While the far right shares a racist discourse, from country to country its parties represent different factions of capital, from domestic manufacturers in Hungary to hedge funds in Britain. Beneath the rhetoric of Europe’s far right we find a web of competing economic interests.
For the past decade or so, the steady rise of far-right populism has been a defining feature of politics in Europe (and beyond). Far-right parties today have a strong parliamentary representation in most European countries and find themselves in government in Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, and Switzerland. Where they are (still) in the opposition, they shape the agenda of mainstream parties and the wider public debate.
This year, far-right populists also made substantial electoral gains in Austria, Germany, and France. In addition, this political family scored one of its best results ever in the elections for the European Parliament this June, gaining nearly a quarter of all seats. Across the Channel, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party gained over four million votes in July’s general election.
All these parties share some core features. Their identity is built around a Manichean dichotomy between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, where the former is often defined in nativist terms, exclusive of otherised groups such as immigrants or Muslims. Indeed, the “elite”, with its alleged “pro-immigration” policy, is blamed for supposedly eroding the national culture and living standards of “ordinary” (native) people.
The electoral success of such narratives has been grounded in rising economic insecurity and popular distrust in mainstream political actors. Unemployment in particular has been a driver of the “populist” vote, although we should also be wary of overstating the level of support for far-right populists among the working class or the so-called “left behind”.
When it comes to the economic agenda of this political family, however, the picture is significantly more complicated. In fact, its agenda is less cohesive than any other major party family’s. While some far-right parties, such as Vox in Spain or Chega in Portugal, display a blatant anti-welfare stance, others like the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) or the Sweden Democrats advocate for what has been called “welfare chauvinism” – supporting welfare but only for the “native” population. These parties are also split on the crucial question of state interventionism, with some like Hungary’s Fidesz espousing protectionist policies and others, like the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), advocating unbridled free market capitalism.
Additionally, on a geopolitical level, far-right parties have adopted contrasting positions on the war in Ukraine and their countries’ relationship with NATO or even the EU.
This divergence in terms of policy has an effect on the transnational cohesion of the populist far right, which is currently divided into three different groups within the European Parliament: Patriots for Europe (the third-largest political group in the current legislature), European Conservatives and Reformists, and Europe of Sovereign Nations. (By contrast, the notoriously fragmented radical left is, with some exceptions, coalesced around The Left group.) Thus, despite the widely publicised transnational networking of the far right in recent years, this rarely translates into any coordination over policymaking at the EU level.
The far right’s apparent unity is rather shallow and may in fact conceal deeper cleavages between these parties. While they converge over their anti-immigration and anti-leftist “cultural” agenda, they are separated by very different takes on the kind of economy they want for their countries. In other words, far-right parties form a political family brought together rather by what they oppose than what they propose.
To make sense of these cleavages, we need to pay closer attention to the social forces that these parties represent. This means going beyond the narrow lens of voting behaviour analysis to look at the fractions of the capitalist class that have aided – and are looking to benefit from – the rise of far-right populism.
Capital and fascism
There is a wealth of historical evidence showing a strong nexus between big business and fascist parties, particularly in Italy and Germany. While they may have initially started as political vehicles of the petty bourgeoisie, vulnerable to the economic turmoil of the interwar era, they eventually won the financial and political support of dominant sections of the business classes. For the latter, fascism presented the opportunity to simultaneously crush the mass organisations of the working class and subordinate the competing fractions of the capitalist class.
As Marxist political sociologist Nicos Poulantzas forcefully argued in his classic book Fascism and Dictatorship, it was the fraction of finance and industrial capital that, in both Italy and Germany, saw in fascism the final stage for the completion and consolidation of their hegemonic position. The economic policymaking enacted by fascist regimes went in this direction, with real wages in Nazi Germany dropping by about 25 per cent between 1933 and 1938, while corporate investment and profits rose exponentially.
