Illustration by Kaan Bağcı. Photo by Bündnis 90/Die Grünen / Flickr.

Earlier this year, a site in the German city of Dresden that had originally been designated for a refugee shelter was turned into a court room. Ironically, it now hosts a terror trial against eight members of the far-right Freital Group, who are accused of carrying out a series of bomb attacks against migrants and anti-fascists in Germany.

In recent years, the Saxon city of Freital gained notoriety for its anti-refugee mobilizations, its racist vigilance and its clandestinely coordinated right-wing militancy. Within spitting distance of the town, the Pegida movement has been mobilizing against the “Islamization of the West” every Monday for over two years now. The situation in Saxony epitomizes an ongoing surge of far-right activity not only in East Germany and the entire Republic, where over 3,500 attacks on migrants took place in 2016 alone, but all over Europe.

The Rise of the European Far Right

Across Europe, far-right parties are steadily gaining the organizational capacity and electoral support needed to take control of democratic institutions. At the same time, extreme-right militias are attempting to reclaim the streets, while New Right “intellectual” circles have been pursuing a long-term strategy of setting the cultural stage for an authoritarian transformation of European societies. These multifaceted manifestations of the shift to the right all find their moment suprême in the confluence of the economic crisis and the so-called refugee crisis.

Most anti-fascist analyses therefore draw a direct line between the outbreak of the global financial crisis and the rise of the far right. “Capitalist crisis breeds fascism,” goes the oft-repeated battle cry — especially in countries that have borne the brunt of brutal austerity measures in recent years. There is indeed little doubt that the temporal acceleration and parallel appearance of similar right-wing phenomena should be considered within its appropriate economic context. Yet in the effort to detect the root causes of the far right’s ascendance, we should avoid falling back on overly simplistic explanatory schemes.

While the crisis has undoubtedly catalyzed far-right mobilization, the growing popularity of right-wing parties and movements ultimately rests on widespread racist attitudes and petit-bourgeois anxieties about social status that have existed at all times and places. Examples like Portugal and Spain show that crisis-ridden societies do not automatically drift to the right. Some far-right actors have been more successful than others in transforming socio-economic grievances into ethnic tensions. Beyond the structural dynamics driving the authoritarian turn of capitalist democracies, we should therefore also pay close attention to the differential capacities, mobilization strategies and immediate crisis responses of the far right, which have fundamentally changed in recent years.

It goes without saying that far-right politics are not a new phenomenon. Anti-fascists from all over Europe have been struggling for years to expose, contain and subvert neo-fascist tendencies through a variety of means. The threat of a far-right resurgence long lured at the margins of the electorate, but today various far-right forces are establishing themselves in different strata of society. This is a trend that no one was really prepared for.

New Forms of Far-Right Activism

The far right was once relatively easy to detect. Most organizations and activists gravitated around one political party that unified different tendencies during election time and that acted as representative of a broader far-right field. Despite existing frictions between different currents, open conflict was usually avoided. Nowadays, by contrast, far-right activism is extremely diversified, decentralized and internally divided in terms of strategy and practices. Moreover, due to personal and political disputes, the European far right has been characterized by multiple schisms.

In recent years, stagnating popularity, inflexible hierarchies and unoriginal policy ideas caused many on the far right to look towards new forms of activism as well as the integration of ideological fragments that were once alien to the right. As a result, the modes of interaction between different players tend to oscillate between conflicting priorities. At the one end, there is the inevitable competition for scarce resources, including money, facilities, labor and adherents. At the other, there is a division of labor that obliterates differences in ideological and organizational matters. Moreover, by blurring the boundaries between (and within) different far-right organizations, the latter manage to deliberately sow confusion about the core of far-right ideology and action.

One striking example of this phenomenon is the Identitarian Bloc that emerged in France in 2012 and subsequently spread to other European countries. Their direct action approach and spectacular interventions against the symbols of Islam and the political establishment are hardly compatible with the more serious political style of the Front National. Nevertheless, as their respective discursive tendencies and personal collaborations attest, even these two organizations are in close contact with one another, and it is obvious that there is a certain degree of coordination between them.

There are other hybrid actors that act simultaneously in different arenas. Looking at Golden Dawn in Greece, for instance, we can see how quickly a tiny neo-Nazi association managed to advance to become the country’s third strongest party. Against its many opponents, Golden Dawn succeeded in integrating different forms of nationalist activism into its ranks and ultimately gaining hegemony in a heterogeneous far-right field. Beside close relationships with state institutions, especially the police and judiciary, this locally based activism provided the basis for the party’s penetration into mainstream segments of society — without abandoning its more militant adherents.

Another important notion when discussing the contemporary far right is that of “populism.” Leaning on a strong element of polarization between a “pure” native people and a corrupt establishment, right-wing populism capitalizes on the public’s deep-rooted mistrust of political elites and representative institutions. Presenting themselves as the incarnation of “the people,” far-right parties have managed to accumulate more votes and legitimacy.

However, the use of populistic elements is neither a new strategy nor a useful criterion to distinguish more dangerous right-wing actors from less dangerous ones. In fact, it is precisely where right-wing populists are in power — as in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the United States — that neo-fascist forces have been on the rise. The propensity to downplay the dangers of right-wing “populists” in the media and academia is inevitably connected with the changing relationship between the far-right and the mainstream.

The Far-Right (and the) Mainstream

It is no secret that mainstream and far-right politics are somehow connected. For a long time, the political mainstream at least drew a clear discursive line between “acceptable” forms of claims-making and far-right propaganda. Today, it is controversial to what extent such a “cordon sanitaire” ever really existed — or if it was always just a bourgeois self-legitimation myth.

Taking the Austrian coalition of the conservative ÖVP and the far-right FPÖ in the early 2000s as an example we can see that this figurative firewall between the far right and the mainstream has always been porous. More recent political constellations in Denmark, Norway and Switzerland could be invoked here as well. The power calculations of the ruling class most often outweigh moral considerations about far-right actions and ideas.

This rightward shift in mainstream politics was to a certain degree self-induced. Representatives of the political center voluntarily opened Pandora’s box with unnecessary discursive transgressions. The German social democrat Thilo Sarrazin is a case in point. In his bestselling book of 2010, Sarrazin complained about the fertility of Muslims in Germany, which he claimed lowered average intelligence levels and created a migrant underclass completely dependent on the welfare state. Back then, surveys revealed that more than 20 percent of the population would vote for a party championing his position. Today, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party reaps the fruits of this earlier taboo-breaking by representatives of the political mainstream.

Nevertheless, the far-right perspective on the political mainstream remains ambiguous. The constant maneuvering between a blatantly racist dialogue among cadres and subdued outward messaging to potential voters portends a two-fold strategy: on the one hand, far-right actors try to assume ownership over contentious issues that are broadly discussed and accepted, hence taking a dissident position to set themselves apart from the “systemic” parties of the “establishment.” On the other hand, they aspire to be accepted as a legitimate alternative to the established right-wing parties, touting for the same political support structures and longing for positive feedback from the media.