The Illusion of Liberty: How the Right Weaponises 'Freedom'

Alex Spencer unpacks the fallacies behind the dominant discourse on freedom promoted by right-wing populist parties and proposes an alternative understanding of freedom to counter it.

Since the exit polls of the federal election were announced on February 23rd, many in Germany are still coming to terms with the increasing popularity of Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD), the right-wing national conservative party founded in 2013. Despite the likelihood that it will not form a majority coalition, the party’s vote has doubled since the 2021 election, becoming the second largest party in the German Bundestag, just eight points behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). 

The mood at the AfD’s election party was described as ‘ecstatic’. In contrast, the German Trade Union Confederation expressed vocal opposition, while the leader of Germany’s Central Council of Jews warned that ‘it should concern us that one-fifth of German voters cast their ballots for a party that in both words and ideology has connections to right-wing extremism and neo-Nazism’.

This is a familiar and well-reported phenomenon across Europe and in the US. Italy and Hungary are under right-wing government, while the Rassemblement National (RN) in France garnered 33.2% of the national vote in the first round of the snap 2024 election. In Austria, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) won the most votes in the 2024 legislative election, narrowly failing to form a coalition government in February this year. The far-right Confederation Liberty and Independence in Poland now holds 18% of the national voting intention in the polls, an increase of 6% in two months. In Romania, nationalist figure Calin Georgescu won the first round of the presidential election in November, before having the result annulled due to alleged Russian interference. 

The support systems for these parties and the electoral dynamics that underpin their popularity are widely studied and speculated. Instead, and having myself studied legal and political ethics, I have been drawn more to the underlying concepts that reinforce their popularity. Understanding how these parties have simplified and distorted political buzzwords is integral to our wider ability to push back on their rhetoric, and repurpose this language against them.

In particular, I thought I would focus on the concept of ‘freedom’ which prevails throughout the messaging and policy of all these parties in a number of guises, such as ‘individual liberty’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘autonomy’. It is a term which appeals strongly to voters across the political spectrum, but which has been largely co-opted the right in their electoral campaigning.

In Germany, much of the AfD’s public rhetoric has been centred around reclaiming sovereignty for Germany and its citizens. Its policy programme begins with the tagline, ‘Freie Bürger, keine Untertanen’ (free citizens, not subjects), and its proposed policies around EU labour regulation, freedom of the press and vaccination mandates all contain frequent reference to removing barriers to individuals’ liberties. Co-leaders Weidel and Chrupalla criticised the ban on Compact Magazine, an extremist right-wing publication as a ‘blow to press freedom’ in 2024, promoting policies of free speech that are echoed by the Austrian FPÖ and further afield in Trump’s executive order on 20th January on the same topic. 

Anti-immigration sentiment sits at the heart of these parties, and this is perhaps where the idea of freedom has been most vociferously invoked. The proposed remigration policies of the AfD and FPÖ centre around ideas of national sovereignty, as does the political programme of Slawomir Mentzen’s Confederation in Poland, self-titled as ‘Konstytucja Wolności’ (The Constitution of Freedom).

In discussions on labour regulation, the anti-EU rhetoric of the AfD hinges on ‘freeing the labour market from unnecessary restrictions’. There have been repeated calls by the right in Germany for removing barriers to increased and more ‘flexible’ working patterns, as well as reducing the power and organisation of Workers’ Councils. 

Illustration by Martina Canullo

The anti-vaccination stance that seems shared amongst these parties relies similarly on this nebulous concept of freedom - this time manifested through sovereignty over one’s body - in order to bear its political weight. The AfD campaigned against vaccines during the pandemic, most infamously in Bautzen which experienced unusually high infection rates, while their Member of the Federal Diet Martin Sichert described vaccines as a ‘massive encroachment on people’s bodily autonomy’. Their 2023 manifesto accuses states and NGOs of ‘systematically restricting civil rights and freedoms on the basis of one-sidedly preferred, sometimes pseudo-scientific theories’ such as pandemic research.

These rhetorical pulls on ‘freedom’ are widespread in Germany, but this can be observed across any number of Western countries over the past 10-15 years. A vague idea of freedom has consistently been evoked and moulded to suit the political flavour of the day, and opposition parties are frequently pulled into debates around freedom versus regulation, or sovereignty versus immigration, or autonomy versus vaccination.

These debates have served to concretise the right’s self-cultivated image of being parties in defence of freedom. However, it is essential to understand what ‘freedom’ parties like the AfD are referring to, and to understand that we should reevaluate our understanding of liberty to challenge this very basis of right-wing rhetoric.

The concept of liberty most frequently evoked in right-wing rhetoric is typically referred to as ‘negative’ liberty - the idea of freedom as the absence of interference or barriers to our actions. This primarily Western concept of non-interference was theorised by early modern British theorists like Hobbes and Locke, and was explicitly coined as ‘negative liberty’ by Thomas Green in the late 1800s in his theories on liberalism. Isaiah Berlin’s seminal 1958 lecture on Two Concepts of Liberty explored the differences between the concept of negative liberty as freedom from external interference and positive liberty, seen as the freedom to self-determine and perform certain actions. Despite their linguistic differences, both of the concepts described by Berlin are fundamentally individualistic, and conceptualise the single person’s desires or needs as the foundation of freedom.

