This open access book explores how parties across Europe—left, right, and centre—draw on history and memory to frame contemporary challenges, interact with voters and opponents, and project competing visions of the future. Moving beyond the familiar focus on populist nostalgia, it reveals the diverse ways political actors mobilise the past: as a resource for legitimacy, as a tool of inclusion or exclusion, and as a means of shaping democratic debate.

Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, the volume offers fresh insights into the symbolic power of history and memory in political communication. From national case studies to cross-European comparisons, it shows how narratives of the past and imaginaries of the future are negotiated, contested, and transformed in public life.

Timely, interdisciplinary, and wide-ranging, this book is an essential read for anyone interested in European politics, history, collective memory, and the cultural struggles shaping the future of democracy.

Katarina Pettersson is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Helsinki. Her core areas of interest lie in nationalist and radical right-wing political discourse, political hate-speech, intergroup relations and polarisation, and online political communication and persuasion.

Kalle Eriksson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Umeå University. Studying political ideas and communication, his main research interests include the temporal aspects of democratic contestation as well as  the politics of AI and automation. 

Manuel Menke is an associate professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research interests comprise (theories of) social and media change, political uses of the past, collective memory and nostalgia in media and digital publics, and journalism research.