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The rise of the far right is no accident. It’s a calculated, data-backed strategy that’s transforming democracies from within, writes Md Fahad Hossain

WHEN I look at political rhetoric, what often gives me pause is the malleability of what words and symbols can do, when they are time and again deployed, to change the parameters of what countries might consider the norm. For years, I used to indulge myself in the belief that far-right discourse is a temporary state of being, emanating on the extremes, igniting during times of crisis, and fading once the storm clouds disperse. Now, however, as I follow this trajectory over the past decade, such confidence no longer feels reassuring to me. Political phenomena I once counted as rhetorical edge cases have since become mainstream political players in action. Political parties that capitalise on exclusionary nationalism, anti-immigrant language and hard borders move with ease from the European parliament to the Lok Sabha in India, with national mandates that stretch from Manila to Lisbon and Vienna, translating speech into votes, ministries and mandates. What troubles me today, then, is no longer the question of winning, but rather the question of how the democracies I study and live in cope today with this persistent pressure.

As a person who studies rhetoric, I am interested to see how these actors put crises into narratives. Let’s look at the European Parliament election of 2024. The far right renamed economic insecurity, migration anxiety and cultural identity questions into policy demands that moved the discourse to the right. I would like to interpret this narrative shifts as a discursive, rather than mathematical. In Germany, the second-place triumph of the AfD in February 2025 was not only a political victory but also a symbolic triumph that embarrassed the ruling Social Democrats and showcased the power of populist rhetoric to undermine the ruling establishment. In Portugal, the Chega party, created only in 2019, took the place of the main opposition in 2025, a development that punctured decades of a bipolar structure of alternation between Socialists and Social Democrats that characterised the country’s political life. If we look at the 2024 elections in Vienna, where the Freedom Party became victorious, we see that the first fundamental taboo that has long existed in that territory was broken: the promise, made after the WWII by that country, of ‘never again’ to radical nationalism.

In historical perspective, I see continuity. Hardline nationalism did not disappear in 1945, but withdrew, regrouped and mutated. In the 90s, through the strategic employment of rhetorical devices and agenda, the French politician Jeane-Marie Le Pen and Jorg Haider of Austria engaged provocative discourse to breach the political climate in their respective countries. They enlarged the scope of what was accepted as normal and permissible in political discourse during that time — especially on the politically sensitive subjects like immigration, nationalism and historical revisionism. Le Pen and Haider used the same techniques — provocation, normalisation, repetition — that prepared their successors to drill edges and widen the appeal. I understood Marine Le Pen’s 41.46 per cent in the French runoff 2022 as the result of two decades of narrative work of rhetorical reorienting ‘security’ and ‘cost-of-living’ as nationalist questions and refraining from overtly fascist references. I would like to read the far-right victories as predictable and as the result of right-wing narratives that had been successful in mainstreaming radical ideas so that they felt somehow common sense.

But there is more evidence than speeches and campaigns. International indices document the relationship between language and power. Freedom House has been tracking democracies’ status for almost 20 years, and surveys by V-Dem’s last editions have spotted a trend where autocratisation no longer applies only to fragile democracies or hybrid regimes but incorporates long-standing democracies as well. Press freedom indices document the decline as well, and India can be found to have gone high on the list of countries that are not able to guarantee the ‘anti-national’ journalistic accusations and legal persecutions that mould the possibilities of public discourse. When I look at those graphs, I cannot help but see rhetorical triumphs becoming institutionalised.

Europe offers a remarkable showcase for these processes. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, nationalist and hard-right parties reaffirmed their clout, sufficient to reshape the discussions about migration and climate. The drama came from France: a far-right win in round one of its legislative elections forced the left and centre to orchestrate an alliance to prevent Marine Le Pen from taking control. The AfD in Germany embarrassed the ruling coalition and confirmed that the far-right had embedded its narratives further west than just the east. Chega in Portugal had moved in a mere six years from nuisance to the remaining challenger, establishing itself as a parliamentary player by surfing waves of anger and disillusion. Austria’s Freedom Party placed first for the first time, fracturing the country’s own rhetorical deal with its past. These examples serve as a reminder that numbers will always have a story. They are evidence of which narratives have gotten sufficient buy-in to put value on the future. When the FPÖ leads in Austria, it isn’t just the result of an election. It is a reshaping of cultural memory. When Chega is moving up in Portugal, it isn’t just disdain for elites. It is grievance calcified as governance. These numbers are not just electoral results — they are proof that narratives of grievance and purity have migrated from the margins to the mainstream.

