More far right populism in Europe
Posted by Thomas Klikauer
Since the 1990s, right-wing populist parties have been gaining more and more voter support, power and, worse, also gaining seats in parliaments throughout Europe. While right-wing populists political parties accounted for just under 5% of all votes cast in the year 1992, their share ballooned to almost 30% by 2022.
Just two years later, in 2024, for example, Germany’s right-wing populists party, the AfD rose to close to or above 30% in voter support in two out of three eastern German states.
Regrettably, the presence of far-right populist parties on the political landscape in Europe and in many other parliaments has now become the norm. In short, a sad and dangerous normality has set in.
In other cases, right-wing populist parties are working their way up to the highest state and government offices and seems to be happening in more and more countries.
Since 2022, for example, neo-fascist and shape-shifting Giorgia Meloni of the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia became the first far right populist radical right Prime Minister in southern Europe.
And Geert Wilders and his far right Partij voor de Vrijheid also won handsomely while seeking to install a version of Dutch Fascism.
In the election year 2024, populist radical right gains have already been recorded in the European elections. Recently in Austria, for example, its neo-fascist FPÖ was victorious in national council elections. It mirrors electoral successes of the radical right AfD in several German states – the home of Hitler’s Nazism.
Given all this, many fear that far right populism is the future of Europe. This is the very opposite of what Germany’s social-democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz had in mind when talking about a Zeitenwende or “turning of times”.
While Scholz favours a democratic future, European far right political parties fancy something entirely different.
Instead of strengthening democracy, right-wing populist political parties use – invented or otherwise – political and economic upheavals to foster authoritarian hatred and fears among the population in many countries shifting attention away from capitalism and towards racism.
Right-wing populist political parties also feast on a deficit in democratic representation since the conversion of Rousseau’s volonté générale into democratic reality is never without problems. Furthermore, there are still problems with the legitimacy of political systems and political parties.
Beyond that, right-wing populists cater to those often identified as the losers of economic modernisation. Yet, this alone might not be enough to explain the function and rising power of a populist authoritarian ideology, their politics, and right-wing populist parties.
An authoritarian ideology can be understood as an ideology that supports right-wing populists in their zealous quest to establish an ethnically homogeneous social order.
This is based on launching racial inequality with the superiority of one group over other groups. Most often, these ideologies are linked to nationalist, racist, white, anti-Semitic, sexists, xenophobic, and even, at the most extreme end, German-Aryan ideas.
In such right-wing extremism, the authoritarian quest is always politically directed against popular sovereignty and against democracy.
Right-wing populists’ ideologies not only provide patterns of interpretation on how to see the world of far-right followers, but these ideologies also promise something like plausible solutions to their problems. Armed with this, they are at least made to appear to be providing plausible solutions to everyday issues.
Since Right-wing populists like to stir up the pot, create controversies, triumph sensationalism and hype, they tend to live off problems and not off solutions to problems. In short, right-wing populists often construct problems but offer no solutions to these problems.
As such, right-wing populism tailors to the so-called ordinary men. To do that, right-wing populism is always a kind of a “catch-all populism”. It is based on mass support.
Yet it is neither based on elite rule by the aristocracy or otherwise, nor is it ruled by conservatism’s self-assigned “born to rule”.
In addition, right-wing populism has an authoritarian view of democracy. It comes almost in the understanding of how the Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt, furnished with Nazi party no. 2,098,860, advocated the destruction of all non-Nazi parties that he framed as the enemy.
Worse, in Schmitt’s Nazism, any form of a recognizable general will presupposes a race-based “substantial homogeneity” or racial similarity to the imaginary the people.
This is the very opposite of Rousseau’s volonté générale. In this fabrication, the “people” is understood as a race and, worse, perhaps even as Aryans living in a Volksgemeinschaft.
Simultaneously, this clearly distinguishes the racist and white Aryan Volk from non-members (non-Aryans) who are framed as unequal – the Untermensch or sub-humans.
While borrowing elements of Nazi ideology, right-wing populism is not outright Nazism and does not advocate the total annihilation of others based on race – at least not openly.
What is similar though, is that right-wing populism features the delirium of something called the pure people. This pure people always face some sort of immoral and immortal danger found in foreigners or in an “always” corrupt and parasitic elite.
In some cases that are supported by obscure conspiracy fantasies, these stealthy, hidden and dark forces work against the morally pure and homogeneous people. In other words, corruption, immorality, and parasitism are core beliefs of right-wing populists.
Set against this is another hallucination, the phantasm “the virtue” and “hard work” of the people – perhaps a reminiscence of the Nazi ideology of “schaffendes capital” (Aryan) vs. “raffendes capital” (Jewish) – an utter nonsense.
