Billionaires. It's not just a coincidence that so many countries are shifting far right. In any sane society, billionaires wouldn't exist while there are homeless people living on the street

Billionaires. They fund right-wring advocates, because tearing down establishment concepts like "rule of law", "industrial standards", "equality", and so forth is very useful to the wealthy.

• Rising costs / decline in incomes
• Failing infrastructure
• Decline in education
• Repression of history
• Brainwash through social media
• Nostalgia

Inequality and decades of painting anything left as evil communism.

Plus liberals would rather hand the reins to fascists than socialists.

Billionaires are pouring infinite money into right wing movements. They have no scruples and can pay anyone they need to get what they want done. The problem is capitalism because it creates extreme unelected power in an extremely small self interested minority. They also fund the power centers of the left to keep things from moving too far against them. Elections move on money far too much. In the end, you can’t have democracy and capitalism. Slowly capitalism always tries to swallow democracy.

Fear is the fuel.

Scared people are selfish, and selfishness is the only common denominator in all right wing politics. They don't have great visions of how to run a society. All they want is to stop someone else from having "their" piece of the imaginary pie.

It takes a lot more positive outlook to have the trust to build a society where people take care of someone they don't know directly.

The world is complex. Humans aren't equipped to deal with that level of complexity. Also the amount of information we are bombarded with is far beyond what we have evolved to deal with.

The right offers a simple solution.

There is one group, "the other", that is the root cause of all your problems. Get rid of them and everything will be swanky again.

This plays on one of our earliest and most ingrained senses of survival. As a social tribal species, we are very good at noticing things that are "like us" and "normal". "Different" and "new" was a potential threat. It literally kept our species alive against far more powerful predators and competition from like species back we we huddled together against the dark night.

Unfortunately we're just wired that way. It takes knowledge, wisdom and a healthy dose of curiosity/wonder to overcome that. Why do you think one of the first goals of the right is to dismantle education?

Honestly, i genuinely believe that social media algorithms are being manipulated by billionaires to push an agenda that saves them from tax or accountability.I am centre left and try to mould fb and insta feeds by specifically flagging content i dislike or dont agree with and it keeps coming back. Some of the insane 'stop the boats' shit i see here in the uk from creators and bots i have never heard of or interacted with in anyway is very, very suspicious.

It's a two-pronged attack.

One is russia. They have "chaos campaigns" going back decades just to sow discord and cause disruption in Europe. There's no better discord and disruption than threatening the EU as a whole.

The second is big American businesses and billionaires, because they hate how the EU presents a unified front against their bullshit and actually forces them to do things that chip into the bottom line.

People are dissatisfied with the economy and the far-right says, "This is happening because of immigrants," the left says, correctly, "This is happening because of billionaires," while liberals just say, "This isn't happening, everything is fine." The far right's narrative beats the liberal one because it at least acknowledges that people are struggling, even if the reasons and solutions it offers are totally wrong. Unless the economic conditions can be reversed, and the far-right are the only ones people see offering an alternative, the growth of the far-right is inevitable.

As for the left's (correct) narrative that the billionaires are the problem, it has the advantage of actually being true and making sense, but it has the disadvantage of threatening monied interests, which are going to try their best to subvert and silence it. Billionaires will generally prefer to promote the far-right because it doesn't threaten their interests.

However, the left's narrative is the only thing that can really counter the right's narrative. You can't keep insisting there's no problem as things get worse and worse and expect it to work. The left is weak right now and faces an uphill battle, but it's a battle where there's a possibility of winning, while the liberals are ultimately doomed.

Big money interfering. Social media was just the latest iteration, billionaires have been buying news outlets since we had news outlets.

Life is getting shit for everyone, but it's a lot simpler and more accessible to blame a handful of brown people for everything. When a man in a tie says the same shit you've been saying down the pub, it's too easy for people to fall into lockstep with them.

Tech bros? Especially Peter Thiel. I thought this is common knowledge already.

It started with the War on Terror of the 2000s destabilizing the Middle East and leading to an influx of refugees into Europe. White supremacists naturally freaked out when they saw more than one brown person, so this started an anti-immigrant sentiment which only continued to build throughout the years. Couple that with funding from rich white supremacists and propaganda from foreign agents like Steve Bannon, and here we are.

Same thing that happened to the US.

