As Trump Arrives, Europe’s Right Claims Charlie Kirk as One of Their Own

For all the many languages spoken at an international convention of far-right parties this weekend in Madrid, Charlie Kirk was the one name on all their lips.

“This is mobilizing,” said André Ventura, the leader of Portugal’s surging far-right party, Chega, after he had fired up the Madrid crowd with outrage over the killing of Mr. Kirk, a popular organizer of conservative youth who was assassinated in Utah last week.

“Usually, the leftists look at a tragedy and say, ‘OK, this guy is a hero, let’s make him a hero.’ But now the right wing and the conservatives are doing the same,” Mr. Ventura said. Right-wing leaders, he added, “should pray for Charlie Kirk, for his family, but we should also not forget his name and use him.”

President Trump is arriving in Europe against a backdrop of conservative fervor, as the continent’s hard-right parties seize on Mr. Kirk’s death as a rallying point. After decades of claiming victimization in their own countries, Europe’s right wing is on an upswing. They are winning elections, gaining traction among young voters and enjoying the support of Mr. Trump, who landed in Britain on Tuesday for a state visit.

And talking about Mr. Kirk’s assassination, experts said, fits neatly into their pre-existing, and often embroidered, narratives of persecution and exclusion.

“There is a common narrative across the far right of victimization, and this is one of the reasons this is so attractive to latch on to,” said Marta Lorimer, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University and an expert on the far right in Europe. “It says, ‘Look, not only have we been excluded, but now we’re also being murdered.’”

On Sunday, Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, Spain’s increasingly popular far-right party that hosted the event, declared “the assassination of Charlie was not an isolated case,” adding, “We know they don’t kill us because we are fascists, they call us fascists so they can kill us.”

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister and a hero to Europe’s right, began her video address to the convention by paying “homage to Charlie Kirk,” a reminder, she said, of “on which side there is violence and intolerance.”

The message about Mr. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, resonated around the European far-right echo chamber.

Right-wing members of the European Parliament banged on desks when denied a moment of silence for him in Strasbourg, France, something they said George Floyd, the Black man killed by police in Minnesota, had received. “Because Black lives matter, as is well known,” Afroditi Latinopoulou, the leader of Greece’s Voice of Reason party said in Madrid, “but not the lives of whites. Enough is enough.”

In London on Saturday, more than 100,000 demonstrators marched in a rally organized by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, during which they listened to a young French activist attribute his attendance as an “homage to Charlie Kirk.” Elon Musk, who connected by video feed, called the left “the party of murder” and urged protesters to “fight back” or “die.”

For decades, Europe shunned its far-right parties and created cordons sanitaires to keep them out of power. That era is over. Hard-line positions against immigration have increasingly gone mainstream. So have hard-right leaders. Ms. Meloni, the first politician steeped in neo-fascism to run a major European nation, is seen as a trailblazer.

Speaking in Munich in February, Vice President JD Vance implicitly defended Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said. Mr. Musk was more explicit, posting, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” The transformation of Mr. Kirk into a sort of Che Guevara figure for the right marked a new phase.

The European far right for decades has sustained itself in the political cold with a culture of martyrdom. Spanish conservatives pointed to political prisoners and Catholics murdered by Communists during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, Mr. Abascal used Mr. Kirk’s death to evoke decades of terrorism by a separatist movement that targeted nationalists among others. In Italy, Ms. Meloni was brought up to revere the fascists killed by partisans and dumped into northern Italian sinkholes, and also hard-right militants killed by leftist extremists during the street battles and domestic terrorism of the 1970s.

As motivating as those stories, and others, of persecution were to marginalized nationalist groups, they rarely resonated across borders. And efforts to turn the past decade’s anti-establishment wave into an international movement have faltered. After getting kicked out of the White House in 2017, the American populist Steve Bannon flew around Europe trying to sign up right-wing leaders for an ill-fated venture called “The Movement.”

Mr. Bannon “was for his own glory,” said Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament with Vox. The mobilization around Mr. Kirk was different, he added, because the influencer resonated with a booming, more online population of young conservatives. Mr. Tertsch said Mr. Kirk was someone leaders sought out at conservative conventions in the United States.

Mr. Ventura, of Chega, added that the assassination, caught on camera and instantly shared in a global “image culture,” helped explain why Mr. Kirk had become such a potent symbol. Also, he said, “maybe because it happened in the United States.”

Young nationalists around Europe have repeatedly said that the United States under Mr. Trump has surpassed the Old World in populism and emerged as the global influencer. Now, in Mr. Kirk, whose views on immigration, women and Islam made him abhorrent to some liberals, they have a global martyr.

“He was a model,” said César Enrique Pintado Planell, 29, a former spokesman for La Revuelta, or the Revolt, a youth organization closely aligned with Vox.

He said he admired the way Mr. Kirk went to university campuses, something the far right in Spain was “still in their first steps of doing.” He cited the last social media post by Mr. Kirk, in which the American conservative urged the politicization of the killing of a Ukrainian refugee on a Charlotte, N.C., light rail train. “This is similar,” Mr. Planell said. “If we don’t speak about what happened to Charlie, nothing will change.”

At a booth selling “Make Spain Great Again” caps, Rocío López Belmonte, 28, said she was shocked by the assassination and had spread Kirk’s posts, which were translated into Spanish. Asked if Spain had a similar figure, she pointed at David Santos, 41, selling the hats behind her. “He’s a YouTuber,” she said. “He’s famous.”

Mr. Santos has only a small fraction of Mr. Kirk’s followers but said he hoped to follow in his footsteps. He said that, like Mr. Kirk, he had been “insulted, threatened,” especially after streaming anti-establishment views from a Spanish town where hard-right groups, egged on by Vox, pursued migrants after the beating there of an older man.

Now, he said, it was Mr. Kirk’s assassination that had struck a nerve with the hard right, in Spain and beyond. “I will talk about it,” he said, “as soon as I get the chance.”

José Bautista contributed reporting from Madrid.