The rise of illiberal Europe – The enemy inside the gates | DW Documentary

The rise of illiberal Europe – The enemy inside the gates | DW Documentary

Italians in January this year, marking the murder of three fascist activists in Rome, in 1978. Almost 80 years after the defeat of the Third Reich, there can be few single gestures that send, and are designed to send, such a chilling warning. When you see pictures like that in Europe what goes through your mind? We are reminded of the darkest hours of this continent when fascists were in power and set the world on fire. And I think that everybody who is in democratic responsibility should be aware that there is this tendency, this political direction and this threat, and we should ally and try to fight this. Last November a secret meeting, involving far-right activists, neo-Nazi sympathizers and senior figures from Germany’s right wing AfD party took place at a hotel in Potsdam outside Berlin. Their mission: to discuss the mass deportation of migrants, asylum seekers and naturalized German citizens, judged to have assimilated poorly to life in their new country. The organizers dispute our characterization of the event and the information we’re reporting about it. What they didn’t know at the time, was that the German investigative group Correctiv was also at the meeting, watching and listening. Principal guest speaker: the notorious Austrian white supremacist Martin Sellner, invited to provide the group with the ideological heft and the means of imposing it. I want to make life unpleasant for those people who want to islamize our country, those people who want to exploit our social systems. Because at the moment Germany is like an open invitation for everybody who wants to exploit our system. Those who attended the meeting had been invited as ‘patriots’ and were expected to contribute financially to the cause. The group was in buoyant mood. It was really a moment of ‘we are just getting the power.’ It’s just a matter of time, we’re almost there. There’s a carrot in front of our nose. All we have to do now is not to f*** it up. The host of the meeting was calling it very outspokenly as the meeting for the “masterplan”. He called it the masterplan and he invited people from the AfD. He invited people with money. And I think in this meeting all this, like in a nucleus, came together: ideology, politics and money. And this was special about this meeting because Martin Sellner was, you know, was really invited in a special way. So in the invitation they called him ‘we have the honor that this man can talk about the masterplan’ so in a way it was a special moment. The report on the meeting hit Germany like a missile. The AfD’s poll ratings plummeted as hundreds of thousands protested across the country, incensed that such a topic was discussed by mainstream politicians mixing with known extremists – and, what’s more – close to a location, stamped forever in Germany’s post-war conscience. Hardly a coincidence was it, that this meeting took place barely eight kilometers from Wannsee where the extermination of millions of Jews was plotted and agreed by Hitler’s Nazi chiefs, or are you going to tell me that thought never crossed your mind? I think that is despicable of the mainstream media to even compare this you know. It’s completely not comparable and I can tell you why this meeting took place there because… I am not comparing I am just saying… No, I can tell you why the meeting took place there… …what thoughts it evoked? No thoughts at all you know because I’m not focussed on the past all the time, not looking at all these special meetings and places. I’m focussed on the future. And all these demonstrations you mentioned, all this criticism – these people are focussed on the past. Six months have gone by since the Potsdam meeting but the dust hasn’t settled and for some at least the warning lights are still flashing red. The polls indicate that the far right will make significant gains in next month’s European elections. If that happens what would it do with all that new power? Is there a grand plan? How safe is democracy going to be across the European Union? The key questions that we set out to investigate. First stop in Brussels where the advance of the right wing has set nerves jangling among senior EU politicians – not helped by a spate of scandals, involving spying and influence peddling among members of the European Parliament. We have politicians who do not hesitate to get paid from our enemies – so it is the combination of external pressures and internal willingness to cooperate with those who have very hostile plans for the EU. And there are many other factors which are threatening democracy – for instance the lack of understandable communication with the voters, because the people are calling for help there is a lot of uncertainty. And the uncertainty has only increased, along with mounting numbers of street attacks on German politicians. The frequency of these incidents has doubled since 2019 – ample evidence that Germany is target number one in Europe for extremist actions. On May the 7th Yvonne Mosler, local Greens candidate in Dresden, found herself campaigning in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the far right determined to disrupt her day. Perhaps the biggest recent threat to Germany is now being assessed in a court in Stuttgart. In all 27 Germans, will be tried, charged with attempting to overthrow the German government. The court president called it the most serious national security trial since the Second World War. Prosecutors said the accused had stockpiled weapons and were prepared to kill to achieve their aims. Senior German politicians say they won’t drop their guard again. Do you think efforts are underway to repeat this attempted coup, there could be other attempted coups? I’m not allowed to talk about concrete things but I would strongly suggest to listen to the presidents of the intelligence agencies in Germany. And they are very clear that there are people still acting and trying to do stuff like that. How crucial are the coming European elections to democracy in Europe? I have to tell you that these elections will have a decisive power for the future years and the way we live, defend, make business in Europe – and so these elections are very crucial and these elections are necessary to protect. I think that if not only the far right but the political powers, including the new members of the parliament will destroy the unity of the European Union then the EU will weaken. We have to be strong now because we have a lot of new challenges and enemies outside of Europe which have influence inside. How can people trust the elections? They don’t know whether they’re voting for a Russian puppet or someone who’s genuine. I think everybody who has a little bit of an understanding about politics knows where the Putin puppets are. If you listen to the pre-election hype you could be forgiven for thinking that the far right is about to storm the citadel of European democracy, demanding to be let inside. But you’d be wrong. It’s already unlocked those gates and its power and influence have expanded rapidly across the continent. You have autocrats and far-right governments and far-right parties that are well established in Europe now. Does that frighten you? It does, because I see a lot of lying in their campaigns and in their promises. So what’s frightening me is that we didn’t do enough to offer the people the alternative. From the far right no such ambiguity. On a trip to Vienna, to see the white supremacist Martin Sellner, I learned plenty about his own playbook and that of other far-right movements. Their firm intention: to exert a high level of pressure on immigrants, either to adapt to life in Europe – or go. What is this high level of pressure. What is it? Any kind of pressure, economic pressure, cultural pressure… …bullying, harassment…. Not at all, not at all… …threats, confiscations…what? No confiscations…that’s, that’s you made all this up. What right have you got to ask them to do that? Every right. Why? Every right as the indigenous population. They have the same rights as you…. Yes, of course… They have passports, German passports What I’m saying is for people who are here legally, who have a passport we have to have a system of high pressure and to offer them voluntarily to go to their home countries. If they prefer to live in an Islamic parallel society, they might as well just go to an Islamic state. So what are you able to deliver, apart from dreams of division, discrimination, closing foreign restaurants, closing mosques, destroying multiculturalism. What do you deliver? That’s a pretty destructive programme, isn’t it? Our programme is a positive one, we want to save and preserve our identity and at the same time we respect every other nation and culture. There are dozens of Islamic countries…. Respect and hope they’ll go away… No, I respect the plurality of the world but I want to save my own country…. It’s just foreigners go home, isn’t it, by another name. …Not at all It’s just foreigners get out of here. … and I tell those left-wing NGO people if you want to help, go there and help them there and stop importing them to Europe and becoming a pull factor. That’s what I say and I think our message is not radical at all. It’s very serious. And that’s why at the moment, the AfD is the most popular party among young voters in Germany. To test that claim, the AfD’s lead candidate in the European elections dropped into a small Bavarian town just a month before the vote. Maximilian Krah – Mad Max to his promoters, was there to greet the faithful, for whom image is crucial. The fancy sports car – driven in, out and in again, in case the cameras missed it first time round, the models for decoration, and an all-white cast of fans, to assist the anti-immigrant message. It didn’t look like a party that German security services have classified ‘potentially extreme’ but it is. Just two days after we filmed, a German court confirmed that classification and the AfD can continue to be watched, bugged and followed by the state. Across the street from the event a counter demonstration. And a reminder that quite apart from his party Mad Max himself has problems. Big ones. Your office has just been raided after your Chinese assistant was arrested last month on the charge that he had acted as an agent for China. A news report said that, it said several people working closely with you received funding from China. Do you know about that. No that’s not true. I mean the first thing is, look the German domestic intelligence said they supervised my former assistant for four years. Obviously he was suspicious but I was not warned and now those who knew everything blame me. So you, you’re playing the victim here… No, I don’t play the victim obviously I am but this is not the political question. This is what I always say. The government reigns Germany and the government wants us to look for spies. But we don’t, we know that espionage is a difficult thing but the