The Far Right

Dearborn, Michigan – Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur in a bulletproof vest, shouts anti-Muslim obscenities on a bullhorn outside a rally featuring former US President Barack Obama in Detroit.

His associates, wearing crusader-themed accessories – including a tin shield featuring a black cross – hold campaign signs for Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, who is in a close race with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

If it weren’t for the bigoted slogans, the people lining up around them to attend the campaign event for El-Sayed and other Democrats could have mistakenly thought the protesters were in Halloween costumes.

“Get the f*** out, Muslims,” Lang shouted. “The crusade is coming. Self-deport.”

Lang may appear like a fringe agitator. But Muslim American activists say the bigotry he is spreading is going mainstream, especially in the context of the Senate race in Michigan.

Anti-Muslim attacks against El-Sayed have been perpetuated at the highest level of the US government, including by President Donald Trump and his cabinet members.

Suehaila Amen, a prominent Arab and Muslim advocate in the Detroit area, said bigotry against her community is reaching an all-time high.

“They make immediately post 9/11 look like a walk in the park for us. This has been absolutely disgusting to witness,” Amen told Al Jazeera.

One of Lang’s allies, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, is an official faith adviser to the Rogers campaign.

Sewell helped Lang organise an anti-Muslim march in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn – home to a large Arab and Muslim community – in August.

Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, said the city – which has long been a target for anti-Muslim provocateurs – has been receiving an increased number of threats in recent months.

“The general public is unaware of how many threats are aimed towards the city of Dearborn on a daily basis, via social [media], via our dispatch when they’re calling 911 or calling our call centre, and lobbing these threats against the residents of the city each and every single day,” Hammoud told Al Jazeera.

“That does worry me.”

Escalating attacks

While the Rogers campaign did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment about the Republican candidate’s links to Sewell, Rogers defended his focus on El-Sayed’s background, saying it was for national security.

“This is not about the way you pray; it’s the way you think,” Rogers told reporters after his debate with El-Sayed earlier this month.

Local leaders say their community is not cowering in the face of such threats and Trump’s near-daily attacks, and is pushing back through civic engagement and rallying around the El-Sayed campaign.

“Trump is a fascist,” Hammoud told Al Jazeera. “I think the best thing we can do, the best response, is to send Abdul to the US Senate, somebody who’s got two doctorates, someone who is a son of this country, a son of the state, someone who is the captain of his high school team … I think that that’s the best response that we can give fascism.”

Trump has repeatedly mocked El-Sayed’s name, misrepresenting it as Mohammed, and called the Democratic candidate a “jihadist”.

Amen said Arab and Muslim Americans are used to being targeted for their names, but when the president does it, it legitimises bigotry and racism.

“It’s not just some loser that lives around the block who may call you a racist expletive; it’s the loser who lives in the White House,” she said.

Amen added that Arab and Muslim communities are going about their daily lives and organising politically despite the escalating attacks, stressing that they reject attempts to cast them as foreigners or outsiders.

“We are an integral part of the fabric of this nation, whether people like it or not,” she told Al Jazeera.

Republicans across US target El-Sayed

As the Senate race intensifies, Rogers has been baselessly accusing El-Sayed of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

Last month, Rogers went as far as agreeing with a social media post calling El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, a “terrorist”.

Trump has suggested that El-Sayed would be a physical threat to the Capitol, saying that he would want him to go through a metal detector.

At an event in western Michigan earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr incorrectly claimed that Arabs do not produce literature or science and “don’t win Nobel Prizes”. He argued that the Muslim Brotherhood – which only briefly held power in Egypt between 2012 and 2013 – has destroyed Arab civilisation.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz joined in on such attacks, describing El-Sayed as a “jihadist leprechaun”.

Cruz warned that El-Sayed, a Michigan-born and raised father of two with a medical degree and a doctorate in public health, could end up on the Senate Intelligence Committee and endanger national security.

“If I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result,” he said.

On Wednesday, Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy invoked Dearborn – one of the safest and fastest-growing cities in Michigan – to drum up fear of immigration.

“Look at what’s happening in Dearborn, Michigan, for God’s sake. We’re not going to let that come to our state of Ohio,” he said.

Trump supporters weigh in

El-Sayed, who is of Egyptian descent, has avoided focusing on the attacks, calling them “deflections and deceptions”.

It’s not clear how attacks linked to El-Sayed’s Muslim faith and Arab heritage will affect the race.

About 38 percent of respondents in a survey of potential voters conducted by Michigan State University said a candidate being a Muslim would make them less likely to offer support to their campaign.

After a Trump rally for Rogers in Port Huron, northeast of Detroit, where the president spent most of his nearly two-hour speech attacking El-Sayed, some attendees appeared to agree that El-Sayed may be a threat to national security.

