Nationalism as Populism: The Protestation Parties

Abstract

After analyzing extra-parliamentary nationalism, it pays to turn our focus to the nationalist strategy and political trajectory of the parties that present themselves as part of the opposition but participate in the legislative game and sit at the Duma. There are three such parties: the Communist Party, Vladimir Zhirinovski’s LDPR, and the Rodina formation, the latter having been partially replaced by Fair Russia. I define their nationalism as populist and argue against the label “fascist” that is sometimes applied to them. Populism here means political currents that base their legitimacy on an appeal to the people. Populist movements worldwide (Boulangism, Peronism, Poujadism, the French Front National, or J rg Haider’s Alliance for the Future of Austria) criticize representative democracy and argue against the elite for betraying the interests of the people and privileging its own. Nevertheless, every democracy, whether it is plebiscitary or participatory, regards itself as representative and includes the appeal to the people as one of its con-substantial elements. Political parties in democratic systems therefore seem to contain populism, albeit to various degrees, as an inherent element. Populism is traditionally divided into two trends. The first, protest populism, gives priority to the mouthpiece function and opposes the dem os -people to the “affluent”; the second, identity populism, prefers the nationalist perspective and presents the ef/mos-people as locked in struggle against “foreigners.”¹