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- [00:03]
James Cantor
Remigration involves mass removal or forced repatriation of non European immigrants as well as certain minority citizens. The European far right, especially the so called identitarians, are in the vanguard of this idea. And they say they are slowly but steadily turning the idea into a reality. A reality where millions of people are effectively expelled to ensure a white Christian future. Needless to say, explicitly racial mass displacement evokes the worst horrors from 20th century European history. The deportations, expulsions and denaturalizations from re migration would likely share similar logistical and ideological elements with Nazi Germany. But those terrifying precedents have not diminished the far right's enthusiasm for the idea of and that enthusiasm was palpable on July 15th inside Hearing Room 1E2 at the European Parliament in Brussels. That's where some of the most extreme figures in Europe were gathered at the invitation of lawmakers from the European Parliament's three main far right groups. Groups that now occupy around 200 seats, representing nearly 30% of the chamber. The July 15 gathering was chaired by Thomas Froelich, a prominent parliamentarian from the German AfD, a party that domestic German intelligence previously classified as confirmed right wing extremist. Speakers included Eva Vlaardingerbroeck, a Dutch commentator who's deemed by British authorities to be a threat to public order and who's barred from freely traveling to the UK. Among her messages at the July 15 gathering, an even more coordinated and transnational push for re migration.
- [01:58]
Eva Vlaardingerbroek
That's what we are trying to do, is create that pan European connected movement with patriots everywhere. Because we face the same threats and we have the same ethnocultural background that we need to protect. And I think that it's working.
- [02:16]
James Cantor
As to the continent's long history of invasions, migrations and demographic shifts, those do not get a mention. Europe is somehow supposed to be ethnically and culturally homogenous, which is nonsense, of course. But Flor Dingerbruck comes at her audience with a rapid fire barrage of arguments designed to distract from half truths and misrepresentations. And she combines that with a brand of rhetoric that is at once coldly clinical and and startlingly violent.
- [02:47]
Eva Vlaardingerbroek
Both abortion and mass immigration are two means to the same end. The replacement of native Europeans. One prevents them from being born, the other one replaces them after they are born and therefore reversing it. Reversing replacement migration Reversing mass migration with remigration is the fight of our lifetimes. It is the most important thing that we have have to do. If we don't succeed at it, our civilization will die. But in the meantime, our children will be murdered.
- [03:25]
James Cantor
Earlier that day, Vladingebro had stood outside the European Parliament to publicize a so called Save Europe Act. That legislation still is just theoretical, but it has become a focal point for the re migration movement. This Save Europe act would stop non Western immigration and provide for systematic and accelerated remigration. The Act's other main backer, Martin Sellner, an Austrian, faces a permanent ban from the UK and ongoing restrictions in multiple other countries due to his extremism. Sellner also was present outside the Parliament where there was a rally to mark the collection of 600,000 signatures for a Save Europe act petition. But that rally was met with an even larger crowd of anti Nazi and pro European protesters. And since then the European Commission has refused to register the Save Europe act petition. The Commission's formal refusal, which came on July 22, was made on the grounds that the act would discriminate based on race and ethnic origin. And that said, the Commission would be manifestly contrary to the EU treaties and to fundamental rights law. Indeed, the remigration concept still is formally rejected by the conservative mainstream, which dominates EU policymaking. But the far right vanguard didn't expect their petition to be accepted in the first place. Rather, it was a strategic provocation designed to further weaken resolve among conservatives.
- [05:04]
Eva Vlaardingerbroek
Of course we started it because we want to save this continent from replacement migration and we want re migration. But we also started it because we figured that they would go against it and that maybe we would wake up a few more people with that, and that's important.
- [05:25]
James Cantor
The far right repeatedly point to how their strategy of pushing the conservative center steadily rightwards is working rightwards toward restricting NGOs. Right words on the rollback of climate protections, and right words above all on the issue of migration. Among recent successes, the far right crow about approval by the European Parliament for a so called return regulation that's a migration law, otherwise known as the Deportations act, where EU member states could end up paying countries in the western Balkans, in North Africa, not just to hold migrants back, but also to accept migrants deported from the EU.
- [06:06]
Dries van Langenhove
The MEPs here voted for return habs, which is a great victory.
- [06:12]
James Cantor
That's Dries van Langenhove, a Flemish far right activist who spoke alongside Eva vlaardingebruck at the July 15 gathering inside the European Parliament. Von Langenhoven was describing the recently approved return regulation as an important waypoint on the road to remigration.
- [06:32]
Dries van Langenhove
It's also a great victory because many politicians who were scared because of the cordon sanitaire, because of the firewall against the far right nationalist parties finally got the courage and the balls to vote with nationalist European loving patriots. And that truly is a victory that opens many, many possibilities. And I'm sure by the next election election, the nationalists, the patriots in this parliament, will be much, much, much more numeric and will have a serious shot at really changing things.
