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In recent days, several far-right European political parties have commented on the large French protests that began after the killing in Nanterre, near Paris, of 17-year-old Nahel M. by a policeman: all these parties have exploited the clashes between protesters and police above all to ask the European Union for hostile and restrictive policies on migration.
In Poland, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki used the recent French events to justify his government’s opposition to the pact on the reform of the Dublin regulation, which was drawn up by the interior ministers of the European Union a few weeks ago. In the event of large arrivals of asylum seekers, the pact provides for the relocation of migrants to other countries, which they may or may not accept. If they do not accept, they will have to pay an amount for each asylum seeker they do not accept and therefore finance their reception elsewhere. “Looted shops, torched police cars, barricades in the streets: this is now happening in the center of Paris and in many other French cities,” he said. written Morawiecki on Twitter.
“We don’t want such scenes in Polish streets. We don’t want scenes like this in any city in Europe. These are the consequences of the uncontrolled migration policies that we are forced to adopt,” he wrote in a publication video in which some images of the French protests alternate with bucolic images of Poland in which we see families laughing during a picnic and little girls with braids smelling flowers.
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In addition to the Polish prime minister, the Italian government has also attempted to exploit the French unrest to its advantage, he wrote Politico. The undersecretary of the Interior Ministry Nicola Molteni, of the League, in a recent interview al Newspaper he said: «It is useless to go around it: what is happening in France is the certification of a failure, that of uncontrolled immigration, but also a warning for Europe. (…) If the migratory phenomenon is not managed, eventually every European country will find itself in great difficulty. And things like the ones we are seeing in France will happen».
Molteni then argued that Italy and Europe must “try to manage, plan and guide the wave of migration” and cited, as a positive model for him, the so-called “Cutro decree”, the decree-law on the management of migratory flows that the government had issued after the serious shipwreck of migrants that took place off the coast of Steccato di Cutro, in Calabria. Above all, the provision contains measures that increase the penalties for people who try to arrive in Italy by sea and others that make it more difficult for those who manage to get there to remain in Italy. Molteni concluded the interview by saying: «It’s not that you come to Italy and do as you please: there is an identity to be respected».
The French demonstrations that began after Nahel M.’s death lasted for four days during which hundreds of people attacked police stations in various cities, looted shops, set fire to cars and clashed with police. The problems underlying the protests (which are notoriously very energetic in France) concern racism, discrimination, police violence and economic inequalities involving migrant people and, above all, third and fourth generation French people who live in the banlieues, inhabited areas mainly by third or fourth generation French and migrant people, and with whom no government has been able to deal effectively for decades.
They therefore concern a specific context: the one that has created, historically in France, places of exclusion for non-white people where poverty rates are high, where the probability of being unemployed is three times greater once outside that periphery, and where the probability of being stopped by the police and being subjected to abuse is also higher. According to various scholars, the interventions of the various governments have so far not worked precisely because they have not reduced either social segregation or discrimination.
However, there is a contradiction in the behavior of the European far right which has used the recent protests from the banlieues in its favor and which has never commented on the equally recent, huge and radical protests against the disputed pension reform wanted by President Emmanuel Macron. These had begun in December and ended in April, there had been acts of vandalism, barricades in the streets, dozens of fires in various cities of the country, clashes with the police or sabotage of the electricity grid which had left thousands of homes without electricity.
Hans Kundnani, an analyst at the British research center Chatham House, explained to Politico that the reactions of Morawiecki and Molteni to what happened in France were «exactly what was expected». In countries such as Poland, Hungary, Italy but also France, Spain and Greece, the far right has been particularly effective in getting centre, centre-right and sometimes even centre-left parties to change their stance on immigration and integration of people of migrant origin from the second generation onwards, so much so that political scientists have been talking for some time about a center-right that has lost its centre.
