The American Dark Boney Behind Europe’s Far Right

From Britain to Hungary to Italy, the far right is on the rise. openDemocracy investigations over the past year have revealed the vital role of US Christian conservatives.

The composition of CitizenGo’s board illustrates the transnational complexion of the support it can rely on. It includes a close business associate of Konstantin Malofeev, sometimes called “the Orthodox Oligarch,” who has been targeted by US and European sanctions for allegedly propping up the pro-Russian breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine.

It also includes an Italian politician, Luca Volonte, who is currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges. An American connection is apparent, too: Brian Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage and a prominent anti-LGBT activist who also leads the International Organization for Family group that coordinates the WCF, is a board member.

CitizenGo’s Arsuaga told our undercover reporter that he gets advice “every couple of months or so” from a “senior expert” in fundraising and technology, who is, he said, “paid by Brian Brown.” That expert is Darian Rafie, Brown’s partner at another US group named ActRight, which describes itself as a “clearinghouse for conservative action.”

ActRight recently encouraged people to “thank president Trump for stopping transgender insanity in the military,” and asked in a Facebook post, “how much do you think Barack Obama paid Harvard to admit his pot-head daughter?”

Our reporter also spoke directly to Rafie, an experienced American political operative who has worked for the Republican Party and a Tea Party media outlet, and said he was involved in the Trump campaign.

He discussed his longstanding relationship with CitizenGo and boasted of his ability to use controversial “geofencing” technology to collect personal data about potential voters gathered in a specific area, such as a campaign rally, via their mobile phones.

Responding to our findings, the former US Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who worked alongside Senator John McCain in efforts to reform American electoral finance laws, called these developments “frightening.” He urged European authorities and regulators to “get ahead of this and not make the same mistakes that were made here in the United States.”

The growing role that CitizenGo appears to be playing in giving European far-right parties in-kind support is a new application of methods long used by internationally connected culture warriors who deploy expertise, as well as cash, in their global campaigns.

For example, during Ireland’s historic abortion referendum last year, openDemocracy reported on how American alt-right activists were targeting Irish voters with social media propaganda. We also revealed how foreign activists could donate to campaigns and continue to buy social media ads online—this in the same week that Mark Zuckerberg made a very public promise to members of the European Parliament that Facebook had banned such foreign ads seeking to interfere in domestic elections.

What’s clear in the pattern of connections and support between American ultra-conservatives and European far-right groups is the willingness on both sides to exploit loopholes in regulations and to embrace unscrupulous, even illegal, methods.

Last month, openDemocracy worked with a nonprofit watchdog named Unhack Democracy Europe to publish a report pointing to widespread fraud by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in the 2018 Hungarian elections, including vote-buying, voter intimidation, tampering with postal votes, missing ballots, and election software malfunctions. (The result of that election was to give Orbán a parliamentary super-majority, enabling him to further tighten his grip on the judiciary, media, and other organs of power.)

The report went on to identify ways in which the European parliamentary elections in Hungary were even more vulnerable to such abuse than national ones. Unhack Democracy is now compiling a follow-up report on what actually happened there in the European elections.

In another development in the run-up to the European-wide vote, openDemocracy received a leaked report authored by the European Parliament’s vice-president, a senior Irish MEP, that sought to facilitate greater influence for religious lobbyists in Brussels. This controversial plan was shelved after lawmakers protested, but with a larger bloc of right-wing populist members now in Parliament, the proposal is expected to resurface.

Although Europe’s far-right parties fell well short of predictions that they would redraw the map of European political power, underperforming in Germany, Holland, and Denmark, they did make significant gains—especially in Italy, Hungary, and France. “Rather than a victory for democracy,” concluded the Dutch scholar Cas Mudde, the European elections showed how populism, and particularly “the populist radical right” has become “mainstreamed and normalized.”

At the World Congress of Families conference in Verona, on the eve of those elections, the mood was jubilant. “It’s great to be among such a group of far-right radicals,” joked the Christian conservative writer and YouTube personality Steve Turley. Proclaiming a “reawakening,” from Trump’s America to Modi’s India, Turley predicted that religious conservatives would soon outnumber “secularists”—simply by outbreeding them.

Another American, a Missouri lawyer and Republican activist named Ed Marton, who co-authored a book called The Conservative Case for Trump, arrived at the podium in a MAGA hat and proclaimed that “Brexit, the Bible, and borders” could “make Europe great again.”

But Marton and his colleagues will not have it all their own way. For the first time at the WCF gathering, the crowds protesting outside were far larger than the audience inside.

More than 30,000 protesters took over Verona after the Non Una di Meno feminist group, inspired by the trailblazing Argentinian Ni Una Menos (“Not One Less”) movement, called a demonstration. People traveled from across Italy and as far away as Belarus, Spain, Croatia, and Britain to take part.

The next day, a smaller group of women staged a silent protest dressed in the iconic red robes and bonnets of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. These robes have been worn by women protesting the backlash against reproductive rights across the US, as well as in Poland, Australia, Ireland, and Argentina. We met a woman from Croatia who said she planned to join a “walk for freedom” to counter an annual anti-abortion “walk for life” when she got home. “This is just the beginning,” she told us.

This article first appeared in the New York Review of Books

*Authors: Mary Fitzgerald