Rubio, France’s Student Uprising, and the Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 28 Oct 2026
Marco Rubio’s speeches invoking a shared Western civilization are part of the ideological consolidation of fascism, mobilizing white racial solidarity to defend a declining capitalist order.
We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it. (Marco Rubio speech at Munich Security Conference, February 2026)
And the world communism envisions is a world without God. For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization – for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great. (Marco Rubio, U.S. Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism)
Marco Rubio’s July 16, 2026, speech at the opening of the U.S. Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism should be understood as part of the ideological consolidation of fascism in the West. Its significance extends beyond the criminalization of the radical left. Rubio invokes a supposedly shared Western civilization to mobilize white racial and cultural solidarity in defense of a moribund order whose economic foundations are in irreversible decline. But it is precisely that decline that explains the pathetic weaponization of an idea of Western civilizational superiority that must be protected. Rubio understands his audience and the anxiety generated by the decline of the Western European colonial/capitalist era. Rubio and the other white supremacists making political and economic policy in the United States from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – both from apartheid Southern Africa – to U.S. President Donald Trump. They understand that this civilizational framing is shared, in different forms, by rightist political forces across Europe—from Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France to Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party political movement in Britain.
This brings me to what is referred to as the French student uprising. African, Arab, and Muslim students and youth from working-class Paris banlieue suburbs played a significant role in the mobilization against deteriorating educational conditions and diminishing prospects for their futures. Their presence generated a violent ideological reaction as intense as the violence unleashed on the students by the French police. It was precisely the racialized character of the uprising that enabled right-wing political forces across Europe to recast a struggle over material conditions as a conflict over immigration, Islam, and European identity, even as increasing numbers of white French workers joined the protests and the demands expanded to cover all of the contradictions produced by four decades of neoliberal policies in France.
The political right understood what mainstream reporting often de-centers: the participation of racialized youth provided an opportunity to distort demands for social justice produced by the contradictions of capitalism as an assault on European civilization. The student becomes the immigrant; the immigrant becomes the cultural enemy; and the cultural enemy becomes a security threat whose presence justifies repression and ultimately expulsion!
This is the dangerous convergence embedded in Rubio’s politics: left, Black, Muslim, “terrorist” that collapses legitimate political opposition, racial and religious identity, and terrorism into a single ideological and security threat. Anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics become evidence of hostility to “civilization,” while the political agency of African and Muslim youth is treated as an existential threat to the state. The consequence is a framework both in the U.S. and Europe that legitimizes expanded state surveillance, police violence, and the criminalization of dissent.
It must be understood with unambiguous historical clarity that what is unfolding in Europe and the U.S. is not a turn to something called authoritarianism but the consolidation of fascism, with white supremacist ideology providing the axis of a cross-class white supremacist legitimation. This obvious turn to white identity politics makes the positions of left racial integrationists like Adolph Reed so incredibly dangerous.
At a historical moment when appeals to racialism and white supremacy are becoming normalized, Reed and other leftists are ideologically disarming opposition to this development by pretending that white supremacist ideology and the materiality of white supremacy is a phantom, a figment of the imagination of petit-bourgeois nationalists and “identitarians” while the mother of all identitarianism – white identity politics and white supremacy is given a pass.
But the ideologues of white supremacy understand that the appeal to the fiction of white civilization supplies the racial glue intended to bind the white working class to the interests of capitalist elites, redirecting anger away from the capitalist relations producing class-wide precarity and toward racialized populations who are themselves the disproportionate victims of colonial/capitalist contradiction.
The European normalization of “remigration”
Across Europe the significance of Rubio’s intervention becomes clearer when placed alongside the growing normalization of a political phenomenon labelled as “remigration.” The growing popularity of remigration, that is, the return of non-Europeans back to their countries of origin, is not simply a debate about enforcing immigration rules. It is a political project whose language of return reveals an ominous turn to a broader racialized struggle over who belongs to Europe and who should be expelled from it.
In Germany, the AfD formally embraced “remigration” in its 2025 election program. Party leader Alice Weidel advocated large-scale repatriations and the term was elevated from a slogan associated with far-right movements into an explicit party demand. The party defines its policy in terms of returning foreigners required to leave under law, while the wider remigration movement includes proposals directed at legally resident migrants and people considered insufficiently assimilated. The distinction matters: the political struggle is over whether formal legal status remains sufficient to establish belonging, or whether racialized definitions of culture and ancestry can supersede it.[3]
Austria’s FPÖ has advocated an EU commissioner for remigration. In Italy, politicians from the Lega have supported a “Remigration and Reconquest” initiative seeking parliamentary consideration. In France, Éric Zemmour has advocated a ministry of remigration, while Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has called for mass deportations in response to unrest in France. Spain’s Vox has also advanced large-scale return proposals for people with migrant backgrounds.[4] These developments do not represent identical policies, but they demonstrate how a once-marginal vocabulary is entering mainstream political debate and linking far-right forces across national boundaries.
