Political Parties & Disability Politics: The Far Right in Six Democracies

Over the last three decades, the far right has become increasingly normalised in liberal democracies. Next to electoral breakthroughs, government participation, and street mobilisations, their reactionary demands and discourses are increasingly accommodated by mainstream parties (Wodak 2020; Krause et al. 2023). These developments not only threaten democratic institutions, but also endanger groups targeted by far-right actors’ reactionary politics. Existing research extensively documents how far-right actors mobilise on a right-wing populist and authoritarian platform attacking the rights of perceived outgroups (Mudde 2007). This work shows how far-right actors flexibly define outgroups across contexts, mobilising on nativist and racist (Mudde 2007; Mondon 2022), as well as antifeminist (Volk 2025) and transphobic agendas (Amery and Mondon 2025). However, we know less about far-right actors’ ableist politics (Harnish 2017; Goodley and Lawthom 2019). This is an important gap given mounting evidence that far-right actors target people with disabilities and mental illness. Recent examples include Reform UK’s 2025 pledge to cut disability benefits, the AfD’s call for increased use of incarceration and preventive detention of people with mental illness, as well as the repeated use of ableist discourses by Donald Trump. This paper addresses this gap by systematically analysing far-right ableist politics in six democracies. Employing a comparative case study design, I combine expert interviews with members of disability justice organisations with content analysis of party manifestos, position papers, and media interviews. The paper makes three contributions. First, I show that ableism constitutes a systematic, yet largely overlooked, component of far-right ideology. Second, drawing on disability studies, I develop and apply a novel analytical framework to examine parties’ policy positions on disability. Third, I make an empirical contribution by compiling the first comparative dataset of far-right party communication on disability policy across six democracies. This dataset provides a resource for future research on party competition, political communication, and disability politics.