Extreme right and Russia: cold affection (nd-aktuell.de)

Lega boss Matteo Salvini reacted angrily when journalists asked him about US secret service reports in the final phase of the Italian election campaign, according to which Russia had invested at least 300 million euros in foreign parties, their candidates and other political organizations since 2014. He will sue anyone who claims his party has ever received money from Moscow. Salvini claimed that not a single “rouble, euro, dinare or dollar” ever flowed from Russia. In fact, there is no evidence to date that the League or its leader has ever received financial support from Russia. The US government only released parts of its information, it is only known that the money flowed to more than two dozen countries. However, the governments of the countries concerned should be informed. If Italy were among them, this would have a curious ending, given the outcome of last Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Rome, where an extreme right-wing coalition made up of Forza Italia, Lega and the victor Fratelli d’Italia should soon govern. The prospective Prime Minister, the fascist Giorgia Meloni, vehemently denies ever having received Russian money.

In her case, that may even seem more credible than in the case of Salvini, Meloni has not attracted attention in the past because of its proximity to the Kremlin. On Wednesday she declared that she would continue to stand by Ukraine. The leaders of their two coalition partners, Lega leader Salvini and Forza leader Silvio Berlusconi, are known for their close ties to Russia and President Vladimir Putin in particular. Iconic is the photo of Salvini, posing like a fan on Red Square in Moscow in 2014, wearing a T-shirt depicting Putin. In 2017, the Lega and Putin’s party »United Russia« entered into a cooperation for mutual exchange.

With the invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine this spring, the open enthusiasm abruptly disappeared. Salvini criticized the war of aggression and even presented himself as a refugee helper on the Polish-Ukrainian border. However, he repeatedly questioned sanctions. This puts him in line with Berlusconi. The 85-year-old even defended Putin in the Italian election campaign. He was “urged by the Russian people, by his party, by his ministers” to “think up this special operation,” Berlusconi said in a TV interview. That doesn’t sound like a clean break.

Many extreme right-wing parties in Europe are in the same situation as in Italy. They are uncomfortable with their earlier, openly flaunted ties to the Kremlin since the war of aggression, and their rejection of the attack on Ukraine is more or less clear. Before the escalation of the Ukraine war, leading representatives of right-wing parties almost held hands on visits to Moscow. In the case of the AfD, the travel list of former and current top officials is long. The two AfD party leaders Tino Churpalla and Alice Weidel were guests in Moscow in 2021 and also met government representatives. In 2017, the then party leader Frauke Petry stayed in the Russian capital. In addition, AfD representatives were hired by the state as election observers in order to legitimize the votes. This was also the case when OSCE election observers canceled their parliamentary election mission in 2021 due to extremely restrictive conditions.

In the meantime, the AfD is more cautious at management level. When three members of the state parliament set out for Russia last week to travel from there to the partly occupied eastern Ukraine, the party leadership tried to keep the project as far away as possible: the three AfD politicians Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Daniel Wald and Christian Blex had each other to justify to the federal board and to clarify the background of the trip, it said. The trip had immediate consequences for the North Rhine-Westphalian MP Blex. The AfD faction in the Düsseldorf state parliament threw him out, the state executive board is discussing further consequences. There is no similar threat to Tillschneider and Wald. Both are organized in Saxony-Anhalt, the East German AfD associations led by ethnic nationalists continue to be pro-Russian. The small tour group is considered heroic here.

In its communication, however, the AfD, like most other extreme right-wing parties in the EU, tries to avoid showing too much sympathy with Russia. They concentrate much more on stirring up fear of the consequences of the war for their own population and therefore rejecting sanctions. In the AfD sound, there is talk of “German interests”, their campaign slogan “Our country first!” is the slogan of the extreme right throughout Europe, whether in the German AfD, the French Rassemblement National or the FPÖ in Austria. This also applies to the Spanish Vox, which, however, was not a friend of Moscow even before the Ukraine invasion. Party leader Santiago Abascal portrays the problems of inflation and lack of energy as failures of the Spanish government and national disasters instead of looking for answers internationally.