‘Why We Must Call the National-Populist Far Right by Its Name’

As the far right has grown in strength and impact, so has the number of commentators denying that’s what it is.

Writing in the Spectator, its former editor Fraser Nelson insists that its “nonsense” to call Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy post-fascist (she’s “centre-right, not radical”) and that European national-populists as a whole should be called “New Right” rather than “Hard”. “Far” or “Radical”.

Also favouring “New” over “Far”, the Financial Times’ John Lloyd writes that these parties are “anti-totalitarian” and assures Unherd readers that Marine Le Pen is just a “democratic nationalist.”

By insisting that the national-populist far-right consists of normal, mainstream parties that should be treated as such, these commentators imply a challenge to the cordon sanitaire, the firewall which denied the far-right participation in coalition governments between the exposure of the Holocaust and the end of the last century. In that, they echo JD Vance’s Munich speech critique of the cordon sanitaire as the censorship of free speech. They also evoke Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman’s 2011 suggestion that Labour should engage with members of the Tommy Robinson-founded English Defence League.

It’s true that the far-right is a multi-headed hydra, with different histories and current strategies. 

As we point out in our Little Black Book of the Populist Right, there are at least five different types of far right party currently operating: first, unashamed neo-fascist parties like Germany’s National Democratic Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn and various neo-Nazi grouplets in Britain and the US; second, fascist legacy parties who can trace a direct descent from pre-war fascist parties, like Le Pen’s National Rally, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the Austria Freedom Party; third, new parties , some of which started out as free market advocates but have become increasingly focused on and obsessed with immigration, like Norwegian Progress, Alternative for Germany, UKIP and its successor parties Brexit and Reform UK; and fourth, new populist parties set up expressly to oppose immigration, including the Danish People’s Party, the True Finns and Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom Party. Finally there are existing parties that were body-snatched by national-populists, like Viktor Orban’s erstwhile centre-left Fidesz in Hungary, the British Conservative Party under Boris Johnson and the Republicans under Donald Trump.

National-populism’s USP is that it combines reactionary policies on race, family and other cultural issues with interventionist economic policies, which separates them from traditional conservatives and attracts/reassures working class voters who are opposed both to immigration and the rich. 

Depending where they are on the journey to power, some parties play down the interventionist economics. Thus, aware of her party’s need to gain over 50% of the vote in a presidential run-off, Le Pen and her lieutenants have been hitting the ‘steak frites’ trail, lunching prominent businessmen and abandoning economic promises like raising the minimum wage, building more social housing, leaving the Euro and blanket retirement at 60.  

Similarly, while Meloni has hammered at LGBT rights and feminist gains (no IVF for gay couples, for example), she has eased up on immigration controls to combat Italy’s labour shortage.

British national-populist ideologue Matt Goodwin has dropped attacks on big business greed in favour of Thatcher-evoking calls for lower taxes and cuts in government spending.

On the edge of power, Holland’s Wilders agreed to tone down his Qur’an-and-mosque-banning cultural instincts in order to try and head a coalition government (unsuccessfully).

Trump already sits on top of an uneasy coalition of the social conservative MAGAites beloved of Steve Bannon and our own Maurice Glasman and the (selectively) pro-immigration and anti-tariff tech giants who financed his campaign. 

Nonetheless— as Lloyd admits —all the national-populist parties generally described as far right share one thing: their rabid hostility to outsiders.

Trump began his first and continued his second presidential campaign by accusing Mexican migrants of being criminals, drug dealers and rapists (as well, in the 2024 campaign, of being dumped from lunatic asylums and eating domestic pets).

Orban thinks that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros wants to flood Hungary with Muslims to destroy its Christian heritage.

Le Pen’s policy of ‘national preference’ would exclude foreigners from the welfare system to which they have contributed financially, creating a cohort of second-class citizens.

Nigel Farage plans to create a Ministry of Deportations. The new Reform UK Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire,