European far right follows Trump in calling for antifa to be declared terrorists | The far right

Where Donald Trump leads, Europe’s nationalists and far right follow. After a Truth Social post last month, when Trump announced the US would designate antifa, the decentralised anti-fascist movement, “a major terrorist organisation”, his international allies swung into action.

That same day, the Dutch parliament, where the largest party is Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV, passed a resolution, noting the US decision and calling on the government to declare antifa a terrorist organisation in the Netherlands.

Then the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán – more usually a source of inspiration for Trump – said his country would follow suit. Next, in the European parliament, a far-right MEP from the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party drafted a resolution with the same request. Tom Vandendriessche announced last week that 79 MEPs from 20 countries supported his proposed text. In a video posted on X with ominous music playing, he described antifa as “an international network that is supported, financed and protected by the system to fight the nationalist opposition with violence”.

Experts characterise antifa rather differently, instead describing it as a loose identity movement with neither leaders nor membership structure. While it has origins in Europe, it gained attention in the US after Trump’s election in 2016.

“Antifa is not what I would call an identifiable group or organisation [but] a movement, perhaps,” Jessica White, acting director of terrorism and conflict studies at the Royal United Services Institute, told the Guardian.

“On the basis of that lack of clear definition, I think it’s very challenging, if not counterproductive, to try and designate it,” she added. The security services, she said, would see “the least amount of value” in such a designation, as “usually what I’ve seen is that it is much easier to reach a verdict and a prosecution based upon focusing on the actual acts of violence.”

She added: “I think there’s probably a very justified sense of fear around how it could be used in a politically motivated way to target people that are seen as opponents to a more rightwing political government.”

The Hungarian government has claimed that antifa, which it calls a “a leftwing terrorist organisation”, is a menace to its citizens. The EU’s law enforcement agency Europol does not use the term “antifa” in its recent Terrorism Situation and Trend report – a document cited in the far-right European parliament resolution. Europol reports 21 attacks attributed to leftwing or anarchist violent extremism in 2024, based on data from 14 countries, excluding Hungary. Nearly all the attacks, which took place in Italy and Greece, targeted property.

Hungarian government spokesperson Zoltán Kovács has said antifa members have “brutally beaten people” in the street, and while some were brought before the courts, “those who did not flee justice for the European parliament have received their due.”

This is a reference to Ilaria Salis, an Italian activist who became an MEP in 2024, an election that brought an end to nearly 16 months of detention in Hungary, where she was accused of assaulting people suspected of far-right sympathies. Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), has described Salis as a “far-left antifa activist”.

This week, Salis narrowly survived an attempt by the Hungarian government to remove her immunity, after MEPs voted by a majority of one not to grant Budapest’s request. Salis says she is innocent and will not get a fair trial in Hungary, where legal experts have long concluded that the rule of law is compromised.

She told the Guardian that Hungary’s use of the term “antifa” was a way of “stigmatising whoever dissents, whoever doesn’t agree with the regime”. She added: “If being anti-fascist means dissenting with his regime, of course I am an anti-fascist.”

Martin Schirdewan, co-leader of the far-left group in the European parliament, which unites Germany’s Die Linke, France Unbowed, as well as Salis’s Greens and the Left Alliance party, said criminalising an anti-fascist group “simply plays the tune of the far right” and was “restricting freedom of opinion” as well as being “ultimately an attack on democracy itself”.

The focus on antifa is one more common cause uniting Trump and his European allies. Pawel Zerka, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Trump served as an important inspiration for the new right in Europe, who were willing to emulate his culture war in their own countries.

In a recent report, Zerka argued that Trump and the US Maga movement are waging a culture war on Europe by aggressively promoting ideological allies on the continent and seeking to humiliate European leaders on the world stage.

Trump, the report argues, provides credibility, framing and coherence to Europe’s new right, from Orbán in Hungary to National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in France, as well as critical infrastructure – conferences, media, funders and thinktanks – that “supports the formation of a Maga internationale”.

The notion of antifa, “a copy-paste from the American political debate”, was another way of polarising European societies, Zerka said. “The mere fact that you can claim there is a dangerous political adversary … gives you a powerful engine to also mobilise your base and seek a certain cohesion among domestic forces.”