Illustration by Martina Canullo

We can see this concept being evoked throughout the rhetoric of right-wing libertarian parties, whether it is freedom from external influence, from labour or market regulation, from bodily interference or from censorship. Conceptualised like this, it is difficult to contest the idea of the AfD or equivalent being a pro-freedom party, when so much of their rhetoric and manifesto hinges around removing bureaucratic red tape and external interference. So how can we reformulate our understanding of freedom to better encapsulate our issues with this rhetoric, and expose the fact that the AfD’s pro-freedom and pro-worker policies are in fact the opposite in many ways?

One such way is to understand freedom as a relational concept, where dynamics of power and control are more accurate reflections of our liberty. This idea has been brought to the fore by neo-republican (small ‘r’) thinkers like Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and Maurizio Viroli, who argue that freedom is reduced when one party or person has ‘arbitrary power’ over another. Understood this way, I can enjoy all the traditional freedoms associated with negative liberty like movement, speech, safety and so on, but if someone has the ability to curtail these arbitrarily, then I am not free. Even if this person chooses not to curtail these rights, I am not really free. 

There is a distinction between the individualistic approach to freedom employed by the right, and this more societal view we can use instead. It shifts our understanding away from ourselves as individuals towards the social relationships and conditions within which we co-exist.  

This strain of thought has been particularly effective in anti-colonial arguments, where theorists such as Pettit, Margaret Moore and Lea Ypi have sought to explain that even in a society where people could be enjoying relative prosperity and individual civil liberties, the mere existence of arbitrary colonial power, and the fact that it could remove these capabilities at any moment, is curtailing people’s real freedom.

The implications of this idea are significant when we look at the rhetoric and manifestos of right-wing parties in Western countries. If we understand freedom as limiting the arbitrary power of more powerful figures in society, then policies like regulation, vaccination and limitations on hateful speech can actually be seen to promote freedom. In this vein, thinkers like Pettit have argued that the State can act as a necessary guarantor of freedom when it introduces these rules, provided there are checks that prevent its own ability for arbitrary power.

The AfD has garnered strong working class support in Germany, finishing first amongst self-identified labourers during the election last year, a jump of 23 percentage points from ten years earlier. It achieved this with a number of promises related to distancing Germany from EU labour regulations on working hours and employment patterns which are seen to hinder the German manufacturing industry. Much of the rhetoric around this, alongside the economic arguments, has been related to German sovereignty and freedom from EU regulatory shackles. 

If we understand freedom as this limitation of arbitrary power, we can more easily understand the potential implications of deregulating labour practices. While ostensibly removing barriers to entrepreneurs and workers, the AfD’s proposals would increase the potential for business owners to exploit workers and open the door to further imbalance in the employee/employer power dynamic. We can look to Hungary for evidence of this slide, where the rights to strike have been curtailed and where the amount of overtime a business can expect from its employees per year has increased from 250 to 400. 

Illustration by Martina Canullo

Proposals for ‘remigration’ in Germany are even more egregious in creating relationships of arbitrary power - referring to Alice Weidel’s calls for “repatriations on a large scale” of German citizens with a migration background if they break the law or “refuse to integrate”. It is a highly controversial term which the AfD embraced in January, and around which the party’s proposals extend vaguely and arbitrarily. It puts into question the idea of citizenship as a guarantor of freedom, if the state has the power to arbitrarily relinquish it. As journalist Hans Pfeifer has written: “many worry about the rise of the AfD because it wants millions to leave the country, though it deliberately blurs the criteria for who exactly it means.” 

Those supporting these policies cite ideas of autonomy and sovereignty, echoing the misplaced idea that the repatriation of those with ‘opposing values’ will increase their own individual liberty. However, the simple fact that the state can retroactively and arbitrarily remove citizenship is a limitation on everyone’s freedom, not only that of those it directly affects.

We can also apply the relational idea of freedom to the debate over vaccination. The argument that people’s individual liberty is curtailed by mandated vaccination programmes neglects the inherently unequal relationships that the spread of diseases creates. The AfD has argued, for example, that mandated vaccines infringe on our personal autonomy. However the unchecked spread of a disease like COVID puts vulnerable parts of the population at high risk, severely reducing their ability to go about their lives without risking serious illness.

Similar arguments can be made against right-wing calls for ‘free’ speech and social media, which, when unregulated, often devolve into the loudest, most vociferous and most powerful voices being the most heard. We can see a microcosm of this in the aftermath of the Twitter acquisition in 2022, and Musk’s reduction of moderation rules on the platform. Several studies have shown that the use of hate speech increased substantially in this period, while the engagement and following of this content also went up. If promoting our individual freedom of speech opens the floor to heightened extremism and identity-based threats, then it is ultimately creating conditions that fundamentally reduce everyone’s freedom. 

Understanding that liberty is a social and relational concept therefore allows us to move away from the traditional individualistic rhetoric of right-wing parties, and enables us to see that ‘freedoms’ that create unequal relationships of arbitrary power are not real freedoms. Freedom and equality are inherently tied together, and as Matthias Goldmann, Professor of International Law at EBS University, told DW: ”The AfD does not share the principle of equal freedom.” The individual liberty that the AfD promote is fundamentally unequal, and it is precisely this arbitrary inequality which makes their conception so flawed.

In the populism of Germany’s AfD, as well as similar parties in Poland, Austria and across Europe and the US, we see the distortion of freedom in its rhetorical form. It risks becoming a smokescreen veiling the removal of checks on power, and it is important that we have the recourse to question this traditional understanding. It is also important that we can challenge these policies on their own terms, and not fall into debates around a trade-off between (for example) labour regulation and freedom, understanding that they can instead be complimentary. Reimagining freedom as a relational and intrinsically social phenomenon is integral to this.