What's going on with the far right parties?

[ItsPrettyGoodReally]

Hi,

I wondered if anybody might know what it is that means far right parties are rising in so many countries?

I was really desperate for this general election so we could get rid of the tories and get a labour government. But now suddenly people are talking about the far right in the UK, and in France and Germany, and Trump seems to be doing well in America.

I do kind of understand that maybe it's a reaction against globalisation and a return to the nation state.

However, I also see the massive gap between the ultra rich and the rest of us, and that reminds me of the way things were just before WWII, which is not a good thing.

It all feels a bit 1932 to me, and I would rather that the world was keeping a calm head while dealing with all the challenges.

Does anybody out there have a way to rationalise the situation that seems like there is a safe and calm way out of all this?

I think the key is that we all (across the globe) have to keep respecting democracy, and talking, and voting, and above all keeping our best calmest heads on, but I would be glad to know what others think.

Thanks!

Isn't part of the problem with climate change just that there are too many people for the globe to support? I mean, I understood that since we started burning fossil fuels, the population had massively expanded.

That's only part of it. It's the [Number of people] x [Average carbon footprint] that's the problem. If we all had a lower carbon footprint the world could support a larger population.

The Right makes a big deal about pointing at China/India and their carbon emissions, but forgets little details such as the average carbon footprint per person is lower there than here, that the West has shifted a lot of it's manufacturing carbon footprint to these countries, and the China is leading the world in renewables investment

The argument the Right is making against Net Zero is exactly the same as all their other arguments - it's always someone else's fault and someone else should be the one to do something. The Right Wing is all about the Personal Freedom to leave your problems for someone else to pick up.

This. When the global economy is supporting huge growth and there's money for everyone to have a good standard of living through plentiful employment and generous social initiatives, then everyone is happy for others to be given stuff - because they feel they have enough for themselves.

When the global economy - including the repercussions of covid - means that there isn't much money around, people start looking angrily at what others have.

Extremist parties (both right wing and left wing) claim that centrist governments don't have the courage to address difficult problems because they're too much part of the status quo. There's some truth in that - all good lies have a kernel of truth - but the extremist parties ignore all the repercussions of their solutions, which the centrist parties are trying to carefully balance. It's always been this way. Extremist parties are voted in during times of adversity - especially economic hardship.

The worry is that things aren't looking likely to get any better. Climate change is going to dwarf all our current problems within a generation, and I suspect that will bring about massive changes both economically and politically. We're only able to imagine the broad political landscape (nationally and globally) which we've seen all our lives, but there are certain things that cause enormous social and political change (eg the plague, the industrial revolution, the revolutions which shifted government from monarchy to parliamentary democracy throughout Europe, WW I and II) and I think climate change will do likewise.

I wonder if the rhetoric would be different if the immigrants weren't predominantly Muslim young men . I think there is a fear factor that people won't discuss unless behind closed doors .

The rise of youth support for the AfD in Germany has been ticking along under the radar for a few years, but really caught attention when it crystalized in the results of the EU parliamentary vote. They're making good use of alternative communication channels, and by going through TikTok aren't going to be as subject to counter-arguments as they would be on FB or X.

Whilst the over-40s are arguing about how often Farage is on the BBC or how pro-Tory biased Kuenssberg, there are entire platforms they're not fully aware of funneling propaganda and misinformation at the under-26 population. Youth disaffection is being targeted with right-wing messages. Voting Right will solve all their problems from being an incel to getting rich quick. It's the cult of Andrew Tate, it's the ideology of anti-immigrant racist violence, etc. Amazing as it seems, what we see in the UK with Reform is almost the soft edge - even Farrage drew the line at allying UKIP with Tommy Robinson. Reform are roughly where the BNP were towards the end of the last century, and there's now a lot worse on the far edge.

I'm left wondering how the hell the constituency I live in has gone from being an extremely safe Tory seat (almost 60% of the vote) to a 4-way marginal tipped by some polls to be one of the seven seats Reform might win.

https://www.dw.com/en/afd-how-germanys-far-right-won-over-young-voters/a-69324954

@DogInATent fully agree with your post. Young people are voting hard right. I assume this will be a factor in France as well as Germany. Unless there the UK can address the needs of young people as a group, it will also go that way. There is lot of “head in the sand” ideas based on how Britain has been. Brexit has changed us. I am left wing but if the left do not respond by making peoples lives better and they feel that and some hope the hard right vote will grow fast and the simple rhetoric about immigration and then race will be much nastier and louder.

Yes, I’ve noticed that there was none of this rhetoric directed at the people leaving HK.
I’m not even sure that they are all young men who are Muslim. Is that something promoted by the RW press ?
Problem is that if climate change isn’t addressed there’ll be huge population movements as areas become uninhabitable. Some places are already running out of water. Even Australia. Surely putting your head in the sand isn’t a good idea.
Sunak has backtracked already on green legislation.

Do you not remember how much semi-joking grumbling there was a few years ago about Polish plumbers??

People's objection to immigration is generally concern about:

1. diluting resources: whether jobs, schools, GP appointments, benefit funding
2. cultural change, especially where it relates to core values and ideas about how society should be structured

Dismissing these legitimate concerns as racism and bigotry isn't helpful. Both because they are genuine downsides to immigration which we should take into account when deciding policy, and also because they won't go away by just telling people off.

Most people are very happy to welcome immigrants so long as they integrate well, become a productive part of our society, and are in small enough numbers that incoming culture isn't in competition with indigenous culture, allowing the cultures to merge naturally over time.