In Argentina, Javier Milei’s 2023 runoff victory, at just under 56 per cent, was forged not in policy detail, but in performance. It was all metaphor, as when he offered a ‘chainsaw’ to hack at the ‘corruption.’ The ‘caste’ is his target for the untouchable political elite. I could not refrain, as I study rhetoric, from noting the efficacy of emotional spectacle as argument. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele’s rise was somewhat inevitability. With 84 per cent of the vote in 2021, his ‘persuasion’ was less about coaxing than dominating. By linking dissent with chaos, he replaced democracy with self; the opposition was silenced before the first ballot was cast. However, Brazil offered the most complexity. Bolsonaro lost in 2022, but a rhetoric of fraud and betrayal lived on past his campaign, in chants and on social media, resulting in the storming of Brasília in January 2023. Here, we can clearly see that rhetoric is not a tool of the campaign, but the bloodstream of the movement, pulsing long after the election is lost or won.

Then there is Asia. Let’s start from home — Bangladesh. In the case of Bangladesh, the far-right shift is not only seen in the Islamist and fringe parties but also in the ruling Awami League party. From a historical point of view, the Awami League was founded on secular and inclusionary beliefs. But as time went by, the traditional defender of the secular liberation ideals moved far away from their core. Instead of being inclusionary, it had been increasingly recasting its narrative in terms of muscular nationalism, religious signalling, and authoritarian populism. When we look at the last decade of political upheaval and ruling under Sheikh Hasina, who had always appealed to the 1971 Liberation War, we would see how she turned the inclusionary rhetoric of democracy into the exclusionary and authoritarian rhetoric by instilling fear day after day and year after year. Her policies, her speeches and her rhetoric never pushed for a plural democracy. Instead, she resorted to the form of a loyalty test, imposing the ‘anti-liberation’ tag not only on dissidents but also on critics of the government. There were heavy pushes to label dissenters, journalists, and organisers of opposition protests as traitors in league with the ‘enemy of Bangladesh,’ similar to the political rhetoric of several far-right movements worldwide. Simultaneously, the Awami League has accommodated conservative religious opinion when it is convenient, leaving popular and representative secular governance compromised and feeding the perception that Bangladesh is not a secular republic. Bangladesh is betrayed by its political centre of gravity: authoritarianism is justified in the name of national security; free speech is equated with chaos and disorder; and pluralism is said to represent weakness. Therefore, what we witnessed was not the fringe exerting pressure on the mainstream but the mainstream adopting far-right rhetoric to gain power.

When we peep over the fence to see our neighbour, India, we see a similar scenario. The BJP in India may have lost seats in 2024 relative to its 2019 gains, but the past decade of rule is rewriting the grammar of Indian politics. In the speeches of prime minister Modi, pluralism becomes majoritarianism, dissent is ‘anti-national,’ and religious symbols become state ideology. As a critic, I can only say it plainly: India is not accidentally marching towards authoritarianism. It is being rhetorically nudged there. In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr did what his dad did not: win a majority. He did so on the back of a social media campaign that turned dictatorship into nostalgia, with the martial law years represented as a golden moment. Interestingly, in this instance, TikTok as a social media was not a tool of the entertainment industry, but a rhetorical machine that recoded brutality as myth. Indonesia under Prabowo Subianto offered a second lesson which was when the candidate positioned himself as the only possible saviour, the institutions aligned with the narrative and how political rhetoric had been shifted. Thailand offered its example of how institutional veto could operate. Although, in 2023, elections resulted in a majority of seats for the parties most favourable to reform, history showed us how military threats and judicial vetoes can prevent reformist parties from accessing power.

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How do far-right actors consolidate their victories?

