Far right? Hard right? Radical right? Or just the right? The success of parties such as Marine Le Pen's National Congress (formerly Front National) and Alternative for Germany (AfD) in recent European Parliament elections has opened up the debate on whether the term "far right" should be retired because, as Fraser Nelson argues, , editor of the Observer, many of the parties that until recently used that description have since "become part of the political mainstream, quite differently from what it was 15 years ago".
Nelson believes that such parties should actually be classified as the "New Right". The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party the Brothers of Italy is a follower of a fascist organization, has shown in practice that she is not radical, but belongs to the "right center". "It is nonsensical to call her party 'post-fascist,'" Nelson continues, "or to claim that all the various parties of the 'new right' belong to one bloc of the 'far' or radical right."
It is true that the term "far-right" is used too lightly, and that when far-right politicians win power they generally rule not as modern-day Mussolinis, but as technocrats with a reactionary agenda. But what is wrong with this argument is the lack of understanding that continuing to normalize the views of the far right will necessarily open up questions not only about its character, but also about the character of mainstream political life.
As John Bloomfield and David Edgar conclude in a new polemical critique of the "populist right," organizations that describe themselves as "far right" include at least three distinct groups. First there are the "blatantly neo-fascist parties", such as the German Fatherland or, NPD, and Golden Dawn in Greece. They may be a menace on the streets, but they do not enjoy the support of the general public.
Then there are the "successor parties to fascism", derived from the old fascist parties, such as the Brothers of Italy and the French RN; some of them try to "detox" themselves to achieve better election results. Finally, there are new parties such as the AfD, founded in 2013 as an opposition to the EU project (at the time it was described as a "party of professors" and a "bourgeois protest party" due to the number of professors in its hierarchy), or the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders (PVV), founded in the Netherlands in 2006 on an anti-immigration and anti-Islam agenda, which triumphed in last year's general election.
The increasing success of far-right parties or the "new right" is not a sign of black shirts on the streets or a return to the fascism of the 30s. Fascist parties of the interwar period emerged at a time of bitter class conflict and confrontation between capital and labor. Today's "new right" is produced by exactly the opposite social conditions.
Over the past 40 years, working class organizations have disintegrated, class conflicts are less visible, and much of the public has lost interest in the political process. At a time when economic and social developments, from job insecurity to the imposition of austerity measures, have made life far more uncertain for the working class, social democratic parties have drifted away from their traditional working-class base, leaving many voters feeling disenfranchised.
Meanwhile, class politics has been replaced by identity politics. Class is less and less a political or economic category and more and more a cultural and even racial determinant. Politicians and journalists often talk about the "white working class" but rarely mention the "black working class" or the "Muslim working class", even though blacks and Muslims make up a much larger proportion of the working class.
Instead, commentators such as Matthew Goodwin, an academic researcher of right-wing populism who has become their adherent, speak of an "informal alliance of white elites, corporations, and minorities against the white working class," thereby simultaneously excluding minority groups from the ranks of the working class and promotes the idea that white workers are the biggest victims. All this has paved the way for reactionary movements to reshape the political landscape by linking racist identity politics, rooted in hostility to migrants and Muslims, and economic and social policies that once belonged to the left: defending jobs, supporting the welfare state, opposing of austerity measures.
In practice, New Right politicians advocate measures that are fundamentally in conflict with the interests of the working class, from attacks on civil liberties to restrictions on trade union rights. But after the social democratic parties abandoned the working class, much of the working class abandoned the social democratic parties. Many of them sought refuge in the parties of the radical right.
Panicked by the current political realignment, centrist politicians readily embrace many of the themes of the extreme right. From the mass detention and deportation of undocumented migrants to the insistence on processing asylum claims in foreign countries. Ideas that not so long ago were confined to the fringes of the political spectrum are now enacted as official state policies. Prominent center-right figures widely recycle far-right tenets, such as the conspiracy theory of the "great replacement" of white Europeans with migrants, and spread panic over the declining birthrate of "native" Europeans.
"Positions that were condemned, rejected, belittled and treated with contempt in the past are becoming universally accepted," Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a political icon of many representatives of the "new right," told reporters in 2016. “People who hold such views today are welcomed as equal partners.” Eight years later his statements ring even truer.
When Ursula von der Leyen was elected president of the European Commission in 2019, one of her first moves was to rename the vice-president in charge of migration policies "commissioner for promoting our European way of life", making it clear that migrants are an existential threat to European culture and identity. Her move, Le Pen rejoiced, "confirms our ideological victory."
Many critics respond that there is nothing "far-right" or "racist" about wanting to limit immigration or draw attention to the dangers of radical Islamism. It's true. Yet there is something deeply devastating about the demonization of migrants when we talk about the influx of asylum seekers as an "invasion", or about Muslims as a population that cannot fit into Western societies, about the obsessive repetition that "whites are becoming a minority in London" and claiming that immigration had forced the British to "surrender territory without a shot being fired", fearing that Europe was "committing suicide". These are the themes of the extreme right, which intellectuals and politicians from the center are now happy to use.
If it seems to you that the label "extreme right" has become redundant these days, it is mostly because arguments that were once reserved for fringe political groups have now reached the center of political debate.

Okno.mk

(The author is a writer)

THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH THEY ARE WRITTEN, AS WELL AS THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THE COLUMNS, DO NOT ALWAYS REFLECT THE EDITORIAL POLICY OF "FREE PRESS"