@DogInATent my DS1 who’s 21 is voting reform. As are some of his friends. Mind boggling but when you dig down you find that they despise the ‘shouty’ (as he puts it) Left more than the Right. He used to watch a lot of YouTube political content, mainly US stuff so I guess he hears the typical alt right propaganda.
He lives with his dad who back in the day voted Labour but has veered to the right too. Not sure why as financially he’s doing well.

God, that is depressing!

@bombastix yup, I worry that we may be thinking things are bad now but give it a couple of years and it'll be Children Of Men waiting for V.

Something that stands out is that the seven seats tipped as potential Reform wins aren't inner cities, they're all areas with a greater than the national average age profile where poverty/deprivation sits alongside retired wealth - Clacton, Ashfield, Exmouth and Exeter East, Great Yarmouth, Mid Leicestershire, North West Norfolk and South Suffolk.

I was amazed to see NWN on their, but that looks like a perfect storm of local issues - collapsing hospital, non-entity sitting Tory MP, last-minute parachuted in non-local Labour candidate, etc. And this is despite tens of millions of Towns Deal, Shared Prosperity and Rural England Prosperity Funding being shoveled in as a bribe by the Tories.

Your son has a point , the left are very shouty / aggressive / intolerant of anyone with differing views , you only have to read threads on here to see how quickly debate turns into personal attack . Tories I find are more calm and measured and not given so much to personal ranting . This affects credibility imo .

The majority of immigrants aren't Muslim men. The majority of people coming over on the small boats from France, are from Afghanistan.

We took in a lot of Ukrainian refugees and people from Hong Kong, seemingly without a problem, so perhaps there's a problem there

@IClaudine fortunately my youngest (17) is far more politically astute 😂but sadly too young to vote.
Oldest has very black and white thinking so I guess the simple messaging appeals to him.

There will be more concern about immigration from groups where cultural values are very different to ours, especially ideas about how to structure society, the role of religion in society, the role of women, lgbt.

The perceived willingness of the incomers to adapt is also relevant: whether they are happy to spread out within the community and start taking on our values, or whether they stick in isolated communities and make it clear that they think our culture (eg how British women behave in our society) is inferior to theirs.

Young, educated Muslim men who come into professions like Accountancy, Medicine, IT (who generally have a socially liberal outlook which meshes well with our own) are very readily accepted.

For several years we had one of those shouty Labour types as their constituency candidate. Bless them, they do ok in local politics but have completely poisoned the well for the left for a decade with Never Kissed A Tory and portraying all Tories as unredeemable demons. Given that the Tories routinely achieved >50% of the vote here I have no idea how they thought they could ever overturn that without offering some sort of olive branch to allow voters to switch across.

Who is predicting those Reform wins, please? Do you have a link to the source?

I think something else. The Tory Party have no credibility on immigration. It’s not a matter of a shouty left. The growth is a more explicitly racial right. The Tory Party cannot respond to that. A much tougher rhetoric is in Germany where they say “foreigners out”, well we shall be the same in short order. Who is deemed “foreign” will be interesting but precedent suggests it will not be a sophisticated assessment taking into account diversity.

I think this attributes a degree of sophistication in hard right politics that has rarely existed in history. It would defy the point of the politics being expressed

I was feeling very worried about this until the Local Elections but that and the current polling have made me more hopeful that the UK are rejecting the far right, despite what the media might have you believe with all their focus on Farage.

I think/hope we were a bit ahead of the curve with the far right and can act as a bit of a cautionary tale. Hard Brexit was ultimately a far right project and its clearly been immensely damaging to us and impossible to deliver. Similarly across the pond everyone can see what a fuck up trump is. Wilders was voted in, in the Netherlands but then was unable to government because he couldn't form a coalition.

The problem with the Far Right is they are all mouth, no trousers. Its easy to call out problems and make "simple" solutions (e.g Take Back Control) but much harder to implement them. We know this in the UK by experience; I think that's why the electorate are massively rejecting the Conservatives.

I think Macron is going down the same path in France. Expose Le Pen to also be "all mouth, no trousers".

Survation, but when you look at the Survation website you can find a variety of inconsistent polls to demonstrate almost any outcome you want. I wouldn't put it past Reform to have done a fiddle, after all Lee got caught out on X using a submit-your-own-data polling chart to claim he is a shoe-in for Ashfield.

Reported in the Express and Labour List. I think I've also seen it in Metro and a few others but can't find the links this morning. Mostly it's being used to demonstrate how far and fast the Tories are collapsing, but I think it's concerning that Reform could end up with even one seat.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1911781/nigel-farage-reform-seats-survation-poll
https://labourlist.org/2024/06/labour-party-polling-latest-mrp-savanta-majority-tories-reform-farage/

Macron is being hammered by the far right, it's why he called an early election.

Yes exactly. In my opinion he called it to get the French people to put their money where their mouth is if they really want the far right, to expose the lack of detail behind populist statements and to neutralise any threat he was "squatting" and anti democratic.
Going to be interesting to see how their vote goes. Meloni in Italy has actually moved back to a more centrist position to keep power. Maybe Le Pen will do something similar.

Thanks. I share your concern!

I'm talking about why the policies resonate with voters, not the policies themselves.

Again: if you dismiss it as racism and bigotry you are not understanding it. And you can't change what you don't understand.

Bardella is more right-wing than Marine Le Pen. But he's very good at hiding it and is very persuasive.

They will be moving more to the right, not into the centre.