(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Pánico y mentira)
They are in panic. So is the current majority in the European Parliament, that social-democratic two-party system of the People’s Party and the Socialists which, together with the Greens and some other invited leftist, has held the total, never-questioned hegemony in the institution’s history.
They are in panic in the European Commission and in the governments of the countries that have always controlled EU policy and that are reeling from one failure to another, as is the case with Germany and France.
In Germany, the three parties of the Berlin government (SPD, Greens and FDP) today barely add up to 20% in the polls. And in the three states holding elections in September, all three could vanish from the parliaments. Meanwhile the advance of the AfD seems unstoppable; in some states it is already the leading force and in the rest the second, behind the CDU.
And in France there are already polls giving victory to Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (RN) even in the second round. Both the AfD and RN are in the Identity and Democracy group, which sits to the right of the ECR, the European Conservatives and Reformists, the group that includes VOX, Fratelli d’Italia and Poland’s Law and Justice party.
Exactly four months before the European elections of June 9, these two groups, ECR and ID, are the only ones growing while all the others lose seats — the European PP, Socialists, Renew, Greens and Communists. The fall of some is dramatic. And the growth forecast for ECR and ID is spectacular.
That being so, the traditional parties, all of social democracy — in which one must include the People’s Party which, as Esteban González Pons says, «governs Europe in coalition with the Socialists and the Greens» — are desperately looking for ways to confront conservative forces that, for the first time in history, threaten their hegemony.
They did not expect this conservative tsunami and now they seek weapons to try to keep dictating everything in the EU — they, the signatories of the Green Deal, that piece of social-engineering nonsense against which, of the Spanish votes, only those of Vox were cast.
They are aligned in defense of Agenda 2030, «our gospel» in the emphatic expression of another MEP and leader of the Spanish People’s Party, former minister José Manuel Margallo.
Cordons sanitaires work against minorities, but not against governing parties. And that business of calling everyone who is fed up with the policies made by the majority parties «far right» no longer works either.
Not even against the AfD have the government campaigns in Germany taken effect — campaigns that have resorted to unheard-of fabrications of supposed coups d’état and fanciful conspiracies of deportation plans, all grotesque for being implausible.
They have even called government demonstrations «against the far right», cheered and celebrated by the chorus of the German media that march out their talking points with Prussian discipline.
They want to try censorship, and the European Commission is assembling a sinister set of arguments to try to veto or amputate the networks that do not apply the filters they want.
They have it in for X, the former Twitter, where Elon Musk, after buying it outright, abolished the iron-fisted leftist censorship that prevailed.
Thierry Breton, the great chieftain of the French and European telecommunications industry, now turned Commissioner for the Internal Market (someone will have to tell me how such conflicts of interest are digested in a man who regulates for all the big companies of his friends, his former partners and employees), has become a Savonarola of social-democratic political correctness who threatens every dissenter.
Now they want to turn what they dislike into hate crimes. Criticizing illegal and uncontrolled immigration could be a hate crime, as could denouncing the evident and brutal relationship between illegal immigration and crime, or condemning the policy that promotes sex-change operations among children and adolescents.
Alongside defamation, the cordons sanitaires, censorship and the hate crime, they have set in motion another device — of course also a trick — which they intend to intensify ahead of the elections.
It is their supposedly well-intentioned «fight against antisemitism and Islamophobia». The farce is complete because antisemitism and Islamophobia are presented as if they existed equally and were the same thing to be combated. Which is radically false.
It is true that Europe has a very grave problem of antisemitism which, to everyone’s shame, once again makes Europe a continent where grave dangers lie in wait for Jews for the mere fact of being Jews.
But European antisemitism today clearly has two origins. One antisemitism we import daily, with borders open to the illegal and uncontrolled entry of millions of haters of Jews. Who are, by the way, also consummate haters of Christians, though they display that less where they do not hold sway. The persecutions of Christians do not for the moment take place in Europe, though they are numerous and monstrous in their death toll, for example in Africa.
But the imported antisemitism has already lost all barrier of shame in Europe, and in the past months we have seen crowds of Muslim immigrants in the streets of the big cities demanding the extermination of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
Then there is the modern antisemitism of the left, disguised as anti-Zionism but as aggressive and fanatical as the other.
It springs from unconditional hatred of Israel, is allied with all the enemies of the Jewish state and has become widespread in the parties of the left.
In the past there was a democratic left so favorable to Israel that it even held it up as a model; today that left no longer exists.
In an inverse development, the antisemitism of the Catholic right, very widespread in the past among the popular classes, is today marginal, confined to fundamentalist and obscurantist groups.
In the Spanish left that antisemitism has soared, and there are flagrant examples such as the professional Israel-haters that are Pedro Sánchez, celebrated by the Hamas terrorists, or his minister Sira Rego, who leads pro-terrorist demonstrations in Madrid in favor of the disappearance of Israel.
And here is the trap that the European Commission and the entire shrinking and terrified social-democratic majority wants to spring ahead of the European elections.
With the mendacious and intellectually contemptible equating of the really existing antisemitism with the supposed Islamophobia, they want to strangle what is the crucial debate ahead of the elections, alongside social engineering, the Green Deal, the lack of democracy and subsidiarity in the EU, and the meddling, authoritarian drift: immigration and the identity of the European nations.
«Islamophobia» as a problem is precisely an invention of that antisemitic left, to intimidate Europeans and thus prevent their reactions and protests against the invasion they are suffering.
If the stigma of «fascist», «far-rightist» or «Nazi» has always served the left very effectively to intimidate and silence truths, Islamophobia is the war cry to stop European societies from reacting and taking measures and decisions in defense of their identity.
They want to force them to accept the unacceptable with this invasion. And they want to discredit this struggle for security, legality and Western civilization. In Europe there are no assaults by Christians on Muslims. There is daily news of crimes and violence or intimidation against Europeans by immigrants arrived from the Muslim world.
It is a fact that millions of immigrants have not come to integrate but to a territorial conquest that in some European regions is well advanced. Many Muslim leaders already take it for granted, and it is carried out by way of both the birth rate and open borders.
And if Bumedian said it decades ago, today Erdogan says it about «his armies» in Holland or Germany, and they say it in the mosques in the Middle East as in London, Paris or Brussels.
Let us all be very clear, in the face of these traps of a social democracy in panic, that the rejection of invasive attitudes is not hatred of any ideology or religion. It is the self-defense of those who are invaded and are not defended by their rulers, who cheer on, finance and open the doors to the invader.
The struggle of self-defense is therefore directed today not against the immigrant but against the false defenders of the nations, who are the rulers that betray their interests and practice a policy of conscious destruction of national identities. And that is what is at stake in the June elections.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
