of the continuing rise of New Right-wing parties worldwide. Today, these parties are present in 17 national parliaments in the European Union. Of these, in 7 countries, they have entered as partners in government coalitions, and in 2, they govern alone, which shows the rise to political power of parties that had occupied marginal positions in most of the world’s party systems since the end of World War II.

European cases – such as that of Hungary with the Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége party (FIDEZ), which obtained the parliamentary majority with 44.8% of the votes in 2014, or that of Poland, where the Law and Justice party triumphed in the 2015 elections with 37.6% (Martinez 2017) – allow us to visualize the importance of this phenomenon. Although at the beginning it was accentuated in Europe, it is not exclusive to this region, as it has been evidenced in America, where right-wing governments have also been positioning themselves in countries such as the United States and Brazil, and, in the case of the latter, where Jair Bolsonaro was elected president in 2018 with 55% of the votes and presenting a favorability of 78% (Jimenez 2018). It is important to highlight that, whether as the only majority party or belonging to a majority government coalition, these parties have positioned themselves in the political arena of various countries with sufficient power to influence the national and international political agenda.

In the 1980s, with the rise of academic production on this issue, Von Beyme (1988) proposed that this was a cyclical phenomenon in which four waves could be identified since World War II. Since then, what some have called the fourth wave is taking place, in which far-right political parties, which were previously in the minority and now are not, have positioned themselves in the political arena of different countries with sufficient influence and legitimacy. Beyme states that the parties in this wave are characterized as using a non-economic discourse based on other ideological values that differ depending on the author and the nationality of the author (Larralde 2009). Nationalism, anti-establishment, and anti-immigration represent a subset of concurrent values within various theories (Ellinas 2007).

Despite considerable media coverage and the numerous investigations on the rise of the New Right-wing parties, it is a recent phenomenon, present in diverse and varied contexts. The discrepancies around the conceptualization of these parties persist in the press and academic literature. Ennser (2012) states that the lack of programmatic homogeneity partly explains the difficulties in conceptualizing these parties – since many parties are on the borderline of classification within the party family. However, others have been quick to assert that this is a homogeneous phenomenon where all parties belonging to the far-right family present a similar party discourse and organization. Nevertheless, the diversity of contexts and parties of these families raises new suspicions, which differ from any previously thought. For this reason, it is pertinent to ask the following: how do the New Right-wing parties that have been in government between 2010 and 2019 vary in their ideological dimensions?

This article is looking forward to identifying the ideological degree of similarity or diversity of political parties that have been in government between 2010 and 2019. Some researchers, such as Nikolajczuk and Prego (2017) and Giordano (2014), have labelled these parties as New Right-wing parties because these organizations have a similar ideological agenda and are different from classic right parties. This issue is relevant since the programmatic similarity allows us to identify whether these parties constitute a transnational movement of “New Rightists” in different countries – or whether their thematic agendas correspond more to national realities. In the first case, this would mean identifying a group of parties considered to be New Right-wing parties in Latin America and Europe due to their thematic homogeneity. In the second case, they are parties with thematically diverse proposals, so grouping them under the label of New Rightists would neither be empirically or theoretically appropriate.

The article is organized into four sections. In the first place, the conceptual discussion about the New Right-wing parties is addressed while showing how this term is understood in the literature and how this conceptual framework allows us to identify a universe of parties that have been considered New Right-wing parties due to their ideology. In the following section, the methodology is exposed. It includes the compilation and systematization of the programs, and it discusses the programs’ advantages and limits, identifying the main problems they have. The third section presents an analysis of frequency, network, and principal components to identify that the parties are not thematically congruent with each other at the transnational level but rather respond to the national realities of each party. The article concludes with a summary of this theoretical and empirical contribution and suggests new lines of research.

Between New and Extreme: A Proposal for Defining Right-Wing Parties

The present article takes up Sartori’s (1980) definition of a political party as “any political group that presents itself to compete in elections and that can place its candidates in public office through them” (20); and it is complemented by the definition of the International Encyclopedia of Government and Politics (Gold 1996), which considers political parties to be all organizations registered under the party laws in force in the different countries and whose purpose it is to influence decision-making by actively participating in electoral processes. Based on these functionalist definitions, political parties can be studies across different countries, with a particular emphasis on their primary objective of competing for power and winning public offices through electoral means.

Among the numerous parties that could be contained under this definition and which are the object of this research, this analysis chooses the parties that have come to power in Europe and Latin America from 2010 to 2019. The parties in government have the most significant direct influence, both on the political system and on the lives of citizens. This criterion ensures that they have become strong and organized enough to take a leading role in the game of political positioning. On the other hand, although most of the literature uses regional isolation, the present work includes parties from Latin America and Europe. As stated by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2013), there is significant potential in transnational comparison through a generic approach beyond the context that shows the different ways political parties of the New Right-wing parties are manifested in particular regions of the world.

There is a significant discrepancy around the universe of cases within the academic literature that should be considered New Rights. Although there seems to be an unspoken assumption on the part of the authors regarding what is understood when talking about this phenomenon (Rush 1963), the difficulties in conceptualizing it are evident even in the language and the selection of the label. While in English, numerous concepts can be found to refer to the same phenomenon, “alt-right, far-right, extreme-right, right-wing, radical-right,” some authors have made an effort to differentiate them, relating, for example, the extreme right (Akkerman and Rooduijn 2015; Eatwell 2000) with those parties that reject democracy as a political system or the radical right (Rydgren 2018) with the rejection of pluralism. In Spanish, the label “Nueva Derecha” (New Right) has been predominantly maintained. Coming from French Nouvelle Droite roots, the concept was used in the 1960s and 1970s in France to refer to the National Front; it was used again by Mouffe and Hinkelammert at the end of the 1980s to refer to the emergence of groups that are heirs to the military dictatorships in Latin America that instrumentalized democracy for the satisfaction of material interests (Giordano 2014).

Since then, many Latin American authors such as Giordano (2014), Luna (2014), and Traverso (2019) have used the term to refer to the New Right-wing parties as right-wing parties that generate a contrast with the traditional right. That is, the novelty does not refer to temporality but to the values of the immediate past of the historical moment (Giordano, Soler, and Saferstein 2018). This article chooses Giordano’s minimalist definition of the New Right, which allows us to include a larger universe of cases, including Latin Americans, in the study. Nevertheless, the need to operationalize the concept becomes evident due to the immense diversity of the phenomenon. Consequently, the following are the minimum conditions for a party to be considered part of the New Right-wing.

Universe of Study: The New Rights

The first condition for classifying a party within this universe is the right-wing ideological character of these parties. Within the discussion on the right, three elements stand out: 1) its historical character, situated between the antagonism of left and right that Bobbio (2014) exposes; 2) the conceptualization of the right as a political position that considers inequality as something natural and thus an essential programmatic tool (Luna and Rovira Kaltwasser 2014), and 3) its pragmatism, that is, its capacity to adapt to new representative formats, the enunciation of new languages, alliances with new sectors, and changes in its composition (Nikolajczuk and Prego 2017).

Beyond inquiring into the implications and ideological characteristics of the right, it is pertinent to highlight two challenges to operationalization. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) state that many parties use similar populist strategies to gain access to voters and seem to have abandoned ideology. Additionally, as if this were not enough, it has been found that many parties avoid calling themselves New Right-wing parties.

The second condition of the New Rights is the marked antagonism toward one another. This characteristic makes sense from the social identity theory of Tajfel and Turner (1979), which states that an individual’s identity is closely related to belonging to a group, and the latter, in turn, is constructed through comparisons between the groups to which they belong and those that are alien to them (Arias and Barreto 2009). The parties of the New Right seem to be adapting their discourse and policies to one of the events that are happening massively at the global level: immigration (Akerman and Rooduijn 2015). Following on from Tajfel and Turner, these parties have strengthened their endo group through nationalism, in most cases, by identifying immigrants as part of the ex-group (Cifuentes and Pino 2018). Nationalism is a vision of society that prioritizes the unity, autonomy, and identity of the nation (Halikiopoulou 2018). Through policies of preference, the New Right-wing parties in Europe have privileged work, housing, and other benefits to be preserved for the nation’s citizens.

Similarly, the term nativism, which is used to distinguish nationalism from far-right parties, is considered with traditional parties (Golder 2016). This concept combines nationalism with xenophobia, considering non-native elements as a fundamental threat to the nation State (Mudde 2007). These non-native elements are based on cultural differences with the other in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and minorities, and/or as members of the international community and people with diverse sexual orientations. Although discourses and policies do not refer to the total exclusion of the ex-group from society, they make clear that the priority must be the protection of the endo group (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013).

Finally, the third condition of the New Right refers to a previously mentioned element, the novelty of these parties. Based on Giordano’s definition of the New Right-wing, parties within this group must present a renewal or update of the right’s traditional values. Cas Mudde (2000) refers to this characteristic by understanding it as revisionism of the status quo or the traditional regimes and parties; Muis and Immerzeel (2017) understand it as territorial revisionism. Other authors, such as Szulman and Barriga (2015) claim that it is a revision of inclusion. As far as the operationalization of the last two conditions is concerned, party political programs and statutes were revised to account for these.

