Western Liberal Democracies are Facing Their Greatest Threat Yet: The Rise of the Far Right 

This story was originally published by Analyst News, an international news organization focused on justice and social issues.

When Humza Yousaf was elected as First Minister of Scotland in 2023, he made history as the first Muslim leader of a Western nation and the youngest person ever elected to the post. Yet his rapid rise in Scottish politics coincided with rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain and a surge of populist parties in Europe. 

As the son of Pakistani immigrants and an observant Muslim, Yousaf’s position made him a target of threats, intimidation and abuse because of his Islamic faith.

He tells Analyst News that he’s faced death threats, online abuse and rape threats against his wife during his time in Scottish politics. He says conditions for Muslims are continuing to worsen: “Muslims are now the target in the way Jews were in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe.”

Indeed, Islamophobia is at a record high in Britain, according to a report by the anti-Muslim hate charity TellMama. It recorded more than 6,000 reports of anti-Muslim abuse in 2024—a rise of 44% from the previous year. Between 2012 and 2024, it recorded a staggering 2,253% rise in offline abuse toward Muslims, mostly in public places.

Yousaf is now warning that Britain could see a far-right prime minister in the next general election, which is less than four years away. “It certainly makes me feel unsafe, and I suspect makes most Muslims question whether their future could possibly be in this country,” he says. The far-right Reform U.K. party has topped the polls in recent surveys with a quarter of British voters saying they would vote for it.

However, racism and Islamophobia don’t just pervade domestic politics, says Yousaf. The war on Gaza has only continued because of the racist attitudes of Western leaders: “Muslim lives and Arab lives, Palestinian lives, simply do not matter. Their blood is cheap.”

His in-laws were trapped in Gaza at the beginning of the war in October 2023, and he still has relatives living there under a brutal siege. He’s been at the forefront of opposing Israeli aggression toward Gaza and condemning the West’s response to the war.

“Never in my life have I seen such naked hypocrisy and blatant racism in foreign policy, because if 18,000 blue-eyed blonde-haired Judeo-Christian children were being slaughtered in the way that Gazans had been slaughtered and are being slaughtered, then the world reaction would be far greater, far swifter,” he says.

Yousaf served as  first minister of Scotland from March 2023 to May 2024, when he resigned after facing an imminent motion of no confidence. Analyst News spoke to Yousaf in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, where he plans to serve until 2026. In a candid conversation, he didn’t hold back on Western hypocrisy, Islamophobia in Britain and the possibility of a far-right British prime minister.

What barriers did you face as a Muslim rising in the ranks of Scottish politics and eventually becoming First Minister of Scotland?

People will spend their lives telling you that you’re the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong height, the wrong gender. They’ll give you 101 reasons why you shouldn’t go for it. Any cursory glance at my social media would show you a plethora of racist Islamophobic abuse.

That abuse would range from death threats to me, rape threats against my wife, death threats against my entire family.

It was to the point where I had to have really difficult conversations with my stepdaughter, who was then 14, saying to her, “Look, you need to be alert. You need to watch out if somebody’s following you, we’ll see about getting you a panic alarm.”

These are horrible conversations I have to have with a 14-year-old child. So plenty of barriers in the way, but I’m always reminded, for all the kind of negativity and the abuse and harassment, the voices of good far outweigh the voices of bad.

With the rise of anti-Muslim hate crimes in Britain, how worried are you about Islamophobia?

Massively worried, but not just about the rise of anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia in the U.K., but in Europe, the United States, and across the Western world.

We have people who were once on the fringes of society, marginalized figures, people like Geert Wilders and movements like the National Front in France, people like Nigel Farage, all these people who over the years have immersed themselves in Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred.

Nigel Farage [leader of Reform U.K. Party] started the general election campaign with a dog whistle saying that British Muslims don’t align with British values, don’t share British values. Geert Wilders once called for mosques and the Quran to be banned.

These people are now either ahead in the polls, leading the polls in the case of Geert Wilders—his is the leading party in the Dutch government. And all of these parties are driven by anti-Muslim hatred.

The problem is that it’s gone from the fringes now very much into the mainstream of political discourse. And Muslims are now the target in the way that Jews were in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. 

