Europe’s Extreme Right and Left United in Support of Putin
It is something George Orwell himself never would have imagined. Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine justified Russian aggression in Ukraine by saying they had to defend themselves against Kiev’s “fascists” and anti-Semites. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even recently condemned the European Union for what he claimed were rising racist tendencies among member states.
In reality, the Kremlin maintains excellent relations with far-right groups in these very same states. From the National Front in France to the Belgian Vlaams Belang and the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary, all have firmly come down on Russia’s side in the Ukraine crisis. And Putin is demonstrating how to effectively, and utterly without scruples, use nationalist politics against hated supranational powers such as the United States and the EU.
What’s more, the Russian leader is presenting himself as the protector of the “Christian West” from Western “immorality.”
Putin’s annexation policy in the name of reclaiming Russian territory closely follows the ideology of “Neo-Eurasianism” developed by the “national Bolshevik” Alexander Dugin. This theory was directly inspired by the ethnic and nationalistic ideas of the Western European “New Right” — an extremist school of thought that started in the 1970s, finding its bases in the traditions of the German Weimar Republic’s “Conservative Revolution.”
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