White Power: An Investigation into the Far Right in Germany, Belgium and France

The journey begins in Germany. According to the film, the intelligence services there have counted 35,000 right-wing extremists, nearly 15,000 of whom are considered violent, a record in Europe. At the Federal Ministry of the Interior, a state secretary and former counterterrorism prosecutor traces the history of this movement. Until late in the 1960s, he explains, former Nazis and neo-Nazis tried to carry National Socialist ideology over into "the new era."

As for violence, he places a peak in 2015–2016, followed by stagnation "at a much, much too high level," at around 1,100 incidents. He notes a slight rise in propaganda offenses and incitement to hatred. What worries him most is a shift in discourse: "the limits of what can be said are being pushed back." He considers this development highly threatening and, at its core, hostile to democracy.

To understand the racial dimension of this xenophobia, the director meets a former activist named Axel near Cologne, who has since renounced his past. Nicknamed "the Hitler of Cologne" in the 2000s, he was for a decade one of the most influential figures in German neo-Nazism. In his view, people don't become extremists because of a well-made leaflet or a good speech, but because something is missing in their lives: the desire to rise above others, the search for a community, or simply an activity offered by someone. He recounts organizing in Cologne the first demonstration of the "national camp" since 1945, which suddenly gave him an important position in the scene.

He admits he was a "verbal killer." He called for fighting the opponent, for "eliminating" them, for "smashing the system." This language, he says, desensitizes and brutalizes. You end up telling yourself that if others don't understand, you will force them to understand, and violence then becomes a necessary means of imposing your truth. Leafing through his photos from that period, he recalls a rally in a highly multicultural Cologne neighborhood under the slogan "Germany for the Germans," and a conspiracist worldview in which democrats, capitalists, communists, the Church and multiculturalism were all rejected. He says that deep down he knew they were talking openly about Hitler, antisemitism and racial superiority.

A second former member, Philip Schlaffer, describes joining the skinhead movement in 1993, in an East Germany where the scene was very present. The worldview was "very simple": all white people are good, everyone else is bad. He remembers groups of tattooed skinheads, with shaved heads and Fred Perry polo shirts, who laid down the law on the streets. What attracted him was that "nobody tells them what to do." He later founded his own "comradeship," which took in angry young people disillusioned with politics. Today, he turns the movement's discourse, which cast itself as that of the "good guys," on its head: "we weren't the good ones, we were the bad ones."

The film then takes a historical detour. It dates the coining of the word "antisemitism" to 1879, inspired by the idea of an Aryan race destined to rule the world. It points out that in the United States, interracial marriage remained banned in some states until 1967, and that the country gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan and its millions of members, which the narrator presents as the first fascist movement in history. In 1916, Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, asserted that a single drop of Black blood was enough for someone to be considered Black. According to the film, the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, hanged thirty years later at Nuremberg, saw American supremacism as a positive first step toward Nazism.

In the 1960s, the American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell influenced supremacism on both sides of the Atlantic and set it against the struggles of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. A researcher explains that the slogan "White Power" came precisely from this milieu: American neo-Nazis wanted to answer "Black Power" with a so-called white pride, based on the idea of a unified white world and an ethnic, racial and cultural identity to be preserved. The documentary recounts the interview Rockwell gave to Playboy in 1966, on the condition that the journalist not be Jewish. The magazine sent Alex Haley, a Black journalist known for his interviews with Malcolm X. Rockwell placed a revolver on the table, used the racist slur and declared that he had "nothing against" Black people but that they would be "happier in Africa." Haley replied that he had often been called that, but this was the first time he was being paid to hear it.

The same researcher emphasizes a transformation he considers fundamental: for more than fifteen years, across all currents of the far right, including the most moderate and the most law-abiding, ethnic concerns have been taking up a growing place.

According to the narrator, the supremacism of these former activists remained confined to small radical cores in the 1990s and 2000s. The 2010s changed everything with the Syrian civil war and the migration crisis. In 2015, Angela Merkel took in around a million refugees. The film shows her speech: everyone who enters Europe has the right to be treated humanely, those who fall under the Geneva Convention may stay, and those fleeing war and terror will have to be integrated and helped.

The documentary then follows Björn Höcke, a figure from the most radical fringe of the AfD, the "Flügel" (the wing). At a rally linked to the anti-immigration movement Pegida, Höcke claims that ten million people have entered the country since 2015. The narrator points out that, according to Germany's statistics office, this figure includes all legal arrivals, a large share of which come from Europe, and he considers the confusion deliberate. "Remigration," meaning the mass expulsion of non-European foreigners, is today championed, in his view, by Höcke as well as by the entire European far right, from violent fringe groups to parties. The director pauses to ask: should a far right whose barely veiled violence is chilling be given a platform? He acknowledges that the question is divisive.

