As the far right gains ground across Europe, the US and Latin America, its politics are increasingly recognisable and transcend borders. Leaders everywhere follow a familiar playbook, winning votes through nationalism, social conservatism, anti-immigrant sentiment and promises to restore some lost national past. But does this model work in Africa?
openDemocracy spoke with three experts on African politics – a journalist who has long investigated the influence of the US Christian right across the continent and two political researchers who focus on the far right. While all three acknowledge deep-rooted reactionary politics on the continent, they resist the idea of applying a blanket “far right” label.
The terminology itself presents a problem, says investigative reporter Lydia Namubiru, openDemocracy’s former Africa editor. “One finds that kind of politics within African contexts, but calling it ‘far right’ is a misnomer because those positions are often not that far from mainstream political thought and practice,” she explains.
In her home country of Uganda, for example, Parliament’s speaker championed a 2023 anti-homosexuality law that includes the death penalty for some offences. Similar dynamics can be seen in Nigeria, where former president Goodluck Jonathan signed a law against same-sex marriage ahead of the 2015 election, and South Africa, where Namubiru notes that “every major political party in the country has moved right on immigration, if it already wasn’t there”.
Jason Love, a PhD fellow at Denmark’s Roskilde University researching authoritarian populism and the global right in the Global South, agrees that applying Western frameworks to African politics can obscure more than it reveals. “Nationalism, anti-colonialism, religion, ethnicity, class and sovereignty have different historical meanings, which in many cases completely befuddle this binary spectrum,” he says. “Someone can be nationalist, socially conservative and authoritarian while simultaneously supporting state ownership, redistribution and anti-capitalist policies.”
But Nigerian political sociologist Sa’eed Husaini, a fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development in Nigeria, warns against dismissing Western frameworks entirely. Avoiding global categories can create “a blind spot” that “removes Africa from global history” and leads observers to treat developments such as ethno-nationalism as peculiarly African rather than connected to wider processes including debt crises, austerity and structural adjustment.
So if there is no single African equivalent of the far right seen in much of the world, how do reactionary politics manifest across the continent? While local contexts produce varying combinations of xenophobia, religious conservatism, anti-LGBTQ politics and ethnic majoritarianism, Husaini notes that exclusionary movements struggle to dominate politics in many African countries.
Instead, the nations’ diversity often forces parties to form cross-ethnic or cross-religious coalitions to wield national power, creating governments such as those led by William Ruto in Kenya and Bola Tinubu in Nigeria, which are “much further right than the independence period, but perhaps not as far right as the 1970s and 80s military regimes”, Husaini explains. Such administrations often combine some ethno-religious pluralism with neoliberal economics, conservative cultural politics and pragmatic foreign policy that espouse anti-Western rhetoric while cooperating with Western powers.
For Namubiru, one common feature of these governments is what she calls “opportunistic political homophobia”: when “a political actor or government in crisis fans prevailing – but not politically focused – anti-LGBTIQ sentiments in an attempt to either distract the population from the crisis or make themself untouchable, lest their adversaries be accused of being backed by homosexuals”. Namubiru has seen versions of this dynamic play out in Uganda, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, with embattled governments intensifying anti-LGBTQ policies or enforcement.
In South Africa, Namubiru says, where homophobia is less prevalent, politicians use the same playbook but with a different target: migrants. She points to recent xenophobic protests, explaining that factions of the ruling party “that have been cut off by Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency are using the streets, in a populist manner, to renegotiate power”.
Love agrees that xenophobia and Afrophobia are particularly significant in South Africa, but warns against reading this through the lens of Europe’s anti-immigrant politics, noting that South African xenophobia has developed through nearly three decades of post-apartheid nation-building, inequality and political contestation, and is overwhelmingly directed at other Africans rather than white South Africans or migrants from Europe and North America. “This tells us the historical and contemporary intersection has come to affect how it manifests now,” Love says.
Husaini, meanwhile, believes African reactionary politics precede the current global far-right moment. He points to the “reactionary counter-revolution” that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in response to the more inclusionary, pan-African independence movements that peaked between the mid-1950s and 1970s, which were often socialist in nature and sought to “unite the continent against Western imperialism”.
