Voting for Jobbik and the Front National

Abstract

The article explores the perceptions of socio-economic change among voters of two European neo-nationalist parties: Jobbik in Hungary and Front National in France. Building on Karl Polanyi’s ‘double-movement’ framework, it advances the argument that marketization of societies is prone to: first, generate individual- and group-level psychological experiences of nostalgia, relative deprivation, and status frustration; and relatedly, second, engender a demand for political refuge in the form of populist nationalism. To empirically substantiate my propositions, I draw on a variety of public opinion data to find the signs of these demand-driven mechanisms. Overall, I find that voters from the working and lower middle-classes, made insecure by socio-economic transformations, have resorted to the neo-nationalist solution as an alternative system of identification, and as a coping strategy. Jobbik and Front National have politicized the frame of the ‘sovereign people’ in congruence with citizens’ perceived frustrations and vulnerabilities. The analysis also suggests that disenfranchised voters are more discontent with the experience of socio-economic decline, and the feeling of betrayal by the elites, than are essentially intolerant towards minorities.