Tag: Far right

Kosovo attack: Who benefits?

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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe. 

The European Union and the United States have been trying to persuade Serbia and Kosovo to end their enmity and normalize relations for more than a decade.

There were finally signs of promise in April, when Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti finally gave tacit, if begrudging, approval to an EU-brokered plan that would see the two finally sprinkle some soil over the hatchet.

But despite all the cajoling and coaxing, it wasn’t to be.

U.S. and European officials have insinuated that Kurti was more to blame here, with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell drawing attention to the failure to establish an association of municipalities in northern Kosovo, which would have allowed Kosovo’s Serbs some autonomy in an enclave where they’re a majority.

Behind the scenes, U.S. and European officials have also quietly praised Vučić for a slow and halting tilt toward the West, secretly supplying some arms to Ukraine and moving to reduce Serbia’s dependency on Russian energy supplies.

This is why last week’s astonishing clash between armed Serbs and police in the village of Banjska, in northern Kosovo’s Zvečan municipality, is especially perplexing — and it’s worth asking whose interests it serves.

Kosovo’s leaders quickly blamed Vučić for the attack, which also involved a siege of an Orthodox monastery. A Kosovan policeman and three Serb gunmen were killed in the clash. And Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani said Friday that “the (armed) group simply exercised the intentions and the motives of Serbia as a country and Vučić as the leader.”

Osmani maintains Belgrade was trying to copy Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, which began with so-called little green men infiltrating the Ukrainian peninsula. “They are trying to carry out a Crimea model in the Republic of Kosovo, but we will absolutely not let that happen,” she added.

Kurti has called for sanctions to be imposed on Serbia for what he describes as a state-sponsored terrorist attack, warning that if the crime goes unpunished, Belgrade will repeat it. Vučić planned and ordered an attack in northern Kosovo “to destabilize” the country with the goal of starting a war, he said.

In response, Vučić has angrily denied these allegations but has noticeably hardened his rhetoric, possibly as a sop to Serbian ultra-nationalists. More alarmingly, however, Serbia has been building up its forces near the border with Kosovo since the deadly clashes, which the White House has described as “unprecedented.” And according to U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, on a phone call with Vučić, Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged an “immediate de-escalation and a return to dialogue.”

If Belgrade did have a hand in the attack, however, it would appear to pull against the caution Vučić has displayed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hedging his bets between the West and Serbia’s traditional Slavic ally. Vučić didn’t join in on Western sanctions against Russia but has condemned the invasion, and says he’s keen to pursue Serbia’s bid for EU membership.

If Belgrade did have a hand in the attack, it would appear to pull against the caution Aleksandar Vučić has displayed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine | Andrej Cukic/EFE via EPA

Marko Đurić, the Serbian ambassador to the U.S., echoes Vučić’s argument that planning or approving an attack in Kosovo at this juncture would make no sense and potentially ruin Belgrade’s improving relations with the West. “We have a lot to lose by any kind of escalation in Kosovo,” he told POLITICO — including harming the country commercially.

Đurić also said the attack has complicated the country’s domestic politics, noting that “the far right in Serbia is going to try and exploit this to the greatest extent possible.”

But Kosovo’s leaders have a case against Belgrade that needs answering.

To support the allegation that Vučić endorsed the attack, they highlight the role of Milan Radoičić, the deputy leader of the Serb List — a party that dominates Serb politics in northern Kosovo and has close links with Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party.

Nicknamed the “boss of the north,” Radoičić admitted to organizing and leading the attack in a statement issued by his lawyer, saying he was solely responsible. “I didn’t inform anyone from the government structures of the Republic of Serbia about this, nor from the local political structures from the north of Kosovo and Metohija, nor did I get any help from them, because we already had had different views on the previous methods of resisting Kurti’s terror,” he said.

But Kurti dismisses the idea that Radoičić would have gone ahead without Vučić’s approval. “I have no doubt that Radiočić was only the executor. The one who planned and ordered this terrorist, criminal attack on our state, in order to violate our territorial integrity, national safety and state security, is none other than President Vučić,” he told reporters.

Other officials in Pristina also say it would be stretching credulity to think Aleksandar Vulin, the head of Serbia’s BIA intelligence agency, would have been unaware of a planned attack.

Bojan Pajtić, a Serbian law professor and former president of the autonomous province of Vojvodina within Serbia, agrees the Banjska provocation wouldn’t have gone ahead without the security agency’s knowledge, saying it is improbable that the BIA would have failed to notice an operation being prepared by a heavily armed formation consisting of dozens of people in such a small area. “The BIA normally knows who drank coffee with whom yesterday in Zvečan,” he said.

“When an incident occurs that is not accidental, but the result of someone’s efforts, you always wonder whose interests it is in,” Paltić said. “In this case, it is certainly not in the interest of Aleksandar Vučić, because after the last attempt at dialogue in Brussels, in the eyes of the West, in relation to Kurti, he still looked like a constructive partner.”

Pajtić isn’t alone in querying who’s interest the attack was in, and so far, both Washington and Brussels have been extremely cautious in their comments. European Commission spokesperson Peter Stano said the EU will wait for the completion of the investigation before coming to any conclusions on what he described as a terrorist attack. Washington, careful to keep its language neutral, hasn’t been specific about who it blames either.

This, of course, stands in sharp contrast to Moscow, which predictably grandstanded as Serbia’s traditional protector, accusing Pristina of ethnic cleansing in northern Kosovo — the very same lie used to try to justify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“This incident, the most serious example of violence in Kosovo for years, turned the tables on Vučić,” said Dimitar Bechev, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe. And he, too, questioned whether the attack was a rogue operation by Serbian ultra-nationalists and Kosovo’s Serb leaders.

“Should the story of Radoičić freelancing be corroborated, it would appear that Vučić has lost control over his erstwhile proxies,” he said.



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Vienna seeks to calm Selmayr ‘blood money’ furor

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Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg signaled his government was de-escalating a row with the EU’s senior representative in the country, Martin Selmayr, who last week accused Vienna of paying “blood money” to Moscow by continuing to purchase large quantities of Russian gas.

“Everything has already been said about this,” Schallenberg said over the weekend in a written response to questions from POLITICO on the affair. “We are working hard to drastically reduce our energy dependency on Russia and we will continue to do so.”

Austrian officials insist that the country’s continued reliance on Russian gas is only temporary and that it will wean itself off by 2027 (over the past 18 months, the share of Russian gas in Austria has dropped from 80 percent to an average of 56 percent).

Some experts question the viability of that plan, considering that OMV, the country’s dominant oil and gas company, signed a long-term supply deal with Gazprom under former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz that company executives say is virtually impossible to withdraw from.

Those complications are likely one reason why Vienna — even as its officials point out that Austria is far from the only EU member to continue to rely on Russian gas — doesn’t want to dwell on the substance of Selmayr’s criticism.

“We should rather focus on maintaining our unity and cohesion within the European Union in dealing with Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine,” Schallenberg told POLITICO. “We can only overcome the challenges ahead of us in a united effort.”

Schallenberg’s remarks follow a decision by the European Commission on Friday to summon Selmayr to Brussels to answer for his actions. A spokesman for the EU executive on Friday characterized the envoy’s comments as “not only unnecessary, but also inappropriate.”

Given that the Austrian government is led by a center-right party, which is allied with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s European People’s Party bloc, the sharp reaction from Brussels is not surprising. An official close to the Austrian government said Vienna had not demanded Selmayr’s removal.

Selmayr made the “blood money” comment, by his own account, while defending the Commission chief. He told an Austrian newspaper that he made the remark during a public discussion in Vienna on Wednesday in response to an audience member who accused von der Leyen of “warmongering” in Ukraine and having “blood on her hands.”

