The Price of Disengagement: Radical Populism in France and Germany

Abstract

This article seeks to account for the emergence of radical populist parties in France and Germany during the final two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. These parties, of the Far Right in France and Far Left in Germany, have attracted the support of economically and socially vulnerable groups—industrial workers and certain service-sector strata—who have broken with their traditional corporative and partisan attachments and sought out alternative bases of social and political identification. Contrary to classical liberal analyses that attribute rising unemployment and declining living standards among these groups to these countries' failure to reform their economies, or varieties of capitalism arguments which claim that the institutional specificities of the post-war French and German economies insulated them from the impacts of neoliberal modernization, the article posits that this outcome is in fact attributable to the far-reaching economic liberalization which they experienced since the 1980's in France and the 1990's in Germany. Specifically, it is argued that this process of liberalization dissolved the Fordist social contract that had ensured the inclusion of these class groups in the postwar capitalist order, triggering a structural and cultural crisis which fueled their political radicalization.