Dazed and Confused? The Far Right’s Opaque Economic Policies

As the world prepares for a second Donald Trump presidency, there is a surprising uncertainty regarding what his impact on the US economy will be. In June 2024, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a letter arguing that Trump’s economic policies would be harmful, emphasizing his “fiscally irresponsible budgets” and disregard for the political and legal institutions that safeguard economic activity. Despite this, many seem optimistic following Trump’s victory, unphased by the potential consequences of protectionism and economic instability. American stocks “had their best week in a year,” pushed by bumps in the value of banking, energy, and private health firms. Investors have said they are still “wary” of what Trump may do, but not enough to stop a feeling of “euphoria” in the markets.

This problem goes deeper. Not only do experts often struggle to interpret the policies of individual far-right parties; there is no real consensus on the economic vision of the North American and European far-right as a whole. A big source of this confusion is the wild variation among their proposals.

Miles Apart

Second, different electorates pressure party leaders towards divergent policies. Trump and the Spanish Vox party have a higher number of extremely wealthy voters than other aligned parties, motivating their support of high-income tax cuts and financial deregulation. Meanwhile, Meloni, strongest with the self-employed and downwardly mobile, attempted to impose windfall taxes on bank profits. Within France, Eric Zemmour, buoyed by comparatively less economically anxious, more educated, and older voters, castigated Le Pen’s proposed “gifts without funding” and offered a more traditional neoliberal platform.

Finally, party history explains some disparities. Neo-fascist parties have been more supportive of stronger welfare systems and even nationalized industries. The Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party frequently praised the violent Metaxas dictatorship of the late 1930s for its welfare investments. Others on the far right have been more clearly capitalist, but also eclectic. Those who were more competitive in the 1980s supported privatization and state retrenchment to diminish the power of established politicians. Many have since moved away from these neoliberal proposals but still embrace conservative economic ideas.

It may be tempting to see no similarity between these parties. Yet, insofar as there exists a significant overlap in the economic profiles of their voters—import-competing small business owners and blue-collar workers alongside older and rural voters—they likely face similar electoral pressures on economic policy.

Interventionist Conservatism

One theory believes the far right is united around a more interventionist form of economic conservatism. More so than liberal conservatives, they are wary of how free markets can undermine traditional behaviors and identities. Downward pressure on wages has gradually made the male breadwinner family model harder for most to achieve. Multinational firms with cosmopolitan and urban consumer bases have embraced “woke.” Fighting against this, the radical right embraces the power of the state to shape and regulate markets.

In the 1980s, far-right parties were built around middle-class, small business-owning constituencies, meaning their interventionist conservativism fused neoliberalism at home—tax cuts, weakened unions, deregulation—with a statist push to shrink the cross-border advantages of multinationals by opposing trade liberalization and interstate policy coordination. Since the 2010s, this conservatism has evolved as far-right parties began attracting more blue-collar working-class voters who historically supported left-wing parties, creating a strategic incentive to offer more redistributive policies.

However, the far right does not copy left-wing proposals: the former remains suspicious of the welfare state, attacking its inefficiencies and bureaucrats, and the far right’s working-class voters are generally more privileged and less supportive of redistribution than others in their class. Instead, they use a “producerist” rhetoric, dividing society into “takers”—aimed upwards at political elites and multinational executives and downwards at immigrants and welfare ‘scroungers’—and “makers.” This conjures a policy of low taxes, particularly for small businesses and middle-income people, harsher conditions on social support for ‘takers’, and protectionism to protect workers and punish footloose corporations.

Instead of “supporting” or “opposing” the welfare state, the far right looks to reconfigure it.

Next, instead of “supporting” or “opposing” the welfare state, the far right looks to reconfigure it. They tend to promote family policies that “support and enhance the capacity of families to care for their dependents” as opposed to ones that provide care outside of the family, like subsidizing childcare institutions and public schooling. That is, they use the welfare state to center and strengthen the nuclear family with measures like child tax credits and family allowances, appealing to both the economic and cultural motivations of voters by reinforcing a gendered division of labor.

Additionally, on this view, the policy outcomes of far-right governments look mostly disappointing. Some Eastern European parties have implemented producerist and welfare-reconfiguring policies, but others further west often fail. For example, Meloni’s banking bill fell apart, while Le Pen has softened her opposition to Macron’s pension reforms. Why have working-class voters not abandoned them?