The three conditions mentioned above must be present in all the New Right-wing parties to be classified within this same group. However, the absence of both transcontinental studies and political parties themselves – how these parties contest democracy, their ways of imposing their agenda, their strategies, composition, common features, and particularities – leave open the question of whether there are any other conditions or variables that should be considered as sufficient and necessary. The first two criteria are transversal characteristics that allow the right-wing parties to be identified, while the third criterion allows them to be recognized as new compared to the traditional right-wing parties. Although the criteria do not allow us to conceptually identify what the New Right is, they do allow us to provide elements for the identification of the issues that these parties handle in their programs and detect if there is a convergence in their ideological postulates.

Ideology as a Constitutive Dimension of the New Right-Wing Parties

As there is no consensus on which dimension should be privileged to conceptualize a political party and less of the New Right, Krouwel (2006) suggests that typologies or models should try not to be too reductionist, emphasizing more than one dimension. In this same line, Montero and Gunther (2003), remember the dangers of falling into a simplification of the characteristics of the parties, the unjustified assumptions of similarity or uniformity and the inappropriate application of labels to parties whose characteristics differ from the original model. ¹

One important model of party classification focuses on ideological labels. The party ideology is a central element in the structure and definition of the party’s identity. It is significant for its function of orientation and legitimization of the construction of projects and policies (Aguilar López 2008). In other words, ideologies serve to guide solutions and filter out the problems they emphasize and ignore. Additionally, Budge’s (2014) findings show that the easiest and most effective representation of the ideological spectrum at both the party and electoral levels is the distinction between left and right, both in terms of analytical convenience and how parties and voters view the political world. However, this representation of the ideological spectrum is more complex and problematic than it appears. For this reason, the analysis of ideology is made based on party programs.

Methodology

The unit of analysis in this article includes all the political parties of the New Right that have been in government in Latin America and Europe. The definition of the parties presented above allows us to study the current and legal parties that maintain participation in the electoral processes according to each country’s legislation. Specifically, the parties are studied between 2010 and 2019. The year 2010 is chosen as it is the first victory registered within the geographical regions analyzed.

In addition, only those who have been in government are considered – i.e., those who have come to power through channels that can be considered formally democratic, either as majority parties or as right-wing coalitions. This criterion corresponds to a classification taken up again by Luna and Rovira Kaltwasser (2014) who propose that among the different strategies that the right-wing can implement to access power, there are the partisan electoral ones. This vehicle or strategy of the right has allowed them to exercise executive power through democratic institutions. The parties that exercise government work have the most significant direct influence on both the political system and the lives of citizens. Likewise, this criterion assures that they are parties that have already been strengthened and organized enough to gain prominence in the game of political positioning.

The primary sources, which include the programs and statutes of the political parties, were systematized and found on their official websites. This process was carried out in 3 months where 32 documents were searched, downloaded, translated, and read – 16 statutes and programs. Among the programs, the section of the programmatic proposals was particularly analyzed as a section common to all, while the statutes, having a similar structure, were examined in their entirety.

In the first part of the database, information was recorded on the parties, political regime, coalition or hegemonic government, the year of the party’s legislation, the dates of the elections in which they came to power, the percentage of the popular vote, and the number of seats. The second part collected the total number of words, the five most frequent words, the party indexes, observations, and the weighted percentages of the most frequent words: State, nation, tax, economy, culture, education, order, security, law.

Once the database was complete, the analysis of party ideology was started, based on a word frequency analysis ² performed by a program; and the most relevant concepts were identified.

Approaching the New Right Ideology: Advantages and Disadvantages of Party Programs

As previously mentioned, the analysis of the ideological dimension of the parties is carried out through their ideological political programs, where they set out their main guidelines and political stakes. In most democratic regimes, parties or party coalitions present government political programs in which they announce their objectives, pillars, and, in some cases, their responses to socially relevant problems. It is important to stress that political programs are a set of diagnoses and prognoses about society, from which specific proposals are derived regarding the political and social order, as well as the duties of government. In the political programs, the parties announce or formulate their proposals and, in addition, deliberately emphasize specific issues. These emphases, understood as political preferences, are defined as current attitudes toward material and ideological interests (Volkens 2001).

Political manifestos are documents with authoritative statements of party preferences representing the entire party, not just a faction or a politician. They cover a wide range of concerns; for this reason, party preferences on these issues can be measured and compared (Budge et al. 2001). It is relevant to recall one of the main findings of Budge’s research, which states that contrary to numerous theories that assume that parties compete by adopting opposing or controversial positions, the theory of prominence argues that the critical difference between parties is how they mention their position on a given issue.

