The EU’s crime-fighting agency, Europol, reported in its December 2023 report that there were 45 arrests of far-right extremists in 2022 and the “threat posed from right-wing terrorist lone actors, radicalized online, remained significant.”

The most significant attack was an October 2022 shooting carried out in Bratislava, Slovakia, in front of an LGBTQ+ bar that resulted in two deaths. Interestingly, the State Department’s designation of the Nordic Resistance Movement highlighted that the group’s violent actions include an anti-LGBTQ+ platform.

The Biden administration designated the Nordic Resistance Movement as a terrorist group shortly after EU parliamentary elections, in which far-right political groups made significant gains.

Far-right groups, such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany, won seats – 15 of them – for the first time. The group encourages violence against immigrants – communities often singled out by violent radical-right extremists such as the Nordic Resistance Movement.

In fact, the Nordic group’s most notorious attack was carried out at a refugee center in Gothenburg, Sweden, in January 2017, during which an attempted bomb attack left one person seriously injured.

The perpetrators of the attack were trained at a camp in Russia by the Russian Imperial Movement – the group that the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist group in 2020.

More recently, on June 18, a former member of the Nordic group carried out a knife attack on a foreign-born 12-year-old child in Finland.

Migration policy has long been a focus for violent far-right extremists, and increasingly politicians have been the targets.

In May 2024, for instance, a center-left German politician was beaten up while hanging campaign posters in an ideologically motivated attack.

In another assault, a politician in Dresden, Germany, was assaulted by a group that allegedly called out, “Heil Hitler.”

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