Grzegorz Piotrowski discusses far right power and its international networking and funding
~ Uri Gordon ~
The far right agenda has never been so powerful since the end of the second World War. After decades of the political centre shifting steadily to the right, ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist forces are now in open alliance with populist and conservative parties around the world, or setting the tone within them. In Israel they have taken over the country and launched a regional war following the genocide in Gaza. In the USA they remain poised to stage a coup whatever the election results, but in either case far right ascendance is far from over. Repelled for now in France, in Austria they recently became the largest parliamentary party.
To talk about far right power and its international networking and funding, we spoke to Grzegorz Piotrowski, a sociologist at the university of Gdansk and the European Solidarity Centre. The answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
While the political and business elites, and especially the right wing press in Britain, are busy spreading xenophobia and calling for tighter borders, those same elites and their attack dogs have no problem working across borders. We talk about our internationalism, but what about theirs?
I mean that’s nothing new, right? Even before World War II they were quite international. But if 15 years ago extreme right groups were deeply rooted in their local context, now they have gained very powerful allies, especially allies that have a lot of money. At the CPAC conference in Budapest you can actually see this ‘far right International’ — Tucker Carlson, Viktor Orban, Russians cannot travel that much anymore but you have people from all over the world, even European Parliament members. But then you can observe the flow of cash and there are a lot of far-right groups that are financed by Western millionaires or the Kremlin. In Poland there are a lot of Twitter accounts that everybody knows are financed by Russia, they were sponsoring the far right in in Austria and Italy, and with groups fighting against reproductive rights you can trace cash flows from Brazil.
So are ‘gender ideology’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ coming instead of open racial hatred, or just ideological covers?
I think the base layer is a kind of simulacrum of white male Christian identity, so Islamophobia or antisemitism is a big part of that but it doesn’t work out the same way in all countries. The same with homophobia, I mean in Poland and Hungary it’s quite effective but in the UK not really, but this then allows them to play the ‘crusades and conquerors’ card.
In addition to the welfare chauvinism card. But this is all about how you create the ‘other’ that doesn’t match, ethnically, culturally, to your homeland, the ‘sacred homeland’ that is supposed to contain the formative values of the nation.
Recently it was exposed that American neo-nazis had helped start a chain of ‘brown gyms’ far right training clubs in England called Active Club. Are there other cross-border connections, say with the European continent?
I know there was the English Defence League — Polish Division and then there was the Polish Defence League — English Division, that created a lot of confusion. The Football Lads Alliance try to use their networks to see who is now in the UK, etc., but these are really really marginalised groups. But in general what is helping the far right internationalise is they all moved to social media, especially now that platforms like X are weaponising ‘freedom of speech’. This was very evident with the Capitol Hill uprising, this scare that was created online translated into real action. So I don’t know how conscious people from the Trump camp actually were of how it might end up, I think they underestimated the power of social media in this case, but you could see that vast array of groups like the QAnon, the identitarians, the Proud Boys \and so on, they all met at the Capitol Hill because of this scare that was created by Trump’s acolytes online.
Let’s go back to the contrast between their ‘internationalism’ and their racism. Are leaders like Orban in Hungary or Meloni in Italy really motivated by hatred of this ‘other’ that they stoke up?
This is actually a very convenient tool to seize power, because it plays on the really low instincts of this society, and in a globalising world there are more and more people coming in. But the interesting thing is that you don’t really need to have refugees or migrants coming in to stoke xenophobia, you just create the image. People read that there are big movements of people from areas of civil war or poverty etc., and you can easily make a scarecrow out of that in order to seize power. I think this is a very cynical play. I think many leaders or at least their close supporters are not actually ideological about it, they’re just using these tropes because they think they work. And what happens after a couple of years is that you see they’re trying to use this power not for some ideological purposes but that it’s basically a kleptocracy. You see that in Hungary, most of the businesses are now owned or run by friends of Viktor Orban, in Poland every day there is a new scandal around stealing money from the state budget, if Bolsonaro were in power longer that would be obviously the case, also in Argentina. I’m pretty sure that lot of people from the immediate surroundings of the leaders are there only for the money and power. As for the leaders themselves, I don’t know to be honest, some of them might really feel they have a mission, but it’s quite often just to to seize power and whatever comes with it, usually money.
But that still causes the mainstreaming of ideas and attitudes that used to be associated only with the far right, and we’re seeing how dangerous that can be.
That’s actually something that I’ve noticed recently when I was talking to parents at my children’s school, and it’s sometimes in form of a joke or something like that, but you can see the spread of this xenophobic agenda in very ‘moderate’ terms throughout the middle class. You know, they were making jokes about lots of engineers and doctors coming on boats from North Africa to Europe, and this always comes with a small wink and so on. This is actually a ‘light’ version of what the far right is saying, and this scare about migrants and refugees is being extrapolated throughout the societies. So far I haven’t seen any tool to combat this, to highlight things like the fact that the only rise in crime that happens after refugees come is in the crimes committed by the far right against the refugees, or against people who help the refugees. This is a challenge I actually think will need to be addressed in the next couple of years both by the movement but also I think by the policymakers to start pushing the anti-fascist agenda to middle class people.
Do you think anti-fascist groups are maybe less internationally networked than the far right? Are people absorbed in local struggles?
It’s a question, how actively interested people are in what’s happening in other countries, because in some cases there are so many things going on in your home country that you don’t even have time to look around at what is happening in the region or the continent, right? I mean we had that in Poland for eight years where the Polish government was quite annoying, especially to activists, and there were a lot of protest campaigns and a lot of people in the street. But there’s so many things happening locally that people didn’t have time to look at what’s happening in Germany or beyond our eastern border because people were so busy dealing with these things on their own.
So what can you say about resisting the far-right internationally?
When you look at attempts to combat those initiatives they’re very much locally based, it is about people protecting their own communities. For example in the US, for many years anti-fascist politics was really scarce after Anti-Racist Action kind of slowed down, there was no militant anti-fascism.
Trump comes to power and you have people like Richard Spencer and others, and suddenly you have a revival of militant antifa. Nowadays, a lot of the American anti-fascist movement is community based, and it actually appeals to the communities saying that these people are a threat to our community which is diverse, migrant based, LGBT friendly or whatever other issue the far right is targeting. And I think that is actually a big power.
The second thing is that the far right is picking up on economic and social agendas that the left abandoned, protecting working families, a safer job environment, or restoring dignity by raising the minimum wage. These are leftist claims but the social democratic and liberal parties have embraced neoliberalism. I think today the mainstream parties’ language is incomprehensible to the younger generation of activists, they want to push their own agenda which is a leftist agenda and they see threats to their agenda coming from the far right, so that’s why they are becoming anti-right or even anti-fascist.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal
