How the new right turns crisis into diagnosis, grievance into coalition, culture into policy, and ideology into durable power through institutions, personnel and media.
The new right is often described in terms of anger and nostalgia. That misses its calculated architecture. It rests on four interlocking elements: a story about crisis and liberal failure, a recomposed class coalition, a culture-centred policy agenda, and an infrastructure of institutions and media that gives these ideas persistence and reach. Mark Leonard’s account of the movement captures these four pillars clearly. Together, these elements turn diffuse resentment into an organised project.
The first element is diagnostic. New-right thinkers argue that post-1945 and especially post-1990 liberalism over-promised and under-delivered. They treat the global financial crisis, the eurozone crisis, the 2015 migration crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war as a sequence of proofs that liberal governments protected banks, Brussels, migrants, global corporations or distant allies more than their own citizens. Their critique is not confined to specific policy failures; it targets the governing ideology itself. In that telling, liberalism elevated individual autonomy, open markets and supranational rules above the protection of a concrete national community.
The second element is a reconfigured class coalition. Survey data and election results across the United States and Europe show that new-right parties have become disproportionately strong among working-class voters and those without university degrees. Leonard documents this pattern across multiple countries. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland doubled its vote share in the 2025 election and drew markedly stronger support from working-class voters than the Social Democrats. That shift has altered the centre of gravity in German politics. In France, the National Rally now dominates the working-class vote more clearly than the traditional centre-left or centre-right. These parties no longer depend only on small hard cores of ideological militants. They are building broad social blocs.
This class recomposition is not accidental. It is theorised in real time. New-right strategists argue that the centre-left abandoned the “social question” for minority rights and cosmopolitanism, while mainstream conservatives remained loyal to neoliberal globalisation and European integration. In the United States, organisations such as American Compass have pushed for a “worker-centric conservatism”, criticising free-market orthodoxy and calling for selective protection of domestic industry, family-oriented welfare and tighter immigration controls. Their case is that conservatism must become socially rooted if it wants to govern durably. Even critics of this current recognise that it represents a substantive strategic turn rather than a branding exercise.
The new right’s real innovation lies in joining cultural grievance to class reorganisation and then giving that fusion a state project.
The third element is a policy agenda that turns this coalition into something more than protest. Across contexts, the movement converges on four domains: borders and demography, trade and industrial policy, foreign policy and alliances, and the structure of the state itself. On migration, parties such as the AfD, National Rally, Vox and Brothers of Italy advocate drastic reductions in entries, more deportations, harder borders and forms of “national preference”. Immigration is framed as both an economic and a cultural threat: a source of wage pressure and competition for services, and a vehicle of demographic and religious change perceived as diluting the majority nation.
On trade and industrial policy, the emphasis falls on economic nationalism. New-right actors argue that decades of free-trade agreements and offshoring hollowed out national industrial capacity and strategic autonomy, and that governments must now use tariffs, local-content rules, reshoring incentives and sectoral planning to rebuild what they often call productive sovereignty. In Europe, that line appears in opposition to agreements such as EU–Mercosur, cast as threats to farmers and strategic industries. In the United States, it appears in scepticism toward the World Trade Organization and in support for tariff-backed industrial policy to counter China and bring manufacturing “home”. The goal is not simply growth. It is national control over the commanding heights of production.
Foreign policy and alliance structures are recast in civilisational terms. New-right leaders argue that the liberal international order subordinated national identity to abstract values and distant commitments, and that foreign policy should be judged against a narrow conception of national interest and cultural survival. That language is visible in the second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which warns that Europe risks “civilisational erasure”. In Europe, it appears in rhetoric about reshaping the EU into a looser union of sovereign states bound by a shared “Judeo-Christian” civilisation. The unifying idea is that alliances should serve nations understood as historic cultural communities, not as merely constitutional arrangements.
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The fourth domain is the state. Here the new right breaks from older small-state conservatism. It wants a strong state, but one aligned with what it regards as the authentic national community and freed from liberal and technocratic constraints. In the United States, this ambition is codified in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which outlines plans to reshape the civil service, concentrate executive power and dismantle regulatory and diversity infrastructures. In Europe, similar ideas appear in proposals to tighten political control over public broadcasters, courts and civil services. The common thread is an attempt to subordinate independent institutions to a majoritarian political project, justified as restoring democratic control.
These programmatic elements would not travel far without organisational backing. The new right has invested in a dense infrastructure of conferences, think-tanks, legal advocacy groups, educational initiatives and media platforms. The National Conservatism network provides a formalised statement of principles on nation, religion, family and state. Project 2025 adds personnel recruitment, policy detail and administrative planning. Think-tanks such as American Compass, the Claremont Institute and their European counterparts supply ideological framing, policy proposals and a pipeline of staffers.
Digital media complete this ecosystem. New-right actors treat platforms not simply as channels but as contested spaces where they can challenge mainstream media gatekeepers, amplify stories about migration, crime or “censorship”, and present themselves as defenders of free speech against an alleged “censorship-industrial complex”. Leonard notes that far-right and hard-right politicians often command a disproportionate share of engagement on platforms such as TikTok relative to their institutional weight. This style of politics foregrounds identity, emotion and spectacle, yet it remains tightly connected to the deeper project: to claim that liberal institutions have lost moral authority and that a different settlement is both possible and necessary.
Seen in this light, the new right is less a spontaneous backlash than a structured attempt to build a successor paradigm. It offers a diagnosis of liberalism’s crisis, a class coalition that connects cultural anxiety with economic grievance, a programme in which culture, borders and sovereignty sit at the centre of policy, and an infrastructure capable of turning those ideas into power. That is the formation with which any serious African strategic project will have to contend.
Understanding the New Right
- 1. Politics after the “Liberal Moment”
- 2. The global context: looming wars, extraction race, and fragmentation
- 3. Anatomy of the new right: ideas and infrastructure ← You are here
- 4. What the new right wants
- 5. Beyond the West: resonances in Asia and the global South
- 6. Interim reflection: why this project fits this moment
