"The New Right does not decisively influence traditional political parties," Massimiliano Capra, a researcher at the Tonino Guerra Institute of Higher Education (Italy), said at the University of Navarra. The expert participated in a workshop hosted by the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) on metapolitics. There, he discussed the different initiatives to restructure public space, institutions, politics and discourse.

Professor Capra, who analyzed the French case during the event, noted that there, "some parties with poorer content are attracted to some of the issues raised by the group that inspires the New Right, namely GRECE."

However, the Italian specialist commented that currently "many fear that the extreme right will degenerate into racist and even totalitarian positions," although he does not think this represents a real danger. On the other hand, he added that, "some policies coming from the left, which is in crisis,emphasize this danger to reaffirm their positions."

Racial fundamentalism

In his opinion, there is a certain relationship between the extreme right’s policies in different countries and with the French New Right movement of the late sixties. "In fact, some of the scholars of this type of movement are seeing how the risks they feared are manifesting,” he noted.

"They denied that philosophical and political ideas could become an ideological arsenal of issues that could easily be geared primarily toward racial fundamentalism, which most commonly inspires new extremist groups," the researcher noted.

Massimiliano Capra spoke at the workshop “Metapolitics and Metapolitical Discourse: Conceptual and Empirical Researches on Populism and (Anti) Democracy,” organized by the Institute for Culture and Society’s Public Discourse project. The meeting was part of the subproject “DEMOS in the imaginary of new politics,” which the Spanish Ministry of Economy finances.