title: May Pang

text: Pang's book of photographs, "Instamatic Karma", was published in 2008. Besides the candid personal portraits, the book contains some historically important photographs, such as Lennon signing the official dissolution of the Beatles' partnership, and one of the last known photographs of Lennon and Paul McCartney together. Cynthia Lennon also provided a back cover endorsement, acknowledging Pang's role in reuniting Lennon with his estranged first son, Julian.


title: May Pang

text: The Tribeca Film Festival announced the 2022 premiere of "The Lost Weekend: A Love Story", a 97-minute documentary about Pang's life and relationship with Lennon, on June 10th via virtual home viewing. The film was produced and directed by Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels.


title: May Pang

text: Pang married record producer Tony Visconti in 1989; the couple divorced in 2000. They had two children. Pang remains in touch with some of the people from her time with Lennon, and Paul McCartney invited her to Linda McCartney's memorial service. She was an invited guest at The Concert for George in 2002 and remained close to Cynthia Lennon and Lennon's first son, Julian.


title: May Pang

text: Although having had no contact for 30 years, on October 9, 2006, Pang accidentally met Ono in Iceland, on what would have been Lennon's 66th birthday. Ono was in Iceland to unveil a sculpture in Reykjavík and was staying in the same hotel.


title: May Pang

text: Pang still resides in New York City. She volunteers with an animal shelter called Animal Haven in New York and owned a dog that was rescued after Hurricane Katrina. She also co-hosts an Internet talk radio show, "Dinner Specials with Cynthia and May Pang", at blogtalkradio.com, with on-air partner Cynthia Neilson.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: The fourth season of "Cobra Kai" released on Netflix on December 31, 2021, and consisted of 10 episodes. The series is a direct sequel to the original four films in "The Karate Kid" franchise, focusing on the characters of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence over 30 years after the original film. It is the second season to be released in 2021 and second to initially release on Netflix after the first two seasons released on YouTube. The season was also released on DVD on September 13, 2022, a few days after the premiere of the show's fifth season.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: The season has twelve starring roles, nine of which returned from the previous season, an additional two were added to main cast after recurring throughout previous seasons, and one was added as a newcomer to the series reprising his role from the film series. The season also featured guest appearances from other characters in the film series, re-introducing two recurring characters after a season-long absence, and featuring a cameo appearance from Carrie Underwood. The fourth season was filmed in early 2021. Two soundtrack albums feature accompanying music from the season and were released on January 7, 2022. The season received mostly positive reviews from critics and also topped Netflix's global viewership charts within three days of its release.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: In October 2020, Netflix renewed "Cobra Kai" for a fourth season prior to the third season's release. The renewal came following Netflix's acquisition of the series after its previous streamer, YouTube, was not interested in renewing the series for a fourth season due to a shift in content focus. Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg returned as writers and executive producers through their production company, Counterbalance Entertainment. Will Smith, James Lassiter and Caleeb Pinkett also returned as executive producers with the Overbrook Entertainment production company. Series stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka were co-executive producers. Susan Ekins was the executive producer for distributor Sony Pictures Television. Prior to this season's release, Netflix renewed the series for a fifth season in August 2021.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: All previous series regulars, Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, Courtney Henggeler, Xolo Maridueña, Tanner Buchanan, Mary Mouser, Jacob Bertrand, Gianni DeCenzo and Martin Kove, returned to this season. Vanessa Rubio and Peyton List, who recurred since the first and second seasons respectively, were added to the main cast. Thomas Ian Griffith also joined the main cast as Terry Silver, reprising his role from "The Karate Kid Part III". The role for Griffith is his first since 2007 when he turned to writing. Meanwhile, Dallas Dupree Young and Oona O'Brien joined the series in recurring roles to portray Kenny and Devon, two school students who turned to karate. Nichole Brown, who recurred throughout the first two seasons as Aisha Robinson, and Paul Walter Hauser, who recurred in the second season as Stingray, both returned in a guest capacity. Carrie Underwood made a guest appearance in the season as herself, performing a song from the original "Karate Kid" soundtrack. Yuji Okumoto returned as Chozen Toguchi, and Macchio's daughter, Julia, appeared as Daniel's cousin, Vanessa.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: Filming for the season began in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 26, 2021. Additional filming took place in Los Angeles, California. Filming concluded on April 30.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: The Def Leppard song "Rock of Ages" was used in a promotional trailer for the season. "The Moment of Truth", a song performed by Survivor and written by Bill Conti, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Beckett for the original film, was performed during the season by Carrie Underwood. Heald stated that Underwood was a fan of the series and that her appearance was kept secret until the performance was filmed, causing an authentic reaction from the extras on set. Other featured music from the season included songs from Judas Priest, Poison, Ratt, Journey, Foreigner, and REO Speedwagon, as well as Mötley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls". Hurwitz said the producers also wanted to include music from AC/DC, Bon Jovi, and Guns N' Roses, but were unable to due budget constraints. The Airbourne song "Breakin' Outta Hell", suggested by music supervisor Michelle Johnson, was used in place of AC/DC's "Thunderstruck", a song that was written into the script but was unable to be used, also due to budget concerns.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson, who composed for the series since its inception, returned for the season. A promotional single titled "It's Karate Time" was released on December 17, 2021. The soundtrack album was released on January 7, 2022, and consists of two separate volumes. Matt Ryan, who made the vinyl record covers for the previous three seasons, designed the soundtrack's cover art. Madison Gate Records released the two volume soundtrack and La-La Land Records later released an extended CD edition.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: The first teaser trailer was released on August 5, 2021, which featured promotional videos of the cast members and confirmed a December release date for the season, which was set for December 31. An extended trailer advertising the season was later released on December 9. Prior to the season's release, a virtual premiere screening was held on December 28. The screening, limited in number of attendees, featured a welcome from Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg, a full screening of the first episode, and a question and answer session with the cast. The Q&A was released on the series' social media accounts following the screening and was hosted by Jacqueline Coley, an editor at Rotten Tomatoes. The season was released on DVD on September 13, 2022, a few days after the show's fifth season premiered on September 9.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the season holds a score of 95% with an average rating of 7.9/10 based on 38 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads: ""Cobra Kai" still delights in a fourth season that mines great fun from shifting alliances, chiefly the uneasy truce between Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso". Meanwhile, on Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the season has a score of 70 out of 100 indicating "generally favorable reviews". Cristina Escobar with "The A.V. Club" wrote that the season "nicely continues the journeys of our favorite (and only) Valley karate fanatics, delivering fun along with impressively high kicks, moments of true emotion, and just enough stunted development to keep it all spinning" and praised newcomer Dallas Dupree Young, noting the similarities between his character and Macchio's


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: original character from the films. The "Chicago Sun-Times" Richard Roeper said the season was "quite ridiculous" but remained entertaining. James Dyer, a writer for "Empire Online", noted that most plotlines throughout the season were expanded on from the third film in the franchise, but that it "introduces its own existential discord", The "IGN " writer Amelia Emberwing felt that it was obvious while watching the season that it was the first to be wholly produced by Netflix; Emberwing however, did state that it was "still one hell of a ride". Rebecca Theodore-Vachon of "IndieWire" opined that the series "faithfully honors its roots while managing to tell new and compelling stories".


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: For the week of December 27, 2021, through January 2, 2022, the season topped the global Netflix most-watched television list. Within the three-day time period 120 million hours of the series was watched; it ranked in the top ten titles of 83 countries, and in 13 of which it was ranked number one. During this week, the series also topped the Nielsen ratings top streaming series list achieving 2.42 billion minutes. The following week beginning January 2, and running through January 9, the season remained in the number one spot on the list bringing in 107 million hours of viewing during the week.


title: Cobra Kai (season 4)

text: At the 28th Screen Actors Guild Awards the season received a nomination for Outstanding Stunt Ensemble in a Television series. The award was lost to "Squid Game".


title: Shannon Tweed

text: Shannon Lee Tweed Simmons (born March 10, 1957) is a Canadian actress and model. One of the most successful actresses of mainstream erotica, she is identified with the genre of the erotic thriller. Tweed has appeared in more than 60 films and in several television series. She was named "Playboy"s Playmate of the Year in 1982.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: Tweed is also known for "Gene Simmons Family Jewels", a reality TV show that portrayed the life of her family from 2006 until 2012. She is married to Gene Simmons, bassist and co-lead singer of the band Kiss; Tweed and Simmons have two children, Nicholas Adam Tweed-Simmons and Sophie Alexandra Tweed-Simmons.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: Tweed was born on March 10, 1957, in St. John's, Newfoundland. She is the daughter of Donald Keith Tweed, a mink rancher, and Louise (Wall) Tweed, and was raised on a mink ranch in Whitbourne. She is one of seven children and has three sisters, including actress Tracy Tweed.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: After Donald Tweed fell into a coma after a car crash, Louise moved with her children to her mother's home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and studied nursing while the family survived on welfare. Shannon had breast enhancement surgery at the age of 20, and subsequently became involved in beauty pageants.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: In 1978, Tweed was the third runner-up in the Miss Ottawa event and won the Miss Canada talent competition for her singing.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: After the Canadian wish-fulfilment TV show "Thrill of a Lifetime" arranged for her to pose for "Playboy" magazine, Tweed was chosen to be the Playmate of the Month for the November 1981 issue, and eventually the Playmate of the Year for 1982. Tweed and her sister Tracy appeared together in a "Playboy" spread.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: Tweed primarily acted in B movies and in television series such as the HBO comedy "1st and Ten" and the prime-time soap opera "Falcon Crest", She also appeared in an episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard" as well as "Married... with Children". In 1985, she landed a year-long role on "Days of Our Lives" as Savannah Wilder. Tweed has appeared as a guest on "Frasier". She has also lent her voice to the Nickelodeon cartoon "SpongeBob SquarePants" in the episode "20,000 Patties Under the Sea", which also featured Gene Simmons as a guest.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: The first major theatrical film in which Tweed appeared was the horror film "Of Unknown Origin" (1983). Since then, Tweed has appeared in more than 60 films, including "Detroit Rock City", produced by Simmons, in 1999. Tweed and her sister Tracy co-starred in the film "Night Eyes 3." She is known as one of the most successful actresses of mainstream erotica. "Vanity Fair" has described Tweed as "one of home video's most rented erotic thriller goddesses".