At the same time, I’m somebody who genuinely has hope in the future. It’s hard to see that hope at times, but I always am struck by the fact that there are more good people out there than bad. We have a city in the northeast of Scotland, Aberdeen, [where] there was a horrible attack on a mosque [there].

Paint was thrown at the mosque, and a rock was thrown through the window. The wonderful thing, thoug,h was that the local community picked up the cleaning tools and began to help to clean the paint off the mosque and to help to repair the window that had been smashed.

That was a great example, small example, but a wonderful example that the voices of good will always outweigh the voices of bad. And that gives me hope. 

How likely is it that Britain could have a far-right prime minister like Nigel Farage in the next general election that is less than four years away?

I don’t know a single political commentator who would bet against it. At the very least he becomes the leader of the opposition, and give him another five years with that platform and he could well end up being prime minister of the United Kingdom. 

This is a man who started a general election with the dog whistle of Muslims, said that migrants and particularly Muslims were a fifth column here to kill us, whose party is riddled with candidates and elected members who have not just dabbled in Islamophobia but are immersed in anti-Muslim hatred. He could be at the very least leader of the next opposition, if not prime minister in five to 10 years.

It is mind-boggling and worrying at the same time. It certainly makes me feel unsafe and I suspect makes most Muslims question whether their future could possibly be in this country. I mean, how can we possibly live under a leader of the opposition, a prime minister, maybe in the future that thinks that we are here to kill the rest of the population, that believes that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that has blown virtually every dog whistle of about Muslims over the decades? 

What do you see as the greatest threat facing Britain today? 

The greatest threat facing liberal western democracies, including the United Kingdom, is the rise of the far right. 

When the far right gets a grip on power, let’’s not forget that while Muslims may be the first target, they’ll certainly not be the last. The far right has incredibly authoritarian tendencies. We can see that through far-right movements that have managed to get into government, or those who are sympathetic to far-right movements, once they get into power, they become more and more authoritarian. 

Far-right rhetoric has been adopted and mainstreamed over at least two decades by U.K. and Western politicians. We have to confront it. 

Let’s just take the issue of migration, one of the hottest topics in the country. Of course, there’s not a sensible person out there who believes there should be uncontrolled migration. Yet we are a country and a continent that has a serious problem with an aging demographic. We have a huge labor shortage estimated to be over 40 million across the European continent by 2050, 7 million alone in Germany. 

So we are a country in a continent that requires migration for our economic prosperity, yet we’ve made migration one of the most divisive and toxic issues to be discussed in this country and openly created policy that makes it harder for migrants to come to this country and for us to upskill them. So the dangers are not just democracy itself, but the economic prosperity of the continent as well. 

The far right’s arguments often center around uncontrolled mass immigration. Is there an underlying fear of Muslims behind this anti-immigrant rhetoric?

It’s definitely about the wrong type of immigrant. I was very proud to be part of the Scottish government that opened its arms and its homes to the people of Ukraine who were innocent against the Russian aggression that they faced. We’ve had thousands of Ukrainian refugees making their home here in Scotland. 

Now compare that to what our approach is to Gaza, the people of Palestine. You could look at any number of countries. You could look at Afghanistan and Iraq, and you’ll have people saying, well, we don’t want that type of refugee or migrant coming here, even though, of course, we bombed their countries if you think about Afghanistan or Iraq or indeed supply arms to Israel which is causing such devastation in Gaza.

So it’s only the wrong type of migrant. A lot of this anti-migrant rhetoric is a veil for anti-Muslim hatred, but not just anti-Muslim hatred, almost anti-person-of-color. It’s very blatantly now a racist trope for many people.

Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire in March and has already killed more than 600 people and vowed to continue its indiscriminate bombardment. It claims it is targeting Hamas, but with at least 50,000 people killed, mostly women and children, what’s your message to those who continue to believe Israeli propaganda?

What I have noticed is the world seems to be waking up. We’ve had protests week after week after week in the biggest capitals in the world. We’ve witnessed scenes that I never thought I’d see.

We’ve had, for example, Jewish people in New York City protesting and sitting in Grand Central Station. We’ve had people of all different colors and religions and faiths joining hands, linking arms, protesting against the awful and disgraceful actions of this Israeli government.

