Public Seminar: "The Far Right's Strategic Alliances with Finance"

Speaker: Dr Inga Rademacher (Co-Director of CITYPERC and Senior Lecturer at City St Georges, University of London)

The contemporary discussion on far-right economic policies have insisted that the far-right policy project is above all erratic. The Guardian describes Giorgia Meloni as a “shapeshifter”.  BBC News calls the AfD “inconsistent” and Adam Tooze warns we should not fall into the trap of “sane washing” Trump’s economic policy programme.

Inga’s presentation will delve into this discussion arguing that our focus on confusion has led us to miss critical insights into the actual policy formation of the far right. Focusing on financial policies, she argues that just because our concepts of good or bad financial policy do not neatly fit the far-right agenda does not mean that we cannot discern a distinct policy project of the far right.

Inga stresses that there is a common denominator that does unite far-right financial policy and that is a willingness to revive economic growth through alternative policy measures. More specifically, leaders of those parties seek an aggressive (state-led) rent extraction from (domestic or international) economic spheres to end the period of persistently low economic growth since the Global Financial Crisis. This finding nicely chimes with Karl Polanyi’s insight that the far-right project is one of reviving economic growth to save capitalism—at the expense of democratic elements of societal organisation.

In his research on the 1920s’ and 1930s’ fascism Giovanni Arrighi found that additional rent extraction in times of low economic growth will be a function of the economy’s position within the global financial system. Thus, choosing paths to growth will depend on leaders’ sense where in the economy monetizable resources sit as well as which institutional capacities of the state can be mobilised.

This might explain the considerable differences in far-right projects: Trump and Farage demand the full liberalisation of financial markets to enable asset managers and private equity to continue extracting rents from (European) markets.

Continental European far-right leaders, however, largely intend to shield domestic financial markets from this extraction: Southern European far-right leaders (including Le Pen and Meloni) intend to revive sovereign debt financing and use state-led credit to revive manufacturing while shielding their financial markets from takeovers and international financial influence. The German AfD and the Austrians FPO, however, want to build a strong domestic capital market shielded from outside financial actors.