A/73/305 rights and racial equality. Although history, for example in Latin America, provides examples of left-wing populism that have improved the circumstances of marginalized groups through social reform, there are contemporary examples of left-wing populist governance presiding over extreme political repression and other human rights violations. This is partly because, even though left-wing populist parties generally do not target minorities per se, they can often reject political competition and claim the sole right to rule. 9 It is thus important to underscore that populism in its dangerous forms on both the left and the right exhibits anti-pluralist commitments. 10 11. The present report centres on nationalist populism to highlight the specific threats to racial equality that arise when these two orientations are combined. Nationalist populism — especially when it is adopted by ethno-nationalists — tends to limit “the people” to a particular racial, ethnic or religious group understood to be the only legitimate national group. Right-wing populists champion this ethnonationalist conceptualization of “the people” using the increasingly multicultural nature of societies as evidence of an imminent threat against the survival and preservation of the nation. Right-wing nationalist populists regularly take the additional step of arguing that those identified as “the people” are long-suffering victims of multicultural society, and that multiculturalism itself is a driver of socioeconomic decline for “the people”. The strategy, then, is not just to target elites, but also to target multiculturalism and members of minority races, ethnicities and religions as all part of the problem. Racial, ethnic and religious minorities are relegated to the status of illegitimate interlopers whose interests are characterized as oppositional to those of the group exclusively designated as constituting “the people”. Thus, when nationalist populists appropriate the language of democratic legitimacy and representation of “the people”, this language masks exclusionary and typically racialized conceptions of the nation that are at odds with liberal conceptions of democracy. 12. Where ethno-nationalist populism is a feature of government, those in power can begin to oversee the rewriting of national history — including to deny the Holocaust, for example — in order to reaffirm a racially, religiously or ethnically specified conception of who “the people” are. 11 And even if nationalist populists do not win seats in government, their participation in public discourse and the electoral process can nonetheless result in a shift in the mainstream political discourse to embrace previously marginal, exclusionary positions. 12 Some of these discourses include a commitment to ethno-nationalist versions of national history that suppress the vital contributions that racial, ethnic and religious minorities have made to build the respective nations. Ethno-nationalists can seek to write minorities out of the history of the nation. The most recent report of the Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council includes a more detailed analysis of ethno -nationalism as a threat to racial equality, and of the interaction between neo-Nazi and other extremist ideologies with populist mobilizations. 13 13. Nationalist populism often successfully advances heteronormative, patriarchal visions of the nation, and a version of “traditional values” that leads to serious violations against marginalized social groups (including women, gender and sexual minorities, and persons with disabilities), especially when those who are socially marginalized are also racial, ethnic or religious minorities. It shores up the dominance __________________ 9 10 11 12 13 6/22 Ibid., p. 148. Müller, What is Populism?, p. 3 (“In addition to being anti-elitist, populists are always anti-pluralist”). A Croatian submission highlighted government-sanctioned historical revisionism along these lines. See Wodak, The Politics of Fear, p. 184 (noting the normalization of right-wing populist policies that push the entire political spectrum to the right). See A/HRC/38/52. 18-12945