Just who is supporting the global rise of the hard right?
Young people are switching to right wing parties and young men in particular are embracing right wing views. Mike Phipps reports.
Half the world is going to the polls in 2024 and so far the signs are not good. Many elections are neither free nor fair – for example, Bangladesh and Russia – and in other countries, voters are shifting sharply to the right. What’s going on?
In November, a right wing bigot facing multiple criminal charges could get re-elected in the United States. If Trump’s 2016 election is anything to go by, this will bolster every authoritarian regime on the planet, with human rights abusers safe in the knowledge that their violations will not be of much interest to a US president who openly admires dictators.
In a previous article, we looked at the role of money and the media and how the pursuit by all mainstream parties of neoliberal economic models which fuel inequality have opened the way for a rising hard right populism. But who is actually voting for this? And what can be done to challenge it?
Culture wars
An interesting twitter thread from John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter at the Financial Times, recently addressed changing social attitudes. He points out that 40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020.
Of course, that outlook is not currently reflected in the UK, where only 10% of under-30s support the Conservatives. This may have a lot to do with the fact that the Tories have been in power for 14 years and young people in particular have suffered, especially in relation to housing and incomes.
Young people in the UK, argues Burn-Murdoch, have less faith in upward mobility than young people anywhere else in the developed world, and far less than their elders. This belief in the ability to get ahead is an absolutely central pillar of conservative politics – but for many younger people it now lies in tatters.
Even as late as 2015, the share of young Britons who said they “strongly dislike” the Conservative party was steady at 20%. It is now double that level. Burn-Murdoch suggests Brexit appears to have acted as a key trigger for this change.
All this looks like good news for the left and helps explain why the Tories are set to lose the next general election. It also means that to recover they will need to find ways to win back this section of the electorate that has abandoned them.
An incoming Starmer government that dithers over its lengthy to-do list and fails to make a speedy and significant change to the property market, the renting crisis, student debt, the climate emergency and a range of other issues hitting younger voters will make that job easier for the Tories.
One way for the Tory Party in opposition to recover would be to take a leaf out of the Canadian Conservatives’ book. Pierre Poilievre’s party has rapidly rejuvenated, boosting its share of the young vote to 40% off the back of ambitious house-building proposals.
But another approach would be for the Tories to double down on the culture wars they have fuelled in recent years. This might play well especially for younger men. On issues to do with identity, studies are showing an increasing gender gap opening between young men and women.
A widening gender gap among younger voters
Put simply, more young men tend to be more right wing than both young women and older people of both genders. One study found that three in ten young men think it will be harder to be a man than a woman in 20 years’ time, nearly double what the UK public overall believes.
Young men are also notably less positive than young women about the impact of feminism. Worryingly, one in five young men who have heard of him have a positive view of notorious misogynist Andrew Tate.
This gender gap in the attitudes of young people is not confined to the UK. Burn-Murdoch again: “In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.”
A recent US survey shows there was not a single issue that young men cared about significantly more than young women. One commentator noted, “As women’s political priorities have solidified, young men’s priorities have melted into mush.”
Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the far right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age. Similar divergences have opened up in Spain.
Beyond the West, the trend is even starker. This is partly due to the radicalisation of younger women around the #MeToo movement, although they are also taking more liberal views on racial injustice and immigration. But it also reflects a movement to the right – sometimes the far right – among younger men.
Argentina and Indonesia
In Argentina’s recent election, a right wing libertarian, Javier Milei, won the presidency on a platform of health care privatisation and an end to disability payments, unemployment insurance and other forms of welfare. As we have previously noted, “Any form of redistribution is labelled as state theft, according to Milei. Rather than rely on state hand-outs, poor people should be free to sell their body parts, children, and organs to wealthy people on private, unregulated exchanges to pay their rent and medical expenses.”
24-year-old Mila Zurbriggen is a former leader of Milei’s party’s youth wing, who broke with it when she saw through his pretended ‘outsider’ status and realised he was just another Establishment politician. She told Open Democracy : “My generation’s outrage is very deep. It has a profound disgust for politicians. I think Javier [Milei] has been able to channel this rejection very well. He exists because of the politicians disconnected from the reality of my generation and unaware of the damage they have done.”
That’s important in a country where young people account for more than a third of the electorate. Young male voters in particular are “attracted by his radical and anti-feminist discourse,” according to one analyst.
“There are many young people from lower middle-class families who have a ‘masculine rocker aesthetic’,” said another. Milei appeals to these groups by wearing a leather jacket to campaign meetings and having local rock music as his soundtrack. His mastery of social media and his interaction with young influencers also enhances his appeal to young voters, who reject traditional political messaging.
If this sounds shallow, it should also be borne in mind that most young Argentinians are not so much patriotic as pro-American. Some 70% say they want to emigrate. The influence of US technology and soft power has allowed Milei’s US ‘imitation-lite’ – the right to ‘bear arms’, charter schools, replacing the peso with the dollar, anti-abortion proposals – to resonate with younger voters. “His campaign aides and allies often donned MAGA hats and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and oversize cardboard US $100 bills plastered with Milei’s face were a typical sight at rallies,” reported The Nation.
Polls suggest that nearly half of voters under 29 backed Milei in the first round of the presidential election. That rose to 70% in the November run-off. His campaign slogan, “Que se vayan todos,” or “Get rid of them all,” reprised the refrain of the mass popular protests during Argentina’s huge financial and political crisis of December 2001, when Argentinians were prevented from withdrawing more than $250 a week from their bank accounts. But it also echoed Trump’s election slogan, “Drain the swamp.”
