Over the last decade, the far right has been on the rise in many world regions (Mudde 2019). In the world’s three largest democracies – Brazil, India and the United States – political actors identified as far right succeeded in attaining power. Across Europe, far-right parties have achieved significant electoral breakthroughs and entered government in countries such as Austria, Italy, Hungary and the Netherlands. Even where the far right is not officially in power, its influence has grown. Recently, scholars have drawn attention to the mainstreaming of the far right by showing how far-right ideas and frames are increasingly entering and shaping the political discourse (Mondon 2025). The mainstreaming of the far right has not only transformed domestic politics but also impacted foreign policy and global politics by contesting international norms and institutions. A nascent International Relations (IR) literature has begun to focus on the inter- and transnational dimensions of the far right (de Orellana and Michelsen 2019; Abrahamsen et al. 2024; Wojczewski 2024).

This short article aims to illuminate the international trends behind the far right and its foreign policy orientation. More specifically, it addresses the following two research questions: How can “the international” help us to explain the rise of the far right in different world regions?  What does the far right want from foreign policy? The article argues that the simultaneous rise of the far right highlights the importance of “the international” for understanding how it constitutes a reaction to international dynamics. In particular, it shows how the rise of the far right relates to the expansion and crisis of liberal internationalism in the post-cold war era. It argues that the far right’s foreign policy outlook is informed by a strict anti-egalitarianism that aims to defend or restore entrenched differences and hierarchies between people and regards “the international” as a key site for countering the global expansion of egalitarian rights, liberal institutions and sociocultural openness.

The far right is best understood as an umbrella term for different political actors located at the rightmost end of the left-right political spectrum (Pirro 2023). It shares a common anti-egalitarian worldview characterized by the strong belief in a natural order of inequality that celebrates and defends hierarchies, differences and practices of exclusion, relating to ethnicity, culture, race, class and gender (Mudde 2019, 24-25). The far right can be further divided into an extreme right and a radical right: While the extreme right ‘rejects the essence of democracy, that is, popular sovereignty and majority rule’, the ‘radical right accepts the essence of democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers’ (Mudde 2019, 7). Accordingly, the extreme right typically supports and practices the violent and revolutionary struggle against the prevailing political order and opponents, whereas the radical right takes a more reformist, plebiscitary approach to politics and derives its legitimacy from the democratic process. Yet, the radical right’s ultimate goal is the creation of an illiberal ‘ethnocracy’, which links political rights to ethnocultural criteria (Mudde 2019, 28).  

Today, the radical right is the prevalent form of far-right politics. However, extreme-right groups and violence have also been on the rise in recent years (Stevenson 2019). The usage of the term far right is intended to highlight the ideological, historical and personal connections as well as direct or indirect alignments between radical and extreme right. For example, Donald Trump openly endorsed extreme-right groups such as the Proud Boys and encouraged the 2021 Capitol Riots, in which such groups played a leading role........

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