Irredentist European populist right-wing

Anyway most or some of the populist European right-wing parties like the National front or the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy or the AFD adopt irredentism as major policies

What would be the impact of this on their popularity in recent years

Would they be as cooperative with each other or with parties outside Europe
 
What degree of tension, if any, might exist between "Let's get the f*ck out of the EU right now!!" and "Let's annex a whole shitload of EU territory!!"?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Exactly what territories would the VVD or National Rally claim? Flanders? Algeria? For the latter case, that would basically require National Rally to openly support genocide of Algerians, because there's no way they would want Algerians in France. As for AfD, that's explicitly against the German constitution and they would be shut down by BfV or driven into obscurity like the NPD was.
 
Afaik Orban is flirting with groups who cant get over the idea of Greater Hungary but other than him the mainstream right is rather quiet on irredentism these days.
 

HJ Tulp

Donor
Anyway most or some of the populist European right-wing parties like the National front or the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy or the AFD adopt irredentism as major policies

What would be the impact of this on their popularity in recent years

Would they be as cooperative with each other or with parties outside Europe

Do you mean the part of Geert Wilders? Because that isn't the Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) is the party of PM Rutter. The party of Geert Wilders is called the Party for Freedom or PVV.
 
Any chance of a militantly anti-clerical populist party in Italy(maybe something like Pim Fortuyn's old outfit in Holland) trying to grab what's left of the Papal States? They could exploit inflammatory issues like Vatican cover-up of child-sex abuse, Catholic support for open immigration, etc.

Of course, this wouldn't be irredentism per se, since any Italians trapped inside Vatican City are already able to "redeem" themselves just by walking a few metres. But it could still play to some sort of resentment, possibly revived if not outright manufactured, over finally getting back what they should have gotten in the 1870s. Though the major motivating issues would probably be contemporary.
 
NATO and the UN says hello.

They could adopt that stance, sure, but everybody knows they aren't actually in a position to follow through on their claims. Modern military action is expensive (moreso in treasure than blood) and produces diplomatic and commercial backlash (Try having your dollar assets frozen) to say nothing of the fact that for many irridentists their claims are on allied counteries.
 
I don't really see many radical populists supporting irredentism in this modern age. Countries like Germany had a good chunk of their population displaced from their former territories and it will likely stay that way, even if they regain their former territories because population control takes a long time under this kind of circumstance. Plus, if any country ends up becoming irredentist, they'll likely have organizations like the UN and NATO knocking on their door.
 
Any chance of a militantly anti-clerical populist party in Italy(maybe something like Pim Fortuyn's old outfit in Holland) trying to grab what's left of the Papal States? They could exploit inflammatory issues like Vatican cover-up of child-sex abuse, Catholic support for open immigration, etc.

Of course, this wouldn't be irredentism per se, since any Italians trapped inside Vatican City are already able to "redeem" themselves just by walking a few metres. But it could still play to some sort of resentment, possibly revived if not outright manufactured, over finally getting back what they should have gotten in the 1870s. Though the major motivating issues would probably be contemporary.
The Catholic Church in Italy has basically accused Salvini of being an emissary of Satan at this point.

He has largely brushed it off, and politically, it has worked so far. But I suppose it is possible that down the road, that could change. I don't think that the Church in Italy has much clout over Italian politics. The Democratic Party, with whom the Church most often supports, has the same somewhat frosty attitude towards the Church that other European Social Democratic Pro-EU parties have.

But I don't think that any of this will lead to irredentism.
 
As for actual irridentism, it is relatively rare. Golden Dawn in Greece has praised the Megali concept, but I don't really see Golden Dawn as right wing populist. They are out and out neo-Nazis, and that has a different tinge to it (for example, praising Hugo Chavez and Bashar al-Assad).


The biggest actor by far for irridentism in Europe is arguably not even European, and it comes from Russia. I tend to see the United Russia Party as being more of a big tent, kleptocratic organ that has some right leaning views on national and cultural questions and some left leaning views in terms of state control of the economy. But I wouldn't really call it populist.

And I would say that the second most irridentist force in Europe right now comes from Sinn Fein in Ireland, and they are clearly identified on the Left.

The griping about the Treaty of Trianon in Hungary is not an explicitly right wing phenomenon. Basically everyone, from Jobbik to the Social Democrats, agrees it to be a bad thing. Jobbik go the farthest though in ritual denunciations of it.

The German AFD is largely more focused on the question of reparations for Eastern Germans dispossed after WW2 than on an actual desire to take back Silesia and East Prussia.
 
