Case selection

To capture the welfare nostalgia of PRRPs and categorise its manifestations, this article analyses and compares the welfare-nostalgic narratives and (master) frames in the electoral discourse of three parties: the FPÖ, the PVV and the Sweden Democrats (SD). Although most contemporary PRRPs in Western Europe are committed to welfare chauvinism in some form and degree, these three parties can be seen as early adopters with a particularly outspoken welfare chauvinist profile (Akkerman et al., Reference Akkerman, Akkerman, Lange and Rooduijn2016; Norocel, Reference Norocel2016; Rathgeb, Reference Rathgeb2020; Schumacher & van Kersbergen, Reference Schumacher and Kersbergen2016). FPÖ and PVV initially advocated the “winning formula” of authoritarian nativism and economic liberalism (Kitschelt, Reference Kitschelt1995) but moved towards strong pro-welfare positions during the 2000s – in particular after the 2008 financial crisis. Their strategy since has been “to reframe welfare state issues as immigration issues and vice versa,” as Akkerman (Reference Akkerman, Akkerman, Lange and Rooduijn2016, p. 149) writes with regard to the PVV. The FPÖ “rebranded itself as the ‘social homeland party’ […] putting its pro-welfare self-image front and center,” which according to Ennser-Jedenastik (Reference Ennser‐Jedenastik2016, p. 416) “clearly put [it] back on the winning track.” In contrast, SD originated as an extreme-right fringe movement but has attempted to establish itself as a mainstream, conservative welfarist party since the 2000s. In that process, it has used “folkhem [ie welfare state] nostalgia as a means to consolidate a coherent political platform for its welfare chauvinist agenda” (Norocel, Reference Norocel2016, p. 372).

Besides sharing a strong commitment to welfare chauvinism, SD, FPÖ and PVV operate in “small states in world markets” (Katzenstein, Reference Katzenstein1985). Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands combine high levels of economic openness with generous welfare provisions and a large public sector. These features are intimately connected with a shared history of democratic corporatism, based on institutionalised partnerships between state, capital and labour in socioeconomic affairs. At the same time, the countries organised their welfare state and the execution of social policy in different ways, respectively representing a social democratic, conservative-corporatist and hybrid regime (Esping-Andersen, Reference Esping-Andersen1990; van Oorschot, Reference van Oorschot2006). Since they reflect dissimilar trajectories in political history, such disparities could be associated with different collective memories of the welfare state and – by implication – different expressions of nostalgia.

Among these PRRPs, I nevertheless expect to encounter a common core of welfare nostalgia that is relatively indifferent to the institutional design and ideational makeup of welfare arrangements. If this hypothesis holds up and the three PRRPs indeed express a similar welfare nostalgia in their discourse, this would suggest that the welfare chauvinist agenda of the European populist radical right draws upon – and reproduces – a rhetorical repertoire that transcends the political, economic and cultural environment of the nation-state within which welfarism is generally organised. Welfare nostalgia could then be considered a radical-right populist and welfare chauvinist “master frame” with transnational purchase.Footnote ¹ Domestic context would still shape the political opportunity structure in which PRRPs act, since “different types of social programmes […] vary in their degree of vulnerability to welfare chauvinistic appeals” (Ennser-Jedenastik, Reference Ennser‐Jedenastik2018, p. 294); however, the expression of welfare nostalgia would not be determined by those institutional constraints.

Data and methods

In the empirical section below, I assess in detail whether we can identify a generic frame of welfare nostalgia as expressed by welfare chauvinist PRRPs. The analysis is based on a set of electoral manifestos, speeches and campaign videos. Apart from their available quantity, these source types were chosen for their public and persuasive nature. Given that election discourse primarily serves to convince and mobilise the electorate, nostalgia is expected to be more salient than, for example, in the more professional and less visible atmosphere of parliamentary debates. The different sources are complementary in their attention to policy questions, ideological positions and collective memory, which allows a rich analysis of problem definitions and proposed solutions to the troubles of the welfare state. Party manifestos were gathered from the Manifesto Project Database (Volkens et al., Reference Volkens, Burst, Krause, Lehmann, Matthieß, Merz, Regel, Weßels and Zehnter2020) while speech transcripts and videos were collected from the parties’ respective websites. All translations are the author’s own. The material is listed in the appendix.

