The Roots Of The U.S.-Russia Rivalry
John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute
05-29-2026 ~ Russia-U.S. relations became most visible during their Cold War confrontation and are now dangerously dysfunctional. Long-established suspicion and overlapping interests have shaped periods of cooperation and competition for centuries, a cycle that risks repeating itself indefinitely.
Washington’s relationship with Russia appears likely to continue its decades-long decline, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on May 22 that formal diplomatic talks over the Ukraine war are effectively frozen. U.S. President Donald Trump’s last meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin took place in August 2025 in Alaska. While the meeting was free from overt hostility, the restrained press conference that followed reflected the cold and distant relationship between the countries, with little meaningful engagement since. No American president has visited Russia since Barack Obama in 2013.
Russia is the only great power with which Washington has an openly adversarial relationship, as Trump’s visit to China in May 2026 and emphasis on his friendship with President Xi Jinping reflect a desire for amicable relations with Beijing, even if it masks greater tensions.
The decaying relationship between Russia and the U.S. has all but erased the international affairs model they built over the second half of the 20th century. Cold War confrontations forced Washington and Moscow to de-escalate through agreements on arms control and maritime encounters, stabilizing relations and setting global standards. Many of those agreements, along with post-Cold War arrangements and treaties, have since collapsed, and America’s advantage over a weakened post-Soviet Russia has left the balance uneven, reducing once well-defined spheres of influence.
Russia’s struggle to control Ukraine and the uncertainty surrounding Washington’s role in global leadership have been reinforced by each side complicating the other’s position. Yet much of the talk about their antagonism ignores their deeper history of failing to gain traction. U.S. perceptions of Russia rarely go back before 1945 and the beginning of Cold War tensions, while Russians increasingly refer to the U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War roughly two decades prior as the starting point of souring relations between them.
However, both countries need to understand that distrust and cooperation have been ebbing and flowing for more than two and a half centuries and require stabilization for their own interests and global well-being.
Early Contact
The first official Russian expedition to sight the Alaskan mainland came in 1741, led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering, in search of animals for the lucrative fur trade. After years of incursions, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska was established on Kodiak Island in 1784, and dozens of Russian merchants, explorers, and missionaries began to settle in the region.
American merchants had already established a transatlantic trade relationship with Russia before the U.S. War of Independence, in violation of Britain’s Navigation Act. The Russian Empire’s neutral stance during the war helped build trust that would fuel commerce after, with American traders beginning Arctic trade by the 1790s. Russia established the Russian-American Company (RAC) as a state-sponsored colonial trading monopoly in 1799 to consolidate Russian commercial interests in North America, basing political administration in Novo-Arkhangelsk (now Sitka, Alaska).
Fort Ross, established in northern California in 1812, became the company’s southernmost outpost. Spain and later independent Mexico both claimed the area, but neither had sufficient presence to deter Russian development, which also unsettled Washington. In 1821, Russia officially laid claim to much of the Pacific west coast down to the modern U.S.-Canadian border, before American and British objections pushed its claim back to the present southern border of Alaska.
The overlap between expanding Russian and U.S. activity was also felt in Hawaii. The RAC briefly established a foothold at Waimea Bay after a shipwreck in 1815 and had limited success in trade and building relations with different native Hawaiian groups. However, the Russians were forced to withdraw in 1817 after pressure from native groups and Americans.
Still, ongoing Russian development in the Pacific Northwest kept concerns elevated in Washington. In 1823, then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told the Russian envoy that the U.S. would “contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on… [American continents].” The Monroe Doctrine, revealed later that year and strongly shaped by Adams, explicitly warned Russia and several other European powers against further expansion in the Americas.
Russia nonetheless continued its efforts to expand its American holdings, and the signing of the Russo-American Treaty for Oregon in 1824 established boundaries between the two powers on the West Coast. By the late 1830s, the Russian population (which included Russians and other ethnic groups within the empire) peaked at just 823 documented colonists in its American territories. Contemporary estimates suggest that the Indigenous population was a little more than 10,000, with a further 12,500 known through contract but not formally registered, and approximately 17,000 more living beyond Russian administrative reach. Read more
The Conservative ‘Plan’ To Dismantle Public Schools Is Entering The Home Stretch
05-29-2026 ~ The Republican Party’s crusade to cap or abolish local property taxes is the latest tactic in their effort to drain funding from public education.
