Right-wing calls to ban left parties and groups mount in Europe

Youth protests spreading across European nations, particularly in France, are serving as an occasion for right-wing parties and governments to escalate demands for bans.

In France, for example, right-wing conservative politicians such as Senate President Gérard Larcher and presidential candidate Bruno Retailleau of The Republicans (LR) are now openly demanding that the party La France Insoumise (LFI) be banned.

Matthieu Valet, a Member of the European Parliament from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), said at the party congress held in Orléans on 24–25 October: “We will dissolve all anti-fascist organisations.”

Polls unanimously show that RN candidate Marine Le Pen leads the vote for the presidential election in April 2027.

In Spain, the rising right-wing party Vox submitted a draft bill to parliament in December 2025 aimed at dissolving organisations linked to the anti-fascist movement.

Vox is polling at 19% in recent surveys, and the party hopes to enter government by forming a coalition with the conservative Popular Party (PP) following the elections on 29 November.

In such a scenario, banning anti-fascist organisations in Spain could become possible.

Acts of violence linked to protests are currently being used increasingly to threaten left organisations with bans.

Belgium offers another example. Since last year, Interior Minister Bernard Quintin has been attempting to ban organisations that threaten “national security or the foundations of the rule of law”.

In this context, government officials cite “Antifa” as an example. Even in the autumn of 2025, Georges-Louis Bouchez, president of Quintin’s Reformist Movement (MR), openly called for the “dissolution of Antifa”.

When property damage occurred on the fringes of student protests in Liège in early October this year, Quintin once again pointed to “Antifa-type” organisations in light of plans to ban such groups.

In June, Defence Minister Theo Francken of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) also claimed, without providing evidence, that the opposition Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA) was responsible following property damage on the fringes of protests in Brussels.

PTB-PVDA supports the protests gaining momentum in Belgium against the government’s policies of militarisation and social spending cuts.

According to polls, the party is currently the second strongest in the country with 23% of the vote nationwide, and the strongest in the Brussels-Capital Region with 26%.

In Germany, the possibility of banning The Left (Die Linke) was raised by the influential mainstream newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

A recent editorial in the newspaper asked: “Why not ban Die Linke?”

Meanwhile, banning youth demonstrations is currently under discussion. As in Belgium, isolated violent incidents on the margins of peaceful protests are cited as justification, discrediting the demonstrations as a whole.

Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt is not only levelling blanket accusations against “left-wing groups” without providing evidence; he is also attributing instances of property damage to “agitators emerging from the migrant community”.

The Interior Minister of the state of Hesse, Roman Poseck, acknowledged that those detained on Saturday on assault charges were “predominantly German citizens”, but nonetheless claimed that they were “predominantly of migrant background”.

These statements therefore attribute responsibility for violence to leftists on the one hand, and to people of non-German origin on the other.

A representative from the Federal Ministry of the Interior under Dobrindt also attended a conference where White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller equated anti-fascists (“Antifa”) broadly with terrorism and categorised them as “enemies of civilisation”.

According to an investigation by the online portal FragDenStaat, this representative was Christian Klos, head of the Public Security Directorate.

Klos reportedly appeared in Washington as part of a “morning panel” on “The Threat Landscape of Far-Left Terrorism”.

What he said there remains unclear: FragDenStaat reported that the Federal Ministry of the Interior refused to publish several preparatory documents related to the presentation, citing their classified status.

However, it is now known that the Interior Ministry took part in a preparatory workshop in the US in May with two officials at the “relevant specialist division level”.

In addition, the federal government confirmed in early October that a follow-up event to the Washington conference would be held this autumn.

The event’s focus will be the “sharing of professional experience among security and law enforcement agencies from various countries”, centring specifically on “manifestations, developments, and challenges in the field of violent left-wing extremism”.

The US Department of State had hosted a conference on 16 July with the participation of representatives from more than 60 countries across North and South America, Europe, and parts of Asia.

The focus of the conference was the “international resurgence of far-left political terrorism”.

Alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller set the tone of the conference.

In a speech, Miller claimed that leftists were “fundamentally driven by envy, hatred, and malice”, adding that no one at anti-fascist demonstrations looked like a “normal human being”.

Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has played a prominent role for years in crackdowns on left-wing organisations.

While serving as CSU general secretary in 2011 and 2012, his rhetoric caused astonishment even within his own party.

In August 2011, for instance, he demanded that authorities “examine whether proceedings to ban Die Linke should be initiated”.

In January 2012, he stated that he believed “in the medium term, we must make every effort to also launch proceedings to ban [the party Die Linke]”.

At the time, Gerda Hasselfeldt, then leader of the CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, expressed her surprise: “At present, I see no grounds for proceedings to ban Die Linke.”

Even after taking office as Federal Interior Minister, Dobrindt continued to stand out with striking rhetoric.

In June 2025, during the presentation of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution report, he displayed graphs with different scales, implying that the number of “far-left extremists” in Germany exceeded that of right-wing extremists.

In December 2025, he suggested that “left-wing extremists” could engage in “espionage or sabotage” activities on behalf of foreign powers.