The leaders of the most successful populist radical right parties in western Europe have one thing in common that is often overlooked. Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Jordan Bardella from France, Jimmie Åkesson from the Sweden Democrats, and Tom Van Grieken from Belgium’s Vlaams Belang all led the youth wing of the parties they now run. These movements shaped the politicians they are today, and they are now shaping Europe’s political future.
As Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, another former radical right youth-wing leader, put it: “Even more than my growth as a politician, I owe my growth as a person and as an Italian to my youth-wing activism. There is no more formative training ground than this.” And yet, until recently, we knew little about these incubation chambers of populist radical right parties.
In researching our new book, Youth Wings of the Populist Radical Right, we looked at 10 such organisations from across Europe. From the youth wing of Austria’s Freedom party to that of France’s National Rally, we found they help to recruit, train and promote the radical right’s grassroots members, their representatives and leaders of the future. They also perform important functions for their parties in the present, encouraging young people to vote for them, providing a key source of labour during election campaigns, running party branches and influencing policy.
In particular, we found that youth-wing leaders and their rank and file members are helping to achieve three key goals for the radical right as their parties expand in the 2020s: internationalisation, professionalisation and normalisation.
First, these youth wings go even further than their older equivalent organisations in building new transnational alliances. Away from the spotlight, there has been a proliferation of international far-right workshops and conferences, such as the Transatlantic Patriot Summit, held each year in Budapest since 2022. These and similar events have brought together youth leaders from Europe, India, Israel, Latin America and the US, to talk about common aims and establish ties that will last through their careers. Many of the youth leaders we spoke to talked openly about how these international ties will benefit them “when we are the ones in government”.
Second, they are heavily involved in political training at international, national and local levels. Once derided as a bunch of amateurs (and with good reason, in some cases), the populist radical right now invests considerably in professionalisation. The young people who join are taught not only about policies and history, but also rhetoric and media communications. They are being trained as future politicians, and the likes of Åkesson, Bardella, Meloni and Salvini are proof of concept.
Third, the recruitment of university-educated young people – who look and sound very different from the stereotypical media image of the angry far-right youth – feeds into the growing normalisation of the populist radical right. Producing more articulate, professional and presentable leaders can help their parties be seen by voters as legitimate political actors. And the more distance they can put between themselves and previous generations of uncouth leaders, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France or Umberto Bossi in Italy, the more they can attract young people like themselves.
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But this smartening up of the radical right’s public image does not reflect a softening of the message. The young leaders we spoke to will not lead their parties down a path to moderation. They may have found ways to smooth down their movements’ rough edges, but the ideology is still an exclusionary, nationalist one. In other words, the regeneration of the radical right through its youth wings makes it an even more significant challenge to liberal democracy.
How can mainstream parties respond to this challenge? One way would be to stop focusing on the radical right as the root of their problems, and to look at themselves and their own youth wings.
Recent research into youth-wing membership has found that centre-left and centre-right youth groups are dominated by men, people from political families and careerists. If mainstream parties are to regain ground with young people, this needs to change.
Governing parties could also do far more to address the problems that young people are facing in the 21st century. For most of the postwar period, younger generations in western Europe grew up with the implicit promise that they would have better life prospects than their parents. That promise has been broken. In fact, with the rise of insecure employment, compounded by the housing crisis, a significant minority of young Europeans are still living with their parents into their late 20s and early 30s. It is no surprise that many have little faith in the capacity of mainstream parties to change their lives.
By contrast, the young populist radical-right activists we interviewed talked about how their parties spoke to them in clear terms about the issues that concerned them, and offered them solutions. Mainstream parties should be doing the same.
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Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today; Duncan McDonnell is professor of politics at the Jeff Bleich Centre in Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.
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Youth Wings of the Populist Radical Right, co-authored by Duncan McDonnell, Sofia Ammassari, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Anders Ravik Jupskås, and Cas Mudde, is published by Oxford University Press