However, some limitations of the study of the programs must also be considered. Three elements stand out. First, regardless of the methodology used to analyze them, the ability to use them depends on the availability and quality of the policy documents to be analyzed, which varies from country to country and is more inconsistent than expected. Second, as stated in the cautions of Benoit et al. (2009), it is important to bear in mind that these documents come from different contexts, are written by different actors for different purposes, and address different issues. Third, political programs differ in the length of their documents. While some are considerably long, others are concise. Finally, it is pertinent to remember that although political programs guide party attitudes with norms and regulations, this does not imply that they act in accordance or that all party members interpret or comply with them in the same way. Given the scope and limitations of the study of the programs, the frequency analysis tool identified the most frequently used words in the manuscripts. It allowed the recognition of the thematic axes prioritized by the parties in their 16 programs. The analysis of all the programs – after the translation of their original languages into English ³ – included 1) reading, systematization, and drafting of the first observations, 2) identifying the most frequent words of all the programs, and, finally, 3) reading them in context with each program. In addition, a comparison was made of the relative weight of the most frequent words, weighted over the total number of words in each program. Both actions allow us to solve the methodological limitation caused by the diversity in the length of the documents.

This diversity was the first finding of this research. Each party has a different design, characteristics, and extent. Thus, as shown in Table 1, some parties such as Law and Justice in Poland or New Flemish Alliance in Belgium present comprehensive political programs of more than 60 pages and 45,906 and 33,763 words, respectively – compared to Latvia’s National Alliance or Finns Party in Finland, which are considerably minimalist with less than four pages and 743 and 1,495 words, respectively. It is evident that a comprehensive party that announces its position on a large number of issues and problems in society contrasts with parties that limit themselves to some central elements, as this difference can be interpreted in different ways; thus, minimalist parties may not find it necessary to specify their positions. It may be due to the type of parties – mass parties, cadre parties, catch-all – or their relationship with the public – clientelist, programmatic, personalist. On the other hand, it can be caused by a lack of interest in committing to specific issues – empty signifiers. ⁴

Table 1. Extension of Parties’ Political Programs

* Program not found on the official party website

Source: Authors’ elaboration

Table 2 presents the keywords and corresponding percentage of usage in the political manifestos, which were utilized to estimate these analyses through the utilization of frequency analysis. This technique enabled the determination of the frequency of appearance for the identified keywords within the political manifestos, providing valuable insights into the underlying themes and issues discussed within the documents. The analysis assumes that mutually dependent terms can be identified when used together, which allows for describing the heterogeneity or homogeneity of the topics used by the different parties. Finally, a principal component analysis (PCA) was estimated. It focuses on reducing the dimensionality of a data set, preserving, as far as possible, the variation present (Urbina and Bárcena 2019). This method made it possible to quantify whether the New Right parties have a standard or heterogeneous thematic agenda.

Table 2. Programmatic Emphasis

Source: Authors’ elaboration based on political programs

Results

The reading of the programs, particularly the first analysis of the most frequent words in all the programs, allowed the identification of three relevant categories to be rescued and analyzed: First, the State and the role that these parties assign to it according to the political programs; second, the strategy of identifying an ex-group and antagonist, and likewise, emphasizing national identity; and third, the presence of conservative values. The frequencies and weighted percentages of each of these categories are presented below, and then the meaning of these results becomes clear.

Main Categories of Political Programs

State

The term State is mentioned 803 times, and synonyms for it (country and nation) are recurrent with 2,208 repetitions. When comparing the weighted frequency of this word in each match, the countries that emphasize it are Colombia (1.46%), Slovakia (1.08%), Brazil (0.88%), Latvia (0.81%). and Estonia (0.81%), while the political programs in Belgium (0.12%) and Norway (0.16%) mention it particularly little; there is even the atypical case of Finland, which does not mention it at all. Even the atypical case of Finland, which does not mention it, is presented. Even if it does not mention it, it does refer to it under other terms, such as government or the country’s name; Finland (22) and Finnish (25) are the two most frequent words in this political manifesto.

Nationalism and Exo Groups

Another element to highlight is the frequency of country names or names of people. All countries except three (Colombia, Brazil, and Turkey) have their country’s name within their five most frequent words. This frequency can be interpreted as emphasizing their nation and the need to highlight their national identity. When analyzing the frequency of the word nation, it was found that it is repeated 467 times in the programs and that the parties that most use it are the Danish People’s Party (0.93%), the National Alliance (0.67%), the Slovak National Party (0.62%), and EKRE (0.62%); these parties contrast with the Social Liberal Party (0.081%), Progress Party (0.082%), and the New Flemish Alliance (0.041%) that mention it little. Hand in hand with nationalism, it is interesting to identify the percentage of parties that use the strategy of explicitly determining an antagonist or ex-group. Among the 16 parties analyzed, only 6 are not explicit.

Conservative Values

Another relevant programmatic element is the emphasis on security. This word has more than 1,657 repetitions and is a priority element in the match indices of Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Latvia, Estonia, Colombia, and Turkey. This frequency makes sense because of the previously mentioned emphasis, shared by 62% of the parties studied, regarding the explicit need to protect a national endo group from an ex-group. It is also interesting to discover the high frequency of other words, such as law and order, with 915 and 888 repetitions. The emphasis of these words – security, law, and order – coincide with the values that characterize right-wing ideologies, which emphasize social control and political influence. In statistical terms, between 187,131 words analyzed in the total of the programs, this set of words represents 0.41%.

