An expert explains the far right’s moment in Europe — well, everywhere.
Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Fratelli d’Italia are expected to lead a far right victory in Italian elections this weekend. That win, if it happens, would come shortly after the far-right Sweden Democrats won the second-largest share of the vote, helping to oust the center-left from power and giving the far right a potential role in the next government.
These shifts are happening as Europe enters another precarious moment: a war on the continent that is increasingly unpredictable, and an inflation and energy crisis that will deepen as winter approaches.
The politics of Sweden, in northern Europe, and Italy, in the south, are very different, and the historical origins and reasons for the far right’s recent successes in each of those countries are unique. But, the far right shares certain trends across Europe — and, really, the globe. What is happening in Sweden, and Italy, is not all that different from what is happening in Brazil, or India, or the United States of America.
Pietro Castelli Gattinara, associate professor of political communication at Université Libre de Bruxelles and Marie Curie Fellow at Sciences Po, said that the far right is a global movement and a global ideology, even though one of the core tenets of these parties is a kind of nativism. That translates into a rejection of migration, but also of the social and cultural changes taking place within societies. The “woke” culture wars may look different in the US or Italy, but they are a feature of the modern far-right.
“New ideas coming from abroad are considered a danger to the nation-state,” Castelli Gattinara said. “We see that quite strongly when it comes to civil rights and, in particular, gender equality.”
Vox spoke with Castelli Gattinara about this iteration of the far right, how it has gained legitimacy in Europe and elsewhere, and what the specific developments in Italy and Sweden might mean for those countries — along with Europe, and the world.
The conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I want to start with a big question, which is: What is going on with the far right in Europe right now?
The main point about the far right at the European level is that it’s not the story of a resurgence. The story of the far right in Europe is very much a story of continuity. What we have seen and what we are seeing in different countries are new variants of an old story of something we have been seeing for quite a few decades.
Political scientists tend to analyze the trajectory of the far right in waves. We are now in probably the fourth wave of far right politics in Europe, considering the first wave as the interwar period.
The subsequent waves were periods in which a number of far right parties and movements were emerging both in the south and in the north of Europe, but they remained quite marginal. They were fringe parties with very clear ideas and very clear-cut ideologies, but they remained at the margin of their political systems. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, those parties have generally gained access to representative institutions. And in the fourth wave, which is what we are seeing today, they have actually become completely mainstream. The distinction between what is the mainstream right and what is the far right is less and less clear. In that respect, I believe it’s also more difficult to set apart the European model from what we’re seeing in the US and in other parts of the world, where similarly, the distinction is becoming less and less clear.
This is a global phenomenon within democracies, not exclusively in Europe.
Absolutely. There are certainly some specificities about Europe, but it is not that different from what we have been seeing in the US with the radicalization of the Republican Party, what we are seeing in India with President [Narendra] Modi, what we have seen with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, just to make some examples. It is a much broader phenomenon of radicalization of mainstream right ideas, and mainstreaming of far-right ideas, especially with respect to some topics such as ethnic diversity, immigration, and gender issues. The positions of the far right have now been actually endorsed by mainstream right parties.
How did that mainstreaming happen?
There’s no easy way to synthesize it. It’s a complex sociopolitical mechanism. But I would say, for the sake of simplicity, there are at least two main channels: one through the media and one through party and political competition.
With respect to party and political competition, there are at least two variants. One is mainstream right parties simply taking up the issues and the narratives of the far right. The best example is migration. The narrative of the far right on migration has been taken up by centrist and mainstream parties — and important to note, not necessarily right-wing ones. A number of Social Democratic parties, for example, in Denmark, or centrist parties — that’s the example of Italy — has taken up far-right narratives on migration, or have implemented far-right policies when it comes to migration. That’s the example of what happened in most of the European countries throughout the migration crisis.
Another party mechanism is coalition building or alliance building. That’s what we’re seeing in Sweden, where a moderate party that won the election will get the support of a radical right party to form of government. Or even more explicitly in the Italian case, whereby since at least 20 years, the mainstream right and the radical right, are in a coalition that is absolutely long-lasting and, up to today, quite solid.
The second is the media mechanism where especially commercial media are surfing on the issues and on the anxieties that far-right parties have brought into the political agenda. There again, the example of the US is very indicative — the politics of Fox News, in the past decades.
