Far-right parties and the politics of education in Europe

ABSTRACT

Formal education shapes the distribution of opportunities and cultural profile of European societies. Political parties, in turn, play a key role in shaping formal education. Focusing largely on the traditional contenders for government in Europe, research on the politics of education shows that parties prioritise redistributive issues and politicise them in line with their electorates’ material interests. It remains unclear to what extent these findings apply to a more recent, but highly successful party family: the far right. This review article and introduction to a special issue integrates existing scholarship from education and political science with findings from six new case studies from across Europe. It argues that far-right parties in Eastern and Western Europe frame education primarily as a means of disseminating (conservative and nativist) culture and values, rather than as a means of redistributing opportunities. In revaluing the cultural dimension of education for far-right partisan politics, the article and the special issue therefore not only provide insight into the educational strategies of an increasingly powerful actor in European politics, but also shed light on the mechanisms and determinants underlying the partisan dynamics that will contribute to shaping the future of European education and societies more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Far right parties
• populism
• party politics
• education policy
• comparative education
• nativism

Political parties are key actors in shaping the education of future citizens. Indeed, providing education is a core function of modern government and, despite trends towards internationalisation and Europeanisation, educational decision-making still takes place predominantly at the national level. Decisions taken by party representatives sitting in national and sub-national parliaments, governments, and administrations across Europe thus shape the outlook of education systems and, as a result, the skills, values, and knowledge that will characterise future European societies.

The last few decades have seen a surge of cross-disciplinary interest in the determinants of partisan attitudes to education. This work finds that party families adopt distinctive approaches to a range of education policy issues, including educational expansion (Ansell 2010), spending (Busemeyer 2009), structures (Busemeyer 2014; Giudici et al. 2023; Österman, 2018), and governance (Gingrich 2011). These studies also show that, once endowed with institutional power, parties translate their distinctive approaches into action. Party preferences are thus a key element in explaining both the fundamental transformation of European education systems after 1945 and the simultaneous emergence of different reform paths and models – as well as the social and political consequences of such change and variation (Attewell 2021).

With the aim of explaining policy change, existing studies have largely focused on parties in government. Social-democratic, liberal, conservative, and Christian-democratic parties have therefore received the most attention, as has institutional politics through governments and parliaments. Less is known about the ideas and strategies of party families that have traditionally been on the fringes. This neglect extends to the European far right (Berg, Jungblut, and Ravik Jupskås 2023; Giudici 2021), which is the focus of this special issue.

Following authoritative definitions in the field, we define the far right ideologically. The parties analysed in this special issue are classified as belonging to the far-right party family because they embrace an ideology characterised by authoritarianism, nativism, and either anti-liberal or anti-democratic attitudes (Carter 2018; Mudde 2000). These parties are by no means identical. Far-right ideology, in this definition, encompasses different variants, ranging from extreme-right neofascist parties that seek to replace democracy with a corporatist state (Bar-On 2007; Carter 2018; Saull et al. 2014), to anti-liberal radical-right parties that use populism to appeal ‘to “the people” against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of the society’ (Canovan 1999, 3). In this introduction we use the term far right as an umbrella concept that encompasses these different variants, which are described in more detail in section 3.

In recent decades, parties embracing far-right ideology have broken through the ‘cordon sanitaire’ that had kept them isolated following the Second World War. Between 1990 and 2019, the average vote share of such parties in Europe rose from 2 to 17.5% (Rathgeb and Busemeyer 2022, 2). As a result, far-right parties have entered national and sub-national parliaments and governments in both Western and Eastern Europe. The increased public presence of the far right is visible not only in institutional politics, but also on the streets and in schools, as far-right parties tend to be linked to, and sometimes integrated into, radical- and extreme-right social movements (Castelli Gattinara and Pirro, 2019; Giudici 2021). As a result of this success, far-right arguments have entered public discourse (Bar-On 2007; Mondon and Winter 2020) and the programmes of mainstream parties, especially those of the centre-right (Abou-Chadi and Krause 2020). In 21^st-century Europe, the far right has become part of the ‘political normalcy’ (Minkenberg 2000, 170).

Interest in the electorate (Allen 2017) and preferences of far-right parties on issues ranging from immigration (Mudde 2000) to gender (Akkerman 2015; Köttig, Bitzan and Petö 2017) and welfare (Rathgeb and Busemeyer 2022) has correspondingly increased. When it comes to education, however, far-right ideology and movements have been largely neglected. This limited attention means that we currently lack an understanding of whether and how this party family, now a serious political contender with access to institutional power, intends to change education.

