Far-right policies don’t become palatable just because mainstream politicians adopt them | Kenan Malik

Far right? Hard right? Radical right? Or just plain right? The success in the recent EU elections of parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, or RN, (the rebadged Front National), and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has generated a debate about whether the label “far right” should be retired because, as Spectator editor Fraser Nelson argues, many parties that carry that moniker are “now mainstream in a way that wasn’t the case 15 years ago”.

Such parties are, for Nelson, better categorised as “new right”. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party the Brothers of Italy is descended from a fascist organisation, has shown in practice that “she is centre-right, not radical”. It is “nonsense”, Nelson insists, “to call Meloni’s party ‘post-fascist’ ” or to suggest that the disparate “new right” parties all belong to a single “ ‘far-right’ or radical-right lump”.

It is true that the term “far right” is thrown around too promiscuously and that, in power, far-right politicians often rule not like latter-day Mussolinis but rather as technocrats with a reactionary edge. What is missing from this argument, though, is the recognition that the mainstreaming of the far right should raise questions about the character not just of the far right but of the mainstream, too.

Organisations termed “far right” comprise, as Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar note in a new polemical critique of the “populist right”, at least three distinct lineages. First, there are the “unashamed neo-fascist parties”, such as Germany’s The Homeland, or NPD, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These may pose a threat on the streets but have little popular support.

Then there are the “fascist successor parties”, organisations that developed out of old fascist parties, including Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and France’s RN, many of whom have striven to “detoxify” themselves in search of electoral success. Finally, there are new parties such as the AfD, founded in 2013 as an anti-EU organisation and described at the time as the “party of the professors” and a “bourgeois party of protest” because of the number of academics on board, and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), created in the Netherlands in 2006 to oppose immigration and Islam, which triumphed in last year’s general election.

The burgeoning success of far-right or “new-right” parties does not herald the march of jackboots, or a return to 1930s fascism. The fascist parties of the interwar years emerged at a time of fierce class conflict and of violent confrontation between capital and labour. Today’s “new right” has been nurtured by almost the reverse social conditions.

Over the past 40 years, working-class organisations have disintegrated, class conflict has become less overt and large sections of the public have become disengaged from the political process. At the very time that economic and social developments, from the casualisation of work to the imposition of austerity, have made working-class lives so much more precarious, social democratic parties have moved away from their traditional working-class constituencies, leaving many feeling politically voiceless.

Meanwhile, the politics of class has given way to the politics of identity, and class itself has come to be seen not so much a political or economic category as a cultural, even racial, attribute. Politicians and journalists often talk now about the “white working class” but rarely about the “black working class” or the “Muslim working class”, even though a far greater proportion of black people and Muslims are working class.

Instead, commentators such as Matthew Goodwin, an academic researcher into rightwing populism who has now turned into an advocate for it, imagine an “informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities against the white working class”, thereby both excluding minorities from the working class and playing on white victimhood. All this has opened the way for reactionary movements to reshape politics by linking a bigoted form of identity politics, rooted in hostility to migrants and Muslims, to economic and social policies that were once the staple of the left: defence of jobs, support for the welfare state, opposition to austerity.

In practice, “new right” politicians advocate measures deeply inimical to working-class interests, from attacks on civil liberties to curbs on trade union rights. But as social democratic parties have abandoned the working class, so large sections of the working class have abandoned social democratic parties and many have sought refuge within the parties of the radical right.

Mainstream politicians, panicking about such political realignment, have appropriated many far-right themes. From the mass detention and deportation of undocumented migrants to the insistence on offshore processing, measures once advocated only by those on the political fringe have become policy. Far-right tropes, such as the “great replacement” – a conspiracy theory that the elites are replacing white Europeans with migrants – and fears about the falling birthrates of “indigenous” Europeans, are now recycled by respectable figures on the mainstream right.

“The positions which were once condemned, despised, looked down upon and treated with contempt are becoming jointly held positions,” the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a political icon for many on the “new right”, told reporters in 2016. “And people who stand up for these positions are today being welcomed as equal partners.” Eight years on, that is even more true.

When Ursula von der Leyen was elected president of the European Commission in 2019, one of her first acts was to rebadge the vice-president responsible for migration policy as the “commissioner for promoting our European way of life”, making clear her sense that migrants posed an existential threat to European culture and identity. Von der Leyen’s move, Le Pen gloated, “confirms our ideological victory”.

There is, many critics insist, nothing “far right” or “racist” about wanting to restrict immigration or in raising concerns about radical Islamists. That is true. There is, though, something profoundly pernicious about demonising immigrants, describing asylum seekers as constituting an “invasion”, castigating Muslims as being incompatible with western societies, obsessing over London becoming a “minority white” city, claiming that immigration has led Britons into “surrendering their territory without a shot being fired”, fearing that Europe is “committing suicide”. These are far-right themes now advanced by mainstream intellectuals and politicians.

If the label “far right” seems redundant to some these days, that is largely because arguments that once were the staple of the political fringe now nestle at the heart of mainstream debate.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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