The analysis is concerned with PRR discourse between 2008 and 2018. In this timeframe, three national parliamentary elections took place in Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, which means that there is a relatively large amount of comparable material available. Furthermore, during this period, PVV (2010) and SD (2010 and 2014) experienced their breakthrough and FPÖ made its comeback (2008). These successes are not unrelated to the political upheavals that punctuated these years: the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis and the migration crisis, which are likely to have nourished welfare chauvinism across the EU (Marx & Naumann, Reference Marx and Naumann2018; Otjes et al., Reference Otjes, Ivaldi, Jupskås and Mazzoleni2018). At the same time, socioeconomic issues gained salience for PRRPs and their voters (Lefkofridi & Michel, Reference Lefkofridi, Michel, Banting and Kymlicka2017; Rovny & Polk, Reference Rovny and Polk2020) while mainstream parties accommodated the welfare chauvinist positions of their populist competitors (Schumacher & van Kersbergen, Reference Schumacher and Kersbergen2016).

The source material is examined through qualitative content analysis. The analytical setup is derived from Mols and Jetten’s (Reference Mols and Jetten2014) study on anti-immigration frames of the collective past in PRR discourse. The first round of analysis consisted of highlighting the passages where the parties referred back to, or hinted at, the welfare state and its historical trajectory. This was assisted by a keyword search of terms related to social policy and collective memory (eg “welfare,” “social,” “community,” “history,” “past,” translated accordingly). The subsequent close readings of the relevant sections served to deconstruct the rhetorical strategies which the PRRPs used to frame (the decline of) the welfare state, mobilise their audience and legitimate their policy positions. In this second stage, I used a range of questions to identify the diagnosis and prognosis in this welfare-nostalgic discourse, as well as the sub-dimensions of its rhetorical strategy. These analytical questions were inspired by Wodak’s (Reference Wodak, Wodak and Meyer2001, pp. 72–73) guidelines for discourse-historical analysis and can be summarised as follows:

• • Diagnosis: what used to be so good about the welfare state – and what caused its problems?

1. (1) Appellation: which (affective) label is used to describe the past?

2. (2) Periodisation: when did the “golden age” of the welfare state begin and end?

3. (3) Evaluation: which qualities of this historical period are highlighted?

4. (4) Change: how is the “turnaround” of the welfare state narrated and explained?

5. (5) Agency: who are portrayed as protagonists and antagonists?

• • Prognosis: what should we do in the present to ensure that these good times will come back?

The next section uses the findings of the content analysis to reconstruct the welfare-nostalgic discourse of FPÖ, PVV and SD. The first part sets out the rhetorical tropes that underpin their diagnostic framing of the welfare state and its history; it then moves to the prognostic frames and the differences that were found among the parties. This eventually feeds into a summary and an overview of the rhetorical strategies that underpin the welfare nostalgia of these PRRPs, in line with the analytical dimensions outlined above.

The welfare-nostalgic diagnosis

At first sight, the discourse of neither party qualifies as restorative nostalgia – ie a determination to break radically with the present and return to the past. There is a shared impression among the parties that there is hope for the future. As PVV leader Geert Wilders declared in his 2010 election manifesto, “we still believe that the most beautiful days of the Netherlands lie ahead of us” (PVV, 2010a). At the same time, there are recurrent indications of banal or pastoral nostalgia – a sentiment of lost tradition, certainty and simplicity – in the texts under analysis. This sense of nostalgia is expressed through the nearly ubiquitous frame that life in the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria has changed for the worse in recent decades, not least when it comes to collective welfare provision. When we trace the PRR diagnosis of the welfare state and its history, a nostalgic narrative with a number of common features emerges.

In this nostalgic view, the decades after the end of World War II – usually not defined more precisely – represent the glory days of the welfare state. These are understood as a time of social cohesion and reciprocity when citizens trusted and looked after one another out of a sense of “neighbourly love,” as the title of the 2013 FPÖ manifesto (Liebe deine Nächsten) suggests (FPÖ, 2013a). Through hard work and cooperation, these postwar societies achieved “a welfare and a solidarity that did not know its equal” (PVV, 2010a). This supposedly made it possible to set up extensive programmes of social assistance for the (deserving) needy: the working poor, the elderly, the disabled, the sick and the unjustly unemployed. As might be expected of banal nostalgia, the trope of a historically strong social safety net is rarely elaborate enough to identify concrete policies. Among the three parties, the political discourse of SD is most explicit in its nostalgia for the “solidaristic” past, relying heavily on the powerful myth of the folkhem or “people’s home” (cf. Bergmann, Reference Bergmann2017; Norocel, Reference Norocel2016). This concept is used to convey the hope that, as party leader Jimmie Åkesson put it in a 2017 speech, “class conflict and fragmentation are abandoned – in mutual agreement – in favour of […] the community that is necessary for every human being” (SD, 2017). A similar sentiment is conveyed by the FPÖ’s imagery of the “social homeland.” This sense of historical community is at the core of PRR welfare nostalgia.

