An uncanny feeling came over me as I followed the second round of the French presidential election in 2022. The results from the overseas departments were shocking: the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen won a resounding majority of votes in the same constituencies that only a fortnight before (with the notable exceptions of Mayotte) had displayed a clear preference for the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This seemed to defy common perceptions about the causes of support for the far right. After all, people could not have become racist or acquired a new political identity in just two weeks.  

It may be tempting to explain this result away as a “protest vote” or an “anomaly”. But we could gain much deeper insights by taking the advice of Black feminist thinker bell hooks and adopting the perspective of the margins to better understand the centre, rather than the other way around. What if what happened in the French Caribbean could provide a clue to dissect what we have right before our eyes? 

To many, the proposition that we could actually learn something from the far right may seem disconcerting. Have we not learned too much from it already? Yes, in a sense. But can we not learn better? As Stuart Hall noted in his 1988 essay “Learning from Thatcherism”, “the issue, now, is not whether, but how to rethink.” The far right shares some of the characteristics that Hall attributed to Thatcherism: the ability to recognise and address problems others choose to ignore, a readiness to question established assumptions and make them obsolete, and the capacity to impose its policies on others and shape the world in its image. In most Western societies, the political centre is readily incorporating increasingly big chunks of the far-right agenda. The question, now, is not whether, but what lessons we learn.  

Searching for questions  

What is the “far right” anyway? It cannot be defined by substance. Far-right parties and movements across Europe come in all shapes and hues, whether in terms of their economic policies (from market liberal to protectionist), religious affinities (from radically secularist to religious fundamentalist), or even attitudes towards Jews (from traditionally antisemitic to some of the best friends of Israel). Not even a family resemblance!  

A topographical definition cannot be helpful either. Using “far right” as a label for those occupying positions more extreme than the respectable centre-right could once have worked. But the term has become increasingly dubious as far-right policies and discourses take the mainstream by storm, most notably with regard to migration. This is happening not just in countries where far-right leaders are in power, like Hungary or Italy, but also in some others that are run by centre-right (Austria, Poland), centrist (France), or centre-left (Denmark) governments. Moreover, the far right has captured the discourse of European institutions whose decisions contribute to the incremental “Orbánisation” of EU migration policy. Thinking of the far right as “extreme” – that is, alien to the centre by definition – is a habit as entrenched as it is misleading.  

Taking Nietzsche’s advice – “only that which has no history can be defined” – I propose to understand the far right in the function of what it does: a historical force that, unless stopped, is set to play a central role in our current conjuncture. The task at hand is not to seek solace in definitions, but to unpack and explain this role.  

We must take an honest look at the problems it articulates and unpack these articulations.

Even some of the most convincing available interpretations of the far right fall short of this objective. Within the classical Marxist framework, far-right politics could be seen through the lens of class issues disguised as identity issues. In other words, stable identities are presented as a displaced answer to economic precarity. But is it all just about the economy and “false consciousness”? Concepts such as agonism (popularised by political theorist Chantal Mouffe) or post-democracy (coined by political scientist Colin Crouch) help us see the far right as a call for collective agency, a revolt against the lack of real choice in the system that pretends to be democratic. This interpretation leads us further, but there is still a way to go. The analyses of scholars such as Vincent Tiberj concerning “farrightisation from above” (elites) rather than “from below” (voters) are well supported by data and highly illuminating in different contexts. True and useful, yet still insufficient.  

To learn from the far right means to make a next – and risky – step. It means that we must take an honest look at the problems it articulates and unpack these articulations. What needs to be done is the exact opposite of what the political centre has been doing so far. The mainstream learns from the far right by adopting an ever-growing part of its agenda as its own. This is learning by rote: repeating answers without really understanding the questions. The challenge is to disentangle the two levels. Only thus can we hope to learn lessons of our own choice and not simply prefabricated ones.  

Rejecting the “utopia’’  

The farmers’ demonstrations that swept across Europe in the first half of 2024 were a result of a long history of discontent. Notably, both the far right and the political mainstream shared two crucial assumptions about the movement: that the protests were primarily against the European Green Deal, and that the far right was best fit to represent the farmers’ cause.  

Yet not all these protests were associated with the far right, and resistance to environmental regulations was only a part of their agenda. Three themes emerged in almost every instance: environmental regulations, perceived threats of foreign competition (be it from Ukraine, Canada, South America, or other EU member states), and a fall in production profitability. Across the continent, many farmers struggle to get by, and the number of family farms across Europe is dropping inexorably, while the ultimate beneficiaries of EU subsidies are large-scale agroindustrial players.  

