It’s been reported that in the German elections, a far right party has made ‘significant gains’.
In the UK (at least before the scandals) Reform UK seems to have had a significant boost and has even surpassed the right-wing Conservative Party in some polls/predictions.
Even France, one or two years ago, was threatened with a far-right government due to the French far right party gaining a lot of support.
It feels like in the last few years, the far-right has exceeded itself and had a surge in popularity. Is this the case? And if so, wtf is fuelling it?
I think it’s a combination of stupid people, misinformation, disinformation, and social media
“US tech giants allying with European far-right to strip back EU rules”, Jan 14 2026
Of what use, then, are the American Communists?
They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.
Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.
–Robert A. Heinlein, Take Bank Your Government
Replace “communism” with far-right ideology, and that’s it. People, humanity in general, are fairly agreeable and cooperative, when they are getting along even tolerably well. It’s only when conditions on the ground become intolerable that you see extreme political movements take hold, either left or right, because the established political order has demonstrated that it is either unwilling or unable to provide for the people’s needs.
If more people were able to afford education, medicine, housing, and had the financial breathing room to take the occasional vacation and provide for their and their children’s future, you wouldn’t see extremism. You’d see people happy that things were working out okay. It’s because we’ve allowed economic inequality and environmental chaos to become so widespread that people have become desperate enough to look to anyone who is at least saying they’ll make real changes to fix what’s wrong with the world.
The capitalist system always needs a scapegoat to unify a divided society. That marginalized role has traditionally been filled by immigrants, psychiatric patients, drug users, queer people, and the like… Furthermore, these days, social subsumption by capital has been intensified, which implies that hate toward these people is fueled by some systemic actors, such as the far-right. Some people in this situation adhere to this discourse out of the need for social cohesion and fear.
Russian psyops, companies being bothered by regulation jumping at the opportunity, the same companies optimizing for rage bait, people being fed up with broken promises by “liberal” parties, the world getting more unstable.
Economic issues stemming from Covid. Hatred of minorities fueled by misinformation
Can’t discount the capture of institutions, consolidation of media, and trans-border collaboration. There’s also overt and covert acts of war against liberal democracies by far right governments. We’re due for another oopsies in Europe real soon.
Fear is the fuel.
Scared people are selfish, and selfishness is the only common denominator in all right wing politics. They don’t have great visions of how to run a society. All they want is to stop someone else from having “their” piece of the imaginary pie.
It takes a lot more positive outlook to have the trust to build a society where people take care of someone they don’t know directly.
The west has been in the imperialist stage of capitalism for a bit more than a century. As was described back then, this is a parasitic, moribund stage of capitalism. It’s parasitic in an obvious way, but what’s most interesting is the moribund factor. Imperialism essentially becomes the dominant factor in a capitalist economy once it fully saturates the national economy, when monopoly bank and industrial capital begin consolidating into finance capital, and when these groups must expand outward, not just can.
The reason this is moribund is because it hollows out industrialization, seeking cheaper labor in the global south. It also seeks more specualtive than real returns, and sharpens the divide between rich and poor. What’s happening now is a sharp rightward turn in response to this system breaking down as the global south develops and gains independence from neocolonialism, giving them agency in how the world is run and tools at their disposal not purely linked to the west.
It’s the protracted death of imperialism that is forcing many people into austerity in the west, which drives reaction. Everyone trying to blame it on foreigners and propaganda are missing the point, the actual material system the west runs on is dying away as has already been predicted before by analyzing the very mechanisms of capitalism.
.ml users
Are you saying the few thousand Lemmy.ml users are the primary cause of the rise of the far-right, or communists in general? I actually can somewhat agree with the latter, as imperialism decays more people than ever are sympathetic to socialism and communism, which in turn scares capitalists that then ramp-up repressions against socialists and communists.
Lots of stuff but in general bad economic conditions and lots of propaganda to point fingers. It amazes me how badly right wing goverments want immigrants out, yet without them they wouldn’t have a fraction of the success they had. If anything, they will employ policies that make the divisions more stark and immigrants more predisposed to not being able to adapt.
It’s mostly [xeno/queer]phobic people who don’t understand politics much blindly supporting the one thing they do “understand”.
Trump, amongst a few others, made it acceptable to have shitty and selfish opinions so all the people who used to be too ashamed to admit how they feel now feel justified and it’s snowballing. The far right were always there but now they can be that openly.
Wealth concentration, information manipulation and concentration, lack of education and media literacy. We’ve slowly pulled back the taboo of being a Nazi.
That is scary
When i was growing up we used to enjoy an illuminati conspiracy theory, a bunch of incredibly powerful people behind closed doors pulling the strings of society. So ya now we have that IRL and its not even happening behind closed doors. The reason why rightwing populism is up is… the people with money who create the narrative and incentive structure of society are steering us that way. There is no meaningful opposition to Facebook and Fox News slowly rotting out society.
That’s a question for the ages for sure. I’m worried it’s going to get quite a bit worse before it gets better.
As far as I can tell, there are multiple ongoing components to what’s going on.
There is definitely some Russia-driven agitprop going on, with the apparent aim of weakening the West through division. But on its own I think it’s not a sufficient explanation, for two reasons. The same research showed that Russia is also pushing left-aligned agitprop points to increase division. And Russia was not similarly involved in the 1930’s, which nevertheless saw a somewhat similar trajectory.
But it’s still a factor either way of course.
The main force, I think, is the collapse of capitalism. That capitalism is its own self-destruction mechanism has been observed for centuries; it’s kind of one of the main takeaways from Das Kapital. With the ceaseless rise of wealth capture by the ruling classes, discontent rises correspondingly among the general population, and the beige centrist neoliberals that tend to occupy power seats in most democracies keep onboarding more and more far right talking points in an apparent effort to keep this discontent from getting an actual left wing government elected: drawing false equivalency between left and far right policies, forming coalitions with the far right to prevent even a mildly left wing party from forming a government, etc.
The latter seems particularly driven by the flow of donor money from the wealthy elites.
But it also looks like in many countries, the national media are disproportionately captured by said wealthy elite, who also increasingly push the same far right societal framing for the same core reason.
Historically speaking, this private capture of wealth and power does not stop on its own, and it goes to some pretty bad places before it gets better. It’s bleak as hell, but we can take hope, I think, from another historical observation: it always gets better, eventually.
Till then, take care of each other, y’all.
I’m not political why is far right on the rise
Bruh. Inaction/neutrality helps the oppressor. Far-right is both a distraction from inequality and a tool to promote the interests of the elite by propping them either established success stories, or (alt-right) as alternative voices of genius fighting the corruption of public sector and big governments, even though they benefitted from that more than anyone else.
That is why.
Yea it’s because a growing number of citizens are non political, and the ones that are political don’t do a good job at using their political power to help everyone. Populism rises from the forgotten corners of society.
Here in America, it was NAFTA and a long string of other projects that stripped the wealth in the dignity from the angry MAGA’s.
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