- [07:05]
James Cantor
Even if deportations carried out under the EU's return regulation are done on a much more modest scale than say, full re migration, the picture still looks grim. Deportees could end up imprisoned and much worse. And, and judging by the behavior of ICE in the us, dangerous charter flights, where deportees are shackled in inhumane conditions, could become the norm. Chillingly, the vote to approve the return regulation at the European Parliament was accompanied by chants of send them back from far right MEPs. That's the same rhetoric used by Maga in the us. In his comments, von Langenhove, who has convictions for racism and weapons law violations in Belgium, uses a very specific term, meta politics, to describe the scope and reach of his strategy.
- [08:07]
Dries van Langenhove
The Save Europe act being a prime example, will lead us to more mobilizational capacity, will lead to a consciousness that we Europeans deserve our continent, we deserve to cherish our heritage, to make sure that these lands of our ancestors remain the lands of our descendants. So all of these metapolitical victories that come with electoral victories are in and of itself already worth the fight.
- [08:34]
James Cantor
Metapolitical victories, that's to say, scoring wins in a long term battle for dominance over public thought to prepare Europe for full re migration, or so the identitarians like van Langenhove say. Well, in fact, the term meta politics is drawn directly from the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who wrote his famous prison notebooks while jailed by Mussolini. It is of course a great irony that among those who took Gramsci a Marxist most seriously would be the far right. But after the horrors of Nazism, the far right needed to proceed patiently if it were ever to stage a comeback. And some in Europe, particularly the French New Right, took Gramsci as their guide. Gramsci taught the necessity of strategic positioning, changing culture before engaging in direct confrontation and operating through a revolutionary vanguard. And it was these teachings that also got absorbed by the US radical right. That story, and how Gramsci's thinking continues to flow back and forth across the Atlantic is of particular interest to Philip Adorf at the University of Bonn. Filipp is the author of books on the radicalization of the U.S. republican Party, and he's a leading analyst of the rise of the German AfD. We recorded the following conversation last year, but it remains as relevant as ever, particularly as the AfD was together with the Continent's leading identitarians, try to bring their campaign for re migration directly to Brussels and into the realm of European policymaking.
- [10:24]
Philipp Adorf
No migrants more in.
- [10:26]
Martin Sellner
No Europe without Christianity. An alliance also with Russia.
- [10:34]
James Cantor
Welcome to EU Scream. I'm James Cantor. This is episode 131, remigration and metapolitics, with Philippa Dorff of the University of Bonn.
- [10:50]
Interviewer
You wrote in January about how the AfD works in a kind of parallel with external actors. These actors operate outside the party's formal institutional structure. And in particular you wrote about the Voorfeld. We could sort of translate this word as a vanguard, exactly.
- [11:12]
Philipp Adorf
Sort of an ideological vanguard that really wants to shape society in a certain way. So that is quite literally just means the field in front of the party or something like that, and it's made up or composed of various different groups. For example, you have identitarian, the identitarian movement, you have right wing think tanks. And they see themselves or refer to themselves as the forfeit. They refer to themselves as actors that are outside the political party realm. And they relish that because they believe that within the political parties they might be too constrained, they will have to compromise. But outside of the political parties, they have the freedom to sort of shape the general ideology and conduct work, sort of shine a light on certain issues, popularize certain terms, move them into the mainstream. If you look at the identitarian movement which has spread throughout Europe, they conduct large scale protests, they occupy buildings, they unfurl banners on these buildings, all with the intention of gaining attention for their causes. But their sort of overarching objective is to create an environment where the AfD can become more successful.
- [12:20]
Interviewer
And this presence of this ideological incubator, this vanguard, in what ways is that different to how other political parties operate? Is that really all that different?
- [12:34]
Philipp Adorf
I mean, yeah, most political parties of course, have sort of organizations and structures that are outside. They have political, they have foundations that do some work. I think what's different about the far right is that they really believe they have to, that they have a lot of work ahead of them. They have to change society, they have to shift certain narratives. And in that sense they require the work of these kinds of outside actors. Whereas the sort of established political parties are in an environment where they don't really have to do that much work to change society.
- [13:08]
Interviewer
Right. The obstacles to acceptance are not as high for other parties and in this context, you describe another concept called the Voorfeld arbite, the work of the vanguard. And I wonder if you can sort of break down that word too and what that implies.
- [13:26]
Philipp Adorf
So you have younger activists, for example, that might stage protests in certain areas. You have think tanks that have conferences and academies where they do all of this work. You have publishing houses that are related to these conferences, usually where a lot of right wing thinkers and writers are able to publish their works, which they wouldn't be able to publish in most other sort of established publishing houses. So younger activists might be more interested in taking the movement to the streets, sort of showing everybody, including or especially perhaps young people, that hey, if you have far right beliefs, you don't have to be worried about that. Here's a big group, you can join us in protests, which is also part of a sort of normalizing strategy. And then you have these think tanks which have academies and conferences where they really think about, okay, what kind of policies can we or should we pursue? And that's sort of the work of this vanguard, that it's not just, in a sense, it's twofold, taking it to the streets, but also creating an ideological foundation for the broader far right.
