Right-Wing Populism Is Not Extremist

The left-of-center monoculture in Europe doesn't like dissent; that's why the revived Right is labeled extreme.

The argument: If you look at the facts about the right wing that is surging throughout Europe—what they say, what they do, what they want— it’s clear that it is civilizationally conservative, not extremist, and those who malign it as such are ignoring the obvious truth and stifling democracy.

WHY IT MATTERS

Because conservatism is coming back all over the West, it is under ideological siege. This is especially the case in Europe, where the monolithically left establishment is battling to put resurgent conservatives back in the box. If they succeed, democracy in Europe threatens to be replaced by de facto one-party progressivism. Importantly, the European Union dream of lasting peace via supranational governance—and its denigration of national sovereignty—has played a key role in transforming Europe into a progressive monoculture.

“Right-wing populism” has arisen in Europe because real conservatives, who want to protect their nation, tradition, and way of life, no longer have a home in the establishment parties. The mono-left establishment—including most of the traditional center-right, which clings to the pretense that it’s still conservative—wants to keep it that way. After having excluded conservatives, it now wants to suppress them by smearing them as extremist. We who care about democracy must hold the Left to the democratic rules of the game and strongly insist on resurgent conservatives’ right to have a place in the public square.

Because of Germany's past, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the easiest target for vilification. It's called neo-Nazi. To be sure, German vigilance against the far right is fully justified (and some AfD figures have used dubious rhetoric to provoke their rivals). But the AfD's Basic Principles are classically conservative: "We are open to the world, but we want to remain Germans. We want to preserve … our Western Christian culture, our language and tradition in a peaceful, democratic and sovereign nation-state … within a Europe of sovereign democratic states bonded with one another in … good neighborliness." It's hard to call that Nazi unless you live in a left-wing bubble and think Western conservatism is fascism.

"Right-wing populism has arisen in Europe because conservatives no longer have a home in the establishment parties."

Establishment progressives are also fighting dirty on the legal front, waging lawfare to criminalize the populist right. In France, Marine LePen was convicted of misuse of funds under the flimsiest of pretexts so that she can't run for the presidency in 2027. Italian populist Matteo Salvini faced criminal prosecution when, acting within his powers as interior minister, he refused to allow a ship of illegal migrants to dock in Italy. Geert Wilders, a populist in the Netherlands who calls for strict limits on Muslim immigration, has faced several hate-speech trials for engaging in political speech that offended progressives. Germany's Verfassungsschutz, its domestic intelligence agency, has for years spied on the AfD. It has unsuccessfully attempted to designate the AfD "confirmed right-wing extremist" based on highly disputable allegations.

There is an underlying, more basic reason the resurgence of conservatism is integral to robust democracy. As eastern German conservative Steffen Heitmann observed, political systems that advance freedom assume two opposed and inherently human ways to approach politics: a liberal temperament that champions government-driven change and a "conservative temperament" that respects tradition, acknowledges human limitations, and advocates careful, gradual reform. He said the "peaceful interplay" between those two worldviews, when they remain measured and anchored in the Western tradition, forms the "cornerstone of a healthy, functioning democracy." Otherwise, as I wrote in the Winter 2025 issue of The European Conservative, "we risk devolving into a de facto one-party state."

THE BOTTOM LINE

Against the backdrop of the progressive establishment's decline and European Union imperiousness, the European populist Right has been rising for decades. Despite Orban's recent loss in Hungary, its ascent will likely continue. This is good news: the conservative revival signals Europe's civilizational resilience. All Western conservatives should forcefully call out the establishment's attempt to exclude populists from the public square.