Volkens, Bara, and Budge’s (2001) analyses of the ideological positions of the parties’ political programs, or programs as they call them, highlighted 13 categories to define left and right. The left pole includes positions of interventions in market systems, extensions of the welfare state, peace, disarmament, and internationalism; while the right pole includes the free market economy, limitations of the welfare state, traditional morality, law and order, military, force, autonomy, and national culture. This operationalization allows them to identify the categories of left and right for theoretical and arithmetical reasons, concerning how many of these were included and how often (Casas et al. 2021). Thus, a similar analysis highlights the following: 62.5% of the parties studied emphasize security, law, order, and the preservation of traditional values.

In Search of Meanings

Once the findings found in the analysis of the programs are presented, three critical elements are explored: 1) the role of the State, 2) the dynamics of exo groups, and 3) the programmatic values.

The Role of the State

Three of the five countries that place the most significant emphasis on the State – Colombia (1.46%), Brazil (0.88%), and Estonia (0.81%) – also place particular emphasis on security, including within their six most frequent words the words security, combat, and defense. Further, from the analysis of these political manifestos, it is also striking that four out of five parties – Estonia, Brazil, Latvia, and Slovakia – refer to and emphasize the importance of increasing militarization.

Three categories are highlighted when continuing with the analysis of the word in context. First, in purely descriptive contexts, as it appears in this section of the Slovak political manifesto: “the strategic enterprises of the State and infrastructure of Slovakia” or “initiate a comprehensive program of State family policy” (our emphasis). The second refers to the State’s responsibilities, where the word State is followed by verbs such as has, may, should or must, which has 750 repetitions. All these verbs assign an obligation or responsibility to the State, making sense since many State references refer to the State’s ideal: “Building a just and efficient State,” “An efficiently functioning State must support,” and so on.

It implies a normative ideal of how a State should be and that the great majority emphasizes the need to strengthen and empower the States to ensure better and greater services to their citizens. Finally, our analysis of political party manifestos highlights the dual perception of the State as both the subject of criticism and the entity held responsible for societal problems. These manifestos often attribute social challenges to the State and its leadership, portraying them as incapable of resolving them: “The State institutions malfunction, as a consequence the collective problems of Poles are solved in a way that is far from optimal.”

The parties that most emphasize the State propose an increase in security and militarization, while the following parties refer to State investment in various areas such as culture, education, and budgets. Around the latter, the word tax stands out as one of the most frequent, with more than 510 appearances and 720 synonyms. The countries that most emphasize this word are Latvia (0.62%), Norway (0.58%), and Turkey (0.55%); and most of the references refer, on the one hand, to tax evaders and, on the other, to the reconfiguration that will make these sentences: “Building a new tax system is a priority,” “by expanding the tax base,” “this move will reduce the tax burden in citizens,” “friendly tax regulations.”

A strong State, which redefines taxes and invests in its population, can be understood as a supplier State, which coincides with European research on the Radical Right Populist Parties (RRPs), which asserts the importance of having protectionist, controlling, and even authoritarian States. It is essential to consider that the programs do not provide enough information to make such claims. However, some programs are particularly controlling, as is the case of Order and Justice in Lithuania, where the program even informs about the ideal population’s birth rate. However, this contrasts with parties such as the PSL in Brazil, which believes that the size of the State should be “reduced at all levels and in all spheres to make it more agile and efficient, as well as less corrupt.” It implies that, although this tendency allows us to affirm that the New Right-wing parties share the characteristic of promoting protectionist States, the degree of protection and thus control varies according to each party.

The Dynamics of Exo Groups

As previously evidenced in the frequency of words, there is a tendency for these parties to emphasize nationalist sentiments. Among the political manifestos that most highlight the nation, another shared characteristic is the emphasis on culture, a word that is among the six most frequent. The countries that emphasize the nation the most also emphasize cultural preservation through institutions such as the State, the family, education, the church, and the parties. A couple of particular examples are the party in Turkey, which emphasizes the education that women should receive: “Women’s education level will be raised, and it will be ensured that women will take a further role in business life and decision-making mechanisms and accordingly their social positions will be strengthened” (61); while the Austrian party emphasizes the importance of protecting and preserving traditional families, stating, “Yes to families instead of gender priority. The FPÖ is part of the family policy standpoint that the ‘core cell family’ is the foundation of Austrian society. Therefore, the first thing is to adequate financial security for the smallest of the State is indispensable” (3).