- [14:30]
Interviewer
And I guess the idea is to get more and more voters to, or more and more citizens, more and more people to kind of think about voting for the original, the truly far right afd, and fewer and fewer for a sort of weaker copy, like for example, a far right curious or far right adjacent conservative party that's part of this movement.
- [14:54]
Philipp Adorf
I mean, there are some politicians within the AfD, for example, who also say our biggest sort of opponent is the tdu, the Christian Democrats. Their argument is this party has moved to the center. This party doesn't really have conservative positions anymore. The party, the cdu, has become open to immigration as well. Every four years. The Christian Democrats still manage to win over some sort of voters that might be inclined to vote for the AfD. But the CDU ahead of an election will say, okay, we need to also take strong steps to curtail immigration. And in that sense, the CDU sort of prevents a genuine far right shift in society because it is able to win back voters without ever delivering on these center right or even far right promises. So there are figures within the AfD who make the case that we want to occupy the entirety of the space that is to the right of center, to push out the sort of mainstream center right party which you've, for example, seen in France, where the traditional center right party has essentially disappeared. And Marine Le Pen and her party have to a certain extent taken their place. And that's something that the AfD would like to achieve here in Germany as well.
- [16:05]
Interviewer
When it comes to the Warfeld, you identify one of the most successful efforts of the far right in mainstreaming its political preferences is to do with this concept of remigration.
- [16:19]
Philipp Adorf
Exactly. I would say that the term has become popularized. The AfD has been using it for quite a while. I think it was already present in the 2021 political platform. But having said that, it wasn't really attached to any sort of serious sort of policy profile. And this is where the work of the Forefeld comes in. And then the AfD has been able to sort of pick up different components of it. Having said that, different right wing actors have different interpretations of remigration. The AfD being a political party that has to be somewhat careful about possibly being banned. They interpret re migration in a very sort of legalistic sense, making the case that all we want to do is deport people whose asylum claims have, for example, been rejected, perhaps deport people without a German passport who have a criminal record. And that's all we're talking about. We're not talking about deporting Germans that have a non German ethnic background. And then there are some on the far right who will say, well, actually, in order to establish a better country, we also need to deport people that, that they have a German passport, but they would consider to be non assimilated. So this is where we have different interpretations of the term. But certainly the fact that we are talking about remigration, the fact that a term which sort of originated within the far right has become or has been adopted by the AfD to such a significant extent, really illustrates how successful the work of the forfeit or the ideological vanguard has been in recent years.
- [17:50]
Interviewer
As you say, the term re migration wasn't so well known at the beginning of this decade, but it became rather better known in early 2024 when it was revealed by journalists at the outlet corrective that senior AfD figures attended a clandestine meeting of European extreme right figures. It was in Potsdam about a supposed master plan for deportations of millions of people, also including naturalized German citizens. Now, what followed was a huge outcry. There were very large protests, very big marches against the AfD in Germany, all across Germany. But that outpouring of revulsion, it hasn't really stopped the AfD.
- [18:35]
Philipp Adorf
But it also illustrates that the AfD does have a pretty high floor nowadays. So it is illustrative of the fact that the AfD, in the eyes of many voters can do no wrong. That even if there are large scale protests across the country, and the AfD certainly garnered a lot of negative attention during that period, a significant share of Germans continues to support the party. So it also illustrates that even beyond the term re migration, that there has been something of a shift, I would say, in German society over the past few years with the AfD having become normalized and with plenty of voters really believing that the AfD is the sole solution for, for their primary concern, which is immigration. And I would say there are also plenty of voters nowadays who actually support the core concept of remigration and who would support the positions that, for example, Martin Sellner voiced during that meeting. And beyond that, just a word on
- [19:32]
Interviewer
Martin Sellner, the Austrian identitarian Martin Sellner. He is a key figure in the Vorfeld that you describe. He pushes ideas about the superiority of European ethnic groups. His organization in Austria, the ibo, received donations from and communicated with Brendan Tarrant before Tarrant carried out consecutive mass shootings in 2019 on a mosque and Islamic cultural center in Christchurch, New Zealand that left more than 50 people dead. Sellner also has been supported by Elon Musk, who restored Sellner's social media account on X and amplified Sellner's posts. You describe how Sellner is abundantly aware of how his far right ideas, particularly on re migration, face this entrenched and powerful ideological opponent, particularly in the media. And he has this idea of a Meinungs Kliemannlage, a climate control system for public opinion. Maybe you can describe a little bit more what this means beyond it being what is clearly an over elaborate, overwrought metaphor.
