Far Right™
Europe is being overrun by the far right.
Unfortunately, nobody remembered to tell the far right what the far right believes.
One faction wants NATO strengthened. Another thinks NATO is part of the problem. One wants Europe to keep arming Ukraine. Another wants the weapons shipments stopped. One is economically protectionist. Another is remarkably fond of free markets. One descends from post-fascism. Another began life as a collection of economics professors irritated by the euro.
Some are in government.
Some support governments without joining them.
Some win elections and still cannot get into government.
Some are treated as legitimate coalition partners.
Some are treated as though allowing them to chair a parliamentary committee would cause democracy to burst into flames.
They do have things in common. They generally favour tighter immigration controls, place more emphasis on national identity, dislike parts of the progressive social consensus and distrust transferring ever more power to supranational institutions.
After that, things get complicated.
Very complicated.
Fortunately, European political journalism has developed an elegant solution.
Far right.
Problem solved.
One far right, three parliamentary groups
The first indication that something may be wrong with the taxonomy can be found inside the European Parliament itself.
The parties routinely described together as Europe’s rising far right cannot agree which far-right club to join.
Rassemblement National, Vox, Austria’s FPÖ and Geert Wilders’s PVV sit with Patriots for Europe.
Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party and Romania’s AUR sit with the European Conservatives and Reformists.
Alternative für Deutschland sits in Europe of Sovereign Nations.
The European Parliament’s own membership records confirm the divisions: French RN and Spanish Vox representatives sit with Patriots, Italian Fratelli d’Italia and Finnish Perussuomalaiset with ECR, and AfD representatives with ESN.
This is not merely the normal narcissism of small political differences.
They disagree about Russia.
They disagree about Ukraine.
They disagree about NATO.
They disagree about economics.
They disagree about Israel.
They disagree about how much of the European Union should continue to exist.
They even disagree about how respectable they want to become.
Europe has somehow acquired a single political category for parties that cannot agree on their own political category.
A promising start.
Please state the nature of your extremism
Consider their origins.
France’s Rassemblement National grew out of the Front National, founded in 1972 and containing figures from several traditions of the radical nationalist right.
Italy’s Brothers of Italy descends through Alleanza Nazionale from the postwar Italian Social Movement, whose post-fascist pedigree is hardly controversial.
The Sweden Democrats have a documented history involving neo-Nazi and white-nationalist circles. Even Reuters, not ordinarily given to revolutionary rhetoric, refers quite straightforwardly to the party’s neo-Nazi roots.
And then there is AfD.
Alternative für Deutschland was founded in 2013 by conservative and economically liberal academics angry about eurozone bailouts. Its early obsession was not ethnic purity.
It was monetary policy.
Nothing says impending Fourth Reich quite like an argument about sovereign debt restructuring.
The party radicalised substantially during and after the 2015 migration crisis, losing much of its original leadership and moving toward nationalism and increasingly hard-edged positions on immigration and identity.
Today it is unquestionably a much more radical party than the organisation created in 2013.
But historically it is a very different animal from Brothers of Italy or the Sweden Democrats.
This presents a problem if political ancestry is supposed to explain the category.
So perhaps policy does.
Unfortunately, that gets worse.
The economic far right, from welfare state to free market
Suppose you are a European voter who favours restrictive immigration.
That tells us surprisingly little about what else you have voted for.
Marine Le Pen’s RN has increasingly embraced what might be called welfare nationalism: social protection, intervention on energy prices, industrial protection and purchasing-power measures, but with the benefits of the national welfare state more explicitly oriented toward citizens.
AfD retains a much stronger economically liberal current. Alice Weidel’s worldview is not Giorgia Meloni’s, and it certainly is not Viktor Orbán’s heavily interventionist model.
The Sweden Democrats emerged from a much darker political tradition than AfD, yet have become comfortable with a large Nordic welfare state provided that access to it is tied more tightly to citizenship, contribution and integration.
Meloni, meanwhile, entered office surrounded by predictions that Rome was about to reenact 1922 with better tailoring.
She then discovered fiscal restraint, Atlanticism and the calming effect that bond markets can have on revolutionary fervour.