However, nostalgia only sets in with the feeling that one has lost something dear; the good old days must somehow have ended. Again, the exact dating of this historical change is rarely specified but the parties seem to identify it with the last quarter of the twentieth century. This would coincide with the “silent revolution” in cultural values, the backlash against which has formed an important motivation behind support for the populist radical right (Inglehart & Norris, Reference Inglehart and Norris2016). In the examined discourse, this turnaround is primarily portrayed as a crisis of political will rather than the result of societal change. It is alleged that the “caste” of politicians betrayed the socioeconomic needs of the native people in favour of their own narrow interests, as well as those of immigrants and “Eurocrats.”

In general, the PRRPs fault the political mainstream en bloc for this historical development. As Åkesson deplored, the established parties “promise a lot of things, from left to right. But these promises not seldom lack real substance. They mean nothing” (SD, 2014). Special blame is reserved, however, for the representatives of social democracy. All parties explicitly recognise and praise the contribution of social democratic prime ministers – Willem Drees, Bruno Kreisky, Per Albin Hansson – to the creation of the welfare state. Their ambition to emancipate the lower classes is presented as a mission driven by patriotism, which has allegedly been lost on present-day social-democratic career politicians. The latter, so the PRR narrative goes, are nothing more than an ideologically indiscernible component of the “left-wing elite” (PVV) or “left-liberals” (SD) who prioritise multiculturalism and European integration over the well-being of “our own people.”

The other prime actors who attract blame for the retrenchment of the welfare state are the European Union and migrants. The deepening of European cooperation is typically presented as an ever-increasing “waste of money” that ought to have been spent on domestic welfare. Moreover, especially in the context of the Eurozone crisis, “Brussels” is reproached for its strict rules that put limits on a sovereign fiscal agenda. “Foreigners” are condemned even more strongly for their negative impact on the fate of the welfare state. They are accused of making too small a contribution to the economy whilst enjoying many social benefits, making the costs of the welfare system unsustainable. At its heart, the nostalgic diagnosis of PVV, SD and FPÖ rests upon the welfare chauvinist dichotomy: politicians have to make a choice for either welfare or immigration, which are mutually exclusive. Over the last decades, this dilemma is seen to have been resolved in the wrong way. “Especially in the recent past, the welfare state has reached the limits of its capacity due to waves of immigration,” the 2017 FPÖ manifesto notes (FPÖ, 2017a). But, as in an act of political defiance, the title of the 2014 SD manifesto declares, “we choose welfare!” (SD, 2014).

At the opposite side of the spectrum of blame in PRR welfare nostalgia, the parties place the elderly, whom they often describe as the “reconstruction generation.” This group is assigned two crucial roles in the nostalgic narrative: it serves both as a historical protagonist – in the heroic position of having built up their country and the continent from the ruins of war, thus heralding the heyday of national welfarism – and as the foremost victim duped by the political establishment. In the latter role, this generation is typically equated with the broader category of “pensioners.” They feature, for example, in the 2018 SD manifesto as the persons “who have built Sweden and made it into a fantastic country to live in,” yet whose situation has deteriorated due to the political elite’s mismanagement of migration and economic policy (SD, 2018a). In a similar vein, the 2017 FPÖ election programme deplores that “over the last ten years, especially for our seniors, who built Austria up again, life has become markedly more expensive” (FPÖ, 2017a). Next to the elderly, other socially disadvantaged groups also play a role in this nostalgic discourse. They figure not as heroes, though, but only as the victims of the policies implemented by the “progressive elites.”

In response to the perceived decline in the quality of life, the PRRPs advocate a response that has elements of both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia. Overall, their focus is aimed at bringing back the solidaristic community of the past through a nativist and populist political agenda, once again putting “the people” and their welfare front and centre. This would allegedly require significantly reduced levels of (if not an end to) immigration as well as a sense of national pride and unity. In 2017 Åkesson called for “mutual understanding and community in times of fragmentation and polarisation” (SD, 2017). On the economic level, the parties do not only express their wish to bring back the old level of social support – that is for native citizens – but also call repeatedly for a rebalancing of rights and duties, most saliently expressed in the notion that “work should pay off” again. In these matters of immigration, citizenship, welfare and work, nostalgia appears in its most restorative form, in the sense that it suggests that a return to the cultural and socioeconomic circumstances of the postwar decades is both feasible and desirable.

