Far-right Research Articles

Whitewashing white Power: a Rhetorical Political Analysis of the parliamentary ambition of the Nordic Resistance Movement in Sweden

ABSTRACT Since 2018 the largest National Socialist organization in the Nordic countries, The Nordic Resistance Movement, has been taking part in national and local elections in Sweden. Although the organization has no real political influence, it consistently feeds individuals and groups against immigration with racist and antisemitic propaganda or so-called ‘evidence’ of a Jewish conspiracy. In this article, the organization’s political manifesto and a series of speeches given at three public demonstrations are subjected to a rhetorical political analysis demonstrating how leading figures of the organization attempt to persuade and motivate new and existing members. The analysis provides insight into a rhetoric that articulates established social concerns in public discourse to legitimate a National Socialist ideology. As opposed to most far-right parties in Europe and certainly in the Nordic, the organization has not abandoned traditional antisemitism in favour of anti-Islamism. The NMR, in turn, uses the fact that they do not hide their racism to provide credibility as the only authentic nationalist actor in Sweden. The findings should be relevant for anyone working on understanding and preventing such parties from gaining support and potentially mainstreaming antisemitism in a time when extreme nationalism is growing all over the world.

The Russian-Ukrainian war has shattered the European far right. The opposing influences of Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin

ABSTRACT This study analyses the consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on the European far right by examining the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and the Swedish Sverigedemokraterna (SD). The political and geopolitical choices of the AfD and SD are contextualized in the political history of the two parties, in the influences that thinkers such as Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin have on the European right, and in the context of geopolitical change taking place at the international level. A dichotomous reality of the European far right emerges with opposing political and geopolitical visions. On the one hand, the Westernist and Atlanticist extreme right, which is based on white supremacism and the West's indispensability to place itself at the helm of the world order, whose army is identified with NATO, on the other hand, an anti-American, Eurasianist, pro-Russian extreme right and that sees in the end of the American unipolar order an opportunity. Two components of the European far right that are irreconcilable and that focus attention on the inappropriateness of looking at the movements and parties of the European far right as if they were a single ‘black thing’.

Exploiting Sociocultural Issues in Election Campaign Discourse: The Case of Nyans in Sweden

The Swedish far-right party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), came to power in 2022 and is currently the second-largest party in the Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag. While it has been propagandizing an anti-migrant discourse, another newly founded party has been producing a counter-discourse. The newly created Nyans party claims to represent migrants and minorities in Sweden. However, its discourse uses controversial issues that could potentially misrepresent those communities. Our study aimed to analyze Nyans’ Facebook posts published in the month leading up to the 2022 elections. Through our analysis process, which lasted from January to August 2023, we applied a critical discourse analysis approach to uncover the relationship between sociocultural issues and their social, political, and ideological contexts. The results reveal that Nyans’ discourse focused on opposing left-wing parties and aligned itself with the far-right. The discourse aligned with misinformation campaigns on social media when addressing sociocultural issues. These issues include the childcare law, the burning of the Qur’an, and the veil, which are pertinent to a particular perspective in the Muslim community and do not necessarily represent immigrants or minorities.

Representation of women in the digital discourse of Spanish far-right female leaders

The Spanish far-right party – Vox – articulates several ideological components in public discourse, among which nativism and anti-feminism stand out. Anti-feminism is being central in the digital discourse of Vox female leaders, Carla Toscano and Rocío de Meer, and of the former Congress deputy, Macarena Olona. With the aim of deepening the analysis of the discursive representation of women in Vox, this research employs the approach and methodology of critical discourse analysis with the corpus, consisting of 6753 tweets from the accounts of these three leaders, taking into account three of the representation that they (re)produce. The results show the imaginary of the Spanish and Catholic-woman. The discourse of racial Spanishness is initiated through mystified historical events. This occurs with the representation of the Mother-woman, which reinforces the device of patriarchal femininity and the frame of the demographic change based on nativism. The representation of the Tormentor-woman is used to deny both the specificity of gender violence and the need for gender equality policies. These three frames are used to justify the anti-feminist discourse and to explain its modulations. The results show that we need to pay attention to gender in order to understand the discursive strategies of the far-right parties, with special care to the femonationalism strategy, as well as to observe its mobilizing and agglutinating capacity.

Becoming neighbors with refugees and voting for the far-right? The impact of refugee inflows at the small-scale level

We investigate the effect of the refugee inflow between 2014 and 2017 on the electoral support for far-right parties in the 2017 German federal election. Leveraging unique, fine-grained data, we differentiate between the impact of refugee inflow at two distinct geographic scales: the immediate neighborhood (1km x 1km) and the county level. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we employ past settlement patterns as instrumental variables. Our results reveal noteworthy variations across geographic scales and regions. We find that refugee inflows lead to an increase in far-right vote shares at the county level, while we observe a negative but statistically insignificant effect at the grid cell level. This negative neighborhood effect attains statistical significance in West Germany, particularly in urban counties, aligning with the contact hypothesis. We find no significant effect in rural areas, and a positive impact of the inflow rate at the county level in West Germany, suggesting a contrasting effect beyond the immediate local vicinity. Despite the fact that support for far-right parties is most pronounced in East Germany, our analysis does not yield robust evidence of a statistically significant relationship in this region.