The racialization of the French uprising provides a justification for this agenda. When African, Arab, and Muslim youth are depicted as enemies of European civilization, collective expulsion can be presented as a legitimate response to social disorder. The same narrative helps normalize violence against racialized communities and intensifies the danger posed by police forces already notorious for their treatment of youth in the immigrant banlieues. The recent deadly shooting near Paris, in which an African was killed and others wounded, must be understood within this wider atmosphere of racial hostility. [5]
The material Contradictions beneath the civilizational rhetoric
The uprising in France and across Europe cannot be understood apart from declining wages and living standards, deteriorating public services, austerity, debt pressures, and the narrowing prospects confronting working-class youth across racial and ethnic backgrounds. These pressures are often more acute in African, Arab, and Muslim communities because economic marginalization intersects with racial discrimination and unequal access to education, employment, and housing.
France’s fiscal crisis intensifies the struggle over public resources. Debt servicing and demands for fiscal consolidation constrain political choices even as communities require greater investment in education, health, housing, and employment. The war against Iran and the resulting energy-price pressures have added to the burdens confronting working-class households. At the same time, European governments have embraced military Keynesianism, mobilizing resources for military production while social needs remain subject to austerity and fiscal discipline.[6]
These contradictions have emerged throughout the advanced capitalist economies expressing the structural crisis of Western capitalism: a system increasingly unable to provide broad material security while preserving the accumulation and geopolitical power and interests of monopoly capital. But France’s specific crisis is also connected to the weakening of its historical ability to maintain its parasitic relations of extraction that allowed capital to bribe workers in France.
However, as the ability of France and other Western capitalist states to dictate economic and political terms to the Global South that allowed a continuous flow of value to the metropoles became more contested resulting in declining wages and living standards, white civilizational nationalism offered an ideological substitute for the failed promise of unbroken material prosperity to the Euro-American and European masses.
The appeal of Trump, Rubio, Le Pen, Farage, and other figures rests on the continued obscurantist policies emanating from the consolidating global fascist movement. They promise national renewal through exclusion hoping that the white working classes never catch on to the fact that the defense of white civilization is the defense of oligarchic capitalist rule.
The fascist response to capitalist crisis is to reorganize domination through white supremacy and civilizational exclusion. The peoples’ response must be to organize for liberation beyond the colonial and capitalist relations that have produced the crisis.
Endnotes
- Adolph Reed, Jacobin, October 25, 2026, “Adolph Reed on What It Will Take to Defeat Trumpism” https://archive.ph/V6nbU
- Gerald Horne, “Gerald Horne: Against Left Wing Nationalism” Gerald Horne: Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade) – Monthly Review
- Deutschlandfunk, “AfD nimmt Begriff ‘Remigration’ ins Wahlprogramm auf,” January 12, 2025, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/afd-nimmt-begriff-remigration-ins-wahlprogramm-auf-102.html; Alternative für Deutschland, “Wie die AfD den Begriff ‘Remigration’ definiert,” https://www.afd.de/remigration/.
- Clément Guillou and Allan K. Figueira, “Avec la ‘remigration’, l’extrême droite veut préparer les esprits à une politique raciale en Europe,” Le Monde, June 7, 2026, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2026/06/07/avec-la-remigration-l-extreme-droite-veut-preparer-les-esprits-a-une-politique-raciale-en-europe_6699142_823448.html; David Broder, “Look to Italy to See How the Dangerous Idea of ‘Remigration’ Is Taking Root in Europe,” The Guardian, February 26, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/26/italy-remigration-europe-deportation-far-right; Associated Press, “Thousands March in Rome in Anti- and Pro-Migration Rallies,” June 13, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/f32680a757da2ca62fdbe28f2e91f1b1.
- Agence France-Presse, “Macron Condemns ‘Racist Terrorist Attack’ After Deadly Shooting Near Paris,” October 23, 2026. Reporting on the investigation and official statements should be checked for updates as the case develops.
- International Monetary Fund, “IMF Executive Board Concludes 2026 Article IV Consultation with France,” July 22, 2026, https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2026/07/22/pr26255-france-imf-executive-board-concludes-2026-article-iv-consultation.
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
