‘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, Andrea Jenkyns, wants to house asylum-seekers in tents (a form of accommodation usually assembled in camps). 

Moreover, despite sometimes toning down the rhetoric to get elected, national-populists either in power or riding the wave of electoral success tend to move further right.

Meloni is the only fascist legacy leader to have mellowed (in some respects) since achieving power. 

Elected with an overall majority in 2010, Orban quickly abandoned his economically progressive agenda, imposing a thoroughly unprogressive 16% flat rate tax, weakening employee and trade union rights, raising the permitted number of overtime hours which workers could be required to work and reducing the job-seeker benefit from nine months to three. Simultaneously, his anti-immigration rhetoric (in particular) has increasingly echoed Renard Camus’s racist and paranoid Great Replacement Theory, linked chillingly to pre-war fantasies about Jewish conspiracies to destroy the nation states in the interests of one-world government. 

Similarly, in his first term, Trump had already followed the Orban playbook in stuffing the judiciary with like-minded cronies, and has now—in his shock-and-awe first hundred days —sought to re-cast the civil service, universities and education system in his image. The call for unpurged civil servants to inform on those who covertly pursue the “left ideology” of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is an echo both of the Great Fear of the McCarthy era and that of prewar Germany. 

Finally, far from being tamed by their electoral success in February this year— the party came second, defeating all members of the then governing coalition—the ‘Alliance for Germany’ celebrated its achievement by rehabilitating one member who had asserted that the SS were not “automatically criminals” and another who described himself as “the friendly face of the Nazis”. Both are now members of the AfD parliamentary group, while the Thuringia AfD leader, Bjorn Hocke, has twice been fined for shouting the banned prewar Nazi stormtrooper slogan Alles fur Deutschland (“Everything for Germany!”) at meetings.

At the same time, the AfD joint leader Alice Weidel refused to distance herself from an AfD’s remark that the Nazi period was “no more than a speck of bird poo in over 1,000 years of successful history”. Not surprisingly, but to howls of protest from US secretary of state Mario Rubio and Vance, the German intelligence agency has designated the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” organisation, due to “the ethnicity-and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party”, which renders it “incompatible with the free democratic order”. 

In other words, the party treats some people as lesser because of their ethnic origin. The Germans have particular reason to be wary of allowing a party of that persuasion anywhere near sole power.

Even as junior partners or proppers-up of mainstream-led coalition governments, the far right has had a significant and deleterious effect on the whole body politic. Freed from the constraints of the cordon sanitaire, conservative and social-democratic parties have allowed themselves to be pulled rightwards, expanding the “Overton Window” of democratically acceptable speech and practice. Across Scandinavia in particular, the incorporation and thus legitimation of the far right has acted as a magnet to suck their policies into the mainstream.

In Britain, we’ve seen how UKIP and its successor parties not only forced the Cameron Government into holding the Brexit referendum, but also pulled its subsequent leaders rightwards, from Theresa May’s national-populist “citizens of nowhere” to Kemi Badenoch’s hapless dog-whistling today. But, more worryingly, the Labour Government is being enticed down this road too.

This is not just a matter of the obvious Trumpian policy echoes: cutting overseas aid and welfare, upping defence spending and deporatations, downgrading net zero policies and threatening chainsaw cuts in the civil service.

On 28 April, the lead story in the Observer New Review argued that Blue Labour founder Glasman was no less than “the man of the moment”. To date, no-one else in Labour has openly shared Glasman’s jubilation at Trump’s election victory — “we should be dancing in the streets” — but he clearly senses the opportunity for his classically national-populist cocktail of social conservatism and anti-European, economic nationalism.

He knows that Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is receptive: “Morgan is one of us”. Glasman’s behind-the-scenes collaborator, Jonathan Rutherford, is assiduously cultivating Starmer’s Downing Street team, while setting up a ‘Future of the Left’ group under the auspices of the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange with the express purpose of developing a new cadre of Blue Labour intellectuals. Here, unsurprisingly, they’re being helped by Civic Future, the vehicle of ex-Johnson policy chief and one-time Revolutionary Communist Party activist Munira Mirza.

Yet the clearest signal of a potential national-populist turn comes from Jason Cowley, the New Statesman’s former editor responsible for its decade-long sojourn in the Blue Labour right.

Writing in the Sunday Times (13 April 2025) Cowley sets out McSweeney’s thinking, an evolution from Blue Labour to “what is being called Hard Labour”. We read that “hard Labour rejects default progressive orthodoxies and the pieties of left-wing virtue signalling.” (Presumably, this is not a reference to the obligatory presence of a Union Jack as the backdrop to every ministerial interview.) “It believes in the centrality of the nation state and strong borders. It champions rearmament and reindustrialisation.” 

Following this Glasmanite call for arms-based manufacturing, Cowley concludes that “Hard Labour is above all realist”.  Locating the faction in the very heart of Downing St, Cowling describes McSweeney as “less Blue Labour than Hard Labour”. However, in quoting McSweeney’s insistence that “immigration, border security and law and order” are “the defining issues” facing the country, Cowley commits an error. 

Those may be the issues that Reform, Badenoch and the right-wing press want to focus on, yet the reality — according to YouGov — is that cost of living is the decisive issue in voters’ minds, with health a distant second, the economy in general third, and immigration fourth (YouGov 1 June 2024). Other Hard Labour illusions include the idea that a Britain outside the EU can effectively “lead in Europe” and that a tariff-walled British economy can reindustrialise through military spending in the twenty-first century world.

Hard Labour as a programme for a social-democratic government is thus seriously flawed. It inflates the migration issue; exaggerates UK military potential; belittles the thinking of our European partners; and believes that the UK can revamp its economy on its own. It’s a performative label: it talks hard; spouts endlessly about ‘tough choices’; “rejects progressive orthodoxies” in favour of a reindustrialised Britain. It’s a nostalgia act for 1950s Britain: not so much hard Labour as Macho Labour.

The Nelson/Lloyd idea that the far right which threatens Labour in the Midlands and the North is a “New Right” should be allowed to march through a dismantled firewall into the mainstream contributes to Labour’s machismo turn. 

We do not favour banning political parties or denying them the right to contest elections freely (a practice common in Russia). But we support the retention of a guardrail that discourages mainstream parties from accepting or relying on support from parties which regard and treat some residents as lesser citizens.

We backed the cross party alliance which prevented Le Pen’s National Rally — which topped the poll in the first round of parliamentary elections with a minority of the overall vote — from taking power in the second round. Democrats should keep a wary eye on the fascist legacy parties in France and Italy who appear for the moment to have changed their spots but which may in time follow Hungary and America far-rightwards. 

The most effective way for Labour to defuse the far right is not to pose as harder-than-thou but to present and implement a clear, feasible and distinctive social democratic agenda, which would acknowledge the need for and benefits of immigration.

It would accept that the US has gone rogue and that the UK needs to be working as closely as possible with the European Union.

It will welcome the turn to Keynesian economics across the channel, agreeing that, in the twenty-first century,  growth and new jobs will come more from services and green innovation than heavy industry. 

This is an agenda that many others — Greens, Liberals, Scottish and Welsh nationalists along with many disenfranchised former Conservative voters — could rally around. It’s a change agenda that could appeal to millions disconcerted by Trump and his UK apologists. Rather than chasing the populist dragon, it’s the road all progressives should follow.