28 Jun 24 | Europe and Central Asia, European Union, News and features
While the outcome of the 2024 election is yet to be finalised, results at the time of writing show that Eurosceptic conservatives are on course to win an extra 14 seats (taking them to 83), while right-wing nationalists will gain nine seats (to 58). Overall, the right, including centre-right politicians of the European People’s Party grouping, has done well, largely at the expense of the liberal and green party groupings. With just five nations out of 27, including Italy and Estonia, remaining to publish their final results, the overall picture is unlikely to change dramatically.
The move to the far right is evident across Europe. France, which elects 81 members to the European Parliament (EP), was perhaps where this was most evident. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party is projected to receive around 31-32% of the vote, against President Macron’s centrist party, which is estimated to reach around 15% of the vote. Macron was so concerned about his party’s poor showing that he has called an election in the country. Belgium’s prime minister also handed in his resignation after the nationalist New Flemish Alliance emerged as the big winner after regional, national and European Parliament elections were held in the country on Super Sunday.
In Germany, Eurosceptic parties are projected to secure over 16% of the EP vote. The AfD tripled its support from voters under 24 from 5% in 2019 to 16% and gains six seats to reach 15. The Greens lost nine seats from 21 last time around. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party gained nearly 26% of the vote, gaining three seats, while in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration Party for Freedom gained six seats with 17% of the vote. A similar story played out in Poland, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria and Croatia.
But what is driving Europe’s veer to the right?
There is some evidence that the success of the far right comes from millennial and Gen Z voters shifting towards these parties. A third of French voters under 34 and 22% of young German voters favour their country’s far right, while in the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom has become the largest party among under-34s.
Young Europeans, mainly those aged 18-29, overwhelmingly rely on social media for daily news consumption. In Italy and Denmark, nearly three-quarters of young adults use social media for news daily (74% and 75%). A recent German youth study found that 57% of youth prefer social media for news and political updates.
There is growing concern that external actors, particularly from Russia, may have influenced the elections.
Media reports reveal that EU leaders were so concerned about foreign interference in the elections that they set up rapid alert teams to manage any serious incidents. Officials told the Guardian that disinformation has reached “tsunami levels.”
The evidence points to Russia.
Last December, France’s VIGINUM group, which is tasked with protecting France and its interests against foreign digital interference, published a report revealing a network of nearly 200 websites with addresses of the form pravda-xx.com or xx.news-pravda.com, where xx is the country identifier.
The sites, which generate little new content themselves, instead amplify existing pro-Russian content from state sources and social media, including posts from military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk. Pro-Russian content relating to the Ukraine war is a particular favourite.
Thirty-four fact-checking organisations in Europe, showed that the Pravda network had spread to at least 19 EU countries. Fact-checking organisation Greece Fact Check, in cooperation with Pagella Politica and Facta news, has since noticed that the Pravda network has been attempting to convey large amounts of disinformation and pro-Russia propaganda to sway EU public opinion.
The organisation said that “minor pro-Russian politicians who run for the elections are quoted by state media such as Ria and then further amplified by the Pravda network, in what seems an attempt to magnify their relevance”.
A report by EDMO on EU-related disinformation ahead of the elections found that it was at its highest ever level in May 2024. Ministers for European affairs from France, Germany, and Poland cautioned about efforts to manipulate information and mislead voters. Across the EU, authorities observed a resurgence in coordinated operations spreading anti-EU and Ukraine narratives through fake news websites and on social media platforms Facebook and X.
Among the false stories that emerged and covered were reports that EU President Ursula Von der Leyen had links to Nazism and had been arrested in the European Parliament.
In Germany, there were stories circulating that the country’s vote was being manipulated, ballot papers with holes or corners cut were invalid and that anyone voting for the far-right party AfD would follow stricter rules. Other stories attempted to trick voters into multiple voting or signing their ballot papers, practices that would invalidate their votes.
The report also noted that around 4% of such disinformation articles have been created using AI tools.
The tsunami of disinformation looks unlikely to fade away any time soon. The Guardian says that the EU’s rapid alert teams have been asked to continue their work for weeks after the election.
A senior official told the paper, “The expectation is that it is around election day that we will see this interruption of narratives questioning the legitimacy of the European elections, and in the weeks around it.”
30 Sep 22 | Brazil, News and features
It seems incredible but Brazil is becoming a hotbed of fascism, something we thought was more of a European phenomenon. Michel Gherman, a member of the Far Right Observatory, a collaboration between academics from more than 10 Brazilian universities and from other countries, says that Bolsonaro’s election has created a “Disneyland of neo-Nazism in Brazil”, because those who defend him “begin to feel more at ease”. It is true. After the end of the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1980s, the extreme right was ashamed of itself or remained silent. Now its demons are loose, attacking democracy, killing democrats, because it feels protected by the individual in the presidency and the police around him.