election is about politics. It’s not about spies. You are also, I believe, under investigation by the public prosecutor in Dresden. No I am not. No? On suspicion of receiving payments from Russia and China? The public prosecutor in Dresden is now reading news and is considering whether the news reports are enough to prosecute me or investigate me. So they call it a pre-investigation. It is just taking dirt on me because those people don’t want to talk about politics. No payments came your way, nothing from the pro-Moscow Voice of Europe foreign media portal, no? Nothing. For months I declare that there are no payments but once again if you repeat payment, payment, payment, espionage, espionage, fear, that the way to avoid a serious political debate. But a serious political debate was brewing. Only it wasn’t the one Krah wanted. Mr. Krah you talked about scandals and, uh, misinformation by the intelligence agencies. You’re falling out with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. So you’re not so exciting to some of your closest political allies anymore, are you? We are. Look, first of all we work together with our colleagues in the European Parliament, so they are very happy with us. But Krah spoke too soon. Days later the AfD’s allies in the European parliament – the far-right Identity and Democracy group threw them out and Krah was banned by his party from any further campaigning. He remains, though, their lead candidate. And he’ll find out soon enough what the voters make of the AfD’s pre-election chaos. In Berlin the question to the Chair of the Bundestag’s intelligence committee. Can you foresee down the line any circumstances under which a far-right government could come to power here in Germany? No, seriously, right now I see no way. People never thought the AfD would poll at 20-25%, did they? Yeah well, I mean you can’t foresee anything… They are the number two political force in Germany… Yeah that’s true but you asked me for a prognosis and I don’t see that. But that doesn’t change that we have to take this very, very serious. If right wing extremists would be voted into power and then they show that they can’t solve the problems we would, and then they get exchanged for someone else in the next election, we would have no problem. The problem is that when right-wing extremists get into power, they don’t give it up again – and that’s what you see everywhere. That ‘everywhere’ includes Hungary with its far-right populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Friend of Vladimir Putin – enemy of Brussels. He doesn’t want to leave the EU. He said recently – he wants to conquer it. In office since 2010, he’s cemented power with associates from his Fidesz party, dominating key roles in government. Only now he has a serious challenger: In a little village close to Hungary’s border with Ukraine, a whistleblower and former Fidesz insider is campaigning for a seat in the European Parliament, but Peter Magyar’s long term ambition is much larger. He wants to oust Viktor Orban from power. It’s not an easy job to win supporters here – the rural areas are a stronghold for Orban. But a turnout this size on a rainy day is still an achievement. And in the cities Magyar knows he’s bringing in crowds and telling them what they’ve long wanted to hear. The system is complex and the people are fed up with corruption, with the propaganda with the lies, with the secret service, so it’s quite a hybrid regime. But I still think and I’m quite sure that in an election it’s possible to defeat Fidesz and Viktor Orban. Magyar speaks publicly about government interference in a judicial case – and he does so with some authority. He was married to the previous Justice Minister Judith Varga and knows the strengths and weaknesses of the system. He also knows what a state capture operation looks like when populists are in charge. The main problem in Hungary – the Russian-style propaganda. You know, in five years the Orban government spent more than 1.300 billion Forints for propaganda. We have a ministry of propaganda in 2024 in Europe, in the European Union. We don’t have a ministry of health, ministry of education, we don’t have a ministry of environment but we do have a ministry of propaganda. It’s a bit funny but rather strange I think in the European Union. And what about the capture of state institutions like the police, the security services, the press, everything is captured? Yeah, everything is led by a Fidesz guy or an ex-Fidesz guy. The court of auditors, the constitutional court, the president. Everybody. Of course, it was the idea of Mr Orban I think from 2010 to rule everything and everybody, all the positions. So now there is no balance of power in Hungary. The only existing power is the Fidesz. This is a power factory, the so-called power factory with economic power, with political power, with secret service power, with police, with everything. With all that power is he really going to let himself be voted out of office? That’s a question. I really hope that something is still there from the democratic hero in Prime Minister Orban and he will let us take over the power, if we will have the mandate from the Hungarian people. It will be a long run, not a short fight and it will be difficult. It will take more than some gladhanding on a rainy day to push the Orban machine through the exit. But how was it possible to let a single leader take over an entire European state for so long? And could it happen elsewhere? There’s a reason why people might turn to the right, isn’t