This lack of understanding is all the more worrying given that education policy is a field with profound distributive and cultural implications. With the establishment of modern nation-states, education has become a key institution through which governments can shape the values, skills, and knowledge of future societies (Apple 2006; de Swaan 1988). At the same time, the replacement of pre-industrial feudalism and inherited privilege with more meritocratic understandings of success has made education a central mechanism for assigning individuals to social positions (Ansell 2010; Domina et al. 2017). By analysing education, therefore, we can gain insight into how parties balance cultural and redistributive issues, as well as into their position on both dimensions.

The post-1945 period has seen a fundamental transformation of European education systems. Reforms have been based on a general agreement among the traditional mainstream parties on the broad principles that should underpin education policy. While disagreeing on specific measures, in terms of redistribution, centre-left and centre-right parties share the idea that education should contribute to both economic growth and social equity (Carstensen and Emmenegger 2023; Gingrich and Giudici 2023). These goals have underpinned key reforms, from the dramatic expansion of secondary and tertiary education (Ansell 2010; Schofer and Meyer 2005), to the softening of early tracking (Furuta 2020), to the introduction of more participatory forms of governance (Gingrich 2011). Culturally, mainstream parties’ support for international norms has led to the inclusion of content promoting liberal rights and cultural pluralism in schools across Europe (Lerch et al. 2017; OECD 2023).

In this sense, contemporary European education systems embody what Nancy Fraser (2017) calls the ‘progressive-neoliberal’ orientation that the far right has set out to defeat (Norris and Inglehart 2019; Minkenberg 2000). Their curricula have come to reflect, to varying degrees, the liberal aims of the politics of recognition. They positively emphasise cultural diversity and coexistence, as well as the need to empower talented individuals from formerly marginalised groups (Fraser 2017; Lerch et al. 2017). Educational structures and governance also create competition and legitimise the resulting stratification of status and resources (Butera et al. 2024; Domina, Penner and Penner 2017), thus contributing to the creation of the ”left behind” that current far-right parties often claim to represent (Norris and Inglehart 2019).

Far-right ideology is defined by its very opposition to such goals. Authoritarianism and illiberalism naturalise social inequalities and imply a strict social order undermining liberal ideals of equality and inclusiveness (Carter 2018; Köttig, Bitzan and Petö 2017). By seeking to align ethnic and political boundaries, nativism opposes both individual rights and cultural pluralism (Mudde 2000). The focus of current European far-right parties on waging culture wars against progressive-neoliberal frameworks (Fraser 2017) suggests that education may not only be central to these parties’ long-term ideological plans to reshape society into ethnically cohesive authoritarian communities. It may also be a rhetoric and strategic means to challenge the current ‘liberal elite’ and to replace it with a new one (Norris and Inglehart 2019).

Does this opposition to the common foundations of post-1945 European education policy translate into an approach to education that is distinct to other party families and shared across national borders and education systems? To what extent are the educational rhetoric and strategies of European far-right parties shaped by their ideology, and when do they reflect the specific electoral and institutional environments in which these parties operate?

The study of far-right parties and of education politics have so far constituted separate fields. Due to the lack of contact, neither field has produced systematic answers to these questions. However, both fields offer valuable starting points. In the following section, we examine these points, starting with scholarship on the far right.

Education and the far right: a review

In recent decades, the far right has become one of the most intensively studied party families (Mudde 2019). However, the attention paid to the relationship between far-right parties and education in the literature focusing on this party family varies between the disciplines of political science and education.

Work in political science largely considers education as an independent variable, i.e. as a potential determinant of far-right electoral support. Several studies link lower levels of formal education with support for far-right parties as well as anti-immigration and authoritarian attitudes (Cavaille and Marshall, 2019; Golder 2016). So far, political scientists have rarely explored the reverse relationship, except in studies that subsume education under parties’ broader cultural and social policy agenda (Almeida 2019; Enggist and Pinggera 2022). These studies show that education-related issues play an important role in far-right politics, but they cannot identify specific approaches to education or discuss how they vary and change. A notable exception is a recent study by Berg et al. (2023), which we discuss below.

