UK’s Reform. Japan’s Sanseitō. The right’s hymn sheet is international
When hard right political minnows in two tea-drinking island monarchies make waves, it’s worth thinking of a recent Project Syndicate piece by Princeton’s Jan-Werner Müller (paywall).
The professor had written that Donald Trump is trying to build a far-right international.
Right on cue, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK’s Reform Party, popped up on July 21, with a tough-on-crime message and promises to despatch prisoners lodged in British jails to El Salvador etc.
And on July 20, Upper House elections in Japan saw the upstart Sanseitō Party claim nearly 12.5% of the vote with its Japanese People First message and extreme hostility to Japan’s (tiny) immigrant population. [Just to be clear, that while the hard right party made significant gains, the Liberal Democratic Party is still dominant, as for the past seven decades.]
Professor Müller’s piece was clearly right on the button. He specifically pointed to the US president’s wielding of tariffs as a political weapon to help Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil’s rightwing former president has never made a secret of his admiration for Mr Trump. Like his hero, Mr Bolsonaro used an alleged coup attempt to seize power after losing his 2022 presidential re-election bid to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Accordingly, Mr Trump’s steadfast support for Mr Bolsonaro must be seen for what it is: An attempt to permanently take Brazil’s politics in a similar direction to the United States. It’s worth noting that Mr Bolsonaro’s domestic political constituency is openly nostalgic for the days of military dictatorship.
Recent events further underscore efforts to build a far-right international alliance. The scaffolding would mainly be Trumpian rhetoric and defiance of the international architecture of rules, rights and norms. Occasional infrastructural support would be provided by ideological innovations from other new heroes of the right, such as Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
Nigel Farage’s July 21st crime-busters press conference is a case in point. Not only did he put forward ideas borrowed from Mr Trump such as consigning prisoners to countries such as El Salvador, he cited Mr Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani as inspiration for another Reform policy on crime: cracking down hard on low-level criminality in an attempt to deter larger operations.
As mayor of New York three decades ago, Mr Giuliani was guided by the so-called “broken windows” theory, which posits that visible signs of crime and social disorder such as broken windows and litter can create an environment that encourages further crime and disorder.
Mr Farage also invoked another Trump ally, Argentina’s president, to explain how he would fund the £17 billion cost of his crime and justice plans.
He added that the libertarian Mr Milei was accused of being a “madman” but has managed to “cut the size of the public sector by about 15 per cent, 20 per cent in some cases”. As a result, Mr Farage said, “Argentina is beginning to see the beginnings of an economic miracle”. (Yes and no, but that’s another blog.)
And then there’s Japan’s Sanseitō, founded just five years ago. Like Mr Trump’s MAGA movement, it is able to make non-stories (“nothing burgers” in the American idiom) into vehicles of viral outrage. An example is its unrelenting attacks on foreign university students. The party has falsely claimed foreign students got huge scholarships at the expense of the Japanese taxpayer, even as Japanese students worked multiple jobs to pay for college.
Japan’s Sanseitō and UK’s Reform really are singing from the same hymn sheet. Are we hearing the faint strains of a new ‘Internationale’, this time for the right and sung with an American accent?
