(DCNF)—Europe’s political establishment is facing a growing nationalist backlash over years of permissive immigration policies, with young Europeans taking to the streets to demand tougher borders and an end to mass migration.
From Italy to Spain and France, demonstrations have attracted thousands of participants, ranging from conventional conservatives demanding immigration reform to openly fascist organizations embracing the symbols of Europe’s authoritarian past. While some marchers carry torches and perform Roman salutes, others are ordinary nationalists concerned about their countries’ borders, highlighting the distinction between conservative movements and extremist groups seeking to capitalize on public frustration.
And their concerns about the scale of immigration are backed by official statistics, with asylum applications in the European Union surging from approximately 260,000 in 2010 to more than 1.3 million in 2015, according to the European Council. The influx, driven partly by wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, coincided with approximately 1.8 million detected irregular border crossings in 2015 alone, according to the European Council.
The migration pressures persisted into the following decade, with first-time asylum applications climbing to approximately 1.05 million in 2023 after declining during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Eurostat. Although applications declined to approximately 669,400 in 2025, millions of Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s invasion were also living under temporary protection across the bloc, according to the European Council.
The fascist label has also been directed at electoral conservatives, with British Reform UK council leader George Finch alleging he was called a “fascist” before an assault, according to The Guardian.
In Germany, a Guardian opinion column linked opposition to the AfD with combating fascism, although a German court subsequently blocked authorities from designating the entire party as confirmed extremist pending a final ruling, Reuters reported.
The nationalist demonstrations take on new significance as widespread unrest grips France and Italy, where rioters looted Milan storefronts, torched vehicles and set the historic city hall in Limoges ablaze during October protests, according to the Associated Press. Some of the “protestors” allegedly crossed the line into terrorism when they decided to openly carry firearms.
In Milan, approximately 2,000 demonstrators marched through the streets on April 29, carrying Italian flags and torches before performing Roman salutes in unison, according to Reuters and ANSA.
One video uploaded by a far-right account on X shows the Roman Salutes at the finale of the march. The video was corroborated and can be seen from a different angle in an article uploaded by Italian news agency La Stampa.
The nighttime procession commemorated Sergio Ramelli, an 18-year-old activist affiliated with the Italian Social Movement’s youth organization who died in 1975 after being attacked by far-left militants. Participants marched in organized columns toward a memorial on Via Paladini, where they conducted a ceremony honoring fallen comrades, according to ANSA.
Among the demonstrators were activists associated with neo-fascist CasaPound Italia and Lealtà Azione, organizations operating within Italy’s nationalist movement. Participants carried a banner honoring fallen comrades, while the procession’s conclusion featured the synchronized fascist-era salute, ANSA reported.
One image posted by ANSA further corroborates the previous video, showing a different angle of the procession finale, complete with Italian flags and Roman salutes.
The demonstration was particularly notable for its scale and its participants’ open use of symbols associated with Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala condemned the Roman salutes while acknowledging Ramelli’s place among the victims of Italy’s historical political violence, according to ANSA.
The Milan gathering was not organized as an immigration protest, however, and its size does not establish that Italy’s neo-fascist organizations are attracting more members than in previous years. Rather, it demonstrates that groups explicitly embracing elements of the country’s fascist history retain the organizational capacity to stage substantial public demonstrations.
The connection to contemporary immigration politics became much clearer in Rome on June 13, when thousands of demonstrators marched through the Italian capital demanding the remigration of illegal African and Muslim immigrants back to their countries of origin, according to the Associated Press and La Repubblica.
The demonstration included activists from nationalist organizations such as CasaPound and Veneto Fronte Skinheads, with approximately 4,000 participants reported by La Repubblica. Some shouted slogans praising Mussolini and performed Roman salutes during the march, according to the Associated Press and ANSA.
One video uploaded by Italian news agency Repubblica shows what the event looked like.
The march also attracted participants from abroad, including representatives of nationalist networks in Poland, Hungary and Spain. Demonstrators carried Italian flags through Rome’s Prati district while police maintained a significant security presence, according to La Repubblica.
Italy’s electoral conservatives and openly fascist street organizations should not be treated as interchangeable. Opposition to illegal immigration, demands for stronger borders and support for deporting people without legal status do not, by themselves, constitute fascism, whereas the groups participating in these demonstrations have openly displayed fascist-era symbolism.
Spain has witnessed similarly explicit displays, including one demonstration in which teenagers reportedly constituted much of the crowd.
On May 23, 2025, approximately 300 demonstrators affiliated with Falange Española marched through Madrid demanding the removal of immigrants, with the average participant reportedly around 18 years old, according to Research Against Global Authoritarianism and El País.
Many participants wore black clothing, carried Spanish flags and marched in organized rows while promoting remigration. Some delivered fascist salutes and sang the Falangist anthem, according to El País.
The Falange traces its political identity to the movement founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, whose ideology became closely associated with Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. The organization’s continued use of historical fascist symbols makes the Madrid procession materially different from conventional conservative demonstrations over immigration policy.
