How far-right violence resurfaced in Europe

The monument to Nazi-fascist war criminal Rodolfo Graziani in Affile, summer 2013. Olivier Favier

Text by: Olivier Favier

10 mins

It is expressed in the street or against places dedicated to minorities.

It is also spread in the media through the voice of its political representatives or personalities who support it.

Finally, it haunts the police or the courts of many European countries.

The violence of the extreme right is now omnipresent in Europe, to the point that in Germany, for example, we no longer hesitate to talk about terrorism.

Back to the roots of this re-emergence of the far right in Europe.

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Towards the end of the 1970s, after the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal

and in Greece (1974), or in Spain (1977), after a failed coup d'état in Italy (1970) [1], the far right seems, in Europe at least, now to be history.

It remains, moreover, politically infrequent for democratic parties because of its Nazi past in Germany, fascist in Italy, Pétainist in France.

However, it continues to exist in the form of parties present in the elections, but also in a nebula of groups, unions, associations or lobbies, often rivals or even antagonists.

Around the 1970s, if far-right violence received less media coverage than that of far-left terrorist groups in Italy or Germany, it nonetheless resorted to indiscriminate attacks, as in Italy at the train station. in Bologna in 1980 and probably also in Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969.

During the summer of 1973, in Marseille, at least sixteen racist murders were committed against Algerian nationals, an episode erased from French memories.

However, they killed more people than all Direct Action crimes.

1980s: the far right returns to power in Austria

In 1983 and 1986, an extreme right party, the FPÖ, entered into coalition governments in Austria.

Its leader, Jörg Haider, who would become governor of Carinthia, was nevertheless a neo-Nazi activist in his youth.

Moreover, the first party leader in 1956 was a former SS general.

The astonishment is such in the other European countries, that many try to explain this return as an Austrian anomaly, not as a sign that certain taboos linked to the tragic history of the twentieth century are falling.

From that time on, far-right violence was expressed in the hooligan and skinhead movement, testifying to a renewed popular and generational anchoring.

It feeds on the rise in unemployment as well as the deindustrialisation which marks the end of the Trente Glorieuses.

It also feeds on nostalgia and colonial rancor, as evidenced by the passages of the OAS, a terrorist organization against the independence of Algeria, the National Front in France, or the export of the "School". French counter-guerrilla warfare, formed in Indochina and Algeria, in the direction of Latin American dictators.

It maintains links with authoritarian or xenophobic powers, as well as those existing between the Swedish far right and the apartheid regime in South Africa, suspected of being behind the death of Prime Minister Olof Palme.

1990s: "

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, by feeding the theories on the "End of history" revive the idea that extremisms are no longer short, and that fascist ideologies have lost. their main reason for being: anti-communism.

However, it is precisely the latter, fueled by a now broader consensus on the reality of Soviet totalitarianism, and a less and less hidden nostalgia for "the time when trains arrived on time", which will feed the various coalitions led by Silvio Berlusconi, in power in Italy since 1994.

If he calls himself a center-right, his two supporters are for

clearly nationalist and post-fascist, for the regionalist and xenophobic Lega Nord.

By keeping the leadership of this triumvirate regularly renewed until 2010, Silvio Berlusconi and his

party

claim to keep their allies in the “constitutional arc”.

In Germany, far-right violence is now terrorism

The “ 

 ” who, by his own admission in 2019, “legitimized” the fascists and regionalists by bringing them to power, therefore set himself up for decades as a herald of democracy in Italy for having kept under his control. parties that could have turned out to be undemocratic.

In 2012, a monument was erected in Affile, one hour from Rome, in memory of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, one of the few fascist criminals to have been sentenced to the Liberation, with the money embezzled from the region of Lazio.

In 2019, an impressive arsenal of war was seized from neo-fascist militants.

The “constitutionalization” of the far right has therefore in no way tempered its discourse or its violence.

In Germany, the end of East Germany and reunification left a whole section of the population on the fringes of liberal society.

In these disaster-stricken regions, the fear of foreigners is very often fantasized in the absence or almost no immigration.

The anti-fascist and anti-Nazi references, omnipresent in the ideological base of the former GDR, have nonetheless been shattered.

Whether anti-Semitic as in Halle or anti-immigrant as in Hanau, far-right violence is now clearly perceived as terrorist.

And it now affects both Germany.

Despite its electoral successes, the far-right AFD party is constantly monitored by the state, especially its most radicalized fringe.

From street violence to state violence

At the local level, as in France for a quarter of a century now, at the national level, as in Italy, Poland, Norway, the extreme right sometimes comes to power in Europe, most often within coalitions or, as in Hungary, under a conservative label that seeks to give a consensual face to a policy deemed xenophobic or populist.

It earned him a suspension from the European People's Party in 2019.

With some exceptions, the far right obtains double-digit electoral scores in other countries, which in any case place it in the normality of the political landscape, as a constant threat, recurring in France after two qualifications for the second tower.

The violence associated with it is doubly legitimized.

In Italy, for example, the summer which followed the arrival of Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League, at the Ministry of the Interior, racist attacks multiplied, some even leading to murder, such as this had already been the case in 2008. The most spectacular of these, the attempt to carry out a mass killing against black people in Macerata was practically justified by various far-right politicians, who gave their support to its author during his trial.

In Greece, police support for the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement, which had up to 18 MPs, does not only manifest itself in elections.

In 2013, the assassination of rapper Pavlos Fyssas by an activist of this party, led to the resignation of 2 generals, the suspension of many executives and an investigation by the police directorate, for suspicion of collusion with the extreme right. .

Similar accusations have tarnished the image of the German police and army in recent years, while the mobilization against police violence in 2020 has exposed a systemic racism within the police force in France.

The role of French identity propaganda

And it is again from France, where many of them still have an open table in many media, that editorialists or the theorist of the “great replacement” Renaud Camus come, developing an anti-Muslim and / or anti-Semitic discourse.

Their influence has been able to encourage acting out across the world.

It will be recalled that the concept of "wildness" of the identity thinker Laurent Obertone, in common use in the extreme right, was taken up by part of the political class, in particular the Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin.

We find, in some cases, these writings as a reference to terrorists who have committed attacks against places frequented by Muslim or Jewish communities.

Those of Renaud Camus fueled the ideology of terrorist Anders Breijvik, who in 2011 killed 77 young members of the Labor Party, as he himself acknowledged in his "Manifesto" drafted in prison.

This influence did not prevent the theorist from publishing directly in English his essay

which sums up his political thought in 2018.

85 years after the fall of Nazism, there is still a great risk of seeing the street violence of the extreme right turning into institutional violence.

The recent lifting of Matteo Salvini's parliamentary immunity by the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate in July 2020, when he is accused of having allowed migrants to die at sea, is enough to remind us.

Just last summer, the former Italian interior minister was given by many as the future president of the Council in the event of early legislative elections.

He now faces 15 years in prison.

[1] The said Golpe Borghese, on the night of December 7-8, 1970.

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