How is the right | The Far Right

What does it mean to be more accurate?

The term comes from the beginnings of the left-wing political divide in the late 1800s, when one of Europe’s most powerful empires experienced political upheaval.

During the French Revolution, real divisions arose in the National Assembly, the country’s parliament. Defenders of the monarchy and the old order sat on the right, while advocates of republicanism, secularism and equality took seats on the left.

From that accommodation system grew the political language we still use today.

By the end of the 19th century, the leftist movement born in revolutionary France became part of the political discourse in Europe.

The German Reichstag writes from the time it was originally referred to for ministers on the left (links) and right (rechts), while Italian newspapers used sinistra and destra as the usual political notations.

The word droite too, in turn, came to be used as a symbol of royalists, or courageous rulers who rejected the Republic and wanted to return to a strong monarchy. Their position was in stark contrast to traditionalists, who emphasized the preservation of existing institutions, gradual change and participation in constitutional politics.

By the end of the 1800s, European newspapers and political writers were already using “right” to describe anti-republican and nationalist groups, although the label had not yet acquired a fixed meaning. Over time, it came to describe groups that reject liberal democracy and embrace nationalism – the belief that race, often expressed in ethnic or cultural terms, should take precedence over population and individual rights.

In the 1920s and 30s, fascism gave the term “right” its most modern form and used social media to gain power. Groups like Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany combined values ​​that would mean far-reaching freedom for decades. This included the rejection of democracy and communism, hatred of the masses, and the rise of international conflicts, which put the interests of the country before everything else. Anti-Semitism was, of course, central to Nazi ideology.

After World War II, the political situation changed throughout Europe.

The liberation of the concentration camps, the revelations about the Holocaust, and the fall of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy left the continent facing the consequences of racial hatred and dictatorship. Fascist parties were banned, dissolved or pushed out of government and public life, but the ideology did not end.

In some places, they survived through authoritarian regimes, most notably in Francisco Franco’s Spain, where a tightly controlled one-party government combined Catholic, military and anti-communist traditions until the 1970s.

Elsewhere, they have also appeared in new forms, such as Le Pen’s FN, a new kind of nationalism, including anti-immigrant sentiments, instead of the familiar trend of the interwar years.

Today, political scientists use the term “right” as an umbrella and rely on three main approaches as Mudde, author of Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe and The Far Right Today.

The first measure involves nativism.

Nativists believe that states should be owned and governed primarily by members of the “native” group – often defined in terms of ethnicity, culture or religion.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in 2017, Mudde said that “nativism is about the ethnicity of ‘us’ and ‘them’, wanting a country (of one culture) and seeing strange things and people as dangerous”.

Although Mudde’s definition is widely accepted, it is not set in stone, and there are opinions about how political scientists use it.

For example, Daphne Halikiopoulou, chair of comparative politics at the University of York in England, believes that the term nativism is too narrow. He prefers to use “nationalism” because some modern, far-right parties are developing a “nationalist agenda” that is not based on race.

The second concerns populism.

Mudde’s book with the Chilean political scientist Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, explains that it is a “small theory that sees people divided into two groups of non-aligned people, ‘pure people’ versus ‘corrupt people’.

They said populists see democracy as a given rather than broken – something that should be returned to corrupt elites rather than overthrown.

Marta Lorimer, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics, told Al Jazeera that populism can be “part of a party’s ideology or their message, but it is not what makes them stand out”.

Words alone don’t mean what you believe – but how you do politics, he said.

Cynical leaders often use populism – as is the case with the Syriza party in Greece – to cast citizens as victims of public corruption while positioning themselves as champions of the people.

The third level of the concept of “right” is authoritarianism, love of order, obedience and strong, centralized leadership, against pluralism or liberal democracy.

Mudde, in his book, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, said that in an authoritarian system, the violation of authority should be “severely punished”.

But even on the far right, there is a distinction to be made.