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If the True Finns actually adopted an irredentist "Greater Finland" policy for the party, they would open themselves to all kinds of ridicule by all the other relevant parties, and this stance would scare away even many of their merely "immigration sceptic" supporters. Irredentism was never the done thing here after 1944 or so, in official national-level politics, and practically an irredentist True Finns party would soon find itself gagged and tied up in an out-of-the-way corner in the parliament, metaphorically speaking if not in actual fact. Give it a few years, and they might well drop out of parliament altogether if they insist on clinging to "Greater Finland" nonsense.
 
Anyway most or some of the populist European right-wing parties like the National front or the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy or the AFD adopt irredentism as major policies

What would be the impact of this on their popularity in recent years

Would they be as cooperative with each other or with parties outside Europe

It is in east-central Europe that irredentism has the most appeal, though even there its impracticality is too obvious for it to be much of a rallying point. What land would the National Front want for France? France has had no serious territorial ambitions in Europe since she got Alsace-Lorraine back--and the last thing the FN would want would be to recover Algeria even if that were possible. Note how Brigette Bardot has defended the consistency of her early and late political positions: "je ne me suis pas battue contre l'Algérie française pour accepter une France algérienne."
 
As late as the 1990's the MSI/AN in Trieste was talking about taking back Istria, Fiume, etc.

"I got a chance to see the League's competition in Trieste up close when I stopped by the MSI offices as December's local election results came in. On the wall were posters calling for a "new irredentism," illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches of Dalmatian cities -- Fiume (now Rijeka), Zara (Zadar).

"Roberto Menia, a national coordinator for MSI, openly said the party would take advantage of the relative weakness of Slovenia and Croatia to redraw the borders. "We have struggled for 50 years," he said, 'and now that we are stronger we will renegotiate everything, borders included. We want the territories we had before the war." If necessary, the party would cooperate with the Serbs, Menia said, pointing out that his party's president had already visited Belgrade. "We know that our own interests and the interests of the Serbs can fit together."

"With that sort of memory in the air, the League in Trieste concentrates on the future. "They the MSI) want to put our Italian flag on Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia again. I think that's a nineteenth century way to think," Fabrizio Belloni, head of the League's office in Trieste at the time of my visit, said. "If I were a solider and I got back Istria for Italy there would not be one more ship in our gulf."..." http://www.icwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/CRR-15.pdf

Indeed in 1996, "THE Italian flag and that of the Istria region flew at half mast outside the Trieste party headquarters of the neoFascist Alleanza Nazionale last week.

"The mourning signs were a symbolic protest at the "association agreement" concluded on June 10th in Luxembourg between the European Union and Sloveuia, the former Yugoslav republic which shares a land border with Italy. Trieste is just a few kilometres from that border." https://www.irishtimes.com/news/italy-bandages-old-wounds-in-agreement-with-slovenia-1.60403
 
As for AfD, that's explicitly against the German constitution and they would be shut down by BfV or driven into obscurity like the NPD was.
Wars of conquest are anti-constitutional, but peaceful irredentism was official FRG policy for a long time, admittedly more in the sense of "RoC claim to mainland China"-style virtue signalling, but still. The bigger issue is that no one really cares about the Ostgebiete anymore, and AfD doesn't want to integrate 20 million Poles that badly.

Going through possible irredentist targets for Germany:
  • The Ostgebiete. You'd need to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Prussia, Silesia or the Sudetenland. Once this happened, irredentism as a political idea was living on borrowed time. So you'd need a different WW2 aftermath. Or maybe an earlier collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
  • Austria. Again, you'd need a pre-1955 PoD. You'd have to have Austrians see themselves as "Germans" more than IOTL; an earlier Anschluss, an Alpenfestung-type German strategy in late WW2, or failure of the Austrian State Treaty negotiations leading to a weaker "Austrian" identity, something like that.
  • Post-1945 German-populated regions outside of the 1938 borders... well, irredentism for Transylvania or the Volga German ASSR is a bit impractical. South Tyrol irredentism is OTL, it's just Austrian irredentism instead of Greater German irredentism. East Belgium and North Schleswig are hardly worth breaking the post-war order over. That leaves Alsace-Lorraine, again with a fairly early post-war PoD since you'd need to prevent the doctrine of FRG-French reconciliation.
  • Germany itself. You could have the GDR survive the Warsaw Pact's collapse and reunification become a hot-button issue.
Edit: Random crazy idea: The British annex Helgoland after WW2. Things don't deviate from OTL until Brexit happens and the status of Helgoland becomes as problematic as the one of Gibraltar.
 
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