Finally, the interventionist conservatism label is less helpful outside of Europe. Though Trump certainly wielded state power in the economy more often than his predecessors, he repeatedly weakened the welfare state, making it harder for all citizens to access benefits, and his threats to Wall Street now seem largely empty. Maybe his approach better resembles the older 1980s far-right formula, but that is all the more puzzling given he commands a greater proportion of working-class voters than most far-right parties. This is even more problematic in the case of Javier Milei and his unambiguously libertarian agenda, which has received surprising praise from more welfare-minded European allies.

Thicker Ideologies

An alternative set of views understands far-right economics through a thicker model of their ideology. Policy-making similarities are theorized, not in terms of shared policies, but as common dispositions manifesting differently by case.

One formulation argues that the dominant disposition for far-right parties is to blur their economic positions, offering vague, sometimes even contradictory, proposals, like advocating for both spending and cost-cutting, instead of a coherent program. They care more about—and are more persuasive when discussing—sociocultural issues, like immigration, cultural change, and crime and thus prefer to contest elections on those bases. Ambiguity allows them to satisfy more extreme core supporters without alienating new voters with economic motivations. Research shows far-right parties differ more on economic policy than on other major topics; no other party grouping differs as much as they do.

Blurring has its limits. Parties eventually have to take positions if they come to power, join coalitions, or just during elections with salient economic debates. Indeed, it is not difficult to find campaigns where far-right leaders prioritize economic rhetoric and provide clear proposals. Yet, the blurring argument can be extended: when they need to make policy commitments, the far right generally makes the most politically expedient choice, often aligning closer to center-right policies to increase the chances of being included in coalitions and assuage powerful economic actors. The relative ambivalence of their supporters towards economics gives leaders space to change their positions frequently over time. Far-right parties are thus expected to be more eclectic and left-wing in opposition but veer towards liberal conservatism with power.

While persuasive, this composite blurring theory retains methodological problems. Their studies rely on manifestos, classifying economic policies as either left or right-wing, and comparing the quantity of each. This overlooks the relative salience of different proposals: the far right’s popularity is partly premised on their rejection of the mainstream conservative elites, meaning they tend to be judged by their more subversive policies. Furthermore, making such an explicit division between left and right-wing policies is problematic. As the above literature on welfare reconfiguration suggests, far-right parties regularly combine the logics of both: the question should not be how much of each they use, but rather, how they link them together.

A different strategy deduces a set of economic tendencies from more abstract principles held by the far right, which apply to all policy areas: nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. Economic nativism desires a national economy insulated from perceived foreign and “globalist” threats, whether from above or below. Economic authoritarianism enforces traditional rules and cultural norms around work, placing great significance on the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor who follow “the rules.” Economic populism blames stagnating living conditions on corrupt and immoral elites, incentivizing maximalist demands, large, easy-to-monitor policies, and the rejection of critical experts.

Evidence of this ideological unity is mixed. On one hand, far-right parties consistently use nativist policies and welfare conditionality: most engage in protectionism or give advantages to domestic firms and restrict protections for foreigners. Similarly, a study of Italian municipal governments from 1998-2020 found that populist mayors were associated with less debt repayment, more public contracts overrunning their budgets, and more forced turnover among top bureaucrats.

Measures of economic authoritarianism, however, are less emphatic. Many far-right parties do not translate their rhetoric about deserving recipients into real support. And, though most share populist tendencies, there is a similarly large variation here: many eschew populist policies when in power. More generally, both ideology-based arguments are weakened by their attempts to make general ideological axioms specific to economics, instead of asking how these economic dispositions interact with the far right’s wider political project. Many far-right parties explicitly state that they hope to use policy to change the character of their states; economic policy must be understood relationally, as one tool in this effort.

The Far-Right Project

The economics of the far-right project can be seen from two perspectives: those of supporters and elites. Regarding supporters, Phillip Rathgeb argues that far-right economics is oriented around demands to protect the status of current and retired labor market insiders; that is, stable, full-time employees in traditional industries with generous pensions and access to public services.

Rathgeb’s account unites the above views. Growing working-class support is not seen as a solely economic phenomenon: culture and economics are linked for voters who express their frustrations as “status anxiety,” a worry about both their diminishing prospects and social position. Workers who worry about facing newly precarious job markets trust retraining and education schemes less than the guarantee offered by the far right that their industries will grow. This form of economic security protects more old-fashioned family and work dynamics, where men of the majority ethnicity support their families on one income and wield social power, as their wives remain homemakers.

