Froth, Fury, and the Rise of the New Right

This may be the dawn of a new political age. A novel brand of right-wing politics is challenging the liberal orthodoxy of the last eight decades and changing the very craft of politics.

The political scientist Peter Mair’s brilliant 2006 essay in New Left Review, “Ruling the Void” (posthumously turned into a book in 2013), provided a powerful insight into political dynamics and was a useful predictor of future trends. Mair’s core claim was that a double “withdrawal” was underway at the time. Looking below, he saw citizens abandoning the arena of mass electoral politics, as evidenced by falling turnout during elections, collapsing party membership, partisan dealignment, and declining trust in institutions. Above, the political class was also withdrawing, he claimed. Parties had migrated out of civil society and had become a shadowy continuation of the state. Instead of acting as a bridge between the community and the state, politicians were becoming a homogeneous professional caste. Mair argued that elites were inclined to manage the void by depoliticizing governance—handing contested decisions to non-majoritarian bodies (central banks, courts, regulators) and, supremely, to the European Union.

Mair claimed that these forces were “mutually reinforcing.” He argued, “Citizens turn from being participants into spectators, while the elites gain more space in which to pursue their own shared interests.” His analysis drew on the logic of “cartel parties” that he had developed with the political scientist Richard Katz in 1995. Mair’s “void” was the dramatic name he gave to the empty space that opened up between a disengaged electorate and a self-referential governing class after political parties had stopped bridging the two.

For Mair, the European Union was the archetype of this development: a sphere deliberately constructed by national leaders to be insulated from popular contestation, a zone of policy without politics. His shorthand for the resulting model of democracy—“NGOs + judges” in place of mass participation—captured the beginning of technocratic drift. And when the euro crisis erupted in 2009 he went from being seen as a shrewd political scientist to a prophet. This paragraph captures his core insights:

Two outcomes of this mutual disengagement may briefly be noted. In the first place, the resulting gap has sometimes helped to fuel a populist mobilization usually, but not exclusively, on the right. In other words, partly as a result of this withdrawal, the political class has itself become an issue of contention in a large number of democratic polities. Second, and as noted above, the growing distance between citizens and their political leaders has also helped to fuel elite demands for more ‘non-majoritarian’ decision-making, and a greater role for non-partisan and non-political agencies—judges, regulatory bodies, central banks and international organizations.

Mair’s conclusion was blunt: The age of party democracy had passed. The dialectical relationship between technocracy and populism that he described so brilliantly became a toxic brew during the euro crisis—with macro-economic policies increasingly being taken outside the sphere of political contestation and put in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and lawyers. In debtor countries like Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, national sovereignty was emasculated and European Commission officials were installed as proto-viceroys. This spawned a populist response in the form of anti-system parties like Syriza and Golden Dawn, Podemos and Vox, the Five Star Movement and the Northern League. This dynamic has been examined further by scholars such as Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti in the 2021 book Technopopulism.¹

Over the years critics have questioned Mair’s thesis from both sides, casting doubt on the premise of continued disengagement from politics by both elites (supply) and citizens (demand).

In 2014 Jean-Claude Juncker, freshly elected president of the European Commission, promised elite re-engagement when he declared that he would lead a “political commission,” rather than a technocratic bureaucracy that blindly imposed rules and harmonized standards. This tendency sped up after the refugee crisis of 2015 and then Brexit, and again with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s second coming. It is true that Brussels has become more flexible in its approach to fiscal policy (relaxing its standards and taking on common debt with its “Next Generation Europe” plan, its COVID pandemic recovery package), more political in its approach to migration (moving toward ever-tighter borders and even refugee centers), and more involved in both defense (investing in materiel and supporting Ukraine) and the green transition (accelerating its policies—though it then watered them down as the politics changed). And within key member states such as Germany, there was a partial step away from the debt brake and the idea of constitutionalizing fiscal policy rather than deciding it through elected politicians (even if the way this was operationalized, by an incoming chancellor who had run on a promise not to do it, had all the trappings of an elite conspiracy). But most people would argue that these minor adjustments took place within a broader tide of the professionalization of politics.

On the demand side, after 2013, a number of highly contested, high-stakes votes garnered large levels of citizen involvement: Turnout for the Brexit referendum was at 72%, participation in the US elections of 2020 and 2024 was high, and the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament elections mobilized the highest number of voters since 1994. The void was not quiet. Alongside this electoral re-engagement, there were the culture wars, Black Lives Matter, and the Gaza protests, and politics bled into many areas of cultural life.

