Public Policy and the Far Right

Mohamad-Klotzbach discussed the relevance of studying public policy related to far right and populist parties and leaders both in government and opposition. Thereby, he focused on empirical findings in the policy fields of welfare, health and environmental politics. These policy fields are interconnected and therefore spillover effects can be found due to policies produced by both far right and/or authoritarian parties and leaders. Being part of the MARKOPOLO project at the Chair of Social Science Sustainability Studies, he also presented ideas on how to improve knowledge transfer in the field of Environmental health and challenges posed by parties from the far right. Especially rising science scepticism which is pushed forward by those political actors poses a severe problem due to the need of science-based decision-making on national, transnational and the global level. The participants of the class, colleagues and students in Brazil, are closely following what is happening in European and German politics and the discussion after the input was very lively and inspiring. It showed that there are clearly differences between politics in Brazil and in the European context.

The course aims to analyze the phenomenon of the rise of the far right in contemporary democracies from a comparative perspective, with a central focus on the cases of Brazil and Germany. The overall objective is to understand the factors that explain the growth of the far right and to assess its impacts on elections, political parties, and political agendas. The growth of the “far right” is observed in democracies with different institutional frameworks and political cultures. Regardless of systems of government, electoral systems, and party structures—whether in long-established or newer democracies—there is a common diagnosis: the emergence of the “far right.” The phenomenon takes shape and develops in distinct ways in contemporary democracies, but there is a consensus in the literature that, despite being shaped by regional or contextual specificities, it is a global phenomenon.
This course is an initiative of the project group “The Far Right in Germany and Brazil: A Historical and Comparative Analysis” (PROBRAL—Brazil-Germany Program/CAPES-DAAD), as it will be taught simultaneously in the political science graduate programs at UFRGS and IESP-UERJ and features special guest lecturers from German universities.