In what is being touted as the “Golden Age of School Choice,” the option that is most popular with American families—to fund and attend their local public schools—is gradually being made less viable.
Take North Carolina, for instance. For years, the Republican-dominated state legislature has chosen to cut the state’s funding for public schools, resulting in a decline in inflation-adjusted per-student funding of about 13 percent since 2003, according to the NC Budget and Tax Center. The Education Law Center’s (ELC) 2025 national ranking of state education funding, “Making the Grade,” report shows that the Tar Heel State is dead last out of 51 states in school funding effort—a measure of PK–12 public education funding as a percentage of the state’s overall economic capacity (its GDP). “North Carolina spent $12,193 per student during the 2022–23 school year. That’s $5,660 less than the national average,” states WRAL News, citing the report. The state also ranks 46th in teacher pay.
A decades-long legal struggle to bring North Carolina’s school funding levels in line with its constitutional requirement, resulting from a state Supreme Court ruling in the Leandro v. State of North Carolina case in 1994, culminated in a decision by the current court. The state’s Supreme Court was “taken over” by a Republican majority and dismissed the Leandro ruling on procedural grounds with no possible recourse. “The court held that the trial court lacked the authority, or subject matter jurisdiction, to rule on this much more expansive case,” according to EdNC.
North Carolina lawmakers have also ramped up efforts to redirect taxpayer dollars for education to private operators through charter schools and private schools that opt into the state’s school voucher program.
Thanks to the legislature’s efforts to ease the process for opening and expanding charter schools, the percentage of students enrolled in charters has steadily increased, surpassing 10 percent since 2022–2023, raising the state’s rank for charter school growth to fourth in the nation, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 2025 Enrollment Brief.
And since the state opened its school voucher program to all families in 2023, North Carolina ranks seventh in voucher usage, with 3.4 percent of the state’s public K–12 expenditures going to vouchers, an annual expenditure of $624 million, based on 2026 rankings by EDChoice. “[T]he program represents cost increases and relatively little savings, given the price tag of more than half a billion dollars,” WRAL News reports.
Not satisfied with these efforts to defund public schools, North Carolina lawmakers are now considering legislation to cap local property taxes—an important source for funding public schools in the state.
“Property taxes provide revenue for critical local services like public schools,” Joanna LeFebvre, a policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), tells Our Schools in an email. “Property taxes are one of the most stable sources of revenue because they are insulated from economic downturns.”
In North Carolina, state funding accounts for 60 percent of school resources, while local funding, mostly from property taxes, contributes 23 percent (the federal government chips in only 17 percent).
Despite the importance of property taxes as a revenue source for public schools, Republican lawmakers passed a bill to place a constitutional amendment on the November 2026 ballot that would give the state legislature the power to limit property tax increases.
Proponents for the amendment say it’s “a result of constituent complaints about rising property taxes,” according to NC Newsline. Various news stories from around the state, however, point to another cause for the increases—the state’s inadequate funding for essential infrastructure like schools.
Border Belt reports that in many rural counties where property taxes are spiking, county officials are raising taxes as an “[attempt] to punch above their weight in ‘funding effort.’” Because the Republican dominated state legislature has been lagging in its effort to address increased costs for local services, “[t]he poorest counties in our state tax themselves at greater rates,” explains Public School Forum senior researcher Elizabeth Paul.
Larger, more urban school districts are also feeling the squeeze. As Indy Week explains, Wake County, the state’s largest school district that includes Raleigh, is looking at raising property taxes to balance its budget in the fiscal year 2027. “[I]t’s another example of the state legislature and Congress falling short of their fiscal responsibilities and passing the buck to us,” the county manager, David Ellis, says.
In Mecklenburg County, the state’s second most populous county, which includes Charlotte, state assembly member Brandon Lofton tells NC Newslinethat “the county has spent about $2.9 billion on items that are the state’s responsibility,” resulting in 700 teaching positions being funded completely by the county.
In Orange County, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest counties, the county budget for the fiscal year 2027 is being hit with a barrage of higher costs, including increased expenses for debt service, gas prices, health insurance, and the federal government’s decision to slash reimbursements for food benefits for low-income families (known as SNAP). County officials blame state and federal funding cuts and persistent inflation for these increases.
