Acton’s founder, Robert Sirico, said the Rome office had participated in this process without his knowledge, and that he instructed it to distance itself from Dignitatis and Bannon. But the controversy surrounding Bannon’s involvement misses the more significant point about Acton’s work. The think tank has an explicit mission to conjoin and support values of free-market capitalism and social conservatism. Unlike the US, in Europe, this blend of often contradictory fundamentalisms is a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s an alliance that succeeds in uniting climate-change deniers, anti-abortion activists, and anti-LGBTQI campaigners in attacks against the “liberal” pope, for example. It also explains the rise in anti-welfare state rhetoric we heard at the annual World Congress of Families, an increasingly influential, ultra-conservative summit, held this year in Verona,where one speaker claimed that “the only welfare state that has worked in Italy is the family.” This type of rhetoric is gaining traction in places like Italy and Spain, where such systems of benefits and entitlements have long been popular and strong.

The American religious right’s support for campaigns against legal abortion, LGBTQI rights, sex education, and other causes in Africa and Latin America has been well documented over the years. Notorious examples such as the “kill the gays” bill in Uganda and draconian anti-abortion laws in Latin America have left a trail of violence, trauma, and repression across both continents. But the scale of the American religious conservatives’ push into Europe has not been widely reported or well understood.

“It took the Christian right thirty years to get to where they are now in the White House,” said Neil Datta, the secretary of the Brussels-based European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, reacting to our research. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.”

Transatlantic coordination

Shortly before the recent European elections, Matteo Salvini took the stage in Verona at the World Congress of Families conference. In his address, he mocked feminists as “interesting for anthropologists to study” and promised to “fight the theory of gender until it changes.” The audience included prominent Christian conservative and anti-abortion activists from the United States, members of the Russian government and Orthodox Church, and representatives of various European far-right parties.

To roaring applause, a stream of Italian politicians joined in declaring their support for the “natural family,” defined exclusively as a married man and woman, preferably with many children. Following Salvini’s lead, they condemned Europe’s “crisis of empty cribs” and framed their culture war against the rights of women and LGBTQI people as an economic solution to their country’s persistent problems of low growth and high unemployment rates, particularly among young people.

This was the third time openDemocracy had sent reporters to the WCF, after Moldova last year and Budapest in 2017, at which Orbán also spoke. But this year was different. What we discovered there was a clearer picture of how American ultra-conservatives and their friends on Europe’s far right are working together. We found new evidence of what a group of MEPs has described as “deeply concerning” coordination between some of these movements. Most apparent was the intense focus of this alliance on achieving political power.

One of the more effective speakers was Ignacio Arsuaga, leader of the Madrid-based CitizenGo group. Founded in 2013 after a previous WCF in Spain, CitizenGo was intended to act as a conservative answer to the giant progressive online campaign platforms like Avaaz and Change.org. Arsuaga’s organization is best known for its online petitions against same-sex marriage, sex education, and abortion—and for driving buses across cities around the world bearing advertising slogans against LGBTQI rights and “feminazis.” From the stage, Arsuaga railed against “the heirs of [Italian Communist leader Antonio] Gramsci, cultural Marxists… radical feminists… LGBT totalitarians.” He declared that “this culture war is a global war,” and told the assembled participants to pursue both direct paths to power, via “parties and elected officials,” and indirect paths — “By controlling their environment… you also control them.”

In Verona, we learned that CitizenGo, which has support from both American and Russian ultra-conservatives who sit on its board, was aiming to play a far more ambitious and influential role in the European elections than it had in its previous campaigns. It now sought to act, in the words of one senior Vox official, as a Super-PAC to drive voters toward the far right. Arsuaga told an undercover reporter who posed as a potential donor about the group’s plans to run attack ads in Spain against Vox’s political opponents in the final weeks before Spain’s national elections in April.

He went on to describe how his group is increasingly coordinating with far-right movements across Europe, and told the reporter how he could get around campaign finance laws in his country. In a number of countries in Europe, campaign finance laws cap political spending during campaign periods, limit coordination between different campaign groups, and usually require donor transparency. The new tactics outlined by Arsuaga of pumping potentially unlimited funds from proxy groups into domestic political races is an extremely worrying new development.

The composition of CitizenGo’s board illustrates the transnational complexion of the support it can rely on. It includes a close business associate of Konstantin Malofeev, sometimes called “the Orthodox Oligarch,” who has been targeted by US and European sanctions for allegedly propping up the pro-Russian breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine. It also includes an Italian politician, Luca Volonte, who is currently on trial in Milan facing corruption charges. An American connection is apparent, too: Brian Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage and a prominent anti-LGBT activist who also leads the International Organization for Family group that coordinates the WCF, is a board member.

