Religion, Cleavages, and Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Italian Case

The political science literature analyzing the genetic profile of European political parties has mainly focused on the salience, for the identity of today’s parties, of four social cleavages rooted in European history: among them, a religious/secular cleavage created by the birth of the modern national state. However, in the past two decades, some contributions about new party types developed after the end of the Cold War have hypothesized the existence of new cleavages, based on materialist/post materialist sets of values and on the acceptance or rejection of globalization and Europeanization processes. This article will work on this latter hypothesis, by highlighting how some European parties, previously secular or focused on the “traditional” religious cleavage, are increasingly using religion-related arguments in the context of a civilizational stance focused on anti-globalization and anti-EU discourses, but most of all on the idea of migrants and Muslims as a threatening other. The second section of the paper will focus on the Italian case and on the development of a right-wing populist discourse on religion by the Lega Nord party.