If these efforts to defund public schools seem like a coordinated campaign, that’s because it is. And North Carolina is not the only state where this campaign is rolling out. Read more
Building Fairer Cities: New Insights From Mohenjo-daro
Dr Adam Green -Lecturer in Sustainability Dept. of Archaeology and Dept. of Environment and Geography – University of York
05-27-2026 ~ Inequality and Urbanism
Today’s cities are hotbeds of inequality. Urban real estate is one of the most expensive kinds of land in the world. It attracts billionaires looking to store their wealth and hedge funds looking to garner predictable returns: New York’s avenues, Paris’s thoroughfares, and Dubai’s dazzling skyscrapers are great at making the rich richer. But they raise the cost of urban life for everyone else.
And yet, plenty of people who are not rich flock to cities, driving the ongoing expansion of urbanism across the globe. In the 21st century, humans became an urban species, with more than 50 percent of the global population living in urban areas. This is because the benefits of living in a city—the opportunities provided by dense networks of interaction, cultural production, and heaps of concentrated resources—outweigh the immense cost of urban life. Inequality is the price we pay for the myriad opportunities that cities bring.
But what if we don’t have to pay this cost? Archaeological evidence from South Asia is rewriting that story of urbanism. My new article in Antiquity reveals that inequality was low in one of South Asia’s first cities and that it decreased as its citizens prospered.
The Measure of an Ancient City
In 2021, I joined the GINI Project, a working group devoted to investigating the long-term dynamics of inequality using archaeological data, a project supported by the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis.
The idea was to systematically compare evidence from archaeological sites like Mohenjo-daro, an early city that seemed to defy the tradeoffs of urbanism, with comparable data from other time periods, to better understand why inequality is skyrocketing today.
The GINI project adopted the “Gini coefficient,” an economic statistic that captures the level of inequality within the distribution of a particular variable, like income or wealth, in a given population. When all the wealth or income is concentrated in a tiny portion of the population, you get a Gini coefficient of 1. When it’s more evenly distributed, you get a Gini coefficient closer to 0. Archaeologists often apply the Gini coefficient to house areas, which provide a reasonable, but far from perfect, proxy of wealth or income within a given society.
I collaborated with Cameron Petrie and Iqtedar Alam, both based at the University of Cambridge, to measure all of Mohenjo-daro’s 309 excavated houses, contributing these measurements to the GINI database, which includes similar measurements from more than 50,000 residences found throughout the archaeological record. These measurements, and the Gini coefficients we can get from them, tell a striking story.
Every House a Palace
Mohenjo-daro was built more than 4,000 years ago in what is today the Sindh Province of Pakistan. It was one of the first cities in the world, emerging after a 1,000 years of village development throughout the broader Indus River Basin, forming part of the expansive Indus (or Harappan) civilization, which stretched from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of the Himalaya.
Excavations at the Mohenjo-daro began nearly a 100 years ago, uncovering the foundations of hundreds of structures arranged along wide streets. What archaeologists found astonished them—a massive public bath, the foundations of an assembly hall, and huge foundation platforms that could have provided a defense against Indus River flooding.
But it was the city’s numerous houses—replete with second stories and private bathing platforms—that made the biggest impression. The first-ever report on the archaeology of the Indus civilization opens with a description of Mohenjo-daro’s “commodious” and “well-built” houses, which rivaled the palaces seen in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Excavators have documented more than 300 residences from Mohenjo-daro, some dating to the earliest phases of the city’s development. Read more
To Defeat Trump, Be Mindful Of The Anti-Democratic Tradition He Sprung From
C.J. Polychroniou
05-21-2026 ~ Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic.
The notion that the US is an empire in decline has been a recurring theme in international relations literature since the 1980s. Surely, the United States remains the dominant force in the world economy, but it faces daunting challenges from the emergence of China as an economic superpower. And there is no denying the fact that while the US is a military superpower, with the highest defense budget in the world and possessing a range of weapons that other major powers simply do not have, its influence over global politics has been getting weaker. It can bully a country like Venezuela into submission and strangle Cuba to death as part of a strategy of selective hegemony under Trump 2.0, but cannot shape political outcomes across Latin America; holds no monopoly over diplomacy in the Middle East; cannot dictate policy to Europe; cannot force Russia to end the war in Ukraine; and surely lacks the political and economic leverage to contain and isolate China.
