Far-right Brazilian president given honorary citizenship by Anguillara Veneta
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, was met with cheers and jeers as he visited a small Italian town on Monday to collect honorary citizenship.
Bolsonaro’s great-grandfather was born in Anguillara Veneta, a town of 4,200 people in the Veneto region. Tensions have been brewing since its far-right mayor, Alessandra Buoso, approved granting honorary citizenship to the far-right leader.
Continue reading...The FBI and other key law enforcement agencies failed to act on a host of tips and other information ahead of 6 January that signaled a potentially violent event might unfold that day at the US Capitol, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.
Among information that came officials’ way in the weeks before what turned into a riot as lawmakers met to certify the results of the presidential election was a 20 December tip to the FBI that supporters of Donald Trump were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to “overrun” police and arrest members of Congress, according to internal bureau documents obtained by the Post.
Continue reading...As Emmanuel Macron opens a museum dedicated to the exonerated Jewish soldier, ultra-nationalists led by Éric Zemmour again question his innocence
More than a century after he was exonerated, Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer whose false conviction for treason sparked bitter controversy, has erupted into France’s presidential race amid far-right attempts to question his innocence.
Emmanuel Macron last week personally inaugurated the first museum dedicated to the Dreyfus affair, a historical collection exhibited in the house of Émile Zola, the writer and best-known defender of the persecuted officer, in Médan west of Paris.
Continue reading...Extremist party’s demise has left a gap that it is being filled by far-right groups in north of the country
“They were big and brawny and struck like a thunderbolt,” says Aphrodite Frangou, an activist and leftwing journalist recalling the moment a group of far-right Golden Dawn sympathisers went on the attack. “They kicked us and punched us and broke everything, tables, chairs, even the loudspeakers we had set up. Four of us spent the night in hospital.”
October was meant to be a month of celebration for Frangou and other members of Keerfa, Greece’s pre-eminent anti-fascist movement.
Continue reading...Weapons seized after call from far-right party for members to prevent migrants from entering country
German police say they have stopped more than 50 far-right vigilantes armed with pepper spray, a bayonet, a machete and batons who were trying to patrol the Polish border to stop migrants entering the country.
The vigilantes were following a call by the Third Way, a far-right party with suspected links to neo-Nazi groups, for its members to stop illegal crossings near the town of Guben.
Continue reading...With just months to go before presidential polls, the centre-right Les Républicains, under pressure from both flanks, are scrambling for a suitable candidate
Six months before a presidential election and France’s mainstream right finds itself squeezed – between the hammer and the anvil as they say here – without a candidate and facing an existential threat from either side.
On one flank are the far-right Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, a polarising television pundit who wants to talk about immigration, identity and Islam – the three i’s – and ban “non-French” names such as Mohamed.
Continue reading...Organisers of exhibition on history of British fascism say parallels can be drawn with current thinking
A surge in Covid-19 conspiracy theories risks boosting antisemitism, hate crime campaigners have warned after the opening of an exhibition shedding light on interwar British fascism and its parallels today.
The Wiener Holocaust Library in London is staging the exhibition – focusing on the motivations and propaganda of British fascists and their European peers in the 1920s and 30s – out of concern about the recent growth of far-right ideas and populism in the UK and abroad.
Continue reading...Founder of far-right party among 12 arrested after mob storms A&E department and trade union HQ
Calls are growing in Italy to abolish neofascist movements after violent protests against Covid-19 vaccine passes in Rome, during which demonstrators tried to force their way into the official residence of the Italian prime minister.
Twelve people, including Roberto Fiore, the founder of the far-right Forza Nuova party, were arrested in connection to Saturday’s unrest, in which a group of about 30 raided a hospital accident and emergency unit – injuring four medical workers – and the offices of a trade union were stormed.
Continue reading...Resignation of Austrian chancellor follows Germany’s CDU crashing to its worst federal election result
Europe’s ailing centre-right is mourning the departure of a second high-profile conservative leader in the space of a month, as Austria’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, announced he would resign over allegations he encouraged the use of public funds to buy himself positive media coverage.
The fall from grace of the 35-year-old leader of the Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) comes just weeks after its German sister party failed to fill the space left by the outgoing chancellor, Angela Merkel, and crashed to the worst result in its history at federal elections.
Continue reading...The feedback loop between US conservative media and Australia’s fringe right has intensified as New South Wales and Victoria have struggled with outbreaks
At a rowdy rally to protest against mask mandates in New York on Monday, some participants carried Australian flags and joined in with chants such as “Save Australia”.
