What Is To Be Done? Fighting The Far Right In The UK and Spain

McSweeney, Sánchez and voter nihilism

What is to be done about the apparently unstoppable rise of the fascist-adjacent far right in the UK and Spain? Events over the weekend suggest that the approaches of neither major social democratic party are working particularly well.

Labour is in chaos following the departure of Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief strategist and one of the architects of the party’s 2024 election victory. The party has tried to drive back the far right by offering slightly decaffeinated versions of some of its policies, especially on immigration, while hoping voters won’t notice its genuinely left-wing commitments like spending billions to achieve net zero and improved rights for renters and workers. Starmer has even sucked up to Trump more shamelessly than most European leaders.

In Spain, the PSOE suffered very bad results in Sunday’s regional election in Aragon, losing ground to both the erstwhile centre-right PP and the far-right Vox. This is particularly troubling because it occurred despite Spain’s government taking the opposite approach to Labour’s. Pedro Sánchez has been open about his left positions, especially on immigration, climate policy, social welfare and Gaza.

Under his management over the last seven years, the Spanish economy has been booming, with strong growth, falling unemployment and real wage increases for many workers. And he’s taken a harder line on Trump than any other European leader.

So we have two different strategies being tested simultaneously. Labour tries to defeat the far right through calculated ambiguity about progressive policies, along with a brutal approach to immigrants. The PSOE tries to defeat it through clarity, economic competence and unapologetic social democracy. Both are struggling. Labour’s poll numbers are dire and the party appears to be disintegrating internally. The PSOE faces a real prospect of losing power to a PP-Vox coalition whenever the next national election comes.

Why are both approaches failing to convince voters? The immediate answer is fierce media opposition to even mild social democratic reforms, turbocharged through social media platforms owned by foreign billionaires hungry for clicks and, in at least one case, actively hostile to democracy itself. In Britain, a relentlessly hostile press has poisoned public discourse about Labour’s achievements. Every policy success is ignored or minimised, whilst every misstep is amplified into a full-blown crisis. Social media algorithms reward outrage and extremism.

Spain faces similar dynamics. The PP and Vox benefit enormously from a Madrid-based press that treats Sánchez as an illegitimate usurper and amplifies every scandal, real or invented, whilst ignoring economic success. Social media platforms boost far-right content whilst suppressing progressive voices. Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a propaganda vehicle for the international far right has been particularly damaging.

This isn’t just about media bias or algorithmic manipulation, though both are real and destructive. A significant portion of voters in both countries appear genuinely attracted to the chaos and destruction the far right promises. They’re not confused or misled. They know exactly what they’re voting for. They seem to want to smash the institutions and norms that have governed their societies.

In the case of Spain, economic success doesn’t persuade them because they’re not primarily motivated by economic concerns. They’re motivated by rage, resentment and a desire for change, any change. Traces of this energy can even be seen in the columns of El País, Spain’s newspaper of record.

This presents centre-left parties with an impossible dilemma. If you triangulate and moderate, you demoralise your own supporters whilst failing to win over the people attracted to far-right extremism. If you’re honest about progressive policies and deliver economic success, you still lose because significant numbers of voters don’t care about economic performance or policy outcomes. They care about the emotional highs of seeing enemies punished.

There’s a hopeful irony in Spain’s situation. The supposedly moderate PP’s attempt to imitate Vox’s policies has led to falls in its vote, both in Aragon yesterday and in Extremadura last year. Voters attracted to far-right positions usually vote for the genuine article rather than the knockoff. (Hello Morgan!)

The PP’s strategy of moving rightward to limit Vox’s growth has simply legitimised Vox whilst weakening itself. This suggests that by the next general election, Spanish voters may face a stark choice between the PSOE and a PP-Vox coalition in which the PP has been entirely captured by the neo-fascists, having destroyed its own credibility as a moderate alternative through years of capitulation.

Not an entirely negative scenario for Pedro Sánchez.

So what’s the answer? Maybe there isn’t one, at least not in the short term. Maybe some voters just want to watch the world burn, and no amount of economic competence or policy success will change their minds. Maybe the information environment is now so poisoned by billionaire-owned platforms and hostile media that truth and reality simply can’t compete with rage and fantasy.

If that’s the case, what should centre-left governments do? Press on regardless with sensible social democratic reforms. Don’t listen to the critics shrieking that every progressive policy is electoral suicide. Deliver higher wages, better public services, serious climate action and decent treatment of immigrants, not because it will necessarily win elections but because it’s the right thing to do.

This sounds defeatist, and perhaps it is. But consider the alternative. If Labour continues down the path of triangulation and moderation, it will achieve nothing of substance whilst still losing power to Reform. If the PSOE abandons its progressive policies to chase phantom moderate voters, it will demoralise its base whilst still losing to the PP-Vox coalition. At least by governing according to their actual values, these parties can point to real achievements when they eventually lose power. At least they can say they tried to make their countries better.

We’d all prefer a clear strategy that guarantees victory over the far right, a clever bit of messaging or policy innovation that wins back lost voters and restores faith in democratic governance. But such strategies may not exist, at least not in the current information environment.

The forces arrayed against progressive or even just democratic governance, from hostile media to algorithmic manipulation to genuine voter nihilism, may be too powerful to overcome through conventional political means. If that’s true, then virtue really may have to be its own reward, because electoral reward looks increasingly unlikely regardless of what centre-left parties do.

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