Kitabı oku: «The Radical Right During Crisis», sayfa 10

Under Lockdown, Germany’s PEGIDA Goes to YouTube

Sabine Volk

On a Monday evening in early April 2020, around 1,000 users are waiting for a YouTube livestream, hosted by Lutz Bachmann, co-founder of the Dresden-based protest movement Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA). For the second time already, Bachmann’s YouTube channel “LUTZiges”—a pun of his given name and the German word lustig (funny)—invites to a “virtual evening march”.

Protest in times of coronavirus

Since October 2014, PEGIDA had been mobilizing against the “Islamization” of Europe, the political “elites”, and the established media.1 On a weekly basis, PEGIDA organizers and supporters demonstrated in Dresden. They marched through the city centre and gave speeches with xenophobic and anti-elitist content on some of the most iconic squares. The marches, always scheduled on Mondays, aimed to re-perform the “Monday demonstrations” which toppled the GDR regime in the fall of 1989.2

Over the years, participant numbers consolidated at around 1,500 supporters per demonstration. In February 2020, numbers peaked again at 3,000 or so during the 200th march of PEGIDA, marked by the visit of Björn Höcke, a high-ranking politician of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD).3

In the spring of 2020, when countries all around the world shut down public life as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, it first seemed as if the lockdown would finally disrupt PEGIDA’s protest ritual. Indeed, the demonstration planned for Monday, 16 March 2020, was cancelled due to the ban of association in public.4 Yet, the group quickly adapted and took up “virtual evening marches” as a new form of protest.

The protest ritual continues

Based on ethnographic observation of the first two YouTube broadcasts, PEGIDA aims to make its online version as similar as possible to its street events by following the offline format and procedures. The livestreams started with PEGIDA’s anthem, featured several speeches, and ended with the performance of the German national anthem. Even the march still played a role—in the form of a high-speed display of a video of the march during PEGIDA’s 200th event. Throughout the YouTube events, the organizers kept their well-studied roles: Wolfgang Taufkirch as serious host, Lutz Bachmann as funny moderator, and Siegfried (“Siggi”) Däbritz as bad boy.

Similarly, the invitees were more than familiar. Some of the best-known figures of the German speaking far-right scene livestreamed or sent video messages from their living rooms to address PEGIDA supporters, including Michael Stürzenberger (activist and blogger from Munich), Christoph Berndt (activist and AfD politician from Brandenburg), Heiko Hessenkemper (AfD politician from Saxony), and Martin Sellner (cover boy of the Austrian Identitarian movement). All four are recurrent guests of PEGIDA, in particular at special occasions such as the organization’s anniversaries or Christmas editions.5

The speeches featured the usual topics. Importantly, however, PEGIDA’s key frames were now adapted to the lockdown. First, PEGIDA criticized the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. They denounced the restrictions to public life, rejecting the cutting back on civil rights such as the freedom of association. Organizers yet again drew parallels between the current state of German democracy and the dictatorships of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Third Reich. Second, the speakers also continued to discriminate against people of immigrant and Muslim background, accusing them of not respecting the restrictions to public life—in contrast to the allegedly socially responsible PEGIDA supporters. Third, the speakers praised the movement and its supporters for constituting not only Germany’s economic backbone, but also for being the guardian of civil liberties and Europe-wide leader in peaceful protest politics in times of crisis.

The issue with social media

Nevertheless, the online adaption differs in many ways from the well-established protest ritual. The YouTube events ran much less smoothly than real-life PEGIDA marches. The use of the technology seemed unprofessional and confusing, namely because the organizers repeatedly had trouble coordinating the image and sound of up to five simultaneous speakers. ‘I am approaching the age of 50’, said Bachmann in apology.

Moreover, nobody knows the audience(s) of the livestreamed performances. Whereas the setting of the street demonstrations was quite straightforward—PEGIDA organizers and supporters on one side, counter-demonstrators on the other, and the police in between and surrounding the two—there was very little certainty about PEGIDA’s virtual company. Indeed, it is impossible to find out if the YouTube followers were more or less the same as those who joined the street protest. YouTube’s chat function also provided only limited insight: many chat participants seemed to be regulars, greeting other spectators as well as the organizers, commenting on the content of the speeches, and sharing their own political views. Most viewers, however, did not use the chat.

