Scholarship on the populist radical right (PRR) treats nativism, alongside authoritarianism and populism, as its ideological core (Mudde 2007). Research has concentrated primarily, though not only, on Western Europe, where nativism is closely tied to opposition to immigration; as a result, the immigrant has become the paradigmatic object of nativist exclusion. Yet as the PRR has expanded, comparative research has struggled to travel the concept: because anti-immigration is less salient in Latin America, scholars either drop nativism from the definition (Borges and Zanotti 2024) or subsume it under a broader nationalism (de Jonge et al. 2024). This paper argues that such conclusions mistake the fixity of nativism’s object for the weakness of nativism itself. Building on Kestler’s (2022) inverted nativism and on settler-colonial theory (Wolfe 2006; Moreton-Robinson 2015), it reconceptualises nativism as a dimension whose constitutive “non-native” is not fixed: in settler-colonial societies it expands beyond the immigrant to include the Indigenous person as an internal other. Parties such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia and the Republican Party in Chile still mobilise against immigrants, yet they also frame Indigenous distinctiveness, recognition, and rights as threats to national unity, equal citizenship, and single sovereignty. Through a structured comparison of Australia (the 2023 Voice referendum), Chile (the 2021 Constitutional Referendum), the paper traces how this anti-Indigenous nativism is mediated by distinct frames: civilisationism, law-and-order securitisation, and conspiracy. Empirically, it examines supply-side campaign and parliamentary discourse, using large language models (LLM’s) to classify nativist appeals through a theory-driven codebook of indicators and critical discourse strategies. The contribution is threefold: it bridges the comparative PRR and Indigenous-studies literatures, shows how nativism travels and multiplies its objects rather than disappearing beyond Europe, and clarifies the stakes of these discourses for democratic pluralism and Indigenous rights.
