ANALYSIS

For years, Europe’s political classes have comforted themselves with a simple story: the primary danger to public order comes from the far-Right.

It is a reassuring narrative, neat enough for speeches and tidy enough for policy papers. Yet reality has begun to intrude, and nowhere more starkly than in France this week.

French police have arrested several hard-Left activists over the killing of a far-Right activist, as Reuters reports — a case that has shocked even a country long accustomed to ideological confrontation. According to investigators, the victim was targeted after a politically charged altercation, and suspects linked to militant far-Left networks were detained.

France has seen violent political clashes before, but the significance of this case lies not simply in its brutality. It lies in the direction of the violence — and the silence surrounding it.

For decades, European governments, universities and media institutions have treated radical Left activism as a largely rhetorical phenomenon: noisy, disruptive, occasionally illegal, but ultimately harmless. Violent extremism, by contrast, was presumed to sit almost exclusively on the nationalist Right. That assumption now looks dangerously outdated.

A continent of street militias

In France, organised far-Left groups — frequently operating under “anti-fascist” banners — have become a regular presence in demonstrations. Their tactics are neither spontaneous nor marginal. During pension-reform protests in 2023 and 2024, black-clad militants smashed shopfronts, torched vehicles and attacked riot police across multiple cities. Parisian authorities repeatedly described coordinated “ultra-left” blocs embedded within demonstrations, using crowd cover to conduct targeted violence.

Germany has faced an even more entrenched problem. In Leipzig and Berlin, autonomous militant collectives have attacked police stations, sabotaged rail infrastructure and carried out assaults on political opponents. German security services have long warned about linksextremismus — left-wing extremism — but their alerts rarely travel beyond specialist reports.

Italy offers another example. In Rome and Milan, anarchist networks have firebombed vehicles, attacked government buildings and organised violent prison protests in support of detained militants. These are not sporadic eruptions; they are ideological campaigns rooted in a belief that political violence is morally justified against “fascism,” broadly defined.

And now, in France, the consequences have become fatal.

Britain’s similar blind spot

The United Kingdom, despite its reputation for political stability, has experienced comparable dynamics. Violent protest tactics have increasingly emerged from activist movements aligned with radical causes.

Members of the direct-action group Palestine Action broke into a Royal Air Force base and vandalised military aircraft, causing significant damage, after which large-scale arrests followed demonstrations defying a legal ban on the organisation.

Environmental protest networks have also crossed into physical confrontation. Police officers have been assaulted during road-blocking operations and infrastructure sabotage campaigns. In several cases, emergency services were obstructed — a detail often dismissed as incidental, though legally it is grave.

Britain’s authorities tend to describe such incidents as “public order offences.” Yet politically motivated property destruction, coordinated sabotage and organised assault have historically carried another name: extremism.

The asymmetry of attention

None of this is to argue that far-Right violence does not exist. It does, and it is rightly policed. The issue is proportionality.

Across Europe, intelligence agencies increasingly report that militant far-Left networks are larger, more organised and more active in street confrontation than their far-Right counterparts. The difference lies in perception. The far-Right is viewed as ideologically illegitimate; the far-Left often cloaks itself in moral legitimacy — anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism. Those causes provide a reputational shield.

Consequently, identical acts are interpreted differently. A nationalist who smashes windows is an extremist. A revolutionary who does the same is a protester. A Right-wing group forming street patrols is a militia. A Left-wing group dressed in helmets and body armour is “anti-fascist.”

The French killing forces a reckoning precisely because it removes ambiguity. When political violence results in death, the comforting narrative collapses.

The moral hazard

There is also a deeper danger. By tolerating violence from one ideological direction while condemning it from another, governments unintentionally legitimise political vigilantism. Activists conclude — not entirely irrationally — that violence is permissible if framed as moral resistance.

This is historically familiar territory. The political street fighting of 1920s Europe did not begin with mass murder; it began with brawls, then organised beatings, then killings justified as defence of society. Democracies rarely fall overnight. They erode through selective tolerance of illegality.

France now confronts precisely that risk. The killing of a political opponent — regardless of his beliefs — is not protest. It is a declaration that persuasion has failed and force will replace it.

What Europe must confront

Europe’s problem is not merely extremism. It is the hierarchy of condemnation.

If democratic societies wish to prevent escalation, the rule must be simple: violence is illegitimate regardless of ideology. Political motives cannot excuse assault, arson or murder. Nor can fashionable causes sanitise them.

The French arrests matter because they puncture a myth. Political violence in Europe does not belong to one side of the spectrum. Increasingly, the most frequent street-level confrontation comes from radical Left networks convinced they are morally authorised to act.

The lesson is uncomfortable but necessary. Democracies survive not by choosing acceptable extremists, but by refusing to tolerate extremism at all.