Europe’s
far right seizes on protest violence to push authoritarian anti-immigration
agenda
Nationalist
leaders are framing unrest as consequence of failed liberal governance and open
borders
Jon Henley and Guardian correspondents
Wed 21
Oct 2026 16.36 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/21/europe-far-right-protest-violence-authoritarian-agenda
Europe’s
far-right leaders have jumped on the violence that rocked numerous cities last
weekend, framing it as the inevitable consequence of failed liberal governance
and open-border policies and insisting only they can restore law and order.
Months
away from key elections in Spain, France and Italy,
authoritarian nationalists are eager to weaponise the wave of street unrest,
originating in peaceful protests over the cost of living and deteriorating
public services but hijacked by violent rioters.
View
image in fullscreen
Jordan
Bardella, the president of the National Rally in France, said the government
was ‘impotent’ in the face of widespread rioting and looting. Photograph:
Nicolas Messyasz/Sipa/Shutterstock
Those in
opposition have not held back. In France, where cities such as Paris, Marseille
and Lyon faced widespread rioting and looting, the far-right National Rally (RN)
has denounced centrist incompetence and promised a crackdown.
The
party’s president, Jordan Bardella, said the government was “impotent”. The RN
leader, Marine Le Pen,
said on Wednesday the state was “collapsing” and had “lost control of
everything” amid “migratory, budgetary and security chaos”.
Ahead in
presidential polls and seeking voters beyond her base, Le Pen has resisted
explicitly racialising the unrest, but has framed it more broadly as a result
of state and policy failures leading to “anarchic immigration” and “a total
loss of authority”.
In
Germany – where there were no major protests – the far-right Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) has stoked fears rioting could spill over the border. Its
co-leader Alice Weidel said France’s “violent excesses” were a “warning for
Germany”.
View
image in fullscreen
The AfD
co-leader Alice Weidel linked the unrest to immigration. Photograph: Hesham
Elsherif/Anadolu/Getty Images
Weidel
also linked the unrest to immigration, posting: “The dangerous mix of mass
migration and leftwing extremism threatens to lead to civil war-like conditions
here too … There will only be a turnaround on migration with the AfD!”
In
Portugal, populists have used peaceful protests to blame immigration for the
country’s housing crisis, which André Ventura of the far-right Chega party said
was chiefly a consequence of an “uncontrolled influx of people from
abroad”.
In Spain,
where the housing crisis has led to huge
protests and a Madrid encampment, and prompted the socialist prime
minister, Pedro Sánchez, to
call a snap election next month, the far-right Vox party has sought to
demonise the protesters. “They’re not defending the right to housing, or asking
for work, they’re serving Pedro Sánchez,” the party’s leader, Santiago Abascal,
said. “They’re Sánchez’s militias.”
Vox has
also attempted to link the housing issue to migration. In a message posted on
social media last month, the party falsely suggested that the 87-year-old woman
whose
eviction sparked the mammoth protests would
have had a home had she been an immigrant from north Africa.
In Belgium, where cost of
living protests also escalated into street clashes in Brussels and Liège, the
far-right Flemish nationalists of Vlaams Belang framed the rioting as a failure
of integration and open borders, characterising it as “imported violence”.
Italy’s
prime minister, Giorgia
Meloni, has adopted another strategy – as head of a far-right government
she has headed for four years, she cannot simply blame failures of the state.
Instead, she has expanded her law-and-order agenda, and framed rioters as
extremists.
“Demonstrating
is a right, but setting our cities ablaze is not,” Meloni said after rioting in
Milan and Bologna. “Hooligans have exploited the protests to sow chaos, attack
those responsible for ensuring security, and hold entire cities hostage.”
View
image in fullscreen
As head
of a far-right government she has headed for four years, Giorgia Meloni cannot
simply blame failures of the state. Photograph: Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images
Meloni
has previously enacted sweeping
security measures aimed at hindering public dissent, including jail terms
for blocking roads, tough sentences for resisting police officers, and
pre-detention for demonstrators thought likely to cause trouble.
This week
she
passed emergency decrees creating an offence of violent participation in a demonstration, imposing tougher penalties on rioters and organisers of violent groups, and
penalising parents whose children take part in vandalism and looting.
But she
too has highlighted immigration as a factor, noting that “nearly half of those
stopped or arrested” after the Milan riots were “of immigrant background,
including individuals born abroad and second-generation children of immigrant
families”.
Beyond
Europe’s orthodox far-right parties, anti-immigration polemicists have gone
further, interpreting the violence not as state and policy failures but as
evidence of a looming civilisational war fuelled by multiculturalism and non-EU
immigration.
Éric
Zemmour, the founder of France’s Reconquête! (Reconquest) party, demanded an
immigration halt and the deportation of “foreign delinquents”, declaring:
“These are not riots, but the warning shots in an ethnic war. Either we
establish absolute order or we yield.”
The
far-right narrative has been reinforced by similar comments from the US, where
both the president and vice-president have sought to turn the unrest in France
in particular into a cautionary tale for voters before midterm elections.
Donald
Trump described France as a once-great nation that had been “conquered, looted,
and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists”, adding on
social media that immigration “has shattered that once great country”.
JD Vance
echoed the same view, saying: “Western liberals imported the third world into
France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion.” In doing
so, they “ignored fundamental questions about assimilation and compatibility”,
he said.
Deborah
Cole in Berlin, Angela Giuffrida in Rome and Sam Jones in Madrid contributed
reporting
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