Rebranding the Transnational Illiberal Right: NatCon and the Making of a ‘Conservative International’

Despite stark differences, diverse right-wing actors have been building a movement that transcends national borders and defies conventional labels. Using the ‘transnational illiberal right-wing movement’ as a working analytical category broader than ‘far right’ or ‘New Right’, we analyze international right-wing conferences to reconstruct the political logic behind the movement and examine social semiotic practices informing political identification with it. Combining Discourse Studies with topic modelling and socio-semantic network analysis, we study the 2024 NatCon Brussels conference as the most likely case for exploring how politicians, intellectuals, and activists engage with the movement and NatCon, one of its key networks, in the EU. We show that, despite the ideological heterogeneity of its participants, the conference was structured around discourses on Europe and conservatism in an attempt to build and ideationally equip an illiberal right-wing electoral coalition before the 2024 European elections. Functioning as a site of hegemonic articulation, the conference enabled its participants to appropriate the signifier ‘conservatism’, presenting the movement as a natural continuation of the conservative tradition while symbolically excluding conservatives portrayed as incompatible with it. The article shows how studying one purposefully selected international conference can illuminate the composition, ideological boundaries, networks, and purposes of such gatherings.