Champions of democracy like Putin, Orbán, Salvini, Elon Musk, and that sad figure called Abascal came out in force to deplore the court ruling against Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Rally party. They immediately turned Le Pen into a victim of the system: they use harsh words like judicial scandal, covert coup d'état either liquidation of democracy, as the far right always does when it clashes with justice or, simply, with the norms of representative democracy. They are the same ones who applaud or promote the lawfare, The dirty judicial war against political adversaries, through judges or prosecutors willing to act in vain: then they find that justice must be final, and that any debate about judicial prevarication is an attack on democracy. We, the subjects of the Kingdom of Spain, have experienced all of this.
As a general principle, for the far right, democracy is only democracy when it works in their favor. It's not a caricature or reductionism, but their daily praxis. They could paraphrase Bettino Craxi, that corrupt Italian socialist leader who, in a fit of cynicism, proclaimed: "Socialism is what we socialists do." Similarly, the Western far right, those whom Steve Bannon wanted to unite around a project he called The Movement, but who have ended up coalescing around Trump during the Musk era (and the pro-Putin era), could coin the slogan "Democracy is what we democrats do," since they tend to be democrats, which would be (you and I would be too) everyone else. The leaders of the illiberal right parasitize institutions, and even when they are in power, they sell themselves to the public as enemies of the establishment, when the pure and hard establishment, the darkest part of the establishment, is themselves. It's a basic game of hiding: they pretend to be pursued by power, when they are the ones seeking to accumulate all the power and use it to persecute others.
Victimhood is the far right's ace in the hole. It's easy to detect, but difficult to defuse, because it feeds on resentment, the fuel that permeates the irritated collective life of our communities: it's cheap, abundant, and easy to take. For many people, having someone to hate is a comfort, and that's what the doctrines of the far right and neo-fascists provide them. Then, as in the case of Le Pen, Orbán, Trump, Salvini (or even opportunistic buffoons like this Alvise Pérez), the big words about patriotism and social order, about the fight against corruption, barely manage to mask the only real objective: money. And that's why the race to claim victimhood is so fierce: as long as democracies don't find more effective ways to defend themselves, their parasites will resort to that trump card again and again.