title: Shannon Tweed

text: Tweed was featured along with her family on the reality TV show "Gene Simmons Family Jewels" from 2006 until 2012. One of the highlights of the series was Simmons' proposal to her and their subsequent marriage at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. In 2010, an episode of the series was taped in Tweed's former hometown of Saskatoon. During the visit, she was presented with an honorary street sign denoting the (nonexistent) "Tweed Lane". Tourism Saskatoon subsequently requested Saskatoon City Council approve the naming of a real Tweed Lane in her honour. The Council approved the request, and the street is located in the neighbourhood of Rosewood.


title: Shannon Tweed

text: Tweed resided at the Playboy Mansion for approximately 14 months as "Playboy" founder Hugh Hefner's partner. The relationship coincided with her Playmate appearances and with being named 1982 Playmate of the Year. The Mansion was the location of her first meeting with her future husband, musician Gene Simmons. Tweed has been in a relationship with Simmons since 1983. In a 2011 interview, Simmons said, "I need Shannon in my life. Not just because of love and family but because she holds me accountable." After 28 years together, the couple wed in an outdoor evening ceremony on the crystal lawn of the Beverly Hills Hotel on October 1, 2011.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Sweet Home Alabama is a 2002 American romantic comedy film directed by Andy Tennant. Written by C. Jay Cox, it stars Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey. The supporting cast includes Fred Ward, Mary Kay Place, Jean Smart, Candice Bergen, Ethan Embry, and Melanie Lynskey. It was released in the United States on September 27, 2002, by Buena Vista Pictures. The film takes its title from the 1974 Lynyrd Skynyrd song of the same name. It received a mixed critical reception but was a success at the box office.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: On a beach in the fictional town of Pigeon Creek, Alabama, 10-year-olds Jake Perry and Melanie Smooter inspect the result of lightning striking sand. Jake asserts that they will be married one day.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: In the present day, Melanie is a successful New York fashion designer who has adopted the surname "Carmichael" to hide her poor Southern roots. After wealthy Andrew Hennings proposes, Melanie returns to Alabama to announce her engagement to her parents and finalize a divorce from her husband Jake, whom she married as a pregnant teenager and left after she miscarried their baby. Meanwhile, Kate Hennings, Andrew's mother and the Mayor of New York City, doubts Melanie's suitability to wed her son, whom she is grooming to run for President of the United States.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Melanie visits Jake, who has repeatedly refused to sign divorce papers over the years since she left for New York. After he orders her out of his house, Melanie empties Jake's checking account, hoping to spur him into ending the marriage. Angry, Jake leaves to meet some friends at a local bar without signing the papers. Melanie follows and gets drunk, insults her old school friends, and outs her longtime friend, Bobby Ray. Jake scolds her and takes her home, preventing her from driving drunk, and Melanie wakes to find the signed divorce papers on her bed.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Melanie goes to the Carmichael plantation and apologizes to Bobby Ray, whose family lives there. She is cornered there by Kate's assistant, sent to gather information on Melanie's background. Bobby Ray backs up her pretense that she is a relative and the family mansion is her childhood home. Melanie reconciles with her friends and learns that after she split with Jake, he had followed her to New York to win her back. Intimidated by the city and her success, he returned home to make something of himself first. She and Jake have a heart-to-heart, and Melanie realises why he never signed their divorce papers.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Andrew arrives to surprise Melanie, but upon learning her true background and that she never told him she was married, he angrily leaves. He later returns, saying he still wants to marry her, and the wedding is immediately set in motion. Melanie's New York friends arrive for the event. While visiting a nearby restaurant/resort with a glassblowing gallery, they admire the glass sculptures that are similar to ones they have seen in New York. Melanie realizes Jake is the artist and that he owns the resort.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: During Melanie and Andrew's wedding at the Carmichael estate, a lawyer arrives and halts the ceremony. He has the divorce papers, which Melanie hadn't signed. Melanie confesses that she still loves Jake and cancels the wedding. She and Andrew wish each other well, though Kate berates Andrew and insults Melanie, her family, and the entire town, for which Melanie punches her in the face. Melanie finds Jake at the beach planting lightning rods in the sand during a rainstorm to create more glass sculptures. She tells him they are still married, they return to what would have been Melanie and Andrew's reception, and finally, have their first dance as husband and wife.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: A mid-credits sequence shows that they have a baby daughter, Melanie continues to thrive as a designer, and Jake opens a "Deep South Glass" franchise in New York. Andrew is engaged to a girl named Erin Vanderbilt.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: In addition, Dakota Fanning and Thomas Curtis appear briefly as the childhood versions of Melanie and Jake, respectively.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Katharine Towne was cast as Witherspoon's character's assistant who ultimately ends up marrying the Patrick Dempsey character, but all other scenes were dropped in the final cut.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Although centered in a fictional version of the town of Pigeon Creek, near a fictional version of Greenville, Alabama, the film was mostly shot in Georgia. The Carmichael Plantation, which Melanie tells the reporter is her childhood home, is the Oak Hill Berry Museum, a historic landmark in Georgia which is near the campus of Berry College in Rome, Georgia.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: "Sweet Home Alabama" was the first film allowed to shoot in New York City after the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was also the first film allowed to film at Tiffany's since "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961).


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: The streets and storefronts of Crawfordville, Georgia, were used as the backdrop for the Catfish Festival and other downtown scenes. The coonhound cemetery was on Moore Street in Crawfordville and the bar was located at Heavy's Barbecue near the town. Glass that forms when lightning hits sand, as in the film, is called fulgurite.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Jake's glassblowing shop was filmed at an old mill named Starr's Mill, in Fayette County, Georgia. Wynn's Pond in Sharpsburg, Georgia, is the location where Jake lands his plane. The historic homes shown at Melanie's return to Pigeon Creek were shot in Eufaula, Alabama.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: This film received mostly mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a critical score of 38% based on 159 reviews, with an average rating of 5.19/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Reese Witherspoon is charming enough, but the road to Alabama is well-traveled." At Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 45 out of 100 based on 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Roger Ebert, critic for the "Chicago Sun Times," awarded it three-out-of-four stars, commenting, "It is a fantasy, a sweet, light-hearted fairy tale with Reese Witherspoon at its center. She is as lovable as Doris Day would have been in this role... So I enjoyed Witherspoon and the local color, but I am so very tired of the underlying premise." Andrew Sarris, critic for the "New York Observer," said that the movie "Would be an unendurable viewing experience for this ultra-provincial New Yorker if 26-year-old Reese Witherspoon were not on hand to inject her pure fantasy character, Melanie Carmichael, with a massive infusion of old-fashioned Hollywood magic."


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: The film grossed over US$35 million in its first weekend. At the time, it had the highest September opening weekend, surpassing "Rush Hour". For a decade, the film would hold this record until 2012 when "Hotel Transylvania" took it. By the end of its run in the United States, "Sweet Home Alabama" grossed over US$130 million, and another US$53,399,006 internationally. With a reported budget of US$30 million, it was a box office hit, despite the mixed reviews.


title: Sweet Home Alabama (film)

text: Sweet Home Alabama (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), the film soundtrack, includes thirteen songs by different artists.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Right-wing populism, also called national populism and right-wing nationalism, is a political ideology that combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric employs anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking to or for the "common people". Recurring themes of right-wing populists include neo-nationalism, social conservatism, and economic nationalism. Frequently, they aim to defend a national culture, identity, and economy against perceived attacks by outsiders.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Right-wing populism in the Western world is generally associated with ideologies such as anti-environmentalism, anti-globalization, nativism, and protectionism. In Europe, the term is often used to describe groups, politicians, and political parties generally known for their opposition to immigration, especially from the Muslim world, and for Euroscepticism. Right-wing populists may support expanding the welfare state, but only for those they deem fit to receive it; this concept has been referred to as "welfare chauvinism".


