After the 2016 Brexit referendum, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson came to be seen as the main figureheads of a new pro-Brexit ‘silent majority’ in the UK. It is often forgotten that leaving the EU had long been a goal of many mainstream Conservative Party members, including Michael Gove and several ministers in David Cameron’s government. Cameron committed to a referendum in his 2015 manifesto, despite opposing Brexit, to paper over internal divisions over EU membership. The fact that Farage and Johnson nonetheless became the leaders of this movement is puzzling and poses a challenge to the grievance-based debate on the far right’s rise.
That debate assumes that individuals choose to support far-right parties because of grievances—either economic or cultural—that mainstream parties have not responded to. Therefore, by offering protectionist and anti-immigrant policies, the far right provides exclusive representation for a new voting group. However, in the Brexit case, both mainstream and populist Brexiteers offered voters the same policy with the same economic and cultural arguments. yet political momentum went to those with less institutional access, expertise, and, at times, realistic prescriptions. Therefore, theories on the rise of the far right must ask an additional question: How do populism and illiberalism contribute to their success? One answer argues that, beyond representing specific grievances, today’s far-right populists offer a rejection of the political and economic trends and institutions of contemporary liberal democracy—that is, liberal democracy in its neoliberal form.
What is Neoliberalism?
“Neoliberalism” is a term used to link and describe a set of distinct, yet reinforcing political and economic logics that are often—though not always—pursued as a united policy project, most influentially by the Reagan and Thatcher governments of the 1980s.
Its first feature is a greater trust in the ability of markets and private finance to efficiently allocate scarce resources compared to the state. This necessitates significantly relaxed constraints on capital and “entrepreneurial freedoms,” from trade barriers to market and labor regulations. While this implies a non-interventionist, faciliatory state under neoliberalism, in practice the state is very active insofar as they must crack down on organized labor while privatizing and commodifying public assets and utilities, like healthcare, education, and water and telecommunications infrastructure, among other things.
Secondly, neoliberalism favors an international regime of economic interdependence between states, so as to create a more coherent, integrated global market. This has spurred deeper standardization and coordination between states across new and old policy spheres to diminish drags on capital mobility, a more globally integrated production process helping firms minimize production costs, and the decentralization of global authority through powerful non-state actors, like firms, economic organizations, policy-making institutions, social movements, and NGOs.
Finally, neoliberalism possesses a normative dimension, which extends its sociological assumptions of rational individualism, personal responsibility, consumerism, and the efficiency of market mechanisms into other social domains, like welfare provision, the organization of higher education institutions, and even interpersonal relationships.
Neoliberalism is a structuring logic of our era. However, a deeper look is required to understand how these reforms have changed the dynamics of European and North American politics and the role they have played in the rise of the far right.
Politics Under Neoliberalism
Many argue that the globalization set off by the neoliberal turn helped erode the redistributive and representative capabilities of states. Exceptional levels of capital mobility make it much harder to finance redistribution and the ambitious provision of public goods. As Dani Rodrik writes, it makes an “important segment of the tax base footloose”; even threats of relocation and financial market retaliation are enough to disincentivize greater tax and regulation. Regions and countries are thus forced into a downward spiral, competing to offer the most favorable investment conditions. Neoliberalism, however, does not require a shrunken state—in rich countries, state expenditure as a percentage of GDP has consistently increased. Instead, it incentivizes spending that promises private sector gains, like public-private partnerships, even if these end up being more expensive over time; more regressive taxes and deficit spending also become more commonplace.
Neoliberalism, however, does not require a shrunken state. Instead, it incentivizes spending that promises private sector gains.
In this process, transnational firms and investors gain institutional power. Yawning inequality gives the rich greater lobbying and agenda-setting powers which they can coordinate across national and transnational spheres, from domestic and supranational parliaments to judiciaries. With greater debts, states rely more on institutions like the IMF with coercive powers, advocating further market-friendly austerity programs.
There is, however, a tendency to exaggerate this point. There are many drags on capital mobility: abandoning investments in physical projects and infrastructure as well as losing access to the large consumer markets and skilled workforces of rich countries would be extremely costly for most firms. Where they are seen as sustainable, debt and higher taxes often do not provoke investor retaliation. Welfare provision and social investments can benefit firms in the long run, by increasing productivity, skill formation, labor flexibility, and consumer demand; there is some evidence that such policies can increase foreign direct investment. Certainly, these economic pressures crowd out more radical forms of redistribution, but they can hardly explain the extent of state retrenchment that has occurred.