Some commentators treated these trends as a straightforward refutation of Mair’s thesis: See, the void is filled with fury. But the historian of political thought Anton Jäger makes a powerful attempt to save Mair’s framework in his recent book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Jäger reads the last century as a sequence of four phases.² “Mass politics”—the world of parties, unions, churches, mass membership—endured until the 1980s. “Post-politics” defined the 1990s and 2000s, with the Third Way, the “end of history” theory, and depoliticized technocratic management. “Anti-politics” marked the 2010s: Witness the first populist anti-establishment revolt. And now, “hyperpolitics”: A condition in which politics is everywhere—infusing food, music, sport, identity—and yet nothing seems to change, because the old infrastructure that converted passion into durable power (parties, unions, civic solidarity) has been hollowed out. The subtitle of Jäger’s book is the whole argument: “extreme politicization without political consequences.” Politicization has decoupled from organization. Affect without infrastructure.

Jäger’s move is to show that the hyperpolitical public can simultaneously be more politicized than Mair’s apathetic late-cartel citizen and just as organizationally hollowed-out as Mair described. Jäger essentially takes Mair’s “hollowing” idea as his premise: The disappearance of the mediating institutions is exactly what makes politicization curdle into something ambient, episodic, and light on real-world consequences. Jäger’s Hyperpolitics is like a sequel to “Ruling the Void.” He argues that it is only vibes that entered the empty space between citizens and the state. Voter turnout in elections can spike even while party membership keeps on collapsing. That is, for him, not a paradox—it is Hyperpolitics. And the void is still a void.

I think it’s fair to follow Jäger in characterizing much of the activism on the left as “Hyperpolitics” and a consequence-free politicization. Black Lives Matter and Reclaim Wall Street may be the paradigms of movements that flared and dissipated. The same is true on the right, for example with Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Her post-fascist lineage, the viral “Io sono Giorgia,” and the invocation of God-family-nation are all more vibe shifts than consequential change. The striking thing about her time in office is how little void-filling she has achieved. Her proposals for institutional transformation—the premierato (allowing for the direct election of the prime minister by voters) and the Nordio judicial reform (which critics claimed would weaken the independence of the judiciary)—have stalled in parliament and been rejected in a referendum in March. Meloni governs as a fiscally orthodox, NATO-aligned leader; she has substantially re-entered the depoliticized sphere rather than dismantling it.

Many aspects of Trump’s presidency have the same characteristics. In some ways his war in Iran is the archetype of the new Hyperpolitics—a lot of sound and fury that ultimately signifies nothing. For sure, it has brought unnecessary death and destruction, has disrupted energy markets, and has had other negative consequences for hundreds of millions of people around the world. But it has not radically changed the course of Iran’s nuclear program, its regime, or its relationship with its neighbors.

Yet the institutionalist worldview of both Mair and Jäger nevertheless risks missing a new shift in global politics that is epitomized by the rise of many forces on the so-called New Right. It is hard to deny that some of the New Right’s politics has crossed into consequence. Perhaps not as measured in terms of traditional party organization, but in the transformation of the public sphere itself. In my research on the New Right, I have come to believe that a new set of political movements might permanently fill Mair’s void with something other than traditional political parties: They could create a new kind of mass politics for the twenty-first century—with real consequences.

Viktor Orbán is probably the paradigm case. He has managed to combine an explicit doctrine (first outlined in his 2014 speech embracing a majoritarian illiberal democracy) with a wholesale rebuild of Hungarian politics (a new Fundamental Law, media capture, a gerrymandered electoral system, packed courts, a loyal oligarchy). What he created was the opposite of froth; it aimed to construct a durable order. True, he lost the elections of April 2026, but this was after a decade and a half in power and was only achieved by a counter-mobilization that channeled much of his own politics.

The case of PiS, the Law and Justice Party, in Poland is another example of the New Right transcending Hyperpolitics. PiS attempted to copy the Orbán agenda, by packing the Constitutional Tribunal with sympathetic judges, turning the national broadcaster TVP into an outlet of state propaganda, and launching judicial reforms that would have politicized the courts. The party’s proposals were eventually challenged at the ballot in 2023, and by a historically unprecedented turnout of more than 74%—but they were not without consequence. The captured institutions outlived the government that had built them, and the PiS-backed candidate Karol Nawrocki won the presidency in June 2025. He is now blocking Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s rule-of-law restoration with a record run of vetoes and referrals to the still-partisan Constitutional Tribunal. He has even convened a commission to draft an entirely new constitution. Brexit and the rise of the Reform Party in Britain are other examples of the New Right having real consequence without replicating the methods of the mass parties of the twentieth century.

