A lovely day in Dystopia
What sort of world do the far-right populists want to create? And what do their billionaire backers want for their money?
A couple of months ago, Belgium elected its most right-wing
government in many decades. Giorgia Meloni, of the far-right Brothers of Italy
party, has been Prime Minister since 2022. In Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, Czechia,
France, Germany, Latvia and Norway, far-right parties are either in government
or leading in the polls.
And Donald Trump was elected to the most powerful post in
the world. Twice.
The rightist surge is driven by the perception that
conventional parties have lost connection with the people they claim to
represent: in most cases, the working and lower-middle classes who have
experienced the greatest pain in the economic turmoil that has accompanied the
fracture of the neoliberal consensus. Established parties have been accustomed
to a predictable and contained political world in which power moved from one to
the other and back again. Now they – and particularly the established centre-right
– are in decline.
The rise of the radical right began in central and eastern
Europe in the 1980s, as the former Soviet empire collapsed in the east and the
neoliberal era began in the west. Far-left parties have languished, their
overall support dropping from 11% at the end of the second world war to 7%
today. The radical right was shunned after the Nazi era but is now flourishing.
The two-party system in the United States appears to make
that country unusual among contemporary democracies, with no serious challenge
to the Republican-Democrat duopoly – until you realise that the insurgency has
already swallowed the Republican party, the presidency and both houses of
congress. The upside is that the Republicans are struggling under the load of
Trump’s unpopularity: at the time of writing, the president’s disapproval
rating was 58% and climbing.
Canadians, acutely aware of the mayhem on the other side of
their undefended border, reject the populist Kool-Aid. Their two major parties
remain dominant, with the centre-left Liberals on 43% and the Conservatives
remaining highly
competitive on 39%.
Elsewhere, it’s a different story. Support for the
traditional centre-right parties has collapsed almost everywhere. Few, if any,
can expect to return to office soon, if ever.
The prospects for centre-left parties are a little better,
but not by much. Traditional duopolies have weakened critically in most western
democracies outside of North America. The insurgent far-right has bled support
from both, but particularly from the established conservatives.
Over the past 20 years, the “sensible centre” in many
countries has fractured, with support bleeding off to the right and left. In a
relatively short time, whole societies have become polarised and have forgotten
how to talk to each other. Calm discussion and civil disagreement do not thrive
under these conditions.
In that time, most of the world has become more polarised
and more socially and politically divided. Much of Africa has become less
polarised but the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Russia have gone the other
way.
This they believe
Relatively few of the new supporters of the emergent
populist parties seem to understand the detail of their policies and do not
question whether those policies serve their interests. In most cases, they do
not. They are much more likely to benefit major corporations and large
investors.
Common themes recur across the policy documents: immigration
and climate action must both stop,
government spending must fall, the private sector should be supported and
mining companies encouraged.
Australia’s One Nation wants to:
- Cap overall permanent and temporary visas and withdraw from the UN refugee convention.
- Ban foreign buyers from purchasing Australian residential real estate.
- Repeal net-zero targets, and promote coal, gas and nuclear energy.
- Reimpose import tariffs and review free trade agreements.
Reform UK has very similar policies:
- Return small boat arrivals across the Channel, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and deporting illegal immigrants.
- Big tax cuts: raise the income tax threshold, and eliminate most inheritance taxes.
- Abandon all government net zero initiatives and unlock North Sea oil and gas reserves.
- Radically reform the National Health Service, repeal new employment rights legislation, and get rid of the Equality Act.
The recent surge in antipathy to migrants in many countries
may help the populists but has little to do with the real-life interests of
people experiencing difficulty with the cost of living. The voters who support
the insurgent parties, like Reform UK, hold generally progressive opinions
that, except for migration and climate, put them at odds with the policies of
their chosen representatives.
Men account for a disproportionate level of Reform’s support.
Women tend to be less convinced.
In common with many other countries, Labour and Conservative
parties – the established groupings of the centre-left and centre-right – have
lost ground as the electorate continues to polarise. Reform UK (on the hard
right) and the Greens (on the hard left) have gained spectacularly, as votes
bleed off to the extremes. The slightly-left-of-centre Liberal Democrats are
going nowhere.
In Australia, as in Britain, polling averages reveal surging
support for the far-right. One Nation now far outstrips the conservative
Liberal-National coalition and closing in on the ruling Labor party.
It’s easier to see what the far-right parties and their
supporters are against than what they’re for. These negative
attitudes may make the populists vulnerable in a general election, when voters
have to choose a party capable of running a government – when casual protest
votes can have profound consequences.
Migration and the radical right
Migration is the single biggest issue driving support for
the far-right populists. Without that, it is doubtful that they would be a
potent force in politics or in society. On other issues, they are often at odds
with the opinions of their supporters.
In Britain, as in many other countries, attitudes to
migrants have become hardened. Polling shows large numbers support deportations
and bans on new migration, with just over one in five supporting current
policies.
Attitudes softened during the pandemic, when migration
ceased and people had other things to worry about. Since then, driven by
politically motivated messaging, antipathy to migrants has hardened to a level
seldom seen in recent decades. Australia, which has highly controlled borders,
is typical. Younger people are far more tolerant but levels of concern have
risen in all age groups.
