The summit organized this Sunday in Madrid by the Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF), an international organization of European parties to the right of the formations of Santiago Abascal (Vox, Spain) or Marine Le Pen (National Rally, France), which they call “populists”, served to spread the Russian version of the invasion of Ukraine. At an event hosted by the Spanish National Democracy party, the president of the international far-right group and leader of the Italian group Forza Nova, Roberto Fiore, assured that Moscow will simply react to a conspiracy orchestrated by the United States, NATO and the EU against which it “has the right to protect itself”. “It cannot be said that the war was started by Russia. Militarily it is so, but from a political and strategic point of view it is not”, he concluded.
Parties located on the far right of the political space of eight EU countries (Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Romania, Greece and Serbia) not only justified the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also gave it voice. The speech that raised the greatest expectations was that of the representative of the Brotherhood of Academicians of Russia, the only group participating in the summit that is not formally a party. Unlike the other speakers, the Russian – a pale, dapper young man – avoided giving his name to avoid visa problems, according to organization sources. The leader of their brotherhood is Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, close to the Kremlin, who has been sanctioned by the US, EU and UK for providing material and economic support to Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The owner of the Russian television network Tsargrad TV, he has financed the creation of websites that replicate Kremlin propaganda in Western Europe. Orthodox and ultra-conservative, he is accused of involvement in the abduction of Ukrainian children in areas occupied by Russia and has links to lobby Catholic fundamentalists, such as Hazte Oír.
Malofeev was the guest of the meeting that the APF parties held in St. Petersburg from 12 to 14 September, which was attended, on the Spanish side, by the vice president and head of International Relations of the National Democracy, Gonzalo Martín, and the national head of the Falange, Manuel Andrino, among others. The event had the approval of the Russian authorities, who gave it a luxurious setting, the Mariinsky Palace, the current seat of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, and ended with a march through the center of the former imperial capital. The meeting was attended as a guest by Alexander Dugin, Putin’s favorite philosopher and theorist of Russian neo-imperialism, whose daughter was murdered in August 2022, six months after the invasion of Ukraine.
Some of Dugin’s ideas regarding Eurasia were repeated this Sunday in Madrid by representatives of the European far right. Fiore defended that Europe includes “white and Orthodox” Russia and that its limits extend to the Bering Strait, which separates Siberia from Alaska, and does not end in the Urals: or that Moscow is “the third Rome”, capital of Christianity, after Rome and Constantinople. For the former Italian MEP, the enemy is not Putin, but those who “want to drag Europe into destruction through a war with Russia”. “We are on the side of those who defend Christian values, not the globalists,” proclaimed the Spaniard Gonzalo Martín, placing the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in the latter category.
Although all the speakers aligned themselves with the Russian theses, including Nick Griffin, former president of the British National Party, one of the most outspoken was the representative of the ultra-nationalist Serbian party, Goran Davidovich. At the last moment he replaced the leader of his group, Misa Vasic, who complained of health problems despite having reported the arrival of the Serbian delegation in Madrid via social networks on Saturday. Vasic boasts of having been decorated by the Russian army in the occupied province of Donetsk and of having been sanctioned by the United States for having collaborated in the illegal referendum for the annexation of the Ukrainian separatist republics to Russia.
Unlike other far-right parties present in the institutions, such as the Spanish Vox, the members of the APF have demonstrated their anti-Semitism, placing tycoons of Jewish origin such as George Soros in the Deep statethe deep state that rules the world from the shadows. To justify his break with the Ukrainian nationalists who defend their country from the Russian invasion, Fiore assured that before starting the war he had reproached them for having agreed to profit with “Zionist money to be used against Russia”.
The international far right was represented in the European Parliament until the rise of what they call populist parties left them, as of 2019, without political space. One of the strongest outfits of the group was Greece’s Golden Dawn, which in 2020 was outlawed and declared a criminal gang by Greek courts due to its involvement in violent actions. Zois Bechlis, representative of K21, the successor party to Golden Dawn, asked Madrid for the release of its leaders, who remain in prison. Athens will be the scene of the next APF summit, which will also meet in Rome at the beginning of the year.
For his part, the president of National Democracy, Pedro Chaparro, guest of the meeting, assured that his party maintains a line of “openness” towards other far-right formations, such as the Falange or the National Nucleus, with which he expressed the certainty that “there will be a confluence in the future”. Like its European counterparts, National Democracy has been crushed by the rise of Vox. The last time it ran, within the ADÑ coalition, in the 2019 European elections, it obtained 11,700 votes across Spain, while in the 2023 general elections, the Falange alone obtained 4,700. Now, these forces hope to be reborn from their ashes, taking advantage of the boil that this political space has entered after the concentrations in front of the federal headquarters of the PSOE in via Ferraz, in November 2023, which both Vox and the PP wanted to capitalize on without taking responsibility for their consequences.
