Right-wing politics

Political right refers to a part of the political spectrum. It assumes that people are different and therefore advocates or accepts a social hierarchy. Inequality is therefore seen by the political right as inevitable, natural, normal and desirable (see also: egalitarianism). A distinction must be made here between the classical right, which sees inequality as justified by succession and family tradition, and the liberal right, which sees inequality as justified only if it is the result of fair competition without the passing on of advantage to descendants. Right-wing politics can refer to both the socio-political and the economic policy level.

Norberto Bobbio uses the criterion of "equality" to differentiate not only between a political right and a political left, but also between a "centre right" and an "extreme right" on the basis of the criterion of "freedom". Right-wing currents range from conservative to right-wing populist positions within the democratic spectrum to various manifestations of anti-democratic right-wing extremism, which find their furthest extremes in movements such as fascism or national socialism.

Even if these currents are sometimes far removed from each other, they are all united by the rejection of an actively emancipatory change of society by political means, as is sought by the various currents of the left spectrum. Political rights do not want to fundamentally change the traditional social order and its values and norms (conservative rights), to return to a previous state (reactionary rights) or to fundamentally renew it (revolutionary rights).

Although the division of political poles into right and left is increasingly controversial in view of the complexity of modern demands in socio-political practice, both at the level of the nation-state domestic policy and even more so at the international level, a corresponding classification continues to be common in everyday language use and is also widespread in the public sphere, for example in the mass media. It serves, for example, both to determine one's own ideological position and to identify individuals, political groups and parties, as well as to distinguish them from political opponents.

Historical derivation

Originally, the term political right (and its counterpart, the left) referred to the parliamentary seating arrangement during the so-called July Monarchy in France after the July Revolution of 1830. While the left embodied the oppositional forces, the democrats often tending towards traditional liberalism up to the early socialists, the right stood for the preservation of the status quo and for the monarchy, in the sense of an aristocracy, with a tendency towards absolutism.

Even later and still today, the seating arrangements of many democratic parliaments, such as those of the German Bundestag or the Austrian National Council, are based on this tradition, so that (from the point of view of the Presidium) usually the parliamentary groups of more right-wing parties sit further to the right and those of more left-wing parties further to the left.

European rights of the present

In Europe, there are various right-wing parties in the states, which are outlined below.

In the European Union, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 strengthened the role of the Parliament and the European parties. National parties joined together at EU level to form parliamentary groups and European political parties, see there. Besides left and right (and of course centre/"centrists"), the attitude towards European integration plays a determining role.

Party landscape in Germany

Within the democratic spectrum, the term "right-wing" is today usually equated with "bourgeois" and used for the corresponding parties (in Germany mainly CDU/CSU and to some extent FDP) in order to distinguish them from the "left". As a proper name, it is rather uncommon among democrats, since right-wing is often equated or at least associated with the phenomenon of right-wing extremism, especially in the German-speaking public, and thus has negative connotations. Therefore, most representatives of democratic conservatism distance themselves from it in order to free themselves from the stigma of a "right-wing" image. Instead, like many social democrats, they claim the position of the political centre. Franz Josef Strauß, on the other hand, deliberately occupied the right-wing fringe of the democratic spectrum as well, stressing that there should be no democratically legitimate party to the right of the CSU. This strategy was successful insofar as competitors of the Union on the right flank of the political spectrum, such as the "Deutsche Partei", the "Deutsche Reichspartei" or the "Gesamtdeutscher Block/Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten" (GB/BHE), lost much of their importance from the late 1950s onwards, dropped out of the Bundestag and at best continued to exist as splinter parties. Gerhard Löwenthal, German journalist and Holocaust survivor, also described himself as a "right-wing democrat". In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the party Die Republikaner (The Republicans), founded by former CSU members, which sees itself as right-wing conservative, succeeded several times in entering state parliaments.

In addition, there are a large number of radical right-wing and extreme right-wing parties, some of which are monitored by the constitutional protection authorities because of their anti-constitutional tendencies. The NPD is considered the largest right-wing extremist party. The "Socialist Reich Party" as an openly National Socialist organization was already banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952.