The current situation presents some important similarities. It is true that the capitalist class is relatively united when it comes to securing its interests in relation to other social classes, as the austerity-centred management of the global financial crisis made abundantly clear throughout the 2010s. But decades of neoliberalism have also created “winners” and “losers” among capitalists themselves: if the former group includes transnational capital, big business, and finance capital, the latter entails domestic capital (particularly in smaller economies), small and medium enterprises, and industrial capital.
In the political arena, the “winners” have been represented more or less reliably by mainstream parties of the neoliberal centre (and, internationally, by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank). By contrast, the “left-behind” sections of the capitalist class have felt increasingly alienated from a policy framework that does not necessarily work as well for them. Hence, they have looked for alternative political vehicles to push for alternative policies that may do so. Enter the far-right populist parties.
Elites playing politics
While most political science scholarship has focused on the discourse or the voters of right-wing populist parties, critical political economists have managed to make progress in understanding the nexus between economic elites and these parties. Much of their research has dealt with former or current right-wing populist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, which have largely acted on behalf of domestic capitalist classes marginalised as a result of their countries’ integration into the international markets. Of course, researchers have not identified a linear and exclusive relationship between these actors and far-right governments because regimes can only attain and maintain power by building upon a broader social bloc, made up of different classes and class fractions with their specific interests and demands. Still, one class, and particularly one class fraction, is always dominant in such coalitions.
To take the best documented case, Viktor Orbán’s power bloc in Hungary has had to cater to a wide array of interests, ranging from the German auto industry that contributes a great deal to Hungary’s export-led economy, to Chinese capital looking to make inroads into the region. The Hungarian governing coalition also appeals to the “rustbelt” working class and rural middle class that make up the bulk of Orbán’s electorate. However, the prime beneficiaries of this bloc – in power now for a decade and a half – have been certain fractions of the Hungarian business class, particularly the banking and construction sectors, which have gained directly from Orbán’s protectionist policies (including some limited level of nationalisation).
Broadly similar patterns have been observed in Poland and Turkey – peripheral or semi-peripheral countries in the global capitalist economy – where national capitalists have felt squeezed and undermined by a neoliberal globalisation that has long favoured Western multinationals and financial institutions. As Samuel Rogers aptly puts it in his recent book, The Political Economy of Hungarian Authoritarian Populism, this is about “capitalists without the right kind of capital”, who may have wealth but not significant influence over policymaking. These emergent national bourgeoisies are following the same path from economic to political power that their counterparts in older capitalist Western societies pursued through the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries that consolidated the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
But what is true of (semi)peripheral countries may not necessarily apply to those Western societies today. We know much less about the class character of far-right populist forces in the “core” of European capitalism. That is partly due to the nonexistent or limited experience of these parties in Western European governments. In Italy, however, the right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni has been in power for more than two years, but a comprehensive analysis of its political economy and political sociology is yet to come.
The clash of domestic and global capital
Despite these empirical gaps, there is enough evidence to suggest that far-right populists in Western Europe may be acting on behalf of different cross-class coalitions than in Central and Eastern Europe. In Alt-Finance, an insightful book about the business elites that backed Brexit, Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron argue that the 2016 referendum and its aftermath reflected a deeper, internal conflict between two distinct fractions of finance capital in Britain – a country where finance capital has been more hegemonic than perhaps anywhere else in Europe.
On the one hand, “first-wave finance”, consisting of large banks, insurance companies, and pension funds, overwhelmingly backed Remain because the EU’s Single Market had largely benefitted them. On the other hand, “second-wave finance”, comprising hedge funds, private equity funds, and real estate funds, vigorously supported Brexit, outspending the other camp in donations during the referendum campaign. This “alternative” fraction of finance capital, which focuses on over-the-counter transactions and thrives on deregulation and economic instability, felt targeted by some of the financial regulations introduced by the EU in response to the 2007-8 crisis.