CitizenGo’s Arsuaga told our undercover reporter that he gets advice “every couple of months or so” from a “senior expert” in fundraising and technology, who is, he said, “paid by Brian Brown.” That expert is Darian Rafie, Brown’s partner at another US group named ActRight, which describes itself as a “clearinghouse for conservative action.” ActRight recently encouraged people to “thank president Trump for stopping transgender insanity in the military,” and asked in a Facebook post, “how much do you think Barack Obama paid Harvard to admit his pot-head daughter?”

Our reporter also spoke directly to Rafie, an experienced American political operative who has worked for the Republican Party and a Tea Party media outlet, and said he was involved in the Trump campaign. He discussed his longstanding relationship with CitizenGo and boasted of his ability to use controversial “geofencing” technology to collect personal data about potential voters gathered in a specific area, such as a campaign rally, via their mobile phones.

Responding to our findings, the former US Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who worked alongside Senator John McCain in efforts to reform American electoral finance laws, called these developments “frightening.” He urged European authorities and regulators to “get ahead of this and not make the same mistakes that were made here in the United States.”

The growing role that CitizenGo appears to be playing in giving European far-right parties in-kind support is a new application of methods long used by internationally connected culture warriors who deploy expertise, as well as cash, in their global campaigns. For example, during Ireland’s historic abortion referendum last year, openDemocracy reported on how American alt-right activists were targeting Irish voters with social media propaganda. We also revealed how foreign activists could donate to campaigns and continue to buy social media ads online—this in the same week that Mark Zuckerberg made a very public promise to members of the European Parliament that Facebook had banned such foreign ads seeking to interfere in domestic elections.

What’s clear in the pattern of connections and support between American ultra-conservatives and European far-right groups is the willingness on both sides to exploit loopholes in regulations and to embrace unscrupulous, even illegal, methods. Last month, openDemocracy worked with a nonprofit watchdog named Unhack Democracy Europe to publish a report pointing to widespread fraud by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in the 2018 Hungarian elections, including vote-buying, voter intimidation, tampering with postal votes, missing ballots, and election software malfunctions. (The result of that election was to give Orbán a parliamentary super-majority, enabling him to further tighten his grip on the judiciary, media, and other organs of power.) The report went on to identify ways in which the European parliamentary elections in Hungary were even more vulnerable to such abuse than national ones. Unhack Democracy is now compiling a follow-up report on what actually happened there in the European elections.

In another development in the run-up to the European-wide vote, openDemocracy received a leaked report authored by the European Parliament’s vice-president, a senior Irish MEP, that sought to facilitate greater influence for religious lobbyists in Brussels. This controversial plan was shelved after lawmakers protested, but with a larger bloc of right-wing populist members now in Parliament, the proposal is expected to resurface.

Although Europe’s far-right parties fell well short of predictions that they would redraw the map of European political power, underperforming in Germany, Holland, and Denmark, they did make significant gains—especially in Italy, Hungary, and France. “Rather than a victory for democracy,” concluded the Dutch scholar Cas Mudde, the European elections showed how populism, and particularly “the populist radical right” has become “mainstreamed and normalized.”

 

At the World Congress of Families conference in Verona, on the eve of those elections, the mood was jubilant. “It’s great to be among such a group of far-right radicals,” joked the Christian conservative writer and YouTube personality Steve Turley. Proclaiming a “reawakening,” from Trump’s America to Modi’s India, Turley predicted that religious conservatives would soon outnumber “secularists”—simply by outbreeding them. Another American, a Missouri lawyer and Republican activist named Ed Marton, who co-authored a book called The Conservative Case for Trump, arrived at the podium in a MAGA hat and proclaimed that “Brexit, the Bible, and borders” could “make Europe great again.”

But Marton and his colleagues will not have it all their own way. For the first time at the WCF gathering, the crowds protesting outside were far larger than the audience inside. More than 30,000 protesters took over Verona after the Non Una di Meno feminist group, inspired by the trailblazing Argentinian Ni Una Menos (“Not One Less”) movement, called a demonstration. People traveled from across Italy and as far away as Belarus, Spain, Croatia, and Britain to take part.

The next day, a smaller group of women staged a silent protest dressed in the iconic red robes and bonnets of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. These robes have been worn by women protesting the backlash against reproductive rights across the US, as well as in Poland, Australia, Ireland, and Argentina. We met a woman from Croatia who said she planned to join a “walk for freedom” to counter an annual anti-abortion “walk for life” when she got home. “This is just the beginning,” she told us.

This article first appeared in the New York Review of Books