How radical Right conspiracy theories drive populist mobilisation

We looked at different forms of conspiracy, their themes and typical representations. We noticed that threats are imagined as coming from outside or inside. For example, there is the fear of ‘Islamization’, the threat of ‘invasion’ or the ‘replacement’ of white European citizens. Enemy images are constructed and scapegoats are identified, leading to the resurgence of anti-Semitism for example. More generally, nostalgia fuels narratives about the decline, decadence and apocalyptic and suicidal self-destruction of Europe.

Since 2020, these narratives have been fueled aggressively by the COVID-19-pan-/infodemic. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories were constructed about the origin and intentional or unintentional dissemination of the virus, political countermeasures, epidemiological indicators (e.g., incidence, prevalence and mortality), potential treatment (i.e., medication) and prevention (i.e., vaccines), contributing to panic, disinformation, and political conflict. From the fringes, conspiratorial narratives have been propelled into the mainstream by entering the traditional news cycle.

Populist nostalgia

One effect of mainstreaming extreme positions in the media is the revival of authoritarianism as a political alternative to deliberative and representative democracy. Confronted with the existential threats communicated in conspiratorial narratives about Europe, sizable parts of the electorate turn to political forces promising stability.

Conspiracy theories support the spread of a culture of fear and thus can justify totalitarian or authoritarian policies. Strong imaginaries pretend to provide easy explanations when people feel threatened and insecure. Trapped in an eternal trade-off between freedom and security, the prominent Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued in his last book ‘Retrotopia’, that people long back to the authoritarian and coercive monster, ‘Leviathan’ as described by 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes after the English civil war. For Hobbes, the Leviathan is an entity outside ourselves forcing us to submit to its power, ‘for our best’.

Such an external authority not only promises security, but also a paradoxical release from the suffocating freedom of choice that has apparently dominated the previous (neo)liberal world order. People readily surrender their personal autonomy to a new Leviathan and thus they are also prepared to abandon the advanced rule of law which originally was intended to mitigate different societal interests and to safeguard our civil liberties.

This is what we see happening in real-time in Poland and Hungary, where the independence of the judiciary (and of academia) is being systematically dismantled by populist governments, putting them at odds with EU standards.

On a subtler level, as illustrated by Brexit, expert knowledge is being rejected in favour of simplistic decision-making processes that promise to channel the unmediated ‘will’ of the people, even concerning profoundly complex matters such as international trade and European integration.

This push towards neo-authoritarianism feeds into the populist revival around the globe in which leaders such as Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Victor Órban in Hungary, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia and the like promise to act as strongmen of the people, undisturbed by checks and balances of expert opinion, economic realities, and scientific evidence.

‘Us’ and ‘them’

There is a measurable correlation between populist Euroscepticism and conspiracy beliefs, both of which are inherently related in their rejection of traditional elites, democratic procedures that include checks and balances, and the representation of multiple interests in complex compromises.

Conspiracy theories can be read as narratives establishing clear demarcations between ‘us’ – the people – and ‘them’ – the conspiring elites. In this function, they provide meaning to populist imagination, self-images and victimization. Populists have been able to bypass the previously powerful gatekeepers of mainstream media, and instead bring their combative and polarizing political messages directly to the public, undermining domestic democratic as well as supranational institutions such as the EU.

In the case of Hungary, conspiracy theories are used in the top-down consolidation of populist rule in a rhetoric of fear and enemy images. Such a ‘culture of fear’ has become a factor in the international system, in which populist regimes such as Russia engage in status and symbol politics through repeated disinformation and destabilization campaigns, undermining trust in the negotiated order of international politics.

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