title: Right-wing populism

text: From the 1990s, right-wing populist parties became established in the legislatures of various democracies. Although extreme right-wing movements in the United States (where they are normally referred to as the "radical right") are usually characterized as separate entities, some writers consider them to be a part of a broader, right-wing populist phenomenon.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Since the Great Recession, European right-wing populist movements such as Brothers of Italy, the National Rally (formerly the "National Front") in France, the Party for Freedom and the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands, the Finns Party, the Sweden Democrats, Danish People's Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party began to grow in popularity, in large part due to increasing opposition to immigration from the Middle East and Africa, rising Euroscepticism and discontent with the economic policies of the European Union. American businessman and media personality Donald Trump won the 2016 United States presidential election after running on a platform that included right-wing populist themes.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Right-wing populism is an ideology that primarily espouses neo-nationalism, social conservatism, and economic nationalism.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Cas Mudde argues that two definitions can be given of the "populist radical right": a maximum and a minimum one, with the "maximum" group being a subgroup of the "minimum" group. The minimum definition describes what Michael Freeden has called the "core concept" of the right-wing populist ideology, the concept shared by all parties generally included in the family. Looking at the primary literature, Mudde concludes that the core concept of right-populism "is undoubtedly the "nation". "This concept", he explains, "also certainly functions as a "coat-hanger" for most other ideological features. Consequently, the minimum definition of the party family should be based on the key concept, the nation". He however rejects the use of "nationalism" as a "core ideology" of right-wing populism on the ground that there are also purely "civic" or "liberal" forms of nationalism, preferring instead the term "nativism": a xenophobic form of nationalism asserting that "states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group ("the nation"), and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-state". Mudde further argues that "while nativism could include racist arguments, it can also be non-racist (including and excluding on the basis of culture or even religion)", and that the term nativism does not reduce the parties to mere single-issue parties, such as the term "anti-immigrant" does. In the maximum definition, to nativism is added authoritarianism—an attitude, not necessary anti-democratic or automatic, to prefer "law and order" and the submission to authority—and populism—a "thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, "the pure people" versus "the corrupt elite", and which argues that politics should be an expression of the "general will of the people", if needed before human rights or constitutional guarantees. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser reiterated in 2017 that within European right-wing populism, there is a "marriage of convenience" of populism based on an "ethnic and chauvinistic definition of the people", authoritarianism, and nativism. This results in right-wing populism having a "xenophobic nature."


title: Right-wing populism

text: Roger Eatwell, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bath, writes that "whilst populism and fascism differ notably ideologically, in practice the latter has borrowed aspects of populist discourse and style, and populism can degenerate into leader-oriented authoritarian and exclusionary politics." For populism to transition into fascism or proto-fascism, it requires a "nihilistic culture and an intractable crisis."


title: Right-wing populism

text: [P]opulism is like fascism in being a response to liberal and socialist explanations of the political. And also like fascism, populism does not recognize a legitimate political place for an opposition that it regards as acting against the desires of the people and that it also accuses of being tyrannical, conspiratorial, and antidemocratic. ... The opponents are turned into public enemies, but only rhetorically. If populism moves from rhetorical enmity to practices of enemy identification and persecution, we could be talking about its transformation into fascism or another form of dictatorial repression. This has happened in the past ... and without question it could happen in the future. This morphing of populism back into fascism is always a possibility, but it is very uncommon, and when it does happen, and populism becomes fully antidemocratic, it is no longer populism.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In summary, Erik Berggren and Andres Neergard wrote in 2015 that "[m]ost researchers agree [...] that xenophobia, anti-immigration sentiments, nativism, ethno-nationalism are, in different ways, central elements in the ideologies, politics, and practices of right-wing populism and Extreme Right Wing Parties." Similarly, historian Rick Shenkman describes the ideology presented by right-wing populism as "a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism, and authoritarianism." Tamir Bar-On also concluded in 2018 that the literature generally places "nativism" or "ethnic nationalism" as the core concept of the ideology, which "implicitly posits a politically dominant group, while minorities are conceived as threats to the nation". It is "generally, but not necessarily racist"; in the case of the Dutch PVV for instance, "a religious [minority, i.e. Muslims] instead of an ethnic minority constitutes the main 'enemy'".


title: Right-wing populism

text: Scholars use terminology inconsistently, sometimes referring to right-wing populism as "radical right" or other terms such as new nationalism. Pippa Norris noted that "standard reference works use alternate typologies and diverse labels categorising parties as 'far' or 'extreme' right, 'new right', 'anti-immigrant' or 'neofascist', 'antiestablishment', 'national populist', 'protest', 'ethnic', 'authoritarian', 'antigovernment', 'antiparty', 'ultranationalist', 'right-libertarian' and so on".


title: Right-wing populism

text: To Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, "national populists prioritize the culture and interests of the nation, and promise to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and often corrupt elites." They are part, Eatwell and Goodwin follow, of a "growing revolt against mainstream politics and liberal values. This challenge is in general not anti-democratic. Rather, national populists are opposed to certain "aspects" of liberal democracy as it has evolved in the West. [...] [Their] "direct" conception of democracy differs from the "liberal" one that has flourished across the West following the defeat of fascism and which has gradually become more elitist in character." Furthermore, national populists question what they call the "erosion of the nation-state", "hyper ethnic change" and the "capacity to rapidly absorb [high] rates of immigration", the "highly unequal societies" of the West's current economic settlement. They are suspicious of "cosmopolitan and globalizing agendas". Populist parties use crises in their domestic governments to enhance anti-globalist reactions; these include refrainment towards trade and anti-immigration policies. The support for these ideologies commonly comes from people whose employment might have low occupational mobility. This makes them more likely to develop an anti-immigrant and anti-globalization mentality that aligns with the ideals of the populist party.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg see "national populism" as an attempt to combine the socio-economical values of the left and political values of the right and the support for a referendary republic that would bypass traditional political divisions and institutions as they aim for the unity of the political (the "demos"), ethnic (the "ethnos") and social (the "working class") interpretations of the "people", national populists claim to defend the "average citizen" and "common sense", against the "betrayal of inevitably corrupt elites". As Front National ideologue François Duprat put in the 1970s, inspired by the Latin American right of that time, right-populism aims to constitute a "national, social, and popular" ideology. If both left and right parties share populism itself, their premises are indeed different in that right-wing populists perceive society as in a state of decadence, from which "only the healthy common people can free the nation by forming one national class from the different social classes and casting aside the corrupt elites".


title: Right-wing populism

text: Methodologically, by co-opting concepts from the left – such as multiculturalism and ethnopluralism, which is espoused by the left as a means of preserving minority ethnic cultures within a pluralistic society – and then jettisoning their non-hierarchical essence, right-wing populists can, in the words of sociologist Jens Rydgren, "mobilize on xenophobic and racist public opinions without being stigmatized as racists." Sociologist Hande Eslen-Ziya argues that right-wing populist movements rely on "troll science," namely "(distorted) scientific arguments moulded into populist discourse" that creates an alternative narrative.


title: Right-wing populism

text: European right-wing populism can be traced back to the period 1870–1900 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, with the nascence of two different trends in Germany and France: the "Völkisch" movement and Boulangism. "Völkischen" represented a romantic nationalist, racialist, and from the 1900s, antisemitic tendency in German society, as they idealized a bio-mystical "original nation" that still could be found in their views in the rural regions, a form of "primitive democracy freely subjected to their natural elites". In France, the anti-parliamentarian Ligue des Patriotes, led by Boulanger, Déroulède, and Barrès, called for a "plebiscitary republic", with the president elected by universal suffrage, and the popular will expressed not through elected representatives (the "corrupted elites"), but rather via "legislative plebiscites", another name for referendums. It also evolved to antisemitism after the Dreyfus affair (1894).


title: Right-wing populism

text: Modern national populism—what Pierro Ignazi called "post-industrial parties"—emerged in the 1970s, in a dynamic sustained by voters' rejection of the welfare state and of the tax system, both deemed "confiscatory"; the rise of xenophobia against the backdrop of immigration which, because originating from outside Europe, was considered to be of a new kind; and finally, the end of the prosperity that had reigned since the post–World War II era, symbolized by the oil crisis of 1973. Two precursor parties consequently appeared in the early 1970s: the Progress Party, the ancestor of the Danish People's Party, and Anders Lange's Party in Norway.


