Austrifying Europe:: Ultra-right populism and the new culture of resistance

The article investigates the political and cultural causes of the emergence of right-wing coalitions throughout the European Union, taking Austria as a symptomatic case of this return of political antagonism within a culture of consensus. It is argued that, methodologically and theoretically, a valid analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobic populism can only be achieved with the combined effort of both political and cultural theory, respectively of both political discourse analysis and cultural studies. Two axes of analysis have to be taken into account: the first being the relation between culture (or the popular) and politics (or the 'people'), and the second concerning the even more fundamental relation or difference between politics and the political.