It was January 2017 and I’d just had my first brush with ‘the fash’. After hearing that a $20 million mansion in London’s affluent Belgravia was being squatted by anarchists, I’d decided to head over there with my notepad and pen. Left empty for years by its Russian oligarch owner, the five-story property was now being used to house the local homeless and host radical workshops.
But I wasn’t the only one with the idea of visiting 102 Eaton Square that day.
The crashing sound of glass shattering and a shrill alarm brought the workshop I was attending to an abrupt end. I ran to the next room to see masked men trying to break through the windows: ‘Get out, you fucking lefty scum!’ Panic set in. Children were crying and screaming. We shooed them upstairs. The more hardened anarchists used fire-extinguishers to stop the attackers getting in. After a short battle the men gave up. As one walked away, he gave a Nazi salute. I didn’t know at the time, but they were fascists who’d peeled off from a nearby English Defence League march. No-one was hurt. But we were all shaken.
It was my first (and fortunately only) encounter with violent fascists. I was shocked by their visceral hatred.
Today the ideology behind that aggression seems to be everywhere. Last summer, Britain saw racist riots break out across several towns, with fascists targeting mosques and asylum-seeker hotels. In the Spanish region of Murcia, similar scenes erupted after an attack on a pensioner sparked several nights of violence with vigilantes heeding far-right calls on social media to ‘hunt down’ North African migrants.1 At the same time, we’ve seen this ideology increasingly setting the agenda – not from the streets but from inside the corridors of power.
Of course, the rise of the far right was already well underway in 2017. Donald Trump was in the US White House, Narendra Modi was deepening authoritarian rule in India and Viktor Orbán was undermining democracy in Hungary. But in 2025, it’s no longer just a disturbing trend – it feels like a crashing wave.
As I’ve been working on this Big Story, Portugal’s far-right Chega party and Germany’s AfD made shocking gains in national elections, becoming the second-biggest political parties in their countries. Seven European Union states have far-right parties in government. Argentina, India, Israel, El Salvador and Turkey all have far-right ‘strongmen’ at the helm, while Trump is back – and crueller than ever.
We’re already seeing the damage, ranging from migrant communities terrorized by Trump’s anti-immigration raids to Muslims targeted by vicious pogroms in India. The harm which leaders peddling this politics can cause even in a short space of time is immense. During his four-year tenure, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro inflicted immeasurable and perhaps irreversible harm to the Amazon rainforest.2 Their brand of politics, by and large, rejects climate action and is in service to corporations that want to continue plundering this planet rather than save it. As such, their rise, India Hate Lab founder Raqib Hameed Naik says, should be treated as a ‘public health emergency’, making the pushback imperative to the wellbeing of our communities and even our very survival.3
The new far right
We need to know what we’re up against. The far-right reactionary movements we’re witnessing across the world have their own histories and agendas, which can make them difficult to define and box in (see ‘Definitions and Tenets’, below). But there are commonalities. All share a taste for authoritarianism (often opposing the rule of law and separation of powers), hyper- or ethno-nationalism and the rejection of minority rights. And there are new ideological threads.
First: this is now a global movement. While the far right always collaborated across borders, experts say that today’s level of coordination is unprecedented. Gatherings like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) are the most outward show of this. Between 2000 and 2024, the far right built up a network of 3,000 speakers from 1,800 different organizations who participated in 302 conferences in 35 countries.4 But it’s more than conferences. Through its foundation Fundacio Discenso, Spain’s far-right Vox party has created a network of politicians across Latin America who work to undermine progressive governments on the continent.5
Second: pro-natalist ideology is gaining traction. Led by Viktor Orbán and his former deputy Katalin Novák, who now runs the pro-natalist XY Worldwide, the movement has gained new backers – most notably tech magnate Elon Musk and Italian leader Giorgia Meloni. Musk, who reportedly has 14 biological children, has claimed that declining birth rates are the greatest threat to humanity. Driving this concern, presented as worries about population aging, are often fears rooted in the racist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory: the belief that white ‘native-born’ populations are being replaced by migration.6 But promoting baby-making is not just about incentives to populate: its proponents want to restrict abortion and contraception too. This is where the obsession with birth rates overlaps with another new enemy of the far right – ‘gender ideology’, a conspiracy that feminists and the broader LGBTQI+ movement are threatening to upend the ‘traditional and natural’ family.