As the US president spoke, shouts of “traitor”, referring to El-Sayed, erupted from the crowd.

Trump supporter David Beamer, whose son died in the 9/11 attacks in 2001, spoke at the event and questioned El-Sayed’s American identity.

“Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American,” Beamer said.

Al Jazeera asked Duane Crempa, a 72-year-old Republican in a Batman mask who attended the Trump speech on Sunday, whether he believes that El-Sayed is a “jihadist” as Trump claims.

Crempa said he is a good judge of character. “Yeah, there is something not right with him. That’s all I’ll say; there’s definitely something not right,” he added.

Jermaine Miller, who also was at the rally, told Al Jazeera he hopes El-Sayed is not a “terrorist”.

“But I mean, it sounds convincing, but it is believable,” he said of Trump’s allegations that the Democratic candidate is a “jihadist”.

‘It’s awful to live this way’

In the Detroit area, Arab and Muslim advocates say the issue is bigger than a Senate seat, arguing that such rhetoric endangers their communities and risks ripping the social fabric of the state.

“We’ve seen the increase in hate marches and hate speech and people being very comfortable sharing their hateful views online and coming into our city and harassing people for no reason – people who are just trying to live and function in this country,” Amen said.

“It’s been tremendously heartbreaking to watch our community constantly have to question why people are maliciously maligning them in public.”

Earlier this year, two gunmen killed three people outside a mosque complex in San Diego in southern California in what authorities said was a hate crime.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents Dearborn and parts of Detroit, said she fears for her two Muslim boys, Adam and Yousif, amid the rise of hate with the election campaign.

“Yesterday, we were all watching the football game, and we literally had to turn off the ads every time in between [plays] because we didn’t want our babies to see these awful, racist ads,” Tlaib told Al Jazeera.

“It’s awful to live this way right now.”

With petrol in Michigan nearing record highs, Arab and Muslim advocates say their communities are being scapegoated to cover up the shortcomings of the Trump administration, including the war in Iran.

Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, communication director for American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), said the attacks against El-Sayed amount to “disgusting Islamophobia” that serves as a distraction.

“Abdul El-Sayed’s name is a visibly Muslim name, and it’s being treated as inherently suspicious, as if a Muslim American cannot willfully execute their duties as an active member of Congress to protect the American people,” Abdelrahman told Al Jazeera.

At the Trump rally in Port Huron, one of Trump’s allies appeared to weigh El-Sayed’s candidacy against petrol prices.

Brian Pannebecker, a retiree from an auto manufacturing company Trump invited to the stage on Sunday, stressed that Michiganders need to vote for the Republican ticket.

“I don’t care if they’re paying a buck and a half more a gallon for gasoline. That is no excuse to vote for a socialist Islamist for the US Senate,” Pannebecker said.

The United States midterm elections appear stacked against the ruling Republicans, with polls suggesting the Democrats average an eight-point lead in the House of Representatives and the Senate. But if Democrats take one or both houses, could they affect upcoming elections in Europe?

Not fundamentally, analysts and observers have told Al Jazeera, but besides a welcome improvement in transatlantic relations, they point to two potentially adverse effects.

First, a Democratic Congress might produce complacency among Europeans regarding their own far-right movements.

Second, it might spur US President Donald Trump to raise pressure on Ukraine to make a deal it doesn’t want to make with Russia.

“If the Democrats win the House, let alone both houses, it will be read as, ‘you see democracies bounce back,’” said Catherine Fieschi, a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe, specialising in European far-right politics. It would introduce “the idea that these things don’t mean the advent of a fascist regime”, she said.

From her vantage point in Paris, Fieschi said she imagines a Democratic win leading to “a whole discussion about whether we should fear a Marine Le Pen election as much as some people say we should, or whether, in fact, it’s swings and roundabouts and, at some point, if people are really bad and really incompetent, then elections right the way,” she said.

French right-wing politician Marine Le Pen is currently leading the field in polling for presidential elections scheduled for April 18, with surveys indicating she has about 34 percent of the popular vote.

There is a precedent for the complacency Fieschi alludes to. In June 2025, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think tank, polled Europeans following Trump’s first six months in office. Clear majorities in Western Europe said the US political system was broken. In Eastern Europe, majorities said it was working well – though they were weighted towards right-wing voters.

Greek Migration Minister Thanos Plevris warned against giving too much credit to the US for what Europeans think and do, however.

He said he believes European public opinion hardened against asylum and economic migration independently, but the US marked the shift by expressing it more violently, with military deportation flights and armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sweeping American cities.