Ritualistic performance has its limits

For a long time, both interested observers and PEGIDA’s political opponents have been wondering why the movement survived even though many of its demands have found a parliamentary arm in the AfD. There is a good argument to make that PEGIDA has mainly endured due to the ritualization of its protest politics.6 Indeed, the street events constituted repetitive, highly standardized, and symbolically loaded performances in front of a physical audience which marked a shift from one state of being into another one; in PEGIDA’s reading: from ordinary citizens to political activists, revolutionaries, true democrats.

Specifically, the marches through the historically reconstructed centre of Dresden, passing some of its most picturesque buildings as well as small groups of noisy counter-demonstrators, were able to create feelings of positive identification and of power: notably the power to induce political change “like in 1989”. This ritualized format seemed to be able to keep constant mobilization levels over an extended amount of time.

Do the “social distancing” measures thus doom PEGIDA to decline? Probably not. Admittedly, the online events can hardly generate the same collective emotions and identity as they lack the communal performative element of taking to the streets. Yet, a new virtual ritual in PEGIDA’s protest politics might be underway. Considering the organization’s history of ritualized performance, it seems that the group will continue to mobilize in times of lockdown.

Sabine Volk is a Doctoral Fellow at CARR and a doctoral candidate at the Institute for European Studies at Jagiellonian University. This research is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme, “Delayed transformational fatigue in Central and Eastern Europe: Responding to the rise of illiberalism/populism” (FATIGUE), under grant agreement No. 765224.

1 Hans Vorländer, Maik Herold and Steven Schäller, PEGIDA and New Right-Wing Populism in Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Manès Weisskircher and Lars Erik Berntzen, “Remaining on the Streets. Anti-Islamic PEGIDA Mobilization and Its Relationship to Far-Right Party Politics,” in Radical Right “Movement Parties” in Europe, ed. M. Caiani and O. Císař (London: Routledge, 2019), 114–30.

2 Mara Bierbach, “How East Germans Peacefully Brought the GDR Regime Down,” Deutsche Welle, October 8, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/how-east-germans-peacefully-brought-the-gdr-regime-down/a-50743302.

3 “Tausende protestieren gegen Höcke und Pegida,” February 17, 2020, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/pegida-hoecke-dresden-protest-1.4802562.

4 Sabine Volk, “Germany: Is the COVID-19 Pandemic Weakening the Far Right?,” openDemocracy, March 30, 2020, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/germany-covid-19- pandemic-weakening-far-right/.

5 Sabine Volk, “‘Silent Night, Holy Night’? The Populist Performance of Neo-Traditionalism and Classical Masculinity in PEGIDA’s Christmas Celebration,” Populism Europe, December 17, 2019, https://populism-europe.com/silent-night-holy-night-the-populist-performance-of-neo-traditionalism-and-classical-masculinity-in-pegidas-christmas-celebration/.

6 Irene Greuer, “Politologe über Pegida: Ein Ritual der zornigen alten Männer,” Deutschlandfunk, August 23, 2018, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/politologe-ueber-pegida-ein-ritual-der-zornigen-alten.862.de.html?dram:article_id=426271.

Europe’s Far-Right Fails to Capitalize on COVID-19

Jean-Yves Camus

Europe’s radical right parties have quickly understood the benefit they can derive from criticizing their respective governments in managing the COVID-19 health crisis. Their communication focuses on three main areas. First, they question the animal origin of the epidemic through the use of several conspiracy theories. Second comes the criticism of globalization presented as the root cause of the pandemic. And, finally, they criticize the threats that lockdowns and other measures, such as the wearing of face masks, impose on the individual freedoms of European citizens.

The conspiratorial mindset of the European radical right is evident in the current COVID-19 moment. Like other extremist milieus, the idea of a hidden cause according to which any historical event occurs is prevalent. The search for mysterious reasons that the powerful media and political elites would like to hide from the people is never far away in the far-right diagnosis of the origins of the pandemic. In particular, as the origin of the virus is still disputed in public discourse, the pandemic is the ideal issue for those who are prone to such conspiratorial thinking.

