By Michael Barker, Socialist Alternative Leicester
We are right to be concerned about the global rise of the far right in electoral politics. Recent additions to this reactionary movement arrived at the end of 2023 when Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party won the Dutch elections, and when Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina.
These newly-anointed preachers of hate join the ranks of rulers which include the likes of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, India’s Narendra Modi, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. What unites them all is the combination of exploiting genuine political discontent and the scapegoating of minorities for all of capitalism’s ills. The primary targets of this misdirected anger are immigrants, but particularly Muslim immigrants, along with members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Attack on migrants
Figures like Farage, Le Pen and Trump have particularly targeted asylum seekers and migrants as a whole, claiming developed countries are ‘full’. In doing so, they are scapegoating these people for the already-existing crises in housing, education and health services created by capitalist crisis and austerity.
Responsibility for the ongoing refugee crisis must be laid at the door of the capitalist system, which has ravaged and impoverished whole areas of the globe, exacerbated ethnic conflicts, fomented civil and cross-border wars over mineral resources, and now, through climate change, rendered parched river valleys and flooded coastlines uninhabitable. Whether migrants are ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘economic migrants’ is irrelevant; they are desperate, and willing to make dangerous journeys across oceans and deserts to escape wretched lives. We need parties of the left who will trumpet socialist policies at home and internationally to solve these crises, which would allow everyone to live decent lives.
The Daily Mail recently gloated: “How the right is on the march across the Continent – after voters in the 27 EU states give stinging rebuke to the bloc’s centrist and left-wing politicians.” But it is completely mistaken to describe these politicians across Europe as being on the left. In fact, those who suffered the greatest losses were representatives of the pro-capitalist establishment.
Posing as ‘anti-establishment’
Any growth in the far right’s electoral successes should be seen as undermining the organising capacity of the global working class to unite against our capitalist oppressors. While posing as ‘anti-establishment’ figures, the economic policies of these rising far-right parties are thoroughly anti-working-class, idolising the market, private enterprise and deregulation.
Occasionally, as with Marine Le Pen in France and Andrzej Duda’s ‘Law and Justice’ party in Poland, they adopt populist policies on pensions or the minimum wage. But this is a cover for their real role, which is to divide the working class with anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, homophobic and transphobic slogans.
Leaders of the far right may repetitively insist that they care about the common voter, but what in reality unites them most of all is their defence, in the last instance, of capitalism. Their disregard for the lives of migrants and refugees is no different to their attitude toward workers in ‘their own’ country. Despite talk of ‘looking after our own’ the priorities of these reactionary figures lie with their millionaire financiers.
So how do we stop the far right?
To fight the far right, we need mass struggle. This includes mass demonstrations to say no to the racist agenda of Reform, as well as mass action to defend the rights of refugees, queer people and all the oppressed, and resist all attacks from the bosses. But crucially, we need a clear political alternative.
If all we have to offer in the fight against the right is a ‘lesser evil’ vote to the discredited mainstream political establishment, this can in fact be a gift to the right who paint themselves as representing ‘the people’.
The best tool against the far right would be a new left party, by and for the working class, with a socialist programme to point a way out of capitalist crisis, alongside a fighting trade union movement. In the absence of such organisations that can serve our collective interests, all manner of political conservatives are able to deploy their divisive lies.
Unfortunately, some on the ‘left’ have failed to grasp this necessity. Some, such as George Galloway in Britain and Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany (who recently led a ‘left-conservative’ split from the Die Linke party), falsely claim that the solution lies in emulating mainstream conservative parties in peddling the right’s immigration nonsense.
The celebratory article in the Mail unintentionally makes this point when it observes that Denmark “looks to be an exception to the rightwards drift” in the EU elections as the “hard-right party, Denmark Democrats, came fifth with 7.4%.” the Mail adds, “the left had stayed in power by adopting strong anti-immigration policies” which included their party’s pioneering of what we now know to be Sunak’s infamous Rwanda plan.
It must also be stressed that the growth of the far right is not completely inevitable. Rather than a simple swing to the right, we are seeing growing political polarisation around the world.
While some are being drawn into a consolidated right, growing numbers can also be won over to a socialist and revolutionary alternative. The growth of the far right has highlighted the urgent importance of building a fighting left opposition.
We must be honest with our class. We need a strategy which prioritises building the types of mass struggles and working-class revolts that can win concrete gains, and puts forward a programme that stands resolutely for a break with the current system, and for the socialist transformation of society.