“I think there was a European about-turn on migration. We saw this in Germany, which had a welcoming attitude [to refugees] for many years, and they went to a more controlled policy. All northern European governments saw societies change,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But the US provided a change in tone, from induction and integration and benefaction to deterrence, border protection, increased returns and consequences if asylum is denied. I do think that pivot played a role in Europe,” Plevris added.

The fallout for Ukraine

Should French voters decide that the only way out is through electing Le Pen – “like some kind of strong medicine that would wake us up to what we might lose”, as Fieschi put it – they would have to contend with three controversial propositions – cutting French financial contributions to the European Union’s federal budget to pay for earlier retirement, cutting military aid to Ukraine and possibly leaving the single currency, the euro, in favour of a devalued franc.

Any one of those policy moves would be a major setback for the European project, which has coalesced around trade, money and now security. A cut in assistance to Ukraine would remove 3.5 percent of its foreign military aid, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker, which other allies would have to make up.

At the same time, “we could end up in a situation where Trump is basically clinching deals with Putin as fast as he can,” said Fieschi, referring to the US-Russian strategy to coerce Ukraine into a peace agreement that involves sacrificing its eastern Donbas region – something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said would be a strategic error leading to renewed war, and which a majority of Ukrainians are against.

Trump has already leveraged US early warning on incoming ballistics and Starlink satellite navigation against Ukraine. He has twice echoed Russian calls for Zelenskyy to be replaced.

Compounding this renewed pressure from a beleaguered White House, Russia could intensify its “all-domain war”, which many European governments believe it is already waging against them, said Victoria Vdovychenko, a Ukraine expert at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics.

“Cognitive warfare never stopped on the European continent, and Russians are already using existing vulnerabilities to the utmost,” she told Al Jazeera. “I hope that the European partners will be staying very strong.”

What Europeans think

Trump’s abandonment of the world order the US and Europe established after World War II, his disregard for democracy and human rights, and his betrayal of Ukraine have already transformed European public opinion, observers say.

Only 31 percent of Europeans see the US as Europe’s “most trustworthy ally”, down from 51 percent in 2024, when Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, was in office, according to a poll for the German think tank Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Seventy-three percent of Europeans across all age groups say Europe should “go its own way” rather than continue a close cooperation with the US, up from 63 percent in 2024, and that figure includes a clear majority among those on the centre-right and right.

In this year’s Spring Eurobarometer, a regular pulse-taking conducted by the European Commission, 68 percent of respondents wanted the EU’s role in protecting Europeans from global crises and security risks to increase, while 39 percent wanted it to be a top priority.

In a June poll for the European Council on Foreign Relations, the description of the US as an “ally” fell from 22 percent in November 2024 to 11 percent across all territories polled in Eastern and Western Europe.

In a June poll for the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, 76 percent of people polled in 36 countries, of which nine were EU members, expressed no confidence in Trump, and 57 percent expressed unfavourable views of the US.

It would appear that such shifts against the US and especially Republicans, formed over two Trump terms, would be difficult to reverse in a single congressional election, especially with a Russian war ongoing in Europe.

Orleans, France – Marine Le Pen took to the stage with a clear message: She would lead France’s “renaissance” as the country sank into crisis – and she would do so soon.

The far-right figure’s words were met with cheers from thousands of supporters gathered in Orleans in central France on Sunday, as she launched her presidential campaign against a backdrop of mass demonstrations and widespread social and economic discontent.

“Marine présidente!” the crowd chanted, waving French flags beneath a sea of red and blue lights. Organisers said 8,500 supporters had gathered in a venue transformed into a fort for the event.

Standing tall on stage in a pink blazer, her hair impeccably coiffed, Le Pen spoke with the confidence of a leader who believes the presidency is within reach.

Riding high in the polls, with candidates from the right, left and centre trailing behind her, she presented the election as a historic opportunity to restore France’s past glory.

“This is a story to be written, a destiny to be fulfilled,” she told the crowd, which erupted in cheers.

Her pitch was a promise to restore authority and security in a country she portrayed as having lost control.

“We are going to re-establish the rule of law,” she said, drawing loud applause from supporters wearing “Marine présidente” T-shirts.

Manon Funeau, 21, a business school student, was among the supporters.

“What they propose are values that resonate with me, that vibrate within me,” she said. “Honestly, I feel at home here.”

Le Pen’s speech comes as the country is at a crossroads. France has been shaken by a wave of protests since mid-September, a movement sparked by high school students in a Paris suburb that grew into a nationwide mobilisation tapping into widespread discontent.

Over the past two weekends, largely peaceful protests have been accompanied by episodes of violence on a scale rarely seen in recent years.

