Radical Right and the Minority Vote: A Rapprochement in Progress?

The supporter base of populist radical right parties and politicians is diversifying. Contemporary far right parties and candidates do not achieve electoral success by merely appealing to the stereotypical lower-educated white/ethnic majority male voter, but also appealing to women, ethnicized, racialized or gendered minority voters. This trend seems to apply equally to Europe, as well as the 2024 US presidential elections.
How to explain this trend? By drawing on examples from Estonia, Sweden and the Netherlands, this lecture will demonstrate, what strategies the populist radical right uses to seemingly broaden its appeal, and why. It outlines, how features ascribed to the populist radical right actually facilitate outreach to minority voters, and challenges some attributes associated with the success of fourth wave far right politics.
Mari-Liis Jakobson is Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the Tallinn University School for Governance, Law and Society, in Estonia. She is also the Principal Investigator of the starter grant project “Breaking Into the Mainstream While Remaining Radical: Sidestreaming Strategies on the Populist Radical Right (SIDESTREAM)“ funded by the Estonian Research Council and the Project Leader of “Political Inclusion in the Era of Radicalization (POLINERA)” funded by Nordforsk. Her research interests relate to populism, the radical right and migration and integration politics and policy. Her work has been published in several internationally recognised peer-reviewed journals, such as European Political Science, Contemporary Politics, Politics and Governance and International Migration. She is also co-editor of the book Anxieties of Migration and Integration in Turbulent Times (Springer, 2023).
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