Regarding the three previously mentioned exceptions, which do not emphasize the name of their countries, they support this interpretation of the nationalist character by sharing a particular characteristic. Colombia, Brazil, and Turkey are the only three countries that do not belong to the European Union, which may mean that, unlike the others, they do not consider it a priority to highlight their national identity. This exacerbation of nationalism corresponds to a strategy of preservation of the endo group, which, according to Feldman and Johnston (2014), generates feelings of loyalty, obligations, and vigilance toward threats to the group. The latter is evidenced by the presence in the discourse of one or more ex-groups. Referring to an enemy or antagonist reinforces feelings of belonging and endo group identity. The presence of this dichotomy is consistent with the authors who label these parties as populist, understanding this concept as a discourse that separates society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people versus the corrupt elite (Betz 2018). In this text, we have decided to describe the presence of this phenomenon but not to use the concept of populism due to the multiple definitions and connotations that exist around it.

Mudde (2000), Akerman (2015), and Halikiopoulou (2018) had observed a nationalist characteristic in extreme right-wing parties, and they suggest that this characteristic is a result of the increasing anti-European sentiments and attitudes, as well as the rise of immigrants. The literature, the media, and even the politics explicitly or implicitly state that the favorite ex-group in the discourse of the New Right-wing parties is immigrants. However, it is interesting that, within the political manifestos, there is no emphasis on this phenomenon, and even the words or synonyms referring to immigration are scarce. Only in six countries (Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Norway, and Lithuania) is migration part of the index of the political manifestos, and this word is not even part of the 100 most frequent words. Other synonyms, such as foreign or foreigner, appear in 60th place, with only 215 repetitions in all political manifestos. Brazil’s PSL is a particular case since, although it does not emphasize immigrants, it does emphasize the need to protect and strengthen its borders to reduce drug and arms trafficking.

It does not mean that the parties do not refer to an ex-group; on the contrary, most political manifestos make explicit the existence of an ex-group that threatens the life and well-being of national citizens. First, in eight out of ten political manifestos, parties identify corrupt politicians and previous governments as antagonists. These include the Progress Party in Norway and Law and Justice in Poland, including bureaucracy and State institutions.

Second, foreigners are the ex-group of only four parties: the Freedom Party of Austria, Lega Nord, Progress Party, and Slovak National Party. In its political program, the Freedom Party of Austria affirms the importance of the integration of immigrants if they fulfil their duties and says explicitly that the homeland and the native population must be protected from immigrants. The party of Latvia is a particular case since it states that the antagonists are the government and the pro-Russian forces. Finally, it is interesting to note that the parties that do not make an exo group explicit are also parties with comprehensive political manifestos that instead present numerous problems and challenges to be solved. These are the Danish People’s Party, New Flemish Alliance, Order and Justice, and EKRE. The only exception is the Democratic Centre of Colombia, a party that, despite having a minimalist political manifesto, does not include any exo groups. This case shows the limitation of the analysis of the programs since, contrary to the program, several studies (Caicedo 2016; Cifuentes and Pino 2018) point out in the members’ discourse a strategy of the exo group that identifies the former president Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as the main antagonists. According to the analysis of its public documents, it is possible to affirm that the Democratic Center as a party does not use a strategy of designating determined exo groups, contrary to what its members manifest individually, both in networks and in their communications in the media. We can conclude that despite not explicitly including immigrants in their manifestos, these parties maintain rhetoric that excludes different segments of the population, prioritizing the services and rights of natives.

The current finding supports Zúquete’s (2015, 81) argument that right-wing parties are characterized by the inclusion of exclusionary logics in their political manifestos and dynamics, which are based on the “us versus them” strategies. This logic can be polymorphic and ambiguous in terms of the definition of those who should be excluded, enabling these parties to incorporate new groups and identities into their discourse of stigmatization.

The Values on the Right?

The preservation of traditional conservative values – including security, order, and law – has often been regarded as an interconnected set of principles. Among the political parties analyzed, 62.5% of them give significant weight to safeguarding these values. Colombia and Austria stand out with the highest percentages of these words, in contrast to the parties in Belgium and Finland, which hardly mention them. In addition to this, there were other words highlighted, including culture, education, and social, which are associated with social issues. Words related to the economy, such as tax, were repeated 510 times, while words related to migration, such as migrants, immigrants, and foreigners, were also frequently mentioned.

It is pertinent to read these results in light of the above. The New Right-wing parties consider that the State should be a provider, but a provider of what? By categorizing political manifestos based on their policy priorities, key questions can be addressed. Notably, the Democratic Centre, Progress Party, and Finns Party stand as exceptions, as they do not conform to the six policy areas highlighted. However, as depicted in the table below, variations in the significance and prioritization of each policy area are evident across the remaining parties.

Most parties emphasize values surrounding security, order, and law. This emphasis can be interpreted as the ideal of a State that seeks to control, monitor, and secure most spheres of society. It implies that the parties consider the existence of a threat against them, so they must protect themselves and establish order. In this way, the importance they attach to culture becomes meaningful, emphasizing cultural preservation as the fundamental core of their identity that must be protected.