One incident went viral during the protests in Spain, where Spanish women brought shower gel to the event, pointing out how far-left extremists generally tend to smell and have poor hygiene. One video, originally posted by Spanish news agency La Bandera, shows the comedic event unfolding.
The young participants demanded a harder response to immigration than that offered by mainstream political authorities. Some even directed insults at Madrid’s conservative regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, accusing her of insufficiently restrictive policies concerning unaccompanied migrant minors, El País reported.
The event also attracted counterdemonstrators, prompting authorities to shorten the nationalist march’s planned route and position police between opposing groups, according to El País.
More recently, young demonstrators displaying fascist symbols confronted housing activists in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol following Spain’s National Day military parade on Oct. 12, 2026. Some performed fascist salutes and sang the Falangist anthem while police intervened to separate the competing groups, according to the Spanish Eye and Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.
Another video uploaded by Spanish News agency EuroPress shows the rising tensions at Puerta del Sol.
Three people were arrested and one police officer was injured during the October confrontation, according to RTVE. One photo uploaded by Spanish news agency elDiario.es on X shows the people at the event appear to be mostly teenagers and young adults.
Unlike the earlier Falange demonstration, the October confrontation was not primarily organized around immigration. Nevertheless, both incidents illustrate how explicitly fascist symbols remain visible among sections of Spain’s younger nationalist scene.
France has witnessed its own demonstrations involving young nationalist activists, including a massive gathering following the killing of a 23-year-old activist.
Approximately 3,200 people marched through Lyon on February 21, 2026, commemorating Quentin Deranque, who died after being beaten during a confrontation involving opposing political activists, according to Euronews.
A video uploaded by French news agency BFMTV shows the protesters marching in Lyon.
The demonstrations attracted participants from multiple organizations within France’s nationalist movement. French president Emmanuel Macron appealed for calm following Deranque’s killing, according to Euronews.
Another video, also uploaded by BFMTV, shows that some protesters carried torches as they marched.
Images from the gathering showed activists carrying torches and marching through Lyon, a city with a history of confrontations between far-right and far-left militant organizations. The demonstration attracted nationalist supporters alongside known extremists, including neo-Nazi activists, according to Le Monde.
A third video from BFMTV, clipped from its TV channel, shows a wide shot depicting the large number of protesters.
Deranque’s death became a political flashpoint, with opponents of France’s far-left France Unbowed movement raising questions about its relationship with militant activists. The killing involved suspects allegedly connected to the radical left, while the party’s leadership denied responsibility and condemned the violence, according to the Associated Press.
France’s militant nationalist movement has also staged demonstrations invoking older neo-fascist traditions.
On May 10, 2025, activists associated with the Comité du 9 Mai marched through Paris carrying Celtic crosses and other symbols during an annual commemoration. Some participants displayed neo-Nazi insignia and were linked to previously dissolved organizations, according to independent footage published by CLPRESS.
As in Milan, the Paris event centered on a historical commemoration rather than immigration. Its significance lies in the continued coordination of openly neo-fascist organizations, rather than evidence that conservative French voters broadly support their ideology.
Elsewhere in Europe, immigration-related street movements have demonstrated a capacity to mobilize substantially larger crowds; although their participants were not ‘far-right’ or fascists, they were conservatives advocating for the conservation of the United Kingdom.
In London, approximately 150,000 people attended the Sept. 13, 2025, Unite the Kingdom rally organized by anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson, according to a subsequent attendance estimate released by the Metropolitan Police.
One video uploaded by Reuters shows the protesters marching, arms linked together, with dozens of English and British flags.
Participants carried British and English flags while voicing concerns about immigration, national identity and government policies. The protest also produced clashes with police, although participation in the broader gathering did not indicate affiliation with “far-right” organizations, Reuters reported.
Similar immigration-related demonstrations occurred in the Netherlands, where hundreds of protesters clashed with police in The Hague in September 2025. Rioters set a police vehicle ablaze and vandalized a political party’s office, while the demonstration’s organizer subsequently disavowed the violence, according to Euronews.
Poland also witnessed widespread anti-immigration demonstrations in July 2025, with protests organized by the right-wing Confederation party in more than 80 cities. Demonstrators demanded stricter border controls and opposed government immigration policies, according to Euronews.
In Austria, roughly 200 political activists participated in a July 2025 demonstration advocating remigration, including participants from outside the country. Police also dealt with multiple counterdemonstrations, which resulted in 56 temporary arrests, according to Austrian public broadcaster ORF.
Despite the growing demonstrations, first-time asylum applications in the European Union fell 27% to approximately 669,400 in 2025, with declines recorded in 24 member states, according to the European Commission. Nevertheless, immigration remains a major rallying issue for nationalist movements across Europe.
The demonstrations highlight the divide between conservatives seeking tighter immigration controls and extremist nationalist organizations. From young Falangists in Madrid to torch-bearing militants in Milan, the gatherings also raise questions about whether Europe’s nationalist movements are attracting a new generation of supporters.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.