In a speech, Höcke describes a "cultural struggle" for German and European culture, which he says is "in very great danger." He presents the AfD as the only party that wants to preserve it "without ifs or buts." He announces that an AfD government would make Germany the driving force in the fight against illegal immigration and for remigration, and that Europe would be built "like a fortress." He cites Viktor Orbán and the 2,700 illegal entries that Hungary supposedly prevented thanks to border troops and fences. Building such barriers around Germany would, in his view, cost a few billion, whereas immigration over the past ten years has cost, and will continue to cost, "trillions." The narrator stresses that Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, considers this racial vision a threat to the Constitution.

A Spiegel journalist specializing in the far right describes the Flügel as a group that has been officially dissolved but remains active, since its members stayed in the party. According to her, its ideas and networks still function, as can be seen at party conventions, and they ultimately hold the majority. Höcke would therefore be the true holder of power in the party, "because without him, nothing gets done." She also points to a mistake made by German society: believing that neo-Nazis necessarily have shaved heads, combat boots and bomber jackets. Far-right ideas can also come dressed in an elegant jacket, and part of the AfD's success stems from its initial image as a "party of professors."

The film then meets a far-right publisher, a former soldier, who has been active in this milieu for about thirty years. He presents Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel imagining Europe being overwhelmed by an invasion of migrants, which he published in Germany with an interview with the author, as "very important for us." For him, 2015 was decisive in the AfD's rise: a "shock" and a feeling of powerlessness in the face of arrivals presented as skilled families, when in his view they were mostly young men who had come to "change this country." He asserts that Germany is Germany because Germans live there and built their culture there, that mass immigration destroys this "uniqueness," and that integration is all the more difficult the greater the cultural, ethnic and religious distance.

In January 2024, the investigative outlet Correctiv revealed a secret meeting in Potsdam. Members of the AfD and the conservative CDU met there with the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner, who advocates also expelling German citizens of foreign origin. The narrator notes that some saw it as an echo of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. The Spiegel journalist points out that after the debate over the meaning of "remigration" within the AfD itself, Höcke and the other parliamentary group leaders in the eastern states published a statement that explicitly includes "non-assimilated" Germans. That, she says, is exactly what is at stake: driving out of the country, through coercion and pressure, those whom the AfD deems insufficiently integrated.

The director travels to Austria to make sure he has understood the concept correctly. Sellner says it is common for AfD officials and activists to meet privately. He identifies as targets of remigration non-European, African, Arab and Muslim people living in "parallel societies," which he considers to be growing. He also describes a reform of the system, a strict European border regime with pushbacks at the borders, and migrant camps outside Europe.

The narrator points out that the rejection of multicultural society is nothing new. What is new is that it now appeals to one voter in five in Germany and one in three in the former East Germany. In his view, the first electoral victory of the Flügel's line in Thuringia cannot be explained by migration alone. He refers to a "dark Germany," to use the German press's expression, where 20% of people say that poverty and inequality fuel the radical vote, a situation the AfD seeks to exploit. A young activist explains that he got into politics because of migration policy and claims that Germany offers asylum seekers the most favorable social conditions. The narrator responds that no one flees the massacres in Syria, Afghanistan or Sudan to collect welfare benefits, and that migrants' labor has helped make Germany the world's third-largest economy.

At a monthly AfD stand in Ohrdruf, Thuringia, activists explain that they gather residents' concerns. One of them rejects the label of Nazi or extremist: if that were the case, he would not be a member. They all come "from the bourgeois spectrum," are attached to their region and are therefore "not afraid of the Verfassungsschutz."

The director then heads to Belgium, which he presents as a unique case. In the French-speaking part, since 1992, the far right has had no access to live broadcasts on public television and radio. The Belgian Front National ended up dissolving itself with barely 1% of the vote. This success could have inspired other countries, the narrator notes, but that did not happen. In Flanders, the nationalist far right, the Vlaams Blok, which became Vlaams Belang, has settled at the top of the polls. During a filmed exchange in Flanders, an activist explains that they should start by sending back illegal immigrants and criminals. When asked what would happen to the children, he laughingly mentions a train abroad.

