Centrists often come across as wishy-washy compromisers, instinctively committed to smoothing out political differences and avoiding conflict. But this familiar description no longer captures the reality of contemporary politics. Instead, recent decades have seen the rise an extremism of the center, or militant centrism.
Far from defending moderation and compromise, militant centrists are assertive, coercive, and willing to deploy authoritarian and technocratic measures to weaken and even eliminate their populist opponents.
“Militant centrism treats popular sovereignty as a threat rather than as a source of legitimacy.”
Militant centrism is committed to no grand project and promises no social transformation. In fact, it seeks little more than the maintenance of a fragile status quo. But it will stop at nothing to pursue these modest aspirations. Lacking confidence in its ability to persuade, militant centrism treats popular sovereignty as a threat rather than as a source of legitimacy. Political disagreement is no longer seen as the lifeblood of a healthy democracy, but instead as a risk that must be neutralized and, where possible, removed.
Nowhere is this tendency more visible than in Europe, which has become a laboratory for the techniques of militant centrism. In recent years, centrist elites have grown increasingly casual about postponing elections, annulling results, or excluding candidates from the electoral process in the name of defending democracy. The militant centrist attitude was voiced by Zselyke Csaky of the Centre for European Reform who, referring to the recent expulsion of candidates in France and Romania from the electoral process, remarked that, “excluding candidates in elections may be a legally sound option to protect democracy from anti-democratic forces.” In other words, democracy may need to be defended from voters.
After the annulment of the Romanian presidential election, the French EU Commissioner for the internal market between 2019 and 2024, Thierry Breton, boasted: “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany.” And they are certainly at it in Germany: Members of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have been banned from standing in next year’s mayoral election in Nieder-Olm after local authorities introduced a mandatory declaration excluding candidates linked to organizations labelled extremist by the state interior ministry. For its part, the German government has allowed the security services to classify AfD as “extremist,” a possible prelude to banning the party outright.
Such interventions are rarely presented as political acts. Instead, they are justified through the language of legality and technical necessity. Lawfare has become one of the preferred instruments of militant centrism. Financial investigations into populist parties, often culminating in punitive fines, serve to discipline and delegitimize opposition movements without ever confronting them openly in the political arena. In Spain, for example, the fiscal court imposed a fine of more than $1 billion on Vox, the country’s third-largest party, for alleged financial irregularities.
This is part of a broader retreat from democratic rights and institutions. In Britain, trial by jury has historically been seen as a touchstone of the justice system. Yet following the recent announcement by Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy that most jury trials will be abolished, few of the legal protections traditionally afforded by due process can be taken for granted. Predictably, this erosion of democratic guardrails is justified not through ideological argument, but through managerial rationales of crisis management and efficiency.
The most eloquent critic of these developments is the French public intellectual Mathieu Bock Côté, who sees the militant center’s strategy as one of dispossessing political opponents through a combination of censorship and the use of exceptional measures. Bock Côté uses the term totalitarisme sans goulag to characterize a system where formal liberal-democratic institutions tolerate the policing of speech and where those who question the project of militant-centrism face media ostracism and administrative sanctions.
Beyond law and administration, militant centrism also relies heavily on cultural power. Through its coercive application, opponents are subjected to aesthetic violence and stigmatization. In Britain, a range of laws are being used to “protect” children from right-wing views. Recently, former Royal Marine Jamie Michael was deemed “unsuitable” to work with children by a safeguarding board after local authorities discovered he had posted an online video critical of illegal immigration. The attempt to silence people who uphold “suspect” views is systematically pursued by the cultural agents of the managerial technocratic elites.
The ethos of militant extremism exercised a powerful influence over British schools. Adults who criticize the moral outlook of the militant centrist project risk punishment and ostracism. In early December, a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that “Britain is still a Christian state.” This non-crime was investigated by a senior Metropolitan Police detective and referred to a safeguarding board. Formally, of course, Britain is a Christian state. Its head is King Charles, who is also the head of the Anglican Church. But it appears that drawing attention to this inconvenient fact can lead to your expulsion from your job.
In some schools, children are told that Reform is a far-right party and that many of its supporters are extremists. In some instances, children who articulate patriotic sentiments are humiliated. In one case, a school in Rugby sent a girl home for wearing a Union Jack dress on Culture Celebration Day. As Pierre Bourdieu noted in his magisterial sociological essay Distinction, “aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent.” When directed at children it can serve to create a conformist group of young people who regard any challenge to militant centrism with dread.
Militant centrism has acquired a powerful presence as an emergency response to the crisis of authority of technocratic-managerial elites. These disoriented elites lack arguments that can motivate, direct, and inspire. Their solution is to depoliticize public life by rendering political conflicts technical. They rely on a form of technical governance that shifts attention from democratically representative institutions towards the use of expert-led institutions, the courts, international organizations and the media and cultural institutions.
Militant centrists are often surprisingly frank about their project. In April 2022, then French President Emmanuel Macron, seeking a second term, openly distinguished his “extreme center project” from both the far right and the far left. This outlook has transatlantic parallels. In the United States, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has called for a new “Tea party of the Radical Center.” Those most concerned to present themselves as anti-extremists are increasingly ready to resort to extreme measures. They cultivate a politics of fear towards what they characterize as the imminent threat to democracy posed by populists, while themselves systematically corroding the structures of democratic life.
Militant centrism is an attempt to create and extend the state of exception described by Carl Schmitt. It seeks to do so not through a dramatic rupture but through a slow process of bland normalization. Democracy is not abolished, but emptied out. Political contestation is not abolished, but forced out through procedure. In the name of defending democracy, militant centrism destroys the very conditions that once gave it life.