Saying ‘Criminality’, meaning ‘immigration’? Proxy discourses and public implicatures in the normalisation of the politics of exclusion

ABSTRACT This article explores political discourse in the context of an online-mediated 2021 rapprochement between Swedish ‘mainstream’ and far-right parties paving the way for their eventual 2022 electoral success and later joint government coalition. The article analyses specifically how the above political accord on the Swedish right – often seen as breaking the long-term cordon sanitaire around Sweden’s far right – would be legitimised via discourses that carried significant elaboration and deepening of the ‘criminality’ and ‘immigration’ connection later recontextualised into the broader Swedish public discourse and public imagination. Using social media analytics and qualitative, critical discourse analysis, we explore in depth a ‘discursive shift’ wherein the focus on criminality would become a key ‘proxy discourse’, i.e., a public-wide implicature, which, while referring to and debating a potentially genuine social issue would be strategically instrumentalised to effectively pre-legitimise ‘moral panics’ around immigration and cultural diversity. The analysis highlights that the emergence as well as the later recontextualisation of the ‘proxy discourse’ in question – implicitly suggesting that criminality, immigration, and cultural diversity are ‘somehow’ inherently connected – not only supported the political mainstreaming of the Swedish far-right’s anti-immigration stance but also normalised the wider tenets of illiberal, nativist ‘politics of exclusion’.

The green, green grass of the nation. A new far-right ecology in Spain

The Spanish far-right party Vox has undergone, together with other similar forces in Europe, an “ecological turn”. To analyze this case, the article starts from the premise of the need to understand better the far-right parties’ discursive mechanisms and their engagement with environmental issues. Theoretically, we criticize the ideological and ontological approaches to the current wave of national populism; instead, we argue that the dominant form of authoritarian national populism is more usefully analyzed in terms of embodied narratives, metaphorical imagination, mythmaking, and affective intensification. Empirically, using discourse analysis (Laclau, 2005) and drawing on the affective turn in political ecology, first, we argue that Vox's eco-narrative is interpretable as a combination of national populism and biopolitical imaginary pitting a “culture of death” against the “culture of life”. Vox's key rhetorical mechanisms, we intimate, are hyperbolical metaphorization and rhetorical inversion, have an intensifying effect at two interconnected levels: fear and indignation concerning the degeneration of Spain, pride and hope regarding Vox's and its male hero's promise of salvation and the Reconquista of the Spanish way of life. Second, by looking into key policy areas (energy and water), we argue that Vox has systematically chosen the former in conflicts between capitalist interests and environmental issues.

코로나19는 여당 지지율을 상승시켰는가?

During the pandemic period, the world underwent significant changes not only in health and economic fields, but also in political ones. European politics also saw substantial changes in supporting rates for the ruling parties, far-right parties, and the main opposition parties. However, in exceptional situations like COVID-19, supporting rates for parties might be influenced more by the crisis itself than by party policies or economic performance. This paper aims to identify the key factors that contributed to the changes of supporting rates for the ruling parties, far-right parties, and the main opposition parties during the two waves of COVID-19 in 2020. A multiple regression analysis was conducted, with the dependent variable of supporting rates for the ruling parties, far-right parties, and the main opposition parties of 30 European countries, including EU member states(excluding Cyprus), Iceland, Norway, the UK, and Scotland, during the first wave, period of pause, and second wave of COVID-19. The independent variables are supporting rates for other parties, health factors such as COVID-19 casualties and confirmed cases, economic factors like GDP growth rate, inflation, total income, and 23 government-imposed lockdown measures of 30 European countries. The analysis revealed following findings. First, the human casualties of COVID-19 did not directly impact supporting rates of parties. The number of deaths per million was only positively correlated with an increase in support for the ruling party during the second wave, likely due to a rallying effect as the pandemic resurged. Second, among the lockdown measures, bans on outdoor activities, restaurant closures, and workplace shutdowns had an impact on the support rates for the ruling parties, far-right parties, and the main opposition parties. Countries that imposed outdoor activity bans for a longer duration experienced a decrease in support for the ruling parties, while far-right and main opposition parties’ supporting rates tended to increase. Third, economic factors continued to influence party support during the pandemic. Countries with higher GDP growth rates, higher total income, and lower unemployment rates during the first and second waves maintained higher supporting rates for the ruling parties. Additionally, during the second wave, countries with rapidly rising unemployment rates had higher supporting rates for far-right parties and the main opposition parties. Through this analysis, it became evident that supporting rates for parties in 30 European countries were influenced more by government-imposed lockdown measures and economic factors than by the direct impact of COVID-19 casualties during the pandemic spread.