Moreover, protests also took place outside of the EU (in the UK, India, and Canada, for example), where farmers are not affected by the European Green Deal. And although discontent with environmental regulations was a part of the farmers’ grievances in some countries, this was not always the case. Other topics, like trade policies and unfair or disadvantageous purchasing practices (by supermarkets or governments), were at times the main drivers of farmers’ movements.  

The choice of the European Green Deal as the symbol of the protests at the expense of other demands was, in fact, a question of convenience. It is easier to water down or defer some environmental regulations than to address the underlying problems that make those rules unbearable in the first place. Getting real about the farmers’ protests means acknowledging that.  

How can we articulate the need for order and security without compromising the values of hospitality and openness?  

But we also need to understand the power of anti-regulation sentiment. It is precisely this factor that created an elective affinity between farmers’ protests and the far right in many countries. Resistance to overregulation, a feeling of being stifled by what David Graeber called “the utopia of rules”, is something most of us are familiar with. And, nowadays, it is one of the pillars of the far right’s affective economy.  

Thus, we must ask ourselves: can we imagine another kind of green deal in Europe that would not rely to such an extent on regulations to achieve its goal? But the more serious, broader question is: how can we organise our social life and policymaking beyond the “utopia of rules”? And can resistance to overregulation be articulated in different ways and by political forces other than the far right?  

Migration and the politics of fear  

“But they should abide by Polish law, shouldn’t they?” I would hear this question every now and then during the 2015 electoral campaign, which coincided with the climax of the refugee crisis. With my academic mindset, I would read it as a sign of subtle – and in most cases, unconscious – racist prejudice. Shouldn’t everyone, citizen or not, abide by the law? Why assume that refugees would be more prone to breaking it? The same mindset suggested that the only appropriate answer to such questions is to debunk them. The way out, I believed, was education.  

But that question was once asked in my hometown by an old friend – a local politician and lifelong left-winger. Unconventional by current standards of the urban left with her love of hunting, in politics she has always been passionate about social justice and individual freedoms. And yet, she was asking the question in earnest. I struggled to make sense of that.  

Public attitudes towards migration have their ebbs and flows, but a certain reluctance to accept migrants and refugees is on the rise across Europe. This is generally perceived as a reflection of xenophobia – a desire to protect a collective self, be it “Polish culture”, French “Republican values”, or “our European way of life”. The fear of the Other, in short. The political mainstream and the far right both take this fear for granted and thus have a similar reading of the migration issue. But this is not the whole story.  

Since 2015, I have been following public opinion polls and other research on attitudes towards migrants and refugees in Poland. Surprisingly, there was a clear majority in favour of accepting refugees throughout most of this period. Including words like “Arab” or “Muslim” in the questions did not change much. Only in two cases would the level of support be significantly lower, to the extent that it could flip the outcome and produce an anti-refugee majority. First, when the question was formulated with reference to the European Union and Poland’s external obligations. Second, when there was a migration crisis.  

It is not that our answers have become obsolete; we are looking in the wrong direction.

A migration crisis is, first of all, the image of chaos: pictures of people storming the borders, stories of migrants behaving in uncivilised ways, and images circulating in the media, amplified by politicians, clickbait headlines, and retweetable slogans. What kind of anxiety does such a mediatic and political context produce? It may be articulated as a fear of the Other, but more fundamentally, is it not about something we are all afraid of – the spectre of anomy and insecurity?  

Arguably, much of this perception is stateproduced: asylum seekers cross borders illegally because the state itself is actively depriving them of other possibilities. The perceived anomy is enhanced by the media and compounded by whatever sources of insecurity are already in place, including social and economic precarity (jobs and housing, for instance) and other causes of collective anxiety. This, however, does not make the problem less real. There are genuine racists in town, to be sure, but they are not a swing constituency. Framing any reluctance to accept migrants or refugees as caused by racism can only strengthen the far right. You cannot educate people out of their fundamental emotional needs. And there is a universal human need for order, as much as there is a universal need for liberty.  

Hence, the second pillar of the far right’s affective economy is the fear of anomy. If we want a decent and humane migration policy, we have to address that. Our second question, thus, reads: how can we articulate the need for order and security without compromising the values of hospitality and openness?  

