Few expressions circulate today with the frequency of Far Right. Often rendered in Italian as "ultra-right", it is used for Trump and Orbán, for Meloni and Fratelli d'Italia, but also for the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and, more recently, for Vannacci's National Future . Why do we use it so often?
We probably do not resort to this conceptual simplification only out of laziness, but because it is difficult to precisely place these political subjects along the continuum between radicalism and anti-democratic and violent extremism. The problem is prospective and depends on the position from which we observe them: the frame of reference is gradually shifting, and a slow shift is, by definition, more difficult to record than a clean break.
The boundary between what a democratic system tolerates and what it sanctions is based on a delicate balance and does not move all at once. Electoral and judicial rules continue to formally punish attacks on constitutional constraints, but they do so with less constancy; mainstream parties continue to declare themselves distinct from radical and extremist ones, but increasingly treat them as ordinary interlocutors, in parliament as well as in local alliances; Voters continue to declare themselves bound to democratic principles, but a growing share of them are willing, on a case-by-case basis, to tolerate violations of those principles when their own side commits them. None of these changes, taken individually, are enough to reclassify a party or a leader. Taken together, and repeated over time, they change what that party or leader can afford to do.
This is why a label like Far Right is useful today, although it inevitably remains imprecise: the reference system against which an actor appears radical or extreme is not static, and our ability to classify it does not keep pace with its transformation. A party can remain identical in its program and still change its position, simply because around it the threshold of what was previously precluded to it is lowered.
This is an indication for those who observe these phenomena. Before asking what a party is, radical or extreme, mainstream or not, it is perhaps worth asking what the context allows it to represent. It is the degree of institutional sanction, the legitimacy of the mainstream and the tolerance of the voters that tell us, more precisely than the label itself, where a political actor really stands and how far the context allows him to go.