The headquarters of Italy’s CGIL union in Rome were deserted when neo-fascists tried to smash their way in after an anti-vax protest in October 2021.

“I wasn’t in the building when it was attacked,” says Salvatore Marra, CGIL’s head of European and international policies. “It was a Saturday afternoon, and our offices were closed but if people had been here, they would have been severely injured because these thugs had sticks, machetes and other weapons. They destroyed the whole basement of our headquarters!”

The attack was a wake-up call to Europe’s trades unions – which the far right has historically targeted – and a harbinger of the wave of authoritarian governments now breaking across the continent.

Eventually, police used tear gas and water cannon to contain what CGIL’s leader Maurizio Landini called “an act of fascist thuggery.”

“No one,” he said, “should think they can return our country to its fascist past.”

But the following year’s election was won by Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, whose origin traces back to the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). One Brothers candidate in the last European election was Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, the “post-fascist” great grandson of Italy’s wartime fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

Since Meloni’s election, “there has been repression of freedom of association,” Marra tells Equal Times. “The right to strike is being attacked by decrees from Matteo Salvini [Italy’s deputy prime minister and leader of the nationalist, populist Lega party] – especially in public transport – and a new ‘security decree’ now in effect is highly repressive.”

When thousands of striking metalworkers in Bologna demonstrated for the renewal of their collective agreement in June, the police instantly filed a complaint with the public prosecutor under the new security legislation.

The decree, which became law last month, allows protestors to be jailed for terms of up to six years for blocking roads. Non-violent actions such as refusing food or remaining seated during a prison riot are also criminalised by the law.

Far right groups in Italy and elsewhere often posture as defenders of rights for ‘indigenous workers’ but their behaviour in power betrays an antipathy towards the working poor and unwavering support for the corporate rich.

Meloni’s government has ended most social dialogue, cut social welfare payments, and attacked an array of scapegoats – migrants, journalists, people from the LGBTQ+ community – while simultaneously eroding women’s rights to abortion.

“The more I look at it, the more Italy seems like Turkey in terms of civil liberties and human rights,” says Marra. “Dissent is no longer welcome. It is silenced and it is punished.”

From the ashes of austerity: a resurgent far right

The Italian clampdown has been mirrored across the European Union, where the far right holds power in Hungary, and participates in coalition governments in Finland, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

In Sweden, the radical right-wing Swedish Democrats, which came second in the 2022 elections, has formed an adjacent voting-bloc to the government, while the extreme right has made huge electoral advances in several other states including Austria, France, Germany and Romania.

Experts say that a decade of deregulated markets, austerity and falling benefits created the basis for the rise of neo-fascist parties, which have tended to campaign for strong ethno-nationalist welfare states – and then act against measures that would benefit claimants, so intensifying the conditions in which their parties thrive.

Juliana Chueri, an assistant professor in comparative politics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam tells Equal Times to remember that far right advances “emerged in the context of neoliberal social policymaking and welfare retrenchment, which left-wing parties in many EU countries were also responsible for.”

Once in power though, the far right’s flagship policy everywhere was “welfare chauvinism”: the limiting of welfare benefits to a ‘deserving’ class of hard-working white citizens, which also criminalises the long term unemployed as “parasites on the welfare state,” according to Chueri.

The narrative – especially for pensioners – was: “You were there from the beginning. You worked in this country and contributed to it. It’s not fair that you have fallen behind and are struggling to make ends meet,” she says.

In Finland, this message was deployed by the Finns party (FP), which came second in elections in 2023 and took up seven out of 19 ministerial seats, even if one of its ministers was quickly forced to resign when jokes that he’d made about Hitler came to light.

During the election campaign, the FP leader Matti Putkonen – or “the working man Putkonen” as he called himself – promised to cut the number of refugees, deny them social and welfare benefits, and bring down petrol prices (which have since continued to rise).

But Putkonen, a former blue-collar labourer, “knew how to talk to workers,” says Susanna Salovaara, the director of FinUnions which represents Finland’s unions in Brussels. “He had done that all his life.”

Putkonen’s anti-immigrant message landed well with many workers who, as Salovaara put it, “would prefer the state to pay child allowance to a Finnish family living in Thailand than to an immigrant who has been working and paying tax in Finland for 10 years.”

Once in power though, the FP oversaw radical austerity measures, tax cuts for the wealthy along with a rollback of universal welfare payments – including unemployment benefit, healthcare access and housing allowances – in addition to severe restrictions on employment contracts and the right to take sympathy action or political strikes.

