Who decides what is "far right"?

Rishi Sunak spent the weekend in Rome at a conference hosted by Italian populist party Fratelli d'Italia; they are often labelled "far right",but should we just accept this?

Did you have a good weekend? Yes, not so bad, thanks. Read the papers, did quite a lot of writing, went to the cinema. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was in Rome, attending the Atreju conference for European Conservatives. Held at the Castel Sant’ Angelo on the right bank of the River Tiber and named after Noah Hathaway’s character in The NeverEnding Story, the gathering is organised by the Fratelli d’Italia party which dominates the coalition government of Giorgia Meloni, and brings together members of the umbrella European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR). The ECR was founded in 2009 and proclaims its support for “individual liberty, national sovereignty, parliamentary democracy, private property, limited government, free trade, family values and the devolution of power”. Among its members are Poland’s Law and Justice, Vox from Spain and the Sweden Democrats, while global affiliates include the US Republican Party, Israel’s Likud and the Ulster Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

The Conservative Party left the ECR in 2020 when the United Kingdom left the European Union, but had been one of the driving forces behind the group being established. It was David Cameron, when still leader of the opposition, who decided that Conservative MEPs should leave the European Democrats sub-group of the European People’s Party and ally with Law and Justice and the Czech Civic Democratic Party to form a new organisation. The justification was logical enough: the EPP was and is essentially federalist and integrationist, and supported the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, neither of which appealed to mainstream Conservatives by the late 2000s. It was also an act of reassurance by Cameron to the Eurosceptics in his party who distrusted his modernisation of the Conservative brand.

Controversy surrounded the change in allegiance from the EPP to the ECR. The Conservatives, with 26 MEPs after the elections in 2009, were the largest party within the new bloc, but the ECR only had 54 MEPs and was the fifth group in the European Parliament, while the EPP emerged as the largest fraction with 265. Moreover, the Conservatives’ opponents alleged that some of their new allies were far-right extremists and fringe parties. David Miliband, then foreign secretary, did not hold back:

The Conservatives under David Cameron’s leadership have dragged themselves from Euro-scepticism to Euro-extremism. By removing the Conservatives from other mainstream centre-right parties in Europe, David Cameron has isolated his party and potentially this country when we need influence to deliver on the issues that matter for Britain today.

Mark Francois, the shadow Europe minister, countered that the ECR “will make a strong case for a centre/centre-right but non-federalist future for the EU”. Both men had a point: the Conservatives were now aligned much more closely on matters of integration with their European Parliament allies, but it was equally true that they had managed to co-exist with more federalist colleagues for the preceding 17 years.

Although the United Kingdom left the European Union in 2020 and is no longer represented in the European Parliament, the Conservatives’ switch from the EPP to the ECR has influenced its relationships with European parties more widely. The Fratelli d’Italia, Sunak’s hosts at the weekend, are relative newcomers to the forefront of politics: the party was founded in 2012 by dissidents from Silvio Berlusconi’s now-defunct Il Popolo della Libertà, and Giorgia Meloni, one of the founders, became party president in 2014. She and Sunak are said to have a warm relationship, being similar in age, though Meloni has a much longer political career behind her, having been elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2006—the same year Sunak graduated with an MBA from Stamford—and joining the government as minister of youth policies in 2008.

Sunak needs allies in Europe. French president Emmanuel Macron, only two-and-a-half years older and sharing a background in financial services, seems a natural fit, and personal relations between the two men seem good, but the UK nationally is still living down Liz Truss’s clumsy remark that “the jury’s still out” when asked last summer of Macron was “friend or foe”. There is also diplomatic fall-out from the unveiling of the AUKUS military partnership with the UK, the US and Australia, which involved the Australian government cancelling an agreement with France to build new submarines with only a few hours’ notice.

Of the other major European leaders, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is a Social Democrat whose attention is focused on his own collapsing reputation, while Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, is a socialist. Closer to home, the taoiseach of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, has criticised Sunak for cutting aid and casting doubt on the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.

All of this means that the British government has been associated, willingly or unwillingly, with populist parties of the right, some of which our domestic media has labelled “far right”. How fair is this? Most people would agree that the “far right” label is a derogatory one, to a greater degree than “far left”, so to use it is to make a value judgement on the party in question. That has implications for those who ally with it.

When we talk about the “far right” in the UK, we tend to mean two distinct but connected things; firstly, ideological positions which are extreme and often violent, but also frequently a willingness or even desire to subvert the democratic process and wield influence through other means, again, sometimes violent. We think about the National Front, or the British National Party, or Britain First, overtly racist parties which carry populism at least to the frontiers of fascism. But in this respect, the “far right” label is easy to identify in practice; we know it when we see it. More challenging, however, is creating a kind of framework of criteria against which we can judge other parties, at home or abroad.

Let is take Fratelli d’Italia. It can trace its heritage back through Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà to the Alleanza Nazionale, a conservative body founded in 1994, and thence to the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) which was formed immediately after the Second World War by former supporters of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Of course institutional lineage alone is not, I think, enough to brand a party “far right”. Positions and parties evolve over time, as does the context in which they operate: for example, both major UK parties went into the 1959 general election seemingly content that capital punishment was still, albeit in limited cases, available to judges and that homosexual acts between consenting adults were illegal (notwithstanding the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report in 1957; however, a political party espousing those positions today would be regarded by many as clearly of the “far right”.