“This surprises me, because blood money is sent to Russia every day with the gas bill,” Selmayr told the audience.

Selmayr expressed surprise that there wasn’t more public outcry in Austria over the country’s continued reliance on Russian natural gas, which has accounted for about 56 percent of its purchases so far this year. (A review of a transcript of the event by Austrian daily Die Presse found no mention of the comments Selmayr attributed to the audience member, however.)

Austria’s deep relationship to Russia, which has continued unabated since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has prompted regular criticism from its European peers.

Even so, the EU envoy’s unvarnished assessment caused an immediate uproar in the neutral country, especially on the populist far right, whose leaders called for Selmayr’s immediate dismissal.

Europe Minister Karoline Edtstadler called the remarks “dubious and counterproductive” | Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFE

Schallenberg’s ministry summoned Selmayr on Thursday to answer for his comments and the country’s Europe Minister, Karoline Edtstadler, called the remarks “dubious and counterproductive.” Some in Vienna also questioned whether Selmayr, who as a senior Commission official helped Germany navigate the shoals of EU bureaucracy to push through the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline — thus increasing Europe’s dependency on Russian gas — was really in a position to criticize Austria.

Nonetheless, Selmayr’s opinion carries considerable weight in Austria, given his history as the Commission’s most senior civil servant and right-hand man to former Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Though Selmayr, who is German, has a record of living up to his country’s reputation for directness and sharp elbows, even his enemies consider him to be one of the EU’s best minds.

His rhetorical gifts have made him a considerable force in Austria, where he arrived in 2019 (after stepping down under a cloud in Brussels). He is a regular presence on television and in print media, weighing in on everything from the euro common currency to security policy.

After Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer recently pledged to anchor a right to pay with euro bills and coins in cash-crazed Austria’s constitution, for example, Selmayr reminded his host country that that right already existed under EU law. What’s more, he wrote, Austrians had agreed to hand control of the common currency to the EU when they voted to join the bloc in 1994.

A few weeks later, he interjected himself into the country’s security debate, arguing that “Europe’s army is NATO,” an unwelcome take in a country clinging on to its neutrality.

Though Selmayr’s interventions tend to rub Austria’s government the wrong way, they’ve generally hit the mark.

The latest controversy and Selmayr’s general approach to the job point to a fundamental divide in the EU over the role of the European Commission’s local representatives. Most governments want the envoys to serve like traditional ambassadors and to carry out their duties, as one Austria official put it to POLITICO recently, “without making noise.”

Yet Selmayr’s tenure suggests that the role is often most effective when structured as a corrective, or reality check, by viewing national political debates through the lens of the broader EU.  

In Austria, where the anti-EU Freedom Party is leading the polls by a comfortable margin ahead of next year’s general election, that perspective is arguably more necessary than ever.

Victor Jack contributed reporting.



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Procedural glitch clears French suspects in plot to attack Morocco World Cup fans

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A court in Paris has dismissed a high-profile case against seven suspected far-right activists, including a prominent figure in the French “ultra-right”, citing procedural errors in the investigation. The suspects were accused of planning to carry out a racist attack on fans of Morocco during the recent football World Cup, in the latest evidence of rising far-right militancy in France. 

Shortly after 10pm on December 14, moments after France defeated Morocco en route to the World Cup final in Qatar, a flood of football fans hit the streets of Paris, converging on the Champs-Elysées, the French capital’s traditional rallying point for jubilant supporters. 

Most were draped in the French tricolour, though a sizeable contingent – including many French citizens of Moroccan descent – waved the red-and-green flag of the Lions of the Atlas. Both were in celebratory mode, with Morocco’s fans determined to pay tribute to an extraordinary World Cup run.  

One group’s attire, however, pointed to other plans. 

Outside a bar in the capital’s swanky 17th arrondissement, about a mile away from the Champs-Elysées, police officers acting on intelligence detained several dozen individuals suspected of planning to carry out a racist rampage.  

Body searches revealed an arsenal of weapons that included batons, tear gas canisters, shin guards and tactical gloves. One was held in possession of stickers with the three letters GUD, standing for “Groupe Union Défense”, a far-right student group notorious for its violence, which became dormant at the start of the century but has recently made a comeback. 

Ten months later, seven of them were brought before the Paris Criminal Court on Friday on charges of “carrying prohibited weapons” and “forming a group with a view to committing violence and damage”, offences punishable with up to 10 years in jail. 

In a startling twist, however, the entire case was thrown out on procedural grounds just hours into the trial, with the presiding judge arguing that police had exceeded their mandate in carrying out the arrests – and ordering the seven suspects to walk free. 

Ultra-right pedigree 

Among the 38 people detained on December 14, about half were known to have belonged to a variety of far-right groups, most of them now outlawed. A dozen were labelled “fiché S”, indicating a potential threat to national security. The majority were from the Paris region, though a handful had travelled from as far as Brittany. 

The seven men in the dock on Friday included Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier, a central figure in the French ultra-droite (ultra-right) – a term used to refer to extreme-right groups with neo-Nazi sympathies. He is believed to have led the militant group Zouaves Paris – a GUD offshoot that was banned last year.

At just 24 years of age, the scion of a family of ultra-Catholic aristocrats has already had multiple run-ins with the law, including a suspended jail sentence for his involvement in violent clashes on the sidelines of a Yellow Vest protest at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in December 2018. 

In January 2022, Cacqueray-Valménier was sentenced to a year in prison for attacking the Saint-Sauveur bar in Paris, a popular anti-fascist hideout, though he has appealed the conviction. He is also under investigation for a violent attack on anti-racism activists who disrupted a campaign rally in support of far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour. 

Far-right protesters wave a flag of the GUD at a rally in Paris on May 26, 2013. © Thomas Samson, AFP

Police investigating the alleged plot to attack Moroccan fans believe Cacqueray-Valménier summoned his acolytes via a Telegram message that called for a “general mobilisation to defend the flag from the Moroccan hordes”, French daily Libération reported on Thursday, citing transcripts of police interrogations. 

He is also believed to have instructed participants to delete all messages, a tactic that hindered investigators’ efforts to gather evidence – and partly explained the small number of defendants in the dock, one of whom tried unsuccessfully to delete the messaging app before investigators seized it. 

During his interrogation, Cacqueray-Valménier denied any role in the alleged plot, claiming he was “no longer a militant” and that he “identified with no ideology”. Hailing the court’s decision to quash the case on Friday, his lawyer Clément Diakonoff accused politicians of “creating a myth around” Cacqueray-Valménier and “designating him as a target”.

‘Clash of civilisations’ 

Police’s decision to carry out preventive arrests, before any violence had been committed, ultimately undermined the case against the seven suspects. While it may have helped avert disturbances in Paris, racist attacks involving far-right activists were reported elsewhere in France, despite the deployment of 10,000 police officers across the country.

In Lyon, a hotbed of far-right militancy, several dozen men wearing balaclavas attacked fans in a central square to cries of “bleu, blanc, rouge, France for the French”. One officer spoke of a “volatile mix of ultra-right activists and football hooligans”. 

Racist assaults were also reported in Nantes, Montpellier and Nice, where masked men chased after Moroccan supporters shouting “Out with the Arabs”, while hooligans marched through central Strasbourg waving neo-Nazi symbols.  

While the incidents involved only a few hundred people across the country, they reflect the growing visibility and assertiveness of France’s militant far right, with small groups jostling for influence and notoriety in a fragmented landscape. 

