Far-right parties are turning housing into a nationalist battleground, study finds

Housing, long claimed by the political left as its natural terrain, is becoming a central arena for far-right politics in Europe, according to a comparative study published in Geographica Helvetica. Nils B. Ludwig of the University of Trier and Matt Varco of the University of Manchester examined how the far right in Germany and the United Kingdom engages with housing policy, and they found two very different stages of the same trajectory: in Germany, a parliamentary party and its intellectual orbit are already drafting ethno-national housing programmes that break with free-market orthodoxy, while in the UK a loosely organised movement mobilises sporadically but intensively around the accommodation of asylum seekers.

The authors argue that these developments matter because they challenge a common assumption that far-right politicians rely only on fearmongering and culture-war theatrics, or that their social policy amounts to boilerplate pro-market rhetoric. As the far right’s electoral rise becomes a more established phase, Ludwig and Varco suggest, parts of the movement are developing genuine policy thinking about housing that positions it as a responsibility of a nationally conscious state. In Germany, they trace this through the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the New Right intellectuals around it; in the UK, through the wave of protests against so-called asylum hotels in the summer of 2025.

The German case shows the more advanced ideological development. In 2022, AfD parliamentarian Roger Beckamp gave a Bundestag speech titled “Deportation creates living space”, claiming that demand for housing was growing because of one- and two-person households, internal migration to cities, and what he called mass immigration since 2015. According to the study, the demand for deportation policies aimed at freeing up housing for German nationals first appeared in the AfD’s youth organisation and then ascended to the federal level, being included in the party programme in 2025. The authors describe this as a normalisation process in which public shock gradually subsided and the deportation agenda became embedded in the party’s platform as a means of addressing infrastructural topics like housing.

Behind the party, the researchers identify a network of thinkers who are increasingly comfortable with state intervention in the market. Figures such as Benedikt Kaiser, through his publication Solidarischer Patriotismus, and another right-wing thought leader, Menzel, base a principle of solidarity-based patriotism on cooperatives and a local economy, in which local communities collaboratively manage essential aspects of life, including housing. The study notes that far-right authors argue public services like housing should be state-led, and that Kaiser himself criticises the continued focus of local housing policies on the interests of high-income households through private investors and real-estate companies. The authors also observe that far-right actors actively engage in neighbourhoods and try to shape their living environments, citing case studies in Germany.

Within the AfD itself, the picture is internally divided. The study describes strongly liberal economic positions represented by party leader Alice Weidel and Beatrix von Storch, set against ideas of a so-called organic market economy advanced by Björn Höcke, head of the AfD in Thuringia. The party programme simultaneously promotes new construction in a classic neoliberal vein and calls for a social housing policy, including supra-regional building land commissions, radically simplified permit bureaucracy, the promotion of municipal and cooperative housing associations, and additional social housing through the purchase of occupancy rights. The authors’ analysis of AfD programmes found that in 2016 the party focused predominantly on neoliberal themes, and that the shift towards a stronger social policy has since been confirmed, with housing policy serving as a particularly salient indicator of this transformation.

The UK case presents a different formation. In July 2025, a sexual assault case involving a 41-year-old asylum seeker in the Essex town of Epping provided the spark for protests around the Bell Hotel, where the man was being temporarily housed. The individual was charged in September 2025 and deported the following month, but the incident was seized upon as purported evidence of a connection between immigration and criminality, and the hotel became a flash point for protests every few days, which periodically turned violent. A High Court ruling in August, later overturned, had prohibited the continued use of the Bell Hotel to accommodate asylum seekers. Similar rolling protests emerged at other hotels used as temporary asylum accommodation, including the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf, the Cresta Court Hotel in Altrincham, and the Park Hotel in Diss, Norfolk.

The study emphasises that these protests were premised, in the authors’ view, on a radical misrecognition: the phenomenon being protested was already part of a highly punitive carceral infrastructure. Housing for asylum seekers has been provided on a no-choice basis since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, and the 2012 COMPASS contracts consolidated asylum provision to three multinational companies. In 2015–2016, Serco and G4S began using hotels in England and Scotland to fulfil their Home Office contracts, and in 2023 the Home Office reclassified hotels within the standard categories of housing provision, formalising their status as part of the normal functioning of asylum. Darling and Burridge, cited in the study, use the term “carceral hospitality” to describe this dual identity of the hotel, where care and control blend together. The authors note that documented conditions inside these hotels include confinement, anxiety, and a lack of bodily autonomy.

Strikingly, the researchers find that the far right’s demands in the UK have in many respects already been realised by a bipartisan commitment among successive governments to keep asylum seekers precariously housed and limit their access to the housing market. Through 2025, several Reform MPs submitted written questions in Parliament requesting data on how many asylum seekers were housed in social housing in their constituencies, and each was answered by the Labour Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook with the reminder that asylum seekers, whose immigration status does not allow them recourse to public funds, are not eligible for an allocation of social housing. The authors argue that this drift of public policy into positions which already satisfy far-right demands should be at least as concerning as the prospect of a far-right electoral victory.

The comparison also reveals transnational connections. The study documents that extreme-right agitators at Epping used German-language ideological vocabulary, with neo-Nazi groups handing out leaflets reading “Protect the Volk” and “Volk First: Preserve the White Race”, and that the fascist Homeland Party draws inspiration from the AfD’s youth wing, Generation Deutschland, including an official Homeland delegation visit to the Bundestag in 2025. In Germany, the AfD has risen to become the second-largest party in the 21st Bundestag, while Reform UK won five seats in the 2024 general election, rising to eight in 2026 following Conservative defections and by-elections. The authors note that polling consistently reveals housing and affordability as central issues for young voters, while the far right continues to build its vote share among young people, creating what they describe as a clear demographic incentive for far-right parties to bend welfarist, social-national ideas towards overtly exclusionary housing policies.

Ludwig and Varco conclude that both cases show how “housing discontent” can be channelled politically through infrastructural-populist discourses that position the right as defenders of the people while opening new possibilities for how the state might regulate housing stock as an ethno-national asset. They argue that resisting these developments requires broad societal solidarity, neighbourhood-level community resistance, and coordinated international responses, pointing to legal tools such as expropriations and mandatory purchase orders, and to ongoing campaigns including Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Enteignen in Germany and renewed UK debates on social housing and rent controls. The study is a qualitative comparative analysis based on party manifestos, policy documents, New Right publications, social media material, and investigative reporting, and its authors caution that the two cases were examined through deliberately different empirical entry points reflecting the distinct organisational forms of the far right in each country.

Subject of Research: Far-right housing politics and policy in Germany and the UK

Article Title: Home, identity, and populism: far-right housing politics beyond neoliberalism in Germany and the UK

Article References: Ludwig, N. B., & Varco, M. (2026). Home, identity, and populism: far-right housing politics beyond neoliberalism in Germany and the UK. Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 635-649. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-635-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-635-2026

Keywords: far right, housing policy, AfD, asylum hotels, Germany, United Kingdom, neoliberalism, populism, Reform UK, ethno-nationalism, social housing, migration