It translates, predictably, into voting patterns. Far-right
populist parties, such as Australia’s One Nation, benefit greatly. So, to a
lesser extent, do established conservative parties which have adopted
anti-migration rhetoric.
Little of this is based on actual migration numbers. Over
the decade to 2021 (the most recent year for which comparative OECD data are
available) migration has tended to slow. Britain’s increased numbers are
largely associated with the upheavals of Brexit.
Much of the migration angst in Europe is due to massive
publicity about the tiny numbers of undocumented asylum seekers. In the whole
of Europe, the only standout country is Cyprus, which by 2024 had given refuge
to more than 2,029 asylum seekers for every 100,000 population. That’s a
percentage rate of 2.03%. Britain, in contrast, has 180, or 0.18%.
Who cares about the climate?
Throughout the world, most people now care quite a lot about
climate change and want more action to be taken. In Britain, this view is held
by 83%, in France and Germany by 85%, by 74% in the US, by 83% in Australia, by
95% in Brazil and by 97% in China. By emphasising their diametric opposition to
this dominant view, the insurgent populists have a vulnerability that opponents
could exploit in election campaigns.
Despite those findings, there remains a large minority who
either think climate change is not caused by humans, or is not happening at
all. Reform UK is pitching to that large repository of voters.
Even people who accept the science of climate change may
believe they are being asked to sacrifice too much in this cause. That belief
persists despite renewable forms of energy now being much cheaper, as well as
less polluting, than fossil fuels.
Much of the sense of urgency about climate change has gone
out of public discussion, providing yet another opportunity to right-wing
populists. In only five years, substantially fewer Britons say the prospects of
global warming are of major concern.
That’s despite that country, and the rest of Europe,
experiencing unprecedented heatwaves.
“The impacts of ongoing climate change are increasingly
visible in the UK,” wrote the Climate Change Committee. “In summer 2022,
unprecedented high temperatures, including record-breaking 40°C heat, caused
the early deaths of over 3,000 people in England and Wales. Combined with
widespread wildfires, emergency services experienced a 500% spike in 999 calls,
putting huge pressure on their ability to respond. Human-caused climate change
has made exceeding 40°C in the UK today at least 20 times more likely than it
would have been in the 1960s.”
Abortion and the far right
The new far-right parties also seek to attract people who
are against abortion-on-demand or think it has gone too far. On this measure
there is a smaller, but still significant, minority in Britain likely to
support the Reform UK policy. But this may limit the party’s prospects of
attracting the large majority needed to ever form government.
In most of the western democracies, support for legal
abortion runs at 70% or above. There is the potential for parties in all these
countries with a strong opposition to abortion to attract a handy (and often
committed) minority – but no more than that.
And they shall build Dystopia
The populist surge is so recent that it has seldom been
tested in general elections. We just don’t know how much of the support showing
up in current polling is likely to translate into seats in national
legislatures.
Protest parties, whether of the left or right, only do well
in elections when the field is vacated by unappealing or incompetent
alternatives. Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and again in 2024 because the
Democrat candidates and campaigns were so inadequate. The Democrats, having
neglected their working-class and middle-class base for so long, appeared to
represent Wall Street rather than the people of America. Hillary Clinton’s acceptance
of more than $600,000 from Goldman Sachs – the most reviled of all the Wall
Street banks – helped to kill off her tilt at the presidency and helped Trump,
an even more complete puppet of big money, into the White House.
What ultra-rich political donors want, and what the people
need, seldom coincide. All parties are complicit but the far-right populists
are more closely aligned than usual to their billionaire donors.
Nigel Farage has raised big money from oil interests in the Middle
East. On a trip
to the United Arab Emirates in which he was “treated like a Prime Minister in
waiting”, he clearly admired the place. "I want Clacton to look like
this," he said.
If anything, Rinehart is even more right-wing than One
Nation. She is in favour of lower wages, almost no regulation (particularly in
mining), much lower taxation (particularly for mining companies), abandoning
net zero and the Paris climate agreement, sacking tens of thousands of public
servants, embracing nuclear power, doubling military spending, and following
Donald Trump. She wants immigration to be drastically cut, except for
semi-skilled, low-paid temporary workers to work in mines.
Nigel Farage follows a similar path: big immigration cuts,
mass deportation of around 600,000 illegal immigrants, no net zero, tax cuts
(particularly for corporations), deregulation, reversal of anti-discrimination
policies, tougher prison sentences, heavy financial penalties for non-citizens,
weakening anti-smoking measures, toughened measures against Muslim immigration,
and banning people with HIV from moving to Britain.
These people want to re-create a world few of us, today,
would want to live in. It would be a world in which foreigners were
second-class non-citizens, people were judged not on the content of their
character but on the colour of their skin, wives went back to the kitchen,
women died under the hands of backyard abortionists, gay men were again
ostracised and victimised, and the Earth could no longer support human life.
An ill-informed protest vote for these people could come at a price nobody can afford.