Shifting notions of the rural: Protests over traffic infrastructure and far-right normalization

Current far-right attitudes to the climate crisis are highly ambivalent, oscillating between the glorification of nature and ideological fragments of “fossil fascism”. Invocations of “the rural” serve as semantic mediations, enabling populist radical right parties (PRRPs) to apply seemingly frictionless and multi-scalar narratives of far-right ecology to rural protests. Applying relational and scale-sensitive approaches can help to disentangle how far-right discursive and political effort ties into and transforms spatial imaginaries. This paper discusses the role of rurality for populist scalar re-articulations and the impact of the latter on local communities. Drawing on findings from a qualitative longitudinal study in small towns in Brandenburg, Germany, the paper shows how local PRRP chapters create a specific notion of ‘rural rationality’ that helps to normalize far-right politics and politicians at the local scale, contrasting a proclaimed albeit abstract cordon sanitaire.

Book Review: Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics

Book Review: Contemporary Germany and the Fourth Wave of Far-Right Politics

Does urban design drive sympathy for the far right?

The far right has now entered into the mainstream politics of nearly every European country, yet we have confirmed little about the social context in which far-right parties thrive. While most of the literature assumes that far-right sympathies are driven by economic or cultural grievance, this paper looks to cities and contact theory. Recent advances suggest that even indirect or vicarious intergroup contact can reduce prejudice toward out-groups such as migrants. Urban theorists, as well, have long argued that urban design can influence social outcomes by promoting or discouraging interaction between residents. This paper applies this literature to the rise of the far right, which often scapegoats out-groups in its rhetoric. Using data from 73 cities in Spain, we find that residents of cities rich in continuous urban fabric—which promotes contact—are less likely to consider voting for the far right but that this relationship is weaker in highly segregated cities.

Hate Speech on Twitter: Vox in the Catalan Parliamentary Elections

ABSTRACT The Spanish far-right Vox party ran for the first time as a candidate for the Catalan parliamentary elections in February 2021. This paper analyses the party's political discourse on Twitter during the Catalan parliamentary election campaign in order to assess whether the degree of dialectical confrontation of their messages can exceed the limits of democratic debate. The results reveal how this far-right party's inflammatory messages, which seek to insult its political opponents, ultimately foster an undemocratic environment that turns Vox's political rivals into its enemy, driving social polarisation and a discourse of hatred towards individuals defending other ideologies or parties. Ultimately, it is intended to add that political-ideological nuance for future research that surpasses traditional hate speech —such as those based on criteria such as race or sex— and the suitability of Twitter for the proliferation of the latter.

Is Populism reversible? Evidence from Italian local elections during the pandemic

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the central government to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that lockdown-induced economic insecurity positively affected the electoral performance of progressive and left-wing parties, while it negatively affected conservative and far-right parties. Conversely, we find no effect for the populist Five Star Movement, local independent parties (i.e., Civic Lists), and electoral turnout. We provide evidence that extraordinary economic measures introduced by the central government to compensate workers for the economic insecurity can explain this shift in partisanship toward the left and the increasing support for pro-EU parties, away from euro-skeptic and populist forces.

Securitization of International Migration in the Context of Economic and Societal Security: An Example of the Hungarian Fidesz and Jobbik Parties

The phenomenon of international migration has become one of the most complex issues within the expanding and deepening security field since the conclusion of the Cold War. By the end of the 1990s, far-right parties had securitized international migration, which had previously been encouraged by many European countries to meet their workforce needs, posing a threat to the security of both the international system and developed and developing countries. Particularly after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, immigration and anti-immigrant sentiments and actions were concentrated in the Western world in general, and Europe in particular, reaching a pinnacle during the Arab Spring. Far-right parties have risen in response to migration and anti-immigration discourses, securitizing international migration by claiming that immigrants disrupt European society’s homogeneity and increase integration problems, unemployment, and crime rates. This study examines the securitization of international migration on a socioeconomic and political level within the framework of far-right parties in Europe using the example of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz and opposition Jobbik parties. The conclusions reached show that international migration will be securitized in both Eastern and Western European countries where the far-right is on the rise.

Putin’s puppets in the West? The far right’s reaction to the 2022 Russian (re)invasion of Ukraine

While an argument that the far right supports Putin is popular, comparative analysis of far-right parties’ stances on Russia is generally lacking. In the wake of the 2022 Russian (re)invasion of Ukraine, this becomes increasingly problematic. This study aims to fill this gap and provide an initial answer(s) to an increasingly important question of who supports Putin's Russia within the Western world. First, I examine the immediate reactions to the 2022 (re)invasion of far-right parties across the European Union. Based on the findings, new sub-categories within the far right in terms of stances on Putin’s Russia are proposed. Second, I provide a comparative analysis of the roll-call votes in the European Parliament on resolutions condemning Russia’s actions and test the proposed sub-categories.

