Autumn 2023 may be remembered as a benchmark for a more explicit split between the political class and popular feeling in Western Europe than had previously been the case, bringing with it, at least in the short term, the normalisation of repression and violence.
With the rise of ‘populist’ right-wing parties, we are also seeing a rise in political violence and threats. On October 8th,
According to AfD officials, [Alice] Weidel was forced to flee her apartment due to what appears to have been advanced intelligence about an imminent attack against the politician and her family as the AfD prepares to contest regional Bavarian elections on October 8th.
On November 9th, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, co-founder of VOX, was shot in the face in Madrid, Spain. And a week later, on November 20th, Thierry Baudet was taken to hospital after being attacked with a bottle in Groningen—the second case of physical violence against him in a month.
These events received scant media attention, with a partial exception in the case of Vidal-Quadras, whose story was picked up by more outlets but who, in any case did not receive so much as a telephone call from Spain’s PM. Pedro Sánchez only managed a tweet in response to the attempted assassination.
Violence against dissidents generally leaves the media and political class cold.
Seen in the context of ongoing Spanish and Irish protests, violence against political figures on the anti-establishment Right seems part of a larger tendency to drop the subtlety with respect to political repression, as exemplified by the Irish state’s uncommonly explicit move to further restrict freedom of speech. This has been prompted by the simple fact that more and more people living in Western Europe feel alienated from their political classes, thanks in no small part to their refusal even to pretend any longer that the policies they sponsor, especially to do with migration, are remotely democratic.
We should remember, however, that the media’s relaxed posture towards violence or the threat of it against politicians on the Right is just one instance of a more insidious complacency. The mainstream Western press has long underreported violence against politicised subjects, not just political actors.
What is a politicised subject in Europe? To be blunt: an indigenous person, so long as the attacker isn’t one. If a migrant or child of migrants from outside Europe commits violence against a person of European descent, the media struggles to report the story straightforwardly (particularly because this constitutes a general trend of migrants being overrepresented among perpetrators of violent crime in Europe).
How are we to explain this?
Why should belonging to the majority ethnic group of a given place constitute a disadvantage? The kind of disadvantage represented by having crimes against one’s person unfairly reported?
Answer: historically, this occurs when a colonising project against a local population is underway.
There are plenty of good reasons why such a project is countenanced today by our elites. To name a few:
- Culturally diverse populations engage in less unionisation and political mobilisation, making them easier to control,
- The importation of labor through migration is cheaper than internalising the cost of raising the next generation of workers in the salary of present workers, and
- The life standard and working conditions to which Europeans are accustomed make them expensive human resources.
To reiterate, the recent uptick in violence against dissidents and social discontents in general may mark autumn 2023 as the season when the powerful decided that pretending to be on the side of the people was too difficult—or maybe the season when a sizable enough part of the population decided that pretending the powerful are receptive to their legitimate grievances was simply a farce.