title: Right-wing populism

text: A new wave of right-wing populism arose after the September 11 attacks. "Neo-populists" are nationalist and Islamophobic politicians who aspire "to be the champions of freedoms for minorities (gays, Jews, women) against the Arab-Muslim masses"; a trend first embodied by the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List and later followed by Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom and Marine Le Pen's National Rally. According to Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, those parties are not a real syncretism of the left and right, as their ideology and voter base are interclassist. Furthermore, neo-populist parties went from a critique of the welfare state to that of multiculturalism, and their priority demand remains the reduction of immigration.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Political scientist and professor Matthew Goodwin has argued that the growth of European right-wing populist parties has sometimes depended on the country or region they have been founded in and that the public in some European nations such as Spain, Germany, and Sweden initially had an aversion to nationalist forces in the late twentieth century, either due to their political histories concerning World War Two, having codes of neutrality and maintaining better economic stability compared to other nations. However, parties in these countries that have been founded since the turn of the century have performed well in elections due to not having past stigma associated with fascist and antisemitic beliefs and have mobilized on concerns felt by voters over non-Western immigration, Islam, terrorism, loss of national identity or sovereignty, and beliefs that the political establishment has ignored concerns felt by ordinary people. Goodwin has also opined that political commentators have misjudged voters' concerns as solely related to economic fears and not cultural issues and that right-wing populists scored ideological victories by performing well in elections and pressuring mainstream parties into adopting similar policies to win back voters.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Piero Ignazi divided right-wing populist parties, which he called "extreme right parties", into two categories: he placed traditional right-wing parties that had developed out of the historical right and post-industrial parties that had developed independently. He placed the British National Party, the National Democratic Party of Germany, the German People's Union, and the former Dutch Centre Party in the first category, whose prototype would be the disbanded Italian Social Movement. In contrast, he placed the French National Front, the German Republicans, the Dutch Centre Democrats, the former Belgian Vlaams Blok (which would include certain aspects of traditional extreme right parties), the Danish Progress Party, the Norwegian Progress Party and the Freedom Party of Austria in the second category.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Right-wing populist parties in the English-speaking world include the UK Independence Party and Australia's One Nation. The U.S. Republican Party and the Conservative Party of Canada include right-wing populist factions.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Brazil, right-wing populism began to rise roughly around the time Dilma Rousseff won the 2014 presidential election. In the Brazilian general election of 2014, Levy Fidelix, from the Brazilian Labour Renewal Party, presented himself with a conservative speech and, according to him, the only right-wing candidate. He spoke for traditional family values and opposed abortion, legalization of marijuana, and same-sex marriage and proposed that homosexual individuals be treated far away from the good citizens' and workers' families. In the first round of the general election, Fidelix received 446,878 votes, representing 0.43% of the popular vote. Fidelix ranked 7th out of 11 candidates. In the second round, Fidelix supported candidate Aécio Neves.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In addition, according to the political analyst of the Inter-Union Department of Parliamentary Advice, Antônio Augusto de Queiroz, the National Congress elected in 2014 may be considered the most conservative since the "re-democratization" movement, noting an increase in the number of parliamentarians linked to more conservative segments, such as ruralists, the military, the police, and the religious right. The subsequent economic crisis of 2015 and investigations of corruption scandals led to a right-wing movement that sought to rescue fiscally and socially conservative ideas in opposition to the left-wing policies of the Workers' Party. At the same time, right-libertarians, such as those that make up the Free Brazil Movement, emerged among many others. For Manheim (1952), within a single real generation, there may be several generations which he called "differentiated and antagonistic". For him, it is not the common birth date that marks a generation, though it matters, but rather the historical moment in which they live in common. In this case, the historical moment was the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. They can be called the "post-Dilma generation".


title: Right-wing populism

text: Centrist interim President Michel Temer took office following the impeachment of President Rousseff. Temer held 3% approval ratings in October 2017, facing a corruption scandal after accusations of obstructing justice and racketeering against him. He managed to avoid trial thanks to the support of the right-wing parties in the Brazilian Congress. On the other hand, President of the Senate Renan Calheiros, acknowledged as one of the key figures behind Rousseff's destitution and a member of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, was removed from office after facing embezzlement charges.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In March 2016, after entering the Social Christian Party, far-right congressman Jair Bolsonaro decided to run for President of the Republic. In 2017, he tried to become the presidential nominee of Patriota, but, eventually, Bolsonaro entered the Social Liberal Party and, supported by the Brazilian Labour Renewal Party, he won the 2018 presidential election, followed by left-wing former Mayor of São Paulo Fernando Haddad of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's Workers' Party. Lula was banned from running after being convicted on criminal corruption charges and imprisoned. Bolsonaro has been accused of racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic rhetoric. His campaign was centered on opposition to crime, political corruption, and LGBT identity, and support for tax cuts, militarism, Catholicism, and Evangelicalism.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Canada has a history of right-wing populist protest parties and politicians, most notably in Western Canada, partly due to the idea of Western alienation. The highly successful Social Credit Party of Canada consistently won seats in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan but fell into obscurity by the 1970s.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the late 1980s, the Reform Party of Canada, led by Preston Manning, became another right-wing populist movement formed due to the policies of the center-right Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, which alienated many Blue Tories and led to a feeling of neglect in the West of Canada. Initially motivated by a single-issue desire to give a voice to Western Canada, the Reform Party expanded its platform to include a blend of socially conservative and right-wing populist policies. It grew from a fringe party into a major political force in the 1990s and became the official opposition party before reforming itself as the Canadian Alliance. The Alliance ultimately merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada, after which the Alliance faction dropped some of its populist and socially conservative ideas.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In recent years, right-wing populist elements have existed within the Conservative Party of Canada and mainstream provincial parties and have most notably been espoused by Ontario MP Kellie Leitch; businessman Kevin O'Leary; Quebec Premier François Legault; the former Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford; and his brother, Ontario Premier Doug Ford.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In August 2018, Conservative MP Maxime Bernier left the party, and the following month he founded the People's Party of Canada, which has self-described as "smart populism" and been described as a "right of centre, populist" movement. Bernier lost his seat in the 2019 Canadian elections, and the People's Party scored just above 1% of the vote; however, in the 2021 election, it saw improved performance and climbed to nearly 5% of the popular vote.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Pierre Poilievre, who has been described as populist by several journalists, won the 2022 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election and became the leader of both the Conservative Party and the Official Opposition. Some journalists have compared Poilievre to American Republican populists such as Ted Cruz, however many journalists have dismissed these comparisons due to Poilievre's pro-choice, pro-immigration, and pro-same-sex-marriage positions.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the 2018 political campaign, both Evangelical Christian candidate Fabricio Alvarado and right-wing anti-establishment candidate Juan Diego Castro were described as examples of right-wing populists.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Early antecedents of right-wing populism in the United States during the 19th century include the Anti-Masonic and Know-Nothing Parties. The Populist Party (which existed in the 1890s) was a primarily left-wing populist movement.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Moore (1996) argues that "populist opposition to the growing power of political, economic, and cultural elites" helped shape "conservative and right-wing movements" since the 1920s. Historical right-wing populist figures in both major parties in the United States have included Thomas E. Watson, Strom Thurmond, Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In 2010, Rasmussen and Schoen characterized the Tea Party movement as "a right-wing anti-systemic populist movement". They added: "Today our country is in the midst of a...new populist revolt that has emerged overwhelmingly from the right – manifesting itself as the Tea Party movement". In 2010, David Barstow wrote in "The New York Times": "The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent". Some political figures closely associated with the Tea Party, such as U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and former U.S. Representative Ron Paul, have been described as appealing to right-wing populism. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the Freedom Caucus, associated with the Tea Party movement, has been described as right-wing populist.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, noted for its anti-establishment, anti-immigration, and anti-free trade rhetoric, was characterized as right-wing populist. The ideology of Trump's former Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, has also been described as such.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Australia's main right-wing populist party is One Nation, led by Pauline Hanson, Senator for Queensland. One Nation typically supports the opposition Coalition.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Other parties formerly represented in the Australian Parliament with right-wing populist elements and rhetoric include the Australian Conservatives, led by Cory Bernardi, Senator for South Australia; David Leyonhjelm, Senator for New South Wales; and Katter's Australian Party, led by Queensland MP Bob Katter.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Some figures within the Coalition have been described as right-wing populists, including former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the Australian state of Victoria, The main opposition party Liberal Victoria and its leader Matthew Guy have been described by the media for its constant attack on pandemic health measures and posting irrational attacks on the Andrews Government in the social media account. However, Liberal Victoria still aims to appeal to moderate voters on issues such as climate change and indigenous treaties


title: Right-wing populism

text: "Netto-uyoku", "Zaitokukai", and the Japan First Party are evaluated as similar to Western far-right populism and the alt-right movement.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Pakistan, Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf (PTI) has recently been described as centrist-populist while sharing some characteristics with right-wing populists. Its leader Imran Khan has furiously attacked traditional politicians and made people believe that only he has the solutions. British journalist Ben Judah, in an interview, compared Imran Khan with Donald Trump on his populist rhetoric.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Conservatism in South Korea has traditionally been more inclined toward elitism than populism. However, since the 2016 South Korean political scandal, Korean conservative forces have changed their political lines to populism as the distrust of the elite spread among the Korean public.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Hong Joon-pyo and Lee Un-ju of the United Future Party are leading right-wing populists advocating anti-homosexuality, anti-immigration and social conservative views. Yoon Seok-youl, a candidate for the PPP in the 2022 South Korean presidential election, is criticized as a "populist" for using hostile sentiment toward feminism and proposing unrealistic economic policies.


title: Right-wing populism

text: South Korean right-wing circles insist that the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye is wrong, stimulating conservative public nostalgia for the Park Chung-hee administration. It also shows a radical anti-North Korea, anti-Chinese and anti-communist stance.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Taiwan's right-wing populists tend to deny the independent identity of their country's 'Taiwan' and emphasize their identity as a 'Republic of China'. Taiwan's left-wing Taiwanese nationalists have strong pro-American tendencies, so Taiwan's major and minor conservatives are critical of this. In particular, Taiwan's right-wing populists demand that economic growth and right-wing Chinese nationalist issues be more important than liberal democracy and that they become closer to the People's Republic of China. Some of Taiwan's leading right-wing populists include Terry Gou, Han Kuo-yu, and Chang Ya-chung.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Senior European Union diplomats cited growing anxiety in Europe about Russian financial support for far-right and populist movements and told the "Financial Times" that the intelligence agencies of "several" countries had scrutinized possible links with Moscow. In 2016, the Czech Republic warned that Russia was trying to "divide and conquer" the European Union by supporting right-wing populist politicians across the bloc. However, as there in the United States of America, there seems to be an underlying problem that is not massively discussed in the media. That underlying problem is that of housing. A 2019 study shows an immense correlation between the price of housing and voting for populist parties. In that study, it was revealed that the French citizens that saw the price of their houses stagnate or drop were much more likely to vote for Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential election. Those who saw the price of their house rise were much more likely to vote for Emmanuel Macron. The same pattern emerged in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, in which those that saw the price of their house rise voted to Remain. Whereas those that saw it flatline or drop voted to Leave.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), established in 1955, claims to represent a "Third Camp" ("Drittes Lager") beside the Socialist Party and the social Catholic Austrian People's Party. It succeeded the Federation of Independents founded after World War II, adopting the pre-war heritage of German nationalism, although it did not advocate Nazism and placed itself in the political center. Though it did not gain much popularity for decades, it exercised a considerable balance of power by supporting several federal governments, be it right-wing or left-wing, e.g., the Socialist Kreisky cabinet of 1970 (see Kreisky–Peter–Wiesenthal affair).


