Challenging dichotomies: On the normalisation of the far right in urban neighbourhoods

In ‘Urban neighbourhoods and far-right spatial strategies: Displacement, infrastructure and civic life’ Santamarina and Ince draw attention to urban neighbourhoods as a significant albeit neglected scale in the study of opportunity structures for both contemporary far-right and anti-fascist politics. With a decidedly geographic focus on the Global North, they draw on case study research in the UK and Spain and identify the three core themes of civic engagement, displacement, and infrastructure as the threads that weave far-right politics into urban neighbourhoods. In doing so, they conceive of their argument not as a mere exercise of downscaling far-right politics from national, regional, or global levels. Rather, they aim to ‘expose how everyday socio-political experiences at the neighbourhood scale play a central role in shaping patterns of far-right support at multiple scales’ (Santamarina and Ince, 2026: 80).

While I find much to agree with Santamarina and Ince's insistence on the neighbourhood scale, I want to use this commentary to add nuance to their argument by challenging three dichotomies that explicitly and implicitly guide their propositions: far-right actors/anti-fascists, disruption/continuity, and fringe/centre. To do so, and keeping with the authors' metaphor of the thread, I take up the three core themes they suggest, weaving them together with the concept of normalisation. Normalisation denotes the process of how formerly tabooed topics of far-right discourse enter the boundaries of the ‘sayable’ (Wodak, 2021). I examine how normalisation goes hand in hand with the material conditions that have fuelled the rise of the far right, which Santamaria and Ince are primarily concerned with. I contend that we are not able to fully grasp the growing support of far-right politics without paying attention to the creeping process of normalisation when studying the far right's encroachment on processes of urban change.

Far-right actors, anti-fascists, and those in between

To begin with, Santamarina and Ince operationalise a definition of the far right as an umbrella term, including a wide range of actors inside as well as outside the party arena, acknowledging its ‘multiple articulations, contradictions and alliances’ (Santamarina and Ince, 2026: 66). Stemming from extensive discussions in political sciences, this is a helpful and common take, as it allows us to account for the complexity of the phenomenon and its heterogeneous actors. Yet the conceptual underpinnings of anti-fascism, and who is included in this category, is less clear. The authors refer to ‘counterpublics’ opposing the far right, but bringing more nuance to this definition would be an important next step when it comes to identifying ways urban scholarship can contribute to countering the rise of the far right, as the authors themselves acknowledge.

Here, however, I am concerned with those in between. I contend that in order to fully grasp how support for the far right emerges and solidifies in neighbourhoods, a sole focus on far-right actors or anti-fascists and their respective activities does not suffice. This becomes clear with regard to the article's first thread, the ‘neighbourhood as civic space’. Crucially, it highlights how far-right tactics have shifted from ‘violent’ to ‘civil’ territorialities, detailing how far-right actors are increasingly encroaching on civil discourses. This stands in contrast to the mobilising strategies based on violent physical attacks, which dominanted the 1990s and early 2000s. I have observed this shift in the context of fieldwork in neighbourhoods in German cities, too. Yet, building on my empirical insights, I find that it is also the discources and practices of non-far-right actors that stich far-right ideology into everyday neighbourhood life.

Studying the far right's infringement upon civil discourse, I have scrutinised how municipal leaders and public officials created neighbourhood forums in pursuit of countering the far-right surge in Germany. Interested in the way normalisation unfolds in the very spaces that aim to mitigate it, I found that participatory processes do not prohibit the normalisation of far-right agendas (Nettelbladt, 2023). In the case of the city of Cottbus, this was not only due to the far right's treacherous insistence on ‘free speech’ to legitimise racist and unconstitutional statements during neighbourhood forums, which were supposed to open a dialogue on current community issues. Rather, far-right advancement was enabled through municipal leaders’, civil servants’ and other local politicians’ emphasis on ‘everyone's right to have a say’. Inviting far-right actors in ultimately served as their trojan horse in the continuous destruction of the democratic deliberative order. Grasping the role of these seemingly neutral, yet complicit state actors in the advancement of far-right ideology is vital. While they reject far-right agendas, these actors often do not profess to being anti-fascist either. The role of these ‘inbetween actors’ becomes visible through the prism of normalisation. This is particularly relevant at the neighbourhood scale, as people often wear different institutional hats: Local politicians serve as volunteers, and civil servants are sympathetic with conservative parties that have long adopted far-right rhetoric. Thus, grasping the dynamics of the rise of the far right at the neighbourhood scale is only possible when recognising these blurred lines of local democracies by challenging the alleged dichotomy between far-right and non-far-right actors.