Towards these goals, Rathgeb argues that in Continental Europe—countries with generous but atrophying welfare systems still built around the male breadwinner model—the far right prioritizes expanded welfare spending and protections exclusively for insiders at the expense of immigrants and other, even native, outsiders. Northern European countries, like France, also have strong welfare systems, but more women work traditional jobs, making gendered social investment less attractive for the far right who move towards more aggressive forms of racialized welfare chauvinism. Contrastingly, Eastern European states have weaker welfare systems, older populations, traditional gendered work patterns, and are more heavily reliant on foreign investments. Their far-right attempts to keep natives and capital in, so they increase investment for pro-natalist and gendered family policies, moving the costs of these to foreign firms and cultivating domestic alternatives instead of protectionism.

In the US, the story is different as there exists no significant welfare state to reconfigure alongside a historic anti-tax movement within the Republican Party. Here, voters in industries threatened by the new, globalized economy face even greater risks associated with unemployment. To protect their jobs and social status, Trump used tariffs for traditional American industries with typically masculine workforces. In theory, these would make manufacturing and import-competing businesses subject to less competition, increasing their profitability, and safeguarding the jobs and ways of life of their workers.

Far-right leaders must be understood as part of a wider illiberal project, aimed at undermining the international, economic, and cultural constraints of contemporary liberalism and rebuilding the nation-state’s unrivaled power. Some hope this will enable more radical societal transformations in the future, while those with less explicitly fascist views believe national renewal necessitates an attack on “a swollen apparatus of government, ideologically captured institutions and civilisational decline,” to quote philosopher John Gray. Far-right parties are thus clear about their desire to embed their values into the state and economy, for example, by preferencing ideologically aligned firms and organizations for state contracts, politicizing the judiciary, and closing government departments. They also look to increase the geopolitical, economic, and discretionary powers of the state. As Wendy Brown writes, their image of the state is “privatized and familialized.” It must become more competitive and stronger to defend the national family and its values.

The far right tends to seek an increase in the state and leader’s influence in the private economy, tends to use economic means to further their cultural goals and tends to take a zero-sum view of trade policy.

This suggests three further economic tendencies. First, increase the state’s and the far-right leader’s influence in the private economy (particularly with strategic firms). Trump has been outspoken about his desire to block the sale of US Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel firm; Meloni has become a fixture in financial negotiations between foreign and Italian firms, increased the use of state vetoes on corporate transactions, and augmented the state’s financial stake in domestic firms; Orban doles out preferential treatment to executives with close links to him.

Second, they use economic means to further their cultural goals. This is already clear in family policy, but it goes further. On top of lowering immigration rates, leaders use labor and welfare laws to institutionalize subordinate economic positions for migrants, like by making it harder to gain resident status. They invoke “cost-cutting” logics to challenge the funding of organizations whose cultural orientation they oppose, like educational institutions. They use taxes to disincentivize firms from hiring foreign workers or to target residents based on their race and income. Milei has used welfare state reforms to target civil society organizations, non-governmental services, and distribution networks with left-wing affiliations. Cumulatively, these policies change the state’s economic role. It is not just more interventionist; it is re-oriented along ideological lines and incentivizes participants who need access to modify their behavior accordingly.

Finally, they take a zero-sum view of trade policy. The German AfD supported abandoning the Euro, arguing that the Deutschmark would be stronger, increasing German purchasing power. Farage too was no protectionist: he argued that Brexit would allow the UK to sign more advantageous trade deals. This also means that the far right usually wants to further strengthen dominant industries, especially when in power. Orban has invested aggressively in the Hungarian automotive industry. Despite his prior harsh rhetoric towards them, Trump has garnered support from tech firms with proposals to ban foreign competitors and shrink cryptocurrency and AI oversight.

Conclusion

The far right’s economic thinking may continue to evolve. While their parties have been powerful for almost a decade now, most have come nowhere near executive power, reducing the need for clear policy commitments. Being closer to power may prompt them to think deeper and cooperate with each other more.

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Alberto Polimeni is a researcher based in London. He has an MA in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA in War Studies and Philosophy from King’s College London. His research is interested in how far-right populist parties make strategic political decisions, how they prompt systemic changes in political systems, and their emerging foreign policy ideas.

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