Bulgarian ultranationalism and the spread of Alt Right across Europe
They all raised their torches. Together. The silence was overwhelming. The noise of the fire crackling and their breath in the cold night was the only thing you could hear. Warmth because of the fire, cold because of the winter. That is how the scene felt. Warm, passionate, heated. Cold, quiet, dark. They were all wearing dark clothes, the younger ones with hoodies, the older ones with more traditional, smart, outfits. If you saw them anywhere else you would think they are nice grandpas. Looking at the younger ones… you wouldn’t really expect them to be that, although they kind of looked like it.
Up front from the crowd, representatives from different countries, some dressed up in military clothes, lined up to get on the stage and give their speeches. In Bulgarian first, then in English, German, French… The military-like lighting that lit the stage was hard on the eyes. As if it was designed to provoke dizziness, to blind you into your own fear. Without dropping the torches, they all listened. Silent. Until it was time. A big portrait of him with a wreath around it had been standing in front of the stage since the beginning of the act. They lit some flares and everything turned red. “General Lukov, General Lukov!,” they all started shouting while a rain of thin ashes covered everything. They were automatically transported back in time. To the days of the “old glory.” It felt like a military march. They looked like robots. Programmed to follow orders. Programmed to respond without thinking. Brainwashed.
When the shouting faded, his portrait was hanged on the façade of what once was his residency, where he was murdered. They all slowly started taking turns to pay their respects to him, individually. First the elder, important ones; then the younger ones, the most dangerous ones, his anonymous supporters, the puppies of his movement.
The scene takes place on February 23rd 2020, 77 years after General Hristo Lukov, the leader of the Union of Bulgarian National Legions, the most powerful patriotic organization in the 1930’s, was killed by a communist assault group on the 13th of February 1943. Lukov is considered a WWI Bulgarian war hero and is venerated by modern “patriots” for his activities as a Nationalist and his ties to prominent high rank German officials of the era. Or, in other words, because of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic work he did during the Second World War.
Lukovmarch is an annual torchlight procession organized by the Bulgarian National Union, an ultranationalist alt right party, to mourn for the death of the General. The rallies started in 2003 because, according to the Lukovmarch webpage, the “great patriotic deed [of the General], shall forever serve as a shining example for the future generations of nationalists.”
As disturbing as the scene of 30-year olds mourning for someone who died decades before they were even born and who has done nothing for them might be, right wing extremism isn’t really very popular in Bulgaria, yet. The Bulgarian National Union didn’t get any seats in Bulgaria’s Parliament in the last elections and the initial Lukovmarch rally, cancelled by Sofia’s municipality, ended up just being a gathering of around 300 people in front of the General’s house. But it is in the Europe that Bulgaria became part of not that long ago, the EU, where the rise of alt right parties has gained popularity in the past few years. The rise of parties that claim that there is a European identity that has to be preserved against the menace that migrants coming from the Middle East or from Africa involve.
It all starts in Italy, where anger originated by the mass migration of more than 5 million Syrian citizens due to the war in the country started being the main reason for citizen’s anger. Berlusconi was one of the first far right candidates who used fear of immigration to gain success, setting the mold for other populist candidates in Europe. He called for a unified plan to handle this mass migration but other European politicians started running campaigns for a more divided Europe. “If we will not unite [conservatives], Europe is gone. Christian history and culture, this is who we are,” says Dominik Tarczyński, MP of Poland Law and Justice Party, in a VICE News report.
“When we analyze xenophobic or racist discourse, we are sometimes guilty of the assumption that the people who produce this type of dialogue do so because they are simply intolerant or idiotic. However, xenophobic rhetoric has a greater background to be taken into account in order to combat it,” says Álvaro Hervás, an anthropologist who specializes on migration, in an exclusive interview for this article. “It seeks to influence people’s psychological foundations, presenting reality as a competition for limited resources — a threatening reality. Then it creates two groups, natives and foreigners, who compete for such resources; promoting by various means a feeling of affinity and injustice amongst national citizens when faced with their ‘rivals’. If you add the idea of a single culture monopoly to the recipe, which implies that everything culturally different is inferior, you have the perfect breeding ground to start xenophobic sermons. However, we must never forget that this type of discourse is a means to an end: power.”
“The far right’s rise ultimately emerges from a crisis of the political center. Politicians tasked with stabilizing the Continent after the global financial crash of 2007–08 became adept at turning the political narrative away from their own culpability,” says K. Biswas, in an opinion article for The N.Y. Times. “Europe’s leaders found themselves re-evaluating the benefits of historic migration into their countries.”
“These phenomena have their reasons, which correspond to the fear, to the anger, to the needs of a vast portion of citizens,” says Silvio Berlusconi in another VICE News report. “Ordinary working-class people are feeling not at home any more in their own country. They don’t feel like the elites are representing them, defending their interests so they want to see something new,” says Mattias Karlsson, the riksdag leader of the Sweden Democrats, in the first VICE News mentioned report.
In 2012, Marine Le Pen (The National Front) began to declare her anti-immigration isolation populist platform in France. “We are fighting against globalization that has been destroying our nation, we are fighting against a massive immigration and we are also fighting for our identity (French identity),” she said in an interview for VICE News. Five years later, in 2017, her party became second on national French elections and is now “the front line of opposition to the new president,” as she said in her election concession speech.
