Before his fatal shooting, few if any of the leaders of Europe’s resurgent far right had so much as mentioned the name of Charlie Kirk. Since last week, the propaganda potential of the conservative US activist’s killing has escaped none of them.
Kirk, a rising star of Donald Trump’s Maga movement, was hit in the neck by a single bullet as he addressed students in Utah on 10 September. A 22-year-old suspect, Tyler Robinson, has been charged, but his alleged motives remain unclear.
But that has not stopped far-right figureheads from across the continent seizing on the killing to attack “the left”, presenting Kirk’s death as the logical conclusion of what they portray as a long-running hate campaign aimed at silencing them.
“We must stop the hate-mongering left!” said Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox went further: “Censorship isn’t enough for them – so they resort to murder.”
For Jordan Bardella of France’s far-right National Rally (RN), the “dehumanising rhetoric of the left and its intolerance … fuels political violence”. Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD said Kirk had been shot by “a fanatic who hates our way of life”.
The objective, experts say, is to raise Kirk to the status of a martyr to the conservative cause, and a victim of liberal-progressive persecution – simultaneously lending greater legitimacy to the right’s positions, and inflicting damage on the left.
“Martyrdom is a social operation to transform a morally and socially unacceptable act of violence into a narrative,” historian Pierre-Marie Delpu told Le Monde. “Here, the far right is constructing a plot and a persecution, with one executioner: the left.”
Some on Europe’s far right were disarmingly open about the business of capitalising on the killing. “We should not be ashamed of ‘politicising [Kirk’s] death’ – or putting a tragedy to good use,” urged Damien Rieu, an adviser to Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal.
In the European parliament, the ultranationalist Europe of Sovereign Nations group, which includes AfD and France’s Reconquête, nominated Kirk for the Sakharov prize, awarded annually for “the defence of human rights and fundamental liberties”.
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Mobilising the base
At a far-right gathering hosted by Vox in Madrid last weekend, a stirring video tribute to Kirk wowed the audience. To loud cheers, Abascal told an estimated 8,500 people that the left “do not kill us for being fascists – they call us fascists in order to kill us”.
André Ventura of Portugal’s Chega said the killing showed “arguing over ideas” had given way to “hatred, persecution and murder”. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, told the rally that Kirk’s “sacrifice … shows us once again which side the violence and intolerance are on … We will continue to fight tirelessly for our people’s freedom.”
In London, the 110,000 to 150,000 people who attended Tommy Robinson’s “unite the kingdom” protest on Saturday – including far-right figures from France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland and Germany – held a minute’s silence for their hero.
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A continent on the march
This all might matter less if Europe’s far right were not already on the march. Populist and far-right parties are in government in Italy, Hungary, Belgium and Slovakia, and the most popular parties in France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and the UK.
In Finland and Croatia they are signed-up members of conservative-led coalitions, and in Sweden they are lending parliamentary support to another. In Spain, Vox is surging in the polls and in Portugal, Chega is in the lead ahead of local elections.
In German regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia last Saturday, AfD was well beaten by chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right CDU and his Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners – but the far-right party succeeded in almost tripling its vote.
More insidiously, hardline far-right policies – on immigration, Islam, the green agenda, EU integration, traditional values – are becoming normalised across Europe as mainstream parties ape them in a vain attempt to maintain their vote shares.
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Holding the line
In a passionate op-ed for Le Monde, the French MEP and former European affairs minister Nathalie Loiseau – who received death threats after objecting to the far right’s calls for a minute’s silence for Kirk – said that while Kirk’s killing was an abomination, he had “glorified racial segregation and slavery, demanded women return to the home, demonised homosexuality, blamed Jews for promoting immigration … and compared abortion to the Holocaust”.
She was, she said, the only one of 720 MEPs “to speak out and demand that a distinction be made between the unanimous condemnation we should all express in the face of a man’s assassination, and the refusal to endorse his ideas”.
In the present circumstances, Loiseau said, resisting the concerted call for Kirk’s martyrdom – “keeping our heads, remaining true to what we are” – is of paramount importance.
Because “it is not respect for the dead they demand; it’s the right to insult and hate the living who do not resemble them … It is not freedom of speech they defend, it is the normalisation of their extremism. In America, as in Europe.”
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