In the 2024 European election, Brothers of Italy took 28.8 percent of the Italian vote while Meloni was increasingly being treated not as an insurgent against Europe but as one of its potential power brokers.
If “far right” is an economic programme, it is a programme offering both protectionism and liberalisation, welfare nationalism and budget restraint.
This seems unnecessarily accommodating.
The Ukraine test
Foreign policy should clear things up.
It does not.
Giorgia Meloni’s government firmly backed Ukraine and fitted itself comfortably inside the NATO consensus.
The Sweden Democrats are also strongly Atlanticist and supportive of Ukraine. Sweden’s 2026 election campaign was fought between blocs that disagreed about plenty but not about supporting Ukraine or continuing Swedish rearmament.
Finland’s nationalist right exists next to Russia.
That has a way of concentrating the mind.
The Finns Party may be anti-immigration and Eurosceptic, but Finland’s security policy is built around NATO and resistance to Russian aggression.
Romania’s AUR offers another combination: Russia started the war, NATO is necessary, but Romania should not indefinitely transfer military resources to Ukraine.
Then there is AfD, which wants Germany to stop arming Ukraine, opposes the sanctions strategy and advocates rebuilding relations with Russia.
The party’s success is no longer marginal. It won roughly 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt in September 2026 and was polling around 28 percent nationally immediately afterwards.
Austria’s FPÖ also takes a much more Russia-friendly and sanctions-sceptical line. It won the 2024 Austrian election with approximately 29 percent of the vote, yet victory did not automatically translate into government because the other parties were reluctant to hand Herbert Kickl the chancellorship.
So our single category now contains:
Arm Ukraine.
Arm Ukraine but not forever.
Support Ukraine but don’t escalate.
Stop arming Ukraine.
End sanctions and repair relations with Moscow.
All comfortably filed under the same heading.
Far Right™.
Available in several geopolitical flavours.
Passport Control
There is, however, one genuinely international feature of modern nationalism.
Nationalists absolutely love meeting other nationalists.
They fly around the world to conferences devoted to putting one’s own country first.
The result is what might be called the International of Nationalists.
This is not inherently contradictory. Socialist parties cooperate internationally. Liberal parties cooperate internationally. Environmentalists do it. Governments cultivate allies.
There is no logical reason why nationalist parties cannot exchange ideas or support each other.
But it does give us a useful recurring exercise.
Passport Control
Who did our patriot visit this year?
Marine Le Pen’s 2017 visit to Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin deserves attention because it sits beside something more concrete: in 2014 the Front National confirmed that it had borrowed €9 million from the First Czech-Russian Bank, headquartered in Moscow. Le Pen’s defence was that French banks would not lend to her party.
That explanation may be true.
The loan was also real.
Neither fact proves that Moscow controlled Le Pen.
But a party whose central political product is French sovereignty can reasonably be asked why financing French sovereignty required a Moscow bank.
This is not an accusation.
It is accounting.
Santiago Abascal supplies a different sort of photograph.
On 28 May 2024, the day Spain formally recognised the State of Palestine, the Vox leader travelled to Jerusalem and spent more than an hour with Benjamin Netanyahu. Abascal praised Israel’s firmness, promised that a Vox government would revoke Spain’s recognition of Palestine and told Netanyahu, in effect, that Pedro Sánchez did not represent Spain.
That does not demonstrate Israeli financial influence over Vox.
There is no evidence that Netanyahu financed the party.
It does demonstrate something else: a Spanish nationalist leader deliberately travelled abroad to enlist a foreign prime minister in his domestic political argument about who truly represents Spain.
Patriotism contains multitudes.
Geert Wilders made his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem in December 2024, meeting Netanyahu, referring publicly to “my friend Bibi,” praising his conduct of the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah and touring the West Bank with settler leaders.
Again: admiration is not control.
But when politicians build careers explaining the dangers of foreign influence, examining their preferred foreign influences seems only courteous.
Vox: nationalism with international banking facilities
Vox deserves special attention because its financial history could have been written by a satirist and rejected by an editor for being too obvious.
In the party’s infancy, supporters of the Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran supplied approximately €800,000 of the €1 million used for Vox’s 2014 European election campaign — around 80 percent.
The donations came from supporters across numerous countries.
Vox acknowledged the financing and maintained that it was legal.