I have spent much of the last two years talking to politicians, political strategists, and intellectuals who are affiliated with different political movements of the New Right in a dozen countries, mainly in Europe but also Israel and the US. Although many people see these movements as recycling old ideas in the name of a better yesterday, I think that there is something ultra-modern about the way the right has adapted to the contemporary world. I have identified four common features of their operations—all of which could spell an end to the Mairian void.

The first thing I discovered is that these parties see that void as the New Right’s natural habitat. Their favorite philosophers—Alain de Benoist, Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony—claim that liberalism, particularly in its post–Cold War globalist iteration, is hollowing out our societies and leaving the individual naked in the face of global challenges. A focus on individual freedom ultimately leads to the atomization of society because it ignores critical forms of collective identity that have little or no place within a liberal framework: family, tribe, nation. These thinkers claim that liberal principles, however well-intentioned and catchy at first, have gradually eroded the differences between countries, removed protections for national cultures, and emptied societies of meaning. The core critique of the New Right is that the deep interdependence of the world that liberalism has created has left people powerless in the face of the new crises of globalization.

Benedikt Kaiser, a young intellectual who works for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), argues in his 2023 book Konvergenz der Krisen (Convergence of the Crises), that these crises fundamentally damage the legitimacy of the traditional parties and provide an opening for new forces.³ Kaiser claims that “permanent crisis” is an inevitable consequence of the deep interconnections in a globalized society where capital flows freely. He cites Antonio Gramsci to argue that these disruptions will create an all-consuming crisis of authority for the ruling elite.⁴ Where Mair’s cartel parties worked to remove decisions from contestation, the New Right’s defining move is to reconnect every crisis to a single charge—the elite acts not for you but for banks, corporations, and global elites, and the state has lost control. The New Right is not entering a vacuum; it is the entrepreneur of the void that Mair described, and it is converting depoliticization into the raw material of mobilization.

The archetype of this is the AfD. Founded by academics in economics, it began in 2013 as a Eurosceptic “professor’s party,” established to challenge Chancellor Angela Merkel’s repeated insistence that there was “no alternative” to Germany’s membership of the eurozone or to bailing out Greece. But with the refugee crisis of 2015, the party shifted to an anti-immigrant message. During the COVID pandemic, it adopted an anti-vax stance. And it led a greenlash in 2018, when the Green Party was part of a governing coalition.

The second dimension to the New Right is class politics. Mair’s analysis is strangely blind to distributional politics, and yet the New Right parties have identified working class voters as the key to their developing an electoral base. Mair treated voter disengagement as apathy; the New Right sees it as a sign of an available electorate. The void didn’t stay empty on the working-class side: It has become the most fertile ground of all. “Class is the basis of British politics,” wrote the Oxford professor Peter Pulzer in the 1960s, “all else is embellishment and detail.”⁵ But by 2024 his statement no longer applied to the parties that traditionally dominated British politics.

According to the professor of politics John Curtice, Labour and the Conservatives now have a similar class profile. The exception is Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which is the most popular among groups with the lowest level of education and class. According to a 2025 poll by YouGov, “Labour’s losses to Reform UK are half as likely to hold a degree than those sticking with Labour (25% vs 51%).” The pattern is even more dramatic in other countries. In Germany, working-class support for the social democrats dropped from 48% in 1998 to 12% in 2025.⁶ Meanwhile, the AfD won 38% of working-class votes in the 2025 election (up 17 points since 2021), compared with 21% among the overall electorate.⁷ In the first round of the 2024 snap parliamentary election in France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National secured 59% of the blue-collar worker’s vote, while the far left, the Socialist Party, the right-wing Les Républicains and its allies, and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists only scraped 41% combined.⁸ And in the US in 2024, Trump won 66% of white working-class votes, compared with a paltry 32% for Vice President Kamala Harris.⁹

The New Right seems to have managed to re-politicize the most antipolitical part of the electorate, but not in the institutionalized way that Mair favors: The leader, not the party, channels the people directly. It may well be that many of the New Right figureheads claiming to represent the working class—such as Trump and Farage—in practice only intervene in distributional conflicts to the benefit of elites, but so far this has not undermined their claims. And parties such as PiS and Orbán’s Fidesz can show how they have shifted support to these key constituencies (including by making extravagant promises of fiscal transfers in the run-up to elections).

