Donation From New Zealand Attack Suspect Puts Spotlight on Europe’s Far Right

BERLIN — Clean-shaven, well-dressed and polite, Martin Sellner is the poster boy of Europe’s new far right. A 30-year-old philosophy graduate, he blogs about what he says is the threat Muslim immigration poses for Europe, stages nonviolent protests and is widely known on the global far-right scene.

Just how widely became clear this week when it emerged that Mr. Sellner received a 1,500 euro donation — about $1,700 — a year ago from Brenton Harrison Tarrant of Australia, who is accused of killing 50 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, two weeks ago.

“He gave me a generous donation and I thanked him, that’s all,” Mr. Sellner said in a telephone interview Wednesday, condemning the attack but acknowledging that the two men had written back and forth a few times over email.

That contact with the Christchurch suspect has renewed concerns that despite a self-conscious effort by Europe’s “new right” to rebrand itself with more careful language and a youthful face, its ideology is not much different from that of the neo-Nazis of old.

And now, some say, the ideas promoted by Mr. Sellner and his increasingly well-networked web of actors may serve as an incitement to terrorism with a potentially global reach.

“The ethos of the identitarians is nonviolent,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College in London. “But they promote an idea that is taken by some people to justify violence. It is not directly responsible for the violence — but it enables it.”

Austrian security services raided Mr. Sellner’s apartment on Monday, confiscating his electronics and opening an investigation into links between the Christchurch attack and Mr. Sellner’s movement, Generation Identity.

[Read more about the growth of Generation Identity.]

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria, a conservative, said Wednesday that his government was considering banning Mr. Sellner’s movement. “There is no tolerance for dangerous ideology,” he said.

Beyond the email exchange and the donation, there are other indicators that Mr. Sellner influenced the thinking of the Christchurch attack suspect.

Generation Identity’s flagship idea — the “Great Replacement” — was also the title of the manifesto Mr. Tarrant released through his social media account on the morning of the massacre. It is essentially a conspiracy theory that accuses liberal politicians of deliberately acting to supplant white Europeans with Muslims through mass migration and higher birthrates.

Mr. Sellner himself acknowledged in the telephone interview that Mr. Tarrant had expressed admiration for his work, and that he in turn had pointed Mr. Tarrant to his English-language YouTube videos. He also did not exclude the possibility that Mr. Tarrant’s email had ended up in a list he used for groups emails.

In September 2018, around the time Mr. Tarrant was believed to be touring Europe, Mr. Sellner posted a YouTube video about the “Great Replacement.” It has had over 100,000 views.

Mr. Sellner said he had never met Mr. Tarrant, who is reported to have visited Vienna during his travels, and rejected the idea that he could be held responsible for his actions.

Generation Identity originated in France in the orbit of the nativist essayist Renaud Camus. It has chapters in several European countries, counting a few thousand committed followers but far more sympathizers, officials say.

Mr. Neumann of King’s College in London compared the movement to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has also mixed powerful conspiracy theories with a sense of existential crisis. “They argue that an invasion is happening, that it is us against Islam,” Mr. Neumann said.

He said: “If you relentlessly speak about an existential threat, you can’t be surprised when some people take the logical next step and use violence. If the Muslims are invading and fighting a war against us and our identity, then there is only one answer: ‘We have to defend ourselves.’”

Like jihadist ideologues, who mark key battle dates against the crusaders, Generation Identity commemorates dates when Europeans fought back foreign — and often Muslim — invaders.

“Our ancestors protected Vienna,” Mr. Sellner said in an earlier interview last fall. “Now it’s our turn.”

The movement’s symbol is the Greek lambda, which is said to have marked the shields of Spartans when they fought back Persian invaders in 480 B.C. Every September in Vienna, Mr. Sellner and fellow activists march in honor of Prince Eugene, who beat back the Ottomans outside Vienna in 1683.

It is a narrative that risks mutually reinforcing violent extremism on both sides, Mr. Neumann said.

“What unites jihadis and the new right is the idea that the fight has never stopped,” Mr. Neumann said. “We are in a modern replay of the Crusades. This is what unites the two forms of extremism. And it mutually reinforces the narrative of Islam and West being in an existential standoff.”

Mr. Sellner does not like the analogy. He prefers to compare his link to the mosque shooting suspect to that between leftist activists — his own parents once fell into that category — and leftist terrorists. Someone who talks about class struggle can hardly be held responsible for leftist militants then exploding a bomb, he said.

In his leather jacket and trendy horn-rimmed glasses, Mr. Sellner embodies the image makeover of the far right. He has admitted to once being a member of a neo-Nazi group, but these days, Gandhi and Martin Luther King share book shelf in his Viennese apartment. He calls himself a patriot and a democrat.

Experts like Mr. Neumann don’t buy it.

“The presentation has changed, but the message is still racist,” Mr. Neumann said. “When they talk about European identity, they mean white Christian identity. They use friendly, progressive language, but the content is the same old.”

What’s genuinely new, he said, “is that they are increasingly globally networked.”

Mr. Sellner also personifies the reach of an increasingly global movement with his close links to activists across Europe and the United States: He is engaged to Brittany Pettibone, an American YouTuber with links to the alt-right who once claimed there was a “white genocide” in South Africa.

The couple routinely appear on videos together, recently expressing admiration for Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian prime minister, Victor Orban, and Italy’s vice premier Matteo Salvini.

In the interview, Mr. Sellner described President Trump as “a catalyst for the European right” and expressed his admiration for Mr. Kurz, the Austrian chancellor, for daring to go into coalition with the far right.

The movement is having an influence on politicians.

Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, made ‘‘the Great Replacement’’ the title of a news release in April 2017, six months before his party became the third-strongest in the German Parliament.

That same year, Heinz-Christian Strache, now the Austrian vice chancellor, urged voters on Facebook to replace mainstream politicians “before they replace the Austrian population in its totality.”

He has since deleted the post, but the fact Mr. Sellner’s movement has longstanding links to the far-right Freedom party, which is now part of the Austrian government, has made any investigation into the movement particularly fraught.

Last year, the interior minister, Herbert Kickl, who is a Freedom Party member, ordered a police raid on the domestic intelligence service, a move some interpreted as a way for the minister to find out what the security services knew about his party’s far-right network.

When Mr. Kurz pointedly demanded that law enforcement agencies and the justice system uncover the full extent of links to the attack in New Zealand, some saw this also as a veiled warning to his own minister.

“Any link between the Christchurch attacker and the members of Generation Identity in Austria must be brought to light unsparingly,” Mr. Kurz said.

The police in New Zealand said Wednesday that its investigating team was making a large number of inquiries, both across New Zealand and internationally, but declined to provide details.

Mr. Sellner warned that Mr. Kurz’s threat to potentially ban Generation Identity risked pushing people underground and toward greater extremism.

“We are a patriotic movement on the nationalist right, and we are committed to nonviolence,” Mr. Sellner said.

He said: “If you take people’s right to debate away and push them underground, there is a risk of radicalization. Then people might say ‘Tarrant is right.’”