Susi Meret is an Associate Professor at the Danish University of Aalborg and for 25 years she has been interested in the Danish radical right specifically, but also in that of other countries. This will be the focus of our interview.
I have lived in Denmark for 25 years, I left Italy after finishing my history studies at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. I am an Associate Professor at Aalborg University which is right on the tip of the Danish peninsula, after Hamburg it is about 600 km to the north, in fact it is the northernmost university in Denmark. My doctoral project was on the radical right, when I arrived in the Scandinavian countries as an Italian and as a Southern European, I was totally shocked in witnessing the profound nativism, the strong cultural homogeneity of Denmark, on the one hand, and of a strong reaction against immigrants and the idea of culture threatened by cultural diversity, i.e. multiculturalism, on the other. I have seen the reticence to share wealth with those who contribute to the well-being of society – immigrants, in fact.
It seems a somewhat different situation compared to Sweden?
Yes, then it was, but now Sweden has moved closer to the Danish position. For many years I was invited to Sweden to talk about the Danish radical right and the developments that were taking place in Denmark precisely with the intention that the same conditions would not be created in Sweden. Unfortunately, after 2015 that was the path taken, with public opinion expressing itself to the right; the electoral demand also focused on parties that from a historical point of view have extreme, even Nazi roots for Sweden. In Denmark we haven’t gotten this far, that is, there is no Nazi matrix, and this has facilitated the entry into Parliament of these parties.
Do you reckon that the Scandinavian radical right is heavily influencing the European Parliament?
Danish social democracy has co-opted several of the positions that 10-15 years ago were those of the radical right parties, brought them into the European Parliament and cleared them as Social Democracy. Now the question is what will happen with the next elections in Germany. Many German colleagues, German organizations, even affiliated with the SPD, ask me for an account of the policies that are applied in Denmark and which are supported by the Danish Social Democracy in a government of broad alliance with the moderates and the liberal party. Denmark is one of the countries in Europe that has the most restrictive policies from the perspective of political refugees and also from the perspective of second and third generation non-Western immigrants to the country.
Let’s get to the topic of these days: gender perspectives in Europe and elsewhere.
I almost immediately added the gender perspective to my research path because one of the interesting things about radical right parties was the main role of women. Women at the head of right-wing parties in Denmark was a phenomenon that dates back long before Meloni, we are talking about the times of Umberto Bossi. Women have been used in right-wing parties, everywhere, in strategic ways to approach the electorate with a respectable facade. But even when we talk about Trump there are gender implications and that’s the reason that brought me closer to the study of “Project 2025”, also encouraged by discussions with colleagues who have been mapping all the far right organisations, of these extreme fringes that are close to the Trump administration.
The previous Trump’s mandate has legitimized practices and speeches that were not openly used so lightly before: racist speeches, hateful phrases, slogans against women. ..He opened a Pandora’s box from which everything came out including a lot of misogyny
He is not the only one, he had those who anticipated him in Europe. Within the populist radical right, there has been a tendency to normalize or legitimize a certain type of discourse, of rhetoric but also of policies… in Italy the various governments in which there was the League and also the National Alliance at the time of Berlusconi anticipated other developments in the rest of Europe.
As for the United States, it has a genealogy of radical right parties and even nativism that has deep historical roots. Let us remember the movements between 1800 and 1900 against immigrants, including Italians who, after afro- Americans, are the minority that has suffered the most lynchings in the history of the country. Let’s think about all the policies against Asians, for example, implemented by immigration policies that imposed quotas on how many Chinese were to enter the United States, so if we look at history the perspectives change.
The fact is that there are policies that could be helpful to what is happening in the United States, but also in Europe, where we find people who are very disaffected with politics and who do not feel represented, also legitimately. Just look at what is happening in the United States, for example in the Rust Belt, and all those post-industrial areas, for which there was no industrial plan or economic policy that helped people emerge from situations of severe crisis. In fact, even in Europe and Scandinavia we can see a split between urban centres, which tend to be more progressive, which vote to the left, sensitive to rights, rights for immigrants, for women, for lesbian-homosexual-transgender communities, while in the suburbs there are totally different positions. No one denies the fact that there are segregated areas, where there is a strong ethnic presence, where the problem is poverty which is conveniently hidden and converted into a problem of ethnicity and religion.
In light of all this, it was a successful political choice to channel legitimate aspirations, but also economic necessity, into a series of values, into a culture, which fueled discrimination, racism, the feeling of the other as a threat, a threat to your job or your welfare or your gender. For example, it has emerged that in recent years, in the Scandinavian societies that we have always considered a model for the gender regime, public opinion thinks that gender equity has gone too far, that it has exceeded the limits, when facts tell us that the gap is still present, that there is still a lot to do.
In your speech you spoke at length about Project 2025 and the influence it will have on conservative and anti-gender policies not only in America.
In 2023 the Heritage Foundation decided to write The Mandate for Leadership, a road map for the Trump administration with the precise idea of having everything under control. It’s not the only one road map written by conservatives but in my opinion this is the one that will have the major chance of success, many of the associations, institutions, think tanks that are involved in writing the project are organizations close to Trump, in fact, they were part of the Trump administration in the period from 2017 to 2021. Project 2025 is about bringing together all the ultra-conservative American forces, but also the European ones starting from Viktor Orban who created his think tank to be able to disclose certain positions. Orban showed how one can work within a liberal democracy and empty it of those measures that maintain it, for example the division of powers, the right to express oneself, the right of the press to express positions against the government.
Inside the 900 pages of Project 2025 there is all the domestic politics, economic policy, health and healthcare policy, foreign policy. Above all, international aid funding, development funding, for which America is one of the main donors, will arrive in an extremely constrained manner, and it will be even more so. This funding has now become a consolidated form of indirect control over the policies of those countries, on reproduction, on family and rights, on sexual education, on transgenders, that is, all those policies for which we thought we had achieved initial successes but instead the aim is to reconvert everything. These ultra-conservative networks that are trying to take the world backwards are networks that have been collaborating for a long time, that know what their strengths are.
Today the problem is that an institution like the European Parliament is blocked. Where is Europe? I don’t see the will to proceed with a credible response. We have to admit that our civil societies remain the ones most capable of providing answers and direction. However, as regards an important institution such as University, it is an institution dependent on public funds which are increasingly limited. Even within our Universities there is an attempt to silence or muzzle those who are too critical, not only that, the critical voices of gender studies, post-colonial studies and studies on racism have been the ones who in all countries, including Northern Europe, have suffered the most, where there have been funding cuts, layoffs, putting forward the idea that it is pseudoscience. Instead, what is true is that we increasingly need faculties where social criticism is carried out, critical studies, too. Our societies are crossed by this forgetfulness of recent history -see fascism- this failure to create connections, this seeing things as a snapshot of the immediate, I find this to be the problem of nowadays.