- [20:46]
Philipp Adorf
It's sort of, perhaps you could also translate it as a thermostat, that in other words, there's the belief, and this is something that's present in the United States among some far right thinkers as well, that you have this dominant political left which controls all the levers of power. It controls not just governments, but it controls the media, it controls universities. Even the financial elite nowadays supports these positions. And it's sometimes summarized also a civil society in Germany, civil gesellschaft. So that society in general is to a certain extent controlled by these different actors. And what Sellner argues is that if you, for example, have terrorist attacks, people will get angry, the sort of temperature will go up, it will get hotter because people will be annoyed. They will want to call for less immigration, for example. And Zelena makes the case that the dominant political left has all of these tools at its disposal which will allow it to once again lower the temperature by demonizing the AfD, for example, by bringing people out into the streets. So the notion there is that all of these protests, for example after Potsdam, with regards to the AfD, that they are government funded, that there are big institution NGOs behind it that are financing these different protests, that they're not protests that are necessarily coming from within society, but that they are a reflection of the dominance of the political left. And all of these tools then allow the sort of the elite, if you will, to lower the temperature. And, and Zellner would then argue that a couple of weeks after a terrorist attack, people will once again sort of have relaxed attitudes, anger will have cooled down. And this is only achieved not because people have changed their mind, but because they are sort of bombarded by the elite, by the media, which tells them no, your anti immigrant attitudes are wrong. And this is the sort of metaphor that he uses, that the temperature of a thermostat can be adjusted by an all powerful sort of all encompassing enemy.
- [22:48]
Interviewer
And that's a useful metaphor for Sellner because he uses it to say, well, this is why we need the meta politics to change the culture in order to in a sense destroy the climate control mechanism.
- [22:59]
Philipp Adorf
It highlights the belief that yes, we need to actually have our own institutions, we need to become more present in universities, for example. This is where the thinkers of tomorrow are shaped to have our own, perhaps identitarian activists on university campuses and things like that. So that the all powerful enemy will eventually lose its power, will no longer be able to influence society. And part of that of course also is social media. The fact that Elon Musk took over Twitter or X, that has played a huge role or substantial role, sort of destroying a central pillar of ever present ubiquitous enemy that you have. Because all of a sudden not just Zelna, but different far right actors are the ones that are actually able to turn up the heat through social media. They're able to create more anger, they're able to drive animosity towards immigrants, towards migrants in general after these attacks.
- [23:50]
Interviewer
And that's what we saw Vidal, Alice Vidal, the leader of the AfD, telling Elon Musk in that interview on X. Thank you Elon, for giving me my own frame. I'm not being reframed by others. What that really means is what you just said, which is it allows them to pour more fuel on the fire quite a lot of times when it comes to generating outrage.
- [24:15]
Martin Sellner
If I, if, if I may continue A little bit, because now it's a, it's a Elon. It's a complete new situation for me that, that I just can have a normal conversation and I'm not interrupted or negatively framed how that has been in the media, the case in the last 10 years, which is completely ridiculous.
- [24:49]
Interviewer
Your view is that the APDA has very effectively used a broader cultural strategy and it did so following the game plan of, it turns out, other post war far right movements, this prioritization of cultural and societal transformation over immediate electoral gain. And I just want to highlight how this strategy reflects one of the great ironies, I think, of modern day far right politics. Irony. Because the far right has drawn explicitly from the theories and strategies of the political left, most notably from the Italian Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci, who was most active in the 1920s and 1930s. Sellner is among many on the far right to cite Gramsci. He does so in his book Regime Change from the A Strategic Sketch. What Philippe, is Gramsci's basic argument about diffusion of culture as a precondition for
- [25:50]
Philipp Adorf
revolution, Gramsch's president, that has been picked up by a lot of far right thinkers in recent decades, is that in order to enact political change, you have to first of all change society. You need to have an ideological majority before you can obtain a political majority. And there are different ways to go about this, but at the most basic level, this probably requires a fair bit of work. So Gramsci talked about a war of position or a war of movement. So there are always these different periods where a sudden victory can be achieved if there's an upheaval. So you would have a war of movement where all of a sudden you can take over the government. But then when you have a war of position, that's usually in an environment where you have strong government institutions, you have a civil society with certain belief systems, and this is where you have a constant, almost you could say war of attrition, where bit by bit you need to try and change society, you need to popularize certain terms, you need to try and win over different pieces of society before you can actually obtain political power eventually.
- [26:50]
Interviewer
I just want to go back a little bit to the origins of this thinking. There was this kind of zero hour of 1945, the Nazi disaster. Then in the 50s and 60s we have the advent of Christian democracy, liberalism, social democracy and post war Europe, the very significant civil rights gains and advances of the 1960s. So for the far right to make a comeback, it was more and more apparent that this would be a long Game. And the one person who gets a lot of credit for laying the groundwork for this cultural meta political strategy is the French philosopher Alain De Benoit. His Nouvelle Droit, or New Right movement, would by the 1980s come to be called right wing Gramsciism. And what seems most relevant is De Benoit's founding of an ethnonationalist think tank.
