FASCISTS and other far-right extremists are set to assemble today in Warsaw for a march which has become one of the largest gatherings in Europe and beyond for white supremacists.
The march, on Poland’s Independence Day holiday, has drawn tens of thousands of participants in recent years.
Extremists from Sweden, Hungary, Slovakia and elsewhere now join Polish nationalists in a public display of xenophobic and white supremacism since the event began on a much smaller scale in 2009.
The slogan for this year’s event is “We Want God” – a phrase from an old religious Polish song which US President Donald Trump quoted in July while visiting Warsaw.
Trump praised Poland for what he described as the country’s defence of western civilisation.
Rafal Pankowski, head of the anti-extremist association Never Again, said the march should not be viewed as inspired by religious beliefs, despite including Roman Catholic groups and far-right “neo-pagans”.
Pankowski, a sociologist, said: “We know Donald Trump is not the most religious man, and I think that most of the organisers are not very religious, either.
“But they use Christianity as a kind of identity marker, which is mostly about being anti-Islam now.”
The Warsaw march has grown so large it might be the world’s biggest assembly of far-right extremists, he said.
The organisers include the National-Radical Camp, the National Movement and the All Polish Youth, radical groups that trace their roots to anti-Semitic groups active before the Second World War.
In a sign of the rally’s international reach, American white supremacist Richard Spencer was scheduled to speak at a conference in Warsaw yesterday – until the Polish government said he was not welcome in the country.
Anti-migrant views run high in Poland, Hungary and other countries once behind the Iron Curtain, despite few of the Muslim refugees and migrants who have arrived in Europe since 2015 settling there, preferring Germany and other richer countries in the west of the continent.
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