During the Trump era, America increasingly seems like a motley collection of states brought together for reasons of territorial contiguity and little else. The conservative South is ravaged by a pandemic. The liberal Northeast waits patiently for elections in November to oust a tyrant. A...
In early 2017, Europe’s far-right parliamentary bloc met in Koblenz, Germany, to plot its political future. The meeting of the bloc’s leaders — which included Marine le Pen from France, Matteo Salvini from Italy and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands — took place shortly after the...
The 2008 economic crisis hit a number of European Union countries like a storm, with widespread patterns of electoral volatility and bad news for governing parties on both the left and right of the political spectrum. A central dimension of political competition in a number of EU countries was...
In academia, we seem to have a fondness for the trope of the “wave” and “wave theory.” Samuel Huntington gave us the waves of democratization — a process of global, though asymmetrical, shift from authoritarian and oligarchic to democratic forms of government and state institutions....
Euroskepticism is often discussed, particularly in the context of the ongoing Brexit debate, as a right-wing political cause. However, the recent maneuverings of the European authoritarian right ahead of the EU parliamentary elections in May suggest an attempt by the radical right to seize the...
Belgium presents a “negative” case where the radical right has experienced a downward electoral spiral. The majority of recent research has focused on the rise of populist radical-right parties in contemporary European politics. Recent cases such as Italy (Northern League), Austria (The...
As Umberto Eco warned and as Alain de Benoist shows, fascism can return in the most unexpected of disguises. I am the author of two books about the French nouvelle droite (ND): Where Have All the Fascists Gone? and Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity. In 2014, I published...
Anti-immigration rhetoric is running rampant across the globe, and Hungary’s prime minister is holding one of the many loudspeakers in the conversation. Ahead of a parliamentary poll on April 8, tens of thousands of people attended a rally in Budapest, where Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor...
Radical nationalism has long been a state ideology in some of the countries that once comprised the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The ideology of the radical right is becoming increasingly popular across Europe. In the West, one key reason is the rapid change in the demographic picture as...
Voters can't tell the difference between the center left and the center right, and they don't want either. More than a quarter of a century ago, much of the European center left made a course change, edging away from its working-class base, accommodating itself to the globalization of capital...
