Media must stop normalizing the far right

Georgios Samaras is an assistant professor of public policy at the School for Government, King’s College London.

I’ve spent more than a year examining the media’s habit of using substitute labels instead of calling the far right what it is — and this practice is now everywhere.

Newsrooms cycle through a growing list of alternative descriptors, usually in search of language that feels safer or less likely to trigger backlash: hard right, alt-right, new right, religious right, national conservative, traditionalist… The list keeps growing.

This would matter less if any of these terms added clarity, but most do not. They’re vague, they aren’t grounded in political science research, and they blur ideology rather than naming it, only to leave readers with softer language that hides what these actors truly stand for. And there are grave consequences to this mainstreaming.

Of course, none of this is new. Scholars of far-right mainstreaming, such as Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon, have shown how buzzwords — especially “populism” — helped produce this kind of journalistic ambiguity. The far right understood this dynamic long ago and has been exploiting it with discipline. Many of these actors now routinely deem being described as “far right” as defamation, treating accurate political description as if it were a form of vilification.

Instead, these parties— from Reform UK and France’s National Rally to Brothers of Italy and Alternative for Germany — are selling a self-proclaimed conservative vision that is wrapped in the language of common sense. Paired with promises of order and national renewal, this is the standard trick for presenting racist politics as natural, and smuggling some of the darkest ideas of the 1930s back into public life under the cover of murky policy language.

Let’s take, for example, the concept of “remigration.” In political science, remigration refers to the forced removal of minorities, especially those of African and South Asian descent, through coercion, exclusion and mass displacement — it’s ethnic cleansing dressed up in bureaucratic language. But today this term is appearing across Western media with far too little scrutiny, often treated as just another hardline immigration policy in the far-right playbook.

We can observe the same pattern being applied to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which which purports that political and cultural elites are deliberately engineering demographic change by encouraging immigration and higher birth rates among non-white, non-Christian populations to displace white Christian Europeans. Claims that whole cities are being “lost” to Islam, “no-go zones” and “two-tier policing” myths; distortions around grooming scandals; and blatant lies about crime statistics are turning the conversation around migration into a permanent moral panic.

While the effects of this are visible all across Europe, Britain’s Reform UK presents one of the clearest cases — not least because the party has been at the front of the line when it comes to legal threats and public pressure against media outlets for using established terms to describe its ideology.

Alas, much of the media has also handed Reform UK an absurd amount of airtime. This party, with just eight members of parliament, is routinely given a platform to push extreme ideas with a free pass, while its figures pose as a government-in-waiting more than three years ahead of the U.K.’s next general election.

This is exactly how someone like Reform UK policy head Zia Yusuf has become such a central figure. Not even an MP, Yusuf has been laying out his far-right vision in plain sight, getting it amplified nonstop. He has threatened mass deportations on a staggering scale — floating figures approaching 300,000 people a day — called for an end to “Indefinite Leave to Remain” when it comes to Brexit, and proposed an enforcement agency akin to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry it out. He has also boasted that Reform UK wouldn’t just leave the European Convention of Human Rights, but “derogate from every international agreement” standing in the way of its deportation agenda.

But while these slogans play well on X and rack up thousands of likes, the second a journalist pushes back and calls this ideology what it is, the whole act falls apart — as when BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire pressed Yusuf to name even one protected characteristic his party wanted to remove from the Equality Act, and he couldn’t name a single one.

This interview showed exactly how little substance sits behind the political performance — and the vital importance of proper scrutiny. The problem is that moments like this are growing increasingly rare.

The BBC’s reporting style, for example, is all too often shaped by internal guidelines and a collapsing vision of performative neutrality. This was clearly demonstrated in coverage of the death of 23-year-old Quentin Deranque in France two weeks ago, with a report that described Deranque as a “far-right feminist” — a phrase that invents a political category no serious politics course anywhere in the world would recognize. Far-right politics and feminism come from fundamentally different traditions and pursue fundamentally different aims.

But this isn’t a one-off example. These aren’t isolated editorial lapses. They reflect a political climate that rewards euphemism and intimidation. And that ecosystem now has a global engine it would be naïve not to name — U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last year I wrote in POLITICO that Trump wants to poison global political culture. What we’ve seen since is an effort to export a style that thrives on bullying journalists and steadily lowering standards, including those of political language.

It’s a lesson that travels fast. His European counterparts are catching up. They now understand that these practices can pressure media organizations into softening their language and normalizing their presence. And with far-right parties topping the polls across so much of Europe, we’ve already passed the mainstreaming stage.

Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed. And how some media are no longer just covering the far right but helping it speak.