Sustaining the Exclusionary Neoliberal State

In the years following the financial crisis of 2008, many countries across the globe witnessed a renewed rise of far-right populism, such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, and Trump in the United States. Many commentators interpreted the far-right’s electoral success as rejection of neoliberalism and, in fact, as a protective countermovement against the unhinged market economy that led to the events of 2008. Party competition literature complimentarily found that economic positions of far-right populists moved toward the center to include welfare state support among other social policies. Based on the case of the Austrian Freedom Party, this chapter shows how far-right populist discourse performs a crisis of the political-economic status quo, which appears as critique of neoliberalism, while pursuing exclusionary neoliberal policies when in office. The chapter re-engages with the economic nationalism debate and suggests that economic nationalist ideas can be understood as survival tool for the exclusionary neoliberal status quo.