While educational scholarship has shown a greater interest in far-right approaches to education, its primary focus has not been on current political parties. One stream of educational literature analyses the historical far right. These studies link the support of fascist governments and movements for centralising control over schools and reshaping teaching to conform to party doctrine with the racist, totalitarian, and militarist features of fascist ideology (Ansell and Lindvall 2021; Giudici et al. 2020). However, to become more electorally palatable, most contemporary far-right parties have disavowed or moderated such features, replacing them with populism and nativist identity politics (Bar-On 2007; Mudde 2000). Stronger democratic institutions also mean that, so far, no far-right party has gained as much power as some of their historical antecedents. The extent to which these ideological and institutional developments have reshaped the approach of far-right parties to education remains to be explored.

A second strand of educational literature focuses on the contemporary far right as a social movement. This work highlights the importance that the far-right movement attaches to education, both in the US (Apple 2006; Brown 2021; Nickerson 2012) and in Western Europe (Geva and Santos 2021; Giudici 2021). It also shows that the movement has developed a multifaceted approach to education, politicising cultural aspects of education through a combination of institutional politics, grassroots mobilisation, and alternative educational provision, such as home schooling (Brown 2021; Giudici 2021). Work on the US finds that the cultural approaches forged by social movements have reshaped the platform of the Republican Party since the 1960s (Nickerson 2012). The extent to which the educational platforms and strategies of European parties also show traces of such transfers has not yet been analysed.

If scholarship on the far right in both education and politics rarely incorporates insights from party politics, conversely, research on the politics of education has rarely paid attention to the far right. With the aim of explaining policy change and variation, this literature has focused on the traditional contenders for government, i.e. centre-right and centre-left parties. Drawing on partisan theory (Castles 1982), this work also largely analyses education from a redistributive, rather than cultural, perspective.

Studies show that centre-left and centre-right parties tend to defend the distributive interests of their class-based electorates and allied interest groups when it comes to educational expansion and structures. Specifically, centre-left parties show stronger support for the expansion of compulsory education (Ansell 2010), the replacement of early tracking with comprehensive schooling (Busemeyer 2014; Österman, 2018), as well as the regulation of educational markets (Gingrich 2011). These are policies that typically benefit organised interests vested in the public sector, less affluent parts of the electorate, and the social-investment friendly middle class (Gingrich and Häusermann 2015; Moe and Wiborg 2017). Centre-right parties, on the other hand, are more likely to support policies that protect elite tracks and tertiary education, as well as less regulated markets, in line with the preferences of their wealthier constituents and allied business interests (Busemeyer 2014; Giudici et al. 2023; Österman, 2018).

As electoral scholars have highlighted, European far-right parties rely on constituencies that combine affluent and economically precarious voters (Vlandas and Halikiopoulou 2022). What unites these groups is a belief in conservative values, with a focus on culture and opposition to immigration in Western Europe and a focus on religion and hostility to ethnic minorities in post-communist Europe (Allen 2017; Bustikova 2019). There is little understanding of how far-right parties use education to appeal to this constituency. A key finding from research on the politics of educational expansion is the existence of an ‘inverse-U’ (Ansell 2010, 137) pattern in political manifestos, with parties at the extremes attaching less importance to educational expansion than those in the centre of the political spectrum (Ansell 2010; Busemeyer, Franzmann and Garritzmann 2013). Whether this pattern indicates that far-right parties pay less attention to education in general, that they oppose the redistributive function of education, or that they mention redistributive aspects such as expansion less in order to focus on cultural aspects, remains unexamined.

Berg’s et al. (2023) content analysis of educational preferences in 15 recent manifestos of Western European populist radical-right parties provides a first insight into these questions. The authors confirm, firstly, that education is a rhetorically relevant policy area for these parties, especially for those already well established in their national party systems. Secondly, the authors link educational rhetoric and ideology. They argue that support for policies that promote national culture, discipline, and practical rather than academic skills is consistent with the analysed parties’ ideological support for nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. The contemporary far-right educational programme, they conclude, is characterised by support for limiting the redistributive effects of formal education and a particular emphasis on the cultural role of education in transmitting illiberal values.

This growing body of research provides important initial insights into contemporary far-right approaches to education. Crucially, it shows that far-right parties are concerned with education both ideologically and strategically. However, because this work largely considers far-right parties in isolation from their electoral and cultural contexts, there is still much to learn about whether far-right approaches to education differ from those of other party families. And while comparative studies suggest that there are common themes across the Western European far right, their cross-sectional nature risks essentialising these features. Far-right parties are strategic organisations. They can emphasise or ignore ideological features and issues in response to changing contexts and their own position in the political system (e.g. in opposition, coalition or government; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2016; Saull et al. 2014; Taggart 2000). Finally, the focus on Western Europe leaves far-right parties in Central and Eastern Europe and the potential differences between Western and Eastern political and educational systems unexplored.

