No guts, no glory: How framing the collective past paves the way for anti-immigrant sentiments

Populist Right-Wing Parties (PRWPs) have made a remarkable comeback since the 1980s, especially in Western Europe. In this paper we argue that in order to explain such successes we need to understand the creative way in which PRWP leaders frame the collective past, present and future. We examined speeches of PRWP leaders in France, The Netherlands, and Belgium and examined in each of these unique contexts how these leaders instill collective nostalgia and perceptions of discontinuity between past and present to justify a tougher stance on immigration, asylum-seeking and multiculturalism. We found that these PRWP leaders use temporal narratives about history and identity to persuade their audience that (a) our past is glorious, our future is bleak, (b) we know who brought the country down, (c) we were once glorious because we were tough, (d) we need to be tough once more, and (e) we are the only party prepared to take on “the enemy”. We conclude that PRWP leaders not only feed collective angst and fear of losing collective roots, they also provide (potential) followers with a historicized justification for harsher treatment of migrants and minorities, arguing that history has shown that the nation's survival depends on its ability to be unflinching.