Another argument links these economic changes to shifts in the representative abilities of political parties. In their famous paper, Richard Katz and Peter Mair note a drift in the relationship between parties, civil society, and the state: where they used to act as “agents of civil society […] penetrating the state,” parties have increasingly become anchored in—and control access to—the state. Like cartels in oligopolistic markets, parties now collude (usually implicitly) to minimize certain policy differences, raise the barriers to entry for challenger parties, and lower the costs of electoral defeat through state subvention and easier access to private donations. Political elites are unmoored from civil society, shrinking the scope for public involvement in policy-making; regional party organizations and media are weakened, moving attention towards national politics; electoral support rests more on voter inertia than passionate mobilization. As Katz and Mair say, “There is an increased sense in which electoral democracy may be seen as a means by which the rulers control the ruled, rather than the other way around”.
Beyond factors like cheap access to mass marketing, two economic causes of cartelization are often cited. Firstly, the economic crises of the 1970s overturned the bases of post-war political competition. Amid rising inflation, growing budget deficits, and skittish bond markets, continuing to guarantee voters increased wages and public spending now seemed to risk provoking a fiscal crisis. Yet, by turning away from these older demands, mobilized memberships became a liability, prompting parties to look elsewhere for resources, “downsize voter expectations,” and “externalize” policy-making to unelected and technocratic bodies, like independent central banks and supranational institutions, or otherwise constrain themselves with constitutional or judicial restrictions. Secondly, class-based political cleavages began to shift as globalization created wedges between manufacturing working classes, often disadvantaged by import competition, and new tertiary sector urban workers with more blurred class identities. “Post-materialist values” became salient as younger generations eschewed bureaucratic unions and labor parties in favor of new social movements. New cleavages diminished the influence of old electoral groupings while opening space for new areas of political competition.
Cartelization has shrunk the scope, ambition, and representativeness of organized politics.
Cartelization has shrunk the scope, ambition, and representativeness of organized politics. While parties still rely on loyal constituencies, they now compete over a small, common pool of voters, motivating a “convergence” towards the center and diminishing bottom-up influence between elections. With overlapping electorates, parties lose their “agonistic” character. Instead of claiming to represent the interests of one social group over others, parties make universal claims about harmonizing all interests: good for business and workers, small and multinational firms, pro-growth, and environmental protection. This is referred to as “post-politics”: a situation where competition over values and ideology become secondary, political elites become managers competing over their relative efficiency and effectiveness, and opposition to the status quo is discouraged.
A hegemonic shift also occurred. Trying to understand the causes of the 1970s’ crises, many mainstream actors internalized a starkly negative view of voters and politicians, crediting their short-term outlooks with budgetary indiscipline and inflationary spirals. Many now saw voters as atomized, rational consumers, opting for whatever policies offered them the biggest and most predictable individual benefits. Even left-wing parties begrudgingly accepted that voter demands needed to be moderated: there was no alternative, and recognition of that became a marker of their realism. Distrust in voters and beliefs in anti-majoritarian conceptions of democracy further distanced elites from discovering and representing constituents’ preferences. Colin Crouch refers to the resulting system as “post-democracy”: one where “all the institutions of liberal democracy survived and functioned, but where the vital energy of the political system no longer rested within them.”
However, parties are not the only representative political institutions people can turn to. Why have unions, organized religions, social movements, and activist groups not been able to prevent this drift? Mass extra-parliamentary organizations also saw massive drops in membership due to their diminishing influence over parties, not to mention the bashing of trade unions that facilitated market reforms. Their power is less reliant on mobilizing members, and more on accessing the state by raising money, working with all parties, and persuading policy-makers: they too have cartelized.
Activist groups faced similar pressures to distance themselves from grassroots supporters. As policy-making became more insular and professionalized, opportunities to consult with governments gave social movements unprecedented access to the state. While this produced undeniable progressive victories, particularly for gender-focused policies, it spurred competition between organizations to augment their internal technical and implementation capacities, which gave them more power than mass membership could. Likewise, competition grew over access to donor money; groups thus saw their more radical beliefs as liabilities hampering their ability to deliver other forms of change.
Far-Right Support?
While these shifts are often invoked in explanations of the far right’s rise, the actual link between the two is often left ambiguous.
Some posit a supply-side explanation. While economic and cultural grievances produce new demands, implicit frustrations with neoliberal politics explain why voters prefer populist candidates over mainstream ones, even when they offer the same policies. Several studies identify falling levels of trust in political parties, parliaments, and the EU. This more structural distrust suggests a growing disbelief in political norms and processes: even mainstream politicians who do champion new demands, like radical immigration reform, may not be trusted insofar as they insist on playing by the rules. Given cartel parties rely on trust in their competence, once that diminishes, the actual content of their proposals matters less: their promises become hollow. By rejecting managerial politics and adopting an adversarial approach toward political institutions, populists become more attractive to frustrated voters.
Structural distrust suggests a growing disbelief in political norms and processes: even mainstream politicians who do champion new demands, like radical immigration reform, may not be trusted insofar as they insist on playing by the rules…By rejecting managerial politics and adopting an adversarial approach toward political institutions, populists become more attractive to frustrated voters.