Organisation of the special issue

Our special issue extends previous research on education and the far right in several ways. First, it documents the educational rhetoric and strategies of far-right parties located across Europe, with case studies covering Austria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Slovakia (see Table 1). From a European perspective, it is important to consider both Western and Eastern Europe, as several studies find that parties in the two contexts adapt far-right ideology in different ways. For example, parties operating in Western Europe are more likely to politicise immigration, while in Eastern Europe far-right nativism tends to target traditional ethnic minorities (Bustikova 2019; Neumann and Rudnicki, 2023; Pirro 2015). Moreover, it is in Eastern Europe that parties embracing far-right ideology have been in power the longest. Countries such as Poland and Hungary also offer insights into how centre-right parties can integrate far-right positions into their educational approach to consolidate their power in contexts where far-right cultural positions feature prominently in public opinion.

Table 1. Organisation of the special issue.

Authors	Case(s) and Ideological Variant			Design
	Party name, year of establishment	Stance to democracy	Stance to populism
Ismail Ferhat	France: National Front/Rally FN/RN, 1972	Radical Right	Populist	Longitudinal study (1972–2018)
Oliver Gruber & Philipp Schnell	Austria: Austrian Freedom Party FPÖ, 1955	Radical Right	Populist	Longitudinal study (1990–2020)
Paola Mattei & Giorgia Bulli	Italy: Lega Nord/Lega, 1989	Radical Right	Populist	Longitudinal study (1994–2018)
Palle Rasmussen	Denmark: Danish People Party DPP, 1995	Radical Right	Populist	Between-party comparison in single country
	New Right Party NB, 2015	Radical Right	Not Populist
Tomáš Nociar & Pavol Struhár	Slovakia: Slovak National Party SNS, 1990	Radical Right	Populist	Between-party comparison in single country
	People’s Party our Slovakia ĽSNS, 2010	Extreme Right	Not Populist
	We are family SR, 2015	Radical Right	Not populist
Eszter Neumann & Paweł Rudnicki	Hungary: Fidesz, 1988 Poland: Law and Justice PiS, 2001	Radical Right	Populist	Between-country comparison

Second, the parties analysed in this special issue represent different variants of far-right ideology. They all share an ideology characterised by nativism, authoritarianism, and opposition to either liberalism or to democracy. They can therefore be classified as far right according to the conceptualisation adopted here (Carter 2018; Mudde 2000). At the same time, this conceptualisation also identifies two sources of variation within far-right ideology. One concerns far-right parties’ attitudes toward democracy. Radical far-right parties oppose liberalism but endorse democracy in their speech and action – for instance, by supporting and complying with electoral regulations. In contrast, parties that oppose democracy are categorised as extreme right. Attitudes towards populism are another source of ideological variation between parties. Indeed, while some far-right parties have adopted anti-elitist rhetoric and attitudes, others continue to espouse elitist views that emphasise the need for strong leadership (Carter 2018). As Table 1 shows, the parties analysed in this special issue represent this ideological variation, with most parties falling into the radical-populist category.

Finally, the articles in this special issue present a range of case study designs and data sources. They either take a longitudinal perspective or engage in qualitative comparisons between selected countries or parties. Rather than offering a comparative snapshot of party manifestos, they are thus able to identify differences, changes, and parallels in far-right educational views and strategies across Europe and to relate them to local electoral, institutional, and educational contexts. In addition, by complementing the study of party manifestoes with a combination of internal party literature and public (e.g. parliamentary) sources, they shed light on both the ‘front’ and ‘back-stage’ of party strategy and discourse (Mudde 2000, 21). They thus provide a more detailed profile of the parties analysed than studies involving a large number of cases.

More specifically, in terms of design, three articles trace the evolution of a single party’s educational approach over time. They examine how this approach has evolved as the parties moved from opposition to government (Gruber and Schnell 2023 on Austria), from regional to national player (Mattei and Bulli 2023 on Italy), and through changes in leadership (Ferhat 2023 on France). Two articles compare parties representing different variants of far-right ideology within one country (Nociar and Struhár 2024 on Slovakia and Rasmussen 2023 on Denmark) with the aim of clarifying the relationship between ideology and views on education, and to contrast the positional nuances of far-right parties competing in the same political arena. Finally, one study compares two governing parties that gradually moved to the far right, in Hungary and Poland, in order to identify common features and developments in these parties’ educational approaches as they strengthened their executive power (Neumann and Rudnicki 2023).

