Changing Enemies of the Western far-right: from Immigrants to Europe

Summary

The essence of the shift can be summarized as immigration still being a dominant issue in the far-right parties’ 2014 EP-campaigns, but now as a part of a more general Euroreject agenda. In 2014 migration is not as much of a cultural phenomenon, a ‘scarecrow’, any more than it was in 2009, in the wake of the mass immigration of asylum seekers from the Middle East.

Consequently, there is a substitution of migration as a cultural group-threat with a more systematic cross-country Euro-reject stance in which the rejection of the European establishment serves as a common cause for the effects of migration on the economic hardships of the majority. This also reveals a unique, far-right logic of conspiracy which treats migration as only a visible symptom of the real enemy working behind the scenes, the European Union.

Read the complete analysis here (pdf, 142 kB).