Le Grand Enfumage

Populism and migration in seven European countries

Book

03/02/2022

Does the populist vote rise where most immigrants settle? Do Europe’s far-right parties treat immigration in the same way? Is France following a particular path regarding this question?

Hervé Le Bras tackles these and many other issues in Le Grand Enfumage (The Great Smokescreen, untranslated) throughout a detailed study of seven different countries – Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The author analyses the transformations of a worrying ideological line: after having moved away from groupings nostalgic of Nazism, Francoism or Fascism, and after having tried to hide behind a respectable façade, these countries’ populist parties are evolving towards an identity-oriented vision, dramatized in France by the concept “grand remplacement”, the great replacement.

Resulting from an ambitious European collaboration between the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Le Grand Enfumage is a necessary reading for understanding and countering those far-right themes and narratives that gained way too much ground in Europe.

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