DefenseHub · Sunday · History · October 11, 2026
On Friday, at the first rally of Brazil's runoff campaign, President Lula told supporters that "this country will not again be governed by fascism." He did not name Flávio Bolsonaro, the opponent he faces at the ballot box on October 25, but nobody needed the name. Two years ago Kamala Harris answered "Yes" when asked whether Donald Trump was a fascist, and in France and Germany the word, or its cousin "Nazi," follows Marine Le Pen's National Rally and the Alternative for Germany into every election. The label has become the most common insult in democratic politics. It is worth recalling what it meant. (Folha de S.Paulo; NPR)
What We Know
Historians disagree about many things, but not about what fascism did. Roger Griffin, whose definition is the most widely cited, describes its core as "a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism": palingenetic meaning reborn, the promise that the nation would rise again from decadence. Nazism was its most extreme variant, with race at the center. Robert Paxton treats fascism as a process in five stages: a movement forms, roots itself as a party, takes power, exercises it, and radicalizes or decays. In both accounts what matters is the destination. Fascism was not a style of speech. It was a route to a particular kind of state. (Library of Social Science; The Spectator)
In Italy the route ran through violence before it ran through law. Mussolini's squads burned union halls and opposition newspapers from 1920, and the March on Rome in October 1922 pressured the king into making him prime minister. In June 1924 the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced the intimidation around that year's election, was kidnapped and murdered. In January 1925 Mussolini told parliament he took political responsibility and dared his opponents to act. They could not. Within two years the opposition press was silenced and rival parties dissolved. (Britannica; World History Encyclopedia)
Germany made the same journey in eighteen months. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 without a majority. A decree after the Reichstag fire suspended civil liberties, and in March the Enabling Act let the government make laws without parliament, passed with Communist deputies barred and SA men lining the chamber. By July the Nazi Party was the only legal party. Its outcome was a war of conquest and the murder of some six million Jews. (USHMM; USHMM; USHMM; USHMM)
Behind the machinery sat an ideology. Both regimes rejected liberal democracy and individual rights in the name of a nation-state that claimed the whole of life, and Nazism added a biological theory of race. Its eugenics came early: a law of July 1933 ordered the compulsory sterilization of people judged to carry hereditary illness, and about 400,000 Germans were sterilized. From 1939 the regime murdered some 250,000 disabled patients in its so-called euthanasia program. Italy followed with racial laws against its Jews in 1938. (USHMM; USHMM)
Comparing Italy and Germany yields a test any reader can apply. Fascism in power abolished competitive elections, banned every other party, ruled through a party militia, subordinated the courts to a single leader, wrote racial hierarchy into law and organized the nation for war. Nationalism, a strong leader, hostility to immigration or contempt for the press can each be criticized. None of them, alone or together, is fascism.
Operational Context
The scholars who know the subject best have not treated the label lightly. Paxton said in 2017 that Trump was "not really" a fascist, then changed his mind after January 6, 2021, writing that Trump's "open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line." That is the strongest version of the case, though not the consensus view. Richard Evans notes that war sat at the center of fascism; Samuel Moyn warns that the comparison flatters the observer more than it explains the present; Griffin applies the label only if Trump meant to replace the Constitution with personal rule. (Newsweek; The New Yorker; NPR)
Apply the test to what followed. Trump lost the 2020 election, contested the result, and still left office when his term ended. He won again in 2024 and governs with a Congress whose seats are on the ballot in three weeks, against an opposition free to campaign. The system prosecuted more than a thousand January 6 participants, most of whom Trump pardoned on his return, and held two more national elections. Mussolini's Italy held no election after 1924 that anyone could lose.
