It is well known that funding is a powerful tool to influence international organizations (IOs). The recent decision by the Trump administration to withhold voluntary funding from much of the UN system has plunged the organization into a major financial crisis, leading to downsizing and restructuring across many UN bodies, from the World Health Organization to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Because of its scale and suddenness, this approach to funding IOs has become mainly associated with the disruptive politics of the second Trump administration. However, it has a long pedigree in far-right approaches to global governance: once in government, radical and extreme-right parties use voluntary funding allocations as a strategic tool to change how IOs operate.

Radical-right and extreme-right parties promoting ultranationalist and exclusivist positions have been on the rise in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. They currently sit in around a third of all OECD governments as junior coalition partners or even as heads of government, shaping the IO funding policies of the most important donor governments. Beyond the US, far-right governments are also in power in Finland, Hungary, and Italy, among many other countries. Particularly among OECD donors, ultranationalist positions are often tied to strong anti-migration preferences. This ideological commitment of far-right parties, together with their electoral promises to halt migration, is key to understanding whether and how they try to shape IOs.

One avenue many governments, both far-right and otherwise, can use to shape IOs is earmarked funding—voluntary funding that is tied to specific themes, countries, or projects. Earmarking gives donors significant discretion over IOs, their programs, and how and where they spend money. The donors, for their part, benefit from IOs’ pooled expertise and capacity to efficiently implement projects.

Yet in a study of earmarked funding patterns of 37 OECD donors from 1990 to 2020, we found that far-right governments spend on average 30% less on IOs than their non-far-right counterparts. One reason far-right governments often eschew earmarked funding is that there is a limit to what types of project funding UN organizations are willing to accept. The policies and mandates of most UN organizations commit them to respect and protect human rights and work in a nondiscriminatory way. This often clashes with the goals many far-right governments seek to realize via foreign aid. For example, projects administered by IOs cannot serve only certain nationalities or religions while excluding others; neither can governments force IOs to condition funding on migrant-return agreements.

Faced with such constraints, far-right governments often seek alternative channels, especially bilateral aid, to implement more controversial projects. For example, Austria’s formerly ruling Freedom Party (FPÖ) demanded to condition bilateral aid on binding return agreements while criticizing the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for its allegedly pro-migration policies. Similarly, Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary barely gives earmarked funding to IOs but instead uses bilateral aid with the exclusive goal of combating migration.

Nonetheless, far-right donors do still use earmarked funding to move the work of IOs in the direction of their anti-migration agenda. Some far-right donors fund IO projects that align with their preferences but do not clash with IO mandates. For example, the current Finnish government continues to spend on reproductive health projects via IOs as a way to “curb… population growth,” a goal that an OECD peer review criticized as incompatible with a rights-based understanding of development aid. Similarly, the current Italian government increased funding for migrant protection by channeling funds to camps run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in third countries (e.g., Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). This funding for migration-related measures often comes at the expense of funding for other issues, such as social protection, economic assistance, or democracy promotion that often adversely affect the livelihoods and human rights of people, particularly women and vulnerable groups, in recipient countries.

Far-right donors also tend to prefer certain IOs over others. For example, UNHCR, which focuses on protecting refugees, has received less funding from far-right governments, while IOM, with its broader aim of managing migration, has received more. To the extent that far-right governments are willing to fund UNHCR, they are much more likely to fund migrant-return projects than other donor governments, even though this is not a primary objective of the agency. Given that IOs rely on voluntary funding, this repurposing of funds has the potential to alter project profiles and policies.

More recently, however, both IOM and UNHCR have faced crippling funding cuts by the US, dwarfing the impact of these smaller shifts in funding. Current debates on the future of multilateralism thus tend to focus on the massive US funding cuts, withdrawals from international organizations, attempts to undermine international negotiation processes, and the broader crisis of multilateral politics. The spotlight has been on how different organizations, such as the World Bank, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme, have tried to appease the Trump administration. While these changes are pivotal to understanding current global politics, they might lead us to overlook more piecemeal, incremental shifts within international organizations that predate 2025. These shifts are continuing under the radar.

Even if there is not yet majority support among member states for completely refocusing IO activities on a far-right migration agenda, vulnerabilities are rising. With shrinking funding, IOs face more pressure to try to please their remaining donors. At the same time, some donor countries with more politically mainstream governments are increasingly using earmarked funding, as well as foreign aid more generally, to curb migration pressures.

Observers often assume that far-right governments reject international organizations because of their nationalist and sovereigntist ideology, citing Orbán’s obstructionism in the EU or Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-climate agenda. Yet based on scrutiny of far-right IO funding, we observe a strategy of selective, strategic engagement shaped by opportunities and constraints. If further opportunities arise, there is a growing risk of far-right governments repurposing UN agencies to implement their core agendas.