Understanding the Rise of the Far Right in the European Union: A Lévi-Straussian Perspective on Political Culture

The structuralist framework of Claude Lévi-Strauss is used in this study to examine the emergence of far-right populist movements in six European Union (EU) member states: France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Sweden, and Portugal. The study uses qualitative methods at the macro level and manual document analysis at the micro level to uncover the symbolic underpinnings of far-right speech by looking at party manifestos and programs. The results demonstrate that these movements use binary oppositions -such as us against them, natural versus artificial, and clean versus dirty -to generate political meaning. These oppositions are consistent with structuralist beliefs about myth and cultural codes. Far-right parties portray their leaders as heroes in stories of catastrophe and rebirth, and they portray themselves as defenders of a mythologized national identity. Within these symbolic systems, discourses on Islamophobia, Euroskepticism, and anti-immigration serve as cultural myths as well as policy stances. The study concludes that far-right populism is best understood as a cultural response to structural transformation, for which the theory of Lévi-Strauss offers a compelling analytical tool.