The Finns hadn’t campaigned for such measures but many workers “will take the lowering of their standards as long as there’s no immigrants coming to Finland,” Salovaara says. “They never talk about their harshest ideas. They just sneak them in.”

“People vote for the original, not the copy”

The far right’s ability to steal votes from a left that seems to have abandoned the working class has been as well-documented as has its neglect of such voters after it has won power.

One crucial question for many people though is whether the new far right agenda can reasonably be called ‘neo-fascist’.

The issue is a life or death one for trades unionists, who were among the first victims of the German Nazis after their election in March 1933. That same month, unions were disbanded, and by the end of the year, 27,000 trades unionists and political dissidents were in concentration camps.

Thankfully nothing like that has (yet) happened this time around but are today’s far-right parties cut from the same cloth? Opinions are divided. For Chueri, “fascism” is too blunt a term, when most of today’s far right constellations “pretty much accept electoral democracy, at least on paper”.

A greater danger, she argues, is that far-right policy ideas and language will become mainstreamed when they are aped by liberal and social democratic parties. “The lesson we learned in the Netherlands is that it’s really not a good idea to copy the far right’s policies because in the end people will vote for the original, not the copy.”

The case of Hungary

The first breakthrough for Europe’s alt-right came in Hungary with the election of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in 2010, which had not focused its campaign on immigration.

Tamás Székely, the president of the VDSZ union which represents chemical, energy and general workers in Hungary said that Fidesz “moved absolutely to the extreme right” after that election, using “Nazi-style propaganda” to separate and attack groups of workers, LGBTQ people, migrants and refugees, and even – by demonising George Soros – Jews.

In the face of unremitting repression, “union membership fell from about 12-13 per cent before Fidesz to around eight per cent now because of the many attacks in the last 10 years, particularly in the public sector,” Székely tells Equal Times.

A labour code introduced in 2011 drastically curtailed public sector workers’ right to strike and obliged unions to maintain “minimum services” acceptable to employers, when they did. “Workfare” schemes that kept the long-term unemployed out of the labour market were expanded. Older women were encouraged to retire. Younger people were nudged to leave school without qualifications, and inward labour mobility needs were neglected. A so-called ‘slave labour law’ was even introduced allowing bosses to demand an annual 400 hours of compulsory overtime, while delaying payments for up to three years.

At the same time, Orbán has attacked balancing institutions such as the free press and independent judiciary. He has moved to privatise health insurance, limited unemployment benefits to just three months – the shortest in Europe – and whittled welfare benefits to the bone, all while raising taxes for the poorest and slashing them for the richest.

Trades unions have naturally been in his crosshairs. Gabor Scheiring, an assistant professor of politics at Qatar’s Georgetown University and a former member of the Hungarian Parliament tells Equal Times that the Fidesz onslaught has been “devastating” for the country’s union movement.

“It redistributed resources from working class communities to the upper middle classes and to economic elites,” he says. “It also led to a destruction of the institutional self-defence mechanisms of the working class, including the deliberate fragmentation of trade unions, in some cases their partial co-optation, and an overall repression of labour rights and workers’ ability to organise.”

Ominously, Scheiring noted that Hungary had become a laboratory for illiberalism in which scapegoating, clientelism and an authoritarian politics of fear finessed a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. “You can’t sustain democracy in the context of those obscene inequalities,” he says.

One female Hungarian union activist who asked not to be identified fearing reprisals tells Equal Times that workplace harassment against Fidesz’s political opponents was now common.

“Because it is known that I do not agree with the policies of the current governing party, my career path has been slowed for some time,” she says. “There was a point when they wanted to fire me. I said that if they did, I would use my media and political connections to tell my story. They don’t like me, but they gave up on the idea of firing me after that.”

“Unfortunately, I know of numerous cases where my colleagues were fired, or their situations were made impossible because of their union positions and political beliefs,” she continues. “There is nothing extraordinary about this in today’s Hungary. We have no legal protection, no legal remedy. Our laws allow it, and this kills people’s ability to stand up for their interests.”

In the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) 2025 Global Rights Index, Hungary received a score of 4 (out of 5+ for the very worst cases, indicating that workers’ rights are not guaranteed due to the destruction of the rule of law). In the cases of Finland and Italy, both with a score of 2, the ITUC Index highlights the way in which these two countries “have imposed draconian restrictions on strike action”. Furthermore: “The far-right coalition government led by Petteri Orpo in Finland is further evidence of the playbook deployed worldwide to weaken unions and suppress workers’ rights.” In the case of Italy, the Index warns of “clear signs” that workers’ freedoms “are increasingly threatened by the rise of the far right”.

---