The track record of the far right, when it has wielded power, has been pretty dismal.
The UK is still reeling economically from its exit from the European Union, a departure orchestrated by Nigel Farage and his band of xenophobes. Despite Brexit shrinking the British economy by as much as 8 percent , voters in the local UK elections this year ran screaming from both the Labor and Conservative parties and into the arms of Reform UK, Farage’s far-right scrum.
The U.S. government bungled its pandemic response in the last year of Donald Trump’s first term in office, among a number of other misfortunes perpetrated by the scamster-in-chief, and yet American voters returned him to office in 2024. This time around, he has used his mandate—and his mind control over a Republican Congress—to destroy the country with wars, tariffs, and government “restructuring.”
The far right in Colombia expanded and prolonged the country’s civil war, supported death squads, and likely maintained connections to narcotraffickers and organized crime. Again, despite this history, voters elected Abelardo De la Espriella in this year’s presidential election. As a young man, De La Espriella supported right-wing paramilitaries and then, as a lawyer, defended narcotraffickers, while adopting their lifestyle of “luxury cars, private jets, and Italian designer suits.” He ran against and beat Ivan Cepeda, a philosopher and human rights activist who helped negotiate a peace deal that substantially reduced the violence of the country’s civil war. It was as if Al Capone won against Gandhi.
In Peru, the daughter of Alberto Fujimori—who extended his power through a coup and then was jailed for corruption and massive human rights abuses—won the presidency earlier this year by a narrow margin. Keiko Fujimori ran on a platform of Fujimorism—the neo-liberal, anti-woke personality cult of her father’s that predated Trumpism by an entire generation. Instead of being a discrediting factor, her perpetuation of a bankrupt ideology evoked nostalgia within a sufficiently large segment of the electorate.
If these were the only examples of far-right victories, they could be dismissed as political pendulum swings, however eccentric the tastes of the voters involved might have been.
But the far right has taken charge in a series of Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador. The far right remains in power in the Philippines, Israel, and India. It has been in control of politics in Russia for a quarter century. And it is surging throughout Europe.
There have been a couple exceptions. The far-right Swedish Democrats’ share of the vote fell from 20 percent to around 17 percent this week in Sweden. Viktor Orban lost to a more conventional conservative in the last elections in Hungary in April. A couple years ago, Lula beat out Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency of Brazil, shortly before the latter was thrown in prison for attempting a coup to stay in power.
But as the most recent German election in Saxony-Anhalt suggests, the far right continues to outperform more traditional conservative parties on social issues and outmaneuver the left on economic positions that were once the latter’s strong point. In my 2021 book, Right Across the World , I warned that the far right, rather than just benefitting from the politics of backlash, was trading lessons internationally on how to seize and maintain power across election cycles. Elections since then have confirmed that warning.
AfD über Alles
Polls had long predicted that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) would do well in the regional election in the former East German region of Saxony-Anhalt. But few expected it to nearly win a majority. The turnout in the election was high, and AfD benefitted from the support of many first-time voters . Perhaps even more important was the general discontent with the Christian Democrats, who have governed Saxony ever since it became part of federal Germany in 1990. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat who presides over a coalition government at the federal level, has an approval rating of 13 percent and dropping .
Anti-immigrant sentiment birthed the AfD, and some voters are still attracted to the party’s consistent xenophobia. But falling asylum applications and stricter border policies have reduced the importance of immigration as an issue for many German voters. Instead, the AfD has hammered home its economic talking points—the government should cut taxes, eliminate Russian sanctions and import cheap energy, and spend deutschmarks at home instead of helping Ukraine—which appeal to its working-class base.
But the special sauce of the AfD’s popularity is how it plays on the resentments of eastern Germans in particular. It’s been 37 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which precipitated the reunification of the country. During that time, the perception has lingered in the east that only the western part has really benefitted from reunification. Nearly three out of four Saxony-Anhalt voters believe that they are treated as second-class citizens in their own country.
