POP already treated extensively about the links between populism, the far right, and nostalgia. In the last year alone, we had a great talk with Francesca Melhuish, who analyzed British nostalgia and Brexit, as well as Ezgi Elçi, who studied Ottoman nostlagia in Turkey.
In this interview, Luca Versteegen shows that nostalgia predicts support for radical right parties and is associated with more negative evaluations of the government.
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In this interview, Ezgi Elçi talks about the populist use of the past. Collective nostalgia is about yearning for a time before a fall or a decline in society: populists often instrumentalize this feeling to generate an opposition between the pure people versus immoral elites. Unexpectedly, though, the nostalgia of populists is more about the future than the past. The elites allegedly betrayed the country in the past, but what really matters is to build a new society which, clearly, needs new (populist) elites.
We then move to discuss the case of Turkey, and how Erdogan’s party (AKP) exploits Ottoman nostalgia to legitimize contemporary policies: the secular elites are blamed because they cut ties between the people and the glorious Ottoman Empire, thus mobilizing mostly Islamic masses. We then talk about nostalgia in the UK, Hungary, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and the the links between nostalgia and populism.
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In this interview, Francesca Melhuish claims that nostalgia played a crucial role on both sides of the Brexit referendum.
To better understand British Euroscepticism, and the different factors that made the Leave campaign succeed, Melhuish looks at colonial as well as imperial nostalgia, but also at the role of ‘anti-nostalgic’ nostalgia. Moreover, we discuss the role of Dominic Cummings, the idealization of the past in times of crisis, Captain Tom, Winston Churchill, ethno-nationalism, and much more.
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