Finally, another element that contradicts the assumptions regarding these parties is the issue of the environment and climate change. It is usually assumed that these parties omit everything related to this issue or consider it a minor concern; however, 62% of the political manifestos studied included this category. It coincides with the high frequency of the words nature and environment. Although this shows that most parties consider it to be a central programmatic issue at present, it does not mean that they all priorities it or address it in the same way; 56% of the parties mention it, only 18% are explicitly in favor of protectionist policies concerning the environment, and the others, such as the Finns Party in Finland or the Law and Justice in Poland, maintain ambiguous positions where they recognize its importance and also its sovereignty over the industry, investment, and development. Instead of affirming the importance of reducing pollution, the Finns Party in Finland justifies that industry can continue to produce gas emissions, as long as it is under control within its national borders, literally as long as “the chimney is in their territory.”

Exploring Thematic Diversity. Do New Rights Exist?

Several tools were used to construct the typology of the ideological dimension of the right-wing parties. First, the analysis of networks ⁵ that allow us to observe the main concepts in the political manifestos and how they relate to each other by structuring various thematic axes. The networks shown in figure 1 follow a criterion of centrality and intermediation, which represents a metric that quantifies the statistical importance of words. The parties are represented as a node within a network of concepts where the connection between words and the importance within the corpus is evident. It is pertinent to highlight that one of the main contributions of network analysis shows that all parties include and share most concepts and themes. It is evident in the multiple connections between the nodes, which connect with other concepts and various parties simultaneously. In turn, it confirms the thematic variation that exists in the programs of these parties due to how they omit or include topics in their programs and the differences in the emphasis they give to them.

Figure 1. Cooccurrence Network Analysis

Source: Authors’ elaboration based on political programs

Figure 1 shows that the parties’ emphasis on the State is confirmed; it is possible to observe the connections with multiple parties, their centrality, and the degree of intensity reflected in color. In other words, the nodes in blue represent a substantial degree of intensity in the ideology of the political programs. The four blue words in the figure coincide with what was previously found and reflect the reiterative character of the parties to refer to their citizens and the promises in the form of policies.

It is worth noting the proximity of the political parties in the analysis. As shown in the figure, the parties are represented as red squares, and they are significantly close to one another and connected by key concepts. It is also important to highlight the presence of relevant concepts that pertain to the categories chosen for analysis, such as those related to the economy (including terms such as economic, market, and tax), conservative issues (with words such as order, law, and protection), and social issues (with terms such as social, support, provide, and public), among others. However, although this analysis allows us to see how parties are connected and differentiated through the main concepts, it does not allow us to see the most central topics for parties and whether they are homogenous or heterogeneous.

In this sense, a principal component analysis (PCA) was estimated to identify how many thematic dimensions the ideology of the New Right-wing parties had from the database. If the PCA showed that the ideology was one dimensional, it is possible to appreciate that these parties can effectively enter under the label of New Right-wing parties. However, if this had more than one dimension, it would be difficult empirically to consider the existence of an ideological unity of the right-wing parties, at least by analyzing their programs (the results for each of the components can be observed in Table 3).

Table 3. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of Programmatic Emphasis in New-Right Parties

Source: Authors’ elaboration

The PCA can identify four principal components with an eigenvalue greater than 1.7. The results show that a thematic one-dimensionality cannot be identified in the parties’ programs catalogued as New Right-wing parties. Although some topics with a more significant agreement show a certain homogeneity, great heterogeneity is observed in others, and it is impossible to demonstrate that they have a common ideological agenda. Four scatter plots were made to explore this issue graphically (figure 2), where the relationship of the elements that showed a higher correlation in each of the components identified by the PCA was shown.

Figure 2. PCA Scatter Diagram

Source: Authors’ elaboration

In the first component, it is evident that most of the parties have the same number of references to security and order issues in their programs, so it is possible to affirm that there is a thematic congruence among them. The only case that moves away from this trend is the Democratic Centre, possibly due to the programmatic emphasis that its speech has had on increasing security in the country, accompanied by a deepening of subsidies to increase social cohesion, which is summarized in the slogan of this party “Mano firme y Corazón grande” (steady hand, big heart). While the Austrian People’s Party is characterized by not placing the same emphasis on security, its platform distinguishes itself by making several references to aspects of social policy.

A greater distance is observed between the New Right-wing parties in the second component. However, parties such as the EKRE, the Danish People’s party, the National Alliance, and the Slovak National Party greatly emphasize their programmatic proposals around culture, while Order and Justice emphasize education. Although most parties show that they do not place much emphasis on these issues, they do appear on their programs. It is on the issue of the economy and taxes that a greater emphasis is observed in most of the New Right-wing parties, although this thematic pattern is not transversal to all the parties analyzed, as can be seen in the parties on the lower side of the graph, while any party hardly emphasizes the issue of education except for Order and Justice.

