European far-right takes advantage of protest violence to promote authoritarian anti-immigration agenda | The extreme right

Europe’s far-right leaders have pounced on the violence that shook many cities last weekend, portraying it as the inevitable consequence of the failure of liberal governance and open border policies and insisting that only they can restore law and order.

With key elections in Spain, France and Italy just months away, authoritarian nationalists are eager to weaponize the wave of street unrest, stemming from peaceful protests over the cost of living and deteriorating public services, but hijacked by violent rioters.

The opponents did not hold back. In France, where cities like Paris, Marseille and Lyon have faced widespread rioting and looting, the far-right National Rally (RN) has denounced centrist incompetence and promised a crackdown.

The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, said the government was “powerless.” The leader of the RN, Marine Le Pen, declared on Wednesday that the State was “collapsed” and had “lost control of everything” in “migratory, budgetary and security chaos”.

Leading in the presidential elections and seeking voters beyond her base, Le Pen resisted an explicit racialization of the unrest, but presented it more broadly as the result of state and policy failures leading to “anarchic immigration” and “a total loss of authority.”

In Germany – where there have been no major protests – the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has fueled fears that riots could spill over the border. His co-leader Alice Weidel said France’s “violent excesses” were a “warning for Germany”.

Weidel also linked the unrest to immigration, posting: “The dangerous mix of mass migration and left-wing extremism threatens here too to lead to conditions bordering on civil war… There will only be a turnaround on migration with the AfD!

In Portugal, populists used peaceful protests to blame immigration for the country’s housing crisis, which André Ventura of the far-right Chega party said was mainly the result of an “uncontrolled influx of people from abroad.”

In Spain, where the housing crisis has sparked huge protests and an encampment in Madrid, and prompted socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to call snap elections next month, the far-right Vox party has sought to demonize the protesters. “They do not defend the right to housing or ask for work, they are at the service of Pedro Sánchez,” said party leader Santiago Abascal. “These are Sánchez’s militias.”

Vox also attempted to link the housing issue to migration. In a social media post last month, the party wrongly suggested that the 87-year-old woman whose eviction sparked the huge protests would have had a place to live if she had been an immigrant from North Africa.

In Belgium, where cost-of-living protests also degenerated into street clashes in Brussels and Liège, far-right Flemish nationalists Vlaams Belang presented the riots as a failure of integration and open borders, calling them “imported violence.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has adopted a different strategy: as head of a far-right government she has led for four years, she cannot simply blame the state’s failures. Instead, she expanded her policing agenda and portrayed the rioters as extremists.

“Protesting is a right, but burning our cities is not,” Meloni said after the riots in Milan and Bologna. “Hooligans have exploited the protests to sow chaos, attack security officials and take entire cities hostage. »

Meloni has already adopted sweeping security measures aimed at hindering public dissent, including prison terms for blocking roads, harsh penalties for resisting police and pretrial detention for protesters suspected of causing unrest.

This week, she passed emergency decrees creating a crime of violent participation in a protest, imposing harsher penalties on rioters and organizers of violent groups, and penalizing parents whose children participate in vandalism and looting.

But she, too, highlighted immigration as a factor, noting that “nearly half of those arrested” after the Milan riots were “of immigrant background, including those born abroad and children of the second generation of immigrant families.”

Beyond Europe’s orthodox far-right parties, anti-immigration polemicists have gone further, interpreting the violence not as a failure of the state and politics, but as evidence of an impending civilizational war fueled by multiculturalism and non-EU immigration.

Éric Zemmour, the founder of the Reconquest! (Reconquest), demanded a halt to immigration and the expulsion of “foreign delinquents”, declaring: “These are not riots, but warning shots in an ethnic war. Either we establish absolute order or we give in.”

The far-right narrative has been bolstered by similar comments from the United States, where the president and vice president have sought to turn the unrest in France in particular into a warning for voters ahead of the midterm elections.

Donald Trump described France as a once-great nation that was “conquered, pillaged and burned by migrants, jihadists and communists,” adding on social media that immigration “broke this great country.”

JD Vance echoed the same view, saying: “Western liberals have imported the third world to France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. In doing so, they “ignored fundamental questions about assimilation and compatibility,” he said.

Deborah Cole in Berlin, Angela Giuffrida in Rome and Sam Jones in Madrid contributed reporting