The image of Fratelli d’Italia is not helped by the fact that several members of the Mussolini family have stood for election under its banner. Meloni herself has been explicit that her party is not fascist or extremist, telling journalists that there are no “nostalgic fascists, racists or antisemites in the Brothers of Italy DNA”. The party has called for “zero tolerance” of illegal migration, and Meloni has called herself a “woman, mother, Italian and Christian”, with “pro-family” views. That kind of language is taken, however, by the LGBT community as inherently hostile towards them and their interests and, perhaps, rights.

Here we have a complicated blend of content and presentation. I wrote in February that the language we use to discuss immigration can have a significant effect on how we approach the policy area; if we think back to Donald Trump’s campaign to become president of the United States, he was addressing the security of the US’s southern border when he said of immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” It was, self-evidently, a grotesque way to generalise about a huge group of individuals, and that kind of rhetoric does indicate “far right” tendencies at the very least. Yet it surely cannot be beyond the Pale to suggest that a country maintains rigorous checks on people coming in from a neighbouring country.

Let us look at France. In the 1980s, Jean-Marie le Pen’s Front National was widely regarded as “far right” and extremist. He advocated the isolation of those infected with HIV, accused President Jacques Chirac of being “on the payroll of Jewish organisations”, criticised the French national football team for containing too many non-white players, and, while denying being a Holocause denier, was content to say “There weren’t mass murders as it’s been said” and describe the Holocaust as a “detail”.

Last year, however, le Pen’s daughter Marine, having rebranded the party as the Rassemblement National, found herself in the final round of the presidential election, and although Emmanuel Macron was re-elected comfortably, le Pen won 41.5 per cent of the vote, the support of some 13,288,686 electors. At the legislative elections immediately afterwards, the RN seized 89 seats in the Assemblée nationale, its highest ever tally. Le Pen has certainly repudiated many of her father’s more extreme ideological stances, but the party’s policy is still that multiculturalism has failed, that there must be a moratorium on immigration and that there must be a fight against the “Islamisation” of French society. Are these “far right” policies? And is that status still applicable, appropriate or helpful when more than 40 per cent of those voting have endorsed them?

There is also the matter of whether we use “far right” as an absolute or relative term. Logically, it should be the latter, but that would mean that what we regard as “far right” would to an extent depends on the Overton window, that range of policies which is acceptable to the broad mainstream of public opinion. Maybe that is right: that would allow us to account for issues like the death penalty, support for which was unremarkably conservative 60 years ago but which now would suggest a position further towards the extreme.

Perhaps those who have a responsibility towards unbiased commentary and reportage ought to forswear the phrase “far right” altogether. It is, after all, manifestly a slur: try to imagine someone explaining their approach to life by cheerfully admitting to being on the “far right”. There are more neutral terms—”conservative”, “populist”, “nationalist”—into which we surely all accept people will read their own prejudices anyway. For comparison, look at the different ways in which “liberal” can be used, from talking about “liberal democracies” in which we all aspire to live, to the damning label of “liberal elite”, which suggests many qualities of which few are good. I think we must accept that much flexibility in tone and nuance. But there is something more judgemental, more pseudo-authoritative about “far right”, as if it is a verdict or a diagnosis rather than a simple shorthand.

Of course there is a moral argument that we should call out extremism where we find it, and that to give extremists the costume of respectability is dangerous. I understand that. There is also a certain mindset, not, I think, restricted to either side of the political divide, which will acknowledge the concept of bias but will argue that in the case of this or that figure or party or ideology you know he/she/they/it is/are extremists or “far right”. The problem is that each of us will perceive differently where this line between opinion and objective certainty lies.

I think my fundamental objection, or at least the one with which I am most comfortable at the moment, is that the application of the label “far right” precludes and proscribes debate. To describe a party or politician that way puts them in a box and tells us that we can, indeed must, treat them in a certain way. Even if we don’t argue that it puts them beyond the Pale, it is a caricature, an archetype. This, for me, is the most alarming and potentially most dangerous aspect: we stop thinking.

We have more think tanks and policy institutes and research groups than ever. We like to talk grandly of “a marketplace of ideas” and it is certainly easier than it ever has been for anyone with what they think is a valuable pensée to make it available for the world to share (Substack is, of course, a great example of this). Mainstream politics, however, does not currently reflect this flowering of intellectual diversity. WE live in an age of cramped thought, simplistic notions and an insistence that any worthwhile proposal must be reducible to a slogan or soundbite. I’ve lost track of how often I’ve argued that some issues are not being poorly explained, they are simply hard. It has a deadening effect and was in part why I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how much I resented being told what I think and why I think it.

Under these circumstances, it seems reckless beyond imagination to reduce further the need or opportunity for critical thought by placing parties or politicians or ideologies in pre-defined boxes, effectively saying “You don’t need to investigate this, here are its essential features”. That’s why I twitch nervously at the glibness of “far right”. Maybe it’s accurate, maybe it’s not. But by accepting it, each of us is abdicating a degree of intellectual responsibility. We are taking someone else’s word for something. That’s a reaction we need, of course, to get us through life in such a frantic, complex, interconnected world. But it should, surely, be something we do sparingly. Take some accountability, take some agency. Find out yourself. Rely on your own judgement. The chances of making a bad decision because you have too much information are vanishingly small. Why risk it?