A day after an Islamist rampage against a British synagogue and two days after the indictment in Berlin of three suspected Hamas members for planning terror attacks in Germany, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and French president Emanuel Macron met in Saarbrücken, Germany, and warned of . . . right-wing threats to European democracies. Neither said a word about the Manchester assault or the Berlin indictment.

Instead, Merz announced to the European potentates commemorating the 35th anniversary of German reunification that “our liberal way of life is under attack, from both outside and within.” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle decoded for the clueless: Merz’s enemy “within” was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s voice for immigration restrictionism.

Macron connected those external and internal threats: “authoritarian countries” outside Europe are “aligned with the extreme parties” inside Europe, he said. Europe’s “extreme parties” embrace a “new nationalism,” based on “hate of the other,” according to Macron. Unless European democrats fend off the “dark Enlightenment,” the European continent would become “like many others,” filled with “conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”

It required no decoding to pick up the reference to the North American continent.

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier took up the same theme: political forces looking to undermine democratic institutions and poison debate with hatred were gathering strength, especially in Germany’s East — another boilerplate reference to the AfD. “Let’s not allow our democracy to be further damaged,” said Steinmeier.

The Saarbrücken speeches illustrate a key rule of contemporary European power: wheresoever two or more members of the European elite gather together, they will denounce the “far right,” right-wing “extremists,” and “dangerous nationalists.” They will ignore Islamist violence. In Saarbrücken, Merz did not note that attacks on Jews in Germany have been spiraling upward. Merz did not mention Germany’s knifing assaults by first- and second-generation immigrants or the fact that immigrants and their progeny commit a vast disproportion of crime.

In August 2025, for example, an American was slashed in the face while trying to protect two women from non-native attackers on a Dresden streetcar. In February 2025, a Syrian refugee stabbed a Spanish tourist at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial so severely that the victim had to be placed in an induced coma. The refugee had been planning for weeks “to kill Jews.” In January 2025, an Afghan immigrant knifed to death a toddler and an adult in Aschaffenburg. In August 2024, an illegal Syrian fatally stabbed three people and seriously wounded ten others at a “diversity” festival in Solingen. In May 2024, an Afghan stabbed to death a police officer in Mannheim and gravely injured five other people at a rally protesting mass immigration.

At the German reunification ceremony, Macron did not mention France’s no-go zones, where state authority has broken down. He did not acknowledge France’s history of large-scale Islamist terror episodes.

Wheresoever two or more members of the European elite gather together, they will show no self-awareness that they are the ones threatening democracy with their “firewalls” against cooperation with democratically elected populists; with their ad hoc rule changes to block those democratically elected representatives from their parliamentary rights; with their attempted party bans; with their shunning, silencing, and sidelining of dissenters; with their press blackouts on coverage of populist party leaders; with their social media censorship of “hate speech,” and with their arrests of “haters.”

Germany’s AfD, France’s Rassemblement National, and Britain’s Reform U.K. have proposed no such democracy-quashing measures but seek only to exercise their political rights. Being an “enemy of democracy,” in establishment Europeanspeak, simply means opposing uncontrolled Third World immigration.

Germany’s elites and their European brethren pretend that the biggest threat to Jews in Europe comes from the right. Never mind that the AfD, the Rassemblement National, and Reform UK are the most philo-Semitic and pro-Israel parties in their respective countries.

Wheresoever two or more members of the European elite gather together, they will cloak themselves in the mantle of science and enlightened expertise. In Saarbrücken, Macron denounced the “return of the dark Enlightenment.” The “new Enlightenment,” as he put it, believes that “respect and science are stronger than hate and fury.” That is the same respect for “science,” presumably, which closed schools during the Covid epidemic — despite evidence that children faced virtually no mortal risk from the disease — established arbitrary social distancing rules, and shut down the economy without regard to costs and benefits.

The elites can hardly open their mouths without invoking diversity. In Saarbrücken, Merz insisted that Germany must be “open to the world.” British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy couldn’t offer condolence for the Manchester victims without making reference to the Rainbow Coalition. “Our country, those of all colors, all faiths and none, stand with you,” he told mourners at a vigil. The risk that that Rainbow Coalition might break down is the biggest threat from Islamist terrorists, according to Lammy. “We cannot, must not, let them divide us — we must show them who we really are, not what they want us to become or to believe,” he said.

Actually, the Islamist agenda is oblivious to Western multiculturalism, even as that multiculturalism is the key to its power in the West.

On the evening of the Manchester attack, anti-Israel activists marched in Manchester and London, leading to 40 arrests, including six for assaulting police officers. The feckless British home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, expressed her disappointment at the demonstrations, which had ignored pleas by British leaders to give the country a chance to grieve. “Carrying on in this way does feel un-British,” Mahmood said. Mahmood is just now noticing that Britain has become decidedly un-British. Don’t expect that recognition to last.

Nigel Farrage, head of Reform UK, provided a sharper gloss: the Thursday night demonstrations were celebrations of the synagogue attack, he said.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Metropolitan Police Chief Mark Rowley promised increased protection at Jewish sites over the weekend after the rampage. Physical protection is not what European Jewry and other European natives need. It is impossible to put enough police officers at every possible site of terrorist attack. The only lasting security involves reducing migrant populations through deportation and strict border control.

The obsession with the “far right” among European elites has become a psychotic delusion. AfD, Rassemblement National, and Reform U.K. voters are ordinary people, no different from their fellow citizens except in their willingness to oppose the open-borders status quo. Their leaders do not seek to destroy democracy; they only want to participate in it.

Yet populist party members are portrayed as a pathogen within the body politic. British Housing Secretary Steve Reed said on September 28 that the Labor Party is the “disinfectant that is going to clean up the pollution of the Far Right in our politics.” Such concern with purity is ironic in people who rest their moral authority on their allegedly unique opposition to fascism.

The European globalists’ refusal to work with restrictionist parties is worsening government instability and incoherence. Macron is seeking his eighth prime minister since he took office in 2017. Five of those late PMs bit the dust since 2022. Macron’s most recent one lasted just weeks. The German “firewall” against the AfD has prevented Chancellor Merz from enacting the economic reforms, including to competition-busting climate mandates, that he knows are necessary.

The people will not be disinfected out of their beliefs, however. Across Europe, populist parties are growing in strength (as demonstrated again this weekend in the Czech Republic). They are the last Europeans with the will to conserve European civilization. The establishment cartel will try to hold on as long as possible, through as many anti-democratic gambits as it can cobble together. Which side prevails in that battle will determine the future of the West.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit and other books. This column originally appeared in City Journal on October 7, 2025.