Why Economic Explanations Can't Stop the Far Right

The left has a diagnosis it loves too much to question. Whenever a far-right movement surges — in Italy, Argentina, France, the Netherlands, or anywhere else — the progressive autopsy follows a familiar script: inequality, wage stagnation, austerity, the hollowing out of the industrial working class. Fix the economics, the argument goes, and the politics will fix themselves. It is a tidy theory. It is also demonstrably insufficient, and the electoral record is piling up to prove it.

As economist Andrés Velasco argued in a recent Project Syndicate commentary, far-right leaders across Europe and Latin America have been winning elections — or dramatically expanding their base — while campaigning on wildly divergent economic programs. The economic-grievance framework cannot explain this pattern. The left's persistent reliance on it may, in fact, be one reason the far right political rise keeps outpacing every attempt to contain it.

Why the Left Keeps Reaching for the Economic Explanation

There is something psychologically understandable about the left's attachment to materialist explanations. The Great Recession, the decade of austerity that followed in Europe, the collapse of manufacturing in post-industrial regions — these were real wounds. They did produce genuine political displacement. Academic research from the Brookings Institution and others documented a correlation between economically declining communities and a shift toward populist voting. The explanation felt grounded in structural reality rather than cultural panic.

It also offered the left a flattering corollary: that far-right voters were not genuinely illiberal, merely desperate. Given better jobs, stronger unions, and a more generous welfare state, they would return to the fold. The remedy, conveniently, was what progressives already wanted to do. The theory let the left be both correct about the problem and the solution simultaneously.

The trouble is that flattering theories rarely survive contact with a sufficiently contradictory world.

What Far-Right Leaders Actually Campaign On

Spend any time watching how Giorgia Meloni speaks to her base, how Marine Le Pen frames her pitch in peripheral France, how Javier Milei won over millions of Argentines, or how the Party for Freedom under Geert Wilders surged to the largest bloc in the Dutch parliament in 2023, and you notice something the economic thesis struggles to explain: these leaders do not primarily campaign on economic repair. They campaign on identity, sovereignty, cultural loss, and above all on immigration and crime.

Cas Mudde, the political scientist who has studied European far-right movements for decades, has consistently argued that the ideological core of these parties is nativist, not redistributive. Their economic platforms range from welfare-state nationalism in northern Europe to aggressive market liberalism in Milei's Argentina. The economic packaging changes. The cultural content — protect the native community from external and internal threats — remains constant.

Polling data from the European Social Survey confirms this pattern. When respondents who support far-right parties are asked to rank their concerns, immigration and national identity reliably outrank wages and unemployment. A Latinobarómetro survey found that crime and public safety were among the dominant anxieties driving political shifts in several South American countries where far-right or authoritarian-leaning candidates have surged. Pew Research Center surveys in multiple European countries show that attitudes toward immigration are among the strongest single predictors of far-right vote choice — stronger, consistently, than personal economic dissatisfaction.

The Evidence Problem: Far-Right Wins Across Divergent Economies

The most direct challenge to the economic explanation is geographic and comparative. If material deprivation drives the far right political rise, then the phenomenon should concentrate in low-income, high-unemployment, high-inequality societies. It does not.

The Netherlands is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a robust welfare state and unemployment rates that most governments would envy. Wilders' PVV nonetheless became the largest party in the 2023 elections. Sweden, routinely ranked among the most equal societies on earth by Gini coefficient, saw the Sweden Democrats — a party with roots in the neo-Nazi fringe — become the second-largest party in parliament by 2022. Meanwhile, in Argentina, Milei rose to the presidency amid a genuine economic catastrophe, running not on Keynesian repair but on chainsaw-wielding austerity libertarianism. He won anyway.

The juxtaposition, as Velasco noted, is striking. The far right wins in rich, stable countries. It also wins in countries experiencing economic freefall — and in some of those cases, it wins by promising to dismantle the state rather than repair it. The economic-grievance thesis can absorb one of these facts. It cannot absorb both simultaneously without breaking.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's cultural backlash theory, developed in their 2019 study Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, offers a more durable explanatory frame. Their thesis: decades of post-material value change — greater acceptance of gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, and secular norms — produced a counter-mobilization among voters, primarily older and less formally educated, who experienced those changes as a loss of cultural standing and social recognition. The resentment is real, but its content is cultural, not primarily economic.

The Left's Diagnostic Failure and Its Political Cost

The stakes of this misdiagnosis are not merely academic. When a party or movement believes the problem is unemployment, it designs policies accordingly. It campaigns on job guarantees, wage floors, industrial policy, green transition spending. These are not bad policies. They may even be good ones. But they are not answers to the question that is actually motivating a significant portion of far-right voters.

The left has spent roughly fifteen years promising that better economics would drain the far-right swamp. In that same period, the radical and populist right has gone from a marginal irritant in European politics to a governing force in Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia, a coalition partner in Finland and Sweden, and a near-majority phenomenon in France. In Latin America, the trajectory looks similar. Something has not worked.

What has not worked, specifically, is mistaking sympathy for the voter's material circumstances for an understanding of the voter's actual political motivations. These are not the same thing. A working-class voter worried about housing costs may also hold deeply restrictive views on immigration — and may vote primarily on the latter even when the former is pressing. The left, locked into its diagnostic framework, often fails to take the second concern seriously enough to compete on it.

What a More Effective Counter-Strategy Looks Like

Competing effectively on immigration and crime does not require adopting the far right's dehumanizing rhetoric or its authoritarian policy preferences. It requires acknowledging that the concerns are real, that they are not simply manufactured by cynical politicians, and that they demand credible answers rather than dismissal.

Several center-left governments have tested this approach with meaningful results. The Danish Social Democrats under Mette Frederiksen pursued a strict immigration policy paired with strong welfare-state commitments, a combination that kept the far right from gobbling up working-class voters while preserving the party's economic identity. It was politically uncomfortable. It also worked.

Credibility on crime requires the same unsentimental realism. Voters in communities experiencing actual insecurity — violent crime, neighborhood disorder, deteriorating public spaces — are not imagining their concerns into existence. When the left responds primarily by questioning the framing or the statistics rather than offering concrete safety strategies, it cedes enormous political ground to movements that do not share its values but do at least take the problem seriously.

Stop Explaining the Far Right — Start Competing With It

The economic thesis survives in part because it is easier to explain the far right than to compete with it on terrain that feels uncomfortable. To engage seriously with immigration restrictionism, or to campaign forthrightly on public safety, requires accepting that progressive instincts on some cultural questions have lost ground with voters who are not, for the most part, bigots seeking permission to hate — but ordinary people who want order, coherence, and a national community that feels legible to them.

The far right political rise across two continents and multiple economic contexts is not a coincidence waiting for the right minimum-wage law to dissolve. It is a political phenomenon with its own logic, its own emotional grammar, and its own durable voter coalition. The left can keep performing its post-election autopsies, reaching each time for the familiar scalpel of economic precarity. Or it can read the actual evidence, update its diagnosis, and begin the harder work of building an alternative that addresses what voters are actually anxious about. One of these options has a future. The other has a very good track record — of losing.

Source: Project Syndicate