Drawing on different cases and designs, the articles in this special issue address three questions: Firstly, what kind of educational policies do contemporary European far-right parties support? Secondly, are these policy preferences distinct from those of other party families and shared across national borders and education systems? Lastly, what are the potential determinants of far-right parties’ approach towards education? The articles provide detailed and insightful case-based answers to these questions. They contribute important empirical evidence that not only advances our understanding of how key representatives of the European far right approach education, but also identifies implications for the future trajectory of European formal education. The remainder of this introduction integrates these findings, identifying comparative patterns and discussing potential underlying factors.

Far-right parties and education policy: comparative patterns

Research on post-1945 education politics, focusing on mainstream parties, reveals both cross-party agreement on the general direction of reform and partisan approaches to it. Where does the European far right fit in? Taken together, the articles in this special issue show that far-right parties have strong and consistent – albeit context-dependent – preferences on the cultural dimension of education, but that their positions are more ambiguous and varied when it comes to educational redistribution.

Education as cultural politics

Since the late 1960s, far-right parties have typically distinguished themselves from their competitors by focusing on the cultural dimension of politics (Fraser 2017; Mudde 2000). Their ideological nativism is linked to a conservative concern for protecting and strengthening cultural traits they see as indigenous to a society in the face of change (Saull et al. 2014). Contemporary parties translate this attitude into a vehement opposition to post-materialist values in Western Europe (Carter 2018) and to the inclusion of ethnic and social minorities in Eastern Europe (Bustikova 2019), which are their trademarks, along with exclusionary forms of identity politics (Mudde 2000).

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the parties analysed in this special issue frame education largely in cultural terms. From this perspective, schooling is a means of transmitting specific cultures and norms to future generations and protecting them from others – rather than a tool to redistribute wealth and opportunities.

The reshaping of educational content and curricula is therefore a key common focus of the educational approach of European far-right parties. All the parties analysed make a clear distinction between the norms, languages, histories, and traditions that constitute ‘native’ cultures, whose dissemination should be institutionally ensured through formal education, and foreign elements that should not be represented in curricula. The specifics of such distinctions vary according to national discourses and the cultural diversity of local populations.

To start with the exclusionary aspects of their programme. Most of the parties analysed contrast allegedly native cultures with ‘foreign’ elements of multiculturalism and (European) internationalism. However, in describing the latter – and thus outlining the content they want to see removed from the curriculum –, parties in Eastern Europe emphasise Western lifestyles and national minority cultures (Neumann and Rudnicki 2023), while Western European parties focus largely on content related to globalisation, international organisations, and immigration (Ferhat 2023; Rasmussen 2023; Gruber and Schnell 2023). Similarly, most parties prioritise national over international and minority cultures. The Northern League in the 1990s is an exception, as it then supported autonomy for northern Italy, and therefore sought to use schools to institutionalise a specifically regional identity (Mattei and Bulli 2023). As part of its transition into a national electoral contender in the 2010s, the party adopted a clearly pro-Italian identity and agenda, and adjusted its education programme accordingly – a development that further illustrates the close link existing between far-right parties’ cultural and educational agenda.

Similar types of contextual dependency emerge in how the analysed parties define the ‘native’ culture and norms that they want curricula to prioritise. While all parties support the teaching of national languages and histories, they emphasise context-specific aspects of these. For example, while the Slovak SNS wants curricula to rehabilitate the country’s wartime autocracy (Nociar and Struhár 2024), the Danish DPP focuses on including more literature from the ‘pre-liberal’ Danish period before 1870 (Rasmussen 2023), and the Fidesz government on exposing students to visits to former Hungarian homelands (Neumann and Rudnicki 2023). European far-right parties share a strong cultural approach to education, but their politics and preferences are shaped by local contexts and debates (see below for a discussion of potential determinants).

Another striking similarity between the analysed parties’ definitions of native culture is the importance of religion. While the increasing reliance on religion is a phenomenon that is found to characterise far-right agendas more generally (Mudde 2019), in terms of education it is surprising. Traditionally, only denominational parties with formal links to the dominant churches advocated a weakening of the separation of church and state in education (Ansell and Lindvall 2021; Giudici et al. 2023). Far-right parties typically lack such formal links. However, as several authors in this special issue show, religion-related proposals rarely focus on empowering specific church actors or strengthening denominational scriptures and teachings. Instead, they aim to root schools in a more broadly defined (Christian) religious heritage.