In a July interview with Le Monde, Nicolas Lerner, the head of France’s internal intelligence agency, the DGSI, spoke of a “highly alarming rise in violent actions or intimidations by a segment of the ultra-right”, whose targets include immigrants, rights activists and elected officials. 

Anti-racism advocates and politicians on the left have accused the political far right of spreading inflammatory rhetoric in the run-up to the World Cup match, stoking hostility towards populations of immigrant descent with ties to former French colonies, such as Morocco.  

Damien Rieu, a close ally of Zemmour, described the historic semi-final as a “clash of civilisations”, while Zemmour himself reiterated his complaint that the French squad featured too many players with “foreign-sounding names”. 

When French citizens “have a heart that beats for another country (…) it raises questions about their assimilation” into French society, argued Sébastien Chenu, a lawmaker in Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and a deputy head of the French National Assembly, speaking on France 2 television. 

“In the week leading up to the France-Morocco game, parts of the far right and some in the media shaped public perceptions by repeatedly warning that incidents were bound to occur,” left-wing lawmaker Thomas Portes, the head of the National Observatory of the Far Right, told FRANCE 24 earlier this year. “When you fan the flames of hatred and blow on embers that are already burning, unacceptable things happen.” 

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Decline, fear and the AfD in Germany

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Mathias Döpfner is chairman and CEO of Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company.

In Germany today, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) is maintaining a stable 20 percent in opinion polls — coming in two to four points ahead of the ruling center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and running hard on the heels of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

In some federal states, the AfD is already the strongest party. In Thuringia, for example, it has reached 34 percent, meaning the party has three times as many supporters there as the SPD. And in some administrative districts, around half of those eligible to vote are leaning toward the AfD. According to one Forsa survey in June, the AfD is currently the strongest party in the east of Germany — a worrying trend with elections due this year in Bavaria and Hesse, and next year in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. And, of course, there are also the European Union elections in 2024.

However, this rapid rise should come as no surprise. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. And more than anything else, the party’s recent advances are a result of an increasing sense among broad swathes of the population that they aren’t being represented by traditional political and media elites.

This disconnect was first accelerated by the refugee crisis of 2015, then increased during the pandemic, and has since escalated in response to the increasing high-handedness of the “woke movement” and climate politics. Just a few weeks ago, a survey by the German Civil Service Association revealed trust in the government’s ability to do its job is at an all-time low, with 69 percent saying it is deeply out of its depth.

Meanwhile, opinion polls show the government fares particularly badly in Germany’s east. A rising number of people — including the otherwise stable but also staid middle classes — now feel enough is enough, and no other party is as good at exploiting this feeling as the AfD.

The problem, however, is the AfD isn’t a normal democratic party.

The regional offices of Germany’s domestic intelligence services in the federal states of Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Lower Saxony and Baden-Württemberg have all classified their local AfD associations as “organizations of interest.”

And the same applies at the federal level. The national office of the domestic intelligence service, the remit of which includes protecting the German constitution, has also classified the national party of the AfD as “of interest.”

These concerns about the party’s commitment to the constitution aren’t unjustified. In a 2018 speech at the national conference of the party’s youth section, Junge Alternative, former AfD chairman Alexander Gauland said that “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in a thousand years of successful German history.”

When speaking about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Björn Höcke, group chairman of the AfD in Thuringia, said on 2017 that “We Germans — and I’m not talking about you patriots who have gathered here today. We Germans, our people, are the only people in the world to place a monument of shame in the heart of our capital city.”

And in a speech in the Bundestag in 2018, party boss Alice Weidel bandied about terms like “headscarf girls” and “knife-wielding men,” while her co-chairman Tino Chrupalla speaks of an “Umvolkung” — that is, an “ethnicity inversion” — which comes straight out of Nazi ideology.

This small sample of public statements leaves no doubt that such utterings aren’t slips of the tongue — they reflect these leaders’ core beliefs.

And while many vote for the AfD out of protest, more than anything else, the party feeds off resentment and fear, exploiting and fueling anger, hate and envy, pushing conspiracy theories to hit out at “those at the top,” as well as foreigners, Jews, the LGTBQ+ community or just about anyone who might be deemed different. And the party leaders’ blatant admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin exposes their reverence for autocracy.

Failure to prevent the AfD’s rise could potentially first corrode, then shatter democracy and rule of law in Germany.

But how can a party like this, which is getting stronger in the polls, be dealt with? Is a ban the right way to go? They are always difficult to deal with, and it isn’t even an option at this stage. What about joining the AfD to form a coalition and temper the party? That is even more difficult, as it is unreasonable to argue that the AfD should be treated like other parties. The Nazis and Adolf Hitler had also been democratically elected when they seized power in 1933.

So, what options remain? Many politicians and journalists say we need to confront the AfD with critical arguments. Sounds good on the face of it. But people have already been doing that for a decade — with scant success.

This is why the only remaining option is to attempt what neither the AfD nor many politicians from established parties have been able to do: Start taking voters’ most important concerns and issues seriously, and seek to find solutions.

The fears that have allowed the AfD to become as big as it is today are clearly identifiable. When a recent survey by Infratest Dimap asked “What topics most influence your decision to vote for the AfD at the moment?” 65 percent said immigration, 47 percent said energy policies and 43 percent named the economy.

And in their handling of all three of these key issues, the older parties have demonstrated moral cowardice and a lack of honesty.

This is especially apparent when it comes to immigration.

Why is it so hard for centrist politicians to just come out and say a few simple truths? Germany is a land of immigration, and it must remain so if it wants to be economically successful. And modern migration policy needs a healthy balance between altruism and self-interest.

According to economists’ most recent estimations, Germany needs to bring in 1 to 1.5 million skilled individuals per year from abroad. What we need is an immigration of excellence and qualified workers. People from war zones and crisis regions should obviously be taken in. But beyond that, we can only take the migrants we need, the ones who will benefit us.

This means the social welfare benefits for immigrants require critical rethinking, with the goal of creating a situation where every immigrant would be able to and would have to actually start working immediately. Then add to this factors that are a matter of course in countries with a successful history of integration: learning the local language and respecting the constitution and the laws. And anyone who doesn’t must leave — and fast.

Germany’s current immigration policy is dysfunctional. Most politicians and journalists are fully aware of this, but they just won’t say it out loud. And all this does is strengthen the AfD, as well as other groups on the left and right that have no true respect for democracy.

Not speaking out about the problem is the biggest problem. Indeed, when issues are taboo, it doesn’t make the issues any smaller, just the demagogues stronger.

We’re seeing the same with energy policy. Everyone knows that in the short term, our energy needs can’t be met by wind and solar power alone. Anyone interested in reality knows decarbonization without nuclear power isn’t going to be feasible any time soon. And they know heat pumps and cutting vacation flights won’t solve the global carbon challenge — it will, however, weaken the German economy.

We need only look at one example: While just over 2 percent of global carbon emissions come from aviation, almost a third are caused by China — an increasing amount of which comes from coal-fired power stations. Ordinary Germans are very much aware the sacrifices they’re being asked to make, and the costs being piled on them, make no sense in the broader scheme of things, and they’re understandably upset.

In some cases, this makes them more likely to vote for the AfD.

This brings us to the third and final reason why people are so agitated. The EU, and above all Germany, has broken its promise about advancing prosperity and growth. Fewer young people now see a future for themselves in Germany; more and more service providers and companies are leaving; and the increasing number of immigrants without means is reducing the average GNP per capita. Germans aren’t becoming more prosperous — they’re becoming poorer.

Traditional politicians and political parties unable to offer change are thus on very shaky ground. They have disconnected themselves from their voters, and they are paving the way for populists who use bogeyman tactics and offer simplistic solutions that solve nothing.