This has also been seen in Italy. In 2021, after the end of the Conte government and the formation of a new government led by Mario Draghi, Forza Italia had joined it showing a moderate image closer to the center than to the radical right. In 2022, however, he had decided to get out of it and to take positions and tones similar to the parties of Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni. The most visible episode had been when Silvio Berlusconi had condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine without explicitly attributing responsibility to the Russian president Vladimir Putin: he had been criticized by some more moderate exponents of Forza Italia, who later left the party and was was defended, however, by Salvini himself.
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“Since the 2015 refugee crisis, the far right has used these and other episodes to call for tougher measures. And it has been quite successful in gaining centre-right support in many parts of Europe,” says Kundnani. For him, the success of this convergence is due to the fact that topics such as the defense of national identity or Islamophobia have a strong hold among people: «This is the lesson that the centre-right has learned from the rise of populism: that it must be stricter on immigration. And this change underpins growing cooperation with the far right, particularly in coalition governments.”
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Far-right parties are now in government in countries like Finland or Sweden. In still others they may get there shortly or have nevertheless achieved significant local victories (and this, comment Politicois a development that “will inevitably reshape Europe, affecting everything”, not just migration policies).
In Spain, where the vote will take place on July 23 and where the prospect of the far right in a possible future government coalition with the Popular Party cannot be ruled out, Santiago Abascal, leader of the radical right-wing anti-immigration party Vox, has exploited the French riots for ask tougher migration policies. However, Abascal ignored the fact that many young people who are French took part in the French protests: “There is a Europe threatened by hordes of anti-Europeans who destroy police stations, burn libraries and stab to steal a mobile phone, who are not willing to adapt to our way of life and our laws and who think that we have to adapt».
Abascal denied the idea that poverty, marginalization or police brutality could be the root causes of the French riots and said indeed that these conditions have never «induced Europeans», presumably of Christian religion, «to stab children», « to slaughter teachers’ or to ‘run over pedestrians with vans’. He added that in the Spanish region of Catalonia “today more foreigners are born than Spaniards”, that “Salafists and fundamentalist mosques are proliferating”, that “insecurity is growing” and that with the arrival of “Muslims” even “crimes” have arrived in Europe previously unknown», such as gang rapes. However, these statements by him are mostly political propaganda and are not reflected in reality.
Finally Abascal, who is the head of an anti-feminist, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ people’s rights party, used the attack against people of Islamic faith to present himself as a defender of homosexuals and women: «Homosexuals feel more protected by my party than by Mr. Sánchez (Spanish socialist prime minister, ndr) and Mr. Macron (the French president, ndr)”, since both “have imported a type of immigrant who denigrates women and thinks homosexuals should be hung from a crane”.
Meanwhile in Belgium, where regional and national elections will be held next year, Tom van Grieken of the Vlaams Belang party, a pro-independence nationalist with extremely radical positions on immigration, spoke of France saying that these latest unrest explain how “the multicultural dream of the left» is «a multicultural nightmare for citizens». He also added that the Belgian authorities “do not have the courage” to face the problem and that “real change can only be guaranteed” by his party.
Kundnani he said a Politico that, in addition to influencing domestic politics, the far right is also influencing the European Union.
Although Hungary and Poland opposed the recent pact on the reform of the Dublin regulation, this same pact accepted many of the requests made by the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which most international newspapers place explicitly and easily in the area of ‘extreme right. It is an unambitious reform which, in fact, restricts the rights of migrant people. Furthermore, about a month ago, Giorgia Meloni had returned to Tunisia just under a week after her last official visit to ensure that the Tunisian government collaborated more in blocking the departures of migrants and asylum seekers. Also with her were the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, of the centre-right: “A show of inter-party unity”, he said commented Kundnani.
Another proof of the convergence between centre, centre-right and far-right is, according to Kundnani, the fact that Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission has created a subcommittee for the Promotion of the European way of life, currently occupied by the Greek Margaritis Schinas, of New Democracy: «That commissioner’s job is basically to keep migrants out. And the existence of that place highlights that migration is no longer treated as a complicated political problem, but rather as a direct threat to the European way of life”.