On October 17, shops were looted and ransacked, and more than 2,000 people were arrested as hundreds of thousands took to the streets of French cities. A similar dynamic unfolded the following weekend, though on a smaller scale. The protests show little sign of abating, with calls for further demonstrations already circulating.

The unrest has given Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) an opportunity to play one of its favourite cards: presenting itself as the guarantor of law and order. It has fuelled criticism of President Emmanuel Macron over his handling of public security, allowing Le Pen to accuse him of incompetence and the far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon – a contender in the coming elections – of encouraging the violence.

‘My country is drifting off course’

“I believe that my country is currently drifting off course,” said Nadede, a 56-year-old who began voting for RN in 2024 over what she said was the country’s growing lack of security. She did not spell out any specific event.

“I think that the only person capable of setting it back on the right track is Marine Le Pen – especially since, up until now, everyone else who has run for office has struggled to do so,” she said.

Outside the convention hall, the scale of the security operation offered a glimpse of the tensions surrounding the event. Police checks began at departure stations in Paris and continued on arrival, while officers in full gear moved through train carriages during the journey.

Orleans itself had been brought to a near standstill. All businesses were shut and public transport suspended.

Standing almost alone in the city’s main square was the statue of Joan of Arc, surrounded only by fences. A day earlier, about 3,000 police officers had been deployed to prevent unrest as anti-RN protesters gathered against what they say is a xenophobic and racist party.

Orleans was no casual choice. For a party that has long sought to cast itself as the guardian of French identity and national sovereignty, the city is inseparable from the story of Joan of Arc, the 15th-century heroine who helped lift the English siege of Orléans in 1429 and became a symbol of France’s resistance and liberation.

For decades, the far right has claimed her as an emblem of national pride, invoking the image of a warrior who came to save France from foreign domination. Le Pen herself has drawn parallels between Joan’s mission and her political ambitions.

The crowd at the RN Congress offered a glimpse of how the party has expanded its appeal to a wider section of society: from young people from urban centres to middle-class workers who used to vote for the centrist party.

Only a few years ago, the party was still considered on the fringes of French politics. Its growth has been driven in part by a carefully crafted strategy known as dédiabolisation, or de-demonisation, developed over the past two decades to broaden the party’s base while tempering its rhetoric and distancing it from positions that had made it toxic to many voters.

The party has long been associated with racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was convicted of hate speech, including for describing Nazi gas chambers as “a detail of history”. He was expelled from the party in 2015.

Far right ‘gaining ground’

Marine Le Pen has sought to broaden RN’s appeal, combining restrictive immigration policies with promises of social protection. The party has gained ground in working-class areas traditionally associated with the left, including former Communist strongholds, by presenting itself as a defender of public services and the purchasing power of everyday people.

While RN has long abandoned some of its most radical proposals, including leaving the Eurozone and pursuing a fully fledged “Frexit”, the election of such a eurosceptic to the helm of the European Union’s second-largest economy would send shockwaves. She has pledged a referendum to challenge the primacy of EU law over migration policy, as well as an annual 11-billion-euro ($12.3bn) reduction in France’s contribution to the bloc.

The party’s membership has nearly tripled, with approximately 112,000 members now paying their dues, up from fewer than 37,000 in 2022.

“The party has been gaining ground at every level: mayors, deputies, senators. Usually, when a movement seems on the rise, people join,” said Baptiste Roger-Lacan, a historian and political analyst with a focus on far-right parties in Europe. “It also shows how it is less and less socially damaging to be a member of the RN.”

But the party’s programme “is still fraught with fiscal absurdity”, Roger-Lacan said. “They still want to implement racist laws, which are bound to provoke widespread anger, and their diplomatic agenda is still pro-Russian and anti-EU – even if they don’t advocate Frexit any more.”

Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s second-in-command and Le Pen protégé – an impeccably dressed 31-year-old who looks like a cross between the Wolf of Wall Street and Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent – also spoke at the event.

“No one should be intimidated by their political opinions,” he said, speaking ahead of his mentor.

Some observers say the October 17 protests and their aftermath have proved a gift to RN, allowing the party to not only reinforce its law-and-order message but also to shift attention away from recent difficulties.

In September, investigative outlet Mediapart published allegations that Bardella had expressed anti-Semitic views in private messages dating back to his teenage years. He denied the allegations and announced legal action against the journalists.

The episode posed a challenge for a party that has spent years trying to shed its xenophobic image and recast itself as a supporter of Israel.

Bardella has also reportedly differed with Le Pen over the party’s economic agenda and whether to make her proposed ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in public spaces a central campaign issue.

Yet, at the Congress, those tensions appeared to have been set aside, at least publicly.

“Marine president – a Bardella government” was the slogan, projecting unity as Le Pen launched her presidential bid and Bardella positioned himself as her prospective head of government.