This project has two aims. First, the emphasis on religion reinforces the role of education in creating more homogeneous populations and identities. Schools should be dedicated to teaching ‘native’ (religious) cultures (Rasmussen 2023; Gruber and Schnell 2023; see also Neumann 2022). They should not provide (or limit) space and representation (in curricula, canteen menus, or the teaching staff) of religiously framed ‘foreign’ cultures, including Muslims in Western Europe and Roma and Jewish populations in Eastern Europe. Second, religion is explicitly about values, and far-right parties interpret religious values as consistent with their ideological authoritarianism (Mattei and Bulli 2023). The need for schools to teach children to respect authority and traditional gender and family models is also often justified on religious and moral grounds (Neumann and Rudnicki 2023).

From a comparative perspective, these findings further highlight the strong link between the cultural and educational views of European far-right parties. The educational policies at the top of these parties’ agendas aim to transform formal education into an institutionalised means of disseminating the ‘native’ culture and authoritarian values that are at the heart of far-right ideology. At the same time, the programmatic variation in descriptions of the ‘native’ content schools should impart (and the ‘foreign’ content they should reject) shows that far-right parties engage deeply with the national contexts in shaping their educational agendas. There are also differences between parties with different attitudes to democracy. While radical-right parties often frame their exclusionary cultural programme as a way to strengthen national unity and raise academic standards (Ferhat 2023; Gruber and Schnell 2023; Mattei and Bulli 2023), extreme-right parties adopt more explicitly derogatory language towards minorities, such as in the case of the Slovak Kotlebas (Nociar and Struhár 2024).

Education as redistributive politics

When we shift our focus from the cultural to the redistributive aspects of education policy, positions become less consistent. The two educational issues considered most relevant in determining the redistributive effects of formal education are the expansion of education systems and their differentiation according to academic (tracking) and market principles (Ansell 2010; Gingrich 2011). With few exceptions, e.g. the Austrian FPÖ (Gruber and Schnell 2023), these issues are not particularly high on the agenda of the analysed far-right parties. Moreover, parties’ approaches diverge. Not only do the analysed parties disagree on the specific implementation of policies, such as in the case of cultural issues, but they also advocate contrasting policies. Some parties adopt positions typically associated with the centre-right and sometimes, although more rarely, the centre-left (such as the Danish DPP, Rasmussen 2023).

The ‘inverse U’ (Ansell 2010, 137) hypothesis predicts that parties at both ends of the political spectrum are less supportive of expanding access. Indeed, many of the far-right parties analysed that mention expansion of academic education do so in rather critical terms. Relying on either meritocratic beliefs or critical attitudes towards academic knowledge, these parties support strict criteria for academic selection and progression. However, while advocating a more stratified education system and early tracking, such positions can hardly be interpreted as opposition to educational expansion as such. Several parties explicitly call for an expansion of vocational and basic education, such as in Slovakia or Austria (Nociar and Struhár 2024; Gruber and Schnell 2023). The far right, like other party families seems to rely on (mass) education to achieve its cultural and economic goals. Parties such as Slovakia’s SNS, which emphasise the importance of education for the country’s collective economic success, even advocate a radical expansion of both mass and higher education.

Regarding educational differentiation, the analysed parties show an agreement on academic differentiation, but not on privatisation. Most of the far-right parties analysed express support for strengthening the distinction between academic and vocational tracks, with several parties using the issue to highlight their appreciation of manual labour. This rhetoric may be a means for these parties to emphasise their anti-elite stance, but it also shows parallels with the strategies of centre-left and Christian-democratic parties to focus on improving the tracks that cater to the educationally disadvantaged (Busemeyer 2014; Martin 2023; Österman, 2018).

In contrast, the far-right parties analysed show different approaches to market-based differentiation. Parties such as the Italian Lega (Nord), the Austrian FPÖ, or the Danish NRP support policies that tend to reduce the standardisation of education through school autonomy and privatisation. This was also the case for the Front National in the 1980s, which was the main party in the political landscape at the time to support a radical privatisation of French schooling and the introduction of vouchers. However, as Ferhat (2023) shows, in the 2010s the party shifted its support from the private to the state sector, while remaining true to its conservative and nativist cultural agenda. The reliance on state capacity to disseminate their cultural and moral programme also unites the Polish and Hungarian far-right governments, which show parallel tendencies in the disempowerment of local authorities, school autonomy, and market actors (Neumann and Rudnicki 2023).

Compared to their clear stance on cultural issues, European far-right parties thus show a less unified, and more subdued approach to the redistributive dimension of education. The studies in this special issue show that material issues are mentioned less, positions vary, and approaches reflect preferences traditionally held by both the centre left and the centre right. Hence, far-right parties have developed a less distinctive approach to issues such as tracking, privatisation, and expansion.

