Why the Far Right is never far away...

Why the Far Right isn’t so far…

Some initial thoughts on the European elections (with embedded links to articles etc.).

350 million people across 26 countries in Europe just cast their votes and the results spell some problems…The 'Far Right' looms.

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“It’s nothing to worry about…”

“We’ve seen it all before…”

“They’re a flash in the pan…”

“It’s the usual populist minorities…on the whole, we have a liberal progressive electorate who will not tolerate the far right…”

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The above are just some of the responses over the past…90 years to right wing political parties gaining a foothold in governments across Europe.

There are huge electoral shifts in support of the Far Right. This will have a significant impact on how many of us live our lives and do the work we have committed ourselves to in racial justice, equality, education, and civic change for better, protected, safer and enriching lives.

There are a range of issues that need unpacking here, but I’m just going to focus on a few. No doubt ‘experts’ may nit-pick at the details – go ahead, this is simply an opinion piece, and I represent my own thoughts here.

One of the problems with the label ‘Far Right’, is that whilst descriptively it indicates right wing thinking, action and policy that is politically ‘FAR’ right of the ‘Centre’ in democratic electoral systems, it also HIDES something else.

The psychological, social and cultural construction of the term and its use also symbolically and emotionally indicates a DISTANCE from normal, everyday civic life. FAR…implying DISTANCE, TIME and SPACE between what THEY (the Far Right) are doing, and what WE are experiencing. In other words, constantly separating the Far Right from what is understood to be liberal, fair, justice and equality-based democracy, is frankly a fiction. A dangerous one.

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Right Here, Right Now.

The FAR RIGHT are RIGHT HERE . They always have been. Right wing talk, rhetoric, policy, violence runs through a whole range of national policies across European and UK governance. The hostile , violent action towards immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees, the UK conservative government’s ‘Hostile Environment ’ policy, the Windrush scandal and recently the damningly indicted Rwanda deportations Bill show us how NEAR-RIGHT government policies are just a stone’s throw away from the Far Right. Employment, housing, education, health, policing, representation across multiple civic entities, are all intersectionally unequal and inequitable. So the Far Right, as constructed in media discourse is FAR…yet the impact of Far Right thinking and practice is always dangerously NEAR.

Separating away and distancing far right politics silences the question: Who is let off the hook and unaccountable for racialised violence against the vulnerable and most in need of protection?

If the FAR RIGHT, are OVER THERE, away from ‘real’ politics and life, then ‘WE’ must be ok… The Centrists, Centre Right, Centre Left parties must be the ‘Good ones’…?

Not necessarily …There is plenty of evidence to show racist, populist far right parties have now become the mainstream…

The UK government legislation on immigration, policing, criminal justice, housing, education, and parliamentary governance over the last 20 years, and it’s now damningly indicted response and failure to the COVID-19 pandemic, has shown that not only do we need to worry about the ‘FAR RIGHT’, but also the present NEAR-RIGHT – in all their forms.

The European Elections have explosively revealed just how NEAR the FAR RIGHT is. France, Germany, Italy, amongst other countries show major electoral upsurges in support for political parties that, frankly, are dangerously reminiscent of events of 100 years ago.

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We’ve seen it before.

There is precedent, of course.

We saw the national, European, and global underestimation of what was happening in the Weimar republic, post WW1, as Germany struggled to regain any sense of economic, cultural and political stability. Then, as now, it was the politics of poverty, disillusionment, disenfranchisement, a gradual but persistent narrative of hatred of ‘elites’ and a visceral, easy-to-demonstrate hatred of the racially ‘unpure’ invaders: Jews, immigrants, Slavic populations, the disabled, those with mental health problems and ‘sexual deviants’. These were seen as responsible for the plight of the ordinary, ‘indigenous, pure’ European / German citizen.

And something “had” to be done. Change was needed. This is ALWAYS the space into which Right Wing, Nationalist, Racialising and Racist groups sometimes creep. But often they blatantly march, mainstreamed by political apathy, and the strategic blind-spots’ of political power elites.

The relationship between land, space and place is woven with European , colonial whiteness’s longings for racial purity – and this plays out across the entire continent and globe where the ‘unwanted’ are rationalized as not-belonging, and to be removed (a lethal, long standing and tragic example being Gaza right now of course).

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Real Near, Far Right.

This recent FAR RIGHT electoral success has been fermenting for decades, and whilst not quite an over whelming success, it is the everyday lives of those who physically and visually, appear as ‘bodies out of place’ who will know best the dangers of underestimating this.

Although there are reassuring calls for calm because the ‘centre is holding’ (according to the European Commission), we have witnessed the dangers of not being vigilant. The European Union Agency For Fundamental Rights reported in 2023 report that “almost HALF of the people of African descent in the EU faced racism and discrimination in their daily life since 216.”

Vigilance is needed now.

We know full well what happens when those who have the power to attend, to pay attention, to be vigilant, do not.

We are also witnessing similar levels of apathy and selective 'liberality' as institutions and individuals ignore the genocide in Gaza, itself yet another time point in the long, settler colonial decimation of Palestine and Palestinian people.

Germany in 1923 was a space to ferment dissatisfaction with life, anger with the ‘elitist’ Weimar political set up, and enough economic and political instability to fulfil perverse (and ‘logical’ by modernity’s standards) dreams of racial purity. We can see this manipulation of the fears and deeply held racial desires of a continent.

We have significant electoral swings happening. Now.

We have seen the dangers of ‘personality cults’ in the politics of nationalism, far right persuasion, and the justification of racial violence (Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro , Le Pen (father and daughter), Wilders, Bardella, Salvini, Villmsky, Petry) .

As before, it is migration, ‘illegal’ humans, and the apparent destruction of all that is the dreamscape of a pure, European land, unfettered by the inconvenient truth of us all.

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World”, wrote Frantz Fanon, in 1961, a quote used, over-used and seldom extended into an analysis of racial capitalism, global colonial power , and the on-going destruction of lives and livelihoods through climate destruction. And yet is Europe’s ‘others’ that have made Europe and European life possible.

A 2018 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights study of Nordic countries revealed their populations to be the “happiest...” due to topping global charts for welfare, education and civic benefits, but also topped the charts for something else: Racism .

When conceptions of Europe as the place of, for and by that fantasy-figure, the all-belonging, natural “European” are mobilized by ‘everyday’ politics, this engages with the very heart of a dangerous Far Right fantasy. Whether Europeans consciously or unconsciously vote with their need for this fantasy to be played out, we are all in danger of the effects.

European Whiteness tends not to tolerate the apparently invading presence of those who built it, fueled it, furnished it, paid for it. No conceptions of so-called ‘Liberalism’ will be enough to combat the impending and contemporary violence of the Far Right.

They are not as far away as people would like to believe. They are right in front of us, as are the liberal centrists appeasing European whiteness and its global north majority. Near, Far, Then and Now Right-Wing violence is waiting for the approval to act out racialised violence fantasies that often lie just beneath the surface of “Its nothing to worry about”.

Many of us have been worried for a while now. There is good reason to act on our vigilance.

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#Solidarity #CollectiveResistance #AntiracismCare #Resistance #Pluralities #StrenghtInDiversity #CombatRacisms #AntiRacism4All

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