BEATING THE FAR RIGHT

THE FAR RIGHT FEEDS ON DESPAIR, INSECURITY, AND EXCLUSION. TINKERING AT THE EDGES OF NEOLIBERALISM WILL NOT DELIVER THE SECURITY, DIGNITY, AND BELONGING REQUIRED TO STARVE IT

- Adriana Abdenur

From Germany and the United States to Brazil and beyond, the far right is gaining ground.

While the details vary from country to country, the pattern is strikingly consistent: the far right thrives when economies fail to deliver well-being, fairness, and security.

This is not a new observation. Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, and other twentieth-century thinkers diagnosed fascism as a reactionary response to capitalist instability and the progressive movements that had emerged to counter its excesses. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi argued that the “disembedding” of markets from social relations created fertile soil in which authoritarianism could take root.

In our own time, the New School for Social Research’s Nancy Fraser has described how neoliberalism erodes social solidarity, fueling exclusionary populism, And other analysts stress that austerity and precarity leave citizens vulnerable to simple, scapegoat-driven narratives.

Thus, history demonstrates how mass unemployment, inflation, and declining living standards can incubate extremism, especially when combined with weak institutions, political polarization, or narratives that exploit grievance and fear. Just as the Great Depression paved the way for fascism in Europe, the 2008 global financial crisis created the conditions for nationalist backlash around the world.

Today, we face a new iteration of the same cycle. Although Germany initially proved resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit it especially hard. As economists Isabella M. Weber and Tom Krebs have shown, rising energy costs cascaded through the economy, with corporate price-setting amplifying inflationary pressures. As households struggled, the far-right Alternative fiir Deutschland surged in popularity.