Meanwhile, far right populist ideologies do not only foster illiberal ideas but are anti-democratic in-itself. Indeed, there is no doubt that there are anti-democratic tendency in right-wing populism and as such, the people are never questioned.
Yet their interest is – miraculously, mystically and perhaps even wondrously – “always” and immediately transparent to the populist leader.
The right-wing populist representation of the people, on the other hand, is merely symbolic and is based on an assumed common and ethnically based identity.
Pushing the ideology of homogeneousness, right-wing populism is actually right-wing anti-pluralism, the very opposite of pluralism. It does not believe in a pluralist society wherein people have a multitude of different ideas about different things.
Instead, right-wing populism fashions the belief of a strictly ordered society directed towards a common goal. In such a society, violations of authority are to be severely punished.
Discipline and punishment as well as obedience are core parts of its ideology. These are the elements that the right-wing populism share with the ideological core of traditional conservatism as well as Christian fundamentalism.
Historically, the traditional enemy in Christian fundamentalism was signified by the devil. And in right-wing populism, the devil is framed as the other. It marks a particularly effective theme across national contexts.
In other words, fear and rejection of the other can be found in right-wing populism and in virtually any country. This leads to xenophobic nationalism which is another key ingredient of right-wing populism.
Key to this ideology is the construction of extraneous and peripheral group that is framed as an “unnecessary” group. In the hierarchical thinking of right-wing populists, we are up here, and they are down there.
This is a standard belief in far right identity building which is often based on an ethnically unified group. The belief to be superior caters to the “resentful losers”. In that way, even the loser has someone to look down on.
In short, far right populism often operates with ethnically homogeneous convictions of superior whiteness. On the one hand, far right populism is actually “anti-political”, insofar as it, believes in a common and homogeneous general will as expressed by the right-wing populist leader. On the other hand, right-wing populism denies the existence of legitimate opposition.
For right-wing populists, politics, just as democracy, is simply unnecessary – particularly when the people are already one and the same in every respect. Warped phantasms like these started to become ever popular during the 1980s. It was also a time of massive changes in the structural composition of media capitalism.
This change came with two elements. Firstly, there was the rise of private-corporate television and for-profit radio companies during the 1980s; the second element is marked by the advent of commercial online platforms like Facebook since the beginning of the 2000s.
The latter have abolished the gatekeeping and agenda setting powers of traditional media. The need of commercial media and online platforms to generate profits favours sensational news that focus on sexy political scandals, corruption, hyped up sleaze and controversies. In short, it fancied the men that killed the news.
Virtually all of this supported and still supports far right populist parties with their often highly personalised, intimidating, insulting, aggressive and emotionalising communication strategies.
For right-wing populists, the fact that their ideologies create distrust in democratic institutions is seemingly warranted. Once people start to distrust democracy, they become easy preys for right-wing populists.
The creation and cranking up of distrust also extend to democratically elected officials as well as democratic parliaments. Worse, the increasing fragmentation of the media landscape furthers this as plenty of people are asphyxiated in far right filter bubbles that reinforce biases, bigotries, prejudices, and worse.
Beyond all that, far right populism rather skilfully gives the expression to be the “only” real opposition to the mainstream.
They even present themselves to be the real opposition to progressives who are portrayed as all-powerful. Even in the much-despised liberal democratic politics, they present themselves as “the opposition”. Set against all that, is the delirium of being a purifier of the people.
At the strategy level, right-wing populists insist that they don’t win elections by convincing voters of new political issues.
As a consequence, right-wing populists draw attention to established socio-cultural issues such as, for example, immigration. Other socio-cultural issues include:
- the decadence and corruption of elite, and juicy and sensationalist political scandals,
- the false perception of rising crime, the statistically insignificant terrorism compared to bathtub drowning, and a
- so-called “crisis” which often boils down to solvable “problems” of, for example, immigration and a multicultural society.
These issues are trumped up to pretend that they are politically most significant issues rather than, for example, the defining issue of the 21st century: global warming.
The overplaying of marginal issues plays into the hands of right-wing populists. And they are often spiced up by sensationalist-obsessed media and online platforms that live on hype not truth. Worse, conservatives have often jumped on the bandwagon for all this.
All too often, conservative parties have played the role of “enablers” of far right populist parties – frequently for electoral strategic reasons.
While standard conservatism fancies the elite, far right populism – with its resentment of the elites and its demands for popular sovereignty and majority rule – also presents itself as a democratizing force. In other words, once in power, it uses democracy to hollow out democracy.
Once populist radical right parties have gained political power, they shift political systems towards an illiberal direction.