According to the narrator, the party's xenophobic discourse has not changed in several decades, but it has taken on a concept that unites the entire far right: the "great replacement," which originally targeted Jews at the end of the 19th century. At a meeting, a speaker welcomes the audience to Brussels, "the so-called capital of Europe, the city where the great replacement has already taken place." Another speaker quips that in twenty years, the president of Parliament will address the public "probably in Arabic." A political scientist explains that the idea of the great replacement rests on a racial vision of the nation, in which a French person of African origin would remain "forever of African origin." Electorally, he says, it clearly drives votes.

The film counters this discourse with the work of a student who chose the subject after Donald Trump compared Brussels to a "hellhole" because of its migration situation. His data are as follows. Among some twenty major international cities, including New York, London, Singapore and Melbourne, Brussels ranks among those with the most immigrants. Out of roughly 1.2 million residents, six in ten were born non-Belgian, two of whom later acquired citizenship, and about 40% of the population today holds a foreign nationality.

But, he stresses, most of these foreigners are Europeans, the opposite of the far-right narrative of being overwhelmed by people from North Africa or Central Africa. The largest diaspora in Brussels is French. In the top 10 nationalities, only one is non-European: Moroccans, in fourth place. His goal, he says, was to "break down preconceptions."

Vlaams Belang, for its part, presents the great replacement not as a conspiracy theory or an ideology, but as "a simple empirical observation," at least for those not "blinded by multiculturalism." A former party president, who sits in the European Parliament in Marine Le Pen's group, recalls that the ties of friendship between the Front National and his party date back to the 1980s. He speaks of the "millions of illegals" whose return should be encouraged and enforced, by negotiating with their countries of origin. In passing, he calls the Geneva Convention "madness." This process would take, in his view, twenty or thirty years, "but not before first turning off the tap."

The Belgian political scientist describes the far right as a "galaxy." An inner circle brings together what he calls radical right populist parties: the Rassemblement National, Vlaams Belang, Vox. Another circle challenges democracy far more fundamentally, with neo-Nazi-type movements such as Golden Dawn in Greece, recognized as a criminal organization by the courts, or individuals such as Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the Oslo and Utøya attacks in July 2011. For him, denouncing a "change of civilization" is standard across the entire far right, from the most moderate to the most extreme.

The film also discusses Brenton Tarrant, perpetrator of the mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, who killed 51 people. It asserts that the great replacement concept has inspired nearly 70 attacks worldwide in ten years, an increase of 320% according to the UN. This terrorist current is called accelerationism. Its manifesto, described as a veritable manual for supremacist killers, pays tribute to murderers and calls for killing. A researcher explains that this current, which emerged from 2015 onward, holds that the race war has begun, that a genocide will take place no matter what, and that what matters is for white people to "win this race." Its followers are Holocaust deniers in their own way: they blame Hitler for not having exterminated Europe's Jews, because they believe Jews are orchestrating the "white genocide" through globalization and immigration.

In France, the narrator reports that the country alone accounts for nearly half of the far-right terrorist acts committed or foiled in Europe, according to the European data cited. French intelligence counts 3,000 violent ultra-right activists there, some of whom are on a watch list. On Telegram, this violence is expressed without restraint. A journalist analyzes a channel that grouped potential activists by département. Judging by their profile pictures, some pose in army uniform with French Foreign Legion patches, while others wear what looks like a tactical vest marked "police." The exchanges contain calls for murder: targeting a migrant reception center and burning it down, and even advice on making bodies disappear by weighting them down in water. According to the film, the channel was shut down, prosecutions were brought and some police officers were convicted.

The documentary dwells on an ultraviolent current that re-established itself in the early 2020s: revolutionary nationalism, present in several small groups in France and Europe. Its intellectual mentor is François Duprat, who himself defined it as a form of neo-fascism. In archival footage, Duprat estimates that the far right represents 8 to 10% of the population "without any political work," but that its major themes are approved by a majority or a large minority of French people. He cites 58% regretting the loss of the empire and about 54% rejecting Marxism. He concludes that a political tool was missing: the party.

A historian explains that Duprat was the driving force behind the creation of the Front National, of which he became number two. Between 1972 and 1978, the FN was primarily anti-communist and paid little attention to immigration. Duprat understood that this ground was already occupied by more established and more respectable figures, such as Valéry Giscard d'Estaing or Jacques Chirac. He therefore laid out in writing a pivot toward immigration and the social question. In 1978, the poster "One million unemployed is one million immigrants too many" appeared. The activists realized they had the right slogan when left-wing activists, until then indifferent, began tearing down their posters.