Another commonality that glues together these disparate forces, from tech billionaires to world leaders, is what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor describe as ‘end times fascism’, which itself draws upon what Richard Seymour describes as ‘disaster nationalism’.7,8 Both argue that a version of fascism is emerging today, one in which far-right leaders and their allies in Silicon Valley exploit today’s crises, not to fix the future but to tighten their grip on a world they believe is already falling apart.
Last, and perhaps most terrifying, is that these ideas have become mainstream.
How did we get here?
Once confined to the fringes and barely seeing above five per cent of national vote shares, the far right has ascended to one of the defining political currents of our time. Why? And why are seemingly disparate movements popping up at the same time around the world?
Understanding this is key to the fightback.
Drawing on a popular quotation attributed to the Italian Maxist Antonio Gramsci, Alberto Toscano describes the ascension of far-right forces as a ‘morbid symptom of our age of despair’ – at the climate emergency, capitalist stagnation and the failed promise of progress.9 It’s in this crucible of disaster that monsters emerge.
Looking back at history, the far right has always fared well from crises. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests people vote further to the right after financial crashes.10 That was also the case for 1930s fascism. With the world in freefall, far-right politics tells you to look after ‘your own’.
With the world in freefall, far-right politics tells you to look after your own
We’ve had 40 years of growing global inequality, falling living standards and an erosion of community that began with the neoliberal reconstruction of capitalism in the 1970s. Today, just 1.6 per cent of the global population hoard almost half the world’s wealth.11 Governance that benefits a tiny few at the expense of the majority inevitably breeds despair and isolation, making lives harder and lacking in meaning.
The far right’s appeal in these dark times comes from offering a simple explanation for peoples’ woes that they feel they can do something about
These real crises often feel too huge and abstract to challenge. The far right’s appeal in these dark times comes from offering a simple explanation for peoples’ woes that they feel they can do something about: the decline in your living standards is the fault of [insert your favourite scapegoat here]. As Seymour says, ‘you can’t shoot the climate crisis’. Research suggests that despair is a vote winner for the far right. One study in Britain showed the more pessimistic people felt about their own lives, the more likely they were to support the far-right Reform party.12
‘In lots of countries the status quo is not working for lots of people,’ says Joe Mulhall, a lead researcher at the British -based anti-fascist organization Hope not Hate. ‘Mainstream politics has failed to meet the material needs of their lives and the far right offer extraordinarily easy and simple answers to these really complex questions.’
There is also a domino effect: once the far right begin winning somewhere it emboldens parties elsewhere. There is a ‘sense of energy and momentum’ within far-right movements that provides inspiration to others, says Mulhall, as well as practical help in terms of money, sharing tactics and iconography.
And there are the powerful enablers. As neoliberalism has created the conditions for the far right to ascend, something else has been lending a helping hand. A global network of think tanks, tech entrepreneurs, academics and big data companies, among others, form a hidden layer that has enabled the rise of the far-right figureheads we see today. This shadowy network, described as the ‘Reactionary International’, gains both in power and profit by having far-right despots in the corridors of power.13
Mainstreaming the far right
The ‘solutions’ the far right offers will do nothing to get us out of the snake pit. The pro-fossil fuel agendas of Europe’s far-right leaders, for example, will only worsen the continent’s punishing heatwaves.14 Despite railing against global elites, these parties largely embrace neoliberalism and are cosy with the billionaire class perpetuating despair. That these parties have been able to present themselves as ‘the alternative’ is only possible because of the lack of real alternatives. This is where the mainstream has a lot to answer for, says Aurelian Mondon, a researcher on reactionary politics. He argues that centrist traditional parties have ‘paved the way for the rise of the far right’.
They’ve done this by first crushing left alternatives and second, by using the far right as a ‘scarecrow’ to win over the centre ground, he explains. ‘The liberal elites are more comfortable with the far right than they are with the left… because the far right doesn’t want to really change the system. They are not a threat to the broad capitalist system.’
The left, meanwhile, with ideas rooted in tackling inequality, offers change that’s too radical for the centre. To ‘manage’ the threat from the far right, centrist parties have adopted their rhetoric and policies to win over their supposed supporters. This is framed as representing the ‘will of the people’.