MY ARGUMENT is that the mechanisms matter more than the movements. The far-right actors portray themselves as the upholders of ‘order’ and ‘tradition’ while portraying their rivals as traitors. They neutralise the press not through outright censorship necessarily, but bankruptcy and intimidation. They rewrite rules and district maps to create tilts to their advantage but insist on their legality. They inundate platforms with high-emotion messaging and allow outrage to drown the facts. They take climate and migration as wedge issues and force the centre to ‘triangulate’ right. And they normalise scandal and survive exposures that previously would have been fatal. The mechanisms are familiar precisely because they are designed to be. They are successful not because they assassinate democracy in one blow but because they persuade the system to cut down democratic institutions bit by bit.

As I examine these shifts critically, I have discovered some mind-boggling truth — resistance through positive rhetorical moves is less a heroic act and more a painstaking, incremental process, defined by its difficult, unsatisfying and convoluted nature. Let’s look at how policies and actions work as rhetorical tools to ensure balance to some extent. France’s republican front in 2024 demonstrated that a tactical coalition, however uncomfortable, can coalesce to stave off the far right’s electoral hegemony. The EU’s move to suspend funding to Hungary represents a decisive change of course. It shows that the EU will use financial power as its new currency for rule of law compliance when moral arguments have failed. Brazil’s judiciary, although shadowed by scandals, showed that holding to account can follow an attempted coup. India’s farmers revealed that organised, peaceful mobilisation can pressure a government to backtrack. Thailand’s youth defied the dictatorship and chiselled away, through days of protest, at a decades-long taboo around the monarchy. These are not victories writ large. Yet they establish a foundation for resistance, through coalitions, institutions, and citizens unwilling to let illiberalism become normalised, achieved in small and sometimes idiosyncratic steps.

Nonetheless, I am still distressed by the consequences for the world. As far-right movements increase, they not only change their countries — they change the world order. A European Parliament swayed by the right has already been reactive to climate legislation. As migration flows across Europe take on positions previously called extreme, externalised borders and shrinking asylum rights become the norm. Right-wing and conservative governments are suspicious of multilateral treaties and their abstraction, opting instead for a diplomacy that appears more transactional and spheres of influence. The law is weakened, power is personalised, and addressing global challenges — climate, war — becomes more and more difficult. What one country shouts in the street can be felt around the world, until the norms that allow countries to work together are dispensed with.

Once upon a time, the enemies of democracy were clear. They wore uniforms. Today’s illiberalism is more sophisticated: it comes in a suit and tie, quotes the constitution, and claims to represent ‘the people’ like nobody else. It defines criticism as treason, chaos as order and diversity as a plot. It wins and, then, it pauses while radicalising the norms. As I closely examine the shifts, I can’t ignore the numbers: the AfD did best of all in Germany, Chega rocketed up in Portugal, FPÖ triumphed in Austria, Modi remains as prime minister in India, Prabowo triumphed in the first round in Indonesia, and Bukele’s reelection was close to absolute in El Salvador. They are numbers, but they are also narratives — narratives of grievance and purity and fear that have convinced millions. Yet, as part of the collective ‘we,’ I cannot unsee these narratives to become inevitabilities. Numbers aren’t destiny. Narratives can be contested. Coalitions can constrain, courts can inhibit, and citizens can march. None of these actions will, by themselves, turn the tide. But together they do something very important: they communicate one thing we can’t forget: democracy isn’t inevitable. It’s a practice.

Thus, as I live and breathe, I keep telling myself: the far right is not an encroaching weather on the horizon; it is the weather we have been living in for a long time now. Our job is not to wait for a turn of the wind, but to design more solid shelters to endure the forecast. And let us not lose sight of the fact — and here ‘we’ is key. Let us sink this in — the sky has never stopped being ours, even when the weather is continuously threatening. To fight the bad weather that threatens our democracy, we must be prepared to dismantle the twisted, nationalistic, monolithic and supremacist rhetorical moves through positive, holistic, inclusionary rhetorical moves that ensure democracy in all aspects of our lives.

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Md Fahad Hossain is a doctoral candidate in English at North Dakota State University. He studies rhetoric, theory, culture, translingualism in teaching writing, and anti-racist pedagogy.