“Europe on fire is a warning for the United States,” a foreign policy expert said of the recent riots in France.
Nile Gardiner, the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, joined Mark Guiney on the Heritage Explains podcast to discuss the leftist-Islamist coalition behind the riots and how the unrest could serve as a blueprint for replication elsewhere.
“If the socialists, the communists, Marxists, the eco-green loonies manage to get away with destroying Western civilization in Europe,” Gardiner continued, “you can be sure their ultimate target is the United States.”
Protests began in late September against teacher shortages and underfunding of education, and since expanded to include economic issues of high costs of living and public services, Reuters reported.
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu this week blamed far-left groups for some of France’s worst unrest in years. “There is, after all, a far-left movement that wants to cause — we can’t put it any more strongly — profound unrest in the country in the run-up to the presidential election,” he said, according to Reuters.
“At the end of the day, this is not about education,” Gardiner said. “It’s not about the state of French schools, it’s really violence that’s driven by hard left-wing groups in conjunction with Islamist organizations.”
While President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition is still in power, left-wing parties form the largest opposition coalition in the French National Assembly, an example of the “red-green alliance” phenomenon that has swept across Europe.
“[The red-green alliance] is a combination between the socialist-Communists and the Islamic organizations, and you throw into the mix the eco-extremists as well, the net zero zealots, and all the rest of them,” Gardiner said. “This is a very dangerous combination of forces.”
The violence, Gardiner noted, is also predominantly being carried out by second- and third-generation immigrants.
“President Trump was 100% right last week when he linked all this violence to Islamic extremism in France, mass migration—and the French hard left, of course, is all part and parcel of this. They’ve been driving across the open borders ideology that has destroyed not only France but much of Europe,” he added. “What we’re seeing on the streets of France is a nightmarish vision, I think, of the future of Europe as a whole.”
This past weekend, protests erupted outside of France, including in the Belgian capital of Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union. Gardiner said he doesn’t anticipate the protests ending any time soon.
“They [leftist extremists] want to see the violence spreading beyond, of course, Paris, Berlin, but also to cities like Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen,” Gardiner said. “Of course they want to see this happening in London, also.”
“So, the ringleaders of this violence are thinking far beyond just the borders of France,” he continued. “They want a European-wide intifada basically, against the West; against everything Western civilization stands for,”
France, Gardiner said, has resisted this type of uprising before in 1968 under the leadership of President Charles de Gaulle. Macron, however, according to Gardiner, is no de Gaulle.
He pointed instead to Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s right-wing National Rally party. In the 2027 French election cycle, she will likely run against leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom Gardiner credited as the driving force behind the present riots.
“Next spring’s presidential election will be an epic confrontation,” Gardiner said, “between the forces of law and order, those who wish to preserve French culture and heritage against the Marxists who are working hand and glove, of course, with the Islamists and the Greens as well.”
The current violence in Europe, Gardiner concluded, is just a test run for what left-wing radicals want to do in America.
“If they can take down Western civilization in Europe, you can be sure they’re coming for America next,” Gardiner said. “Here in the United States, we have to be on our guard.”
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
