Catherine Fieschi

Visiting Scholar, Carnegie Europe

We know the radical right when we see it. Across countries, idioms, and organizational forms, it returns to a familiar cluster of commitments: an organic and essentialized view of the nation, a deep suspicion of pluralism, a taste for hierarchy dressed up as common sense or natural order, and a determination to redraw the boundaries of belonging so that some citizens are always less secure, less legitimate, and less equal than others.

What links a polished electoral machine, a digital grievance ecosystem, and a violent extremist fringe? The fact that they do not share a handbook, but definitely share a political direction. The radical right does not simply propose a tougher immigration policy, a more punitive criminal code, or a more culturally conservative school curriculum. It is not merely offering a policy correction within democratic life. It is advancing a different moral order. Roger Griffin’s definition of palingenetic ultranationalism, first proposed in his 1991 book The Nature of Fascism, captures something essential: The dream of national rebirth is never only rhetorical. It is a project of reconstruction in which the political community is purified, enemies are named, and equal citizenship becomes conditional. Viktor Orbán’s embrace of the so-called illiberal state was not just a constitutional preference; it was an assertion that equality and pluralism should give way to a morally and ethnically homogeneous political community. And when Donald Trump speaks of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation, he isn’t simply escalating campaign rhetoric; he is recasting membership itself in quasi-organic terms, as though the polity were a body to be cleansed rather than a civic compact to be shared.

That project can be advanced in a variety of ways: It may appear in the guise of parliamentary respectability in one place, and as online misogyny, conspiracy culture, or masculinist grievance in another. Elsewhere it can emerge as street violence, identitarian activism, or the slow legitimization of exclusionary language. These worlds need not look alike to reinforce one another. The electoral discipline of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s radical-right National Rally party, may seem far removed from the online manosphere, yet both contribute to a public culture in which equality is derided, resentment is moralized, and archaic hierarchies are rehabilitated. The radical right is dangerous precisely because it works across multiple sites at once: institutional, cultural, digital, affective.

Because it harks back to older myths of order, nation, family, and authority, the radical right is frequently described as mere nostalgia—an anachronism. But it thrives in societies marked by disintermediation, loneliness, institutional fatigue, weakened party attachment, and the algorithmic amplification of outrage. The modern world is the ideal terrain for a politics built on emotional intensity, permanent antagonism, and the corrosion of shared reality. Conspiracy theories like the so-called great replacement, or the way misogynistic subcultures translate private grievance into public anti-egalitarianism, show how seamlessly and easily the radical right moves between digital culture and formal politics.

The radical right delegitimizes institutions, making compromise look corrupt, restraint look decadent, and process look like sleights of hand. We have seen this repeatedly: in attacks on judicial independence in Hungary, in the portrayal of journalists as enemies of the people, in the routine claim that elections are only legitimate when the radical right wins them. But the institutional damage is only the first stage. Once vertical trust in institutions has been eroded, a second process begins: the corrosion of horizontal trust between citizens. The radical right teaches citizens to regard one another as enemies, contaminants, traitors, freeloaders, or strangers. It hollows out the fragile democratic assumption that we are bound together despite our difference—the resulting polarization is a feature, not a bug.

This is not only a threat to representative democracy, it is a threat to the civilizational achievements that delivered it: equal dignity, minority protection, nonarbitrary power, and pluralist coexistence. The radical right does not simply want to govern differently. It wants us to be less equal, less truthful, less free, and to live with much more fear.

In Europe, there is an additional and urgent reason to call the threat existential: the direct security challenge from Russia. At precisely the moment when European states need resilience, trust, social cohesion, and strategic capacity, the radical right weakens all four. It degrades institutions, fractures publics, normalizes admiration for authoritarian power, and in some cases echoes Kremlin narratives, creating a divided Europe less able to defend itself. That is why the radical right is a danger not only to constitutional niceties, but to democracy itself.

Cas Mudde

Distinguished Research Professor, University of Georgia

The far right constitutes the most serious threat to liberal democracy today. Sure, there are more fundamentally and openly antidemocratic ideologies and movements out there, from Islamist terrorist groups like the Islamic State to authoritarian states like Russia or North Korea. But with some notable exceptions, like the Russian threat in Ukraine, they constitute a lesser threat to most liberal democratic countries. This being said, the far-right threat is not existential everywhere and is overstated in some narratives—at the same time, the far-right threat to liberal democracies in the Americas and Europe emanating from U.S. President Donald Trump is still mostly understated.

While democratic erosion or backsliding is a complex process that plays out across different dimensions and in different ways, in most countries it comes from the right, not the left—one of the most notable exceptions, of course, is Venezuela. Not all right-wing authoritarians are far right, at least not in the way that I define it—neither Recep Tayyip Erdoğan nor Vladimir Putin are nativist at the core—but the plurality are. From India to Hungary, and from Israel to the United States, liberal democracies have been consistently attacked by far-right parties and politicians. Although some liberal democratic systems, such as Italy and the United States, still stand, this is not for a lack of trying by the far right.

From the capturing of independent media to the political pressure and replacement of the judiciary, foundational institutions of liberal democracy are being attacked and weakened by the far right in countries around the world. Obviously, the situation is not perfect in many other countries where mainstream parties are in power (think only of Greece, for example), but in most cases, it is much worse under far-right governments. Moreover, there is no far-right government that does not undermine independent institutions and minority rights. While comparison with historical fascism obscures more than it reveals, and overstates the threat, the far right is at least the most significant internal threat to liberal democratic regimes in Western Europe since then.

The far right does not represent the majority of the population in any country—not even where it has won a majority of seats or votes in elections. In fact, those cases are mostly helped by either a very disproportional electoral system, as in Hungary, or relatively low turnout, as in the United States. And, most importantly, the far right can only weaken liberal democracy because major actors within the liberal democratic establishment either collaborate or stay silent. One can see this most painfully in the United States, under Trump 2.0, but also in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime is supported by both Hungarian and German business elites, or Italy where mainstream right-wing parties back up the government of Giorgia Meloni.

Hence, the fact that the threat is existential is not just a consequence of the strength of the far right. Rather, it is a damning insight into the weakness of liberal democracy; not so much its formal institutions as the political establishment that is supposed to defend them. Therefore, to protect liberal democracy, we should be vigilant toward those seeking to weaken it and focus at least as much energy in strengthening democracy itself as in weakening the far right.