In the scholarly research on right-wing extremism, the term “New Right” is one of those that has been used in very different ways, and often rather vaguely. This term has at least three different understandings, which frequently overlap. First, in very broad terms, it refers to purely temporal changes in right-wing extremism; second, in very narrow terms, it refers to all the strands of the far right that consider themselves to be neo-right-wing; and third, primarily in analytical terms, it refers to a category going beyond the self-description of individual actors to also consider the functional question of who or what can or should be described as the “New Right” in right-wing extremism. The common factor shared by all these ways of differentiation is that they distinguish between a “New Right” and an “old” one (no matter how one might define this), be it in temporal, phenomenological or systemic terms.

In a purely phenomenological sense, the term “Neue Rechte” (“New Right”) has been used in Germany since the 1970s, organizationally connected to the 1972 founding of the group Aktion Neue Rechte (“New Right Action”), which affiliated itself with the French Nouvelle Droite. This self-description of a “New Right” was in agreement with its external analytical categorization, because there actually did exist substantial differences between this “New Right” and other strands of far-right thought, not only in terms of political strategy but also worldview.

The heyday of domestic and international discussions about Germany's New Right was in the 1990s, although important studies had already appeared in the country somewhat earlier (cf. Assheuer and Sarkowicz 1990; Feit 1987; Fetscher 1983; Gress et al. 1990; Koelschtzky 1986); internationally, it was the works of Bar-On (2008, 2013), Minkenberg (1993), O’Meara (2004) and Woods (2007) that have proven pivotal.