How to Beat the Far Right: Lessons From History

From Poland and Hungary to Brazil and the US, journalist Daniel Trilling dives into what we can learn about fighting fascism in his new book, 'If We Tolerate This.'

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on April 10, 2026, in Szekesfehervar, Hungary. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The ideas of the far right, once confined to the margins of politics, have gone mainstream. A decade ago, it was just about possible to think that the right-wing nationalism sweeping through liberal democracies around the world might subside of its own accord. Whatever discontents it profited from could, perhaps, be dealt with or absorbed back into mainstream politics. Or perhaps its figureheads would show themselves to be so incompetent at governing that voters wouldn’t give them a second chance. That is clearly not the case.

As the political analyst Mark Leonard argues in a recent study, this is a movement that has attuned itself to the times we live in. In the West, each new shock, from the rising costs of energy and food to increasing global conflict, falls on the shoulders of communities whose resilience has been hollowed out by an economic system in which inequality has been allowed to soar and the public good disdained. Incumbent elites are forced into defending the existing, crumbling order, even though many of them privately admit it isn’t working.

Yet nowhere have right-wing nationalists gained the support of an overwhelming majority – or in many cases, even a majority at all. So where does that leave us?

The good news is that people all over the world have been grappling with this question for some years now. Nobody has a complete answer, but there are several lessons to draw from what’s been tried, what worked, and what didn’t:

Turn The Far Right’s Strengths Into Its Weaknesses

Years of writing about this subject have taught me that there is no carefully worked-out master plan behind the rise of far-right politics. Its movements are riven with contradictions – for instance, between the economic aspirations of many of their supporters and the financial interests of party backers. Populist demagogues are adept at colonizing our attention in an algorithmically distorted media landscape, but they are often just making it up as they go along. What’s more, in the way they define the ‘people’ and the ‘elites,’ it is clear there are millions of us who fall outside either category.

In each of these cases, the far right’s strong points can be turned back against it. The story I always turn to when I’m thinking about this comes from Poland. In October 2020, the constitutional court – which the far-right Law and Justice government had stuffed with friendly judges – tightened already strict abortion laws. In effect, it made abortion illegal even when the fetus had a severe and permanent disability or an incurable and life-threatening disease.

For years, Law and Justice’s opponents had criticized its purging of independent minds in Poland’s judiciary, but the government had always been able to brush this off as an elite concern. Law and Justice thought its Catholic conservatism was what ‘the people’ wanted. Only in this case, it turned out they didn’t. Hundreds of thousands of protesters, led by the women whose bodily freedoms were affected by the new law, came out into the streets to protest against the government. The protests, which united under the name ‘women’s strike,’ demanded abortion rights, the restoration of independent courts, and an end to the Church’s influence on politics and education.

Abortion rights protesters rally in Warsaw in 2023. Photo by Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images

The government tried to ignore the protests, then it tried to suppress them. The organizers were threatened with prosecution, while far-right militias supportive of the government attacked protesters and dragged women who held sit-ins in churches out onto the street. But the protests kept going, and it became harder to deny they were a mass movement, rooted in people’s everyday concerns as well as moral principle: a woman’s right to choose is both.

This message was carried further by protest slogans that expressed both anger at this attempt to restrict women’s rights, and mockery of the politicians who claimed to speak for Polish women: “My body is not a coffin”; “The government is not a pregnancy, it can be removed”; “The cat can stay” – a reference to the Law and Justice leader’s pet cat – “the government get the fuck out.” The energy mobilized by these protests fed into a record high turnout, particularly among young people, at the general election of 2023 that saw Law and Justice kicked out of office.

This isn’t a template to copy: rather, it’s a striking example of where people linked a whole set of abstract issues to one of immediate, material concern. An issue, in fact, that goes right to the heart of right-wing nationalism itself: women’s bodies, which it treats as vessels for national renewal. What other issues are out there that allow us to call the far right’s bluff, and break its monopoly of attention?

The far right fills a vacuum: an absence of challenge to racist and divisive arguments; the holes in the social fabric left by years of failed economic policies; a sense that there’s no better option. It is adept at summoning the emotions and making its arguments sound like common sense. Its opponents need to do that too.

