Category Archives: The far right

Trump ignores Farage – and risks midterm elections farrago – with insistence on big lie

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Analysis: His British friend tried to help but the former president did not want to forget his voter fraud obsession and focus on the future. CPAC loved it but Republicans hoping to take Congress know they are courting disaster

The sagest advice given to Donald Trump all week came from a man who is neither a Republican nor an American.

Nigel Farage, the British politician, broadcaster and demagogue whose Brexit campaign coincided with Trump’s rise to power, warned his old pal against endlessly fixating on the 2020 election.

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French reporter infiltrates campaign of far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour

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Exclusive: Vincent Bresson says he witnessed casual racism and covert posts by ‘shadow Facebook army’

A reporter who infiltrated Éric Zemmour’s presidential election team has claimed he witnessed a culture of casual racism and a covert online campaign involving a “shadow Facebook army” and repeated rewrites of the far-right polemicist’s Wikipedia page, the most viewed in France.

Vincent Bresson, 27, says he spent more than three months as an increasingly trusted member of “Génération Z”, as Zemmour’s young supporters’ group is known. He said he witnessed multiple racist remarks from both volunteers and senior staff.

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Ottawa protests: ‘strong ties’ between some occupiers and far-right extremists, minister says

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Public safety minister speaks after arrest of extremists accused of plotting to kill police officers in Canada border town of Coutts

Canada’s public safety minister has warned of ties between protesters occupying the country’s capital and a group of far-right extremists who were charged earlier this week in the border town of Coutts, Alberta, over an alleged plot to kill police officers.

“Several of the individuals at Coutts have strong ties to a far-right extreme organization with leaders who are in Ottawa,” the minister, Marco Medicino, told reporters on Wednesday.

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Valérie Pécresse rally focuses on immigration as threat from rivals grows

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Les Républicains’ presidential choice promises crackdown after defections to Macron and rise in far-right’s polling

The rightwing French presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse vowed to crack down on immigration as she held her first big rally on Sunday amid competition from the growing far right and defections from her party to the centrist leader Emmanuel Macron.

“There is no sovereignty without borders,” Pécresse said on stage in Paris as more than 6,000 people waved French flags in support of the first female presidential candidate for Les Républicains, the traditional rightwing party of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Viktor Orbán invites Trump to Hungary to boost re-election campaign

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Thinktank linked to government has extended an invitation to the former US president

Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán is hoping Donald Trump will travel to Budapest in the coming weeks to boost his reelection campaign.

A thinktank linked to the Orbán government, the Centre for Fundamental Rights, has issued an invitation to Trump, a government source told The Guardian.

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Cultivating conspiracy: how Boris Johnson amplified the far right

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Prime minister follows Donald Trump playbook by tacitly endorsing wild conspiracy theory to score points

What started out as a conspiracy meme on the outer reaches of the internet has, with the help of Boris Johnson, swiftly established itself amid the cocktail of ideas and conspiracies that define the new extreme right.

The protesters who surrounded Keir Starmer on Monday night mostly shouted the word “traitor” – once a term of abuse against pro-EU MPs during the Brexit crisis – as well as “paedophile protector”, a reference to false claims about the Labour leader’s links to the Jimmy Savile case.

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Ottawa protests: tensions grow as ‘intolerable’ truck blockade paralyzes Canada capital

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Does movement against vaccine mandates herald Canada’s tea party moment?

For nearly a week, Paul Aubue has lived and slept in the cab of his truck, parked in downtown Ottawa.

The 64-year-old grandfather travelled from New Brunswick to join hundreds of others as they descended on the Canadian capital. Aubue, the owner of a trucking company, said he’d been driven to protest by a recent requirement that truckers crossing from the US into Canada be vaccinated against Covid.

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High hopes for Portugal’s optimism-prone Socialist PM after big win

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Analysis: Absolute majority frees António Costa from having to rely on allies as he leads economic recovery

In 2016, Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, issued a lighthearted rebuke to his prime minister: António Costa, the president noted, was prone to “a chronic and slightly irritating optimism”.

Almost six years on, Costa’s optimism appears fairly well founded. On Sunday night the 60-year-old leader of Portugal’s Socialist party (PS) defied the polls, as well as political trends elsewhere in Europe, to secure a surprise outright majority in a snap general election.

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Portugal’s far right poised to play key role after snap election

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Anti-Roma rhetoric, attacks on benefits recipients and lambasting of corrupt elite strike chord with voters

Portugal is voting in a snap general election that is unlikely to result in a majority government but which could lead to the far-right Chega party becoming the third largest group in parliament.

