The Rise of the Far-Right: From Condemnation to Understanding

The Rise of the Far-Right: From Condemnation to Understanding Peadar Kirby (bio) Two days after the riots in Dublin city centre on 23 November 2023, Fintan O'Toole published an article in The Irish Times. While the article was a heartfelt and emotional response to a terrible spectacle of anti-social violence and thuggery, it was also disturbing in two senses. The first was O'Toole's assertion, referring to those who carried out the violence, that 'These pitiful thugs are not us.' The second was his personal response to the question he raised about what could have motivated the person who attacked the children and their minders in Parnell Square that day. 'To be honest, I don't want to know', he wrote.1 The article is noteworthy in that it characterises what has long been a dominant response by the defenders of liberal values to the inexorable rise of the far-right around the world. On the one hand, there is the regular assertion that those who engage in street protests motivated by far-right tropes of–to use Irish examples–'Close the borders', 'Ireland is full', 'Irish lives matter' and 'Send them home' or indeed those who vote for far-right parties are, to use Hilary Clinton's infamous phrase, 'a basket of deplorables'. And, as Una Mullally summed up the consequences of this dominant response: Dehumanising people for acting in this way instead of understanding the social context within which this occurs isn't helpful. It's much easier to say 'scumbag' instead of asking 'Why?'2 The claim that these people are not us is dangerously Manichean, creating an in-group of good and virtuous citizens and another unruly group who really don't belong to our society at all, being all too willing to go on a destructive rampage at a moment's notice. Of course the point is that they clearly don't feel they belong to our society, and this raises urgent questions about what fuels that feeling and about the limitations of the society from which they feel so alien. Yet instead of motivating a far more critical inquiry into the stresses and strains of our liberal social model, the instinct is to circle the wagons and lament the emerging threats. End Page 105 The rise and rise of the far-right Meanwhile the parties of the far-right are on the march. The same week as the Dublin riots saw the surprise success of Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Dutch elections, more than doubling its number of seats since 2021 to become the single largest party in the Dutch parliament. The previous week saw the decisive victory of the chainsaw-wielding Javier Milei in Argentina's presidential election. Far-right parties are now in power in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia, are part of a ruling coalition in Finland, prop up and influence the government in Sweden, and are well ahead in polls in Austria and France. Polls also show that support for the far-right is growing fastest among younger voters in France, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and parts of Germany. However, the rise is not inexorable, as the results of last year's general elections in Spain and Poland showed. Combative campaigns against the far-right by the left-wing governing parties in the former and a coalition of centrist and left-wing parties in the latter saw the vote for the far-right decline. The term 'far-right' requires discussion before continuing. The term is used to describe a phenomenon that has been present in certain European countries for decades. France's National Front was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 and was achieving between 10% and 15% in national elections in the 1990s. It is estimated that far-right parties have tripled their vote in Europe since then, entering government in at least eleven countries. In some of these populist leaders like Le Pen–father and daughter–in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Jörg Haider in Austria have forced the mainstream liberal parties of left and right to act in concert to try to keep the populists out...