Beware of Victories, and Shake Off Defeats

A few years ago, for his book If We Burn, the journalist Vincent Bevins traveled the world to talk to people who had taken part in the mass protest movements of the 2010s. Speaking to people in Brazil, Chile, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Hong Kong, and South Korea, he wanted to find out why, in so many places where people had taken to the streets in support of more freedom, or a fairer distribution of wealth, the ultimate outcome had been forms of authoritarian and right-wing reaction. Was there anything, he asked former activists, you’d say to a young person fighting for change in the world right now?

Don’t give up, was one frequent piece of advice. But so was something equally important: think about what comes next. Again and again, the former activists told Bevins they had been naive in thinking that just because they were in the right, things would turn out for the best. Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian blogger who took part in the 2011 Tahrir Square protests that brought down the regime of Hosni Mubarak, recalled the final battle scene from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ when the monstrous villain Sauron is defeated once and for all. Why, Salem now wonders, did they think the Arab Spring would be like the movies? Why didn’t they have a plan for what came next? As two Brazilians who took part in the mass protests in their country in 2013 told Bevins, “There is no such thing as a political vacuum.” Either you fill the gap, or someone else will come along and do it for you. (In Brazil, as we now know, that someone was Jair Bolsonaro.) In April 2026, Hungarians rightly celebrated the downfall of Viktor Orbán, Europe’s longest-serving far-right populist. But for Hungary, the task of repairing the country’s damaged institutions – not to mention dealing with the economic discontent that helped do for Orbán – has only just begun.

Yet defeat isn’t the end, either. In 2025, people who had campaigned to kick Trump out of power in 2020 had to pick themselves up and start again. Although Trump began his second term in far more menacing form, the opposition is finding ways to turn this against him. The anti-ICE protests in Minnesota at the turn of the year, for instance, were partly the result of years of patient organizing. Sarah Jaffe, a journalist and author who covers workers’ rights, points out that these efforts came on the back of existing campaigns for causes like better working conditions at the local Amazon distribution center, tenants’ rights, and free school meals for undocumented migrants. “These organizations are used to working together and responding quickly to crisis; they have built bonds of trust,” Jaffe writes, “and they have learned to align their goals without needing perfect agreement.”

This sort of campaigning isn’t just a necessary defense against far-right intimidation. Ultimately, it’s the only way we will reach better politics. If mainstream politicians – who are only as good as we make them – are not talking about the things that would really make our communities stronger and more secure, then we need to take the lead.

Don’t Let Anybody Tell You Your Voice Doesn’t Count

If you want to speak out, to oppose the far right’s racism or the excuses people make for it, do it. Your voice is legitimate.

For all the essentialist talk from right-wing nationalists about culture and identity, one thing they understand very well is that nations are made, not born. That’s why, in the UK, where I live, far-right activists spent last summer attaching national flags to lampposts around the UK and encouraging other people to do the same, not as a neutral expression of pride, but as a deliberate attempt to tie people’s sense of home to their false claim that the UK is under invasion. That the country is, in the words of Jim Ratcliffe – Britain’s richest man, who moved to Monaco in 2020, reportedly to save billions in taxes – being “colonized by migrants.”

Many of us do not agree. Take the example of Hannah White, a co-founder of the Sound Lounge, a popular local music venue in Sutton, south London. In the summer of 2025, she asked a group of men wearing masks not to attach a Union Jack to the lamp post outside the venue. They threatened her. White’s response was to invite customers to bring in other flags of countries and causes that meant something to them. She even exchanged messages online with a less hostile local supporter of the flag-raising. “I don’t want to be angry against people who are feeling like they want to celebrate their flag,” White later said. “It’s just, how do we celebrate everyone?”

A few days after White was threatened, the venue’s windows were smashed with a hammer, in the dead of night. She kept going. Hundreds of people contributed to a crowdfunding campaign to repair the damage. Challenging the far right’s narrative – and refusing to back down, without bitterness or hate – was an incredibly brave thing to do. But really, do we have any other choice?

This is an edited extract from Daniel Trilling’s ‘If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable,’ out now in the UK by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan. Copyright 2026.

Daniel Trilling is a journalist and author based in London, UK. He writes about nationalism, migration, and human rights for publications including the London Review of Books, The Guardian, and the New York Times. His work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Political Book Awards, and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

---

Check out more from Zeteo:

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Mehdi Interviews ICC Chief Prosecutor on Israel Arrest Warrants, Backlash From the US and UK, and Sexual Misconduct Allegations

Warnings For Americans From A Historian of the Nazis

What Viktor Orbán’s Landslide Defeat Can Teach Anti-Fascists Across the World