The Far-Right Are Not The Problem... Yet

But if Europe doesn't listen to its citizens, they certainly will be.

Much has been made in recent weeks of the inexorable rise of the so-called far right in European politics. Nominally, this is due to the recent victory of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, which to those not paying attention to the political trends of the last decade was considered a shock. This follows various polling and real victories for the likes of Germany’s AfD and the Sweden Democrats. Marine Le Pen's National Rally look like they will give the establishment parties real cause for concern in France’s next general election. The list goes on.

Cue the usual soft-liberal hand-wringing and steadfast refusal to engage with the serious matter of why people are voting for such parties and the policies they advocate for. Accusations of ‘far right’, ‘populist’, and similar pejoratives are thrown around by the establishment-approved media, and nobody learns a thing. The populists continue their march to victory.

What is far right these days?

The ‘far right’ moniker is thrown around a great deal, and I do not wish to get into a discussion of who is really far right, and who isn’t. The moniker is applied to milquetoast conservatives who do not believe in unbridled mass immigration as frequently as to the jackbooted thugs of the often-discussed-but-seldom-seen neo-fascist movements. In this sense it has lost all meaning, to the great detriment of our public debate. We can lay the blame for this at the feet of the radical Left and their fellow travellers, who since the rise of social media have used and abused such terminology to bash their opponents, with diminishing returns.

Some have warned that this tendency will prevent us from being able to recognise the actual far right when they rear their ugly heads. I am not sure that this is the case, but we will see. For our purposes, let us define the far right as an ethno-centric, ultra-hierarchical politics that is not afraid to use violence to achieve its ends. Some of what we are seeing in Europe would meet this definition, most would not.

I am increasingly convinced that the inability of unwillingness of our current leadership to solve the problems of their own creation will give rise to anyone’s definition of far right, and then we will all be sorry. So, how can we avoid this?

What are the problems?

First, let us do the unthinkable, and consider what may actually give rise to the far right. European voters have become used to having certain serious concerns ignored by mainstream politicians. Our hyper-fixation on the second order consequences is the societal equivalent of putting the cancer patient through chemo whilst they continue to smoke a pack a day.

Mass immigration is chief among these. Across Europe, voters consistently vote for parties and policies that promise to bring the numbers down, and yet they continue to rise, both by legal and illegal channels. The recent history of mass migration into Europe is complex, but we may sketch a rough outline.

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty created free movement within the newly formalised European Union, on top of the 1985’s Schengen Agreement which created the borderless zone within Europe (though separate from the EU). A new wave of of liberal political parties began to take power during the 1990s and early 2000s, who were comfortable with mass movement of people for ideological reasons. Many of them still cling to power today. This set the parameters for what was to follow.

We may skip forward to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the destabilisation of an entire region, from which a direct line can be drawn to the Arab Spring of 2011, with the resulting migration crisis spilling into Europe in the following years. This went into overdrive with Angela Merkel’s decision to unilaterally throw open Europe’ borders in 2015. Events in Cologne at that year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations showed that initial signs of the new arrivals’ integration were not good.

From there we can get to the Brexit vote in 2016, and despite the establishment resurgence that followed (Macron was just about able to keep Marine Le Pen out of the Élysée Palace in 2017, as well as a few other populist flops), it is increasingly clear that matters are not entirely settled. The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th this year, prompting tens of thousands to take to the streets of London, Paris and other European cities while chanting genocidal slogans has highlighted the alarming degree to which our societies have changed in a relatively short time. For many who were formerly content with the situation, ignoring these issues is no longer feasible.

In the UK for example, the recently released net migration figures put the inflow at almost 750,000 in the last 12 months preceding June 2023. The Conservative Party, now in government for over 13 years has consistently vowed to lower net migration, while presiding over the exact opposite.

In Sweden, around one fifth of the population of 10 million is now foreign born. That pace of demographic change, alongside the accompanying rise in crime (the formerly peaceful country now has the second highest gun murder rate in Europe, after Albania) is a matter of great concern to voters, no matter how welcoming they may previously have been. That is to say nothing of the recent surge in Mediterranean crossings. Similar stories abound across Europe.

This is not to say that immigration is the only matter to invoke the populist wrath. Extreme green policies, whose benefits are contentious but costs are clear though largely unacknowledged) have stirred up their fair share of resentment, most notably in the Netherlands.

Covid also played its part. The lockdowns kept on going, costing more and more livelihoods while those responsible for their implementation demonstrated through their actions that they had no confidence in their efficacy. I could go on, but you get the idea.

It is not a matter of left vs. right, or the wicked against the virtuous. Fundamentally, this is about a lack of faith in the current establishment’s ability to solve or even recognise the issues most important to citizens.

A fork in the road?

The societal elites that created the problems discussed above are the same who still rule over us today. They are fundamentally comfortable with the underlying neoliberal assumptions - growth at the expense of all else, we are at the end-of-history, the nation state is an outdated concept, human beings are fungible, and so on.

Where they are capable of recognising a problem, they will tend to view it as a PR challenge first. This not only because the acknowledgement of a problem raises awkward questions about the assumptions that drive everything else, but because the obvious answers are more awkward still.

In the exceptionally rare cases where mainstream politicians are able to recognise the problem and advocate for a viable solution, they are ousted and painted as extremists. Such is the fate of anyone remotely in tune with public opinion.

I believe that in the coming months and years we will have a choice to make, as Europeans and Westerners. Option number one is that a new leadership class comes to power through peaceful democratic means, and is able to enact solutions that satisfy public concern. This is not a simple matter, as decades of various national and supranational (such as EU and ECHR) legislation have consolidated the status quo, but it is not impossible.

Down the second road awaits a much darker fate. This is the one where we get the far right - the real, jackbooted, one - not the one that for now resides primarily in the minds of left-wing journalists.

Any student of history can observe that things have a way of resolving themselves, in some fashion or another. Those who prevent reasonable people from enacting much needed change are making the rise of the extremists inevitable. We will all regret it.