Sunday’s election was triggered in December after the long-running deal between prime minister António Costa’s minority Socialist government and its allies in the Portuguese Communist party and the Left Bloc broke down during negotiations to pass the 2022 budget.

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Splits in left are set to boost far-right TV pundit in Portugal’s snap election

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As support grows for André Ventura, Socialist party has lost ground to centre-right PSD after row over budget with its allies

Between greeting regulars at the busy Lisbon bakery where she has worked for two decades – and reaching instinctively for their orders as soon as they cross the threshold – Susana Santos offers her thoughts on an imminent, and altogether less welcome, encounter.

Like many of her compatriots, she does not relish the idea of Sunday’s snap general election, which arrives amid a stubbornly lingering pandemic and during a time of economic upheaval and political uncertainty.

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Le Pen feud deepens as French far-right leader’s niece withdraws support

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Marine Le Pen calls Marion Maréchal’s decision not to back presidential bid ‘brutal, violent and painful’

France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen has described her niece’s decision not to support her presidential campaign as “brutal, violent and painful”.

Marion Maréchal, who dropped Le Pen from her name in 2018, said she was considering whether to transfer her allegiance to Éric Zemmour, who is even further to the right.

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‘Peace, freedom, no dictatorship!’: Germans protest against Covid restrictions

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The university city of Cottbus held one of 2,000 rallies across Germany on Monday, stoked by the far right

On Monday evening on the dot of 7pm people emerged from dimly lit side streets and gathered on the Oberkirchplatz square in Cottbus for what has become a weekly ritual in towns and cities across Germany: a protest against coronavirus protection measures.

The demonstrations have grown in strength as cases of the Omicron variant have surged, and in recent weeks a looming decision on bringing in a vaccine mandate has become the focus of protesters’ ire. More than 2,000 rallies were held nationwide on Monday, drawing tens of thousands of participants.

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Kill the Bill and period protests: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Costa Rica

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Far-right French presidential candidate found guilty of racist hate speech

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Éric Zemmour drew widespread outrage in September 2020 after a tirade against child migrants

A French court has found the far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour guilty of racist hate speech for a tirade against unaccompanied child migrants.

Zemmour drew widespread outrage in September 2020 when he told the CNews channel that child migrants were “thieves, killers, they’re rapists. That’s all they are. We should send them back.”

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Online extremist content surged before 6 January, says US agency

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FBI and DHS flagged content that could ‘inspire violence by lone offenders against government officials’

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned of an increase in extremist content and threats against US lawmakers in the days leading up to the anniversary of the 6 January insurrection, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.

The memo, sent on Thursday to state and local law enforcement, said that DHS had no indication of a specific and credible plot, but that the agency and the FBI had “identified new content online that could inspire violence, particularly by lone offenders, and could be directed against political and other government officials, including members of Congress, state and local officials, and high-profile members of political parties, including in locations outside of [Washington DC]”.

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Twitter permanently suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account

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Georgia Republican’s Covid misinformation violation prompts move, after being issued a ‘fourth strike’ in August

The personal Twitter account of the Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been permanently suspended, for violating policies on Covid misinformation.

The action against Greene on Sunday came under the “strike” system Twitter launched last March, which uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the coronavirus misleading enough to cause harm.

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After rightwing attacks on rescues, UK lifeboat charity has record fundraising year

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The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has had ‘significant’ increase in annual donations after it went to the aid of asylum seekers

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is on course for the highest annual fundraising total in its near 200-year history. Donations swelled after the charity attracted huge public support following rightwing attacks for helping save the lives of asylum seekers at risk of drowning in the Channel.

The RNLI said it has received a significant increase in support, with online donations rising by 50% this year.

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Polish deputy PM says Germany wants to turn EU into ‘fourth reich’

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Jarosław Kaczyński’s remarks in far-right newspaper are latest episode in Poland’s lengthy standoff with EU

The head of Poland’s ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński, has said Germany is trying to turn the EU into a federal “German fourth reich”.

Speaking to the far-right Polish newspaper GPC, the head of the Law and Justice party (PiS) said some countries “are not enthusiastic at the prospect of a German fourth reich being built on the basis of the EU”.

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‘A Francoist daydream’: how Spain’s right clings to its imperialist past

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A Peruvian author fears her adopted home is far from an apology for its Latin American abuses

The Plaza Mayor, where tourists gather to drink steep beers and feast on overpriced paella, may be better known. So may Puerta del Sol, where locals ring in the new year by eating a grape on each of the 12 chimes.

But Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, a 25-minute walk from these spaces, has come to play its own special part in the social, political and historical life of the capital – and the rest of Spain.

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