Last week’s Trump-Xi summit drove home the reality of shifts in global power. Chinese leader Xi Jinping made US President Donald Trump look weak. Not only did “philosopher-king” Xi concede nothing to the American wannabe emperor but made a subtle threat to the US by invoking the Thucydides trap. In so doing, Xi was letting Trump know that China’s rise is real and that, as such, the world has once again come to a new crossroads. Subsequently, the US should be careful how it handles the new reality of a world no longer dominated by Washington; a strategic miscalculation on its part over Taiwan (the reddest of red lines for China) could lead to war.
Nonetheless, while the debate continues to rage over whether US global hegemony is in decline or not, there should be much less doubt about domestic decline. The over-extension of the empire, characterized by forever wars and endless aggression, an enormously bloated Pentagonbudget, and roughly 800 military bases in over 80 countries, has imposed severe pressures on the domestic economy and led to the worsening of social conditions and the unraveling of civil society. The economy has been facing unsustainable economic imbalances (deficits in its fiscal and current account balances) since the late 1990s, and the national debt now exceeds the country’s GDP. In the meantime, the problems of the country as a whole are mounting: crumbling infrastructure, decaying cities, disintegrated education, an unaffordable healthcare system, and a housing crisis that has reached a breaking point make the US resemble a third world country. And the rich are getting richer every day while wages have remained stagnant for most US workers since the late 1970s.
As if this wasn’t bad enough for what is still the wealthiest country in the world, economic alienation and racism are tearing the social fabric apart, thereby offering more opportunities to extend the police operations of the imperial state to the domestic realm as well—increasing the size of the police and building more prisons, as mass incarceration is indeed “big business” in the United States.
The rise of Donald Trump to power is a symptom of the decline of the US as a world power and as an advanced industrial society. It is in that context that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan captured the imagination of a large segment of the population, reflecting a desire for a return to some idealized state of American society. But it wasn’t simply economics that drove so many to Trump’s arms. The MAGA movement is dependent on racial resentment and straight-up racism. “Make America Great Again” is a politico-cultural project, not some blueprint for economic restructuring.
Many of followers of the MAGA movement professed an aversion to US imperial ambitions and believed that the system is somehow rigged, although they never explained in whose favor. But like traditional conservatives before them, they opposed the federal government not only because they saw it as an instrument of a globalized elite but because they oppose the expansion of federal programs. Their real frustration was over the direction in which the country was moving socially and culturally, which they felt had major ramifications for the economic status of white Americans. This made them perfect prey for Trump’s demagoguery.
Trump himself did identify some of the real economic problems facing the United States, such as decades of manufacturing decline and a growing trade deficit, and spoke from very early on of a collapsing infrastructure that made the US resemble a third world country. But it’s not just that Trump’s actual diagnosis of the structural problems facing the United States is wrong and that the remedies pursued by his administration (sweeping tariffs and mass deportations) are incoherent and designed to backfire. Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, enforce a plutocratic agenda, roll back decades of social progress, and get revenge on his political opponents any way that he can.
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic. From the 20th century onward, the enemy for the political tradition that Trump and his billionaire allies stand for is equality, social welfare, and redistribution. It was so for the era of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and remains so for today’s reactionaries. As Project 2025 perfectly epitomizes, which the Trump administration has been enforcing with great dedication, the enemy is a society that seeks to place the interests of working people ahead of greed, profit making, and the unlimited accumulation of capital by striving to create institutions that strengthen the public good and enforce democratic accountability.
What we have with Trump and the MAGA movement is an updated version of Social Darwinism, a foundational pillar of fascism. Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society. For decent people everywhere, it can be said that the greatest of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. For Trump and his ilk, it can be judged by raising plutocratic power to new heights and inflicting as much pain as possible on the poor and the weak. In this manner, the Trump administration’s politics of cruelty and the callousness of its approach to social policy go beyond simply serving the interests of capitalism as they are designed to produce systemic fear and turn brutality into a source of pleasure. Part of the aim is to make the public numb and apathetic to the astonishing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and how it corrupts politics and the media.
How Trumpism ends is anyone’s guess. But while it must be defeated if there is to be a future hope for the United States, it must also be understood that a major part of the nation’s history is intrinsically linked to the anti-democratic tradition that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to power. How to uproot it is of vital importance for the realization of a good and just society.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Source: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-anti-democratic-tradition
C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).