Orwellian society

We shouldn’t get too carried away with ourselves here, however. Not all radical right actors have reacted to the pandemic with conspiracy theories.1 One of the most interesting issues is that some of them have reactivated the theme of the West having to fight communism, embodied no longer by the USSR but by China as a new bête noire. In April 2020 Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers, for example, accused China of using opacity and lies to downplay the scale of the epidemic, an attitude which he says stems from the command-and-control nature of communism itself.2

Other parties or figures on the European radical right have raised questions not only about the responsibility of the Chinese government for a late and inappropriate response to the pandemic, but also put forward the idea that the virus escaped from a virology laboratory in Wuhan. This theory, propagated in mid-April 2020 by Professor Luc Montagnier, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was relayed3 in France by the elected representatives of the National Rally (RN), Julien Odoul, and Gilbert Collard. The RN, however, did not fully follow in the footsteps of Professor Montagnier and called for the creation of an international commission of inquiry into the origins of the epidemic.4

Added to this, the pandemic has allowed the European radical right to develop the notion that “elites” are using the health crisis to hasten in an authoritarian form of government. For example, Spain’s Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé accused President Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government of authoritarianism when in June 2020, it withdrew from parliamentary control lockdown measures limiting freedom of movement5. The RN soon after, published “The Black Book of the Coronavirus: From the fiasco to the abyss”,6 a brochure criticizing the French government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, accused the authorities of using ‘guilt, infantilization and threats’ against the French people in order to enforce a lockdown.

Other more marginal movements, which do not have to worry about achieving political credibility, have protested in 2020 against outright “dictatorship”, such as the Italian fundamentalist neo-fascist and Catholic New Force party.7 In Hungary, the nationalist Jobbik party, which now seeks to defeat Viktor Orbán by allying itself, if necessary, with the centre-left opposition, decided to denounce government attacks on media freedom during the pandemic.8

The European radical right everywhere has fired bullets at incumbent governments, accusing them of failing to meet the challenges of dealing with the epidemic. In June 2020, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, accused President Emmanuel Macron of ordering the state to lie and cover up the extent of the pandemic by giving the French people incomplete or false information in order to hide his incompetence.9 It was the only French political party to absolutely refuse any policy of national unity in response to the pandemic and to support the hydroxychloroquine-based treatment recommended by Professor Didier Raoult.

The Spanish Vox party also issued very strong words against the government, using such phrases as “criminal management”, “obscurantism”, “loss of all credibility”, and “insulting” (in respect to the people of Spain). The situation in Italy also prompted the far-right League party to attack the coalition formed by the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the centre-left Democratic Party. On the night of 29 April 2020, for example, the League’s leader Matteo Salvini showed his contempt of parliament by occupying the senate hemicycle10 with a dozen other elected officials to denounce economic restrictions, delayed aid to Italian citizens and small businesses, the limitations on freedom of movement and the side-lining of parliamentary powers by the Conte government.

But a poll carried out on 8 May 2020 shows that even if the League remains in the lead, with 26.7%, when it comes to voting intentions, its popularity has been declining since the start of the health crisis while another nationalist party, the Brothers of Italy, is credited with 14.1%—more than double of the 6.2% it won in the 2019 European elections.

No coherent response

Despite all this, the European radical right seems to have failed to develop coherent responses to the COVID-19 crisis. The speed with which the pandemic spread was unrelated to the limited migratory flows observed on the Greek island of Lesbos at the end of February 2020, thus depriving the radical right of the possibility of singling out immigration as the cause of the pandemic. Instead, in all European countries, the radical right put the blame on globalization.

Their idea, therefore, is that the pandemic was caused by globalization itself,11 which generates continuous flows of travel and international exchange, immigration notwithstanding. Globalization, they say, allows multinationals to make financial profits in times of crisis, while the poorest are hit hardest by unemployment and the overwhelmed national health systems. Thus, as a way of example, the Hungarian Mi Hazànk party writes: ‘We are happy to note that the government accepted our idea of a special solidarity tax on multinationals and banks’ and calls for a moratorium on debts and evictions.