Disruption / continuity

My second point concerns a rather implicit assumption Santamarina and Ince make. In their diagnosis of the perpetual transformation of cities under capitalism, they convincingly argue that decades of neoliberal urban planning and austerity urbanism have fuelled feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, which offers breeding grounds for nativist ideology and racial hierarchies. This line of argument carries a sense of disruption, stipulating that such ideologies have only gained traction with the rise of the far right. I suggest that this risks undermining the continuity of far-right thought. In other words, on the one hand the nexus of disruption/continuity indeed captures how far-right contestations disrupt established assumptions about convivial neighbourhoods and local solidarity by way of furthering a plebiscitarian agenda. On the other hand, it points to the continuous fragility of local democracies, which have always lent themselves to stabilising asymmetrical power relations in the name of what political theorist Olson terms ‘white democracy’ (Olson, 2004). This term draws attention to the structural racism inherent in liberal democracies, describing how contemporary liberal democracies are still characterised by white privilege, i.e. the unearned advantage whites utilise to better or maintain their social position, even as they keep up the ideals of political equality and equal opportunity (Olson, 2004: 10). Bringing the issue of normalisation centre stage in local studies of the far right means tracing how the structural racism inherent in liberal democracies offers entry points for the far right's strategy of distinguishing between the ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ regarding the right to housing, a distinction constituted through discourses of national pride and racial hierarchies (Santamarina and Ince, 2026).

Further, challenging this dichotomy brings to light the perspective of those most affected by the rise of the far right, underlining the unevenness of how different social groups are targeted by its ideology. Political theorist Bonnie Honig speaks of the uneven distribution of far-right shocks, which happen fast for some and slow for others (Honig, 2021). While major shocks, like violent far-right attacks, can indeed be perceived as disruptive tremors by a societal majority, political minorities are confronted with the slowness of the far right's advance through increasing forms of relentless, everyday discrimination. In my own work I have started to drawn attention to the norms that are continuously being dismantled and subverted in local state-civil society alliances, entailing the responsibilisation of migrants by city governments (Nettelbladt, 2025). I believe that bringing the perspective of those most affected by the far right to the study of far-right spatial strategies is of vital concern for future work on the issue.

Fringe / centre

Relatedly, my third point concerns the role of the local state in the study of far-right politics at the neighbourhood scale. In line with the normalisation perspective I propose, I find that the restructuring of the local state deserves explicit attention, which Santamarina and Ince only hint at. This is not least relevant as the infrastructures brought up by the authors are always also a tool of statecraft. More so, the contemporary rise of the far right is showing yet again that the state is an inherently contested terrain, where hegemonic struggles between social forces, political actors, and competing visions of order are fought out. This framing goes against essentialising juxtapositions of fringe versus centre politics, treating the far right as an external aberration vis-à-vis the state as a unified, stable centre. Externalising the far right does not account for the far-right attempts to transform the centre of state institutions themselves, gradually shifting the boundaries of what is possible in policy, administration, and governance. The surge of far-right contestations goes hand in hand with a potential authoritarian transformation of the state. It does not leave state institutions untouched.

Again, let me illustrate this point by drawing on my empirical observations in the city of Cottbus, Germany (Nettelbladt, 2025). Tracing the negotiation of counterstrategies against the far right in Cottbus revealed just how central such contestation over the state is: far-right initiatives do not leave municipal institutions unscathed, and alliances across civil society, private actors, and state actors must be renegotiated in response. I found how traditional coalitions between progressive civil society groups and municipal government can weaken under far-right pressure, but also how new partnerships emerge as progressive activists shift from outright resistance to cautious collaboration with the state. Counterstrategies are not simply defensive reactions to the far right; they must themselves engage with, and reconfigure, the terrain of the state. Grasping the far right as embedded into the local states and institutional networks of urban neighbourhoods avoids underestimating its capacity for normalisation – and consequently, for institutionalisation and alliance-building across sectors.

Finally, and in line with Santamarina and Ince's outlook on the need for urban studies to also engage more thoroughly with anti-fascism , this perspective opens an analytical space for understanding counterstrategies not merely as protest or denunciation, but as strategic engagement with the underlying long-term structures of power. Challenging this fringe/centre dichotomy opens a more dialectical perspective, one in which the state is never a passive backdrop, but an arena that is contested, defended and reconfigured, a process in which the far right is neither purely external nor marginal but deeply enmeshed.

In this short piece, I have argued that to focus on the neighbourhood scale as a space of experience, mobilisation, socialisation, and the production of political subjectivity, as Santamarina and Ince (2026: 80) so decisively propose, also requires attention to processes of normalisation. Political norms are often formed, reinforced, or contested within neighbourhood spaces, shaping how political subjectivities are both produced and constrained. These processes of normalisation are not isolated, but deeply entangled with broader regional, national, and international dynamics highlighting, as the authors note, how the neighbourhood is never just local, but always operating within and through larger scales of power. I believe that the research agenda fledged out by Santamarina and Ince is a timely and much needed political and scholarly intervention. My heartfelt thanks to them, as well as to Elvin Wyly, for the opportunity to engage in dialogue with them.