title: Right-wing populism

text: From 1980, the Freedom Party adopted a more moderate stance. Upon the 1983 federal election, it entered a coalition government with the Socialist Party, whereby party chairman Norbert Steger served as Vice-Chancellor. The liberal interlude, however, ended when Jörg Haider was elected chairman in 1986. Haider re-integrated the party's nationalist base voters through his down-to-earth manners and patriotic attitude. Nevertheless, he also obtained votes from large sections of the population disenchanted with politics by publicly denouncing the corruption and nepotism of the Austrian "Proporz" system. The electoral success was boosted by Austria's accession to the European Union in 1995.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Upon the 1999 federal election, the Freedom Party (FPÖ), with 26.9% of the votes cast, became the second strongest party in the National Council parliament. Having entered a coalition government with the People's Party, Haider had to face the disability of several FPÖ ministers and the impossibility of agitation against members of his cabinet. In 2005, he finally countered the FPÖ's loss of reputation with the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) relaunch to carry on his government. The remaining FPÖ members elected Heinz-Christian Strache chairman, but since the 2006 federal election, both right-wing parties have run separately. After Haider was killed in a car accident in 2008, the BZÖ lost a measurable amount of support.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The FPÖ regained much of its support in subsequent elections. Its candidate Norbert Hofer made it into the runoff in the 2016 presidential election, though he narrowly lost the election. After the 2017 legislative elections, the FPÖ formed a government coalition with the Austrian People's Party but lost seats in 2019.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Vlaams Blok, established in 1978, operated on a platform of law and order, anti-immigration (with a particular focus on Islamic immigration), and secession of the Flanders region of the country. The secession was originally planned to end in the annexation of Flanders by the culturally and linguistically similar Netherlands until the plan was abandoned due to the multiculturalism in that country. In the elections to the Flemish Parliament in June 2004, the party received 24.2% of the vote, within less than 2% of being the largest party. However, in November of the same year, the party was ruled illegal under the country's anti-racism law for, among other things, advocating segregated schools for citizens and immigrants.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In less than a week, the party was re-established under the name Vlaams Belang, initially with a near-identical ideology before moderating parts of its statute. It advocates the adoption of the Flemish culture and language by immigrants who wish to stay in the country. It also calls for a zero-tolerance stance on illegal immigration and the reinstatement of border controls. Despite some accusations of antisemitism from Belgium's Jewish population, the party has demonstrated a staunch pro-Israel stance as part of its opposition to Islam. In Antwerp, sections of the city's significant Jewish population have begun to support the party. With 23 of 124 seats, Vlaams Belang leads the opposition in the Flemish Parliament and holds 11 out of the 150 seats in the Belgian House of Representatives.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Flemish nationalist and conservative liberal N-VA party has been described as populist or containing right-wing populist elements by foreign media such as the German "Die Zeit" magazine. However, the party has rebutted the term and does not label itself as such.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the French-speaking Walloon region, Mischaël Modrikamen, an associate of Steve Bannon, was chairman of the Parti Populaire (PP), which contested elections in Wallonia. Political analysts have generally observed that right-wing populist parties tend to perform better with the Flemish electorate over French-speaking Belgian voters, on the whole, owing to the Flemish vote moving to the right in recent decades and Flemish parties intertwining Flemish nationalism with other issues.


title: Right-wing populism

text: As of the 2019 federal, regional, and European elections, Vlaams Belang (VB) has surged from 248,843 votes in 2014 to 783,977 on 26 May 2019.


title: Right-wing populism

text: There are several right-wing populist parties in Bulgaria, including IMRO-BNM, National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria, and Attack. For the 2017 Bulgarian parliamentary election, they formed the United Patriots electoral alliance, which won 27 seats in Parliament. United Patriots entered a coalition with GERB to form the Third Borisov Government. Volya, another right-wing populist party with 12 seats in Parliament, also supported the government.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Following the 2021 Bulgarian general election, another right-wing populist party, Revival, entered Parliament, while IMRO-BNM, NFSB, Attack, and Volya failed to win any seats.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The ELAM was formed in 2008. Its platform includes advocating for Unification with Greece, opposition to further European integration, immigration, and the "status quo" that remains due to Turkey's invasion of a third of the island (and the international community's lack of intention to solve the issue).


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the early 1970s, the home of the strongest right-wing populist party in Europe was in Denmark, the Progress Party. In the 1973 election, it received almost 16% of the vote. In the following years, its support dwindled, but the Danish People's Party replaced it in the 1990s, which became an important support party for the governing coalition in the 2000s (decade). The Danish People's Party is the largest and most influential right-wing populist party in Denmark today. It won 37 seats in the 2015 Danish general election and became the second-largest party in Denmark. The Danish People's Party advocates immigration reductions, particularly from non-Western countries, favors cultural assimilation of first-generation migrants into Danish society, and is opposed to Denmark becoming a multicultural society.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Additionally, the Danish People's Party's stated goals are to enforce a strict rule of law, maintain a strong welfare system for those in need, promote economic growth by strengthening education and encouraging people to work, and protect the environment. In 2015, The New Right was founded and has four seats in the current Folketing.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Finland, the main right-wing party is the Finns Party. It formed the government coalition with National Coalition and Centre-Party after the 2015 parliamentary election. In 2017 the governmental branch broke off to form the Blue Reform, which took the coalition position from the Finns Party. Blue Reform is currently in the government coalition, and the Finns Party is in opposition and is the fastest-growing party in Finland. In 2018 a Finnish member of the parliament, Paavo Väyrynen, formed the Seven Star Movement. The party is anti-immigration but is in the center in economic politics.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Gaullism is considered part of (right-wing) populism because it is based on charisma, popular mobilization, French nationalism, and exceptionalism. Gaullism is deeply embedded in modern right-wing politics in France.


title: Right-wing populism

text: France's National Front (NF) – renamed in 2018 as the "National Rally" – has been cited as the "prototypical populist radical right-wing party". The party was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen as the unification of several French nationalist movements of the time; he developed it into a well-organized party. After struggling for a decade, the party reached its first peak in 1984. By 2002, Le Pen received more votes than the Socialist candidate in the first round of voting for the French presidency, becoming the first NF candidate to qualify for a presidential runoff election. After Le Pen's daughter, Marine Le Pen, took over as the head of the party in 2011, the National Front established itself as one of the main political parties in France. Marine Le Pen's policy of "de-demonizing" or normalizing the party resulted in her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, being first suspended and then ejected from the party in 2015. Marine Le Pen finished second in the 2017 election and lost in the second round of voting versus Emmanuel Macron, which was held on 7 May 2017. However, polls published in 2018 showed that a majority of the French population considers the party to be a threat to democracy.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The 2018 Hungarian parliamentary election result was a victory for the Fidesz–KDNP alliance, preserving its two-thirds majority, with Viktor Orbán remaining Prime Minister. Orbán and Fidesz campaigned primarily on the issues of immigration and foreign meddling, and the election was seen as a victory for right-wing populism in Europe.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Since 2013, the most popular right-wing populist party in Germany has been Alternative for Germany, which managed to finish third in the 2017 German federal election, making it the first right-wing populist party to enter the Bundestag, Germany's national parliament. Before, right-wing populist parties had gained seats in German State Parliaments only. Left-wing populism is represented in the Bundestag by The Left party.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Right-wing populist movements like Pro NRW and Citizens in Rage ("Bürger in Wut", BIW) sporadically attract some support. In 1989, The Republicans ("Die Republikaner"), led by Franz Schönhuber, entered the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin and achieved more than 7% of the German votes cast in the 1989 European election, with six seats in the European Parliament. The party also won seats in the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg twice in 1992 and 1996. However, after 2000 the Republicans' support eroded in favor of the far-right German People's Union and the Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), which in the 2009 federal election held 1.5% of the popular vote (winning up to 9% in regional "Landtag" parliamentary elections).


title: Right-wing populism

text: In 2005, a nationwide Pro Germany Citizens' Movement ("pro Deutschland") was founded in Cologne. The Pro Germany movement appears as a conglomerate of numerous small parties, voters' associations, and societies, distinguishing themselves by campaigns against extremism and immigrants. Its representatives claim a zero-tolerance policy and combat corruption. Their politics extend to far-right positions with the denial of a multiethnic society ("Überfremdung") and Islamization. Other minor right-wing populist parties include the German Freedom Party, founded in 2010, the former East German German Social Union (DSU), and the dissolved Party for a Rule of Law Offensive ("Schill party").