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Step inside the murky world of radical Orthodox influencers

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A small, slick contingent of young Orthodox stars are harnessing social media to spread extreme messages around the globe.

“Democracy is a tool of Satan that has been perfected by Jews and their gentile allies in secret societies to take sly control of nations while allowing citizens to feel that they have a choice in the matter, keeping them compliant and dumb.”

These are the written words of Roosh Valizadeh. 

In his rampantly anti-Semitic online writings – which parrot the classic line that Jews run the world – the former pickup and alt-right blogger, turned Orthodox zealot, talks about a once Christian West transformed into a state of “Jewish pornographic sewage”.

Alleged national decline is a prominent theme in the American’s writings, believing untold millions in the Western world have sold their “souls for comfort, money, and sex”.

“America’s “moral sickness” is in its terminal stage,” he wrote in one blog post. “The boomers are busy counting their money, Gen X is trying to keep their 2.1 children from becoming gay, millennials opened Pandora’s box on degeneracy… and the zoomers may not be able to keep their brains intact from being exposed to hardcore pornography at the age of eight.”

‘They’re done with democracy’

Roosh V is just one of a small clique of more radical Orthodox internet celebrities.

Orthodox Christianity in the United States is a very complex religious scene, with each influencer having their own particular brand.

Historically Orthodoxy was the faith of Eastern European immigrants. However, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, told Euronews the religion is being pulled to the right, “even alt-right”, by a rising cohort of home-grown converts.

“They go by labels like traditionalist, America First, patriots or monarchists. They use all sorts of different political descriptors. But one of the things they have in common is that they’re largely far-right. They’re kind of done with American democracy,” she said.

Many tap into disaffection within religious communities that mainstream church leaders and right-wing politicians have let society turn its back on religion and morality.

Using meme culture, their own websites and social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, the Orthodox celebs reach tens of thousands of people on a daily basis.

“What’s drawing people specifically to Orthodoxy is they see it as a faith that is unchanged, one that has kept to traditional gender roles, forms of patriarchy and hierarchy,” Riccardi-Swartz explained. “That’s really appealing to a community that feels like society and gender roles are shifting really rapidly.”

“It’s fascinating that they use social media to expand their base and movement, which is a lot about getting back to the land, creating a more agrarian society and going offline,” she added, pointing out how modern technologies were ironically being used to revive deeply traditional societies.

‘Alpha male versions of only fans girls’

Much far-right Orthodox influencer chat focuses on what it means to be a man in modern society, with their listeners mostly young, university-educated white men, hailing from upper-middle-class backgrounds, explained Riccardi-Swartz.

A prime example is 30-year-old David Patrick Harry, a PhD student at the University of Berkley and founder of the so-called Church of the Eternal Logos.

In stripped-down live streams, introduced with ethereal religious hymns overlapped with hip-hop beats, he delivers speeches on the manosphere – an umbrella term for male supremacist ideas and groups – to his nearly 20,000 subscribers.

His Instagram – again followed by tens of thousands – is a mix of esoteric Orthodox musings, gym videos and glitzy churches.

In one illuminating video, he criticises the misogynistic internet star Andrew Tate as an example of morally disreputable men who are “self-absorbed”,” materialistic” and ”hedonistic” – instead arguing for a “true patriarchy” of spiritual principles.

“Men are the castle walls, women and children are the jewels inside… when men don’t have values that transcend the physical world… then they collapse,” he said in one live stream, published in June. 

“Men have to be based on something to be a wall which will prevent evil.”

Contradictions blight some Orthodox influencers’ messages, however.

A prevalent theme across some of their online content is a critique of capitalism and how it has helped unleash malevolent forces in society.

However, according to Riccardi-Swartz, “many of them are micro-celebrities. They have created brands, promote their content, have ads, monetise their podcasts and YouTube videos, and often sell things.”

Harry, for example, touts his own branded caps, drawstring bags, premium video sponsorship ($250) and one-on-one education and consulting for up to $380. Other influencers earn income from streaming services, like iTunes and Spotify, and one even hawks CBD gummies.

“It’s just all a grift at some level,” Riccardi-Swartz told Euronews. “They’re promoting what they perceive as an idyllic utopia of traditionalists. But in reality, they’re just recapitulating capitalism, over and over again.”

‘The Orthodox youth can only be entertained by memes for so long’

Though spread over a large diffuse area, the Orthodox church’s far-right micro stars are taking action and trying to bring about change.

Dissident Mama – focused on the alleged cultural genocide of US southerners and “anti whiteness” – writes put-downs of critics, railing against “scardey cat socialists”, “paid propagandists posing as historians” and “progressives Greta Thunberg-ese”.

Darker actions have been taken by some followers of the clique, such as abusing social groups they oppose and doxxing critical Orthodox priests, revealing personal details about their families. 

All this radicalism is creating a rift within the church between younger vocal upstarts and the established powers, many of whom are older men who have little understanding of digital technologies, explained Riccardi-Swartz.

“I get emails on the regular from older ethnic Russians and Greeks and Eastern European Orthodox Christians who are very concerned about how their parish demographics are changing. They don’t understand why when they go to coffee hour, there’s now a young white man telling them that they’re gonna go to hell if they don’t vote for the Republican Party,” she said.

“Things are shifting. You now have a minority religious faith, which is sort of being colonised by white American men.”

“It’s very scary.”

Despite their online hubris, many were still doubtful their movement could take the streets by storm.

“Even if you wanted to assemble a movement to combat the Jewish cultural terrorist, you would not be able to find many men who (1) still possess the cognitive ability to perceive the truth and accept it, (2) have enough physical stamina to endure a fight that requires them to stand for more than two hours a day, and (3) won’t be taken down by the Feds in an unseemly sting operation on trumped-up charged instigated by a loser infiltrator,” wrote Orthodox blogger Roosh V.

“We cannot speak the truth, we cannot organise, we cannot even identify the enemy with our speech, and if we dare do so, we will be utterly destroyed and made to whisper it on the fringes.” 

“Can you imagine what would happen to you if you went into the bars and slapped every Jew you saw,” he added.



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Austrian far right activists protest against ‘Great Replacement’

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“Natural Austrians” are becoming a minority in the country, according to far-right parties, who are marching through Vienna on Saturday to introduce the concept of “remigration” to the public.

A wide array of far-right groups marched in Vienna to launch what they claim is a political solution to “The Great Replacement”, a white nationalist theory which purports that non-European and non-Western groups are replacing majority populations in Europe.

“The goal of this protest is to coin terms and shape concepts and make them popular enough so that they get picked up by big right-wing parties like the FPÖ and the AfD and then be put in motion through parliamentary means,” organiser Gernot Schmidt told the Info-Direkt podcast, a far-right platform that also publishes a widely available magazine.

Several hundred marchers gathered in the Helmut Zilk Platz, named after a former mayor of Vienna in the 1990s who was killed by a letter bomb sent to him by far-right terrorist Franz Fuchs.

They carried black and yellow flags and banners with with “For Remigration” printed on them.

Schmidt is well-known in Austrian far-right circles, and was previously part of the Ring Freiheitlicher Studenten or RFS, a student wing of the Freedom Party of Austria, or FPÖ.

The FPÖ was formerly a pan-Germanist party, but has rebranded itself as merely an Austrian nationalist party. Its affiliate groups such as the RFS, however, often act as platforms for more radical ideas.

Several FPÖ officials have announced their participation in the protest, news that drew sharp criticism.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said that FPÖ’s participation in the protests “poses a security risk” for the country and that “joint protests with right-wing extremist groups such as the Identitarians underline the radical nature of the FPÖ leadership.”

