The international radical right is built by the corporate dollar

In Australia and around the world, the far right is actively working and meeting, aiming to recreate their nations in a form most of us do not want. In Spain recently, a “great patriotic convention” was staged, bringing together the far-right parties of Europe and beyond. In Australia, their affiliated networks are working, largely out of the public eye, to ensure they too are able to impose their minority positions against our majority will. Corporations and their influence networks are funding this activity. Part 1 of a pair of essays addresses the international scene.

In late May, the Spanish convention, Europa Viva 24, brought together most notable far-right politicians, and parties, including the Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli. The (temporary) Zionism of the event veils a deep antisemitism, but Netanyahu has long promoted antisemites and antisemitism providing this supports his expansionist goals. Jew-demonising Neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers are only antisemites if they oppose Israeli religio-ethnonationalism from the river to the sea. Or, as Netanyahu’s Likud Party frames it: “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

Any Jewish person who opposes this project becomes the antisemite in this redefining of the term. In fact, Chikli does not consider such a person a Jew. Madrid is only the latest in a series of meetings with antisemitic far right factions that Chikli has promoted in recent times.

This is the National Conservative (NatCon) movement of affiliated religio-ethnonationalisms. Far right Israelis, Hindutva Indians, and Christian Nationalists cooperate to reinforce each other’s project; Muslims and modernity are the designated mutual enemies that bind them. Civilian Palestinians are only Hamas, in the same spirit as this coalition designating all Muslims as terrorists and central to the Great Replacement conspiracy.

The list of figures in attendance at the Madrid convention, and the variety of rightwing bents represented, is telling. They illustrate how a rightwing “popular front” is being forged against everything the coalition defines as “communist.” Extremist Catholics and anti-communists from across the Latin sphere, north and south of the globe, combine in a neo-Francoist movement based in Spain, known as the Madrid Forum. The Vox Party, representing such forces within Spain, hosted the convention.

Italy’s Meloni and Hungary’s Orbán spoke by video link. France’s Le Pen was amongst the many politicians there in person. All were agitating for far-right mobilisation ahead of looming elections.

Europa Viva 24, however, was much more than a European event. CPAC – the trashy American face of the NatCon movement – declared that it had “joined forces” with Vox at the event. The coordinators of CPAC, Matt and Mercedes Schlapp had just come from CPAC Hungary with Chikli, where Tony Abbott presented on his recent speaking tour.

Another Madrid attendee was Roger Severino, vice-president of the Heritage Foundation. Heritage shaped Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism, creating the Mandate for Leadership that dictated 2/3 of the policy of his first year. The 2024 iteration of this Atlas Network-partner’s Mandate has rejected neoliberalism in favour of theocratic illiberalism.

One of the chief targets in Madrid was international bodies that aim to bind nations. The development goals espoused by the UN were framed as an “ecofeminist” conspiracy. Viktor Orbán, by video, delivered the pronouncement that, ‘We the patriots must occupy Brussels.” The EU has been a key target of their fury.

These far-right parties, junktanks and corporate funders are determined that bodies such as the EU or the UN are nobbled if they can’t be broken. Regulations impede profit. The fact that 5-year-old children in the EU are now taller than in Brexit Britain is a telling symptom of the world this coalition wants to create: the malnutrition of Global North children matters as little as the welfare of children in the Global South has to them. They distract with culture war concerns about the EU “poisoning our children with gender propaganda” to cover for their utter lack of concern about children’s life or death struggle for food.

It is not surprising, then, to find the ever-metastasising Atlas Network is involved. As usual there is money to be made from corporate donors and plutocrats’ foundations in fighting the bodies that enable the population to resist predator capitalists who intend to extract every cent of profit from us, without regard for our opinion or pain.

A weakened Brexit Britain, with poverty prevalent in 1/5th of the state, is tempting pickings for predator capitalists. The NHS is devastated by years of Tory activity driven by private healthcare donors and corporate influence networks mostly linked to Atlas, who are working to recreate the USA’s sickening chasm in healthcare for Britain: the plutocrats and enablers will receive excellent care at eye-watering cost. The masses will die young and bankrupt in pursuit of the universal medical care they once enjoyed.

The EU too can offer such rich profits, if only the technocrats devising regulations that protect the people can be removed. For this reason, speakers at the Spanish convention dwelt on the repulsive “socialism” of the EU and focused on the culture war topics such as mythical attempts to change children’s gender as a weapon for their base.

“Sovereignty” is the justification for these attacks on international organisations, and another weapon. The UK Tories have been trying to present the European Convention on Human Rights as impinging on British freedoms to harm migrants. Like Brexit, leaving the convention would be a matter of “sovereignty.” Of course Britons losing human rights protections would suit the corporate interests that drive the Tories. The same Tories, furthermore, are pushing for freeports which grant all untrammelled rights to corporations, abandoning sovereignty.

Vox, the Spanish far right party, was represented by its leader. He declared that an international alliance was the only way these parties who “defend our national sovereignty” can succeed. Only a “global alliance” can defeat the “shared threat” of “globalism and its socialist soul.” This is the century-old “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy persisting.

Milei is the figure who most clearly illustrates the change in the Atlas Network. He spoke as a staunch advocate of neoliberalism, as an Atlas apparatchik should. He appealed, however, to the theocratic bent prevalent in this NatCon movement: “let’s not let the dark, black, satanic, disgusting, atrocious, carcinogenic side – which is socialism – defeat us.” It is this existential crisis that ought to unite the attendees over “the differences we may have on this side in life.”

In America and around the anglosphere, the Right is radicalising, committing to “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” The “Highest Good” is God’s mandate – as they define it. The Europeans gathered with them in Madrid agree.

And when God is dictating the rules this forcefully, the marketplace of ideas is dead. This is civil war for the soul of the nation: no quarter will be given.

And the corporate dollar is very happy to subsidise illiberalism that will allow it uninterrupted profits.