In 2008, party researcher Peter Lösche considered a future establishment of a party to the right of the CDU at the federal level possible, which came true with the "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) founded in 2013. While it narrowly missed entering the German Bundestag in the 2013 federal election with a share of 4.7% of the vote, it succeeded in entering the EU Parliament in the 2014 European election, just as it has been able to overcome the threshold in all state elections since then and enter the parliaments as a parliamentary party. In the 2017 federal election, it was the third-strongest force in the Bundestag with a share of 12.6% of the vote.

Parties that have emerged from the Corona protest movement since 2020, such as the Basisdemokratische Partei Deutschland or WiR2020, are sometimes seen as "not clearly locatable" in the party spectrum.

Party landscape in Austria

In the Austrian National Council, the moderate right is represented by the bourgeois-conservative People's Party ÖVP. To its right are the right-wing populist-national conservative-German nationalist FPÖ and the BZÖ, which emerged from it. While the FPÖ came third in the 2013 National Council election, the BZÖ failed to re-enter the National Council. In contrast to German parties, they also describe themselves as "right of centre". Team Stronach was also assigned to the right-wing spectrum due to its economic liberal and Eurosceptic positions, but described itself as "neither right nor left". Liberal positions, similar to the German FDP, are represented by the Neos.

Party landscape in Switzerland

In German-speaking Switzerland, too - for the same reasons as in Germany - the term right-wing is generally not used for the democratic parties and instead they are referred to as bourgeois. Among others, the Freisinnig-Demokratische Partei (FDP), the Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei (CVP) and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) describe themselves as bourgeois. In contrast to the moderate center parties FDP and CVP, which are usually not titled as right-wing, the conservative SVP is often labeled as right-wing by outsiders. Within the SVP, however, this classification is avoided. In its self-representation, the SVP sometimes uses the term "bourgeois" to distinguish itself not only from the left-wing parties, but also from the CVP and the FDP.

The smallest party, the Party of Nationally Oriented Swiss (PNOS), which is not represented in parliament, is classified as right-wing extremist.

Party landscape in the Netherlands

Originally, in the Netherlands, the three traditional Christian parties were called right-wing and the non-Christian (mostly liberal) parties left-wing. Approximately since the pacificatie of 1917 this kind of opposition has been overcome.

Christian and conservative parties

Of the three traditional Christian parties, the Catholic party was anchored in the political center insofar as it integrated both poor and rich Catholics and was moderate in economic policy. The same was true of the Calvinist Anti-Revolutionaire Partij, while the likewise Calvinist Christelijk Historische Unie appealed more to the upper classes. In socio-cultural terms, these parties were clearly on the right. They were the classical governing parties of the Netherlands. They merged in 1977-1980 to form the Christen-Democratisch Appèl, a party of the center right.

Since 1918 there is the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij, a particularly strict Calvinist and conservative party. Strictly Calvinist parties founded later, which merged in 2002 to form ChristenUnie, are socio-culturally right-wing, but economically and ecologically rather left-wing. These parties, together with the right-wing populists, are traditionally grouped together in Dutch political science as small right. With the exception of ChristenUnie, they have not yet been represented in any government.

Liberalism and right-wing populism

In the 1960s, the right-wing populist Boerenpartij enjoyed some success. By contrast, the right-wing, non-religious party is traditionally the conservative-liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy), which was founded in 1948. In addition to a right-of-centre wing, it also has a national-liberal or national-conservative wing. The VVD's prominent right-wingers were Hans Wiegel and Frits Bolkestein; when the latter left The Hague for Brussels in 1999, a political vacuum was created.

This vacuum was initially filled by the anti-immigration Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn, a sociology professor and publicist, was initially, from the end of 2001, the leading candidate of Leefbaar Nederland, a middle-class protest movement originally based in the centre. In February 2002, Fortuyn left Leefbaar Nederland in dispute and entered his own list in the parliamentary elections, Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF). Shortly before the elections in May he was murdered. His list made it from a standing start into the Second Chamber, where it even became the second-strongest parliamentary group (after the resurgent Christian Democrats).

