Home, identity, and populism: far-right housing politics beyond neoliberalism in Germany and the UK

This paper examines far-right policy proposals, ideological positions, and protest strategies around housing to explore how a now well-established far right across Europe may convert its electoral successes into policy platforms which reflect ethno-national agendas and which, crucially, might break with received affinities between the populist right and neoliberalism. To this end we consider two forms of engagement with the housing question on the far right. First, we chart emergent discourses in branches of Germany's AfD party on housing policy, focusing particularly on a new identitarian critique of free-market housing policies among the younger, more intellectually oriented wing of the party and its wider ideological orbit. These arguments position housing as a key responsibility of a nationally conscious state, and as a means to promote rooted forms of German family life within a “social–national” framework. In the UK context, by contrast, we examine how housing becomes an arena for nativist claims around national belonging and deservingness of social support through a study of far-right mobilisation against so-called “asylum hotels” through the summer of 2025. Here, racialised social media and press reporting, as well as a policy landscape which works through outsourcing and privatisation to drive asylum seekers and refugees to the margins of public life, reveals a paradoxical situation where the demands of the far right have already effectively been realised by a bipartisan commitment among successive governments to keep asylum seekers precariously housed and limit their access to the housing market. While the German case reveals a far right more advanced in its consideration of the role of housing in an ethno-nationalist programme, compared to a loosely-organised UK far right mobilising sporadically (but intensively) around the contradictions of privatised housing policy, both cases reveal how housing operates as a site of increasing right-wing claim-making about national identity, as well as one of material exclusions. With an eye to the internal dynamics among these far-right formations, and the way these materialise spatially, we consider how these two formations may interact in the future, before discussing how these developments may be resisted.