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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 149–172

Chapter 6
Building left-wing populism in Denmark

Moving far away from the right

In the Danish context, populism is usually associated with the radical right-wing. However, the left-wing Red-Green Alliance (the RGA), which defines itself as socialist, has carried out a populist turn coinciding with a remarkable electoral growth from 2.2% in 2007 to 7.8% in 2015. I argue that the RGA presents a hybrid form of left-wing populism in which socialist and populist articulations converge. The discourse is socialist since equality (or struggle against inequality) is the main value; the materialist approach is dominant; and there are plenty of references to class, working-class and class struggles. It is populist in the sense that inequality is portrayed as a conflict against the elite; and there is an attempt to constitute a new collective subject named “community”. Moreover, the RGA’s opposition towards the EU connects with the populist resistance to global neoliberalism and the defense of national sovereignty.

Keywords: left-wing populism, inequality, community, neoliberalism, discourse theory, Denmark, Red-Green Alliance (RGA)
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Radical left and the populist moment
  • Conditions for a populist left-wing party in Denmark
  • In search for the collective subject: Community
  • Against the elite
    • An alternative to the politics of necessity
    • An alternative to the European Union
  • Conclusion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.07agu
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