Neofascists, national populists, technosovereignists. What do we call the new radical right?

Albert Camus said it, who got it right before its time in almost everything: "To name an object wrong is to increase the unhappiness of this world."

The phrase, in France, is quoted so much that it has ended up disfigured.

But remember something essential: words matter, and definitions.

What label do we put on the new extreme right, for example.

At a time when Giorgia Meloni, heir to neo-fascism, has just come to power in Italy;

in which Marine Le Pen establishes itself in France as the first opposition party after obtaining the best result in history in the legislative and presidential elections;

When, in the United States, the Republican Party senses a future without Trump, it matters what we call them.

Extreme right, national populists, neo-fascists?

More information

The new extreme right wants to be very punk (and it is not doing badly)

Another French thinker, the contemporary Marcel Gauchet, discovered the slipperiness of labels in the middle of the campaign for the presidential elections in France, last April.

Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN), had just qualified for the second round, in which he was going to face the president, Emmanuel Macron.

The RN is a party that is usually described as extreme right.

It was founded 50 years ago under the name of the National Front by Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of the current leader, and nostalgic for the collaborationist regime during the Nazi occupation, and for French Algeria.

Marine Le Pen, when she took the reins of the party in 2011, wanted to demonize it: she changed her name, expelled her father and repudiated her anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements and assumed the principles of the Republic and secularism.

Gauchet, author of

, told Europe 1 radio: “From the point of view of the positions on a political chessboard that go from one extreme to the other, we can say that Marine Le Pen occupies the position of the extreme right. .

Does this extreme right have to do with what was historically the extreme right in this country and in European culture?

Obviously not.

Marine Le Pen objectively represents a kind of authoritarian, national, popular right”.

And he added: "We would gain political clarity if we recognized it, but an electoral campaign is permanent controversy."

Gauchet's words outraged his colleagues in the intelligentsia, such as historian Patrick Boucheron: "What Marcel Gauchet said says everything about him and nothing about her."

The leader of the far-right French National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, on April 24 in Paris.

Thierry Chesnot (Getty Images)

Political labels can serve to describe, but also to disqualify.

A socialist will make no complaint to be called a socialist.

A democristiano, neither, surely.

Everything gets complicated with the new parties, or those located outside the more or less centrist current.

It happens with Podemos or the French rebels, hegemonic on the left of their country.

How to call them?

radical left?

Extreme left?

Populists?

New left?

And it happens with what we call the extreme right, a term that undoubtedly disqualifies: almost no one, among the parliamentary parties of the extreme right, claims it.

The question is whether the description is accurate.

On this point the experts disagree.

Says Guillermo Fernández-Vázquez, author of the book

(Editorial Lengua de Trapo) and professor at the Carlos III University: "Accepting that there is a lot of terminological confusion, if we refer to the strategic point of view, an appropriate denomination could be radical right."

And he points out that the objective of these parties is to supplant the Christian-democratic right, and to be the benchmark on the right.

It has already achieved this in Italy and France.

"They are not right whose objective, at least in the short or medium term, is to reinstate something like Francoism 2.0, or fascism 2.0, but to supplant or displace conservative parties."

Fernández-Vázquez adds, however, that from an ideological point of view they could be called the “post-fascist right”, in the same way that part of the left is called post-communist.

"Although they do not intend to reinstate Francoism or fascism," he affirms,

The historian Nicolas Lebourg, an authority on the subject, sees no objection to classifying Le Pen and his RN as extreme right: "When we look at all the currents of the extreme right in all countries and at all times, the heart of their vision of world is organicism.

By organicism he refers to the idea of ​​the nation as a single body that rejects the class struggle, because it would imply a conflict between the head and the arms, and distrusts the foreign element because it would cause a metastasis, explains Lebourg.

"It is not insulting [to speak of the extreme right], it does not mean that it is against democracy or that it is going to kill everyone."

There is another recurring label for these groups: fascist.

Robert O. Paxton, author of the classic

(Peninsula Editions), responds in an email: “The extreme right in the United States, Europe and other places (Trump, Orbán and the rest) exhibits, in effect, many features of classic fascism: mass rallies, extreme nationalism, the division of the world between 'us' and 'them', the cult of the leader, the tolerance of violence to support the advancement of one's own objectives”.

Paxton, however, notes differences.

“Classic fascists believed in the subordination of the economy to national imperatives like rearmament, while today's extreme right, especially in the US, wants to let businessmen do as they please.

The current extreme right is also little inclined towards wars of conquest or reconquest of territory, although there are exceptions.

The veteran American historian concludes that another term should be sought instead of fascism: “Sometimes I have proposed using the term 'oligarchy,' but this word lacks the force of fascism.

'Neofascism' seems to me a very appropriate name for the current extreme right”.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at a campaign event for the US midterm elections in Hialeah, Florida, on November 7.

EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI (AFP via Getty Images)

The label can pose a drawback: anachronism.

Following Meloni's victory in Italy in September, the director of the multilingual European magazine Le Grand Continent, Gilles Gressani, wrote in

: "In reality, Madame Meloni does not embody the return of fascism, but the emergence of a new formula policy that we could designate with the neologism 'techno-sovereignty'.

In a Parisian café, Gressani develops this idea: “I don't think we can say that Italy today is in a framework in which the next elections are going to be suspended or there is intense political violence.

We are not in a sequence in which we can say that we are facing a return of fascism.

I think there is more risk of a return of fascism in the United States.

And if we really want to talk about fascism, the Putinian regime is much more like it.

“Techno-sovereignty” describes the synthesis that Meloni attempts between the nationalist and conservative principles of his political tradition —a radical tradition— with Italian and European technocracy and the defense of the euro, the EU and NATO.

Gressani points out: "The idea is that you have to sit down at the table to change the rules of the game rather than blow up the table."

The 2016 moment – ​​that of Trump, of Brexit, of the populists who insulted and wanted to turn everything upside down – has passed.

That is why the outbursts and insults of Vox in Spain are out of tune, even in their field.

The new radical right, the one that caresses power or already occupies it, wants to show that it is reliable, that it can govern.

In the United States, the emerging figure is the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who won the midterm elections in November.

A “Trump with a brain”, they call him.

DeSantis sells competition.

In Europe, Meloni presents herself as pro-European and pro-Atlantic and Le Pen forces her deputies to wear a tie and not make scandals in the National Assembly.

He no longer advocates Frexit or leaving the euro.

He even proposes to amend the Constitution to introduce the right to abortion, with limits, it is true,

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during a press conference in Rome on November 10.

Antonio Masiello (Getty Images)

This example underscores the difficulties in continuing to portray the RN as a far-right party, according to Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Political Radicalities at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.

“On issues of identity, security, immigration, it is undeniably a radical right,” he says.

Historically, he adds, the extreme right “wants to conquer power by force, does not recognize democracy, is in favor of corporatism, wants to liquidate parliamentary assemblies…”.

It's not easy to come up with the right etiquette and it can end up looking like a discussion about the sex of angels.

After all, does it matter what you call them?

Jean-Yves Camus responds: “It is important for political scientists and historians, whose job it is to make distinctions and name things with precision, but also on a political level, and from the point of view of the left.

When an elected official or person in charge of a left-wing party calls a formation that is not extreme right, he is doing them a favor, because these formations immediately claim that they are being persecuted.

We have to fight these parties based on the substance of their programs and not sticking labels that reinforce, in their voters, the feeling of being marginalized.

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