- [27:48]
Philipp Adorf
Figures like David Benoist realized that after 1945, the sort of traditional far right nationalism, fascism was simply no longer acceptable. It wasn't something that could actually win over people.
- [27:58]
Interviewer
You couldn't have brown shirts in the streets.
- [28:00]
Philipp Adorf
Exactly. And there was a sense that, well, if we want to obtain political power, we can't do so through revolutionary means anymore. We have to actually apply sort of Gramscian logic, this war of position long term. And this also went hand in hand with certain other sort of ideological shifts. So somebody like Deb Noir would describe himself as an ethno pluralist. So this notion of we are no longer believing in the superiority of any race or any ethnic group, but we are actually the defenders of diversity because we want every group to have their own homeland. And somebody like Debenoir has over the decades, frequently attacked the political mainstream as almost being imperialist. This notion that nowadays Western politicians are still trying to impose their views and values on the rest of the world. We are different. We are telling people in other parts of the world, you can have your values, you can have your customs, you can keep them. We don't want to have those customs in our countries, but we also don't want to impose our own universalist, supposedly values, own liberal Western values on you either. You can sort of live happily ever after where you're living. So this was part of a conscious shift to move far right ideas in a more palatable, in a more acceptable direction, moving away from the traditional ethnic superior or racist positioning towards a position where you would say we're all essentially the same, but in order to preserve and protect diversity, we all have to be in our own separate, different countries. And this is something that has been pushed by Debenoir and thinkers of the French Nouvelle Droit for a number of decades. And something that has been picked up by contemporary activists and strategists as well.
- [29:46]
Interviewer
It's so interesting about De Benoit. I mean, he's sort of profoundly anti globalist, right, anti universalist. Borders really matter to him. He also has this view that sort of late capitalism dilutes and destroys local and regional difference. And he also talks about returning migrants to their homelands where needed. All of this back in the late 60s and in the 70s. All of which sort of sounds very familiar. Especially as well, this strategy of having journals, having publishing houses, having think tanks and all sorts of fora to spread these ideas. And I have to say it also sounds a lot like Viktor Orban supporters and his FIDEST movement sponsoring a think tank called the MCC news outlets. Also, what Marion Marichal, Marine Le Pen's niece, is doing with her institute, l' Institut des Sciences Sociale Economic. Meloni, Giorgio Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, she appointed a Culture Minister. Alessandro Giuli was a very long history of activism in the far right.
- [31:01]
Philipp Adorf
Exactly. And the Italian Culture Minister Giuli has also written on Gramsci. He published a book on the topic where he also laid out his own plan and said, you know, we have to take some lessons, but we have to also perhaps shift our own positions a bit. We also have to present a somewhat acceptable ideology to the general electorate. We can't just be a movement that is against the political left, but we have to present our own vision of society and it needs to be something that is more acceptable. But yeah, it is a testament to the long term success of people like De Benoit and his colleagues in the French New Right that practically every far right political actor has recognized that the realm beyond politics is really increasingly important. And this is where a lot of the groundwork, a lot of the preparation can be conducted for eventual political success.
- [31:50]
Interviewer
Philippe, you're also a noted specialist on the U.S. republican Party and some of its and how it's been evolving over recent decades. So help me link what we've been talking about, especially the impact of the French New Right, the Nouveldo, on the US Radical right, the US alt right.
- [32:10]
Philipp Adorf
I think, first of all, it's fascinating that there is an increasing sort of ideological overlap and an increasing degree of cooperation between the American far right and the European far right. It's worth remembering, for example, the Breitbart doctrine, Andrew Breitbart, who also made the case that politics is downstream from culture.
- [32:28]
Interviewer
So Breitbart being the guy who. Andrew Breitbart founded Breitbart News, which was a big thing ahead of Trump's first election victory.
- [32:38]
Philipp Adorf
Exactly. I mean, during the Tea Party years. And of course, Steve Bannon worked for Breitbart. So you can see that American sort of far right thinkers, even a long time ago, sort of recognized the values of Gramtian approaches and recognizing that through creating different networks, through creating alternative media networks, you could then shift society in a certain direction and yeah, to this day, I think there is a degree of overlap between, for example, the American alt right. Even though the movement has in some ways disappeared, there's not really an organization anymore that deserves the name alt right. But you have different figures that were relevant about a decade ago, during the early years of the Trump campaign and presidency. But they also share the belief that, yes, we need to establish our own alternative realm, essentially, we need to go to college campuses, we need to have our own media outlets and so forth. And you do see influential thinkers at least, who have attitudes or who have sort of ideological interpretations that are quite similar to what you see in Europe. For example, Curtis Yarvin has been cited by J.D. vance as one of the figures that at least shape his own worldview to a certain extent.