It must be noted, however, that these restorative ambitions are equivocal across the board. What partially makes this nostalgic call for action more ambiguous is its pairing with an anti-nostalgic rhetoric. As indicated above, the parties are explicit about their forward-looking attitude, time and again distancing themselves from the politics of the past. “Those who choose to vote for the Sweden Democrats have understood how the old parties have abused their power and have understood how they have destroyed our country,” Åkesson proclaimed in a 2018 speech (SD, 2018b). This quotation serves as a convenient illustration of Kenny’s (Reference Kenny2017, pp. 261–262) observation “that anti-nostalgia and nostalgic sentiments can be powerfully intertwined.” In effect, the wish to rehabilitate the welfare regime of yore gives legitimacy to radically new political experiments. This desire to do away with the “old politics” of domestic and European elites is also evident in the ambition to reform various social policy fields – healthcare and social care, unemployment insurance, pensions – in order to meet the challenges of the future. At the same time, the parties diverge markedly in the ways in which they present and legitimise such reform plans. These and related differences between the parties are the subject of the next section.

Varieties of welfare nostalgia: from diagnosis to prognosis

Given that every political community has its assemblage of collective memories through which citizens remember the past, there will be differences in the content of the nostalgic frames and tropes which political parties deploy in public discourse. Thus, the PRRPs examined in this paper invoke different collective imaginaries – the Swedish “people’s home,” the Austrian “social homeland,” the “caring state” and “father Drees” in the Netherlands – that are embedded in wider discourses about national history. In part, these nostalgic images reflect divergent experiences of welfare state creation, World War II and postwar reconstruction. This explains why the welfare-nostalgic narrative of SD occasionally refers back to the 1930s, while those of PVV and FPÖ only relate to the period from 1945 onwards. Nonetheless, their nostalgic diagnosis relies on comparable sentiments and provides an analogous framing of the welfare past.

In contrast, the prognostic dimension of the parties’ welfare nostalgia is marked by substantial differences. Their relatively similar understanding of welfare state history translates into different nostalgic political agendas. In other words, while the parties concur on the definition and analysis of the problem – the creation and decline of the welfare state – they are at odds about its solution: how can the “welfare paradise lost” be recreated for current and future generations? I identify three diverging ways in which the PRRPs frame the connection of the past to the present and the future in their electoral discourse. These variants of nostalgic prognosis are labelled “modernisation,” “conservation” and “reaction.”

The concept of nostalgic modernisation is borrowed from Kalinin (Reference Kalinin2011), who introduced it to characterise the deployment of Soviet nostalgia by political elites in contemporary Russia. This apparent paradox expresses the notion that

Briefly put, nostalgic modernisation refers to a pragmatic reconciliation between nostalgia and the drive to modernise: the idea that the further progress of the nation is dependent on adjusting its institutional arrangements to the (material) demands of the current age, while the past achievements and ideological ambitions of earlier generations are retained as a continuous source of inspiration. This sort of framing is most visible in the discourse of the Sweden Democrats. In its manifestos and the speeches of party leader Åkesson, there are recurrent calls for a modern and modernised people’s home. To that end, the party proposes introducing various reforms that would overhaul the technical and administrative organisation of the welfare state. This includes allowing the private delivery of health and social care, partial relaxation of employment protection, reform of the employment services and many other (relatively detailed) policy initiatives.

In view of these policy proposals, it is understandable why Fenger (Reference Fenger2018, pp. 203–204) categorised the social programme of SD as an agenda of “social investment” rather than “welfare nostalgia.” Nevertheless, its commitment to social investment and modernisation does not offset its penchant for nostalgia. Time and again, the party clarifies that the ultimate purpose of these reforms is to safeguard the spirit of solidarity and community among (native) Swedes. As Åkesson affirmed in 2017, in the “modern people’s home we dare to be proud of our history, proud of our culture, proud of what has been created and cultivated here in generations” (SD, 2017). A year later, he conveyed a similar message: “through Swedish aspiration, we recreate a safe and cohesive Sweden. A modern people’s home, on the basis of freedom and community” (SD, 2018b). Thus, nostalgia and modernisation are fused into one political frame.

By comparison, the PVV’s nostalgic welfare agenda is framed from a more exclusively retrospective vantage point. It puts little – if any – emphasis on policy reform, and concentrates on the maintenance of social provisions in their “original” form. The keyword in its discourse is behoud (“preservation”), that is preventing the further deterioration of the welfare state. As the 2010 electoral programme underlined, this meant that there would be no changes to “unemployment insurance, no relaxation of termination law, the public transport card and student grants remain in place […] no increase in deductible excess in health care and the retirement age remains 65 years” (PVV, 2010a). Its 2017 manifesto contained even fewer social policy proposals, apart from the abolition of health insurance deductibles, a return to retirement at 65, and a reversal of austerity in the care sector (PVV, 2017a). These plans are not elaborated upon, but it is significant that they appear under the header of Nederland weer van ons! (“the Netherlands ours again”). The welfare nostalgia in the PVV’s discourse, then, legitimates not just the retention of social policy as is but a return to how it used to be – or, more accurately, as it is perceived and portrayed to once have been. The tension between past and present is ultimately resolved in favour of the former; in this respect, the prognostic framing in the PVV’s welfare discourse approximates Boym’s ideal-type of restorative nostalgia. I classify this manifestation of welfare nostalgia as “nostalgic reaction.”