This finding might indicate that European far-right parties rely on other policy fields (e.g. welfare or immigration) to appeal to voters’ economic concerns and specific social strata. It might also be the result of more general dynamics, such as far-right parties’ efforts to strategically blur their economic positions in order to appeal to multiple economic constituencies simultaneously (Rovny and Polk 2020). Alternatively, the underlying dynamic could be education-specific, reflecting a more instrumental approach to redistributive issues, rooted in a more opportunistic ‘chameleon-like’ nature of the populist right in particular (Taggart 2000, 4). Parties may adopt either pro-market or pro-state positions depending on what they believe will help them realise their cultural programme. Further research is needed to evaluate these and other hypotheses.

Potential determinants and drivers of far-right education policy

How can we make sense of the patterns described above? Adopting a comparative perspective, we identify three factors that future analysis of far-right parties’ approach to education policy should take into account. These include the impact of institutional legacies, the specific variant of far-right ideology adopted by parties (radical/extreme right), and temporal changes in both the educational and partisan landscape.

Existing literature finds that institutional legacies shape how much parties talk about education. Quantitative studies of party rhetoric show that parties whose views are less entrenched in existing educational institutions often ‘own’ education policy as an issue by devoting more attention to it in manifestos (Busemeyer et al. 2013). The studies in this special issue find that institutional legacies also shape what parties say about education, i.e. their education-related rhetoric and strategies. Far-right parties across Europe may draw on similar electoral constituencies and the same ideology, but their views on education are deeply embedded in their respective national or regional institutional contexts and related debates. In most cases, they are crafted to express the parties’ opposition to current educational institutions. Thus, while agreeing that formal education should teach only native values and cultures, far-right parties politicise different aspects of these cultures. Some focus on rehabilitating historical revisionism (e.g. in Hungary or Slovakia: Neumann and Rudnicki 2023; Nociar and Struhár 2024), while others want to segregate pupils on the basis of language (such as the Danish DPP or the Austrian FPÖ: Rasmussen 2023; Gruber and Schnell 2023). Similarly, while agreeing that some forms of educational differentiation are desirable, some parties support private schools (e.g. the Danish NRP, the Italian Lega or the early Front National in France) – especially when the sector is dominated by religious providers – while others strongly oppose them (such as the Hungarian Fidesz or the French Rassemblement National).

Secondly, a link seems to exist between the specific ideological variant that a party embraces and its approach to education. As demonstrated by the studies comparing parties within a single country, far-right parties operating within the same electoral and institutional context can develop different educational agendas. This diversification may be related to these parties’ need to establish a recognisable profile in a crowded far-right spectrum, and thus may be the result of strategic considerations (as shown by Rasmussen 2023 for Denmark and by Nociar and Struhár 2024 for Slovakia). At the same time, the one party included in this special issue that most clearly represents the extreme right, the Slovak Kotlebas (Nociar and Struhár 2024; but see also the Danish Stram Kurs mentioned by Rasmussen 2023), is also the one that conceives of formal education as a means to spread biological racism and to destroy minority populations, thus echoing the positions of inter-war fascism (Ansell and Lindvall 2021; Giudici et al. 2020). By contrast, in line with their acceptance of the democratic rules of the game, radical-right parties tend to frame education as a means of propagating (culturally conservative) values rather than as a means of suppressing dissent – a position that brings them closer to the conservative right (Ball 2008; Neumann et al. 2020). We found no systematic differences between parties with different attitudes to populism. However, due to the under-representation of non-populist parties in our special issue, the extent to which this ideological feature might influence parties’ views on education needs further investigation.

Finally, far-right approaches to education are not static. The case studies included in this special issue show that parties adapt, refine, and sometimes radically reverse their educational approaches over time (Ferhat 2023; Gruber and Schnell 2023; Mattei and Bulli 2023). While more detailed research into the underlying processes of intra-party learning and deliberation is needed to explain such changes, the findings show evidence of parties reacting to changes in both the educational and partisan landscape.

Many of the declared educational priorities of the parties analysed may sound familiar. Indeed, calls for entrepreneurship and digital education, improved educational standards and testing, and school autonomy and privatisation mentioned by the analysed parties are not specific to the far right, but reflect broader trends in the educational landscape (Ball 2008; Mehta 2013). The presence of such points in far-right party programmes is evidence of the increasing institutional integration of this party family across Europe, and of its willingness to engage with and work programmatically on specific policy issues such as education.