A silent transition in the role of these parties may also be under way at the level of policy: from garnering anti-political protest votes toward becoming movements that translate the preferences of some social groups into a new politics. The New Right’s policy agenda aims to win over working-class voters who feel that they are losing their status by pushing back against globalization. It has four main pillars: immigration, trade, foreign policy, and the reinvention of the state. These are a joined-up ideological project of transformation organized around the central goal of supposedly restoring a traditionalist version of national culture to the heart of civic life. Not culture as one topic among many, but as the overriding priority cutting through all others.

To counteract the allegedly centrifugal forces of liberalism and wokeness, the New Right has specifically focused on policies designed to rebuild a nationalist cultural identity centered on its conservative interpretation of Judeo-Christian values. Writing about Britain, Curtice and his co-authors have put the issue this way:

Support for Reform is not simply an expression of ‘protest.’ Although those who back the party are more likely than voters in general to be struggling with the cost of living, to be concerned about the health service, and to be unhappy about how the country is being governed, they are distinguished above all by having a socially conservative outlook that is reflected, inter alia, in their attitudes towards immigration, equalities policies, and welfare spending, and is underpinned by a demographic profile that is dominated by older voters and those who have not been to university.¹⁰

But the main way that the New Right is filling the void is through a radically different way of doing politics. One of the reasons Mair and Jäger thought that the New Right’s rise would have no consequence is because they were focused on the structure and role of traditional political parties—but the New Right has managed to fill the void by reinventing politics. Its biggest opportunity comes from the fragmentation of the public sphere and, related, the disempowerment of the gatekeepers of the mainstream media. The rise of new digital platforms, especially social media, has offered its politicians and commentators new ways of shaping popular narratives—and of organizing themselves.

Once the information ecosystem begins to splinter, politics becomes a battle over who controls meaning itself. Citing the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the New Right intellectual Rod Dreher has argued that the present moment is one of “liquid modernity,” in which events are accelerating so fast that institutions and practices do not have the time to stabilize before shifting again. In such a world, people cease to believe that there is a such thing as absolute, knowable truth, and instead begin to rely on their emotions or their individual subjectivity to determine what they accept to be true. The focus of liberal politics on reason, objective facts, and expertise puts it at a structural disadvantage in the new attention economy.

In his recent book The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes argues that people’s attention is a finite resource, commodified and harvested at scale.¹¹ He likens attention today to labor during the industrial revolution. Once highly specialized and hard to replace, labor became fungible and was commodified under mechanized production. Attention today is undergoing the same transformation, sliced up into tradeable units. Because content that provokes strong emotion—outrage, fear, tribal loyalty—earns the widest reach, the New Right frequently outcompetes mainstream parties for voters’ attention. Subjects like climate change or transgender rights cease to be scientific or policy questions and become markers of identity, drawn along tribal lines. The media that once sustained liberalism is thus ceding ground to an information space that empowers its challengers. Farage once told me, “I wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the internet.”¹² The same holds for many New Right politicians. A senior figure in the Polish party Konfederacja explained to me this year that the new media was central to his party’s success: Given PiS’s grip on public broadcasting, he explained, his camp was shut out of the mainstream and had to seek alternative platforms on social media.

Mair, an institutionalist to the end, mourned the passing of mass-party democracy. He was measuring the decline of the party-as-institution with the tools of party scholarship, and so he could not fully see that the void would be filled not by a replacement institution but by a post-institutional form: networked, affective, leader-centric, and transnational. The New Right is precisely this hyper-modern form that can fill the fragmented public sphere.

Mair was right that a governing class that withdraws into the protected sphere of the state has lost the cognitive equipment to read its challengers. He explained why the mainstream would be intellectually disarmed. But he was writing at a time when George W. Bush was in the White House and Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street, when China’s GDP market exchange rate was about 20% the size of the US’s, and when Musk was still a kind of aftershave. Most important, he was writing before the launch of the iPhone, before Facebook, before the financial crisis, before COVID, before Russia’s various wars with its neighbors—and, of course, before the rise of AI.

