Resisting ‘leftist dictatorship’? Memory politics and collective action framing in populist far-right street protest

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to cultural approaches to populism, focusing on the uses of memory in far-right protest politics. Conceptually, it develops a novel approach to memory politics suitable to investigate the uses of memory in grassroots mobilization by integrating scholarship on ‘the politics of memory’ and the ‘movement-memory nexus’. Also, it argues for the conceptualization of populism as a collective action frame to explain the emergence and persistence of populist street mobilization. Methodologically, the article draws from the critical case study of the Dresden-based ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident’ (PEGIDA), one of contemporary Europe’s most sustained instances of populist far-right protest. Based on the interpretive analysis of original ethnographic data generated in demonstrations in Dresden in 2019-20, it shows how PEGIDA deploys controversial reinterpretations of regional, national, and European history to sustain the populist master frame of ‘resistance against dictatorship’, articulating the antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ as a long-standing struggle of democracy against leftist totalitarianism. Uncovering the many ways in which PEGIDA strategically mobilizes the past, the analysis emphasizes the constitutive relationship between culture and populist protest, and demonstrates the dovetailing of populist and far-right ideational elements in grassroots mobilization.