Reimagining What the “Right” Means: The Emerging Transnational Right-Wing Movement as a Hegemony Challenger

The rise of the illiberal right in the West and across the globe over the last decade has been accompanied by a rightward shift in politics in general. As illiberal discourses and policies have been mainstreamed and normalised, the lines between the illiberal and mainstream right have become increasingly blurry, highlighting that the illiberal right has been in the position of a hegemony challenger on the right and beyond. In the process, rising illiberal right-wing forces have invested in building a political movement that transcends national borders. While exploring discursive and structural opportunities, establishing cooperation across borders, and building movement infrastructure, they have continuously been (re)negotiating common points of identification and (re)constructing a shared language to facilitate the emergence of a transnational right-wing public political sphere at the global level. Joint networking events, including international conferences, have played a key role in structuring and amplifying the transnational right-wing movement. As such events bring together like-minded actors under the auspices of common institutional structures, their shared online and physical spaces serve as shared communicative, discursive, and ultimately representative spaces, reinforcing the emergent political identification with shared lived experiences deeply rooted in space and time. This paper focuses on the case of one of such joint networking events—the National Conservatism conference held in Brussels in April 2024—to examine how participants negotiated their shared political identifications with and against particularising and universalising claims. By drawing on the methodological toolkits of post-structuralist Discourse Theory and the Discourse-Historical Approach to CDA, my analysis shows that efforts to renegotiate the content of such emblematic concepts as the “Right”, “conservatism”, or “nationalism” underpin the struggles for hegemony that the illiberal right has pursued on the right flank of the political spectrum.