Talk
The reaction of the Italian and German radical right to democracy protection measures after the 2009 debt crisis: a comparative case study

This presentation is going to show the first results of the doctoral researchd in September 2022. After the 2009 economic crisis, new radical right parties and new party leaderships increasingly gained electoral support and used it to put into question the foundations of liberal democracy. In response to that, the Italian and German states implemented several actions of democracy protection. From here, the research question: how did the Italian and German radical right parties react to these measures after the 2009 European debt crisis? The doctoral thesis consists of three parts. First, a theoretical grounding was assumed to give consistency and scientific depth to the whole research. It consists of a selected summary and reworking of the available scientific literature concerning three main concepts: democracy, political extremism, and militant democracy. Second, the dissertation worked on the selection of radical right parties: Lega, Fratelli d’Italia, and Alternative für Deutschland. Additionally, a total of ten democracy protection measures (ten for each country) were selected inside the research time window. Third, for each selected democracy protection measure, the behavior of the selected parties is observed along all its progression phases. The results are going to be used for mainly two purposes. On the one hand, this dissertation will contribute to the not yet fully explored field of the comparative study of militant democracy. On the other hand, the coming results will help to enrich the definition of political extremism, adding its (expectedly negative) attitude towards democracy protection measures as one of its distinctive traits.

Erik Zignaigo is a Ph.D. student at TU Dresden and an affiliated researcher at HAIT since 2022. He received a Master's degree in Political Theory and Democratic Culture from Complutense University of Madrid in 2021 (with a published Master's thesis on militant democracy theory). He also holds a Master's degree in Local and Global Development (with a Master's thesis on populism in Andean America) and a Bachelor's degree in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs from the University of Bologna.

The Talk is part of the HAIT-Colloquium „History and Politics in Dialogue – Projects at the HAIT“ in the summer semester 2025.

The colloquium takes place in Room 150a of the Zeuner-Bau, George-Bähr-Straße 3c, and hybrid via Zoom. If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

This event is financed by the Saxon State government out of the State budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.