Other notable far-right figures such as Martin Sellner, the leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, joined the march as well. 

During a speech at the protest, he said he hopes the term “remigration” will become “more popular than Coca-Cola” next year.

‘Dress sensibly and avoid attracting attention’

While the march was announced and publicised well in advance, its exact location was kept secret until the afternoon to prevent “the left” from “appearing ahead of time and stopping us”.

Schmidt urged people to “dress sensibly and not like you belong to the scene,” effectively warning people not to bring swastikas or other paraphernalia that could draw attention to their political leanings.

“People should arrive to the march as normally as possible and in normal attire… then we will look just like people walking around Vienna,” he continued.

Anti-fascist groups organised a counter-protest, and blocked the far right by sitting on the streets along their path, forcing the marchers to reroute.

Police separated the two sides with safety barriers and dog teams. Several physical scuffles broke out, with both sides trying to break through the barriers and the far right throwing objects at the police.

Sellner and the Identitarian movement, which is present in other European countries such as France, Germany, Sweden and the UK, openly oppose internationalism, Islam and multiculturalism and advocate for what they call “ethnopluralism”.

According to Schmidt, the idea that Austrians are being replaced by an immigrant population is a non-negotiable fact, and “remigration” is the only way to stop it.

“Remigration is the solution to the Great Replacement, which is the empirically provable fact that Austrians have become a minority in their country due to uncontrolled mass-migration and births by migrants and refugees who have more children,” he said in the Info-Direkt podcast, which styles itself as a “magazine for patriots”.

He explained that remigration “would mean closing the borders and returning migrants and people who are illegally in the country”.

Officially, Austria does not collect data on the ethnicity or race of its citizens. According to UNHCR, the current refugee population of the country is around 146,000. The country’s total population is approximately 8.9 million.

According to estimates, around 74% of the population has no immigrant background at all, while around 26% have at least one parent of immigrant background.

Schmidt says that these protests aim to show that there is popular support for legislative changes that would pave the way for immigrants or people perceived as non-Austrians to be “democratically sent back to their country of origin”.

“If we organise a protest, then the media has to write about it and people in Vienna will see it too, and then it can become popular. Once it becomes popular, then a lot of people will see that it’s a good idea and a sensible answer to The Great Replacement,” he explained.

Also slated to attend be Silvio Hemmelmayr, the chairman of the Freedom Youth of Upper Austria, another youth wing of the FPÖ which has been deemed a far-right extremist group by watchdog organisations in the country.

The groups have recently ramped up their rhetoric about the “great population exchange” or Bevölkerungsaustausch, which they believe is being carried out according to a secret plan intent on wiping out native Austrians.

Matters of belonging

While some argue Austrian identity is clearly distinguishable from the German one, especially when it comes to a wider belonging to the Catholic church instead of Protestantism, the far right in the country rarely encourages an Austria-centric approach.

Instead, they insist on what could be more precisely defined as a Germanic-Austrian identity, or one that does not include native Slavs, Italians, and other minority groups that have lived in the country for centuries. More recent immigrant groups are on their extreme exclusion list.

Michael Colborne, a journalist at Bellingcat and an expert on European far-right groups, says that Saturday’s march is a manifestation of this radical belief that all those deemed non-Austrian have no place in the country.

“They are explicitly saying, as politely as possible, that millions of people, including people who have citizenship and birth in the country, should be expelled,” he explained.

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Polls close in Spain snap election that could see return of right wing to power

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The majority of polls closed Sunday in a general election that could make Spain the latest European Union member to swing to the political right.

Polls in Spain’s mainland and the Balearic Islands closed at 6:00 p.m. GMT. Polls on the Canary Islands remained open one more hour due to the archipelago falling in a different time zone. Once they close, the first results from Sunday’s election are expected to come out.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is trying to win a third consecutive national election since taking power in 2018. But his Socialists and the other party in his leftist coalition took a beating in regional and local elections in May.


 

The mainstream conservative Popular Party led most polling during the campaign and is hoping that its first national victory since 2016 could let candidate Alberto Núñez Feijóo unseat Sánchez. But it may need the help of the far-right Vox party to do so.

 

Such a coalition would return a far-right force to the Spanish government for the first time since the country transitioned to democracy in the late 1970s following the nearly 40-year rule of dictator Francisco Franco.

Voters braved soaring summer temperatures to cast ballots in the election for 350 members of the lower house of Parliament. Near-final results were expected at midnight.

Read moreSpanish PM Sanchez pins snap election hopes on ‘fear of far right’

A PP-Vox government would mean another EU member has moved firmly to the right, a trend seen recently in Sweden, Finland and Italy. Countries such as Germany and France are concerned by what such a shift would portend for EU immigration and climate policies.

Spain’s two main leftist parties are pro-EU participation. On the right, the PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is also in favor of the EU. Vox, headed by Santiago Abascal, is opposed to EU interference in Spain’s affairs.

The election comes as Spain holds the EU’s rotating presidency. Sánchez had hoped to use the six-month term to showcase the advances his government had made. An election defeat for Sánchez could see the PP taking over the EU presidency reins.

Sánchez was one of the first to vote, casting his ballot in a polling station in Madrid.

Commenting later on the large number of foreign media covering the election, he said: “This means that what happens today is going to be very important not just for us but also for Europe and I think that should also make us reflect.”

“I don’t want to say I’m optimistic or not. I have good vibrations,” Sánchez added.

The Socialists and a new movement called Sumar that brings together 15 small leftist parties for the first time hope to pull off an upset victory. Sumar is led by second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, the only woman among the top four candidates.

Díaz called for everyone to vote, recalling that the freedom to vote didn’t always exist in Spain.

“A lot is at risk,” said Diáz after voting. “For people of my generation, they are the most important elections.”

At stake is “waking up tomorrow with more rights, more democracy and more freedom.”

The Interior Ministry said voter turnout at 6:00 p.m. local time stood at 53%, compared to 56% at the same point in the the country’s last national election, in November 2019.

The election was taking place at the height of summer, with millions of voters likely to be vacationing away from their regular polling places. However, postal voting requests soared before Sunday.

With no party expected to garner an absolute majority, the choice is basically between another leftist coalition and a partnership of the right and the far right.

For poll favorite Feijóo, “It is clear that many things are in play, what model of country we want, to have a solid and strong government.”

Vox’s Abascal said he hoped for “a massive mobilization (of voters) that will allow Spain to change direction.”

Alejandro Bleda, 45, did not say who he voted for but indicated that he was backing the leftist parties. “Given the polarization in this country, it’s to vote either for 50 years of backwardness or for progress,” he said.

The main issues at stake

are “a lot of freedoms, social rights, public health and education,” Bleda said after voting in the Palacio de Valdés public school polling station in central Madrid with his wife and young boy.

Voters are to elect 350 members to the lower house of Parliament and 208 members to the Senate.

Carmen Acero, 62, who voted for the Popular Party, compared Sánchez to Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and said she voted because “to continue with Pedro Sánchez is hell.”

Acero, who sported a Spanish flag on her phone, accused Sánchez of being an “assassin” for allying with the small Basque regional party Bildu, which includes some former members of the now-defunct armed separatist group, ETA.

She identified “the unity of Spain, employment and security” as among her main concerns.

The government said that all polling stations were running as normal.

A fire in a tunnel forced the suspension of all trains entering and leaving the eastern city of Valencia, indicating many people there might not make it to their voting station.

Coming on the tail of a month of heat waves, temperatures are expected to average above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and to rise between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius above normal in many parts of the country Sunday. Authorities distributed fans to many of the stations.