Archival footage then shows skinheads from the Jeunesses Nationalistes Révolutionnaires boasting about "beating up immigrants" to make themselves heard. According to the police archives cited, violence against North Africans rose by 225% between 1980 and 1983. According to the historian, 2001 brought a new acceleration and 2015 tripled the number of violent acts against North Africans. He believes there is indeed "a social demand," a strong opposition to the presence of people of immigrant origin and to Islam, of which the radical right has been a vanguard.

To understand the relationship between radicals and parties, the director meets Christian Bouchet, a historic figure of revolutionary nationalism. He presents him as courteous but radical, the founder of the most extremist group of the past thirty years before he joined Marine Le Pen's party. Bouchet repeats the idea he attributes to Duprat: a fringe group gets nowhere. No radical group, he says, has become anything else in fifty years. You top out at 300, 400, maybe 1,000 members, "that's not how you take power." On the other hand, a radical group carries new ideas, acts as a "lobby" with the major parties by influencing their base, and reaches part of the youth. It will "spray ideas."

He recounts rising very quickly through the Front's hierarchy thanks to his activist know-how, far superior to that of local officials. He and those close to him supported Marine Le Pen, whom they then saw as a modern version of what they believed. At the time, the Front did not pose enough of a danger to the "system" for anyone to be interested in his past. He is certain that today it would be dug up. The narrator sees in this the Rassemblement National's habit of recycling radical activists into its ranks.

In Paris, this current is embodied by the GUD, founded after May 1968 to violently confront the left at universities. According to the narrator, the group dissolved in 2013 after the killing of young anti-fascist activist Clément Méric by one of its members, then took the name Zouaves Paris. In November 2022, it readopted the name GUD under the leadership of Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier, whom the film describes as an extremely violent figure. On May 6, 2023, 600 activists marched through Paris with almost no police presence.

A Mediapart journalist explains that this march, clearly driven by the GUD scene, brought back to the surface the presence of Axel Loustau and Olivier Duguet, associates of Marine Le Pen and former treasurers of her micro-party Jeanne. Mediapart has documented, investigation after investigation, this "GUD connection's" taste for parties with dubious folklore. She shows posts by Axel Loustau, a former regional councilor who headed the financial unit of Marine Le Pen's 2017 campaign: a plate of rice forming a swastika, and a January 2013 exchange riddled with allusions to the Holocaust, with ovens and soap, at the time of a rise in gas prices. According to her, some young GUD members, including Logan Djian and Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier, were hired by their companies. Ties also persist through parliamentary assistants or interns of RN deputies, some of whom have been spotted in violent actions, and through the presence of former members of Génération Identitaire, the GUD or La Cocarde at RN meetings.

A leader of the student union La Cocarde describes its goal: to bring people together outside of parties and wage a "cultural struggle" in universities he considers largely won over to the left, as he believes the national education system, broadcasting and Netflix are. University would be "the last airlock" before working life, the moment "to take hold of young people." Asked about his ties to the GUD, he states that he has "no structural link" with that group or any other.

Saphia Aït Ouarabi, an anti-racist activist and former vice president of SOS Racisme, by contrast sees "extremely strong porosity" between the union-based far right, the political far right and groups such as the GUD. Watching a leafleting session, Saphia Aït Ouarabi points out Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier and is worried by the presence of a security detail, which would indicate a willingness to take action. These security details are often armed, in their words, with brass knuckles, umbrellas or motorcycle helmets.

Saphia Aït Ouarabi speaks of "the most terrible years" in terms of the far right's normalization, particularly the RN's, and rejects the term "de-demonization," which would imply that it had once been demonized. According to this analysis, the 2022 presidential election accelerated Marine Le Pen's normalization. The media were mistaken in staging a rivalry with Éric Zemmour: his arrival actually made Marine Le Pen more respectable, by making people believe that she "would only love cats," when her platform includes abolishing birthright citizenship and national preference.

Saphia Aït Ouarabi then recounts an action carried out by SOS Racisme at a Zemmour rally in early December 2021. Activists stood up to shout "no to racism." The slogan had been deliberately chosen to be "as dumb as a box of rocks" to show that it would provoke hostility. About a hundred people then attacked them, Zouaves from Marc de Cacqueray-Valménier's group but also rank-and-file Reconquête activists. According to Saphia Aït Ouarabi, it was the first time French public debate acknowledged the porosity between the fascistic far right and the political far right.

A deputy who called for a parliamentary inquiry into the far right reads out in the National Assembly a list of incidents that occurred in a single week: a violent group calling for the killing of foreigners or LGBT people, an attempted arson and a graffiti reading "Arabs out" in Calvi, racist graffiti near a high school in Givors, Nazi inscriptions on the Communist Party headquarters of the Côtes-d'Armor in Saint-Brieuc. It was, he insists, a "typical" week, and he could have presented the same list for the previous or following week.