Many Australians were puzzled by what seemed a sudden, unbidden show of support, but this spectacle was the culmination of a months-long effort in conservative US media to portray Australia’s coronavirus response as having brought the country to the brink of authoritarianism.
Continue reading...The controversial TV pundit recently overtook Marine Le Pen in presidential election opinion polls
He has been convicted for inciting racial hatred, attacked by historians for claiming the Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain saved French Jews rather than aiding their deportation to death camps, and was this week described by the French justice minister as a dangerous racist and Holocaust denier.
But Éric Zemmour, a far-right French TV pundit, is rising so fast in opinion polls for president that one survey this week found he could make the final round of the April election and take 45% of the vote against the centrist Emmanuel Macron.
Continue reading...Far-right Brothers of Italy candidate is granddaughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
The granddaughter of Benito Mussolini won the highest number of votes in elections for Rome’s city council as support for Brothers of Italy, the far-right party to which she belongs, edged up in northern cities held by the left.
Rachele Mussolini secured more than 8,200 votes in the municipal elections on Sunday and Monday, an increase on the 657 received when she entered the council on her first mandate in 2016.
Continue reading...Current mayor Virginia Raggi lags third behind Brothers of Italy and Democratic party
The mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, is in danger of being ousted in local elections, according to exit polls, which showed a far-right candidate ahead in the race for Italy’s capital.
Raggi was hoping to win a second mandate, but exit polls place her in third position with between 16.5% and 20.5% of the vote.
Continue reading...Judge denies white supremacist, 22, opportunity to address court as survivors of 2019 attack give moving statements
A 22-year-old white supremacist was denied a chance to address a courtroom before a judge sentenced him Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for bursting into a southern California synagogue on the last day of Passover in 2019 with a semiautomatic rifle, killing one worshipper and wounding three others.
An agreement with prosecutors that spared John T Earnest the death penalty left little suspense about the outcome, but the hearing provided 13 victims and families a chance to address the killer and gave a sense of finality to a case illustrating how online hate speech can lead to extremist violence. Many gave heart-wrenching accounts of how their lives were upended and how determined they were to persevere despite such devastating loss.
Continue reading...Virginia Raggi hasn’t solved waste issues while far-right candidate advocates restoring fascist salute
Elio Perugini can’t remember the last time he had a decent night’s sleep. “It’s a disaster, the noise just doesn’t stop,” he said. “I hardly sleep any more. The worst of it is on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.”
Sleepless nights have become the norm for many in Trastevere, a neighbourhood in central Rome once treasured for its charm and old-world feel, but now known for its rowdy nightlife, petty crime, piles of rubbish and graffiti-scarred walls.
Continue reading...President accused of chasing rightwing votes by making sudden, tough gestures on immigration
The Algerian foreign ministry has summoned the French ambassador for talks in “formal protest” against France’s decision to sharply reduce the number of visas granted to Algerian nationals, as opposition parties in Paris accused Emmanuel Macron of using the row to court rightwing voters.
The French government announced this week that it would substantially cut the number of visas granted to people from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, three north African countries which were all part of France’s former colonial empire and where many people have strong family ties in France.
Continue reading...Party that entered German parliament in 2017 drops about 2% nationally despite performing strongly in east
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which made a whirlwind entry into the German parliament in 2017, is set to lose its status as the main opposition force following Sunday’s election but has at the same time emerged as the strongest party in parts of eastern Germany.
The party, which rose to prominence on an anti-immigrant ticket after the arrival of around 1m refugees in 2015 but has more recently focused its attention on attacking the government’s pandemic management, dropped just over 2% nationally to secure 10.3% of the vote.
Continue reading...Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Éric Zemmour slug it out in much-publicised two-hour debate
Two men; two completely different visions for France.
In a debate that lasted more than two hours, the hard-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the hard-right Éric Zemmour, expected to be a presidential candidate, went head to head on prime-time television on Thursday evening.
Continue reading...Site ridicules far-right suggestion that people should be made to have ‘more French’ names
When a far-right political journalist and possible presidential contender began talking about people having “un-French” names, there really was only one response: satire.
The humorous website Vite Mon Prénom (My Name, Quick) was set up to offer a one-click test to find out if your name is French enough, based on a repealed 1803 law, and suggest alternatives if it is considered unacceptably foreign.
Continue reading...Police prepared for trouble at event near Capitol but only a few hundred attended as politicians and pro-Trump groups did not
Any passing American might have been forgiven for thinking they had stumbled on one of the great human rights struggles of our time.
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