- [33:56]
Interviewer
Curtis Yarvin, very interesting. He wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno monarchy. He's defended the institution of slavery. He's compared Nelson Mandela and Anders Baring Breivik, the guy in Norway who carried out this awful, awful massacre more than a decade ago, as being equally guilty of terror. Breivik and Mandela equally guilty of terror. As Vanity Fair wrote, Yarvin is so radically right wing that it's just almost hard to comprehend unless you read his stuff. And yet Yarvin has been spoken of approvingly by Silicon Valley bigwigs like Marc Andreasen. He's close to Trump World. He's been funded by Peter Thiel, another Silicon Valley bigwig involved in Trump World. Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington D.C. and J.D. vance, as you say, J.D. vance, has cited Yarvin as an influence.
- [34:57]
Philipp Adorf
Curtis Yarvin in his writings talked about the so called cathedral, which is very similar to Sellner's positioning on the topic. This belief that there is this all powerful leftist organization which controls not just the levers of power, but the media and so forth, is essentially opposed to democracy in its current form. He views democracy as an inefficient form of governance, believes that the country should essentially be governed almost like a monarchy, because as I said, in his view, democracy doesn't really lead to the desired outcome for many people. So Yarvin mentioned that in a lot of countries, people are opposed to more migration or they are opposed to open borders. Yet this is not something that has been enacted by politicians. So clearly to Yarvin, he would argue this is an example of democracy not delivering on its key promises. Only sort of semi authoritarian rule can actually deliver libertarian promises of free speech and free markets and things like that. I mean, you mentioned Peter Thiel, who has said in the past that he believes maybe freedom and democracy are no longer compatible. So this is the sort of worldview that has in some ways perhaps influenced J.D. vance and other figures within the government.
- [36:11]
Interviewer
It's just so extraordinary that J.D. vance would be openly saying that Yarvin is among the people that he reads.
- [36:19]
Philipp Adorf
Thirty to 40 years ago, when you look at academia, there were discussions, is there such a thing as a right wing populist party family, similar to Social Democratic parties or Christian Democratic parties? And quite often the conclusion was that not really. These are all individual parties. They have some similarities, but they are somewhat different. But I think today there definitely is a very strong ideological overlap between right wing populist parties in the United States and in Europe. They're anti globalist. They believe that there is a global elite. They are essentially also opposed to free trade. They support varying notions of remigration. So they are deeply opposed to immigration. And that's something where you see definitely some similarities and also beyond the political party realm with regards to the different movements. The identitarians in Europe, the sort of far right white nationalists in the United States share similar positions. Some of them would also describe themselves in the United States as ethno pluralist, or they would say, all I'm asking for is to have my own white homeland. I don't have anything against Mexicans, I don't have anything against other people, but I just want them to stay in their own place. I don't want to impose my own superiority supposedly on them, but I want different ethnic groups to be in different countries. There's definitely, I would say, a fair degree of overlap ideologically between both continents nowadays.
- [37:34]
Interviewer
You know, I thought it was interesting how Vance brought this kind of culture war to the Munich Security Conference. Not only did Vance signal this partial withdrawal of the US From European security, not only did he scold the organizers of the Munich Security Conference for not having the AFD there, but Vance spent an inordinate amount of time focused on alleged threats to free speech in Europe, namely regulation of online hate speech, even though Europe has long had rules against hate speech. But Vance called this a greater threat to Europe than even Russia. And as absurd as that is, it certainly didn't come out of nowhere for those who know Vance's influences. Right. Yarvin is among the people that he reads.
- [38:23]
Philipp Adorf
Exactly. And it's fascinating. I mean, in a lot of ways, I think JD Vance is more of a reflection of the sort of online right wing culture that we have today. Than somebody like Donald Trump even saw. So JD Vance, clearly he's read some of Yarwin's writings, but I think he's also somebody who is very much versed within these sort of online writing spheres, so that he, on Twitter or on X rather, he actually engages with certain figures from the far right and answers their posts and sort of presents his positions. So JD Vance is somebody who has been influenced and perhaps to a certain extent, almost even shaped by the online realm of the far right, who has picked up some of these positions and incorporated them. And we saw this at the Munich Security Conference where he did talk about, as you noted, free speech, which ties in with this belief that the left still dominates the airwaves. And J.D. vance accused the political elites of Europe of not just looking the other way, but of actively trying to bring in more and more immigrants, even though they might not contribute to the economy. In a sense, he used the sort of conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement without really referring to it specifically. And that was quite something that he would use the stretch to talk about a topic that is very near and dear to many far right figures. This notion of the political elite wants to replace us. They want to bring in more and more immigrants, and in order to have an electorate that, for example, is more easily influenced, can be more easily shaped. Of course, he also contributed or he also made the case that there is no need for a firewall anymore between the sort of German establishment and the AfD, that in a democracy you cannot have firewalls. You need to cooperate with different parties. So I would say his speech at the Munich Security Conference was something that would have been unthinkable from an American vice president a few years ago or even just a few months ago. And even when Trump and Vance won the election, I don't think anybody could have predicted that JD Vance would deliver a speech quite like this in front of a European audience.
