Labour take note: the politics of home cannot be ceded to the nativist right | Julian Coman

"In the mid-1980s, a remarkable German television series became appointment viewing in my house each Thursday evening. Heimat, an epic portrait of the life and times of a fictional Rhineland village, tracked the inhabitants of Schabbach as they navigated the tumultuous 20th century. Across the course of 15 hours, Edgar Reitz's drama conveyed a romantic, almost religious, sense of rootedness and love of place."

"As the aged local gravedigger liked to tell outsiders: Down on earth as you all know, there's high and low German, but in heaven as you'd expect they speak the Hunsruck dialect. Half-playful, half-serious, those words express something both mysterious and beautiful about belonging. But on the political spectrum, where does such a vision sit? James Orr, recently recruited as an intellectual outrider for Nigel Farage, would have a ready and confident answer to that question."

"Reform is beginning to articulate what is routinely dismissed and demonised as rightwing populism, but which is much better understood as a vision animated by the politics of home. Other parties, his column continued, have governed Britain as if it were nowhere in particular, managing a zone rather than cherishing and protecting a place. Similar observations have long been circulating in the far-right salons of Europe."

"For Macron, our country is not a nation, it's a space, Marechal told a predominantly working-class audience. Me, I gaze in wonder at the gothic cathedral you have here in Sens, the most splendid in France, and marvel at the majesty of Racine's verse. But all that doesn't exist [for Macron]. The only thing that counts is productivity, the economy, benefits."

Heimat depicted a Rhineland village across the 20th century and conveyed a near-religious sense of rootedness and love of place. A local saying about the Hunsruck dialect in heaven encapsulated belonging's mysterious and beautiful quality. That attachment to home intersects with contemporary politics as some intellectuals and politicians recast right-wing populism as a 'politics of home'. Critics contend other parties govern as if the nation were an anonymous zone rather than a cherished place. European far-right figures similarly claim national culture and patrimony are underappreciated, prioritised less than productivity, the economy, and benefits.

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