But the far right is not nearly as popular as often portrayed. When the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen’s came a close second in the first round of France’s 16-candidate presidential election in 2002, he did so with the support of only one tenth of the electorate. Yet when his rival Jacques Chirac won the second round by a wide margin he claimed that to see off the future threat of the far right he had to ‘fight on their turf’ and so adopt their anti-immigration line.
This is what we’re seeing in Britain today, with the Labour government’s pledge to ramp up immigration raids in a bid to see off the threat of Reform. History shows this only legitimizes and normalizes the politics of hate and division.
The mainstreaming of the far right has also been propelled by the myth that the rise of the right in the West is down to the white working class or the ‘left-behinds’ – the communities abandoned by de-industrialization and hit hardest by neoliberal austerity policies. However, research into who votes for the far right in the US, France and Britain found that support was ‘nuanced across classes’.15 In 2016 Hilary Clinton won the low-income vote.8 At least a quarter of working-class voters in Britain and France have always backed the right or far right. Mondon argues that it’s no different today.16 But ‘if we think that it’s them who are solely or primarily responsible for the rise of the far right… we are completely missing the point’.
This narrative of the ‘left behind’ benefits figures of the far right, like Reform leader Nigel Farage, a former city banker, who claims to be a ‘champion of the voiceless’. It has given him an outsized influence to set the agenda in Britain – from Brexit to ‘small boats’— and led to the normalization of such harmful views. It also obscures both the role that the middle and upper classes have played in helping the far right get into power and the ‘elitist, racist and exclusionary politics of division’ it represents, to quote Mondon.
Definitions and Tenets
What do we mean when we talk about the far right? There is no single definition, but many can agree on key features. Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde uses the far right as an umbrella term to describe te radical right – which works within democratic systems but opposes liberal democratic values like rule of law and minority rights – and the extreme right, which rejects democracy altogether.
Here are some of the key tenets that can define the global far right today:
- Hyper- or ethno-nationalism: Believe in protecting ‘native’ culture, identity, or ethnicity of a nation, at the expense of immigrants, minorities, or multiculturalism.
- Authoritarianism: Support strong and centralized power. Oppose checks and balances, independent media and judicial oversight.
- Anti-globalism: Hostility toward supranational institutions (such as the UN, EU, IMF) and global ‘elites’, often with antisemitic undertones. This applies less to the far right in the Global South.
- Militarism, law and order: Order and punishment are seen as crucial conditions to keep society together.
- Opposition to ‘gender ideology’: A transphobic and homophobic conspiracy theory framing feminism, LGBTQI+ rights and gender equality as a coordinated attack on ‘traditional’ gender roles and the ‘natural family’.
Mounting the resistance
There is another way of doing politics that doesn’t make the poorest and most vulnerable pay for the failures of the capitalist system. That doesn’t seek scapegoats to shift blame for today’s crises. One that invests in public services, in communities, and addresses the engineered inequality that’s tearing an authoritarian hole through our democracies. That gives us a vision of a better future that we can believe in, not a binary choice between fascism heavy and fascism light.
In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s (see ‘Introducing’, page 13) success in the Democratic mayoral primaries shows that standing on a platform to improve people’s material conditions and tackle inequality – rent freezes, fare-free buses, affordable grocery stores and a wealth tax – can be a vote winner, even in the global centre of finance capital. ‘These are material concerns that can bring people, young people into a new kind of left politics which gives us opportunity and gives us hope,’ says writer and academic Kojo Koram.17
However, restricting the fight to the electoral arena won’t cut it. Putting faith in transient political parties can often lead to more disillusionment, as seen after the collapse of Greece’s radical left Syriza. History shows us that resisting the far right will require fighting on many fronts and devising solutions that can stand the test of time.
We must mobilize in defence of those at the sharp end of the far right’s policies. This is already happening with the strong community defence networks and trade unions that have mobilized in response to Trump’s anti-immigration raids (see page 32). In Argentina, working-class communities are filling the gaps left by President Javier Milei’s brutal austerity drive (see page 24). These examples of mutual aid show the world what a kinder politics rooted in the values of community and emancipation could look like.
