Hello everyone,
so I’m not actually from New Zealand, but from Europe and I’m currently very worried about the rising popularity of facism and alt-right politics in my country and europe in general. I’m very scared of experiencing physical violence and I’m now very seriously considering moving to another country before the facist parties are elected into power. One of the countries I’m considering is New Zealand, because there wouldn’t be that big of a language barrier and also because I haven’t heard of a lot of problems with facism in New Zealand. So I wanted to ask you if my judgement is correct and what the political situation regarding the alt-right is like in New Zealand.
Thank you for reading. I really appreciate your help :)
NZ has not really had a radical right party in the same way that many European countries have had for decades. Sometimes New Zealand First is thought of as radical right, but they are generally quite centrist but very populist (and therefore have something in common with the populist right). However, they can move around the spectrum opportunistically, and have arguably been more authoritarian right in this election. The Act party seems to be moving to more of a “radical right” position, even though historically they’re economic libertarians.
There is not much sign of hard fascism, although there are definitely groups trying to promote it. They are pretty marginal, however, even though sometimes they get media attention.
I am not sure where you’re from, but I don’t see any of the main EU countries heading towards actual fascist governments in the immediate future. A few countries have definitely gone radical/far right (Hungary, Poland, Italy), but there is still a big leap from there to fascism. It doesn’t seem like there is a risk of widespread political violence in most EU countries, at least in the immediate future. In places like Hungary and Poland, there is a possible heightened risk of being targeted if you’re from a certain group (e.g. LGBT+), although there’s a risk of that in any country, including NZ. There might be a risk of more isolated political violence, but again that’s true in any country, as we experienced in NZ last year with anti-vaccine protests.
You might want to look at some of the indices that measure and compare countries on this kind of thing (e.g. https://acleddata.com/). They are not sensationalised like the media (including social media) is. Most of them show Europe is very stable and not likely to experience widespread violence anytime soon. The rise of the radical right is definitely worrying, and democratic rights may be eroded. But I wouldn’t think Europe and NZ are in a much different position there in the long run. Yes, our politics have traditionally been centrist, but that can change, and there is definitely an element that might support a radical right agenda.
We don’t have an explicit radical right party, but both Act and NZF have found some neat dog whistles lying around and are giving them a real good blow right now
There are a couple of hard right parties right now but they don’t have enough voted to overcome the threshold. They do however have influence to pull National and Act to the right.
Just on this, it’s extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.
Several major parties this election have list candidates who’d not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It’s not as if we haven’t had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren’t as stupid as some people like to think.
If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who’d simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.
Sure why not? Anybody can join any party and then work to lobby to change the policies the party supports. That’s how democracy works.