Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the special guest of the TV show Porta A Porta. On the screen behind him : Matteo Renzi. Vandeville Eric/Press Association. All rights reserved. The debate on the hard right started by Edmund Fawcett and taken up by Anthony Barnett and Jan Zielonka and others deals with central issues from a strategic point of view.
Fawcett captures the structural nature of the changes under way in western political systems. The rise of what he calls the hard right is not a temporary hiccup but a deep-rooted tendency that calls into question the pillars of liberal democracy.
If the direction of this development (the destruction of the liberal order) is evident, the nature of this movement is more complex and varied and probably transcends the traditional right-left dichotomy. There is certainly a strong hard right component in this anti-liberal trend but it is nevertheless not the only one. Left-wing forces like SYRIZA, Podemos and Mélenchon’s party in France, and other parties that are not classifiable on the left-right spectrum, such as the Five Star Movement in Italy, share the hard right’s desire to bend the liberal order.
