Far right? Hard right? Radical right? Or just plain right? The success in the recent EU elections of parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, or RN, (the rebadged Front National), and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has generated a debate about whether the label “far right” should be retired because, as Spectator editor Fraser Nelson argues, many parties that carry that moniker are “now mainstream in a way that wasn’t the case 15 years ago”.

Such parties are, for Nelson, better categorised as “new right”. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party the Brothers of Italy is descended from a fascist organisation, has shown in practice that “she is centre-right, not radical”. It is “nonsense”, Nelson insists, “to call Meloni’s party ‘post-fascist’ ” or to suggest that the disparate “new right” parties all belong to a single “ ‘far-right’ or radical-right lump”.

It is true that the term “far right” is thrown around too promiscuously and that, in power, far-right politicians often rule not like latter-day Mussolinis but rather as technocrats with a reactionary edge. What is missing from this argument, though, is the recognition that the mainstreaming of the far right should raise questions about the character not just of the far right but of the mainstream, too.

Organisations termed “far right” comprise, as Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar note in a new polemical critique of the “populist right”, at least three distinct lineages. First, there are the “unashamed neo-fascist parties”, such as Germany’s The Homeland, or NPD, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These may pose a threat on the streets but have little popular support.

Then there are the “fascist successor parties”,........

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