there? There’s widespread discontent in Europe with politics and outcomes, not just migration. A report to the EU commission in February talked about a broad geography of discontent. Declining regions, many small cities, towns and rural areas have a sense of despair, not just limited to economic hardship but also to a feeling of being politically disenfranchised, socially alienated. You have sympathy with them? Absolutely. But allow me to come back to this leadership question, because look to Macron and Scholz. Macron is currently in the polls with his party around 17% in France, Socialist Scholz is doing with 16% in Germany at this moment of time. Those are the two top leaders of Europe – and that worries me a lot because we are lacking real leaders who have the support of citizens. Just three weeks before the European elections Slovakia’s right-wing Prime Minister Robert Fico survived an assassination attempt in the town of Handlova a 190 kilometers from the capital Bratislava. The government said the shooter had a ‘clear political motivation.’ One of Fico’s allies said the entire hateful opposition had bloody fingers. European leaders reacted in shock, warning that violence had no place in European politics. But there’ve already been plenty of warnings – either late or ignored. In the febrile political atmosphere, ahead of Europe’s June elections, this attack stands out for its brutality and its intention. The fear is: it could encourage similar violence in other parts of the continent – where political hatreds also run deep. Europe’s liberal political group Renew said it was increasingly alarmed by the rising polarization in the political sphere, fuelled by extremist ideologies. Some of those ideologies were on show last November in the far right meeting in Potsdam, cloaked, as it was, in respectable assurances of legality and moderation. What is really interesting about it, they really wanted to do, to plan everything in a way that seemed to be legal. You know they emphasized that always, you know, we do it legally, we do it constitutionally. And I think this also shows the dangers which are there that these organizations these movements and also the AfD of course, they try to infuse these ideas into German society, not by breaking law and not by changing the constitution or doing unconstitutional stuff, but by bending all these laws and institutions, kind of like it’s a slow poison into the society. And the Nazis back then were also saying everything has to be legal. And you can look in the protocol. It’s underlined. Everything has to be legal. This is, you know, normal. The protocol which discussed the extermination of Jews? Exactly. Was there a backlash against you for breaking this story and threats that came your way afterwards Yeah of course. After the story we had a tremendous backlash and we had people attacking us personally. Me, I was on the main channels of the party with name and face saying that I am… …main channels of the AfD? Yes. So it was on the party’s main channels of Twitter, etc. So they were kind of calling out, dog whistling against me but also the rest of the Correctiv editorial room was under attack. I remember there were cameras you know waiting, from right radical bloggers waiting for you to come down the stairs and they were showing we know where you are, we know your address, we’re going to follow you. And we know from internal monitoring of right radical chat groups that they are organizing to find us. And we are actually not the only newsroom. Every kind of newsroom, every journalist who is reporting on these groups is actually targeted. You know the stronger they get, the more people are targeted, that’s for sure. It’s not just in Europe that people are waiting with anxiety for the results of the June elections. Ukraine’s fighters and politicians know that any surge by the far right, with its Russian sympathies, could have serious consequences for the war with Moscow. In Brussels they know that, too. I am not happy, not happy at all because I think Ukraine needs more weapons and more ammunition and so on. Europe is supporting Ukraine – but it’s not enough, is it? Not enough in the military sense. But that’s all that counts in the end of the day. If they don’t have sovereignty over their own territory, they don’t have a country, do they? We have to see at least four lines of support but you are right that this is a key one, this is existentially important, critical one to support Ukraine with sufficient amounts of ammunition and weapons. The west has to do more. Ukraine’s armed forces have seen plenty of promises come and go, aware that they’re a political football and not always in the hands of their supporters. If the elections give the far right greater influence, it might well mean that those ammunition and weapons supplies become a trickle, blocked in successive EU committees by politicians who think Ukraine should settle now with Moscow and end the war. So, far away from the field of conflict, the political battle lines have been drawn and for Ukraine, as much as the rest of Europe, the stakes could hardly be higher.

Investigative journalist Tim Sebastian exposes the growing threat of far-right extremism in Europe. From secret neo-Nazi gatherings in Germany to the alarming rise of populist leaders, discover the chilling realities facing democracy today. Watch as he delves into the ideologies, scandals, and political maneuvers threatening to reshape the European Union.

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