Immigration is one of the effects, one of the symptoms of the ill-functioning and outdated machine that is the elite. Immigration and asylum-seeking have been frequent topics in public debates for years. The number of refugees making their way from war-torn regions of the world to Sweden makes the citizen versus asylum-seeker dichotomy highly relevant for social psychology research about discursively constituted identities. That is to say: how social-categorizations, emotions and attitudes are created in text and talk. Today, public opinion is largely produced online, this makes it possible to explore the motivations, strategies and goals of “the nonracist racist” on Facebook. This study utilizes a dual-edged approach in that coding is done both from an inductive- and a deductive direction. It adheres to a discursive psychology approach and follows Potter and Edward’s (2001) situated, action-oriented and constructed features of discourse. These theoretical features inform the deductive coding and are contextualized using Sakki and Pettersson’s (2016) three representation of otherness with subsequent six discourses produced by the populist radical right. Findings indicate that cultural comparison constructing cultural incompatibility is the main rhetorical resource for constructing the citizen versus asylum-seeker dichotomy. However, this dichotomy is not the most dominant “us and them” construction by the “nonracist racist”. “The elite versus the people” is the most common “us and them” construction. It carries significant weight that the seemingly unfiltered expressions of hatred on anti-immigration pages on Facebook are more concerned with what “we” are doing wrong rather than what is wrong with any “deviant others”. It is more about an internal clash of moral compasses than it is about a supposed clash of civilizations. Along with the occasioned feature of discourse, this partly explains why anti-immigration advocates for example position themselves as victims or defenders.

Over the past two decades there has been a significant increase in the support for radical-right populist parties in Europe. Simultaneously the income inequality has been rising. The aim of this thesis is to examine how income inequality affects the support for populist radical-right parties. To achieve this, we study the support for the Sweden Democrats, a radical-right populist party, and income inequality measured as the Gini coefficient. Using Swedish municipality level panel data of the election years from 2002 to 2014, a fixed effects-method is employed to examine the relationship between the Gini coefficient and support for the Sweden Democrats. Interestingly, the results show a robust statistically significant negative relationship between income inequality and support for the Sweden Democrats. Thus, our findings indicate that increased inequality decreases the support for the Sweden Democrats.

In the past decade, scholars have discovered how European populist radical right parties have increasingly resorted to instrumentalizing issues of gender equality within broader anti-immigration and anti-Islam campaigns. This phenomenon has been coined as femonationalism by sociologist Sara R. Farris; building on her theorization, this thesis aims to investigate thisfurther in a Nordic context by examining whether and how femonationalism can be traced within the politics of the Finns Party (FP) and the Sweden Democrats (SD). This has been achieved by conducting an ideational analysis of the parties’ official election material and policy documents provided on their respective party websites. The analytical framework applied is political scientist Mats Lindberg’s VDP-triad, in which the central task is to capture the proposed value, descriptive, and prescriptive statements in a text. The thesis’ main findings indicate that for the FP, femonationalism could most closely be linked to their policy implications. Here, the FP advocates for extensive anti-immigration and anti-Islam policies, while also promoting policies that uphold a traditional gender order amongst Finns. For the SD, femonationalism was mostly found in their expressed value statements concerning the supremacy of western values in relation to gender equality, which migrants are supposed to internalize and respect. Implications for future research are to examine the phenomenon of femonationalism further in different country settings in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how it presents itself.

This thesis forms a report including human security and economic aspect experienced by three groups that are Radical right, Radical left, and the refugees. The examined theory is based on the securitisation of the EU sphere since the 2014/2015 refugee crisis and the Eurozone crisis. Economic perspective has a place in the public discourse inside the EU sphere, presenting moral dilemmas and political obligations of aiding the refugees in ethical scrutiny of human rights and human security.However, the de-radicalisation of the EU sphere deserves pointing attention to radicalised individuals and the reasons supporting both radicalisation and isolation. Therefore, human security assessment is made in three different groups to prioritise all the groups in the research: The refugees have participated with the presentatives of Radical right and Radical left ideology in the interviews. Data collected from the interviews and literature review include background information on the causes of the refugee movement, the EU-sphere migration process, and the organisations related to administrating and supporting the refugees and asylum-seeking process. The data of the research could be used by report makers, educators, and scholars.

The purpose of this study is to examine the connection between trade union membership and radical right attitudes in Poland. To achieve this survey data from European Social Survey (ESS) was used. One of the questions that the study aims to answer is whether trade union members are more likely to display radical right attitudes. Another is which trade union members are more likely to sympathize with the radical right, and the third question is whether there is any difference between previous and current trade union members in regard to radical right attitudes. Four hypotheses were formulated based on previous research regarding Polish history, the radical right and its ties to the catholic church, as well as populism and nationalism. The study found that those who have previously been part of a trade union are more likely to have radical right attitudes than those who are currently members, and within the group trade union members it is those that are low educated and highly religious that can be expected to sympathize with the radical right.

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Given the tendency of Populist Radical Right (PRR) parties to form anti-LGBTQ+ claims, this thesis aims to understand how a PRR party operating in a context characterized by progressive values relates to LGBTQ+ topics in their political messages on social media. A single case study of the Sweden Democrats (SD) – an example of a PRR party operating in such a context – was conducted. Idea analysis, which included the concepts of homonationalism and heteroactivism, was performed on 44 posts published during the year following the 2022 election on the social media platform X by politicians representing the SD in the national parliament. The results show that the SD pursued a homonationalist discourse in that they advocated LGBTQ+ rights to oppose Islam in general and Muslim integration in Sweden in particular. However, when the SD solely focused on the Swedish domestic context, LGBTQ+ rights were not promoted, but rather heteronormativity was favored above non-normative relationships, gender identities, and gender expressions. Thus, the results suggest that the SD took part in heteroactivism. Moreover, while the SD avoided outspoken homophobic statements, transphobic ideas were evident. Hence, the SD adapted to the Swedish context by performing a balancing act where they weighed the expression of heteronormative ideals against the potential loss of acceptance from a public supporting LGBTQ+ rights. Altogether, these results contribute to research on PRR parties operating in contexts characterized by progressive values as well as research on the SD concerning LGBTQ+ topics.

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The main research question of this thesis is how history is used for political gain by the far-right in Finland. The aim is to study not only the use of history but, rather, specifically, the patterns of that use. Two theories have been utilized. The first is the far-right as a milieu, as presented by Colin Campbell in the cultic milieu theory, which would shed light on the fragmentation of the milieu. And the second is the waves theory by David C. Rapoport, which would shed light on the persistence of far-right violence and militancy through time. I have utilized Pieter Geyl’s analysis of the use of history in identifying patterns of use even though it is not considered a theory per my knowledge. Methods applied are content analysis, netnography, comparative and discourse analysis. Through the utilization of these theories and methods applied to the source material, I have found that the Finnish far-right uses history in six different ways, which are centralized around both the use of national history and the predecessor’s history.

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