After the imminent demise of the LPF, several politicians and microparties attempted to take over Pim Fortuyn's legacy. The most successful was probably Geert Wilders, a former VVD MP who has been in the Second Chamber since 2006 with his particularly Islamophobic Partij voor de Vrijheid. Temporarily successful in the polls was Rita Verdonk with Trots op Nederland, which talks more about crime than Islam. But the VVD under Mark Rutte is also trying to fill the political vacuum on its right-wing fringe.

Right-wing extremism

In 1931 Anton Mussert founded the Nationaal-Socialistische Bewegung (National Socialist Movement), which first took Italian fascism as its model, then German National Socialism. The party had some electoral success in the following years. In 1941 it became the only permitted party during the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940-1944/1945) and was banned in 1945. Before and besides the NSB, there had been other similar groupings. The first was the Verbond van Actualisten from 1923 to 1928.

After the Second World War, the Nederlandse Volks-Unie, founded in 1971, was one of the notable right-wing extremist parties in the Netherlands. However, it did not achieve any electoral success. In the Second Chamber, however, the Centrumpartij of 1980 and the splinter Centrum Democraten of the nationalist Hans Janmaat, with one seat each in the 1982 and 1989 elections and three seats in 1994. Later currents, to which the Nieuwe Nationale Partij and Nieuw Rechts of Michiel Smit belonged, came sporadically into municipal councils.

Other countries in Europe

Belgium

The Christian Democrat, Liberal, Social Democrat and Green party families in Belgium are split into a Flemish and a Walloon party respectively. Among the extreme right-wing or nationalist parties, on the other hand, both those advocating a united Belgium and the Walloon Front national are insignificant. The Vlaams Belang party (formerly Vlaams Blok), on the other hand, which advocates an independent Flanders and opposes immigration and is often classified as extreme right-wing, was able to achieve great successes and at times even rose to become the strongest party in the more prosperous northern part of the country. However, after facing competition from the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, it only managed 7.7 percent in the 2011 elections, down from nearly 12 percent in 2007.

Denmark

Many Danish parties in Denmark and Norway still bear names that date from their founding period and refer to their positioning in the historical right-left scheme of the 19th century, such as Venstre ("Left", liberal-conservative) or Radikale Venstre ("Radical Left", social-liberal). The Danish People's Party (DF) is considered a classic example of the phenomenon of right-wing populism and a political model for the Sweden Democrats. It experienced a rapid rise, and party leader Pia Kjærsgaard was able to gain considerable influence on Danish government policy between 2001 and 2011, especially in the field of immigration policy. In the last election in 2015, the Danish People's Party achieved 21% of the vote.

France

In France, the terms gauche and droite are the most common classification criteria for political positions. These date back in part to the time of the French Revolution and the domestic political disputes that followed it in the 19th century. The French Right has been divided by political scientist René Rémond into three groupings that date back to the monarchist currents of the 19th century: the bourgeois-liberal Orléanists, the national-populist Bonapartists, and the reactionary Catholic Legitimists. These three currents, he argues, are still relevant, despite the fact that almost all political parties now embrace the republican form of government. A significant break for the French right occurred after 1945, when many ideas and representatives were discredited by the Vichy regime and Charles de Gaulle was finally able to unite them in the current of Gaullism. Gaullism emphasized the importance of the French nation and tradition, but referred positively to the achievements of the Revolution, democracy, and secularism. The UMP, founded in 2002, combines Gaullist, liberal, conservative, and Christian Democratic currents. An important party to the right of the UMP is the nationalist Front National, which has existed since 1972 and is primarily committed to limiting immigration, especially for non-European migrants, but also stands for demands such as the reintroduction of the death penalty, withdrawal from international organizations and, in general, a return to "tradition and French identity". Chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen led the party from its founding until January 2011, when he handed over the presidency to his daughter Marine Le Pen. The latter pursued a strategy of opening the party towards the political centre, but without abandoning core positions, and achieved 18.5% of the vote in the 2012 presidential election. The party rejects the labels "right-wing" and "far-right" for itself, as it pursues an economic egalitarian program that tends to be attributed to the political left, and instead uses the slogan "Ni droite ni gauche - français!" ("Neither right nor left")

