Domestic Extremism in Europe - Athena Institute

mostly as a result of American monetary policy – ‘helped’
European elites and societies to avoid facing tough
choices.
Then, Europe suffered its most severe external shock
since the end of the Cold War: the 2008 financial crisis ba-
sically halted economic growth and aggravated political
tensions on the continent.
Since then, disillusionment was followed by anger. Then
came those willing to exploit and build on this anger. Far-
right and far-left parties are gaining strength and using
coded language to direct this anger to re-invented 'enemies'.
Sub-national, organized domestic extremist groups
are more pronounced in re-defining immigrants, the
Roma, the Jewry or the LGBT community as the enemy.
Some of them went further and did carry out lethal at-
tacks against these communities.
At the same time, many dismiss the current relative wave
of domestic extremism as a temporary side-effect of the
above external shock (the economic crisis). They could
not be more wrong.
As we argue in this study, the phenomenon is new in its
current form, therefore it cannot be understood in terms
of the '68 far-left extremism or of the far-right Nazi
movement of the '30s. The main reasons for that are the
Domestic Extremism in Europe - Threat Landscape 8