Proud fathers and fossil fuels: gendered identities and climate obstruction

ABSTRACT While the disproportionate power of corporate and state fossil fuel interests to influence energy and climate policy is now well known, questions remain about the groups that enthusiastically consume such narratives, with far-reaching political consequences. Fossil fuel workers are one such group. Their positions within these debates are highly relevant to policy outcomes, yet their political positions are often assumed to oppose decarbonizing the economy to the detriment of otherwise well-intended interventions. We offer a more nuanced understanding of the sentiments of fossil fuel workers invoked through their public and political engagements. We use the Twitter profiles of 160 self-identified oil and gas workers to explore the nature of oil workers’ masculinity and its implication in climate obstruction and far-right politics. We advocate for engaging workers in the energy transition through meaningful collaboration with workers to build trust and investment in a shared future narrative.

The dark side of entertainment? How viral entertaining media build an attention base for the far-right politics of The Epoch Times

To amplify their audience reach, far-right outlets need a calculated and coordinated array of acts to set the stage for audience attention and to build a communication network that spreads their messages. We examined the Facebook newsfeed history of The Epoch Times ( N = 117,274 posts from 2013 to 2020), which transitioned from a niche anti-China publication to an influential player in US far-right politics. We found that US partisan issues helped the outlet attract immediate audience engagement, but such content did not invite audience growth and engagement with future content. In contrast, viral entertaining videos, while seemingly benign and mundane, demonstrated superb effects in getting audience responses, accumulating followers, and boosting engagement with subsequent posts. We argue that entertainment media is a crucial component of the extreme politics landscape that directs the flows of political attention, which could exert a “ripple effect” on assembling audience networks.

For things to remain the same, everything must change? Studying National front’s and National rally’s platforms on education

ABSTRACT The Rassemblement national, or National Rally (previously known as Front national, or National Front, until 2018) has been the only European far-right party that has constantly been among the major political organizations of its country since the 1980s. However, its agendas, ideas and proposals on education are relatively unknown and have barely been studied. Its manifestos, from its rise in the 1980s to the mid-2000s, showed a mix of a conservative perception of school curricula, an intense hostility towards teachers and a market-oriented approach of education (including school vouchers). Since the party has been led by Marine le Pen in 2011, the National Front/National Rally’s agenda seems to have substantially changed, and now promotes state schools and professionals working in them, while opposing any cuts in educational spending. The idea this research wants to investigate is that such a shift is actually limited, as it does not change what could be theorized as a ‘pedagogical core’ of the French far-right, defined here as a stable corpus of proposals and beliefs towards education. This core has remained remarkably stable since the first platform of the party released in 1973: selective, pessimistic about the outcomes and effects of mass schooling, nationalistic.

Fascism and the Trans Villain: Historically Recurring Transphobia in Far-Right Politics


 
 
 
 This article builds a base of historical and theoretical context to understand the resurgence of transphobic propaganda and violence led by the American far-right through an examination of the connections between trans politics and global political economies of capitalism. Through a synthesis of established theories of fascism, a historical analysis of fascism, and a case study of propagandistic transphobia in two American films from the height of the Cold War, I argue that the proliferation of contemporary anti-trans sentiment reflects the state of crisis that the American empire is experiencing as domestic and international resistance threatens its global hegemony. Further I argue that a historical and theoretical examination of fascism and trans issues show the capacity for fascistic anti-trans violence not as a departure from the norm of liberal democratic nation-state systems that developed through the processes of capital, but rather as a constitutive part of that norm. Trans historians must mobilize historical knowledge and practice to disseminate public facing works that furnish a wide base of readers with the tools to understand and contextualize contemporary trans panic as it metastasizes.
 
 
 

The Origin, Current Situation and Trends of Racism in the West

ABSTRACT After World War II, and especially following the Civil Rights Movement, racism was generally rejected in the West, but the root of racism—capitalist private ownership—still exists. Since the Great Recession of 2008, racial problems have become increasingly serious. The living conditions of blacks and other minority groups have not improved, while ethnic and migrant conflicts are widening. At the same time, white supremacism has gone on the offensive, “neo-racism” has emerged, and far-right parties and organizations are on the rise. The anti-racist movement faces bleak prospects in the “post-ideological” era. The initiative of “building a community with a shared future for mankind” proposed by China advocates that all civilizations should draw on each other’s strong points, make common progress, and promote a higher level of liberation for the masses, including colored people. In this way, we can create better conditions for a transition to a more advanced social system.