To understand some of the reasons for Brazil reaching this state of affairs, it is well worth reading the book Passengers of the Storm: Fascists and Denialists in the Present Time, by professors Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva and Karl Schuster Sousa Leão. Published by Cepe, the second largest publishing house in Brazil, we can learn about the history of fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, which did not remain in the past, because fascisms (that’s right in the plural) work until today on the great masses with irrationality, lies, the implausible and fear, according to the authors. During the research in the book we come to the Brazil of 2022:
“The current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, corroborates the authorisation of the indiscriminate use of violence by constructing and using social devices as a tool and policy. When he uses social media to state that ‘reporters should really be beaten’, being replicated by his supporters, seconds later, with the statements ‘journalists should be beaten’ and ‘journalists deserve to be beaten, YES’, he instrumentalises politics through a personal, authoritarian, and charismatic abuse of power that aestheticises sociability with the normalisation of the use of force.”
As early as the election campaign of 2018, Bolsonaro declared, “Let’s shoot the petralhada”, petralhada being a reference to left-wing supporters.
And then came the assassinations.
On Sunday, 18 October 2018 in Salvador, capoeira master Moa do Katendê was killed with 12 stab wounds in the back after defending voting for the Workers’ Party (PT) and declaring himself opposed to Bolsonaro.
In 2019, 61-year-old Antônio Carlos Rodrigues Furtado died of cardiac arrest in Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina after being kicked and punched by Bolsonarist Fábio Leandro Schwindlein.
In July 2022, Marcelo Aloizio de Arruda, 50, was shot to death at his birthday party by federal criminal police officer Jorge Guaranho. A Bolsonarist, the killer invaded Marcelo’s private party – which had the PT as its theme and images of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – shouting “here is Bolsonaro”, shooting the host three times.
In early September, according to the Civil Police of Mato Grosso, Benedito dos Santos, a Lula voter, was killed by an attacker wielding an axe.
Before this wave of political crimes committed by Bolsonarists, Brazilian fascism presented both the stimulus and the approval for aggression against democracy. The book Passengers of the Storm says that in 2020 “35 per cent of officers and 41 per cent of military police soldiers throughout Brazil interact on social networks supporting President Jair Bolsonaro”. The authors go on to say, “Their positions in favour of the president, who for at least two years has openly discoursed against several governors, with the Northeast as a focus, make the issue even more politicised and instrumentalised.”
Karl Marx, in writing about the French coup of 1851, noted: “Hegel observes in one of his works that all the facts and characters of great importance in the history of the world occur, as it were, twice. But he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
For Brazilians, we are now in the second phase of the tragic dictatorship that began in 1964. This is presented in two ways: the tragic destruction of lives by Covid, for which the president said he was not a mortician, and by the destruction of the Amazon.
In 2022, there is talk that garimpo (artisanal mining for precious commodities that is common in the Amazon and often illegal) has “lost its shame”. Under Bolsonaro’s barbarism, openly favourable to the interests of this illegal activity in the forest, the defenders of garimpo are circulating in the corridors of power in the Amazon’s capitals and in Brasilia, and intend to fly even higher: to occupy elective positions in the Legislative Assemblies and in the National Congress, in addition to the governors’ palaces.
Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s education system, the persecution of artists and the press are tragic but are farcical at the same time. Bolsonaro is ridiculed for being imbrochable, a man who never loses sexual potency, yet he revels in it and this shows in his shouting and speaking. We have reached the point where the animals speak. This is tragedy and farce in unity, the lowest and grossest comedy.
Bolsonaro, in one of his latest farces, has turned historian. He said, “I want to say that Brazilians have gone through difficult times, history shows us. 22, 65, 64, 16, 18, and now 22. History can repeat itself. Good has always won over evil”.
What are these dates he is referring to? It cannot be Modern Art Week because he doesn’t even know what that is. But how has good always triumphed over evil? With murder, torture and cold executions in the dictatorship? With wars and holocausts? Or with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or with the recent killings of Bruno and Dom in the Amazon? Or does good overcome evil when the forest is devastated? We understand the new language, an absolute inversion of values: good is evil, and evil must be the hope and struggle of the resistance.
For now, we can hope that this barbaric farce can be overcome. We, united, have the streetcar, the ship, the ship of future democracy, whose name is Lula, hopefully winner of the election’s first round. If it is not Lula, then we will sink in the darkness of Brazilian-style fascism.