A closer look at the party elites and top donors of Reform UK – the main political successor of the hard-Brexit camp – indicates strong links to this fraction of finance capital (including the fossil fuel industry and especially hedge funds), which is reflected in the party’s virulent opposition to Net Zeropolicies. Thus, in contrast to the domestic capital that dominates the right-wing populist blocs in Central and Eastern Europe, the fractions of capital that seem to drive the UK counterpart are profoundly transnational, with particularly strong ties to US capital.
The class composition of the populist far right may, therefore, differ from country to country. Germany’s AfD, for instance, is led by a former Goldman Sachs banker and the owner of a construction company. In Italy, co-founder of Brothers of Italy and current Minister of Defence Guido Crosetto is the former chief lobbyist of the national arms industry (which might help explain the Meloni government’s staunch support for arming Ukraine despite the Italian right’s well-documented ties with Putin’s Russia).
Across the Alps, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) has been courting domestic big business in recent years, having promised them preference in procurement. In Switzerland, by contrast, more than half of elected representatives who belonged to the national-conservative Swiss People’s Party at the time of the 2015 federal elections that brought the party into power were directors or owners of small and medium enterprises.
Who does the far right fight for?
Mapping the heterogeneous class configurations that are leading the far-right populist surge in each country would require, for one, systematic empirical investigation of the class backgrounds of party elites. The causal link between politicians’ class and their policymaking is not just a Marxist projection but has been well documented by robust findings in more recent academic literature. Secondly, we also need to pay closer attention to political donors, who may not be as generous as in US politics, but are playing an increasingly influential role in countries such as the UK.
Most importantly, we need to better understand what economic policies far-right populists pursue in practice when they enter into government or even when they are a sizeable presence in parliament. Recent research has shown that far-right members of the previous European Parliament (2019-2024) may have some left-wing talking points but largely vote right-wing on socio-economic issues. Similarly, in France, RN MPs have consistently voted against the interests of the “ordinary people” they claim to champion, opposing rent price freezes, free school meals, and tax hikes on incomes higher than 3 million euros. Nevertheless, systematic cross-country empirical data on the legislative behaviour of right-wing populist parties is currently scarce. As the approach that focuses on electoral manifestos is still prevalent among political scientists, we need to go beyond what these parties say and pay closer attention to what they do.
Why should we care about all this, though? First and foremost, if far-right parties are in fact representing certain factions of “the elite”, then this raises big question marks over their key claim to be on the side of “the people” and against “the elite”. In reality, right-wing populist entrepreneurs appear to be an extreme illustration of the wider trend of contemporary elites trying to play down their eliteness amidst growing economic inequalities. However, in this case, we may be faced with an elite class that tries to present itself as ordinary not merely for symbolic purposes or to maintain moral legitimacy in the face of popular anger, but also to gain political capital against competing elites. As the electoral record of many far-right populist parties demonstrates, they are doing this rather effectively.
Last but not least, a materialist turn in the study of far-right populism would also help us better understand why most of these parties talk so much about “cultural issues” like immigration rather than the economy. Of course, this is not to say that far-right populists are not genuinely against immigration and minority rights as part of a reactionary worldview that sees these groups as existential threats to the “national culture”; after all, ideological motivations are not entirely reducible to material interests. But perhaps these parties purposefully maintain a low-key stance on economic issues if their agenda is aimed at furthering specific business interests in their quest for hegemonic status. Mapping those interests would also allow us to shed more light on the intra-capitalist class rivalry that has intensified in recent years, within and between different countries and regions, and which underlies some of the major political and geopolitical challenges of our age.
Vladimir Bortun is a lecturer in politics at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. His work has dealt with radical left parties, transnational politics, political elites and, more recently, the class politics of far-right populism. He is the author of the book Crisis, Austerity and Transnational Party Cooperation in Southern Europe: The Radical Left’s Lost Decade.
The article was originally published in the Green European Journal as part of its excellent special issue: Head On: Facing the Far Right.
Featured image: Picture 16 by Jack Baker (2015) CC BY-ND 2.0.