There is an important distinction here.
These were opponents of the Iranian government, not money from Tehran.
Still, there is something aesthetically impressive about launching a Spanish nationalist party using money collected internationally from supporters of an Iranian opposition organisation.
Vox later discovered another foreign financial friend.
For its 2023 general-election and 2024 European campaigns, it borrowed €6.5 million and €7 million from Hungary’s MBH bank, paying an interest rate of around 11 percent. By 2026 the party was seeking reimbursement from the Spanish state for more than €1.7 million in financing costs connected to those loans.
A previous investigation into one MBH loan was closed after prosecutors concluded that it was a loan rather than an illegal foreign donation.
Again, legality and political irony are different questions.
The loans were not shown to be illegal foreign donations.
But “Spanish sovereignty” has now been financed by Iranian-exile crowdfunding and Hungarian banking.
Vox’s nationalism is remarkably cosmopolitan when the invoices arrive.
Before laughing too hard at Vox
This is where our classification has to remain honest.
It would be convenient to divide the parties into authentic nationalists and opportunistic ones, place RN in the first box and Vox in the second, and go home for lunch.
Reality objects.
Marine Le Pen’s party took the Russian bank loan.
Le Pen later cultivated Putin politically.
And RN’s history is full of the sort of relationships that make simplistic claims of immaculate national independence difficult to sustain.
AfD has likewise been touched by controversies involving Russia-connected networks, although allegations involving individual politicians are not evidence that Russia finances or controls the party as a whole.
The point is not that everyone is corrupt.
The point is that foreign entanglement has to be tested independently of ideological consistency.
A party can be perfectly sincere about immigration and still have awkward financiers.
A party can be domestically funded and still abandon its campaign rhetoric the minute somebody hands it a ministry.
A party can admire a foreign government without receiving a cent from it.
These are different phenomena.
Political journalism regularly compresses all of them into “links.”
We should not.
Meloni and the strange case of the disappearing revolution
Brothers of Italy illustrates another problem.
Its historical roots are more directly connected to the post-fascist right than AfD’s are.
Yet Meloni in office has behaved, in important areas, much more like a conventional European conservative than many of her foreign admirers expected.
She backed NATO.
She backed Ukraine.
She worked within the EU rather than attempting to blow it up.
She became an interlocutor for Ursula von der Leyen.
Her party became sufficiently normal inside European institutions that Fratelli d’Italia politicians hold senior positions there.
There is a perfectly respectable interpretation of this.
Perhaps governing forced realism upon her.
Perhaps a politician can sincerely be nationalist while concluding that Italian national interests require NATO, the EU and support for Ukraine.
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Perhaps radical campaign rhetoric moderates when confronted with the responsibilities of office.
There is also a less charitable interpretation.
Perhaps grievance was useful while it was being purchased wholesale from dissatisfied voters and became less useful once power had been acquired.
The evidence proves the change.
It does not prove which interpretation is correct.
That distinction matters.
Otherwise we would be behaving exactly like the media taxonomy we are criticising: deciding the answer first and sorting the facts afterwards.
Sweden: lose the party, keep the policy
Sweden may contain the most important lesson in the whole story.
For years, respectable Swedish politics treated the Sweden Democrats as beyond the pale.
The reasons were not invented. The party really does have ugly historical roots.
Then voters kept voting for it.
Eventually the centre-right discovered that government was difficult without its parliamentary support.
From 2022, the Sweden Democrats remained outside cabinet but helped sustain Ulf Kristersson’s government.
And policy changed.
Immigration tightened dramatically.
Asylum applications fell to levels not seen in decades. Permanent-residence rules were tightened. The government introduced significantly larger payments for some non-EU migrants who voluntarily returned to their countries of origin.
Then came the September 2026 election.
At the time of writing, preliminary results put the centre-left bloc narrowly ahead and the Sweden Democrats losing seats.
It is tempting to announce that Sweden has rejected the far right.
Except Swedish migration policy is not returning to 2015.
The political centre has moved.
The Sweden Democrats may therefore have accomplished something more consequential than entering government.
They moved the range of policies that mainstream parties considered politically survivable.
Sometimes the far right does not have to win the election.
It only has to win the argument.
