Europe’s Far-Right has a Cure for COVID-19: Nationalism

The absence of a pan-European response to the pandemic, leaving the hardest-hit countries like Italy and Spain to do much of the heavy lifting themselves, has only served to reinforce one of the far-right's key messages - when the going gets tough, it's every country for itself.

"France stole masks from Sweden, and Italy was furious that no other country helped out in their crisis," Angry Foreigner, whose real name is Haris, told BIRN. "Countries like Serbia were denied help from the EU and instead received it from Turkey."

COVID-19, he said, has exposed the "flawed nature of globalism right now, in the sense that since everyone is connected it also means everyone depends too much on each other."

Haris, who declined to give his surname, does not speak in a vacuum. Some of his videos get hundreds of thousands of views, while his opinions are shared by far-right figures and movements across Europe.

Such opinions, experts warn, threaten to infiltrate the mainstream as Europeans try to find their feet in societies and economies reshaped by a virus unlikely to be vanquished anytime soon.

"We have already seen various radical right attempts to make use of [COVID-19] for their own ends," said Matthew Feldman, a professor at Britain's Teesside University and director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.

Feldman warns that the far right will seek to exploit the pandemic to push xenophobic messages into mainstream political discourse, hoping that they are adopted by more established political actors.

"This has been the working practice of fascism since 1945," he told BIRN, "which often boils down to attempting to enter the mainstream on the back of public issues."

Curse of 'open borders'