Extreme Right

Extreme Right, term referring to individuals or groups that profess support for ideologies of the far political right. The term also usually encompasses individuals or groups that are specifically neo-Nazi, whose ideas and activities follow, or resemble, those of Adolf Hitler and his ideology of National Socialism.

Like many other terms in politics, 'extreme right' or 'far right' expresses strong feelings, covers a complex range of ideas and activities, and has no agreed definition. The term has been widely applied to individuals and groups across the world characterized by ultra-nationalist, anti-Communist, racist, and anti-democratic ideologies, often in combination with each other. In its most extreme form, neo-Nazism, it has been applied to individuals or groups who share such features of Nazism as extreme German nationalism, anti-Semitism, hostility to 'deviant' minorities, organized violence, and support for dictatorship, military aggression, and mass murder. In most liberal democracies, definition of a group as specifically neo-Nazi rather than on the far right can be difficult because racial discrimination, the revival of Nazism, and/or denials that the Holocaust, the Nazis' mass murder of Jews, took place are punishable by law and therefore likely to be hidden or disguised.

It is generally acknowledged that there has been an increase in extreme right political activity in Western Europe since the collapse of Communism at the beginning of the 1990s. There has also been an increase in violence perpetrated by specifically neo-Nazi groups against non-white immigrants and citizens. Several political parties of the extreme right have gained electoral support on a platform that includes anti-immigration policies, most notably in Austria, where the Freedom party, under its leader Jörg Haider, won more than 22 per cent of the votes cast in the parliamentary elections of 1994 and over 40 per cent in local elections in 1999. In France, the Front Nationale (National Front) under Jean-Marie le Pen received 12.5 per cent of the votes cast in 1993, and continued to poll strongly in local elections throughout the 1990s (in the 2002 presidential election Le Pen actually managed to beat the incumbent prime minister, Lionel Jospin, to second place). But the lack of electoral success does not necessarily indicate the absence of extreme right elements. For example, in Great Britain, where Holocaust denial is not illegal, the National Front and the British National Party (BNP), both founded by the self-professed neo-Nazi John Tyndall, have failed to win any parliamentary elections, but the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Verrall (also known as Richard Harwood), which denies that the Holocaust occurred, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 2000 the historian David Irving attempted to use this pamphlet as part of his evidence in a libel case in the British High Court in which he was suing an American academic, Deborah Lipstadt, and her publishers, Penguin UK Ltd, for labelling him a Holocaust denier. It was adjudged that Irving had deliberately falsified historical evidence to suit his political views. In Sweden, a rise in extreme right-wing violence prompted Prime Minister Göran Persson to call an international conference on the Holocaust.

In Eastern Europe the collapse of the communist regimes between 1989 and 1991 has permitted the free expression of extreme right wing ideas for the first time since they were established. In Russia the Liberal party, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, which advocates the recreation of the Soviet empire, won 24 per cent of the votes cast in the parliamentary elections of 1993; ultra-nationalist parties are represented in the parliaments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia; and the “ethnic cleansing” which has taken place in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia is sponsored by nationalist politicians. Again, observers do not agree on whether such individuals and groups are best called neo-Nazi, neo-Fascist, or extreme right wing.

A number of other groups across the world are considered to be on the far right due to their strongly nationalist or racist stance. These include the NSDAP-AO, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Aryan Nations in the United States, as well as similar groups in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Other groups that emphasize race include some black separatist groups of the United States, and extreme Jewish groups advocating the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and its occupied territories.