For the European radical right, the health crisis was an opportunity to denounce the European Union, which leaves the competence over health policy to individual member states, and to underline the absolute necessity of returning control of the borders back to member states. As Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch far-right Forum for Democracy, says ‘the Nation-State is the future’.12 During the COVID-19 crisis, European radical right parties, including the National Rally, have continued to reiterate that they were the first to have warned of the dangers of bringing “back home” potentially strategic industries such as pharma away from China and India.

The European radical right has failed for several other reasons as well. In Hungary and Poland, the conservative, illiberal right who are in power very quickly closed their borders, which led to the pandemic being contained. In addition, the governments of the most affected countries, Spain and Italy, have (belatedly) managed the crisis well, as had Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has dropped to its lowest levels in voting intentions since 2017.

To add insult to injury, the AfD is even faced with the birth of a single-issue party, Resistance 2020, that is even more conspiratorial than the AfD and lobbies for the complete rejection of all government-sponsored measures to fight the pandemic. At this point, Marine Le Pen’s popularity rating only rose by 3%, to 26% in May 2020. Were presidential elections set for 2022 held today, she would lose to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron by 45% against 55%—a sobering thought for theorists who suggest that extremism inevitably grows in a crisis.

Dr Jean-Yves Camus is a Senior Fellow at CARR and director of Observatoire des radicalités politiques, Fondation Jean-Jaurès.

1 Gary Buswell, “Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories Have Real World Consequences,” Fair Observer, June 18,2020, https://www.fairobserver.com/business/technology/gary-buswell-covid-19-conspiracy-theories-5g-celebrities-real-world-consequences-14222/.

2 “European Conservatives Call for Investigation into China,” New Europe, April 17, 2020, https://www.neweurope.eu/article/european-conservatives-call-for-investigation-into-china/.

3 “Le Prix Nobel du Complotisme,” Conspiracy Watch, April 19, 2020, https://www.conspiracywatch.info/le-prix-nobel-du-complotisme.html.

4 Annika Bruna, “Pour Combattre les Causes du Coronavirus, Exigeons une Commission d’Enquête Internationale Indépendante sur Son Origine,” Press release, May 6, 2020, https://rassemblementnational.fr/communiques/pour-combattre-les-causes-du-coronavirus-exigeons-une-commission-denquete-internationale-independante-sur-son-origine/.

5 Daniel Dombey, “Spain’s Parliament Votes to Extend Lockdown Powers,” Financial Times, May 6, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/f4586bf4-3cf5-4272-a472-eee985bc3e34.

6 Rassemblement national, Le Livre noir du Coronavirus, (Paris, 2020), https://rassemblement-national15.fr/2020/07/telechargez-le-livre-noir-du-coronavirus.

7 “Italy: Police Halt Forza Nuova Members for Defying Lockdown in Rome,” Ruptly TV, April 20, 2020, https://www.ruptly.tv/en/videos/20200412-018-Italy-Police-halt-Forza-Nuova-members-for-defying-lockdown-in-Romehttps://www.ruptly.tv/en/videos/20200412-018-Italy-Police-halt-Forza-Nuova-members-for-defying-lockdown-in-Rome.

8 Koloman Brenner, “Jobbik Stands for Freedom of the Press,” Press release https://www.jobbik.com/jobbik_stands_for_the_freedom_of_the_press.

9 “Leader of French Far-Right Says Government Lied, Concealed COVID Railures,” Radio France Internationale, July 29, 2020, https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200729-leader-of-french-far-right-says-government-lied-concealed-covid-failures-marine-le-pen-macron.

10 Hannah Roberts, “Salvini Occupies Italian Parliament in Lockdown Protest,” Politico, April 30, 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/matteo-salvini-coronavirus-occupies-italian-parliament-in-lockdown-protest/.

11 Hans-Georg Betz, “COVID-19 is a Wake-Up Call on the Shortcomings of Globalization,” Fair Observer, April 23, 2020, https://www.fairobserver.com/business/hans-georg-betz-covid-19-wake-up-call-globalization-supply-chains-disruption-trade-news-15141/.

12 Thierry Baudet, “The nation-state is the future, not the EU empire. The borders of nation states should be defined by referenda,” Twitter, October 1, 2017, 1:26 p.m., https://twiter.com/thierrybaudet/status/914451426159529985.