Of dignity and identity  

“I would not expect to hear anything interesting from a middle-aged man, and yet here you are,” a friend said to a colleague with whom she had just finished a research project. An innocent joke, by any account. No offence taken and none intended. The male friend does not even remember the situation (I asked him the other day). And yet, what can and what cannot pass as an innocent joke is always revealing of broader social structures. We cannot start learning from the far right until we examine closely the way they respond to and remake current discourses of gender and, of course, nation.  

Far-right milieus define themselves as defenders of the nation. Both their membership and their voters tend to be predominantly male, and among young men, they are often the group with the greatest appeal. Far-right leaders and politicians, both men and women, tend to speak in favour of traditional family values and gender arrangements. This seems to justify the mainstream perception of the far right as nothing more than a backlash, both against European cosmopolitanism and women’s emancipation; an embodiment of chauvinism and toxic masculinity. Leaving aside the valueladen terminology, this account is largely consistent with the far right’s self-understanding.  

But there is more to the picture. In order to understand far-right notions of gender and nation, we should look at how these two dimensions are represented in the mainstream. Statements such as “Poles have not grown up with democracy” or “Hungarians are a racist society” reveal that the supposedly cosmopolitan liberal centre is not free from explaining the world in terms of nations and their qualities. Interestingly, this is the same framework evoked by the far right when they speak of asylum seekers from the Middle East as being fundamentally incapable of civilised conduct (“Muslims/Arabs are so-and-so, that is why we can’t let them in”). Both sides paradoxically agree that certain ethnic or national identities are somehow not worthy of respect. The far-right backlash is thus not just resistance to cosmopolitanism or Europeanisation; it is also a reaction to the perception of being construed as a “despised identity”.  

And what about gender? How does the mainstream relate to the perceived affinity between masculinity and far-right politics? “For the sake of democracy, men could vote a few years later and women earlier,” suggested a left-wing sociologist interviewed by a liberal newspaper shortly before the 2023 Polish elections. Raising the voting age for the male population would disenfranchise young men, perceived as the crucial constituency for the far right. A similar proposition to “save” democracy from the “male, testosterone-driven, nationalist political project” was put forward by another liberal public intellectual in 2019: “I have a simple idea to suspend men’s voting rights for three terms […]. They would not be able to vote, but they could be elected.” (She has repeated this idea several times since.)  

Once again, this position resonates with how the far right speaks of migrants. It argues that, contrary to the claims of humanitarian NGOs, the bulk of asylum seekers are not families with children, but “young men”, not really deserving empathy. What both sides have in common is the cultural framework in which men, and especially “young men”, are somehow not worthy of respect. Here, again, the far-right reaction is not merely resistance to the advent of gender equality but also a backlash against what it perceives as being viewed as a “despised identity”, and consequently a defence of one’s own worth by passing the disrespect on to others.  

The politics of recognition has become a zero-sum game, where respect given to some people must be taken away from others. Passing the disrespect on to other individuals or groups is one possible answer to the experience of being disregarded. But can we imagine a different kind of redistribution of dignity?  

We must learn to unlearn  

In all three cases above, there is a tacit accord between the far right and the political centre, and mainstream perceptions of the far right echo the far right’s self-understanding. This situation leaves us with only two ways of dealing with the far right: either keeping it out of the game (cordon sanitaire) or adopting parts of its agenda in a doomed effort at containment. As a result, the far right can be kept out of the centre (for a time), but this does not prevent the centre from drifting further and further to the right. A dubious victory, if any.  

But there is another path, and it begins with unlearning. The first task is to unlearn what we take for granted about the nature of the far right’s appeal. Then we need to unlearn the received wisdom about how to deal with the far right. And finally, we must unlearn much of what we know about the problems and social grievances of our times: it is not that our answers have become obsolete; we are looking in the wrong direction.  

Once we have done this, we can learn that protests against the European Green Deal do not have to mean a rejection of ecology, but could represent a resistance to over-regulation. That reluctance to irregular migration should not be interpreted merely as a hatred of the Other when it can be seen as fear of anomy. And lastly, that affirming masculinity and patriotism is not only a backlash, but also a call for a redistribution of dignity.  

The forward march of the far right can be stopped. But we can only achieve that feat if, instead of rejecting or parroting its answers, we start on an earnest quest for some solutions of our own.