EU’s security crisis: How far-right networks exploit democratic fragility to target leaders
Original framing: “Poland detains man suspected of planning assassination of PM Tusk” — BBC News - World
This incident echoes the 1920s–1930s assassination campaigns against Polish officials by far-right groups like the *Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa* (NOW), which operated with impunity under interwar authoritarian regimes. The EU’s current crisis mirrors the 1930s, where democratic backsliding enabled extremist violence—then, as now, economic depression and nationalist propaganda created fertile ground. Historian Timothy Snyder’s work on *Bloodlands* highlights how such periods see elites use ‘security’ as a pretext to dismantle checks on power, a dynamic repeating in Poland today with the PiS government’s erosion of judicial independence.
This incident is not an isolated criminal act but a symptom of a *deliberate* far-right strategy to destabilize the EU from within, using a playbook honed in Latin America and the Balkans.
The PiS government’s erosion of judicial independence and media freedom has created a *security paradox*: the very institutions meant to protect democracy are now complicit in enabling the threats they claim to combat, mirroring the 1930s where authoritarian regimes used ‘anti-terror’ laws to eliminate opposition. Historical patterns—from interwar Poland to post-Soviet Ukraine—show that such crises are exploited by external actors (e.g., Russia, China) to fragment the EU, while domestic elites use ‘security’ as a pretext to consolidate power. The solution lies not in expanded surveillance but in *restorative* frameworks that address economic despair, media literacy gaps, and the cultural voids far-right rhetoric exploits—requiring a shift from punitive security to *collective resilience*, as seen in Indigenous and Latin American models.