Milei’s appeal to the youth is all the more arresting as traditionally Argentina’s young voters have leaned left. Years of economic stagnation may have fuelled the shift, but social issues have also contributed. Milei raised his public profile during the pandemic, when he joined anti-confinement protests organised by young people. In Argentina, almost 45% of all workers in the informal economy are between ages 18 and 29 and working remotely simply isn’t an option, suggests journalist Lautaro Grinspan in a recent article.
Presidential elections were also held this month in Indonesia. Prabowo Subianto, “the most notorious massacre general in Indonesia”, according to journalist Allan Nairn, was declared the winner. He’s the son-in-law of former dictator Suharto and a US-trained general who was in charge of an army unit implicated in genocidal violence and discharged from the Indonesian military for the alleged abduction of democracy activists.
Subianto won with a lead among young voters, based on a strong social media presence projecting a cuddly, grandfatherly image. Indonesians under 40 easily constitute a majority of the electorate and they would have no direct experience of Subianto’s alleged military abuses from the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s estimated that 66% of 17 to 25 year olds and 60% of 26 to 33 year olds voted for Subianto. His support declines among progressively older voting cohorts. That said, Indonesia’s election did not register a significant gender gap.
One reason suggested for the support given to Subianto in Indonesia and Miliei in Argentina by young voters was that they did not remember the evil things done by the military dictatorships in these countries forty years ago and more. It’s plausible but it’s not a full explanation.
It doesn’t explain why so many younger people voted for the far right Geert Wilders in last year’s election in the Netherlands. Or why, in the 2022 French presidential runoff, Marine Le Pen won 39% of votes from people aged 18-24 and 49% of those aged 25-34. Or why, before Italy’s election in 2022, the far right Brothers of Italy was the largest party among under-35s, on 22%.
Different theories
There are several theories as to why young men especially are becoming more right wing. “The proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures,” suggests Burn-Murdoch. The far right is increasingly well funded, especially from US dark money, and has developed sophisticated social media operations in many countries.
Others note that men and women tend to think alike where there is close-knit interdependence and shared cultural production. Rising precarity and atomisation among young people undermine that. Alongside this, economic resentment is a driver of gender polarisation.
Another factor seems to be declining empathy. Growing levels of inequality as a permanent fixture of society undermine social solidarity and lead to some believing that they are simply ‘better’ than others. These views were commonplace in the 19th century but declined in the post-war years of greater equality. They are back now, encouraged by a neoliberal economic model that has been in place for over 40 years.
Racism and nationalism have also played a role in undermining human empathy. ‘Othering’ takes many forms, from anti-migrant rhetoric to all-out war. It’s visible in Israel’s brutal and murderous treatment of the population of Gaza, who are frequently referred to as ‘animals’ by senior Israeli politicians. The willingness of Western politicians to support, or express indifference to, such outrages does untold damage to the idea of a shared, common humanity.
As we noted recently, “Few mainstream politicians in the western world can bring themselves to call for an end to the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, hospitals, schools and residential blocks in Gaza. It’s a stain on any society that claims to call itself civilised. Meanwhile, those who want a universal standard to apply – universal human rights, for example – have to justify themselves in every media interview as not being supporters of terrorism.”
All eyes on France
Is the global rightward drift a foregone conclusion? Actually many of the apparent drivers are politically fixable. One recent study in France suggested that “the lack of public services in rural areas, deindustrialisation, unequal access to property and widening inequality are all issues that can be addressed by implementing adequate policies… Parties of the left should also be buoyed up by the knowledge that, in doing more for poorer people in small towns and peripheral areas, they could enlarge their future electoral base and return to power.”
Al eyes are on France’s elections to the European Parliament this year which the far right party of Le Pen is expected to win. There is widespread dissatisfaction with President Macron’s government, with many still angry about its use of a constitutional manoeuvre to pass unpopular legislation, most notably to raise the retirement age, without a vote in the National Assembly. There’s also a cost of living crisis, as elsewhere, and a relentless media focus on immigration and security, an agenda which traditionally favours the far right. Macron’s tough immigration bill passed late last year also helped legitimise Le Pen’s anti-migrant narrative.
Recent opinion polls predict Le Pen’s party will outperform Macron’s in June’s European elections, especially as these elections usually suffer from a lower turnout, which favours more extreme parties. This month a survey put the National Rally on 33% of the vote, with Macron’s Renaissance party on just 14%.
How can this be resisted, given the refusal of the political establishment to address key cost of living issues and the collapse of much of the workplace-based left? One hope is that trade unionists can play a key role in countering far right influence in working class areas, with local trade union alliances enabling activists to help set an alternative narrative.
This year, voters in over fifty countries go the polls in national elections. We can probably forget about Russia and North Korea and nobody is expecting any great surprises in India. Unrest has already broken out in Senegal following the government’s illegal postponement of this month’s elections to December.
But there will be some important ones to watch, including Romania and Slovakia in Europe, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela in Latin America and South Africa and Ghana in Africa. It will be interesting to see how far these new global trends play out in these processes.
Let’s return to Britain, where we started. Surveys in the UK currently show that people are a lot more liberal than politicians want to think. That’s good news – while it lasts. Ultimately, the conclusion is inescapable: if Labour wants to avoid the right wing backlash that has occurred elsewhere, it must deliver the goods for Generation Z and puncture the identitarian resentment that could appeal to younger male voters in the near future.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Image: Marine Le Pen. Creator: European Parliament . Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic
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