Beyond the circumventing, damaging and manipulation of democracy, right-wing populists threaten the independence of courts, the independent, i.e. not-for-profit media as well as minority rights.
Right-wing populists strive for an “ethnocracy“ – the code word for a race-based system that centres on ethno (the race) and kratos (the rule or power): the power of the race.
Under such a racist system, a nominal and formal democratic system remains but it is structurally based on the rule and power of one’s own ethnic or racial group.
Here lies one of the key fundamental differences between neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism on the one hand, and right-wing populism on the other.
Far right populism does not, at least not openly, seek to destroy democracy. For fascism, Nazism as well as the newer versions of neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism, democracy needs to end.
By contrast, right-wing populists seek to establish a kind of façade democracy in which democratic institutions are weakened and made subservient while democracy functions as a shell or a façade but it remains.
The same goes for democratic elections as these become highly guided and manipulated. Neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism will eliminate elections. Whereas right-wing populism will use them.
Nevertheless, far right populist parties are per se anti-democratic parties – they resent democracy. They also reject pluralism and virtually any form of modern representation and they question the idea of modern democracy itself.
Nevertheless, far right populist parties like to invoke democracy – for strategic reasons. Right-wing populists also excuse their far-right populist rule by using a democratic-sounding language.
Although right-wing populists have a general tendency to merge political parties and the state into one and the same, far right populist parties suppress all opposition and resistance that define a modern civil society. In the far-right populist imagination, political opponents are always suspicious.
To them, the opposition does not really belong to the people. Worse, the opposition is framed as the enemy of the people. Far right populism is obsessed with the mirage that the enemy only pretends to belong while secretly trying to sneak in.
Beyond that, right-wing populism is also not interested in capitalism and the political economy. The economy simply does not play a role for right-wing populists and their racist ideologies. The economy simply does not exist as a social cause or as a political issue for far right populist parties.
Worse, it is a common misconception that voters of the populist radical right come mainly from the white working class that previously voted for labour or social-democratic political parties. Instead, voters of right-wing populism are mostly not from the working class. Moreover, the majority of this class does not vote for the populist radical right.
With the increasing success of the populist right, their electorates are becoming more heterogeneous. This groups are enticed to support anti-democratic totalitarianism under a symbolic homogenisation of different interests.
This is cranked up with a hefty dose of backward-looking reactionary hallucinations about the illusory good old days. Such longings often come during times of accelerated social change. They are a reactionary response to capitalism and modernity.
Having eliminated capitalism and class, what remains in the simplistic mind-set of right-wing populists that sees the world are made up of just three groups:
- Firstly, there is the never clearly defined elite that is signified through their greater wealth.
- Next, there is the less wealthy majority that is often presented as the silent majority.
- Finally, there is also the minority that is separated from both.
Right-wing populism feast from the second group while despising the first. The third group is also an important voter reservoir as voting for right-wing populist parties is seen, above all, as the result of individual difficulties.
Apart from the “blame it all” issue of foreigners, these are difficulties because of decades of neoliberalism (unmentioned), of society and its democratic institutions. But they are, to divert attention away from capitalism, class, and neoliberalism, framed as ethnic issues.
As such, far right populism undermines trust in democracy and the rule of law. It also delegitimises the separation of powers and discredits mainstream media.
In short, right-wing populism is extremely corrosive to society. While it systematically suppresses economic factors, right-wing populism uses – and even makes up and invents – racist narratives. This is designed to engage the middle-class and lower-middle-class voters to its authoritarian goals.
Worse, right-wing populists also claim that there needs to be a return of the political sovereign that has been ousted by the hated representatives of the liberal system.
This fabricates the racially homogeneous “the people” as a perverted and ideologically manipulated version of the ruling body of the ancient Greeks: the demos. Worse, all this is featured under getting our country back.
Much of this is possible – thanks to the far-right populists’ deliberate strategy called ‘demediatisation’. This is the taking out of mainstream media and the moving of people into far right online filter bubbles and echo chambers.
Even more than outside, inside such echo chamber, the ideology of populist right-wing parties is almost exclusively directed towards anti-immigration sentiments and Euro-scepticism.
The rejection of Europe is framed as a non-democratic Europe. Hence, there is right-wing populist demand for the fulfilment of the democratic promise that power lies with the ethnographic people.
In the end, however, democratic institutions are merely tools for bringing about far right authoritarianism.
Unlike Neo-Nazism’s total annihilation of democracy, right-wing populists establishes a democracy-pretending façade that camouflages its authoritarianism.
Born on the foothills of Germany’s Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer is the author of over 1,000 publications including a book on Alternative für Deutschland: The AfD – published by Liverpool University Press.
Photo: (source: https://www.img2go.com/ai-creator-studio)
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