Far right pushes anti-immigration agenda across Europe as protest violence spreads
Giorgia Meloni's government passed emergency decrees this week creating an offence of violent participation in a demonstration, as far-right leaders from Spain to Belgium used last weekend's rioting to advance their anti-immigration agenda months before key elections in Spain, France and Italy.
Far right pushes anti-immigration agenda across Europe as protest violence spreads
The unrest that swept through cities last weekend began as peaceful protests over the cost of living and deteriorating public services before being hijacked by violent rioters. Far-right leaders across Europe have framed the violence as the inevitable consequence of failed liberal governance and open-border policies, arguing that only they can restore law and order. With elections months away in Spain, France and Italy, the rioting has become fuel for the far right's anti-immigration agenda.
Meloni tightens the law after Milan and Bologna
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, at the head of a far-right government for four years, has responded by widening her law-and-order agenda and framing the rioters as extremists. After rioting in Milan and Bologna, she said hooligans had held entire cities hostage.
"Demonstrating is a right, but setting our cities ablaze is not"
The emergency decrees passed this week go beyond her earlier measures, which included jail terms for blocking roads, tough sentences for resisting police officers, and pre-detention for demonstrators deemed likely to cause trouble. The new rules create:
- an offence of violent participation in a demonstration
- tougher penalties for rioters and organisers
- penalties for parents of children involved in vandalism and looting
Meloni also noted that nearly half of those stopped or arrested after the Milan riots were of immigrant background, including people born abroad and second-generation children.
Spain's housing protests become an election battleground
In Spain, housing crisis protests included a Madrid encampment and prompted the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to call a snap election next month. The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, said the protesters were not defending the right to housing or asking for work but serving Sánchez, and described them as Sánchez's militias.
Vox also falsely suggested on social media that the 87-year-old woman whose eviction sparked the protests would have had a home had she been a north African immigrant.
Smaller parties echo the law-and-order call
Other far-right parties across Europe tied the unrest to immigration in their own statements:
- AfD co-leader Alice Weidel called France's "violent excesses" a "warning for Germany", even though no major protests took place there, and said there would only be a turnaround on migration with the AfD
- André Ventura of Portugal's Chega party blamed the housing crisis chiefly on an "uncontrolled influx of people from abroad"
- In Belgium, where cost-of-living protests escalated into street clashes in Brussels and Liège, Vlaams Belang called the rioting "imported violence"
- Éric Zemmour, founder of Reconquête!, demanded an immigration halt and deportation of "foreign delinquents", saying: "These are not riots, but the warning shots in an ethnic war. Either we establish absolute order or we yield."
France's National Rally and Washington's echo
In France, cities including Paris, Marseille and Lyon faced widespread rioting and looting, and the National Rally denounced centrist incompetence and promised a crackdown. Jordan Bardella, the party's president, called the government "impotent". Marine Le Pen said on Wednesday that the state was collapsing and had lost control of everything amid migratory, budgetary and security chaos. Ahead in presidential polls, she framed the unrest as the product of state failures that produced "anarchic immigration" and "a total loss of authority".
The French unrest also travelled into American politics. Donald Trump described France as conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists, claiming immigration had shattered the country. US vice-president JD Vance said Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion, while ignoring questions of assimilation. Both used the French unrest as a cautionary tale for voters before the midterm elections.
Elections in Spain, France and Italy remain months away, and Sánchez has called a snap election for next month.