But the New Right has evolved to make the algorithmic information space—with a fragmented public sphere, the domination of emotion over fact, the social media as the main domain of political action—into its native environment. The New Right is not merely using digital media; it is the political formation best adapted to a world where politicization is ambient and detached from organization. It fights on the terrain where everyone is already maximally engaged and minimally organized. That is why—as one speaker explained to me at the National Conservatism Conference in 2025—“smashing things is the point.” In the post-Mair political moment, the gesture of rupture is a way of selling the product, but the New Right can have durable consequences where it captures the state. Look at Orbán’s party-state, the NatCon network, the Budapest-London-Warsaw-Washington conference circuit, the think-tanks, and the transnational coordination that have emerged in recent years.

On this reading the New Right is the first formation to solve the Hyperpolitics problem, and that is precisely why it is winning. The revolution is not only about what laws pass but about what politics itself is becoming and how the mainstream parties are forced to practice it when faced with the New Right. This is the most Mairian answer of all: The New Right is completing the destruction of party democracy that the cartel parties began, replacing it not with a new set of mass parties but with an infrastructure for permanent affective mobilization and using that to rewrite the political rules. Rather than classical parties or froth, there are now a new set of institutions that inhabited the void but have also set themselves up to exploit it through their control of the attention economy.

What, if anything, do progressives have to offer in response? Too often, they have retreated into the traps of identity Hyperpolitics and technocratic deliverism. Their hope is also that the New Right will be defeated by its internal contradictions. For example, it relies on exploiting deflated expectations and cynicism about traditional politics even as it tries to rouse popular passions to re-enchant the public. These two impulses can conflict with each other, such as when Trump gains popularity through media tirades against immigration but loses it when he unleashes a street-level force to implement these policies.

Although it is clear that the New Right’s agenda roils with internal tensions, I think the parties of the left and the center cannot afford to wait for it to implode. If they are to compete in this new political age, they must stake out ground where they have genuine standing, and they must honestly address people’s fears around demographic change and relative economic decline. This is critical to developing a governing philosophy that does not leave working-class voters behind. Most important, they must build a new collective identity as emotionally resonant as the New Right’s appeal to nation, community, and family. If the New Right has demonstrated that Mair’s void can indeed be filled, today’s most urgent political question is whether those who reject its answers can fill that void with convincing arguments of their own.

Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics when the Rules Fail.

1. Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford, 2021; online ed., Oxford Academic, March 18, 2021). ↩︎
2. Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences (Verso Books, 2026). ↩︎
3. Benedikt Kaiser,  Die Konvergenz der Krisen: Theorie und Praxis in Bewegung 2017–2023 (Jungeuropa Verlag, 2023). ↩︎
4. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Hegemony,” Historical‑Critical Dictionary of Marxism: A Selection, eds. Wolfgang Fritz Haug et al., vol. 1 (Brill, 2023)  340. ↩︎
5. Peter Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections: Parties and Voting in Great Britain (Praeger, 1967). ↩︎
6. Richard Stöss and Gero Neugebauer, “Die SPD und die Bundestagswahl 1998: Ursachen und Risiken eines historischen Wahlsiegs unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Verhältnisse in Ostdeutschland, ” Arbeitshefte aus dem Otto-Stammer-Zentrum, n. 2 (FB Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, 1999), https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/fub188/18625/arbeitshefte2.pdf. Lukas Graw et al, “Bundestagswahl: Warum immer weniger Arbeiter SPD wählen, sondern lieber AfD, ”BR Nachrichten, February 25, 2025, https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/bundestagswahl-warum-immer-weniger-arbeiter-spd-waehlen-sondern-lieber-afd,UdukQui. ↩︎
7. “AfD: Bundestagswahl 23. Februar 2025,” tagesschau.de, ARD/infratest dimap, https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/umfrage-afd.shtml. ↩︎
8. Luc Rouban, “Enquête électorale : une victoire de la gauche aux législatives dans une France de droite,” Le Monde, 31 August, 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/08/31/enquete-electorale-une-victoire-de-la-gauche-aux-legislatives-dans-une-france-de-droite_6300332_823448.html. ↩︎
9. John J. Dilulio, Jr., “The 4 Working-Class Votes,” Brookings Institution, December 2, 2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-4-working-class-votes/. ↩︎
10. John Curtice, Georgie Morton, and Jerome Swan, “Who Supports Reform?” British Social Attitudes: The 43rd Report, eds. E. Clery, J. Curtice, and C. Jessop (National Centre for Social Research, 2026), https://natcen.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2026-06/bsa-43-%7C-who-supports-reform%3F-1932.pdf. ↩︎
11. Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025). ↩︎
12. Conversation with Nigel Farage, London, 2014. ↩︎