“We have the heat, but the right to exercise our vote freely is stronger than the heat,” said Rosa Maria Valladolid-Prieto, 79, in Barcelona.

Sánchez’s government has steered Spain through the COVID-19 pandemic and dealt with an inflation-driven economic downturn made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But his dependency on fringe parties to keep his minority coalition afloat, including separatist forces from Catalonia and the Basque Country, and his passing of a slew of liberal-minded laws may cost him his job.

The right-wing parties dislike everything about Sánchez, saying he has betrayed and ruined Spain. They vow to roll back dozens of his laws, many of which have benefited millions of citizens and thousands of companies.

(AP)

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Could Poland’s controversial LGBT-Free Zones finally be scrapped`?

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LGBT-Free Zones established years ago in Poland remain valid in a legal system controlled by right-wing conservatives. The country’s human rights representative is determined to fight them one by one.

In 2019, a wave of Polish towns and cities passed resolutions declaring themselves “LGBT-Free Zones” that at one point encompassed one-third of the country.

Since then, activists and legal experts have fought to revoke or nullify these declarations, chipping away at the bloc of LGBT-Free Zones largely found in the southeastern part of the country.

Significant progress has been difficult, since Poland has been facing a rule-of-law crisis going back to at least 2017, when the right-wing Law and Justice, or PiS party began spreading its influence on key bodies such as the Constitutional Court.

The crisis in the judiciary runs so deep that the EU initiated Article 7 proceedings against Poland, which suspend certain rights for member states if they are deemed to persistently be in breach of the EU’s fundamental values.

The European Commission launched legal proceedings against Poland at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), in a case known as Commission v Poland, and the ECJ ordered Poland to suspend the laws that interfere with the independence of the judiciary.

Poland ignored these rulings.

Now the country’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Marcin Wiącek, has decided to tackle both the homophobic resolutions and the faltering legal system at the same time.

The Office of the Ombudsman, while formally an institution financed by the government, exists in many countries as an independent one-man state body with the mandate to launch inquiries into violations of human rights perpetrated by any institution or body in the country.

Even his election was marred by difficulty, with PiS blocking the opposition-backed candidate for 10 months.

‘Fighting the rainbow plague’

This week, Wiącek launched a complaint against one of the municipalities that have held onto their LGBT-Free Zone designation since 2017.

Tuszów Narodowy is a small settlement in the municipality of Rzeszów known to those outside of Poland as one of the main stops along the Ukrainian refugee route from the border to Warsaw.

Local authorities have refused to rescind the anti-LGBT legislation, with the mayor stating that this “would mean taking the side of the rainbow plague, which is the aforementioned diabolical ideology, and consenting to downgrading the morals of young generations, starting from kindergarten.”

So Wiącek decided to sue them in the administrative courts.

His complaint indicates that the anti-LGBT resolution “crosses the boundaries of public debate, violates the Constitution, international law and EU law” as well as creating “stigmatisation and an atmosphere of exclusion for the LGBT community.”

“Legal and ideological issues concerning LGBT people are the subject of public debate in Poland. Participants in this debate may be local communities, as well as bodies of local government units,” said Wiącek in a statement.

“However, this debate cannot be conducted in forms inconsistent with modern standards of human rights protection, in particular resulting in violation of human dignity and discrimination.”

Crucially, he is also getting the EU involved in what may seem like a very local fight.

In order for countries in the bloc to receive EU funds, they have to guarantee that these funds do not encourage or promote discrimination – as in, the EU needs to keep a check on whether those benefitting act in a discriminatory or exclusionary manner.

So while the country’s Ministry of Development Funds and Regional Policy have said that they are “taking actions to verify the compliance of the spending of EU funds by local government units with the horizontal principle of equal treatment and non-discrimination,” there has not been any move by the ministry to get these resolutions rescinded.

Wiącek insists that the issue of LGBT-Free Zones is not merely a matter of “public opinion,” but a mounting legal problem for Poland.

“The wording contained in these resolutions leads to stigmatisation and creates an atmosphere of exclusion of LGBT people from local communities … even humiliation … and also has real legal effects, especially in the area of the possibility of absorbing EU funds,” the statement continued.

‘The world is possessed by Satan’

Tuszów Narodowy is not backing down without a fight.

Last month the mayor, Andrzej Głaz, held an event for local governments who do not want to say goodbye to these resolutions.

He claims that “the current world, influenced by LGBT ideology, has been possessed by Satan, eroticism and sex.”

“We do not deserve to be deprived of any EU funds in any way, because we have done nothing wrong,” he said at the event, where representatives of 10 other localities participated.

“If we want to talk about discrimination, it would be more appropriate to talk about discrimination against us, local governments, and through local governments, our residents,” he said at a press conference after the meeting.

Małgorzata Jarosińska-Jedynak, the Deputy Minister of Funds and Regional Policy – the very ministry that is supposed to monitor if EU funds are going to those that violate its values – attended the meeting.

According to Głaz, she assured him that they will “look for a good solution that would satisfy local government officials who are not withdrawing.”

A court system fighting itself

Wiącek is not the first Ombudsman to become the public face of the fight against LGBT-Free Zones.

His predecessor, Adam Bodnar, also sued the local administrations of Serniki, Istebna, Osiek, and Klwów in the Supreme Administrative Court, which ruled that these resolutions needed to be repealed.

Judge Małgorzata Masternak-Kubiak stated in her justification for the decision that “the social effect of the resolutions is to violate the dignity, honour, good name and the private life of a specific group of residents,” and that the state needs to protect and not attack marginalised or vulnerable groups.

Poland has seen a strong wave of re-traditionalisation starting since the fall of communism, with the Catholic Church becoming a bedrock of the country’s identity and many political parties and individuals championing conservative values.

This approach became particularly prominent after Law and Justice came to power in 2015. Their anti-LGBT and anti-progressive rhetoric posits that these “ideas” are an unwanted import from the West that are not only unwelcome in Poland – but that also effectively weaken and undermine the country.

An ultra-conservative Catholic organisation, Ordo Iuris, which claims to promote a rethinking of Poland’s legal framework, has been at the forefront of promotion the LGBT-Free Zones and defending their legal basis, along with other policies banning abortion and divorce.

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From Catalonia to the crises: Why is the far right growing in Spain?

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With polls predicting victory for the right-wing Popular Party, a future national government that includes Santiago Abascal’s party is more than likely. Its growth is the result of several factors, and can be traced back to the push for Catalan independence in 2017.

Long gone are the days when Spain was one of the few oases in Europe without a far-right presence in its institutions. But since the 2019 general elections, the Vox party holds 52 of the 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies.

With polls giving victory to the right-wing Popular Party (PP), a future national government that includes Santiago Abascal’s Vox, which is expected to win about 13 per cent of votes, is more than likely. 

“The Popular Party has managed, thanks to its pact with Vox, to make acceptable a force that was once absolutely marginal and had a kind of democratic cordon sanitaire around it,” says political analyst Verónica Fumanal.

Its growth is the result of several factors. To understand, we have to go back to the push for Catalan independence in 2017.  The following year, Vox, which was established in 2013, began to make electoral gains.

“The whole Catalan pro-independence process was experienced throughout Spain as a very strong emotional shock, and Vox rode on the back of that emotionality, that reactivity,” says Fumanal.

Added to this was the Popular Party’s corruption scandals, which brought down Mariano Rajoy’s government through a motion of censure, which saw the Socialist Party come to power with the support of the extreme left and secessionist parties. 

“This was obviously capitalised on by Vox because this is where we find one of their greatest enemies, what they consider to be the anti-Spain,” says historian and author of ‘Far Right 2.0’, Steven Forti.