title: Right-wing populism

text: The most prominent right-wing populist party in Greece is the Independent Greeks (ANEL). Despite being smaller than the more extreme Golden Dawn party, after the January 2015 legislative elections, ANEL formed a governing coalition with the left-wing Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), thus making the party a governing party and giving it a place in the Cabinet of Alexis Tsipras.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Golden Dawn has grown significantly in Greece during the economic downturn, gaining 7% of the vote and 18 out of 300 seats in the Hellenic Parliament. The party's ideology includes annexing territory in Albania and Turkey, including the Turkish cities of Istanbul and Izmir. Controversial measures by the party included a poor people's kitchen in Athens, which only supplied Greek citizens and was shut down by the police.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Popular Orthodox Rally is not represented in the Greek legislature but supplied 2 of the country's 22 MEPS until 2014. It supports anti-globalization, lower taxes for small businesses, and opposition to Turkish accession to the European Union and the Republic of Macedonia's use of the name Macedonia and immigration only for Europeans. Its participation in government has been one of the reasons why it became unpopular with its voters who turned to Golden Dawn in Greece's 2012 elections.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Italy, the most prominent right-wing populist party in the last twenty years was Lega, formerly Lega Nord (Northern League), whose leaders reject the right-wing label, though not the "populist" one. The League is a federalist, regionalist, and sometimes secessionist party, founded in 1991 as a federation of several regional parties of Northern and Central Italy, most of which had arisen and expanded during the 1980s. LN's program advocates the transformation of Italy into a federal state, fiscal federalism, and greater regional autonomy, especially for the Northern regions. At times, the party has advocated for the secession of the North, which it calls Padania. The party generally takes an anti-Southern Italian stance as members are known for opposing Southern Italian emigration to Northern Italian cities, stereotyping Southern Italians as welfare abusers and detrimental to Italian society, and attributing Italy's economic troubles and the disparity of the North–south divide in the Italian economy to supposed inherent negative characteristics of the Southern Italians, such as laziness, lack of education, or criminality. Certain LN members have been known to publicly deploy the offensive slur ""terrone"", a common pejorative term for Southern Italians evocative of negative Southern Italian stereotypes. As a federalist, regionalist, populist party of the North, LN is also highly critical of the centralized power and political importance of Rome, sometimes adopting to a lesser extent an anti-Roman stance in addition to an anti-Southern stance.


title: Right-wing populism

text: With the rise of immigration into Italy since the late 1990s, LN has increasingly turned its attention to criticizing mass immigration to Italy. The LN, which also opposes illegal immigration, is critical of Islam and proposes Italy's exit from the Eurozone and is considered a Eurosceptic movement and, as such, is a part of the Identity and Democracy(ID) group in the European Parliament. LN was or is part of the national government in 1994, 2001–2006, 2008–2011, and 2018–2019. Most recently, the party, including among its members the Presidents of Lombardy and Veneto, won 17.4% of the vote in the 2018 general election, becoming the third-largest party in Italy (largest within the centre-right coalition). In the 2014 European election, under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, it took 6.2% of votes. Under Salvini, the party has, to some extent, embraced Italian nationalism and emphasized Euroscepticism, opposition to immigration, and other "populist" policies while allying with right-wing populist parties in Europe.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Silvio Berlusconi, leader of Forza Italia and Prime Minister of Italy from 1994 to 1995, 2001–2006, and 2008–2011, has sometimes been described as a right-wing populist, although his party is not typically described as such.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Between the late 2010s and the early 2020s, another right-wing populist movement emerged within the centre-right coalition. The nationalist and national-conservative Brothers of Italy (FdI), led by Giorgia Meloni, gained 4.4% of votes in the 2018 election and, four years later, it became the most voted party in the 2022 general election, gaining 26% of votes. Meloni was appointed Prime Minister on 22 October, at the head of what it was considered as the most rightist Italian government since 1945.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Some national conservative, nationalist, and arguably right-wing populist parties are strong, especially in Lazio, the region around Rome, and Southern Italy. Most of them originated due to the Italian Social Movement (a national-conservative party whose best result was 8.7% of the vote in the 1972 general election) and its successor National Alliance (which reached 15.7% of the vote in the 1996 general election). In addition to Brothers of Italy, they include New Force (0.3%), "CasaPound" (0.1%), Tricolour Flame (0.1%), Social Idea Movement (0.01%) and "Progetto Nazionale" (0.01%).


title: Right-wing populism

text: Additionally, in the German-speaking South Tyrol, the local second-largest party, "Die Freiheitlichen", is often described as a right-wing populist party.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the Netherlands, right-wing populism was represented in the 150-seat House of Representatives in 1982 when the Centre Party won a single seat. During the 1990s, a splinter party, the Centre Democrats, was slightly more successful, although its significance was still marginal. Not before 2002 did a right-wing populist party break through in the Netherlands, when the Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) won 26 seats and subsequently formed a coalition with the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Fortuyn, who had strong views against immigration, particularly by Muslims, was assassinated in May 2002, two weeks before the election. Ideologically, the LPF differed somewhat from other European right-wing populist movements by holding more liberal stances on certain social issues such as abortion, gay rights, and euthanasia (Fortuyn himself was openly gay) while maintaining an uncompromising stance on immigration, law and order, and the European Union. Fortuyn was also credited with shifting the Dutch political landscape by bringing the topics of multiculturalism, immigration, and the integration of immigrants into the political mainstream. However, the coalition had broken up by 2003, and the LPF went into steep decline until it was dissolved.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Since 2006, the Party for Freedom (PVV) has been represented in the House of Representatives and described as inheriting the mantle of the Pim Fortuyn List. Following the 2010 general election, it has been in a pact with the right-wing minority government of CDA and VVD after it won 24 seats in the House of Representatives. The party is Eurosceptic and plays a leading role in the changing stance of the Dutch government towards European integration as they came second in the 2009 European Parliament election, winning 4 out of 25 seats. The party's main program revolves around strong criticism of Islam, restrictions on migration from new European Union countries and Islamic countries, pushing for cultural assimilation of migrants into Dutch society, opposing the accession of Turkey to the European Union, advocating for the Netherlands to withdraw from the European Union and advocating for a return to the guilder through ending Dutch usage of the euro.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The PVV withdrew its support for the First Rutte cabinet in 2012 after refusing to support austerity measures. This triggered the 2012 general election in which the PVV was reduced to 15 seats and excluded from the new government.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the 2017 Dutch general election, Wilders' PVV gained an extra five seats to become the second largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives, bringing their total to 20 seats.


title: Right-wing populism

text: From 2017 onwards, the Forum for Democracy (FvD) emerged as another right-wing populist force in the Netherlands. The FvD also advocates a stricter immigration policy and a referendum on Dutch membership of the EU.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The largest right-wing populist party in Poland is Law and Justice, which currently holds the presidency and a governing majority in the Sejm. It combines social conservatism and criticism of immigration with strong support for NATO and an interventionist economic policy.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Polish Congress of the New Right, headed by Michał Marusik, aggressively promotes fiscally conservative concepts like radical tax reductions preceded by the abolishment of social security, universal public healthcare, state-sponsored education, and Communist Polish 1944 agricultural reform as a way to dynamical economic and welfare growth. The party is considered populist both by right-wing and left-wing publicists.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), a right-wing populist party, became the fourth-largest political force in Romania after the 2020 Romanian legislative election.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Spain, the appearance of right-wing populism began to gain strength after the December 2018 election for the Parliament of Andalusia, in which the right-wing populist party VOX managed to obtain 12 seats and agreed to support a coalition government of the parties of the right People's Party and Citizens, even though the Socialist Party won the elections. VOX, which has been frequently described as far-right, both by the left parties and by Spanish or international press, promotes characteristic policies of the populist right, such as the expulsion of all illegal immigrants from the country -even of legal immigrants who commit crimes-, a generalized criminal tightening, combined with traditional claims of right-wing conservatives, such as the centralization of the State and the suppression of the Autonomous Communities, and has harshly criticized the laws against gender violence, approved by the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, but later maintained by the PP executive of Mariano Rajoy, accusing the people and institutions that defend them of applying ""gender totalitarianism"".


title: Right-wing populism

text: Party official Javier Ortega Smith is being investigated for alleged hate speech after Spanish prosecutors admitted a complaint by an Islamic association in connection with a rally that talked about “the Islamist invasion”. The party election manifesto that was finally published merged classic far-right-inspired policies with right-libertarianism in tax and social security matters.