He shows the threats he received from a "Comité 732" starting in November 2022. The first suggests that his place is "underground." The second details possible surveillance of his home, his movements and his schedule, then mentions abduction and being put to death. He describes fringe groups that are organized on a European scale and operational, as well as a strategy of blowing a news item out of proportion with the help of media outlets such as Valeurs actuelles, Boulevard Voltaire or Livre noir, which construct the narrative, then mobilizing on the ground to make people give in. He asks this question: will we have to wait for an elected official, an activist or a citizen to be killed for their left-wing commitment, for welcoming the most vulnerable or for the LGBT cause, before the government acts?

According to the narrator, nearly 40 violent fringe groups are active in France and very few have been dissolved. To understand this tolerance, the director goes to Lyon, which he presents as a kind of "Mecca" of the far right in France and even in Europe. A leader of the revolutionary nationalist group Lyon Populaire says he wants to "go toward the people" and get out of the "political ghetto." He says he attracts varied profiles and has ambitions beyond the local level. For him, replacement "is a fact." The group does not distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, but between European and non-European immigration: a French person would be "a European of French language and culture," and one would not put the assimilation of an Italian on the same level as that of a Cameroonian or a Moroccan. He says he is ideologically distinct from Reconquête and the RN, while acknowledging convergences with the latter on social issues and ecology. The narrator points out that a member of this group is also a local RN official and a former RN substitute candidate in legislative elections.

At a stand, this activist presents the movement's platform: ecology, energy, bioethics. He defends "man from conception to natural death," and therefore opposition to euthanasia and abortion. He accuses the prefecture of trying "by all means" to prevent their growth. When events are banned, he adds, the message sent would be that only violence pays, and the group would then "no longer necessarily be in control" of young activists' fervor. The narrator observes that neither the weather nor the police, who were present, prevented the stand from operating all morning.

A local elected official describes the far right's foothold in Vieux Lyon, in the 5th arrondissement, around identified venues on the Montée du Change: a boxing gym and an association-run bar. According to him, this is where "punitive expeditions" set out against LGBT events, pro-Palestine rallies or on the occasion of football matches. He wonders how a few hundred people carrying such a toxic message can continue to operate. A representative of the state explains the difficulty: individuals work discreetly and the groups do not claim their actions. The work of intelligence services and prosecutors therefore consists of establishing links between acts, places and groups in order to build cases. The effectiveness of dissolutions, the narrator notes, remains debated.

In response to these groups, La Jeune Garde is getting organized. Its spokesperson Raphaël Arnault recounts that some forty people came to his building to attack him, with several vehicles circling around his apartment. He doesn't know what state he would be in if he hadn't been warned. The group claims a "culture of self-defense": doing anti-fascism without anticipating attacks would have been "absurd." Showing that they defend themselves has, in his view, slowed these attacks. One activist asserts that where active militancy exists, the street-level far right retreats, an observation she says she made in Lyon. The activists prefer to put up posters in broad daylight so they can be seen and not come across as "antifas emerging from the forests."

The film follows a demonstration that brings together reinforcements from the five cities where La Jeune Garde is established: Paris, Strasbourg, Lille, Montpellier and Toulon. On the microphone, speakers declare that Lyon is "the capital of the far right" and that the premises of radical groups must be shut down. According to the narrator, masked and armed activists, notably from Lyon Populaire, attempt to attack the march but are held back by the police. After nightfall, they go after a debate on Palestine at a cultural center near their premises. An elected official recalls having written more than a year earlier to President Macron with documented evidence.

At an activist debate, a speaker sums up the mindset of those fighting the far right: the real question is to "defeat defeatism." He calls for displaying "military art" in arguments and actions, because the lines have been "very deeply pushed in" three and a half years before the presidential election. Winning the French presidential election, he stresses, is not like being prime minister in Italy or Hungary, or even president of the United States: it means seizing "all the levers of power."

The narrator concludes that, from ultraviolent fringe groups to parties, the far right forms more than an ecosystem: a family sharing the same racial vision. He recalls that in 2002, more than a million protesters said no to this vision in the streets of Paris, and that in 2024, millions of Germans did the same. But these ideas have already, in his view, borne fruit in European societies. He ends on a question: how many of us would stand up to the far right if it applied its program across Europe? "It is 2024, and Europe is at a crossroads."