Among these “enemies”, says Forti, are not only nationalism and independence, but also “everything connected to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, the rights of minorities, and feminism”, which Vox regularly attacks in its speeches and electoral programme.

But there are other elements that analysts see as key to the rise of the far right in Spain. Fumanal refers to technological changes that are “causing a new cleavage, not only left-right, not only nationalist-non-nationalist but also, for example, rural-urban”.

It is also fed by a fear of the unknown, which “always has a nostalgic movement behind it”, and the poor socio-economic situation. 

“The social elevator has been quarantined. Today, a young person who is better educated than his or her parents is not guaranteed to live better than them. This social contract is what allows populist forces to engage and connect with young people as well,” says Fumanal.

A ‘whitewashed’ populist discourse

“Every successful discourse has small connections with reality,” says Fumanal. She says  Vox uses errors such as the “law of the only yes is yes” which allowed the reduction of sentences for sex offenders as a “weapon of war”.

It can do so with complete freedom, according to the political analyst, because “populism has no ethical or moral limitations, nor any commitment to the truth”.

This political communication is carried out through “B2B channels that are not controlled, generating watertight communities that are not ashamed, communities that feed off each other and are increasingly large because they do not have the element of contrast“. Their aim, in Fumanal’s words, is “to inoculate, not to inform”.

The process of these extremist discourses taking hold in Spain has been gradual and has had to do with the approval of the traditional right.

“Of course, Vox has been whitewashed. Not only after the elections in Andalusia,” argues Steven Forti. 

For the historian, the turning point in the PP’s attitude was its presence, together with another political party, Ciudadanos, and Vox in a joint demonstration in Madrid’s Plaza Colón against socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government.

“Spain never had what is called a cordon sanitaire or democratic cordon in the face of extreme right-wing forces,” Forti points out. Something that materialised after the municipal and regional elections of 28 May 2023 with government pacts between PP and Vox.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP party signed governability pacts in coalition with Vox in 135 town councils throughout Spain that “largely buy some of Vox’s programmatic points”.

The consideration of the far right and its ideology as something “democratically acceptable”, says Fumanal, has also been contributed to by certain media, “because there are certain powers that consider that the right must come to power, and for the Popular Party to do this, it needs a springboard, which is Vox”.

The European extremist wave

Spain is one of the latest countries to join this move to the far right, which has been seen in both Europe and the United States, and which, according to Steven Forti, is in response to the increase in socio-economic inequalities, the so-called “cultural reaction” to social changes or immigration, and the crisis of liberal democracies. The ‘firewalls’ against extremist discourses have collapsed in recent decades, and disaffection with democracy has helped one that exploits fear to take hold.

Looking ahead to the European elections in June 2024, the EU is fearful of the effect that a Popular Party coalition government with Vox in Spain could have. In addition to reinforcing the ultra-conservative wave experienced in Europe since elections in Italy, Sweden, Finland, and Greece, Forti says this would open the door to the “possibility of a future alliance after the next European elections between the European People’s Party and European conservatives and reformists”.

“The extreme right-wingers have all repositioned themselves, so they are not talking about Brexit, Frexit, or Italexit. However, none of them are in favour of greater European integration”, says Forti. Vox, like the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia), advocates a halt to European integration and the recovery of national sovereignty.

But how much can this extremist wave continue to grow? Fumanal believes that when these parties come to power, they do not focus on issues that affect citizens. 

“It is an identity war, not an ideological one,” she says. “Therefore, when they have governed, they are not re-elected. Trump wasn’t re-elected, Bolsonaro either, and we’ll see if Meloni is re-elected. Only in countries where these beliefs are really embedded in society, such as Poland and Hungary, do governments like this persist”.

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France’s Murdoch? Right-wing media swoop threatens ‘pillar of French democracy’

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The shock appointment of a far-right editor to run one of France’s best-known mainstream newspapers has sparked calls for urgent steps to protect the pluralism and independence of the French press, while underscoring a sharp rightwards shift of the country’s media landscape under billionaire Vincent Bolloré.

Since June 22, journalists at the Journal du Dimanche – known as the JDD – have voted daily to down tools in an unprecedented strike action that has kept France’s best-known Sunday paper off the shelves for the first time in its 75-year history.

The walkout by more than 95% of staff followed the appointment of Geoffroy Lejeune, the former editor-in-chief of a far-right magazine that was convicted of publishing racist hate speech under his tenure.

Lejeune, 34, was officially tapped by the JDD’s owner Arnaud Lagardère, though his nomination is widely seen as the work of billionaire Vincent Bolloré, France’s most dreaded corporate raider, whose takeover of the Lagardère Group won the conditional support of EU regulators in June.

Following the appointment, eight former editors of the JDD wrote a letter blasting a “provocation and proof that the far right is taking hold in the media”. They expressed outrage that the identity of the paper was being “erased” by Bolloré, who has a track record of gutting staff and overhauling the editorial line at the news outlets he has purchased in recent years.

Almost three weeks into the strike, the beleaguered newsroom has appealed to President Emmanuel Macron to take a stand, framing the tussle at the JDD as part of a wider battle for press freedom.

“When the JDD, the newspaper of temperance and balance, goes on strike, it means the situation is truly bleak,” they wrote in a letter to Macron on Saturday, pleading with the government not to let their paper “die in silence”.

They added: “Beyond the JDD, what is at stake is the independence of the press and the journalists who produce it – a pillar of democracy.”

‘Hateful attacks and fake news’

Staff at the JDD have described Lejeune’s appointment as a negation of the paper’s values of moderation and journalistic rigour, pointing to his close ties with far-right political figures and his record at the helm of the arch-conservative weekly Valeurs Actuelles.

“Under Geoffroy Lejeune, Valeurs Actuelles spread hateful attacks and fake news,” the paper’s union of journalists wrote in a statement at the start of the strike. “We refuse to let the JDD follow this path.”

Staff at the Journal du Dimanche stand outside the newspaper’s building in Paris on July 5, 2023, the 13th day of their strike. © Alain Jocard, AFP

In his press release announcing Lejeune’s appointment on June 23, Lagardère praised a “raw talent of French journalism (…) with a mission to embody journalistic excellence: namely facts, investigation and the duty to inform” – a description labelled an “oxymoron” by French daily Le Monde, which argued that the young editor had “taken radical opinion journalism to the extreme”.

During his time at Valeurs Actuelles, Lejeune boosted the weekly’s notoriety by pushing provocative headlines and caustic attacks on politicians and intellectuals. In 2021, the magazine was found guilty of racist hate speech after it published a fictional story and cartoons depicting a Black MP as a slave in chains.

The paper’s staples are immigration, crime, Islamism and the plight of white males. Its preferred targets include “woke” teachers, liberal elites and the likes of Jewish financier George Soros.

In the run up to last year’s presidential election, Lejeune endorsed the extreme-right candidate Eric Zemmour, formerly a star pundit at Bolloré’s television channels. He is also a close friend of Marion Maréchal, the niece of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who ditched her aunt’s National Rally party last year to support Zemmour’s presidential run instead.

All of which makes him anathema to the JDD’s striking newsroom, which noted that Valeurs Actuelles’ own shareholders had described Lejeune as “too pro-Zemmour” upon firing him last month.

“Our newspaper has always strived to remain impartial and apolitical, offering a platform to both left and right,” said Bertrand Gréco, a JDD journalist for the past 26 years and a union representative.

“This nomination implies a radical change of editorial line,” Gréco added. “It means a newspaper recognised for its informative content will become an opinion paper – and one that spreads not just any opinion, since Lejeune is a champion of the far right.”

