The riots that have erupted across England in the last week have been splashed across Europe’s newspapers and broadcast on the primetime news. There have been editorials in France’s Le Monde, video reports in Spain’s El Pais and podcasts in Sweden’s Aftonbladet. The Italian newspaper, La Stampa, published video footage of disturbances in Plymouth on Monday night, and described the rioters as a mix of ‘extremists and hooligans’.
Why did the anti-immigration riots not explode first in France or Germany?
Some of the coverage has been superficial. The editorial in Le Monde read: ‘The current riots raise the painful question of the underestimated influence of the far-right in the UK, in a country that likes to recall its traditions of political moderation and its past of resistance to Nazism.’ The German tabloid, Bild, published a more in-depth and honest analysis of the riots on Tuesday. ‘Can something like that also happen with us?’ asked the paper. Yes, was the general consensus from the cross-section of experts canvassed by the paper. Felix Neumann, an extremist researcher, explained there are various far-right organisations in Germany full of angry young men who ‘definitely have a mobilisation capacity’.
Thorsten Frei, an MP in the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, said that the riots in Britain should be seen as a ‘warning’ to Germany. He added: ‘In this country, too, we have to note that migration policy is rejected in some parts of the population and contributes to the strengthening of populist aspirations.’ A psychologist, Ahmad Mansour, said that Germany was in danger of experiencing similar unrest if the poilitical class didn’t address the anger of some of its citizens. Mansour advised: ‘Limiting migration, deportation of criminals, border controls and better integration, taking fears of the population seriously.’
There has been scant reaction from Europe’s political class to the riots in England. Right-wing politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Jordan Bardella in France, and Italy’s deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, have passed no comment on social media. They and their peers are enjoying the sun and the Olympics, recharging their batteries before they return to the office later this month. But Europe’s political class will be nervously following events in England and examining their own societies. Could it happen here?
Another question they will probably ponder is: why England? Why did the anti-immigration riots not explode first in France or Germany? One reason may be Brexit. When Britain voted to leave the EU eight years ago, people believed that immigration would be brought under control. The opposite has happened. Other European nations are angry at the scale of immigration in the last decade, but in England this discontent is deepened by a sense of betrayal.
There is also, as Italian paper La Stampa alluded to, England’s ‘hooligan’ element. Italians have more reason than most Europeans to recall the English football hooligans who terrorised the continent in the 1980s and 1990s, sacking cities from Marseille to Dublin to Rotterdam. In 1985, Liverpool hooligans indirectly caused the deaths of 39 Juventus fans when they rioted at the European Cup Final in Heysel. Football hooliganism was dubbed the ‘English disease’ and it soon infected other nations, notably in northern Europe where Dutch, Belgian and German hooligans modelled themselves on the English.
Some of the troublemakers in England probably do fit the description of ‘far-right’ but many are recreational rioters and hooligans. The worry for Europe, however, is that this new ‘English disease’ will once more spread across the continent.
