Even if he loses the second round of the French elections to current President Emmanuel Macron, there is no denying that Marine Le Pen of the farright National Rallye party had a successful campaign. In his first presidential run in 2012, Le Pen finished third with 17.9% of the vote. In 2017, she qualified for the second ballot with 21.3% of the votes and lost in the end (33.9%). That year he entered the second round with 23.15% of the vote, despite competition in his field from Éric Zemmour (7.07%).
Even if he loses the second round of the French elections to current President Emmanuel Macron, there is no denying that Marine Le Pen of the farright National Rallye party had a successful campaign. In his first presidential run in 2012, Le Pen finished third with 17.9% of the vote. In 2017, she qualified for the second ballot with 21.3% of the votes and lost in the end (33.9%). That year he entered the second round with 23.15% of the vote, despite competition in his field from Éric Zemmour (7.07%).
A week before the election, polls for April 24 give him an average of 45 percent of voting intentions.
Le Pen’s steady growth marks the electoral success of an extreme right that presents itself as “good” with antidemocratic proposals laced with xenophobia and cloaked in racism, playing by the rules of the democratic game. With varying degrees of success or failure, this also applies to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany, Vox in Spain, Chega in Portugal and Liga in Italy, not to mention such cases as in Poland and Hungary, where the extreme rights to national power.
But not all rightwing extremists follow this playbook. There is a blatant “misconduct” on the part of the extreme right that is bordering on programmatic terrorism. Such is the case of the socalled “United Patriots” in Germany, a highly aggressive but small group that is the subject of investigations and arrests by the police.
In addition to confiscating a veritable arsenal of nonlight weapons, money, gold and fake vaccination cards, the police surprised plans to kidnap German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach in a demialist protest against the Berlin government’s health care policies. This was a new perk for farright movements, whether “well behaved” or “ill behaved”: health denial.
The “United Patriots” are not the only group in the crosshairs of the security apparatus. They are also currently investigating against the Atomwaffe Division Deutschland group, more or less Portuguese German Atomic Weapons Division, a kind of branch of the similar movement based in the United States, which has branches in several countries around the world and which is openly neoNazi, antiSemitic, homophobic and supporter of socalled “white supremacy”.
white racist groups
There are many other likeminded groups spreading across Germany, such as Knockout 51, which is known for its violent attacks on politicians and leftwing figures. In general, these are small, dispersed groups that act locally and regionally, but for that very reason are very dangerous, difficult to control and with great autonomy of action.
Although there was precedent, the red light only came on occasionally when, in June 2019, a neoNazi fanatic murdered conservative politician Walter Lúbcke of the CDU for disagreeing with his position on taking in refugee immigrants. Since then, surveillance of the activities of the extreme right has increased significantly, to the point that thenMinister of the Interior (equivalent to Minister of Justice in Brazil), Horst Seehofer, considered them the greatest threat to democracy in the country.
For a long time after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, German secret services neglected to pay attention to farright groups and concentrated on controlling movements defined as Islamic or leftwing extremists. One of these agencies went so far as to shut down its farright control unit and disband it into other departments. Even serious attacks in other countries, such as the massacre in Oslo, Norway in June 2011, when a farright fanatic killed 77 people, mostly young people, at a Labor Party summer camp, did not even serve as a warning.
The fact of the matter is that farright movements with “behaved well or badly” have been growing across Europe, both in terms of action and daring. Some of them in Germany go so far as to deny the existence of the Federal Republic; distribute identity cards and even passports to their members.
So far, these roles only apply to each other. But who knows, maybe one day they will serve as decoration for the forerunners of new exceptional regimes on the continent.