title: Right-wing populism

text: After months of political uncertainty and protests against the party in Andalusia and other regions, in the 2019 Spanish general election, VOX managed to obtain 24 deputies in the Congress of Deputies, with 10.26% of the vote, falling short of expectations after an intense electoral campaign in which VOX gathered big crowds of people at their events. Although the People's Party and Citizens leaders, Pablo Casado and Albert Rivera, had admitted repeatedly during the campaign that they would again agree with VOX in order to reach the government, the sum of all their seats finally left them far from any possibility, giving the government to the social democrat Pedro Sánchez.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Sweden, the first openly populist movement to be represented in the Riksdag (Swedish parliament), New Democracy was founded in 1994 by businessman Bert Karlsson and aristocrat Ian Wachtmeister. Although New Democracy promoted economic issues as its foremost concern, it also advocated restrictions on immigration and welfare chauvinism. The party saw a sharp rise in support in 1994 before declining soon after.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In 2010, the Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time. The Sweden Democrats originally had connections to white nationalism during its early days but later began expelling hardline members and moderated its platform to transform itself into a more mainstream movement. The party calls for more robust immigration and asylum policies, compulsory measures to assimilate immigrants into Swedish society, and stricter law and order policies. The Sweden Democrats are currently the second largest party in Sweden, with 20.5% of the popular vote in the 2022 Swedish general election, and the second most seats in the Swedish parliament with 73 seats.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Switzerland, the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party (SVP) reached an all-time high in the 2015 elections. The party is mainly considered national conservative, but it has also variously been identified as "extreme right" and "radical right-wing populist", reflecting a spectrum of ideologies among its members. Its far-right wing includes members such as Ulrich Schlüer and Pascal Junod, who heads a New Right study group and has been linked to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In Switzerland, radical right populist parties held close to 10% of the popular vote in 1971, were reduced to below 2% by 1979, and grew to more than 10% in 1991. Since 1991, these parties (the Swiss Democrats and the Swiss Freedom Party) have been absorbed by the SVP. During the 1990s, the SVP grew from the fourth largest party to the largest and gained a second seat in the Swiss Federal Council in 2003 with the prominent politician and businessman Christoph Blocher. In 2015, the SVP received 29.4% of the vote, the highest vote ever recorded for a single party throughout Swiss parliamentary history.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have been in power since 2002.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The Victory Party is a patriotic and Kemalist political party in Turkey founded on August 26, 2021, under the leadership of Ümit Özdağ. It is represented in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey by two deputies. The party is the continuation of the Ayyıldız Movement initiated by Ümit Özdağ, the founding petition of the party was submitted to the Ministry of the Interior on 26 August 2021, and then the party was officially established. The party leader Özdağ and his deputies aim to re-institute Kemalist and Turkish nationalist ideologies in the government and aim to send back refugees to their homelands.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Thatcherism, a major conservative ideology in modern Britain, has right-wing populist elements, including nationalism and social conservatism.


title: Right-wing populism

text: Media outlets such as "The New York Times" have called the UK Independence Party (UKIP), then led by Nigel Farage, the largest right-wing populist party in the United Kingdom. UKIP campaigned for an exit from the European Union prior to the 2016 European membership referendum and a points-based immigration system similar to that used in Australia.


title: Right-wing populism

text: The United Kingdom's governing Conservative Party has seen defections to UKIP over the European Union and immigration debates, as well as LGBT rights.


title: Right-wing populism

text: In the Conservative Party, past prime minister Boris Johnson has been described as expressing right-wing populist views during the successful Vote Leave campaign. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, has also been described as a right-wing populist.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Wings were a British-American rock band formed in 1971 by former Beatle bassist Paul McCartney, his wife Linda McCartney on keyboards, session drummer Denny Seiwell, and former Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine. Wings were noted for their commercial successes, musical eclecticism and frequent personnel changes; going through three lead guitarists and four drummers. However, the core trio of the McCartneys and Laine remained intact throughout the group's existence.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Created following the McCartneys' 1971 album "Ram", the band's first two albums, "Wild Life" (1971) and "Red Rose Speedway" (1973) (the latter featuring guitarist Henry McCullough), were viewed as artistic disappointments beside Paul's work with the Beatles. After the release of the title track of the James Bond movie "Live and Let Die", McCullough and Seiwell resigned from the band. The McCartneys and Laine then released 1973's "Band on the Run", a commercial and critical success that spawned two top-ten singles in "Jet" and the title track. Following that album, the band recruited guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Geoff Britton, only for Britton to quit shortly afterwards and be replaced by Joe English. With the new line-up, Wings released 1975's "Venus and Mars", which included the US number one single "Listen to What the Man Said", and undertook a highly successful world tour over 1975–76. Intended as more of a group effort, "Wings at the Speed of Sound" (1976) was issued midway through the tour and featured the hit singles "Silly Love Songs" and "Let 'Em In".


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: In 1977, the band earned their only UK number one single, with "Mull of Kintyre", which became one of the best-selling singles in history. Wings experienced another line-up shuffle, however, with both McCulloch and English departing before the release of the group's 1978 album "London Town". The McCartneys and Laine again added new members, recruiting guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer Steve Holley. The resulting album, "Back to the Egg", was a relative flop, with its singles under-performing and the critical reception negative. During the supporting tour, Paul was arrested in Japan for cannabis possession, putting the band on hold. Despite a final US number one with a live-recorded version of "Coming Up" (1980), after Laine departed from the band, Wings discontinued in 1981.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: After the Beatles' break-up in 1970, McCartney recorded two albums: "McCartney" (1970), credited to himself, and "Ram" (1971), with his wife, Linda McCartney. He had insisted from the beginning of their marriage that Linda should be involved in his musical projects, notwithstanding her lack of previous experience as a musician, so that they did not have to be apart when he was on tour. "Ram" was recorded in New York City, where McCartney auditioned a number of drummers and guitarists, selecting Seiwell and guitarist David Spinozza. When Spinozza became unavailable due to other session commitments, Hugh McCracken was enlisted to take his place.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: After the release of "Ram", McCartney decided to form a new group and asked Seiwell and McCracken to join. Seiwell accepted, but McCracken declined, so McCartney invited Denny Laine, whom he had known since the early 1960s, to join. Laine, who was working on a solo album at the time, got a phone call from McCartney enquiring if he would like to work with him, as McCartney said: "I'd known him in the past and I just rang him and asked him, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'Nothing', so I said, 'Right. Come on then!'" Laine then dropped plans for his album there and then. As he had in the Beatles, McCartney would serve as the chief bassist and lead singer for Wings and he doubled on guitar, keyboards, drums and assorted instruments at various times. When asked why he stayed on bass guitar rather than change back to guitar after the Beatles disbanded, he has explained that by then, he was "a bass player pretty much, who also happened to play guitar" and also considers himself a bassist who happens to play piano.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: In August 1971, Seiwell and Laine joined Paul and Linda McCartney to record Paul's third post-Beatles album for Apple Records. The result was "Wild Life", released 7 December. It was the first project to credit Wings as the artist. The band name is said to have come to McCartney as he was praying in the hospital while Linda was giving birth to their second child together, Stella, on 13 September 1971. Paul McCartney recalled in the film "Wingspan" that the birth of Stella was "a bit of a drama"; there were complications at the birth and that both Linda and the baby almost died. He was praying fervently and the image of wings came to his mind. He decided to name his new band "Wings."


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: In an attempt to capture the spontaneity of live performances, five of "Wild Life"'s eight songs were first takes by the band. The album included a cover of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange". Like "Ram", "Wild Life" left music critics cold, a response that typified the anti-McCartney sentiments that prevailed among the music press following the Beatles' break-up. In their 1975 book "", Roy Carr and Tony Tyler called "Wild Life" "rushed, defensive, badly timed, and over-publicized", and wrote that it showed McCartney's songwriting "at an absolute nadir just when he needed a little respect". Wings similarly struggled to gain artistic credibility, particularly during the early 1970s, with critics, fans and McCartney's musical peers alike ridiculing the inclusion of Linda as a keyboard player and backing vocalist.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: On 24 January 1972, McCartney added to the Wings line-up guitarist Henry McCullough, after he had tried out for the band. The new line-up immediately mounted an impromptu tour of UK universities (with the group driving around in a van), followed by a tour of small European venues. Although this was the first tour including an ex-Beatle after the Beatles broke up, Wings played no Beatles numbers during the tour, to show that it was a new band in its own right.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: In February 1972, Wings released a single called "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", a response to the events of Bloody Sunday. The song was banned by the BBC for its anti-Unionist political stance. Despite limited airplay, it reached number 16 in the UK, as well as number 1 in both the Republic of Ireland and Spain. Wings released a children's song, "Mary Had a Little Lamb", as its next single, which reached the top 10 in the UK. Although some critics interpreted it as a sarcastic reaction to the ban on "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", it was in fact a serious effort by McCartney to record a song for children. Wings followed it with December 1972's "Hi, Hi, Hi", which was again banned by the BBC, this time for its alleged drug and sexual references. The B-side, "C Moon", was played instead. The single peaked at number 5 in the UK.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: The band were renamed "Paul McCartney and Wings" for the 1973 album "Red Rose Speedway" (and for the follow-up "Band on the Run"), which yielded their first US number 1 hit, "My Love". The album included two tracks left over from the "Ram" sessions and was originally intended as a two-record set. After producer Glyn Johns had walked out on the project, however, McCartney conceded to EMI's opinion that the material was "substandard" and cut it down to a single disc. Among the unreleased songs from the seven-month sessions was the Linda composition "Seaside Woman", which was finally issued in 1977, credited to "Suzy and the Red Stripes".