This argument merges several empirical findings. Since the late 20th century, most North American and European states have had well-known far-right parties running in elections. By the mid-2010s, nativist attitudes saw no significant increase and the peak of deindustrialization had now past: therefore, the growth of these parties must be seen as a process of defection, spurred by the failures of successive mainstream parties to avoid austerity following the Great Recession and the gap between their anti-immigration rhetoric and permissive policies. However, supply-side explanations risk characterizing support for far-right parties as a simple matter of convenience, a phenomenon that could be reversed through effective policy design and delivery. This is empirically questionable: over the last decade, levels of trust have periodically increased in many countries without dampening far-right support. Even when far-right populists lost influence, as some did during the COVID-19 pandemic, they quicky reemerged amidst the typical controversies and setbacks of politics.
Other scholars offer a demand-side explanation, suggesting grievances with political institutions play the same causal role as economic and cultural ones: together they represent a rejection of “the policies and institutions of the neoliberal growth regime.” Even if this rejection is often not stated explicitly, radical institutional reforms are central to other demands. Their refusal to respect political norms and economic orthodoxies gives far-right parties a unique policy-making toolkit that mainstream parties cannot access, enabling them to fill “gap[s] in the electoral market,” through protectionism, welfare chauvinism, and law-breaching restrictions on immigration. Their appeal, then, can only be understood through a popular demand to tear up the institutions of contemporary political liberalism.
However, this begs the question of why far-right leaders in office have often not been penalized for their mixed anti-systemic records. Trump extended tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, Giorgia Meloni has developed close ties with mainstream EU leaders, and Viktor Orbán has experimented with flat taxes. Beyond his anti-EU and immigration stances, Farage has not been coy about his support for greater privatization alongside tax and spending cuts. Voters are sometimes even scared when they see the full scale of the far right’s illiberal project, as demonstrated by Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the proposals of Project 2025.
Both explanations assume an overly economistic understanding of voter motivation, reducing it to policy and strategic alignment—paradoxically, the same rational choice logic animating the “post-political” view of politics. As Katz and Mair note, mass parties used to offer supporters more than just policy advocacy: supporters gained a common identity, an informational ecosystem, and a set of networks through which they could indirectly communicate with party leaders. Populist movements provide similar solidaristic fringe benefits. Laclaudian models emphasize how the supporters of populists achieve collective identification as “the people” fighting “the elites”: they create common signifiers and vocabularies and become part of a political movement that is bigger than themselves and their vote. In some cases, they have reversed the trend of falling party membership! Likewise, they produce a sense of agency among supporters both through unmediated, two-way communications (best seen in Trump’s social media behavior, for example) and because populist parties often have more flexible and informal structures, giving grassroots organizations and online influencers, who are closer to their audiences, more agenda-setting power.
Populist and mass parties are very different forms. Mass parties were large, complex organizations that understood political conflict along well-defined class lines. Populists produce a more ambiguous unity against a less stable enemy. But they both engender the loyalty of supporters by offering them a more pronounced and conflictual role in politics and a longer time horizon by which to evaluate their leaders. They attract those with grievances by offering a form of representation that is increasingly elusive in neoliberal times.
Conclusion
Neoliberalism brought with it a dual political shift: it entrenched representative institutions into the state machinery while detaching the leaders of those institutions from the democratic will. Governments became less representative and able to provide public goods to citizens and even gained an incentive to exaggerate their powerlessness. Populists offer three rebukes to this: they offer an alternative to a discredited way of doing politics, they propose to dismantle parts of the failing system, and they provide solidaristic perks for supporters.
Neoliberalism brought with it a dual political shift: it entrenched representative institutions into the state machinery while detaching the leaders of those institutions from the democratic will.
Admittedly, this can explain the rise of both left- and right-wing populists. For this reason, political-institutional explanations cannot displace the underlying debate on economic and cultural grievances. The far-right backlash to neoliberalism thus has unique contours specific to the demographics that support it: it still favors some forms of market liberalism and harbors a deep distrust of the state, even as it hopes to liberate the state from the clutches of global institutions and globalists. It also adopts an illiberal approach, hoping to loosen checks and balances and reorient the state away from the value-neutral ideals of liberalism towards one that reflects and enforces particular political and cultural values.
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.
Image made by John Chrobak using “Tribune hemicycle palais bourbon,” by NonOmnisMoriar licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; “Statue Of Ariel-Bank Of England-Tivoli Corner-London,” by Lonpicman under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; “Statue of Freedom on the Dome of the US Capitol,” by Annaser licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Vote (16723533814),” by Tim Green licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic; “Elezione Camera Deputati Repubblica Italiana 25 set 2022,” by Vale93b licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Mace of the City of London,” by Paul Hudson licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic; “ReichstagSala,” by Fedaro licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
.jpg){kind=link}
