Europe: North and South

The decade following the Great Recession saw the consolidation or rise of diverse forms of populism across Europe, most prominently exclusionary populist parties in the North and inclusionary populist parties in the South. This chapter engages in comparative content analysis of the electoral manifestos of the Dutch Party for Freedom (the Netherlands), Freedom Party of Austria and Alternative for Germany set against those of Podemos (Spain), SYRIZA (Greece) and the Five Star Movement (Italy), identifying internal variation in Europe’s Northern and Southern populisms. European populist discourses differ across cases and over time in terms of the degree to which they are present, the dimensions they stress and the social groups they target for exclusion or inclusion, while they are responsive to national political factors. Our findings qualify the immutability of the North/exclusionary-South/inclusionary pattern and highlight the importance of political agency in explaining the emergence of different populism types.