Last August, I left France to embark on the American college journey. While I was saddened to depart my home country, I was more than glad to leave Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and their Neo-Nazi groupuscule acolytes wreaking havoc in an attempt to regain control of “the streets”. However, my bubble rapidly burst as I remembered that I was flying to QAnon, the KKK and Donald Trump.
In the last decade, many capitalist democracies of the West have witnessed the rise of far-right parties in government elections. To cite only a few: Victor Orban took the helm of Hungary in 2010, Giorgia Meloni rose to the position of Prime Minister of Italy in 2022, and Wilders’ “Party for Freedom” won the most seats in the 2023 Netherlands. The land of freedom recently experienced a four-year term presided over by the very democratic Donald Trump, and he also looks to be in the race for the next elections. France has seen the Rassemblement National’s (ex-National Front) Marine Le Pen obtain a record 41.45% votes in the second round of the 2022 French Presidential Elections. Meanwhile, her newly established competitor Eric Zemmour of the “Reconquest” party won a considerable 7.07% in the first round. The sum of both candidate’s votes reached an astounding 30% in the first round of the 2022 Presidential elections.
So what has permitted the far-right phenomenon to land in 21st-century America and France, the two great advocators of democracy? Evidently, the neoliberalist model of the last forty years has widened inequalities amongst the population with its trickle-down economics, creating frustrated people looking for a scapegoat. With the help of the media, the far right has then accelerated that social condition which turns people towards the far right, inciting hatred through false narratives and as Anne Applebaum, historian and author of “Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends” puts it, “different-sized lies. They sow the seeds of dissent and then reap them with populist discourse. In both France and the USA, Le Pen, Zemmour, and Donald Trump feast on the increasing economic inequalities, the growing feeling of social insecurity, and a sense of “restorative nostalgia” for a time that never existed. While thousands of miles and the Atlantic Ocean separates the USA from France, the far-right entities follow the same recipe.
Rising inequalities and insecurities
The beginning of the political order named “neoliberalism” was marked by the rise of Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics in the 1970s. That era connoted the abandonment of welfare, financial deregulation, fiscal austerity, and privatization of capital. Neoliberalism and the free market have failed to keep many of their promises. Contrary to the common belief that absolute poverty by the definitions of the UN has been reduced worldwide, a narrative which UN special rapporteur of extreme poverty Olivier De Schutter himself repudiates, social inequalities have increased. According to the PEW Research Center, in the USA the income share held by middle-class families has decreased from 32% in 1971 to 17% in 2018. The share held by lower classes has nearly halved, stooping down 7% to 3%. Inequality has not been this high since the Gilded Age of post-Civil War USA. Comparably, France’s GINI coefficient of income inequality has stagnated since 1980.
In addition to worsening economic conditions, globalization, the prominence of identity politics, and the threat of terrorism have created a concoction for growing social insecurities. The easy scapegoat is foreigners: immigrants, refugees, and those who do not have the same physical characteristics. Armed with conflation and populism, the right spreads its ideology through an increasing presence in the media. In France, the three main channels of information, CNEWS, BFM TV, and RMC have had 18-36% of guests represent a far-right party. It is no coincidence that hate crimes are on the rise; they have increased by 20% in France between 2019 and 2023 according to France Info and by 25% in the USA between 2016 and 2020 according to the Department of Justice. A June 2020 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies declared that “far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators”.
Conspiracies, populism, and the appeal of the far right
Those left behind by neoliberalism, who are most people other than those wealthy by inheritance or benefactors of startup nations, are left with a political choice: trust traditional parties on the decline or turn towards the rising extremes. In their speeches and programs, the far-right fuels the anger of these people by propagating a fallacious scapegoat narrative. This narrative is everywhere, with the scapegoat often being an immigrant, a refugee, Muslim, or foreign. The best example illustrating the spread of such a false narrative is the Great Replacement conspiracy theory constructed by Renaud Camus in 2010, which Trump sympathizers, the Vox far-right party in Spain, Le Pen and Zemmour in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Orban in Hungary, and more far-right-leaning individuals have endorsed since. This theory states that non-whites are coming in to take over the jobs and livelihoods of the white locals constructing “anti-white racism” and increasing resentment against people of color in Western countries. Camus warns of the “genocide orchestrated against whites through substitution, the crime against humanity of the 21st century”. The far-right parties attempt to rally people in that common fear and a dream of an ideal utopia (or dystopia) where a nation is isolated by its border and people live by themselves in their communities, having expelled the scapegoats. In short, the far-right reminisce about a past that never existed. This is the philosophy of deception that the far right adopts, creating as journalist Anne Applebaum describes “restorative nostalgia”; they want the “cartoon version of history”.
