Postdoctoral Research Fellow Felipe G. Santos has recently published a paper titled ‘Populist strategy in the European parliament: How the anti-gender movement sabotaged deliberation about sexual health and reproductive rights’ in the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. The paper is open access and you can read it through this link.

This week, our postdoctoral researcher Felipe G. Santos spoke to two Spanish media outlets about the conservative civil society and political party networks that are gathering in Budapest at the Summit of the Political Network for Values, as well as Hungary’s leadership in these circles. Click on the links for the Google translated versions of the articles: ElDiario & InfoLibre.

This week, Prodem members will present some of the early project findings at the joint session on movement parties of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). ProDem has had a central role in the organisation of the joint session, as one of the project’s postdoctoral researchers, Fred Paxton, is one of the workshop directors.

During this event, we will share some of the early findings of the project. Fred Paxton will present data from the project’s mass media data collection and will talk about how the mass media reacted to the movementization of far-right parties. Moreover, Felipe G. Santos will give the first insights of our analysis of what drives support for movement parties using our survey data and cutting edge experimental designs.

If you are in Edinburgh and want to know more about movement parties, join them!

In a new journal article, Dorit Geva and ProDem member Felipe G. Santos explore the new educational projects of Europe’s far-right and their vision for the international order. They study the new institutes for higher education established by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Budapest (Hungary), and former French National Front leader Marion Maréchal in Lyon (France) and Madrid (Spain) and conclude that they are seeking to establish a new globalist illiberal order. They argue that the globalist illiberal agenda extends elements of the globalist project while reclaiming a radicalized view of Christian democracy. Europe’s far-right views the global order as composed of strong nations who need to defend their sovereignty on ‘cultural’ issues while protecting their common Christian roots. They trace their project by focusing on two new institutions of higher education, Hungary’s National University of Public Service Ludovika (Ludovika-UPS) and the Institut de Sciences Sociales, Économiques et Politiques (Institute of Social Sciences, Economics, and Politics—ISSEP), based in France and Spain. Through these institutions, globalist illiberals aim to cultivate new leaders outside the liberal ‘mainstream’ and redefine the meaning of Christian democracy. They conclude that surging nationalism among mid to small powers is not resulting in deglobalization but is fostering illiberal globalization, which has no place for those who do not fit in their exclusionary vision of Christian Europe.