TURN off the sound and you might be watching a video blog by a fixie-bike riding, avocado-munching hipster—an environmental campaigner or a music journalist, perhaps. But Martin Sellner is no liberal. The Vienna-based 27-year-old uses social media sites—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—to promote the “identitarian” movement of which he is a leader. The identitarians are Europe’s answer to the American “alt-right”, which helped carry Donald Trump to the White House.
What Germans call the Identitäre Bewegung (IB) first emerged in France in 2003. Boosted by the refugee crisis and Islamist terrorist attacks, it has spread across northern Europe in recent years. Its local groups all sport the same yellow-and-black websites and anti-migrant, anti-Muslim, anti-media messages. Like its transatlantic counterpart, the IB exercises an outsized influence in two ways. First, it connects the traditional far right to populist politicians on the national stage. Second, it helps both groups by repackaging their ideas for a younger audience.
Its professed mission is to preserve national differences. “Human rights include…
The Economist: Europe