Italy

Historically, Italy has been characterized since 1945 by the opposition between the Christian Democratic Democrazia Cristiana and the Communist Party. In addition, the smaller parties of the historical right (Liberals and Republicans) and the center-left parties (Socialists and Social Democrats) existed, while the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano was ignored by the major parties as incapable of forming a coalition, similar to Germany. After the end of the so-called First Republic in the Tangentopoli scandal in 1993, the political landscape changed drastically: while the centre-left parties remained fragmented until the founding of the Partito Democratico in 2008, media entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi was able to appeal mainly to the old DC electorate with his party Forza Italia, also collaborating with far-right and neo-fascist parties. In 2009 the party merged with the national conservative Alleanza Nazionale, the more moderate successor to the MSI, and has since been called Popolo della Libertà. The FI and PdL present themselves as a liberal-conservative and Christian-democratic party, but critics complain that they often use right-wing populist slogans to stir up public opinion and are one-sidedly oriented towards the interests of the party's founder. The right-wing populist "Lega Nord", which was founded by Umberto Bossi in 1989, also experienced a rapid rise. It was involved with four ministers in the government of Silvio Berlusconi, who owed his office to the success of the "Lega Nord" in the 2008 election. The "Lega Nord" fights for an independent or autonomous northern Italy from Rome and the poorer southern Italy.

Sweden

In the country that was governed by left-wing or social democratic parties for the longest time in the post-war period and implemented most of their ideas, the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats have also established themselves since 2010, alongside parties of the moderate right such as the liberal-conservative Moderata Samlingspartiet, while similar phenomena have long existed in the neighbouring countries of Denmark and Norway. The central demand of the Sweden Democrats is a drastically tightened immigration policy. Party leader Jimmie Åkesson calls for significant cuts in immigration. He sees Islam as the biggest foreign threat since World War II. Among Sweden's 9.4 million inhabitants, about 14 percent are immigrants. Most come from Finland, followed by the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran and Poland.

Serbia

In Serbia, there is the far-right party Srpska Radikalna Stranka, which currently achieved 8.4% of the electoral vote in the 2016 election. It achieved a majority of votes in 2007, but remained in opposition because it could not find a coalition partner. It was founded in 1990 by Vojislav Šešelj and participated in the government from 1998-2000, forming a coalition with the Socialist Party of Serbia under Slobodan Milošević in the "Coalition of National Unity". During this legislative period they provided the Vice-President.

Hungary

The right-wing Hungarian Civic Federation (FIDESZ) has ruled with a two-thirds majority since the elections in April 2010. Party leader and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is increasingly aligning the state along national lines. A "system of national cooperation" is to replace the allegedly chaotic post-transition democracy. With a two-thirds majority, a new constitution has been enacted that places special emphasis on the importance of values such as the family, Christianity and the historic Crown of St. Stephen as the foundation of the Hungarian nation. Further to its right is the Jobbik (The Better Ones) party, which had entered parliament for the first time with 17 percent.

United Kingdom

In the European elections of June 2009, the far-right British National Party unexpectedly won its first seat in the European Parliament, where it is represented by two MEPs. More influential, however, is the more moderate UK Independence Party, which advocates leaving the European Union, limiting immigration, "traditional values," curtailing the welfare state, and a more free-market regulatory policy - it is often classified as right-wing populism. It has won up to 20% of the vote in local and European elections.

Monument for Pim Fortuyn in Rotterdam


Dutch party spectrum 2010, according to political scientist André Krouwel. In the lower right quarter, the economically right-wing and socio-politically conservative parties.