I see a lot of blame on “brainless idiots” or similar labels when discussing this, but I think that’s dismissive of issues many parties seems to be ignoring, or exacerbating, and that the alt-right is pouncing on.

Not everyone who voted Trump is an idiot, and doubling down on that thinking will make the issue worse.

Another is that the far-right parties tend to be “modern” and very social media savvy, whereas establishment centrist parties are out of touch, and campaign in archaic ways. And (from my impression on the outside) the more leftist European parties are prone to disunity and infighting. They don’t benefit from scandal and controversy like the far right does.

I think it's a combination of stupid people, misinformation, disinformation, and social media

Billionaires trying to distract people from their ever increasing wealth and the powerful people in positions of influence. Who owns the vast majority of media, at least in the global west?

It's been seen so many times through history if the status quo is challenged find a scape goat. Every possible example can be seen, different religions, different skin colour, different political beliefs, different gender, different abilities, different sexuality, etc. As soon as power/money is threatened a different focus of hatred is found.

"US tech giants allying with European far-right to strip back EU rules", Jan 14 2026

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying-with-european-far-right-to-strip-back-eu-rules

American billionaires

pieces of shit.

and elon musk.

but i repeat myself

Fear.

When people are afraid, they are less likely to help others, and want to protect their family and posessions.

Ever since Neoliberalism became dominat amongst mainstream "center" large parties in the West:

• Inequality has explode.
• Social Mobility has collapsed.
• The super-wealthy who are behind all of it because they paid the mainstream politicians to reduce their taxes, to have the State stop controlling, shapping or in any way participating in even the provision of life's essentials (most notably housing), to enact policies that support big asset owners all paid for with austerity for those who income mainly comes from their work and to remove any and all oversight over money making activities, have been heavilly funding political parties that blame the consequences for the many (especially those at the lowest end of the wealth ladder) of all that on foreigners ("immigrants", "foreign interference") as well as News companies to parrot such ideas.

I mean, the first two things could also have made the (non-center, non-mainstream) leftwing grow, but unlike the far-right the people who have most of the wealth aren't funding parties fighting for more equality or buying newspapers to have them spreading the idea that we should tax the rich more to pay for universal healthcare and high quality education for free or that the democratically elected state should have greater oversight over and participation in the provision of life's essentials such as housing, so the left only ever advances amongst the well-informed and politically aware, not amongst whose beliefs come tabloid headlines, privatelly owned "news" channels and loudmouth "influencers" who make money from ragebaiting and reinforcing those views.

There are a few little leftwing victories here and there (the recent win of Die Linke in Berlin's municipal elections, Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York and so on), but almost all of the money and pretty much all the propaganda that passes for News nowadays is pushing rightwings views so of which being pretty much Fascist views.

The west has been in the imperialist stage of capitalism for a bit more than a century. As was described back then, this is a parasitic, moribund stage of capitalism. It's parasitic in an obvious way, but what's most interesting is the moribund factor. Imperialism essentially becomes the dominant factor in a capitalist economy once it fully saturates the national economy, when monopoly bank and industrial capital begin consolidating into finance capital, and when these groups must expand outward, not just can.

The reason this is moribund is because it hollows out industrialization, seeking cheaper labor in the global south. It also seeks more specualtive than real returns, and sharpens the divide between rich and poor on an international scale, even if temporarily it reduces inequality in the national level (see FDR's New Deal, before imperialism began decaying and Reaganomics forced austerity to preserve superprofits). What's happening now is a sharp rightward turn in response to this system breaking down as the global south develops and gains independence from neocolonialism, giving them agency in how the world is run and tools at their disposal not purely linked to the west.

It's the protracted death of imperialism that is forcing many people into austerity in the west, which drives reaction. Everyone trying to blame it on foreigners and propaganda are missing the point, the actual material system the west runs on is dying away as has already been predicted before by analyzing the very mechanisms of capitalism.

Social media

Anti-immigration sentiment and Islamophobia have surged in Western and Central Europe, especially when many of the establishment parties have made moves to increase immigration, i.e. the Boriswave in the UK, enacted by the centre-right party that wooed voters just months earlier by promising to "Get Brexit Done."

Can't really elaborate on the rise of National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany, but here in the UK we've had grooming gang scandals that have led to several national inquiries, numerous protests focused around the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, and three riots in the last two years which were sparked by violent crimes.