The nostalgic orientation of the FPÖ is more ambiguous than that of SD and PVV, taking somewhat of a middle position. Its 2017 economic programme contains repeated calls for the modernisation of the Austrian economy – including a “modern infrastructure” and “modern [i.e. less progressive] tax policy” (FPÖ, 2017b) – but these demands make no references to the party’s nostalgic vision of the welfare state. With respect to welfare issues, the FPÖ’s stance is more equivocal than that of the PVV: while it emphasises the preservation or expansion of social provisions such as pensions and family allowances, it less explicit about its desire to return to the past. It appears to suggest that the best way of preserving the historical spirit of the welfare state is to keep things (mostly) as they are. The 2013 party manifesto condemns the fact that the “distribution of burdens and benefits is unfair: the masses are charged; from the needy, money is taken away and cut back” (FPÖ, 2013a) but does not mention any solutions other than the expansion of family allowances. More generally, its discourse does not indicate the need for social policy reform – other than that “those who can help themselves, but do not want to do so” should be excluded from the welfare state’s reach (FPÖ, 2013a). Because the FPÖ’s prognosis of welfare policy is fixated on the present and does not highlight the tensions with either the past or the future, this frame type is designated as “nostalgic conservation” (Table 1).

Table 1. Overview of welfare nostalgia features.

Overall, there appears to be no direct connection between the welfare regimes in which PRRPs operate and the described variation in nostalgic prognoses. The Sweden Democrats, who rely strongly on collective memories of the social-democratic welfare state – epitomised by the notion of the “people’s home” – in fact, have the most outspoken preference for reform and retrenchment. In the context of the Dutch hybrid welfare state, and more equivocally in the conservative-corporatist Austrian regime, PVV and FPÖ refrain from advocating an overhaul of the social system or even argue for a policy reversal. As is hardly surprising, the institutional design of the welfare state and its policy technicalities play a negligible role in PRR nostalgia for the postwar era. Much more salient in their discourse are the sentimental values and principles that are seen to have buttressed the welfare state: community and solidarity among the vaguely defined (yet clearly restricted) deserving inhabitants of the nation-state.

To my mind, a more convincing explanation for the different nostalgic orientations of these PRRPs lies in their specific profiles and the political cultures, rather than the economic-institutional structures, in which they participate. There appears to be a link between a party’s nostalgic prognosis and its position in the domestic political landscape. Over the last decade, SD has made significant efforts to normalise itself politically, emphasizing its self-perception as a “social-conservative party with a nationalist ethos” (SD, 2011) to distance itself from its neo-Nazi roots. Even as it remains in opposition to national politics, the cordon sanitaire against the party has been weakened (Backlund, Reference Backlund2016; Jungar, Reference Jungar, Heinisch and Mazzoleni2016). This gradual normalisation cannot be understood in isolation from its commitment to a (nostalgic) modernisation of the social system, through which SD has attempted to establish itself as an affiliate of the bloc of centre-right parties (Wingborg, Reference Wingborg2016).

The PVV, in contrast, has paid scant attention to (social) policy formulation in recent years. In 2012, it withdrew its support from the right-of-centre coalition government it had tolerated after the 2010 elections over austerity measures that included cuts to state pensions and other provisions. The party has since (once again) operated at the margins of Dutch politics: it “has become more isolated politically and the goal of office-seeking has been moved further from sight” (Akkerman, Reference Akkerman, Akkerman, Lange and Rooduijn2016, p. 163). A similar dynamic affected the FPÖ, whose government stint in the early 2000s proved internally divisive and electorally harmful. After the departure of a group of policy-seeking moderates from the party, it sought to engineer a comeback by restyling itself as the social homeland party (Heinisch & Hauser, Reference Heinisch, Hauser, Akkerman, Lange and Rooduijn2016). This translated into a nostalgic-conservative welfare agenda, the main objective of which was to oppose retrenchment for the deserving population. Following the 2017 elections, the FPÖ again entered government; it left in 2019, mired by scandal. It remains to be seen how this development has influenced its nostalgic diagnosis and prognosis of the welfare state.