The growing threat from the far-right?

If you follow mainstream media commentary in 2026 you could easily come away with the impression that the greatest threat to democracy is presented by the ‘far-right’. The language varies, but the message is remarkably consistent: Political violence comes from the far right. Extremism comes from the far right. Governments should be doing more to curb the spread of far right ideas.

For New Zealanders, there is an obvious reason why that argument has resonance. On 15 March 2019, Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant walked into two Christchurch mosques and murdered 51 innocent Muslim worshippers. It was an appalling act of right-wing terrorism, driven by a racist and extremist ideology, and nothing about what follows diminishes either the horror of that crime or the continuing danger posed by people who share his beliefs.

But does that mean political terrorism is essentially a phenomenon of the right?

Not remotely.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the world’s leading national security research organisations, defines terrorism as the deliberate use or threat of violence by non-state actors to achieve political objectives and create a broader psychological impact. It divides terrorism into four broad ideological categories: right-wing, left-wing, religious and ethnonationalist terrorism.

Those distinctions matter.

Right-wing terrorism includes violence motivated by things such as racial or ethnic supremacy and certain forms of anti-government extremism. Religious terrorism includes violence committed in pursuit of a faith-based ideology, with Salafi-jihadist movements such as ISIS and al-Qaeda representing the principal modern threat in that category. Left-wing terrorism includes politically motivated violence associated with revolutionary socialism or communism, anarchism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and related ideologies. And Ethnonationalist terrorism generally involves violence associated with separatist or nationalist objectives.

Of course, one can be politically left-wing without being an extremist – just as being politically conservative (the default position of most of the west for over 100 years) is not the same thing as being ‘far-right’. The overwhelming majority of people on both sides of normal democratic politics reject violence.

But that distinction shouldn’t become an excuse to sanitise the left when it does embrace violence. Violent revolutionary movements of the left are real, they have a long history, and they remain part of the modern terrorist landscape.

Contrast this with jihadist terrorism. Western governments sometimes tie themselves in linguistic knots trying to discuss the relationship between jihadist ideology and Islam because of a legitimate concern that ordinary Muslims shouldn’t be blamed for the actions of violent extremists. But behind that rhetorical caution there is very little ambiguity in the security world about the threat itself.

After September 11, Madrid, London, the rise of al-Qaeda and eventually ISIS, Western governments built an enormous counterterrorism architecture around jihadism. Intelligence agencies shared information. Governments tracked money. Networks were infiltrated. Plots were disrupted. Leaders were hunted down. ISIS lost its territorial caliphate.

That doesn’t mean jihadism has disappeared. Europol still describes it as the primary terrorist threat in the European Union and, in 2025 alone, jihadists were associated with 24 of the EU’s 45 recorded terrorist attacks and 347 of its 486 terrorism-related arrests.

So jihadism remains dangerous – but the important point is that we recognise it as dangerous. We have institutions specifically designed to identify it, monitor it and disrupt it.

But what about far-left and far-right terrorism? Which is more dangerous?

If your understanding of political extremism comes principally from contemporary media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the main threats exist on the right – but the historical record tells a very different story.

Between 1970 and 1980 there were 1,677 politically motivated terrorist incidents recorded in the West. An extraordinary 93 percent of these were carried out by groups classified as far-left.

Think about that number for a moment. Ninety-three percent.

During one of the most intense periods of political terrorism in modern Western history, the overwhelming majority of attacks didn’t come from the extreme right. They came from the extreme left.

And these weren’t fringe debating societies. Italy had the Marxist-Leninist Red Brigades, which carried out bombings, kidnappings and assassinations and murdered former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Germany had the Red Army Faction, better known to many as the Baader-Meinhof Group, which conducted a long campaign of bombings, shootings and assassinations. France had Action Directe. Greece had the Marxist Revolutionary Organisation 17 November. The United States had the Weather Underground and other revolutionary organisations. Latin America produced the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Montoneros in Argentina, FARC and ELN in Colombia, and the extraordinarily brutal Maoist Shining Path in Peru. Whatever else can be debated about these organisations, their place on the ideological spectrum can’t.

But that was fifty years ago, right? The Soviet Union is gone. The Berlin Wall came down. Most of those organisations disappeared. Western society has moved on?

Sadly, that isn’t the case.

Europol maintains a formal category of “left-wing and anarchist terrorism”, just as it separately tracks jihadist and right-wing terrorism. Its figures make interesting reading.

In 2023, European Union countries recorded 32 left-wing and anarchist terrorist attacks.

In 2024 there were 21.

The comparable 2024 figures were 24 jihadist attacks and just one right-wing terrorist attack.