- [40:27]
Interviewer
He was doing Warfeld Arbeit meta politics at a very high level.
- [40:32]
Philipp Adorf
Exactly. He was doing the sort of meta political world of tying immigration to a deterioration in domestic security, trying to normalize the AfD, of shifting attitudes and sentiments, shifting the overton window. And really, I mean, you could say, well, if an American vice president accuses the political elite of Europe of essentially trying to replace the native population, how, you know, can you really describe this as a far right position anymore? So it normalizes people. And certainly online figures, activists like Zellner, who talked about extensively, were ecstatic about this speech. I mean, this is certainly a speech that I don't want to say it will go down in history, but it's certainly a speech that essentially delivered what the far right wanted to hear. I mean, I would say that if meta political activists from today's European far right had been asked to draft a speech for J.D. vance, it couldn't have looked much different.
- [41:38]
Interviewer
Have pro democracy Europeans? Have centrist Europeans? Have liberal Europeans? Have progressive Europeans lost the culture war?
- [41:49]
Philipp Adorf
I think it's interesting that early on we talked a bit about the question of why do other parties perhaps not need their own forefield. And I think what we've seen in recent years is illustrative of the fact that they probably do need their own forefront. They need to accept and acknowledge that sentiments appear to have changed and shifted. They can't take their own position within society as granted anymore. So they also need to try and have their own perhaps organizational structure outside of the political parties that talks about migration in a more positive light. That makes the case for migration. We are seeing in a number of European countries in the United States as well, for example, that younger voters are increasingly turning towards the far right. In Germany, the AfD has in recent elections done incredibly well among younger voters, which is completely different from what happened even 10 years ago. So this notion that, oh, younger voters will always at least initially vote for the far left and perhaps they might moderate a bit going forward, that appears to no longer be the case and that is indicative or that reflects the fact that sort of meta political work that young activists are doing from the far right is increasingly paying off for them. So in terms of losing the culture war, I think, yeah, there are definitely factors that the political establishment that mainstream parties, that mainstream figures and political actors that they need to adopt and learn and maybe they've just become a bit too complacent. When we talked about the fact that for the past 60 to 70 years they've been. When we talk about democracy and what does democracy mean, they have, these definitions have for the most part been centrist or maybe even center left interpretations. When it comes to immigration, when it comes to a variety of social cultural issues, the political left has really been quite successful. Even in Europe, for example, most center right parties probably subscribe to a position that 30 to 40 years ago would have been described as a left position. They are in favor of same sex marriage. They are making the case that traditional family roles should no longer necessarily apply, that women should be in the workplace and that the government should help women enter the workplace, things like that. Most center right parties nowadays in Europe are open to immigration. So in some sense the political left might have been a victim of its own success.
- [44:07]
Interviewer
Can a sort of centrist establishment be meta political? Cultural organizations, think tanks, so on and so forth, who are closely associated with the center right, the center left with the Greens, with the liberal parties? They have these very well established relationships with political incumbents. Can you develop metapolitical muscles if you have these relationships?
- [44:37]
Philipp Adorf
That's a key question. Because right now, I think in a lot of European countries the riot has been quite successful in saying that there's only one alternative. Looking at Germany, the alternative for Germany would say we are the sole alternative. If you are dissatisfied with the work of all of the other parties that essentially can enter coalitions with one another all the time, you can only opt for us. And that's something that probably needs to be changed, that kind of narrative. So other parties, I think, have to perhaps become more polarized. They have to really present themselves as parties that have different attitudes on a variety of topics. I mean, that's something that is particularly relevant in a German context because of the political system that we have. The center right is open to entering coalitions with various center left parties, which on the one hand you could say is sensible, because the argument is all democratic parties have to be able to cooperate when they are faced with a very strong afd. But at the same time it also plays into the cards of the AfD, which is able to then present itself as the sole alternative. And that's also to a certain extent part of the meta political work of other figures within the forfeit. Also making this case that, hey, if you are dissatisfied with the way things are going, you can only choose one party, whether that's meta politics or just sort of general political work. Other parties have to be more open to disagreements within each other. They have to sometimes perhaps readjust some of their own positions. As you mentioned, it's very difficult for, I think, political establishment parties to do meta political work because they have to a certain extent been quite successful within Gramsci's war of position. They have really dominated different parts of the establishment of the elite. And they have to find their own sort of approach, their own way of reasserting perhaps some of their dominance.
