The “New Normal” and “Pandemic Populism”: The COVID-19 Crisis and Anti-Hygienic Mobilisation of the Far-Right

Ulrike M Vieten

doi:10.3390/socsci9090165

Abstract

The paper is meant as a timely intervention into current debates on the impact of the global pandemic on the rise of global far-right populism and contributes to scholarly thinking about the normalisation of the global far-right. While approaching the tension between national political elites and (far-right) populist narratives of representing “the people”, the paper focuses on the populist effects of the “new normal” in spatial national governance. Though some aspects of public normality of our 21st century urban, cosmopolitan and consumer lifestyle have been disrupted with the pandemic curfew, the underlying gendered, racialised and classed structural inequalities and violence have been kept in place: they are not contested by the so-called “hygienic demonstrations”. A digital pandemic populism during lockdown might have pushed further the mobilisation of the far right, also on the streets.

Highlights

The paper is meant as a timely intervention into current debates on the impact of the global pandemic on the rise of global far-right populism and contributes to scholarly thinking about the normalisation of the global far-right
Since 2016, and with the election of US President Donald Trump, the notion of post-truth as blurred boundaries of fact and fiction—in an Arendtian sense—has become the litmus test for detecting a politically explosive and divisive situation in the US. It is embodied in the electoral success of a populist political leader, whose “America first” slogan swept him into highest office
I borrow this term from German colleagues Boberg et al (2020), who recently published a paper with this title, introducing findings of a pilot study on social media communication of the current global pandemic in Germany

Summary

Introduction1

In 1953, Hannah Arendt argued that the subject of a totalitarian state is the individual, who cannot distinguish between fact and fiction and, in consequence, the totalitarian threat could be witnessed to the degree to which the individuals’ capacity of differentiating true from false information is undermined (Arendt 1953). Spatial governance ties together various layers of national jurisdictions as social–political ordering and bordering (Yuval-Davis et al 2019) Specific localities, such as neighbourhoods, cities, or counties, or with respect to federal political systems’ different lands or devolved regions within a nation state, and belonging to majority or minority religious or ethnic groups, all frame participation of citizens and denizens distinctively, and provide hierarchical access to the public good. The binary view on the world establishes opinions without shades of grey, contrasting the “us” and the “them” This leads to the section, exploring what normalisation means in the context of the current health crisis, and in what ways the new normal of the post-pandemic public space though framed by the influence of digital communication links into wider debates of the normalisation of the far-right

Disrupted Normalisation

Anti-Hygienic Protests in Germany

Findings

Conclusions