In the US, CSIS researchers analysed 750 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States between 1994 and July 2025 and found that left-wing terrorist incidents had been increasing over the previous decade. In 2025, for the first time in more than 30 years, left-wing terrorist attacks and plots actually outnumbered those from the far right.

In January of this year an arson attack on Berlin’s electricity network cut power to around 45,000 households and more than 2,000 businesses. German authorities treated it as politically motivated left-wing extremism, and the Vulkangruppe claimed responsibility. Hospitals, transport, communications and care facilities were affected.

In April 2025 an explosive device detonated outside the Greek national railway operator Hellenic Train. The anarchist Revolutionary Class Self Defence claimed responsibility, and Europol classified the attack as left-wing or anarchist terrorism.

The obvious response from a New Zealand reader might be that all of this is very interesting, but New Zealand isn’t Europe or America.

That’s fair. We haven’t experienced a recent wave of far-left bombings or assassinations, and it would be dishonest to pretend that we have.

But the threat is on our doorstep. Even in Australia, just a few days ago, the Joint Counter Terrorism Team announced that it was investigating the 2025 arson attack on Melbourne defence manufacturer Lovitt Technologies as a potential far-left terrorist act involving anarchist and revolutionary ideology.

It’s also important to note that our own intelligence service paints a much more complicated picture of extremism than you might imagine from listening to the public debate.

NZSIS says there is a “roughly even spread of violent extremist ideologies” among the people coming to its attention, including identity-motivated extremism, faith-motivated extremism and people with mixed, unstable or unclear ideologies.

Its 2025 Annual Report goes even further: “No single ideology currently stands out as presenting a greater threat than the others.”

And in February this year, NZSIS Director-General Andrew Hampton said the same thing again: “There is no one ideology which dominates in the New Zealand threat environment.”

That’s worth remembering because it is strikingly different from some of the commentary New Zealanders have been exposed to.

In March 2024, Massey University Professor Paul Spoonley told the New Zealand Herald that far-right extremism was “by far the biggest threat to national security.”

That’s quite a contrast. One of New Zealand’s most frequently quoted commentators on extremism says the far right is “by far” our biggest threat – while the organisation whose actual job is to investigate violent extremists says there is a roughly even spread of ideologies and that no single ideology stands out as the greater threat.

That raises an obvious question about the way the subject is publicly discussed.

At a New Zealand journalism conference reported by RNZ, Massey University Associate Professor Sean Phelan complained that journalists were actually too reluctant to use the term “far right”. He argued that journalists needed to recognise what he described as a growing, transnational “far-right political project” and suggested that concern about “wokeness” had helped normalise far-right rhetoric. Another Massey academic, Professor Mohan Dutta, told the same conference that right-wing media outlets were themselves part of an ideological project.

So there is an active school of thought within journalism and academia arguing that the “far-right” label should be applied more frequently and more broadly.

This has consequences. If parliamentary conservatives, populists, white supremacists and terrorists can all be routinely pushed toward the same linguistic box, the term eventually stops having any meaning and simply becomes a sloppy proxy for partisanship.

This view is strengthened when we recognise what happens at the other end of the political spectrum. Violent political movements of the extreme left are more readily described as the work of activists, protesters, antifascists, environmental campaigners, and ‘peoples’ movements. Those descriptions carry a very different emotional weight.

An extremist is somebody we’re conditioned to fear. An activist is somebody with a cause.

That doesn’t mean every left-wing activist is an extremist, any more than every conservative is a white supremacist. But it does mean that we should apply the same test in both directions. If somebody uses politically motivated violence to advance an extremist ideology, it shouldn’t matter which side of politics supplied the ideology – and this is where the issue becomes more than an argument about media language.

New Zealand’s National Security Strategy says terrorism threatens “the safety of individuals, the security of democracy, and the cohesion of communities.” That’s why nation states maintain intelligence agencies and counterterrorism units. Terrorism isn’t simply another unpleasant political opinion. Its purpose is to use violence to frighten populations, coerce governments and destabilise the institutions on which democratic societies depend.

Our security agencies understand that that threat doesn’t belong to one ideology. They monitor jihadists, right-wing extremists and politically motivated violent left-wing extremists because all can cross the same line.

The question is whether the rest of us recognise that line.

History should make us wary of complacency. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of politically motivated terrorist attacks in the West came from the far left. Today, Europol is again recording left-wing and anarchist terrorist attacks, transnational extremist networks and attacks on infrastructure and people. In America, left-wing terrorist attacks and plots once again outnumber those from the violent far right.

New Zealand hasn’t yet experienced that resurgence – but our own intelligence service is telling us that violent extremism doesn’t belong exclusively to the right, or the left.

Perhaps we should start listening.

Because a threat we recognise can be watched, investigated and disrupted.

A threat that we’ve persuaded ourselves doesn’t exist is much harder to stop.

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