War is the criterion Trump comes closest to. Since returning to office he has talked of annexing Greenland, even by force, and of making Canada the 51st state. In January U.S. forces seized Maduro in Caracas, and on February 28 the United States and Israel went to war with Iran, killing its supreme leader on the first day, without a new authorization from Congress. Critics are right to scrutinize all of it. It is still not fascist conquest. Greenland remains Danish under a basing agreement signed in September, no Venezuelan or Iranian territory has been annexed or occupied, and Congress has voted repeatedly on ending the war while the courts and the November elections carry on. (Reuters; Reuters; BBC; Congressional Research Service)
In Brazil the pattern repeats. Jair Bolsonaro lost in 2022 and his term ended on schedule. In September 2025 a Supreme Court panel convicted him of plotting to overturn that election, which he denies and calls persecution. He has praised the military governments of 1964 to 1985, which censored the press and jailed opponents, but that was Brazil's military dictatorship, not a fascist mass movement. His son has just finished first in a free election, and the runoff will be decided by voters, not squads. (Reuters)
France and Italy show how far the European right has traveled from its origins. Marine Le Pen expelled her father, the National Front's founder, in 2015 and has lost two presidential runoffs since. Convicted of embezzlement in March 2025, she appealed through the courts rather than the streets. Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy descends from the postwar MSI, founded by veterans of Mussolini's regime; as prime minister she has called the 1938 racial laws the lowest point in Italian history and has governed since 2022 through parliament and elections. (Reuters; BBC; Reuters; Reuters)
Germany is the hard case, and the argument is stronger for admitting it. In May 2025 the domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization, then agreed not to act on the label while the party challenges it in court. Björn Höcke, its leader in Thuringia, was convicted in 2024 for using a banned SA slogan, a deliberate provocation that German courts punished. Those are findings about specific conduct by specific people. They are not a verdict on the one in five Germans who voted for the AfD in February 2025, or on a party that sits in the Bundestag and sues in German courts like any other. (DW)
The vocabulary is not neutral either. Eric Kaufmann and David Rozado studied more than 30 million articles from 54 American and British outlets. Between 2000 and 2019, left-leaning outlets used far-right terms 4.38 times as often as far-left ones, and centrist outlets 3.33 times. The gap persists. DefenseHub counted English-language articles in the GDELT news database over the past twelve months: about 70,000 used "far-right" and 27,000 used "far-left." Part of the gap reflects where the electorally successful movements have been; the BBC's decision to revise its guidance last month suggests that is not the whole story. The new rules demand the same high bar for both labels. (Kaufmann and Rozado, Social Sciences; BBC; GDELT)
My Read
The test is simple, and the politicians most often called fascist today do not pass it. They contest elections, lose some of them and leave. Their parties sit in parliaments beside the parties that denounce them, and their leaders answer to courts. Nothing in that record resembles the abolition of the vote or the squads that killed Matteotti. Calling them fascists is inaccurate, and it weakens the word for the day a real fascist movement appears.
The inaccuracy has costs. It cheapens the memory of the people fascism actually destroyed. It tells tens of millions of voters that their choice makes them fascists, which persuades none of them and signals that the center has stopped listening. And it empties the word: a label that applies to everyone on the right cannot warn anyone when the real thing appears.
None of this puts these movements beyond criticism. January 6 was an assault on a constitutional process; praise for a military dictatorship is a fair target. Those failings have precise names: illiberal, nationalist, authoritarian in tendency. Use them. And apply the same bar to both sides. When a government jails its electoral rivals, as Daniel Ortega's did before Nicaragua's 2021 vote, that is the conduct the word "extreme" exists to describe.
What to Watch
Does Lula's campaign keep the fascism framing through the October 25 runoff, and does it move any undecided voters?
How do German courts rule on the AfD's challenge to its extremist classification?
Do other newsrooms follow the BBC's September guidance on applying the same standard to "far-right" and "far-left"?
Will the November midterms in the United States be held and certified on schedule, as the 2022 and 2024 elections were?
Can Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella turn the National Rally's institutional strategy into a presidential win in 2027?
Recommended Sources
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism: the five-stage model, by the historian who later changed his mind about Trump.
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism: the definition most scholars start from.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia on the Nazi rise to power: the road from chancellorship to dictatorship, dated and sourced.
Eric Kaufmann and David Rozado, "The Increasing Frequency of Terms Denoting Political Extremism in U.S. and U.K. News Media": the data behind the labeling asymmetry.
BBC News Style Guide, political labels: a newsroom's attempt to apply one standard to both sides.