The documentary by Christophe Cotteret, broadcast this Tuesday evening, September 3, explores the links between violent groups and the political extreme right in Europe, through interviews with several figures from the movement.
By dint of seeing the extreme right monopolize the top of the polls and get a little closer to power with each election, we could forget what it really is. By dint of normalization, smiling interviews, well-groomed candidates, we could be tempted to take the extreme right parties as formations like the others. The documentary White Power. At the heart of the European far right, broadcast this Tuesday, September 3 in the evening on Arte and available online until December, serves as a reminder that this is not the case. Racism, anti-Semitism, fascist temptation and violence are still omnipresent in the ecosystem of the extreme right.
For this investigation, Christophe Cotteret visited the strongholds of the extreme right in Germany, Belgium and France. From Thuringia, where the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) won the regional elections this weekend, to Flanders, where the Vlaams Belang reigns, his documentary highlights the links between violent groups and the political extreme right. In North Rhine-Westphalia, we meet Axel Reitz, the “Hitler of Cologne”, now repentant. In the 2000s, with slicked-back hair and a large black raincoat, he was the one who organised the first nationalist march in Cologne since 1945. “When you stand up for your truth and people don’t understand, you get to a point where you say, ‘We’re going to force them to understand.’ That’s where the use of force begins,” explains the former neo-Nazi.
“Great Replacement” and “Remigration”
“It is not with radical groups that we take power. On the other hand, a radical group will convey new ideas and play a lobbying role vis-à-vis the major parties,” also recognizes Christian Bouchet, well placed to discuss the subject, he who founded several extremist groups before joining the National Rally.
One of the merits of the documentary is its encounters. Christophe Cotteret has Björn Höcke, the controversial leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Eliot Bertin, the leader of Lyon populaire, a revolutionary nationalist group from the GUD, Martin Sellner, the Austrian influencer who carries the concept of “remigration” speak in front of his camera. Each explains without embellishment their theories which overlap and resemble each other. Great replacement, ethno-differentialism and remigration form the basis of their thinking, inspired by American white supremacist movements.
“We must repatriate illegal immigrants who arrived illegally and who, outside of the madness of asylum under the Geneva Convention, would never have the right to be here,” says calmly Gerolf Annemans of Vlaams Belang, a party allied to the RN in the European Parliament. “We do not distinguish between legal and illegal migration, but between intra- and extra-European immigration,” Eliot Bertin, from the Lyon Populaire group, acknowledges just as calmly. On the one hand, the young man is campaigning with his face uncovered for “integral ecology”, who defends “human life from conception to death”, and offers coffee to passers-by. On the one hand, he organizes violent and hooded raids in the city center of Lyon or against debates on Palestine. A two-faced mode of action that can be found in all the extreme right-wing parties on the continent.
