The New Right Did Not Arrive by Accident

The resurgence of right-wing politics across Latin America and Europe is often described as a sudden swing of the pendulum—a spasm of voter anger, a culture-war contagion imported from the internet. None of these explanations is sufficient. What we are witnessing is not an aberration but the predictable outcome of long-running economic failures, institutional exhaustion, and a digital political economy that rewards outrage while hollowing out democratic consensus.

From Buenos Aires to Berlin, the new right thrives on a shared promise: order against chaos, sovereignty against distant elites, and “common sense” against what is caricatured as liberal or progressive excess. Yet the similarities conceal crucial differences rooted in history. To respond intelligently, democracies must understand both what these movements share—and why they differ.

Latin America: revolt after the promise

In Latin America, the new right is the child of disappointment. The commodity boom of the early 2000s funded ambitious redistributive programmes under left-leaning governments—the so-called pink tide. Millions were lifted out of poverty. But the underlying economic structure did not change. When commodity prices fell, growth stalled, inflation returned, and states reverted to austerity. The social contract frayed.

Corruption scandals—from Odebrecht to Petrobras—cut across ideological lines but proved politically fatal to the left, which had claimed ethical authority through postcolonial and redistributive politics. Party systems fractured. Voters no longer trusted institutions to translate grievance into policy. Into this vacuum stepped figures who promised rupture from the establishment rather than repair.

Jair Bolsonaro bypassed Brazil’s media and party structures through encrypted messaging networks, presenting himself as the cure for corruption, crime and moral decay. In Argentina, Javier Milei rode hyperinflation and middle-class panic with a quasi-messianic pledge to incinerate the “political caste” and rebuild the economy through radical libertarianism. In Chile, long seen as a model liberal democracy, José Antonio Kast capitalised on insecurity and backlash against constitutional reform, offering authoritarian certainty as an antidote to democratic fatigue.

Crime has been decisive. Where states appeared incapable of guaranteeing basic security, voters accepted the erosion of civil liberties in exchange for order. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele showed how punitive security politics could deliver overwhelming popularity while dismantling judicial independence. The lesson travelled quickly.

Latin America’s rightward turn, then, is not an ideological conversion but a politics of despair: a revolt against economic stagnation, corruption and fear, channelled through leaders who personalise power and promise efficiency without restraint.

Europe: the exhaustion of consensus

Europe’s right-wing surge is rooted in a different failure. It is not primarily the collapse of economic redistribution, but the exhaustion of consensus politics. For decades, European integration insulated economic policy from democratic contestation. The euro, fiscal rules and technocratic governance narrowed the spectrum of political choice even as inequality widened and public services strained.

The financial crisis of 2008, followed by austerity, migration pressures and geopolitical instability, exposed the fragility of this settlement. Voters were told there was no alternative. The new right answered by insisting there was nothing but alternatives.

In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland evolved from Eurosceptic economics into cultural nationalism, feeding on migration anxieties and eastern disaffection. In Spain, Vox transformed territorial conflict and gender politics into a nationalist revival. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán refined a model of “illiberal democracy”, hollowing out institutions while remaining formally inside the European Union. These movements differ in register and policy, but they share a rejection of supranational constraint and liberal norms perceived as imposed rather than chosen.

Where Latin America’s right feeds on insecurity and economic collapse, Europe’s feeds on perceived loss of sovereignty, cultural coherence and democratic voice. Both arise from systems that failed to adapt.

Africa: sovereignty without delivery

Africa offers a third, revealing variation. Here, right-wing populism often does not present itself as “right-wing” at all. It appears instead as sovereignty politics without institutional delivery: leaders who invoke anti-imperial rhetoric while centralising power, hollowing out accountability and governing through patronage and securitisation.

Across parts of the continent, liberation movements that once embodied popular legitimacy have ossified into dominant parties, presiding over high inequality, youth unemployment and infrastructural decay. As democratic institutions weaken, politics increasingly pivots around strongman politics, security forces and digital propaganda. Elections persist, but alternation becomes fragile.

At the same time, Africa has become a laboratory for the convergence of extractive capital, data infrastructure and security governance. From surveillance technologies to resource concessions, political authority is often brokered through opaque deals that bypass public scrutiny. The result is not classical authoritarianism but a hybrid order: formally democratic, substantively oligarchic, and deeply vulnerable to the same forces reshaping politics elsewhere.

The digital accelerant

What links Latin America, Europe and Africa is not ideology but infrastructure. Politics now flows through platforms designed to maximise engagement, not deliberation. Anger outruns nuance; conspiracy outpaces correction. In Brazil, encrypted messaging normalised misinformation as political currency. In Europe, algorithmic amplification has carried fringe actors into the mainstream. Across Africa, social media has become a substitute for weakened civic institutions.

Political legitimacy no longer depends on mediation by parties, unions or churches but on virality. Charismatic leaders speak directly to followers, cultivating loyalty rather than accountability. Democracy becomes performative, plebiscitary and brittle.

These platforms are not neutral arenas. Their business models reward polarisation, and their governance choices—about moderation, verification and visibility—have political consequences. The result is not coordinated propaganda but a structural bias towards extremity.

Power without accountability

The role of tech billionaires is often overstated or caricatured. There is no evidence of a single, coordinated plot to install right-wing governments across continents. But it is equally mistaken to treat their influence as incidental.

Platform ownership confers agenda-setting power. Decisions about algorithms, content moderation and amplification shape who is heard and who is marginalised. When platform owners publicly endorse or amplify far-right figures, or weaken safeguards against disinformation, they tilt the political terrain even without direct financial intervention.

At the same time, the boundary between civilian technology and the security state has narrowed. Data analytics, cloud infrastructure and surveillance tools increasingly shape policing, borders and military operations—domains naturally aligned with coercive power rather than democratic restraint.

Add to this the long legacy of fossil-fuel disinformation—dating back to the 1980s, when industry actors moved to undermine climate science rather than confront it—and a pattern emerges. Expertise is discredited, regulation delegitimised, and truth treated as negotiable. This is not conspiracy but concentration of power in monopolies. Where in the past it was corporations that were capitalist monopolies now it is techno billionaires who are instituting techno feudalism. When economic, communicative and ideological power converge in few individuals or institutions, democracy weakens. What emerges is not fascism, but something colder and timeless: a techno-oligarchic order that governs without persuasion.

What this moment demands

The rise of the new right is not a pathology to be cured by moral outrage. It is a diagnosis. It shows what happens when economies generate insecurity, institutions lose credibility and digital systems reward extremity.

Countering it requires more than fact-checking or denunciation. It demands credible economic policy that addresses inequality and inflation; security strategies consistent with human rights; transparency in political finance and lobbying; and platform regulation that prioritises civic integrity over engagement metrics.

Above all, it requires humility from liberal and left traditions. Voters turning to the new right are not irrational. They are responding to real failures. Until those failures are confronted, strongmen, libertarians and nationalists will continue to present themselves as the only adults in a room democracy allowed to decay.

The new right did not come out of nowhere.

It arrived on time.