Reunification was, to a certain extent, fast-track globalization. Eastern Germany was integrated into the global economy virtually overnight. Barriers to outside capital were eliminated; local traditions were destroyed. Some people in eastern Germany thrived in the new environment of a globalized Germany. They tended to be better educated or working in “sunrise” industries or at least young enough to make the transition. But everyone with unmarketable skills or insufficient education were “left behind.” So, eastern Germans are primed to reject what they see as false integrations, like the European Union and globalization more generally.
The Left has traditionally appealed to the disgruntled, but it has over the years also embraced a politics of inclusion, embracing not only to the economically marginalized but the socially marginalized as well: women, racial minorities, the LGBTQ community. In Germany, the Left fractured on this question, with long-time leader Sahra Wagenknecht splitting from Die Linke—the Left party—to form her own Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). She insists that her economic policies place BSW on the left, even though she differs with Die Linke on most everything else.
In the Saxony-Anhalt election, the AfD won 39 seats, and so did all the rest of the parties, minus one. That one party is BSW, which can now use its five seats to determine who will govern the province. Given the informal rule in German politics not to form coalition governments with the AfD, it would seem likely that everyone will gang up against the AfD, a scenario that Vice President JD Vance criticized in Munich last year as “undemocratic.”
Except that BSW has said that it will consider partnering with the far right on certain issues (the economy, immigration). Thus does a party of the nominal left transition to the other side of the political spectrum. Wagenknecht seems to have forgotten that the Nazis, too, claimed to be socialists.
Welcome to the new political environment. The far right is no longer a political minority in many countries. And the old prohibitions to freeze out the far right are starting to break down. Where the far right has taken power—Russia, Hungary, El Salvador, the Philippines—it has tried to alter the DNA of democracy so that it can stay in office regardless of the pendulum swings of political sentiment.
If the AfD wins at the federal level in numbers large enough that it doesn’t need to partner with other parties to form a government, it will likely follow the U.S., Russian, and Hungarian examples of gaming the system to stay in power indefinitely.
Underlying Reasons
There is one bit of good news buried in the headlines about the electoral successes of the far right. The very extremism of its social program—the virulent anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, the old-fashioned misogyny of its approach to women, the sheer racism of its anti-immigrant agenda—reflects the triumph of the organizing around human rights since the 1960s.
Vladimir Putin, from the conservative bastions of the Kremlin, excoriates “Western liberalism” in defense of the traditional values of Russian culture. He and his right-wing cohort around the world—including the MAGA movement in the United States—want to roll back all the victories secured by social movements from the civil rights and women’s movement to ACT-UP and immigrant rights organizations. They all want to reassert the primacy of state power—not a democratic state but one that tilts in favor of a paternalistic autocrat.
Social movements challenged deeply embedded power structures—the patriarchy, Jim Crow, homophobia—and quite literally changed the world. They can do so again, this time aided by a recognition that elite power structures are not inevitable or invincible.
But the far right doesn’t just derive its popularity from punching down. It also punches up.
“Globalists” are as often the target of right-wing abuse as immigrants. Sometimes, as when MAGA forces criticized Hillary Clinton for promoting “open borders” for immigrants —a misinterpretation of what she’d said—the punches go up and down in tandem. That the far right when in power implements policies that benefit the elite, not “the little guy,” is just one of their bait-and-switch tactics. They criticize “global” oligarchs like George Soros and Bill Gates in order to drum up votes, and then they support “national” oligarchs once they’re in power.
Although the left has traditionally stuck up for “the little guy” to win power, somewhere along the line, the left failed to come up with a popular alternative to globalization. There was the New International Economic Order in the 1970s, the anti-globalization struggle of the 1990s, and the Green New Deal politics of the 2010s. But these campaigns didn’t translate into either popular electoral strategies or popular governing policy.
Some version of the last option—a Green industrial policy—has been perhaps the most promising, at least from a political standpoint. Save the planet and create good jobs: that should be a winning ticket. Further, it could be the basis of a new internationalism that promotes a clean energy economy but not on the sacrifices of communities who just happen to live atop valuable minerals and other resources.
The far right offers an Old Brown Deal, promising to bring back cheap gas and save all the old jobs. Until the left figures out how to beat that spurious combination, the far right will continue to win.
The post Why Does the Far Right Keep Winning Elections? appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .
Why Does the Far Right Keep Winning Elections?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.