We must mobilize in defence of those at the sharp end of the far right’s policies
On a wider level, the pushback also requires fearless and radical anti-fascist monitoring to expose the networks and ‘follow the money’. This is the work that groups like the Reactionary International Research Consortium are undertaking to expose the shadowy forces enabling the far right around the world (see page 28), and to support democratic resilience. While improving people’s material conditions is essential to ensuring the far right isn’t able to exploit conditions of despair, consortium founder David Adler argues that without efforts to dismantle its global architecture the far right will keep returning to power.18
Hope not Hate does this investigatory work in Britain, digging into political candidates of far-right parties to find information that will marginalize those propagating hateful policies.
Meanwhile art and culture – in all its forms – can have a dramatic influence on societal debates, as Mulhall notes.
A global surge
While resisting the far right locally and even nationally may seem doable, fighting it on a global scale feels daunting.
As Toscano writes, the anti-fascist international movements of the past existed in a time when hope in a socialist future was strong.9 Fast forward to today and those hopes are mere flickers of a candle stub. However, he notes, if we recognize that this far-right project exists due to a lack of political horizons and not because it genuinely enjoys huge popular support, that leaves hope for a progressive alternative.
There are glimpses of international movements emerging that embody this spirit. Launched in January this year, the Surge movement held rallies in over 30 cities around the world, bringing together anti-fascist, anti-war and climate justice movements. The roots of the climate catastrophe, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the rise of fascism are all different faces of the same crisis: a global economic and political model that prioritizes capital over life, the group says. These symptoms feed off and exacerbate each other to meet this moment, struggles must unite across causes and borders. ‘We try to really combine those forces to show the global and the interconnected nature of the problems that we face so that we can more effectively articulate against this, disrupt it, create space for alternatives,’ explains Kas, a member of the Surge’s coordination committee.
‘We also want to give direction for the movements that are to come. Because, as scary as the rise of the far right can be, there [are] also a lot of contradictions and weaknesses. The far right doesn’t have an answer at all. Building a movement that people can turn to – [one] that does have answers to the problems that are here and that will come – is already a big step [in] the fight against the far right.’
While the Surge is still finding its feet and doesn’t have all the solutions, it presents the kind of movement we need now: grassroots, internationalist, intersectional and looking at system change – not just symptoms.
What’s clear is that doing nothing is not an option. After many years, Mulhall says people are finally waking up to the threat. ‘I’m feeling lots of energy. Our meetings at Hope Not Hate are getting bigger.’ This is reflected in groups elsewhere, he says.
‘I think it’s going to be a nasty few years, but we only lose if we don't fight – and if we fight, we’ll win.’
- Violeta Santos Moura and Leonardo Benassatto, ‘Spain arrests 10…’, Reuters, 15 July 2025, a.nin.tl/Murcia
- ‘Brazilian Amazon deforestation…’, Al Jazeera, 7 January 2023, a.nin.tl/Bolsonaro
- ‘Why is the far right…’, Transnational Institute, YouTube, 30 May 2025, a.nin.tl/health
- Thomas Greven, ‘The radical right in Europe’, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, December 2024, a.nin.tl/networks
- José Luis Peñarredonda, María Teresa Ronderos et al, ‘Los aliadas de Vox…’, La Diaria Mundo, 7 August 2023, a.nin.tl/vox
- Steve Rose, ‘A deadly ideology…’, The Guardian, 8 June 2022, a.nin.tl/replacement
- Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor, ‘The rise of…’, The Guardian, 13 April 2025, a.nin.tl/EndTimesFascism
- Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, Verso, 2024
- Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism, Verso, 2023
- Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick & Christoph Trebesch, ‘Going to extremes…’, European Economic Review, September 2016, a.nin.tl/elections
- ‘Global Wealth Report’, UBS, 2025, a.nin.tl/inequality
- ‘State of Hate 2024 report,’ Hope not Hate, 2024, a.nin.tl/pessimism
- David Adler and David Broder, ‘Meet the Reactionary International’, The National, 23 April 2024, a.nin.tl/RI
- David Broder, ‘Europe’s leaders are…’, The New York Times, 14 July 2025, a.nin.tl/heatwave
- Aurelian Mondon & Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy, Verso, 2020
- Aurelien Mondon, ‘Populism, the “people” and…’, French Politics, 2015, a.nin.tl/votes
- ‘2025 Amiel & Melburn…’, YouTube, 2 July 2025, a.nin.tl/Mamdani
- ‘The decades long…’, Novara FM podcast, a.nin.tl/Adler