The Murdoch parallel

The JDD’s weekly sales of around 140,000 belie an outsize influence in a country where few newspapers top the 100,000 mark.

The title’s prime position as the only nationwide Sunday paper has long made it the go-to outlet for politicians eager to tout a new policy, bill or election run. It also makes it a prize catch for Bolloré, a corporate raider whose transport, media and advertising empire stretches across Europe and Africa.

A deeply conservative Catholic from Brittany, in western France, Bolloré has been gradually expanding his media assets to take in TV channels, the magazine Paris Match, radio station Europe 1 and latterly the JDD.

After acquiring news channel iTélé, part of the Canal+ group, he provoked a record strike of 31 days in 2016, got rid of most of the staff and turned it into a conservative platform that critics have dubbed “France’s Fox News”.

That platform, renamed CNews, “is no longer a news channel – it’s an opinion channel”, said Pauline Ades-Mevel, chief editor at the media freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), who previously worked for iTélé. She described the turmoil at the JDD as an “aftershock of what has already happened at the other media organisations taken over by Bolloré.”

Read morePushing far-right agenda, French news networks shape election debate

Bolloré’s aggressive expansion into media has prompted comparisons with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose myriad news outlets in Australia, Britain and the United States have fundamentally altered the media and political landscapes of those countries.

Historian David Colon, a professor at Sciences-Po Paris who has written a book about Murdoch’s media empire, pointed to parallels between the tycoons’ respective holdings, most notably in the synergy between publishing houses, newspapers, radio stations and television networks.

“When it comes to media concentration, the key factor is not the number of titles you own or the size of their readership, but rather the diversity of the mediums,” he explained. “It’s this cross-ownership that allows you to set the agenda and rapidly influence public debate.”

In both cases, Colon pointed to a clear intent to push the debate in a socially conservative direction. Unlike Bolloré, however, Murdoch “would never allow his personal convictions to take precedence over the commercial success of his ventures”, Colon cautioned – whereas the losses posted by the French tycoon’s media assets suggest their motive is primarily ideological.

‘Concerns us all’

The tycoon’s purported ideological objectives have prompted mounting alarm among academics, politicians and other public figures, many of whom have voiced support for the strike action at France’s flagship Sunday paper.

“For the first time in France since the (post-war) liberation, a large national media will be run by a far-right personality. This is a dangerous precedent which concerns us all,” said an open-letter to Le Monde signed by hundreds of figures including actor Mathieu Amalric, writer Leïla Slimani, rapper and producer JoeyStarr and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo.

Lejeune’s appointment “heralds the kind of forced transformation that Bolloré is accustomed to”, the letter added, citing the “brutal measures” enacted at his other media assets.

Another op-ed, signed by Nobel literature laureate Annie Ernaux and a host of prominent academics, urged legislators to put in place a legal framework that ensures “journalists are able to work independently – and, in particular, independently of the wishes of their shareholders”.

Alone among Macron’s ministers, Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak voiced her concern at Lejeune’s nomination in a tweet posted shortly after his appointment, which prompted a flurry of racist slurs levelled at the French-Lebanese dual national.

“Legally speaking, the JDD can become what it wants, as long as it respects the law,” she wrote. “But for our Republic’s values, how can you not be alarmed?”


The fact that shareholders can “legally” impose their choice of editors is at the very heart of the problem, according to Daphné Ronfard of the media advocacy group Un Bout des Médias. She blamed a lax legal framework, the bulk of which dates back to 1986, for allowing the likes of Bolloré to concentrate media resources and dictate their will.

“We need a new framework that can limit concentration and guarantee the independence of journalists, which is crucial to democracy,” Ronfard explained. “Editorial content should not be shaped by shareholders with political motives – which, in Bolloré’s case, are all too obvious.”

Her association has come up with a series of proposals designed to ensure journalists have their say on the appointment of editors, which it hopes to push once the government convenes long-awaited consultations on freedom of information in France – a pledge from Macron’s re-election campaign last year.

Pandora’s box

In the run-up to the 2022 presidential race, the French Senate played host to a circus of billionaires appearing in turn to deny the obvious: that ownership of France’s main private media outlets buys them influence and protects their interests.

Bolloré was the first to testify before a parliamentary committee tasked with investigating concentration in the media. True to form, he struck a faux-naïf tone as he belittled his television assets and denied any political motive behind his multiple purchases in the media.

“I have no power to appoint people to these channels,” he swore when quizzed about his role in the many resignations and high-profile firings that rattled the Canal+ media group following his takeover in 2015. He added: “Some journalists have left, others have returned. It’s like the ocean tide, back home in Brittany.”

Regarding CNews and its rolling coverage of Zemmour’s presidential run, Bolloré flatly denied it pursued any “ideological agenda”.

Eric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and former presidential candidate, dominated media coverage in the run-up to the 2022 campaign.
Eric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and former presidential candidate, dominated media coverage in the run-up to the 2022 campaign. © Thomas Samson, AFP

Much like Valeurs Actuelles, CNews has positioned itself as a straight-talking alternative to mainstream media stifled by political correctness, claiming to serve the French public what it really wants: stories on crime, immigration and Islam. Critics, however, say the channel has repeatedly violated the terms of a licensing agreement that applies to France’s four free-to-air news networks, requiring them to provide balanced coverage.

Zemmour’s sulphurous statements have resulted in multiple convictions for inciting hate speech and repeatedly landed CNews in hot water. In 2021, France’s broadcast regulator fined CNews €200,000 for speech inciting racial hatred after Zemmour branded child migrants “thieves, murderers and rapists”. Arcom, the regulator, has also admonished the network for failing to ensure political balance in its broadcasting.

The punishment amounted to too little too late, according to former Arcom member Joseph Daniel, who argued in a scathing op-ed that the regulator had repeatedly missed opportunities to flag and sanction the network’s failure to respect public broadcasting rules.

By allowing CNews to become an “opinion channel”, Daniel wrote at the time, “(Arcom) opened a dangerous pandora’s box for news networks that are freely available to the public and constitute a key element of our democracy.”

‘Hurting democracy’

Arcom’s failure to crack down hard on CNews mirrors a wider complacency by French authorities regarding media regulations, said Sciences-Po’s Colon, who voiced dismay at the government’s reluctance to wade into the battle for the JDD.

He pointed to a French specificity in the provision of public subsidies for newspapers, a long-established tradition intended to safeguard the democratic role of a vibrant press. Those subsidies, he argued, give the French state a certain leverage to ensure press freedom is preserved.

“The state would be perfectly entitled to make public subsidies conditional on compliance with a certain number of basic principles of journalistic ethics and deontology,” he explained, adding that shareholders “should not be allowed to impose an editor who is rejected by 97% of staff”.

“We’re talking about public money: Should it be used to serve the political whims of a billionaire or to defend quality journalism in the service of the general interest?” he asked. “The answer to that question is of fundamental importance to our democracy.”

On Sunday, Macron’s Education Minister Pap Ndiaye stepped into the fray by stating his support for the JDD strikers and arguing that a “manifest far-right bias” at CNews was “hurting democracy”. That in turn triggered a barrage of criticism from the right and far-right, which accused the minister of undermining media pluralism and being out of touch with a public that has itself shifted to the right.

The latter argument is missing the point of the dispute roiling the Journal du Dimanche, said Ades-Mevel of Reporters Without Borders.

“Of course all political stripes should be represented in the media, but that is not what Bolloré is up to. He is taking over mainstream publications to use them as channels for his agenda,” she explained.

“We’re not arguing that the far right is not entitled to a newspaper,” added the JDD’s Gréco. “What we’re saying is that they shouldn’t come grab an existing paper that has its own history, journalists and values.”



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