2024: Year of the Far Right

By promoting the politics of race and identity the left is unwittingly playing their tune

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

I’m not sure people in the UK are fully aware of just how much European politics changed in 2023. The centre of gravity of national politics has shifted markedly to the right – indeed to what most commentators used to call the “far right”. Opinion polls suggest that the nationalist right could dominate the European Elections in June. Nigel Farage may no longer sit in the European parliament but his anti-immigration politics is becoming almost mainstream.

The swing to national populism is most obvious and surprising in the Nordic and northern European countries which used to be regarded as bastions of progressive social democracy. The general election victory last month of Geert Wilders, veteran leader of the anti-Islamist Dutch Freedom Party, caused shock and disbelief across Europe. That so many voted for his campaign against the “tsunami of asylum and immigration” has bewildered and dismayed those on the left who still regard the Netherlands as a beacon of progressivism: Amsterdam, legal dope, white bicycle and all that. But this is no nativist flash in the pan.

In supposedly social democratic Sweden, a party that used with some justification to be called “neo-Nazi”, the Sweden Democrats has been driving events since it became the second largest party in the Rikstdag. Sweden has just announced that it will in future link foreign aid to repatriation of migrants, something not even Suella Braverman advocated.

In October 2023, Sweden’s Moderate party prime minister, Ulph Kristersson, blamed the growing problem of gang violence on "an irresponsible immigration policy [and] parallel societies”. This pacific country now has the second highest gun crime death rate in Europe after Albania. Meanwhile, the populist, and increasingly popular leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, has called for the demolition of mosques that spread anti-semitic and homophobic propaganda and for the army to be sent into migrant ghettos.

In Denmark they’re already demolishing immigrant ghettos to reverse multiculturalism and promote “Danishness”. This supposedly left liberal country, immortalised in the TV series, Borgen, has the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe. The Social Democrat prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has talked openly of a policy of “zero asylum seekers”. Refugees can be forced by law to hand over cash and valuables like jewellery to pay for their keep. Denmark has appalled the UN and refugee charities by reviewing the residence permits of hundreds of Syrian refugees and is actively seeking to send asylum seekers - guess where - to Rwanda for processing.

In Finland, the Conservative leader, Petteri Orop, formed a new coalition in July 2023 that included the national populist True Finns. Leading members of this party have been exposed for making racist remarks in the past and as subscribing to the “replacement” theory that black and asian immigration is an attempt to obliterate white civilisation. In Norway, the anti-Islam Progress Party may no longer be in government since 2020 but it remains influential. In October, Norway joined Denmark, Finland and Sweden in an anti-migration pact to deport asylum seekers from “a Nordic country to a third country”. African countries may apply.

It seems clear that, throughout Europe in 2023, opposition to mass immigration, which used to be a marginal issue of interest only to the far right, has gone mainstream. As have parties which used to be regarded as beyond the pale in Western democracies. In Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative Fur Deutschland is now polling second to the Christian Democrats for the Bundestag and there’s talk of an end to the “cordon sanitaire” that has kept the far right out of governing coalitions in Germany since the Second World War.

The problem is that the far right in Germany isn’t so far to the right any more. At any rate the character of national populism has altered out of all recognition since the days when nationalist parties like AfD were seen by voters as jackbooted fascists inflicting pogroms on jews. The Alternatives now staunchly support the Israeli state in Gaza and condemn the “antisemitism” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The “far right” in Germany as in many European countries now organises around issues of popular concern like transgender ideology in schools, the imposition of heat pumps, restrictions on cars, the ban on nuclear power and above all on immigration. It attracts people who dislike “woke” language and don’t regard themselves as extremist for believing that a person with a penis is a man. This is something the left fails to grasp. Their image of the far right is stuck in the 20^th Century.

Marine LePen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National), has been leading marches against anti-semitism in the wake of recent attacks on French jews. The irony of the Front National which, under Marine’s father, Jean-Marie LePen, was notoriously antisemitic, becoming the leading voice against jew hatred is lost on the left. For their part, French socialists have been joining marches calling for the elimination of Israel “from the river to the sea” which many jews regard as anti-semitic.

This ideological cross-dressing is changing the character of European politics. Voters increasingly resent the accusation that they are anti-democratic if they support parties that want to control borders. In France, Marine LePen’s hasn’t missed a beat since she came second to Emmanuel Macron in last year’s presidential election. According to opinion polls, RN is in line to win next year’s European elections in France.

The rapidity which which all this has taken place has been giddying. Strange alliances are being forged. Before Christmas, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, gave a speech on immigration at a rally organised by the formerly fascist Brothers of Italy party which is in government in Rome. The UK PM has forged a deep personal and political friendship with the Italian prime minister, Georgia Meloni, described by the UK Guardian as a “former teenage neo-fascist activist”.

They bonded, apparently, in the unlikely surroundings of COP27 in Sharm-el-Sheik last year and have agreed to work together on controlling illegal immigration. In December 2023, at the political festival, the Atreju rally, Sunak heard his new BFF talk of immigration as a clash of civilisations. “I believe” she told the Rome conference, “that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization…” That used to be regarded as a racist “trope”. It still is by most people on X.

It is all very confusing: a second generation Hindu immigrant allying with a far right nationalist. It’s not supposed to be this way. Racial minority groups are supposed to always support the left. This patronising assumption lies behind the preoccupation of the left in recent years with identity politics instead of social class. They have sought to harvest votes by encouraging multiculturalism and mass migration. But in adopting the politics of identity the liberal left has been digging its own grave. Right wing political parties are after all well versed in the language of culture and race. They got there first.

Those small, racially homogeneous countries like Denmark, Norway, Sweden are proud of their rugged Nordic identity and many regard globalisation and mass immigration as a threat to their communitarian way of life. Nor do these counties regard nationalism as inherently xenophobic. Like the Scots, they love their countries and their culture. They expect migrants to become Finnish, Dutch, Norwegian and not reside in segregated communities where they wear burqas and observe Islamic law. If that sounds racist, they don’t seem to care.

American academics and journalists are appalled by all this. Nationalism has been regarded with deep scepticism by the liberal elites. Only blacks and native Americans are supposed to celebrate their race and culture. The idea of white people bigging up their identity, and calling for non white Muslims to integrate or leave, is deeply troubling to the US multicultural mindset. They are horrified at the march of national populism in America and regard Donald Trump as a threat to democracy itself.

Well, it is not going away any time soon. A decidedly European version of Trumpism threatens to rumble through the European Parliament come the EU elections in June. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that, before the year is out, we could be seeing the ultimate liberal-left dystopia: Donald Trump back in the White House and the nationalist right dominating the Brussels legislature. And Nigel Farage laughing all the way to the bank.