“As we know, these aspirations were quickly curtailed as domestic and regional opposition – often backed by former colonial powers and relying on assassinations and coups, in the cases of Congo and Ghana – brought radically exclusionary, ethno-nationalist, and anti-leftist regimes to power,” Husaini explains.
“Regimes such as Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Rwanda’s Juvénal Habyarimana are more frequently remembered as kleptocratic Western puppet regimes, and are, as such, treated as non-ideological rather than explicitly right-wing. This, I think, is a mistake,” he adds, arguing that such regimes rolled back earlier progressive ambitions through “what we would elsewhere recognise quite clearly as hallmarks of right-wing regimes”: ethnicising power, scapegoating minorities and privatising or personalising state resources.
Anti-Western doesn’t mean left-wing
Africa’s independence movements fused anti-colonialism with the very idea of the post-colonial nation. The result, Husaini says, is that “some form of anti-Western rhetoric is embraced by nearly all parties across the ideological spectrum” – enabling conservative and authoritarian governments to speak the language of anti-imperialism while pursuing exclusionary politics.
Husaini points to the work of Nigerien political scientist Rahmane Idrissa, who argues that outside observers can mistake the anti-imperialist rhetoric of military regimes in the Sahel for evidence of progressive politics, without paying enough attention to how those governments treat their own populations.
Namubiru makes the same point more starkly. African leaders who embrace the global neoliberal agenda established by the 1944 Bretton Woods conference – which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and pegged major currencies to the US dollar – “still self-identify as ‘anti-imperialist’, ‘anti-Western’ champions of native ‘sovereignty’ before domestic voters, even as they offshore the proceeds of their corruption to Western banks or send their descendants to settle in the UK, US or Canada”.
Newer political actors, including military governments and populist movements, often draw on the same vocabulary. “This rhetoric is brittle and contradictory but politically necessary in many African contexts,” Namubiru explains. Being anti-Western, economically interventionist or rhetorically anti-capitalist cannot by itself tell us where a political movement sits – which, Love says, is why Africa exposes the limits of a simple left-right spectrum.
A global right, but not simply a Western export
While the Western far-right movement may not translate directly into African politics, it “definitely has ambitions for global influence”, Namubiru says. Its proponents are “lending its organising expertise, funding and connections to actors [in African nations] who are amenable to their goal” – particularly around anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender politics.
However, Namubiru, Love and Husaini all caution against viewing African political actors as passive targets. “It would be wrong to describe African actors simply as passive recipients of American or European conservatism,” Love says. “Rather, they are an active shaper of what we can call ‘global right processes.’”
Indeed, African conservatives increasingly participate in international gatherings like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual event organised by the American Conservative Union, and build direct relationships with European and American conservative movements. These networks allow for the exchange of ideas about migration, gender and sovereignty, which can then be translated into local political languages and attached to local grievances. “This is why I would describe the relationship as transnational ideological exchange rather than simple Western exportation,” Love argues.
Unlike in the West, across much of Africa these networks operate not through formal far-right parties, but through evangelical and Pentecostal churches, online communities and other social movements, says Husaini. This may explain how recognisably far-right ideas circulate widely even when an African far right is difficult to identify electorally. The exception, Husaini argues, is South Africa, where there is a more direct bridge between parts of the American far right and white South African ethno-nationalist groups.
Love already sees signs of a more recognisable political right emerging – with contemporary far-right ideas gaining traction among parts of the growing urban male intelligentsia, social movements and online groups, even if their direct influence on national politics is limited outside South Africa. Yet he remains cautious about calling it a coherent far right, pointing out that an anti-immigrant movement in South Africa, an evangelical anti-LGBTQ campaign in Uganda and an ethno-nationalist movement in Nigeria should not automatically be lumped together simply because each shares characteristics with the European far right.
The real question, Love says, is what happens if these distinct strands begin to come together. “If these dividing lines start to converge in a more sustained manner and if formations become increasingly emboldened and widespread, we could see the rise of a unique African ‘far right’, which would play a far greater role in the conception of the global right.”
Has that moment arrived? For Husaini, the answer is cautious: “Not yet.”
