Towards a Cultural Repertoire of Populism in Denmark: Nostalgic Childhoods, Overwhelming Threats, and Disengaged Experience

While research has shown that right-wing populism’s nostalgic features play a key role in understanding its frames and messages, fewer researchers have explored how ordinary populist voters articulate and express nostalgia. Based on a series of focus groups with right-wing populist voters in Denmark, in this article we examine how these individuals discuss, compare, and contrast the past and present. Our findings show that our participants draw from the same cultural repertoire, which we term a cultural repertoire of Danish populism. When employing this repertoire, participants use images of their childhoods to describe the past in terms of specific Nordic ideals and cultural elements. However, in the story of Danish populism, this past society has been lost, as our participants experience an increasing presence of non-Nordic elements in society, which they see represented by the threats of migration, digitalization, and discourses of inclusion. We find that even these threats have distinctively Danish characteristics, and argue that the cultural repertoire of Danish populism remains based on and in conversation with a broader Danish cultural repertoire. The paper concludes in discussing the limited nature of Danish populism’s cultural repertoire, arguing that individuals who employ and adopt it will continue to experience a lack of efficacy and a sense of being overwhelmed in Danish society today, and note that, within this repertoire, Danish society can only become more threatening in the future.