That is what the far right does best: seducing the population through populist lies, adapting to current controversy, and targeting the opposition with demagogic as well as subversive comments. Deray McKesson, an ex-Bowdoin student turned civil rights activist and author of “On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case For Hope” points out one of the false narratives of Trump: that “we [the USA] are the highest taxed nation in the world”. This claim has been refuted by the PEW Research Center which found that in fact, taxes in the USA are below the average of OECD countries. Trump’s statement confirms that his policies are aligned with the neoliberalist model of suppressing the welfare state and enforcing top-down redistribution which increases income inequality. This is the hypocrisy of the far-right discourse, which is also apparent in their politics on social matters. This past October, in France, the “Republican”’ rightist coalition of Macron’s Renaissance party and Les Republicains launched a march against anti-semitism. Controversially, the far-right nationalist party Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen joined the march. An uninformed reader might ask: what is the problem? It could even be seen as a sign of progressiveness and a will to abandon racist stereotypes of the far-right. That is exactly the populist trap. Firstly, there is a historical paradox. Jean Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, is a convicted holocaust denier. When he founded the National Front party, it was alongside ex-Nazi Waffen SS members Leon Gaultier and Pierre Bousquet. To this day, the Rassemblement National President Bardella refuses to admit that Jean Marie Le Pen is antisemitic. In any case, the Rassemblement National attended the march and successfully diabolized the leftist party La France Insoumise for refusing to walk along their side. Hence, they succeeded with their double discourse, appearing as a moderating force which promotes anti-racism while the Rassemblement National rather uses it as a ploy to garner further populist support.
This strategy has worked. Focussing particularly on France, the Rassemblement National (RN) votes have steadily climbed during the last three presidential elections. They obtained 17.9% of votes in the first round of the 2012 Presidential elections and 2/577 seats in parliament. In 2017, this increased to 8 seats in parliament and 21.3% votes in the Presidential elections, allowing their candidate Le Pen to reach the 2nd round. In 2022 the RN won 89 parliamentary seats and 23% of votes in the Presidential election. According to an ELABE study, 34% of those without a high school diploma and 27% of those without a college degree voted for Le Pen. According to Ipsos, 58% of those who earned less than the minimum wage voted for Le Pen in the 2nd round. However, only 17% of the under-24 youth voted for Le Pen in the first round. The demographics of the far-right electorate are blurry, seemingly composed of a majority of uneducated working-class citizens. The far-right exploits the frustrated lower classes.
Political Implications
When one evaluates the four-year term of Donald Trump, the observations are stark. From an economic perspective, unemployment doubled due to his catastrophic management of the COVID-19 pandemic. From an international perspective, the trade deficit was increased due to the trade war with China, destroying 300,000 jobs and decreasing national investment by 0.3%. Trump followed the free market model of neoliberalism, and the same faults of the neoliberalism economic model ensued, with the gap between America’s highest and lowest income brackets increasing by 9% annually. According to data from the PEW Research Center, Trump left office with a 29% approval rating, the lowest after one term of the last five USA presidents. Even before the pandemic, which amplified the phenomenon of conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19 and the vaccine, 50% of Americans already thought that misinformation had become a problem. One cannot forget another notable landmark of Trump’s term: his supporters’ invasion of the Capitol.
Trump’s scapegoats were principally Mexican immigrants. In 2015 he made one of many controversial statements: “They’re [Mexico] sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us”. The hate crime statistics against Hispanics reflected his demonisation of them, with Hispanics becoming victims of 70% more hate crimes in 2019 compared to 2016. Polls suggest that 56% of US adults thought Trump had worsened race relations and increased sectarianism in the country, once again feeding the far-right positive feedback loop.
Most importantly, it must be remembered that climate change remains one of the biggest challenges for humanity in the 21st century, and each presidential term of climate denial is playing a game of Russian roulette against the Devil himself. The far right does not recognise this. When Donald Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and rolls back 112 regulations to mitigate and adapt to climate change, he is engaging in roulette. Similarly, Marine Le Pen’s party platform in 2022 was judged by the reputable public news source FranceInfo to be far off if not contrary to the 2015 Paris Accords. She likewise casually plays roulette.
When the far-right takes power, the government becomes autocratic and increasingly undemocratic. Hungary is a long-lasting far-right model whose policies could inspire future far-right governments in France and the USA. At the helm since 2010, Orban passed a law during the Coronavirus pandemic that allowed him to jail journalists critical of the government’s management. The normalization of xenophobia which resonates with the reign of the far right can also be visible in Hungary. George Soros, a Hungarian and Jewish philanthropist billionaire has perhaps been the most representative victim of the far right’s demonization of a scapegoat model. He once suggested that Europe should, from a humanitarian point of view, accept more Syrian refugees, and Viktor Orban spent millions in a propaganda campaign to denounce Soros as the “instigator of a Jewish plot” to replace whites with Muslims, propaganda that was recuperated by QAnon in the USA later on. This is a strong example of the positive feedback loop which aliments the far-right electoral machine, maintaining scapegoats that serve as a symbol for the people’s ills, in turn incentivizing them to vote for the party that promises to combat that scapegoat.
We cannot underestimate the rhetoric of the far right. The year 2024, marked by the US presidential and European Parliament elections, will be a pivotal year that could shape a new political order in capitalist democracies. Will the hateful populist discourse of the far right reach an eruption point in France and the USA, potentially leading to a conflict that leaves the ballots and takes place in the streets? What political order will be the successor to neoliberalism, and will the far right be the ones who oversee the transition? Is xenophobic authoritarian rule the successor to democracy?