However, programmatic shifts in party rhetoric also seem to be linked to party-specific developments (Rothmüller and Schnell 2019; Gruber and Rosenberger 2023). Several studies suggest that changes in the position and leadership of the parties themselves may contribute to explaining specific approaches and their evolution over time. More specifically, moves from opposition to government participation, as in Austria and Italy (Mattei and Bulli 2023; Gruber and Schnell 2023), or attempts by new party leaders to shift their party’s profile to attract new electorates, as in the case of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, have also triggered reforms of parties’ educational programmes (in the case of the Rassemblement National with a focus on promoting less radical but more easily implementable policies, Ferhat 2023).

Conclusion and avenues for further research

In recent decades, far-right parties have emerged as serious electoral contenders across Europe. Based on an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to liberal values, these parties pose one of the key challenges to European democracies. Far-right ideology also fundamentally challenges many of the principles underpinning post-WWII education reform, including the commitment to promoting equity and strengthening liberal values and tolerance.

Does this mean that far-right parties have also developed a fundamentally different approach to education than other party families? This special issue answers this question with a partial ‘yes’. The educational views of European far-right parties are closely linked to their specific cultural programme, with a characteristic focus on shaping more homogeneous and authoritarian societies. However, when it comes to redistributive material issues such as access and tracking, no such unified approach emerges, and the policies supported are borrowed from both the traditional left and right. These initial findings raise new questions. This concluding section addresses four of them and suggests promising avenues for future research.

First, as mentioned earlier, the analysed far-right parties have different positions on material redistributive issues. This finding is consistent with more general observations about the traditionally more mixed electorates of parties in this family and their ‘blurry’ socio-economic platforms (Rovny and Polk 2020; Rathgeb and Busemeyer 2022). A focus on education, a policy field that has deep redistributive implications and that people (and parents) care deeply about (Ansell 2010; Busemeyer etal. 2023), can help discriminate between different explanations and interpretations of this phenomenon. Designs could leverage the significant change and variation in parties’ positions on redistributive issues – for example regarding education markets and access – to investigate the role of potential underlying electoral and institutional determinants.

Second, collectively, the articles reveal geographical variation. Notably, there are significant differences between the cultural and redistributive positions on education espoused by far-right parties in Eastern and Western Europe, while there are fewer differences between parties in the European South and North. Comparative research highlights the role of communist legacies in shaping the politics of welfare and ethnicity in Eastern Europe (Bustikova 2019; Cook 2011). From a European perspective, understanding to what extent, and how, these legacies translate into specific approaches to education in the East and West is another key question that future research may want to address.

The special issue also highlights the changing configurations of European far-right parties’ approaches to education. Several articles suggest that participation in government – or the realistic prospect of executive power – is an important driver for parties to develop, refine, and ‘professionalise’ their education platforms. This finding suggests that education plays different roles in the politics of the far right when in power and when in opposition. For social movements and opposition parties, education is a preferred field to engage in ‘culture wars’ that increase their visibility and distinctiveness (Giudici 2021).

On the other hand, parties aspiring to or in power may choose to align at least some of their claims with educational expertise and norms to demonstrate competence and influence actual policy. Education systems are complex institutions with many stakeholders. Plans for radical change risk provoking resistance from teachers, administrators or parents, all of whom have been shown to have the power to block education reform (Moe and Wiborg 2017), with serious consequences for a government’s image and electoral prospects. Which issues are more sensitive to the changing role of parties, and how far right parties adapt their education programme when in power, are other important questions for future research.

Finally, because this special issue focuses on parties in selected countries, it cannot answer questions about policy learning. A few articles mention exchanges between parties, social movements, and experts within the country analysed. In these cases, parties may learn from actors involved with national education in different capacities, i.e. as intellectuals, academics, or representatives of educational stakeholders such as teachers and parents. However, the contemporary European far right has been described as a transnational movement with institutionalised means of exchange and networking (Minkenberg 2000). Dedicated research is therefore also likely to uncover instances of transnational policy learning, the mechanisms of which could further refine our understanding of the far right as both an educational and political actor.

This special issue shows that the study of the far right can refine our understanding of the politics of education, and that a focus on education policy generates new insights into the far right. Still, many questions about the relationship between the far right and education in Europe remain unanswered. We invite and look forward to future research in this area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under Grant [SRG1920\101224]; the European Research Council under Grant [759188]; and the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant [P2ZHP1_184086].