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Near the end of the "Red Rose Speedway" sessions, in October 1972, Wings recorded the theme song to the James Bond film "Live and Let Die", which reunited McCartney with Beatles producer/arranger George Martin. Issued as a non-album single in mid-1973, "Live and Let Die" became a worldwide hit and has remained a highlight of McCartney's post-Wings concert performances (often accompanied by pyrotechnics). That same year, McCartney and Wings filmed a TV special, the critically maligned "James Paul McCartney", which featured footage of the group performing in outdoor settings and in front of a studio audience.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: After a successful British tour in May–June 1973, Wings went into rehearsals for their next album. McCullough and Seiwell abruptly left the band in August, however, at the end of rehearsals. Both musicians were disenchanted with the group's musical direction and Linda's inclusion; McCullough also objected to McCartney's domineering attitude towards him as a guitar player, while Seiwell had long felt aggrieved at the lack of a formalised financial arrangement and his status as a lowly paid sideman.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: With the band reduced to a trio, the McCartneys and Laine cut what turned out to be Wings' most successful album, "Band on the Run", at EMI's primitive eight-track recording studio in Lagos, Nigeria. The album went to number 1 in both the US and UK and spawned three hit singles: the rockers "Jet" and "Helen Wheels" (originally included only on the US version of the album) and the title track—a suite of movements recalling side two of "Abbey Road". It also included "Let Me Roll It", which was seen as an affectionate impersonation of John Lennon's vocal style, and "No Words", the first Wings song on which Laine received a co-writing credit beside the McCartneys. "Band on the Run" enjoyed a highly favourable response from music critics and restored McCartney's tarnished post-Beatles image.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: After "Band on the Run", Jimmy McCulloch, former lead guitarist in Thunderclap Newman and Stone the Crows, joined the band. The first Wings project with McCulloch was "McGear", a 1974 collaboration between Paul and his younger brother Mike McGear, with session musician Gerry Conway playing drums. Warner Bros. Records chose not to play up the "Wings" angle in its marketing for "McGear", and the album sold poorly. However, the sessions also generated a single credited to McGear's group the Scaffold, "Liverpool Lou", which became a top-10 hit in the UK. Shortly thereafter, Geoff Britton joined Wings on drums, and the first recording session with this full line-up was held in Nashville, where the band stayed at the farm of songwriter Curly Putman Jr. The trip was immortalised in the 1974 non-album single "Junior's Farm", backed with a straight country track entitled "Sally G", the group's last release on Apple Records. In a rare occurrence for this era, both sides of the single separately reached the Billboard Top 20 in the US.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Wings began recording sessions for its next album in London in November 1974, then moved to New Orleans to complete "Venus and Mars" (1975), the first release from the group on Capitol Records. The album topped the charts and contained the US number 1 single "Listen to What the Man Said", which also featured Dave Mason, formerly of Traffic, on guitar and Tom Scott on saxophone. When the "Venus and Mars" recording sessions moved to New Orleans, Britton quit Wings and was replaced by Joe English who won the job at a secret audition before McCartney. In late 1975 Wings embarked on the Wings Over the World tour, following a postponement to allow McCulloch to recuperate from a hand fracture. Starting in Bristol, the tour took them to Australia (November), Europe (March 1976), the US (May/June), and Europe again (September), before ending in a four-night grand finale at London's Wembley Empire Pool. For this tour, added to Wings' stage act was a horn section consisting of Tony Dorsey, Howie Casey, Thaddeus Richard and Steve Howard, on saxes, brass and percussion.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: In between sections of the tour, Wings recorded "Wings at the Speed of Sound", which was released at the end of March 1976, just prior to the US leg of the world tour. It represented a departure from the previous Wings template in that each of the five members of the band (including English) sang lead on at least one song. However, the two singles, "Silly Love Songs" and "Let 'Em In" (the former a US number one), were both sung by Paul. Four of the album tracks were played in the 1976 portion of the tour, which also included five Beatles songs. One of the Seattle concerts from the American leg of the 1975–76 world tour was filmed and later released as the concert feature "Rockshow" (1980). The tour's American leg, which also included Madison Square Garden in New York City and Boston Garden in Massachusetts, spawned a triple live album, "Wings over America" (1976), which became the fifth consecutive Wings album to reach number 1 in the US. From this album came a single release of the live version of "Maybe I'm Amazed" originally from the "McCartney" album. The single's flipside was "Soily", a previously unreleased rocker that was often used as a closer for the concerts.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: After the tour, and following the release of "Maybe I'm Amazed" in early 1977, Wings took a break. Later in the year, the band started recording their next album in the Virgin Islands, but the sessions were interrupted by Linda's pregnancy and then by the departures of both McCulloch and English. McCulloch, who joined Small Faces, died of morphine and alcohol poisoning in 1979. English joined Chuck Leavell's band Sea Level and later founded the Christian-oriented Joe English Band.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Undeterred by their departure, Wings released the already-completed McCartney–Laine ballad "Mull of Kintyre", an ode to the Scottish coastal region where McCartney had made his home in the early 1970s. Its broad appeal was maximised by a pre-Christmas release. It became an international hit, dominating the charts in Britain (where it was Wings' only number 1 single), Australia and many other countries over the Christmas/New Year period. Ultimately, it became the first single to exceed sales of 2 million in the UK, eclipsing the previous all-time best-seller (the Beatles' "She Loves You"), and remains one of the biggest-selling UK singles of all time. However, it was not a success in the US, where the B-side "Girls School" received most of the airplay but barely reached the top 40.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: The core trio of Wings then released the album "London Town" in 1978. Though only the remaining trio are pictured on the sleeve, much of the album included McCulloch and English, having been recorded before their departures. Laine, however, remained and was co-credited on five of the tracks, including the title song. It was a commercial success, although it became the first Wings album since "Wild Life" not to reach number 1 in the US (peaking at number 2). "London Town" featured a markedly softer-rock, synth-based sound than previous Wings albums. "With a Little Luck" reached number 1 in the US and number 5 in the UK, but "I've Had Enough" and "London Town" were commercial disappointments in both countries.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Later in 1978, lead guitarist Laurence Juber and drummer Steve Holley joined the band, restoring Wings to touring strength. In 1979, McCartney signed a new record contract, leaving Capitol, the company he had been with in the US and Canada since he was a Beatle, and joining Columbia Records, while remaining with Parlophone in the rest of the world. Influenced by the punk and new wave scenes, Wings abandoned its mellow touch and hired Chris Thomas to help in the production process. The result was a somewhat less polished sound. This new version of Wings released the disco-oriented single "Goodnight Tonight", backed by "Daytime Nighttime Suffering", which reached the top 5 in both the US and UK. However, the subsequent album "Back to the Egg" was not favourably received by critics and although it went platinum in the US, sales were disappointing in comparison to its immediate predecessors. It contained the Grammy-winning song "Rockestra Theme", the result of an October 1978 superstar session with members of Wings, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, among others. Three singles, "Old Siam, Sir" (UK only), "Getting Closer", and "Arrow Through Me" (US only), were culled from the album, but performed poorly on the charts. During much of 1979, Wings were inactive as McCartney worked on a new solo album ("McCartney II") without the band.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: In November and December 1979, Wings toured the UK, once again adding the horns and brass section consisting of Tony Dorsey, Howie Casey, Thaddeus Richard, and Steve Howard. This tour climaxed with a massive "Rockestra" all-star collection of musicians in London in aid of UNICEF and Kampuchean refugees. Also during this tour, a live version of the "McCartney II" track "Coming Up" was recorded in Glasgow and became Wings' sixth US number one hit the following year.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: Paul McCartney and his family arrived in Japan on 16 January 1980 for the planned eleven-date Wings' concert tour of Japan (due to visit Budokan Hall, Tokyo from 21 to 24 January 1980; Aichi-Ken, Taiiku-Kan, Nagoya on 25–26; Festival Hall, Osaka on 28; Osaka Furitsu-Kan, Osaka on 29; Budokan Hall, Tokyo from 31 January to 2 February 1980). McCartney was arrested immediately upon arriving at New Tokyo Airport for possession of of marijuana (with an estimated street value of 600,000 yen) hidden in Paul's luggage. The arrest put the tour in jeopardy and Wings' music was immediately banned from all television and radio stations across Japan. Wings' Japanese promoters claimed that almost 100,000 tickets for the concerts had been sold, representing a possible loss of well over 100 million yen. The promoters had no option but to cancel all of the tour dates the day after McCartney's arrest. The other band members of Wings, except Linda, left Japan and returned to England on 21 January 1980. McCartney spent ten days in jail before being (unexpectedly) released without charge on 25 January 1980 and deported. After returning to England, McCartney decided to release his solo album "McCartney II" and plans for a US tour were subsequently dropped. Meanwhile, Denny Laine released the single "Japanese Tears" and formed the short-lived Denny Laine Band with Steve Holley and released a solo album "Japanese Tears" that December.


title: Paul McCartney and Wings

text: By 1980, McCartney was growing weary of maintaining Wings and his personal and professional aspirations began to diverge from the group. The McCartneys now had three school-age children and had moved out of London to the countryside of East Sussex, desiring that their children have a normal upbringing. Musically, McCartney was dissatisfied by the band's performances during the 1979 UK tour, and when rehearsals for the next album began in October, it was apparent his latest songs were not a good fit for the band. Consequently, he and George Martin, who would be producing the album, decided not to use Wings for recording. Instead, top session musicians and guest artists were brought in to make the best possible album. In November 1980, Holley and Juber were told they would not be needed for the new album and other than sessions in January 1981 to finish work on the "Cold Cuts" album of previously unreleased tracks, no further activities were scheduled for Wings. Juber has said he could see the "writing on the wall" regarding Wings' future at that point and moved to New York to continue his career there.