In Sweden, a country where during more than a 100 years politics have been dominated by the left-wing social democrats, the far-right Sweden Democrats have become the country’s third largest party in just a decade, holding 18% of the votes in 2018’s elections. “They are not a Nazi party but they are a party of Nazis,” says Johan Norbert, a Swedish journalist, in the second mentioned VICE News report. “It’s not really economic issues, the polarization comes from a new kind of dimension […] Everything was about taxes and socializing Swedish businesses, now it’s about migration, national identity, culture… thanks to the “Bannonization” of politics.”
Steve Bannon, a political strategist credited with helping get Donald Trump into the White House, founded The Movement, an organization whose stated aim is to unite Europe’s populist and economic nationalist parties that are opposed to the EU governments and political structures of Europe. “Today, the people of Europe, if they were called to a referendum, they would decide to leave Europe [EU],” says Berlusconi. “Europe must change and change a lot, or else it will move towards disintegration.”
Italy is key to understand Steve Bannon’s goal. Since the so called “migration crisis” became a real issue for European politics in 2015, Italy has undergone dramatic political realignments. It was the first big country that voted against the establishment, bringing as a consequence the coalition in government of Matteo Salvini’s, the Trump-like leader of the populist far right party The League, with populist far left party The Five Star Movement. This coalition collapsed last August, but it was a key factor in Bannon’s approach to Europe. “He [Banonn] believes that from Italy can start a larger euro revolution that can change the face of European Union,” says Marcello Foa, a far-right journalist and president of the RAI (Italian Radiotelevision), in the second mentioned VICE News report.
Bannon’s goals for Europe are clear: it is essential to fight against “an excessive globalization and for the return of the centrality of man as the ultimate mission of politics,” says Armando Siri, state secretary for infrastructure and transport senator for The League. “The real issue is that the left/right categories no longer exist […] things could be categorized until the end of the 20th century. Today, categorization is an error.” The Movement “is a big battle prevailing for the soul of western civilization because this feeling of alienation from the ordinary citizen is deep, very deep,” says Mischaël Modrikamen, the executive director of The Movement, in the same report.
Many other European countries have followed this path on shifting politics to Bannon’s ideals. In Germany, in 2017 the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered the federal parliament for the first time with 12.6% of the vote, becoming Germany’s biggest opposition party; In Spain, Vox surged into third place on November 10ths elections, after doubling its seats to 52 since the first time it entered parliament in April of the same year. In Austria, The Freedom Party (FPÖ) became the only far-right party in power in Western Europe when it joined a coalition as junior partner with conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in 2017. In Finland, the far-right Finns Party were narrowly beaten into second place in the April 2019 general election, coming within 0.2% of the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SDP). In Estonia, far-right Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) won an 18% of the vote in 2019’s elections, making it the third largest party after having won its first seats in parliament in the 2015 election. In Poland’s 2019 general elections, the far-right Confederation party got 6.8% of the vote. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, received and overwhelming majority of votes in 2018’s election. This secured him a third term in office after an election dominated by immigration. In Slovenia, although distant from a majority, the anti-migrant Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) was the largest in 2018’s general election. The anti-immigration Greek party, Greek Solution, got 10 seats in the 300-seat parliament after having won 3.7% of the votes in 2019’s national election.
But, according to Biswas, “far-right parties don’t need to win elections to see their agenda carried out. After the financial crisis, the governments of Europe almost universally adopted bullish positions on immigration, binding the issue with concerns around security, crime and benefits spending. In an age of austerity, ‘Natives First’ policies are widely seen as economic common sense.”
“Parties with xenophobic discourse have always existed, but the reason they are now on the increase is due to the current context of political disaffection — the electorate feels their demands have not been met by traditional parties,” says Hervás. “This scenario has been key to the growth of xenophobic parties, who promise simple solutions based on immediacy and accuse liberal democracy of having failed. Also, we must not forget the role of the media as necessary collaborators to spread their message.”
“It was a scandal when a far-right party entered government two decades ago. Now it’s just routine,” says Biswas in his article. “Now no country is immune from hearing, in the words of the historian Tony Judt, the far right’s ‘one long scream of resentment’ — even those with brutal memories of a fascist past,” like Spain or Germany. Biswas says that the taboo on the far right in government has been comprehensively broken: “Mainstream parties appear happy to cooperate with those once considered ‘toxic’ and that “no longer derided or dismissed by their mainstream rivals, far-right parties now show themselves capable of winning nationwide elections.”
Back to Bulgaria, Lukovmarch paints a true picture of the country. What we see is a representation of the mentality of Bulgarian society towards the Alt Right. A few people, some old and nostalgic, but most of them young, gathered to mourn a hero, a representative of what they believe is a mentality worth dying for: extreme nationalism. I do not know their backgrounds. Yet I can imagine them: they never had much, so they always felt the need to belong to something bigger, to feel part of a brotherhood. To defend something. To feel like someone cares about them. They probably didn’t know each other before that night, but they referred to one another as “comrades”. It looked like they would kill for each other.
The rise of the far right in European politics is now not only happening in national and local polls, but also at European parliamentary level. The far right’s most salient achievement was its superiority in France, the UK and Italy in the EU Parliament elections in May 2019. And this is only the beginning, according to Biswas. “As the far-right advance continues, it becomes increasingly likely its parties will hold the balance of power in a Continent unsure of its political future.”
More pictures of 2020’s Lukovmarch by Javier Jennings Mozo
