---
title: "How to block the far right from power"
date: "2026-09-11T00:01:00+01:00"
modified: "2026-09-01T16:43:45+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/how-to-block-the-far-right-from-power/"
post_id: 10859
---

# How to block the far right from power

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/House_of_Commons_Chamber_1-1200x675.png)“Keeping far-right parties out of power does not make them disappear but it does stop them doing their worst”![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/Daniel-Trilling-with-border.jpg)

**This article by Daniel Trilling, author of *If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable***, **is part of our series on how to fight hate, from the Autumn 2026 issue of *New Humanist*. To read the rest of the series, [subscribe now](https://newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe/).**

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It is vital to understand that the growth of far-right politics cannot be simply repressed or ignored; it must be countered with alternative political ideas. Whether we’re talking about extremist street protests and online influencers, or the populist parties that are winning elections around the world, the far right converges on a set of shared themes. In short, they all trade in forms of radical right-wing nationalism, telling their supporters – and potential supporters – that some kind of civilisational revival will be achieved through the vilification and punishment of one or more supposed “national enemies”.

The particular targets may vary, but the central offer remains the same. It is dangerous not just because of the immediate harm to the people being scapegoated, but because it is making an impossible promise. Ostentatious cruelty will not make voters feel “great again” for long. Instead, it opens the door to yet more destructive behaviour from those who gain power by making such a promise.

Simply recognising this danger is not enough. Far-right movements, and in particular the populists who have achieved varying degrees of electoral success internationally, have shown they can adapt to a rapidly changing world. For years they have benefited from the various discontents churned up by rampant inequality and an economic system that, in the west at least, has faltered ever since the 2008 financial crisis. But each new shock, whether it’s the instability that results from increased global conflict, or the rising costs of energy and food in a world under mounting climate pressure, gives the far right a fresh opportunity to attack established political elites for having supposedly failed.

So, what can we do in response? The first thing is to recognise the importance of coalition building. This is most obvious when it comes to elections. Keeping far-right parties out of power does not make them disappear but it does stop them doing their worst. Ejecting far-right incumbents from office gives the rest of us a chance to repair the damage. But wherever these things have been achieved, they’ve involved broad and often uncomfortable coalitions.

In the recent Hungarian elections, for instance, Viktor Orbán’s varied opponents had to get behind a right-wing opposition candidate, Péter Magyar, whom many liberals would have balked at in other circumstances. Even in more limited campaigns, such as the string of parliamentary by-election defeats for Reform in England and Wales over the past two years, the stats suggest that residents of Caerphilly, Gorton and Denton and Makerfield voted tactically.

But this coalition building works only if we treat it as the beginning of a process, rather than the end. It can be used to exacerbate and expose the weaknesses that sit within far-right political projects. In part that’s because all political projects are prone to weak spots and in-fighting, and nothing brings this out like a high-profile defeat at the ballot box. But it’s also because of a central contradiction in what the far right offers people: by making a promise it can essentially never fulfil, its proponents must tread a fine line between radicalism and mainstream respectability. Disappoint its existing supporters and a movement loses momentum; go too far in trying to sate their desire for punishment and it scares other people off.

The far right’s opponents need to work away at this contradiction, not only by challenging extreme rhetoric and hate-filled behaviour when it arises, but by showing how the remedies it proposes for the very real problems that face our societies are woefully insufficient. The far right profits from a failing economic model – yet its leading lights promote an intensification of that model, from promises to slash state spending to support for get-rich-quick crypto schemes. It poses as the defender of culture and identity, yet its conception of these is self-defeatingly narrow. And on the climate crisis, the most pressing threat to our survival, it has either nothing to say at all, or expresses a perverse desire to bring it on.

All that brings us to a final but essential point: opponents of the far right need our own, more convincing answers to the problems facing us today. We won’t find them by pandering to the far right, or by pretending we can simply turn the clock back.

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