- [46:28]
Interviewer
And this is particularly difficult in the context of European Union politics, where you have a kind of inbuilt grand coalition, where even in the Commission, the European Commission itself, you have socialists and you have people from what is the acceptable far right and the conservatives and the liberals all working together for one end. There may be some dynamism but there is the perception from the outside that they are all in it together. And so that does open the space, I think, particularly to Eurosceptic parties, to anti European narratives.
- [47:09]
Philipp Adorf
I think that's a sort of general problem within the European Parliament. You don't have that traditional dynamic of the government and opposition, where you know, as a voter, if you are dissatisfied with the government, regardless of your own ideological positions, you know that there is an alternative movement that you can vote for if you dislike government policies. And yeah, you don't have that at the European level because you have a shift in coalitions. And maybe that's that this is something that. Where you can make the case that the European Union, the European Parliament, needs to become more like a traditional government with governing coalitions. But at the most fundamental level, I think a voter needs to understand that there is an alternative to a governing majority. And that alternative should be made up of not just right wing populist parties. That alternative has to be made up of other parties as well.
- [47:56]
Interviewer
And to that point, there are so many people in Brussels who occasionally talk about the idea, the moment when the socialists and the Democrats, when the center left were will quotes go into opposition. They will not vote for a center right European Commission president like Ursula von der Leyen and become a very large opposition and not go for jobs and not go for high positions. The thing is that even though that's occasionally talked about, nobody really expects it to happen anytime soon. And I think that's a problem too.
- [48:31]
Philipp Adorf
Yeah, most definitely. I think that it's very tempting to be in government. It's very tempting to have these different jobs and positions. But also, I mean, at the German level we are seeing something similar where if you look at various state governments here in Germany, the Christian Democrats have essentially been forced to enter coalitions with left wing parties. All of this in order to continue or to preserve the firewall, which at least on the surface it sounds sensible enough. But in my view, at Some point the AfD will simply become too strong and you're going to have to find some kind of solution there, whether it's incorporating them.
- [49:05]
Interviewer
But then we're facing the question by keeping up the grand coalition, by keeping up the firewall, by keeping up these rather sort of Frankenstein like relationships between, let's say the socialist, the center left and the center right. Are you preserving democracy by doing that? And I think for me that's the big dilemma. Should we be celebrating this sort of grand coalition politics of center left and center right in cooperation as a bulwark preserving our freedoms.
- [49:37]
Philipp Adorf
Yeah, if you look at it from a German perspective, the two parties that used to form the grand coalitions, they're no longer the two strongest parties. Which begs the question that, yeah, it's really sensible for democracy if the traditionally largest parties enter government and voters are left with an environment where the sort of sole alternatives are parties at the fringes. And that's a huge issue, both at the European level, but also in different national electoral arenas. And it'll take some time for political parties to readjust their positions. But certainly, I think one of the big conclusions is that all of these different parties, Whether it's the AfD, the Freedom Party in Austria, Marine Le Pen, these are all political actors that are here to stay. And it appears quite clear that in a lot of environments, retaining the firewall clearly has not had the desired result. I mean, here in Germany, we can say the AfD over the past decade has become more radical, but it's also become more successful. That's not solely due to the policies or the positioning of other parties. So I'm not saying that there's necessarily a very strict causal relationship between these two factors. I personally worry that at some point, 10 years from now, the AfD will be strong enough to form governments on its own and that the options that are on the table are no longer the AfD can disappear or the AfD grows stronger. But you're essentially facing the option of the AfD will become a governing party at some point, either governing by itself because it might have a substantially large share of the vote, or it'll become a junior coalition partner in some other form of government. And then the question becomes, in order to preserve democracy, what is the best path going forward? We would all agree that the perfect path for preserving democracy would be if anti democratic parties were not particularly strong. But we're just in an environment now where these parties have gained in strength and maybe we need to find ways to decrease their vote share by bringing some of them in from the cold. That has sometimes worked, sometimes it doesn't work. And of course, you're faced with the issue that what happens if you bring an anti democratic party into government? Will this decrease democratic quality? And I know it's not a satisfactory answer, but I think the problem is that we're just faced with a bunch of really poor options and there is no great option anymore. There is no real blueprint for preserving democracy.
- [51:59]
James Cantor
That's it for this episode. EU Scream is nonprofit journalism and is produced in association with the Brussels Times. It's your feedback and support that helps us delve into this new, darker era in our politics, into how the EU should be responding, and into the thoughts and experience of people who really know what they're talking about. Small donations to large ones, that's all incredibly appreciated. It also helps when we get a five star rating at Spotify or a review at Apple. Podcasts and passing on episodes to family, colleagues and friends. That's yet another great way to show support. For more details and for more EU scream, do please visit Brusselstimes.com and look for the podcast. Thanks for listening.