So if there is one kind of kernel of hope, it is that the world has woken up to the historic injustice that the Palestinian people have faced not since Oct. 7 but actually since their lands got occupied in 1948. They were forced off their lands like my wife’s grandmother was in 1940. The problem is the ones who do take it [Israeli propaganda] seriously, like for example, the administration in the United States and indeed the United Kingdom and many other governments across Europe who continue to supply arms funding and give support to Israel, they’re the ones that have the power and leverage to do something about it.

My message to them is to find your humanity. You don’t have to care about the geopolitics of the situation. But I question your humanity when you look at the images of dead children, limp in their parents’ arms being rushed to the hospital…put yourself in those shoes, what would you do if that was your son or your daughter, your nephew, your niece, your grandchild that was dying in your arms? And that’s happened to at least 18,000 children. So my message is pretty simple: Where is your humanity? 

When Israel announced it was renewing its blockade of Gaza, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said it was a “breach of international law”—moments later, the government backtracked on that. What is stopping Western leaders from calling out Israeli war crimes and taking a consistent approach to international law?

I’m extraordinarily disappointed in his [David Lammy] inability to be robust in the same way he is against Russia. I’m not expecting him to be a megaphone diplomat or a megaphone politician. What I do expect, though, is real clarity, and he provides that clarity when it comes to Russia.

Where’s that same clarity when it comes to children being slaughtered on a mass scale, when it comes to U.N. facilities being bombed, when it comes to hospitals being bombed, when it comes to upholding International law?

If you don’t want to take a position, that’s fine. How on earth you can’t take a position, I don’t know. But if you don’t wanna take a position, at the very least, align yourself with international law.

The honest truth is that Muslim lives and Arab lives, Palestinian lives, simply do not matter. Their blood is cheap, because if this was happening to blue-eyed, blond-haired Europeans at this scale, there wouldn’t only be sanctions, 

but those arrest warrants would’ve been enforced within 24 hours, and the leaders would be on trial in the Hague and probably be locked up in a jail cell, never to see the light of day again. 

Never in my life have I seen such naked hypocrisy and blatant racism in foreign policy, because if 18,000 blue-eyed blonde-haired Judeo-Christian children were being slaughtered in the way that Gazans had been slaughtered and are being slaughtered, then the world reaction would be far greater, far swifter. We certainly wouldn’t be supplying arms to the aggressor, let alone billions of U.S. dollars to fund the aggressor. It’s a shame that so much of Europe and the Western world can’t show such a clear moral clarity.

You’ve been one of the most vocal Western leaders advocating for Palestinian rights. What kind of backlash have you received for speaking up for Palestinians?

I think the real shame in all of this is from somebody who’s spent his life tackling all forms of hatred, including antisemitism, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jewish friends in the fight against hatred, including antisemitism—that the fact that anybody who criticizes the Israeli government’s actions gets labeled antisemitic by certain quarters, like the Jewish Chronicle for example, has just cheapened the real cause of antisemitism, because antisemitism absolutely exists.

But saying that all those millions of people across the world, if not billions of people who support Palestinian rights, who are horrified at the killing of children by the Israeli government, are antisemites, I’m afraid nobody believes that form of argument anymore. I don’t really care about the backlash one jot because the future generations, our children and their children will study what happened in terms of the terrible atrocities on Oct. 7, and then the awful barbaric retaliation thereafter.

And they will ask each and every single one of us, particularly those who had any political influence whatsoever, what did you do? What did you say? And I want to be able to at least have a clear conscience and say that I did whatever I could in my power.

Author: Atif Rashid, Analyst News

Atif Rashid is the editor-in-chief at Analyst News. He previously served as the social media lead at Today, the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs program, leading its coverage on digital and social media platforms. Atif oversaw BBC Radio 4 social media projects on stories including Brexit, Greta Thunberg’s first meeting with David Attenborough, and the rise of religious extremism. With a passion for human rights, justice, and equity, he has reported on religion, youth culture, and social trends. In 2021 he created a podcast for the U.N. that featured reformed extremists; he later spoke at the U.N. about the media’s role in combating violent extremism. His reports have been published across television, radio, and online, including in the Huffington Post, The Independent, BBC, and specialist religious magazines. Atif is based in the U.K.