Mapping the far-right rise in three of Europe’s biggest countries.
Poland
By Magdalena Środa
Contemporary civilisation, with its pace of change driven by advances (?) in communication and technology, engenders a sense of trauma for many. Too many of the “cultural constants”, broken down into binary categories such as man-woman, private-public, natural-artificial, democracy-authoritarianism, have been completely shattered. Some people enjoy these changes and want to participate in them or control them. Others, on the other hand, are frightened by them and want to put a stop to them. Hence the conservative clinging to established values such as tradition, community, religion, hierarchy, and patriarchal authority.
From Poland’s standpoint, three elements are particularly relevant. The first one is rapid secularisation. Poland has been a Catholic country for centuries; Mary was the Queen of Poland, and the Polish Pope was, and is, considered to be the one who liberated the Polish people from Soviet oppression. Indeed, as Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz lamented: “Poland will either be Catholic or nothing at all.” Many cannot come to terms with this present-day “nothingness”, which explains the fervent revival of religious values in the agendas of political parties and movements.
The second element is the emancipation of women and the identity politics associated with it. German sociologist Ulrich Beck believed that the entry of women into the labour market was the greatest revolution of the last millennium. This revolution strikes at the heart of not only the public but also the private sphere; it constitutes a breakdown of the traditional model of patriarchal power. The authoritarianism and brutality of many right-wing organisations and parties aim to remind us that power comes from God, and God was a man. Identity politics, on the other hand, which is a further iteration of emancipation and aims to reveal the plurality of the genders, strikes at the anthropological dogma: “[God] made them male and female.” The breakdown of this dualism – a fundamental reference point for the European conception of humanity – sows political panic (amongst the greatest enemies of Putin, Orbán, and Kaczyński are the notions of gender and LGBTQIA+ rights).
The third element is the fear of losing and the idea of defending a communal identity that was long cultivated in Europe and eventually took the shape of nation-states. Now they are threatened not by neighbours, but by strangers: refugees, migrants who “take our jobs”, “drain us of our wealth”, “rape our women” and, above all, “are bearers of bad news” – that our lives are fragile and that a similar fate may befall us too. If there are no strangers at our borders, one has to invent them in order to then appear as an effective defender of the homeland. The Right is thus practising – as Zygmunt Bauman claimed – a politics of securitisation.
Translation by Stephen Gamage | Voxeurop
Spain
By Rosa Martínez Rodríguez
The late rise of the far right in Spain was explained for a while by the emergence of Podemos, whose progressive discours channelled the political discontent of the anti-austerity 15-M Movement in 2011. So how did far-right Vox become the thirdlargest party in the Congress of Deputies in 2019? The answer lies in the call for an independence referendum in Catalonia, known as the procés.
The social and political mobilisation for Catalan independence led to an explosion of popular and political support in the rest of Spain for centralist nationalism, traditionally represented by the Right (as opposed to the federal or plurinational vision of the Left). Not yet represented in the Congress at the time, Vox seized the opportunity and made Spanish unity the central theme of its discourse. Today, the far right has become a relevant, mainstream political party with experience in regional government.
Now, with a socialist government in Catalonia, the political conflict pacified, and very low popular support for independence, Spain’s rightwing parties, Vox and the Partido Popular, are turning their political efforts towards migration, which until now had not been a decisive or central issue in public debate. It remains to be seen how this will work out for them, but realistically, the Partido Popular is a long way from the results it would need to govern Spain.
As of today, the Partido Popular and Vox do not have an absolute majority, and none of the Basque or Catalan parties that have gained electoral strength in response to the rise of Vox would support a government with the far right. Once again, alliances in Spain revolve around the territorial axis, going beyond the left-right divide.
Translation by Jacqueline Lamb | Voxeurop
French Femonationalism
By Charlène Calderaro
Over the last decade, the rise of the far right in France has largely been driven by the strategic use of feminist rhetorics to promote nationalist agendas – a phenomenon known as “femonationalism”.
The first key moment was the appointment of Marine Le Pen as leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN, formerly Front National) in 2011. Marine Le Pen marked a strategic shift away from the legacy of her father, the party’s founder. Her normalisation strategy for the party involved feminising its image and broadening its appeal to women. This approach quickly proved successful: since 2012, France has become one of the few countries where the gender gap in far-right electoral support has closed, with women now voting for the far right at similar rates to men.
While the RN has never explicitly claimed to be feminist, recent far-right movements have increasingly sought to appropriate feminist ideas and labels. The emergence of the far-right women-only collective Némésis in 2019 marked a new phase in this intensification of femonationalism. By identifying as “identitarian feminists” and focusing on street harassment, the collective further incorporated feminist fights into far-right agendas. A key event that fuelled this dynamic both in France and across Europe was the 2015–16 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, which received widespread media coverage emphasising the perpetrators’ migrant backgrounds.
Labelling themselves as the “Cologne generation”, young French far-right women capitalised on this racialised narrative, framing gender-based violence in the public space as linked to immigration.