How Earth-Centered Education Helps Children Learn Through Nature, Play, And Relationship
05-19-2026 ~ An ecological approach to learning uses outdoor play, storytelling, and shared experience to help children develop a kinship worldview—a deep recognition that living and nonliving parts of the Earth are fundamentally connected.
A group of children gathers in a forest clearing. Before anything else begins, they check in—with themselves, with one another, and with the world around them. Each child is invited, but never required, to share how they are feeling, something they are grateful for, and what they hope the day might hold.
From there, the day unfolds.
Some children wander toward a creek, asking where the water comes from. Others begin building shelters from fallen branches. A few linger in conversation, reflecting on something they noticed—a bird’s call, a shifting season, a question about life and death. There is no rigid lesson plan, no fixed outcome to achieve. Instead, there is attention, relationship, and the steady unfolding of curiosity.
This is Earth-centered ecological education.
At a time when many conventional education systems remain structured around standardized testing, rigid curricula, and indoor instruction, this approach offers something different: a way of learning rooted in relationship—with the Earth, with each other, and with the systems that sustain life.
What Is Earth-Centered Ecological Education?
Earth-centered ecological education is an approach to learning that recognizes children not as passive recipients of knowledge, but as active participants in living systems.
Rather than separating subjects into discrete disciplines, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things. Learning emerges through experience—through play, observation, skill-building, and conversation—rather than being delivered through predetermined instruction.
At its core, this approach is guided by a few key principles:
– Children are participants in the ecosystem, not observers.
– Learning is relational, shaped by interactions between humans and the more-than-human world.
– Free play and choice are essential, allowing curiosity to guide engagement.
– Process matters more than outcome, with growth unfolding over time rather than being measured in fixed benchmarks.
In contrast to conventional models that prioritize efficiency, standardization, and measurable outputs, Earth-centered education invites a slower, more attentive form of learning—one that reflects how living systems actually function.
The Big Ideas That Shape the Learning
Underlying this approach are a set of ecological understandings that guide both planning and presence.
We are all members of a global ecosystem. Every living and nonliving component—humans, plants, animals, water, soil—gives and receives matter, energy, and information. This constant exchange means that all things are interrelated and interdependent.
At the same time, there are both profound similarities and meaningful differences across life. All living beings are composed of similar materials, rely on energy to sustain life, and participate in cycles of growth and decay. Yet each organism expresses these processes in its own way, contributing to the diversity that allows systems to function. Read more
The Ideology Behind The ‘Islam Agenda’ Of Far-Right Parties In The European Parliament: Revamping The European Union Into The Multipolar World Model?
Jan Jaap de Ruiter at the Shanghai Conference – The EU’s 7Ds: Perspectives and the China Dimension
05-18-2026 – Abstract
This paper examines the party positions on Muslims, Muslim migrants, and Islam of four European far-right parties. It concerns the relative veterans, the French National Rally and the Dutch PVV; and relative newcomers, the German AfD and the Spanish VOX. Relatively large Muslim communities live in the four countries where these parties operate. After analyzing the political views of the four parties, the focus is on the two far-right factions in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations, and examine how and to what extent the visions of these four parties are reflected in the political platforms of both political families, and how these policies are realized in the European Parliament.
Far-right parties are by nature nationally oriented, and not internationally. Yet, European far-right parties operate within the European Union and have recently adopted a more pragmatic approach to reorganizing the union according to their wishes. In the European Union China relationship context and based on the image of an ‘equal and orderly’ multipolar world as promoted by China, characterized by various centers of power rather than a single central power, it is an interesting question whether an eventual ‘far-right European Union’ will develop within this model. Does the ‘our people first’ aspiration of European far-right parties fit within this multipolar worldview or is it counterproductive? A question very much worth discussing.
