In the opening scene of the TV series Deadwood, a US Marshall in Montana is confronted by a lynch mob determined to hang his prisoner, an alleged horse thief. The lawman’s response is to fashion a makeshift gallows and hang the man himself, thereby allowing him claim that some form of official justice has been served. The scene might be a metaphor for the way in which mainstream European political parties have responded to the rise of the far right – by doing the same things the far right would have done but granting those acts a veneer of respectability.
The Deadwood scene resonates with a recent article – ‘Far-right agenda setting: How the far right influences the political mainstream’ by Daniel Saldivia Gonzatti and Teresa Völker – in the European Journal of Political Research. Its starting point is that the far right influences political policy and practice not only through participation in government (one third of all EU member state governments are now led or propped up by far right parties) but also by pushing other parties to prioritise the issues the far right deems most important, such as immigration and Islam.
Focusing on Germany, Saldivia Gonzatti and Völker analyse 500,000 articles in 6 newspapers over 26 years, finding that there has been a “discursive mainstreaming” of the far right’s “nativist, exclusionary and authoritarian worldview”. The upshot is that “the [far right] ideas are not perceived as radical or extreme anymore – they do not deviate from the norm and are not questioned by mass society but become part of everyday life”. That claim is probably overstated (many people do question these ideas), but what does seem to be clear is that mainstream political parties (centre-right and centre-left alike) have increasingly adopted the agenda set by the far right – the issues the far right wants to talk about are, more and more, the issues the other parties (and the media) tend to talk about also.
But an immediate question arises: in what way are the other parties talking about these issues? Are they agreeing with far right priorities, or are they challenging them? The article does not specify. Socialists might, for example, be talking more about immigration over recent years but only in order to contest the rising threat of the far right. After all, as Owen Jones states, “Defending the dignity of Muslims, migrants or trans people is a moral imperative for the left”.
In a subsequent newspaper interview, Saldivia Gonzatti and Völker have claimed that any mention of issues the far right prioritises works to their advantage: “Even if you’re countering it, you’re repeating it”. But can the Left afford not to talk about the very real threat that the far right (and, as we shall see, the mainstream itself) poses to oppressed people? You can’t very well fight the pandemic of Islamophobia, racism, transphobia, etc. without naming the disease. And as previous writers on this site have emphasised, Left contestation helpfully places the issues in a wider context generally shunned by the far right – such as the shortage of public housing and underfunding of public services.
Of course it is not just that everybody increasingly talks about the things the far right likes to talk about, it is that the mainstream, as Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin puts it, has been making more and more “concessions to the racist arguments of the far right”, or at least justifying its policies as responses to the pressure of the far right. The Starmer government in the UK, for example, ever more hysterically bloviates about those arriving in ‘small boats’, and implements ever more draconian restrictions on immigration, in the context of the electoral growth of Nigel Farage’s Reform and the demented xenophobia of much of the British media. Chancellor Merz in Germany says there have to be large-scale expulsions of immigrants because only then will “will the [mainstream] political parties win back trust”, and he justifies this with overtly racist rhetoric about migration and crime: “Ask your children, ask your daughters, ask your friends and acquaintances: everyone will confirm that this is a problem – at least after dark.”
In both the British and German cases this approach often, ironically, serves to boost Reform and the AfD respectively, because the far right arguments are being accepted as valid and the centrist governments’ attempts to adopt them are seen as pale imitations of the original. When French prime minister Bayrou talked earlier this year about French people feeling “submerged” by immigration, his remarks were treated, reasonably enough, by the far-right National Rally as proof that it had “won the ideological battle.”
When the EU signs deals with countries like Libya to consign migrants to slavery in North Africa rather than allow them try to reach Europe, is this not an acceptance of (and a boost to) far right claims that immigration is a problem demanding the most harsh and extreme responses? Amnesty International has shown that “The EU’s morally bankrupt migration cooperation with Libyan authorities amounts to complicity in horrific human rights violations [given] the hellish conditions faced by migrants and refugees in Libya”. Restrictive European policies have turned the Mediterranean into a graveyard for thousands of desperate people who are denied safe and legal means of travel and whom the EU (eminently respectable and mainstream) no longer even attempts to rescue when they are in distress.
The Irish government, equally respectable and mainstream, portrays its increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policies – new visa requirements for some countries; classification of more countries as ‘safe’ (treating asylum applicants from them as likely bogus); suspension of the European Agreement on the Abolition of Visas for Refugees; accelerated decision making procedures; and increased deportations – as sensible reforms and not as responses to a rising tide of protest against asylum seekers and to general anti-immigrant sentiment.