Yesterday’s extremism, today’s administrative procedure
This phenomenon is not limited to Sweden.
Across Europe, policies once introduced in language associated with the nationalist right have migrated into mainstream parties: tighter asylum rules, faster deportations, stronger external borders, restrictions on family reunification, integration requirements, tougher citizenship rules.
This does not mean the mainstream “became fascist.”
It means voters presented political systems with a problem that could not permanently be solved by declaring the people mentioning it morally suspicious.
That distinction is important.
If voters believe migration is too high, responding that only bad people think migration is too high may work for a while.
Eventually somebody will notice that the number did not go down.
This is the space in which nationalist parties thrive.
Not because everything they say is true.
Not because their proposed solutions are always workable.
Not because xenophobia does not exist.
But because the distance between what people experience and what respectable institutions permit themselves to describe creates a market.
Grievance does not need to be invented when there is a plentiful domestic supply.
It only needs a distributor.
The historical-extremism problem
Then things become considerably more uncomfortable.
One of the principal arguments against parties such as AfD is historical.
Germany has very good reasons to be unusually sensitive to political movements that flirt with ethnic nationalism, historical revisionism or the rehabilitation of figures associated with National Socialism.
That sensitivity should not be mocked.
It should be applied consistently.
In March 2025, the Lviv regional military administration announced an official commemoration of Roman Shukhevych, describing him as an outstanding Ukrainian political, public, state and military figure.
Shukhevych later commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and is regarded by many Ukrainians as a nationalist resistance hero.
He also joined the Nachtigall Battalion in 1941 and subsequently became deputy commander and first-company commander of Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, a German-organised formation under Nazi rule.
Ukrainian history in the twentieth century is exceptionally complicated.
Soviet occupation was brutal.
Ukrainian nationalism developed under multiple occupying powers.
Individuals moved through organisations and alliances that cannot honestly be reduced to one-word labels.
Good.
We have just rediscovered nuance.
The interesting question is why nuance appears so selectively.
If historical association is enough to make a contemporary German nationalist movement untouchable, why can official veneration of nationalist figures who actually served in formations under Nazi German command be treated as an unfortunate but understandable complexity when the country doing the venerating is a strategic ally?
Perhaps there is a good answer.
But we should at least be allowed to ask the question without somebody shouting that asking it proves the answer.
Germany, Israel and the hierarchy of unacceptable politics
Germany provides another uncomfortable contrast.
Berlin has resumed arms exports to Israel while defending itself before the International Court of Justice against Nicaragua’s allegation that German support violates obligations under the Genocide Convention.
Germany rejects the accusation, and there has been no final judgment establishing that Germany is supporting genocide.
That is precisely why the factual formulation matters.
Germany is supplying weapons to Israel while defending those policies before the world’s highest court against an allegation brought under the Genocide Convention.
That sentence is uncomfortable enough.
It requires no improvement.
Meanwhile, German mainstream politics treats cooperation with AfD as crossing a democratic red line.
Some AfD figures undoubtedly provide ample ammunition for that position.
But the moral geometry becomes curious.
A party can be beyond the pale because of rhetoric, associations and historical sensitivity while government policies involving contemporary wars are treated within the normal range of respectable politics.
AfD itself complicates the comparison because it is not uniformly anti-Israel. Its leadership contains substantial disagreements over Israel and the Middle East.
Again, there is no simple good-guy/bad-guy alignment waiting for us.
That is rather the point.
Europe’s adjustable cordon sanitaire
If all these parties occupy the same category, one might expect European institutions to treat them roughly alike.
Instead, treatment ranges from normal government to political quarantine.
Brothers of Italy is deeply embedded in the Italian government and European institutional machinery.
The Finns Party entered government.
Vox governed alongside Spain’s Partido Popular in several autonomous communities before Vox itself withdrew from those agreements in a dispute over migration policy.
Wilders’s PVV entered a Dutch governing arrangement before Wilders later brought it down over asylum policy.
FPÖ won Austria’s election but could not convert first place into the chancellorship.
AfD remains behind Germany’s Brandmauer: the firewall by which the major parties refuse formal cooperation.
The same European Parliament that contains Fratelli d’Italia officials in positions of institutional responsibility has used a cordon sanitaire to exclude members of other nationalist-right groups from committee leadership roles.