Finally, in the fourth component, as seen previously, the issue of migration, unlike what was expected, is not such a frequent issue in most parties. However, it can be identified as a theme for the Finns Party, the Progress Party, and the Austrian People’s Party; so only in these three parties could it be said that this theme is frequent in their programs.

The component analysis results are consistent with what was identified in the concept network analysis. The issues identified in the analysis of the programs belong to an agenda that can be called “right wing.” Apart from environmental issues, despite their apparent ideological closeness, the PCA allows identifying the differences intuited in the thematic network analysis. These differences focus on specific emphases in their programs that make it difficult to classify these parties under the term New Right-wing parties, especially if this refers to an apparent ideological unity, which is not reflected at least in their political programs.

Specifically, the analysis built in this article allows us to show that similarity does not necessarily imply homogeneity. In this order of ideas, conceptually grouping a group of parties as New Right-wing parties can lead to underestimating their ideological variation and making it invisible that they are parties that adapt to specific demands of their political context, in a logic that obeys more to a catch-all party than to ideological and dogmatic parties.

The ideological corpus is thus largely made up of conservative values of order and the social. Having found in the qualitative analysis that, in the ideological dimension, the parties of the New Right-wing seek to promote a supplier State, this analysis allows us to identify investment in the social aspects, order and security for their citizens.

The PCA showed that the parties do not have a common thematic agenda that reflects an ideological homogeneity as parties of the New Right. Instead, considerable differences are appreciated in how they perceive the State, immigration, culture, the economy, and education. Similarly, in many of the programs, many of these issues do not receive much emphasis in programs and, in general, the parties that emphasize some of the issues identified in the content analysis in their programs are in the minority. A possible explanation for this is that they prefer to maintain a sufficiently broad stance to be able to adapt to contextual changes, thus approaching the behavior of catch-all parties, so it would be difficult to show from the programs whether the parties that are considered to fall under the label of New Rights have a thematic homogeneity. The obtained result necessitates a critical reevaluation of the extent to which the current label effectively categorizes political parties that share common thematic agendas, thereby revealing a transnational political movement. Alternatively, it may obscure political parties with conservative agendas that are confined to national issues and respond to them strategically. This, in essence, calls for a meticulous assessment of the label’s ability to accurately represent all parties, and whether it effectively captures their nuanced differences.

Conclusions

In this article, we aim to examine the ideological similarities and differences that exist among the New Right-wing parties in Europe and Latin America. While previous scholars, such as Ennser (2012) and Traverso (2019), have argued that these parties share a set of distinct ideological characteristics that distinguish them from conventional right-wing parties, our analysis of their programmatic content reveals a more complex reality. Although these parties do converge on issues such as law and order and nationalistic discourse, our investigation highlights a significant degree of ideological diversity among them.

In is thus pertinent to emphasize several elements. The variation among the parties concerning the ideological dimension shows that, although it exists and is essential to highlight, it is not as strong as it was supposed to be at the beginning of the research. It corresponds to the reflections of some authors, such as Cole (2005), who affirm that the actions of these parties are guided by pragmatic and contextual reasons more than by determined ideological positions. That means it is possible that the speeches of the parties of the New Rights correspond not so much to their ideological bases as a guide of their behavior but as electoral strategies that adapt to the current context. The above questions the idea that there is a new, unified transnational right wing based on their shared ideological characteristics and shows that their programs do not have a strong ideological emphasis. Instead, the parties use their ideologies to showcase electorally attractive issues, like any political party does.

The findings invite to the continuous reflection and investigation on the parties of the New Rights that continue claiming power, appearing in different and diverse places of the world. The study of political programs is limited for an ideological characterization; in future research, it would be necessary to complement the analysis of their ideological homogeneity or heterogeneity by analyzing the messages of their political cadres in networks, interviews, and speeches.

In further research, it is necessary to compare the parties labelled as New Right-wing with the traditional right-wing parties. Based on the empirical and theoretical contribution made in this research, it can be expected that the differences are not as significant as usually assumed in the literature. Other interesting research should include a more systematic and inductive analysis that would probably contain all the parties that won some threshold number of votes and evaluated their distance on some set of criteria. This would open the possibility that we might find some parties that are not thought of as “New Right” look like them in terms of their programs.

In this order, it is necessary to think that ideological similarities do not imply ideological homogeneity and coherence between New Right parties. Therefore, grouping these parties as an ideologically homogeneous and coherent phenomenon can lead to undervaluing their ideological distinctions and making it invisible that they are parties that fit the particular demands of their political environment, in a logic that follows more a catch-all party than to ideological and dogmatic parties.