But it looks a lot like a Marshall choosing to hang the prisoner himself in order to appease the lynch mob, an impression reinforced by the Gardaí‘s pattern over recent years of “positive engagement” (a Garda spokesperson’s words) with protestors intimidating and threatening asylum seekers and their defenders throughout the country. Daniel Finn accurately describes the Garda approach as “laid back” and “indulgent”, the perhaps perverse reward for such indulgence being the far right mob turning on the Gardaí themselves in the course of violent anti-migrant riots. The Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, condemns the rioting but he himself panders to the far-right mob when he boasts about the deportation of children and their families: the far right feels it is legitimised, that it is winning, and, duly emboldened, quickens its racist charge.
But mainstream Ireland has been treating asylum seekers appallingly long before the far right became a high profile presence here. The demeaning and brutalising system of Direct Provision – deliberately designed to make Ireland an unattractive location for refugees – has been a disgrace for decades. In 2004, then Minister for Justice Michael McDowell introduced and pushed through the Citizenship Referendum, having manufactured a phony panic about foreigners coming to Ireland to allow their children claim Irish citizenship. Gavin Titley described that racist campaign (led by mainstream actors, the far right was almost non-existent at the time) as having “singled out women of colour as welfare tourists and parasites, jetting in to give birth and abuse the nation’s hospitality.” McDowell himself now pontificates about a range of issues in his weekly column for that bastion of mainstream liberalism, the Irish Times.
Neither in Ireland nor in Europe more generally can we assume that the mainstream is driven to implement exclusionary policies solely as a result of pressure from the Right. Many anti-migrant measures across Europe, not just in Ireland, long predate the electoral rise of the far right. The mainstream is, furthermore, perfectly willing and able to resist and condemn certain aspects of the far right agenda, notably those that dissent from the anti-Russian narrative being employed to legitimise a massive build-up of European military capacities.
As Harry Browne has observed, “the Far Right that is presented as a danger to Europe’s leadership class largely consists of that section of the European right that is sceptical of those [military] developments, and open to more sympathetic engagement with Russia.” For example, the xenophobia, homophobia and general bigotry of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (for which he has faced no EU sanction, though in fairness there has been condemnation) is less of a problem for Europe’s main leaders than is his engagement with Vladimir Putin. By contrast, Italian far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni is hailed by the mainstream for having abandoned her previously emollient views on Russia and transformed herself into a firmly pro-NATO war hawk, which indicates how skin deep far-right anti-war protestations can prove.
The example of Orbán highlights another hypocrisy within the European mainstream: he is heavily criticised for meeting Putin but largely escapes such criticism for hosting the war criminal Netanyahu. The European far right as a whole tends to be virulently pro-Israel, despite its movements being historically steeped in anti-Semitism – hostility to Islam is much more of an acceptable calling card now, and it is one that grants the far right much greater mainstream legitimacy as well as fruitful links with, especially, the Israeli and US Right.
However, it is important to remind ourselves that the Israeli genocide in Gaza was greenlighted and facilitated by the European mainstream, not the far right. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen did not stand shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu because of pressure from the far right, and she was reelected Commission president with the overwhelming support of the EU’s centrist parties (despite some unease her stance towards Israel generated in such quarters). It was not Reform or the AfD that prompted the British and German governments to supply weapons to Israel throughout the genocide. Closer to home, it is not the Irish far right that is causing the government to long-finger and dilute the Occupied Territories Bill, or to allow armaments destined for Israel pass through Irish airspace.
Pressure from a flourishing far right is certainly pushing Europe’s political centre to the Right on some issues, especially migration, but they are pushing an open door – the mainstream is perfectly happy (the Spanish centre-left is a partial exception) to throw migrants under a bus in order to try and ward off electoral assault from the Right, precisely because they never cared much about migrants to begin with. To return to the opening metaphor, the mainstream Marshall is happy to hang the migrant prisoner on the demand of the far right lynch mob.
But when some far right elements protest the ridiculous representation of Russia as an existential threat to the whole of Europe, the mainstream is quite willing to push back and deem such views beyond the pale – now the Marshall insists ‘law and order’ must be maintained at all costs, whatever the mob may say. In this latter instance the far right becomes what Browne terms “menacing zombies outside the realm of sensible legitimate politics”, whereas when it comes to migrants they are routinely deemed to be expressing the legitimate grievances of ordinary people. The rise of the far right is a real threat. But that threat arises in the context of a violent underlying system upheld by those who see themselves as sensible, reasonable centrists – it is they who are drowning migrants in the Mediterranean and who gave their backing to genocide in Palestine.
Despite its regressive agenda, the rise of the far right’s influence offers an important lesson for the Left – that, as Antonio Gramsci argued, what constitutes ‘common sense’ can be radically altered by political work. If the far right can render previously marginal, reactionary ideas the ‘new normal’ (which is what the article by Saldivia Gonzatti and Völker documents) then a radical Left can equally make progressive socialist ideas seem nothing more than simple good sense, though it will take a great deal of education and activism to get there (and there will be no open mainstream or media doors to push through). In the meantime, don’t expect the Marshall to come riding to our rescue.