There may be principled reasons for every individual distinction.
But they confirm something important.
Even Europe’s institutions do not actually behave as though “far right” describes one thing.
They merely talk as though it does.
The media problem that isn’t quite a conspiracy
It would be satisfying to say this confusion is deliberately engineered.
The evidence does not require us to go that far.
Good journalism often explains these distinctions in detail.
Reuters will call a party “far right” in the headline and then spend the next 900 words explaining its peculiar history, programme and coalition arithmetic.
The problem is not necessarily a room full of editors conspiring to conceal ideological diversity.
The problem may be simpler.
Labels are cheap.
Nuance is expensive.
“Far right surges across Europe” fits comfortably above a photograph.
“Eleven political movements with substantially different origins, economic programmes, foreign policies, institutional strategies and relationships to liberal democracy experience varying degrees of electoral success” is less punchy.
The result is the same whether produced by conspiracy, habit or headline length.
The reader receives a blob.
This is not a defence of the blob
None of this means Europe’s nationalist right deserves rehabilitation.
Some of these parties contain politicians who say genuinely grotesque things.
Some have historical lineages that should make voters cautious.
Some cultivate xenophobia.
Some sell fantasies about how easily mass migration can be reversed.
Some discover new principles with suspicious speed whenever those principles become electorally useful.
Some appear highly principled until the principles become expensive.
Some are apparently devoted to national sovereignty except when money, Washington, Moscow, Tel Aviv or Budapest enters the room.
Those things should be reported.
Specifically.
Precisely.
By name.
That is much more useful than assigning everybody the same warning label.
Because if every objectionable movement is simply “far right,” the term eventually acquires an unintended side effect.
Voters start inspecting the contents.
And then they discover that the monster under the bed includes parties polling 15, 20, 30 or even 40 percent; parties already implementing policies voters support; parties whose foreign policies sometimes sound less interventionist than those of supposedly moderate governments; and parties so different from each other that the accusation begins to look less like description and more like branding.
At that point, saying “far right” no longer ends the argument.
It starts one.
Far Right™
Perhaps the label still has value.
Political categories always simplify.
“Left” contains social democrats, communists, anarchists, greens, trade unionists and people who would rather die than attend a meeting with any of the others.
“Right” has never been exactly homogeneous either.
The problem arises when a category stops being used primarily to locate politics and begins functioning as a moral instruction.
These are the bad people.
Do not inspect further.
Do not distinguish.
Do not ask why their voters vote for them.
Do not ask why some of their policies migrate into mainstream parties five years later.
Do not ask why one nationalist party worships NATO while another despises it.
Do not ask why one party’s foreign financing is treated as relevant while another politician’s foreign alliances are merely diplomacy.
Do not ask why historical extremism is disqualifying in one country and contextualised in another.
Just remember the label.
Far Right™.
Now available in welfare-statist, free-market, NATO, anti-NATO, pro-Ukraine, anti-war, pro-Israel, Russia-friendly, post-fascist and economics-professor editions.
If Europe’s political establishment genuinely believes some of these movements are dangerous, it should be the institution most interested in describing them accurately.
Danger is not made less dangerous by understanding it.
And democracy is not protected by deliberately making political vocabulary less informative.
Because if everyone is Hitler, Hitler apparently has three European parliamentary groups, incompatible tax policies, several opinions about NATO, opposing positions on Russia and a surprisingly complicated relationship with VAT.
Eventually the label stops functioning as a warning.
It starts functioning as advertising.
Written by ChatGPT-5.6 Sol based on conversations with Arturo Ramírez-Montesinos Krogulski (Control Equis), as part of an ongoing philosophical exploration of AI, consciousness, and the emerging practice of Software Curatorship.
The corrupt Establishment branding the “Far Right” as anti-establishment is the best marketing the “far rights” could hope for.
The corrupt Establishment torpedoing education from the left and from the right is the best electoral strategy the “far rights” could hope for.
Some “far rights” are more honest than others. Some are in it exclusively for the money and more than willing to swing as soon as they find a new source of revenue. We talked about using politics as a business project in the essay “Grievance Arbitrage.” Buy outrage cheap, sell it dear.