Key words: far-right parties, populism, Muslims, Islam, European Union, China
1 Introduction
After the 2024 European elections, far right parties in the European Parliament gained strength. The Patriots for Europe became the third-largest faction with 84 of 720 seats, while the Europe of Sovereign Nations bloc was to hold 27+ seats. These parties promote nationalist agendas and employ terms like ‘remigration’ to describe strategies intended to preserve perceived ethnic homogeneity, frequently singling out longstanding Muslim communities across the European Union. Parties such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland) and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) emphasize anti-migrant and anti-Muslim policies. Approximately 5% of the EU population—about 22 million people of roughly 450 million—have a Muslim background. Far right formations prioritize national constituencies and often reject the EU’s broader conception of a shared European identity. Yet many are attempting to reshape the Union from within to secure their goals.
This paper analyzes the political positions on Muslims, and Islam of four far-right parties: the French National Rally (Rassemblement National) and the Dutch Party for Freedom (established actors), and the German AfD and Spain’s VOX (more recent entrants). All four operate in countries with sizable Muslim populations.
After assessing party-level positions on Muslims and Islam, the study examines how these views are reflected in the platforms and actions of the two European parliamentary families—Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations—and evaluates how those policies manifest in parliamentary activity, in particular related to two terms central in the conference, demography and democracy. The central research questions of this study are:
– How do the parties Alternative for Germany, Party for Freedom, National Rally and VOX conceptualize and prioritize demography and democracy with respect to Muslim citizens?
and
– What ideological patterns emerge around these issues?
Although inherently nation-focused, European far right politicians have adopted pragmatic strategies to reorganize the European Union according to their preferences. In the context of EU–China relations and debates about a multipolar world, the paper also considers whether a ‘far-right’ European Union driven by an ‘our people first’ logic, minimizing the role of Muslims and Islam can align with or be integrated into an eventually emerging multipolar international order.
This paper is structured as follows. In the next section (2) the term far-right is discussed, followed by a description of the four parties central to this paper. The focus in that section is on the history and founding principles of all four, and a short description of the current (spring 2026) political situation of each party in each country. In addition, the section briefly describes the two far right groupings in the European Parliament. The following section (3) presents data concerning the Muslim communities in the four countries. In the next section (4), the political views of the four parties are examined per country, notably based on statements on Islam and Muslims by their leaders. The political actions of the two factions in the European Parliament are also central to that same section. Section (5) presents telling quotes of Muslim leaders in the four countries on the party programs and statements of the four far-right parties in their countries. In a concluding paragraph (6) the conclusions are drawn, the research questions are addressed, and the answers are considered in light of how they relate to China’s policy of an ‘equal and orderly’ multipolar world.
2 Far right parties in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain
2.1 What is far-right?
This sections first discusses briefly the designation ‘far right’ of the four parties under concern. It is not the aim of the paper to treat this issue extensively, the more so because researchers have until today not reached unanimity on the definition of what far-right means. Smeets (2025) presents an excellent overview of this debate. Basically, most researchers agree that far right parties share the following characteristics: nationalism, xenophobia, racism, anti-democracy, authoritarianism and populism (p. 30). In the context of this debate Smeets (2025, p. 37) quotes Cas Mudde (1996, p 233): ‘We know who they are, even though we do not exactly know what they are.’ European far right parties think and act outside the liberal mainstream. It is tempting to refer to these parties as ‘populist’ but we apply the label ‘far right’ thus following mainstream research on this topic. For a discussion of the debate on what is far right and what is populism, we refer to Smeets (2025). Far right parties furthermore make a stark religion-based distinction between -good- Christianity and -evil- Islam. Religion plays in this respect quite an important role in their ideological considerations. A thorny issue is the anti-democratic characteristic of these parties. Because nearly all of them, and that goes as well for the four parties under concern here, were established within democracies and function within democracies. Cas Mudde states (p, 48) that there are far-right parties that are not against democracy per se, but against the liberal democracy. Many of them demand the reform of democracy as well, striving after more state intervention. Taggart (2000, p 4., in Smeets, 2025, p. 141) coined the term ‘the populist institutional dilemma’. Far-right parties, striving after changes, have to make use of the political system they condemn at the same time. Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom once called the Dutch parliament a ‘fake parliament’, illustrating this dilemma, while he, today, i.e. in spring 2026, is the Dutch MP who has served the longest in the legislature (since 1998) . Numerous studies on far-right parties label the four parties under concern in this study as far-right or similar terms and we refer the interested readers to these studies for more information (Maly, 2024; Mudde, 2019).
The following sections present the four parties, in order of the year of establishment, followed by the presentation of the description of the two factions in the European Parliament. Read more