Far right homeland

A growing number of far-right leaders and activists are now basing themselves in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Situated at the crossroads of Europe, Victor Orbán’s…

A growing number of far-right leaders and activists are now basing themselves in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Situated at the crossroads of Europe, Victor Orbán’s right-wing rule provides the far right with a political security not found in most other European countries.
Here, HOPE not hate profiles the far-right leaders currently hiding out in Budapest.

Nick Griffin

The ex-leader of the British National Party (BNP) has spent the three years since being dumped as an MEP scrabbling around Europe and the Middle East in search of a living.

Currently vice president of the Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF), Griffin will soon be unsalaried again as the European Parliament is about to slash its funding.

Life in the political wilderness has done nothing to dampen Griffin’s enthusiasm for antisemitism and conspiracy theory. Now aged 58, Griffin has almost completely turned his back on the UK and spends much of his time extolling the virtues of life outside the European Union, encouraging, where possible, his supporters to follow his example and move to either central or eastern Europe.

Griffin’s pet project and favoured meal ticket is speaking – with a deformed understanding – on demographics, in his case scare stories about the demographic changes happening with the EU. “Britain is lost, is finished,” he is fond of saying.

Despite being a minor political figure in the UK, Griffin is treated with reverence by some sections of the European far right and although Hungary looks his best bet for a new home, he is also popular with fascists in Serbia where he is believed to have looked at rural properties.


Jim Dowson

Accumulating infamy and influence in both Europe and the United States, it is Dowson who has opened the door to members of the far right in Hungary by attaching himself to churches there.

Dowson runs a number of internet operations in Budapest and Belgrade. His pervasive influence and the role he may have played in the Presidential elections have even been questioned in the US.

The former BNP fundraiser and founder of Britain First is heavily involved in plotting an exodus of hate-filled “Christians” from around the world to settle in the Hungarian countryside and build a new society free from liberalism, homosexuality and abortion.

Dowson has vowed to throw his considerable online operation behind a vote for Scottish independence in the belief that it will hasten the destruction of Britain and lead to an exodus of Christians to central and eastern Europe under the austere leadership of God-fearing characters like himself.


Tor Westman

Westman is the marketing chief for Arktos Books.

Westman formerly worked as a web designer and sits on the board of directors of Altright Incorporated, also working as its technical director. Westman was involved in organising the Identitarian Ideas IX conference in Stockholm on 25 February 2017.

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1988, Westman currently resides in Budapest.


Group Suavelos

Suavelos is an internet project seemingly owned by Daniel Conversano – a “Billy no mates” internet fascist – who has desperately sought links with extremist groups in France, not least with the fascist French Nationalist Party (PNF), the Jew-baiting “comedian” Dieudonné whose virulent antisemitism he shares and Alain Soral with whom he had punch-up – and lost – during a televised debate.  Both Suavelos and Conversano are held in very low esteem and regarded as cranks by most of the French far right. Conversano is believed to be living in Hungary.


Daniel Friberg

Originally from Sweden and CEO of a mining company called Wiking Mineral, Friberg is a leading alt-right activist and a founding member of the far-right Swedish metapolitical ‘think-tank’ Motpol. He is also a founder and now CEO of the influential far-right European publisher Arktos Media Ltd, through which he has published his book The Real Right Returns: A Handbook For the True Opposition (2015).

Friberg was also central to the creation of Altright Incorporated, a joint venture between Arktos, the American-based NPI and the media platform Red Ice. As well as being on the board of directors he is the new organisation’s European Editor.


Willem Nassau

Probably using a pseudonym, “Willem Nassau” is a self-styled “French royalist” and “white supremacist” with a risible Twitter following that numbers a mammoth eight. He makes very nasty YouTube video clips that exhibit a strange fixation and extraordinary fascination with paedophilia and with accusing others – including the billionaire Hungarian-American and philanthropist George Soros – of it. “Nassau” claims to be living in Budapest.


Mario Rönsch

Rönsch, 33, is an anti-immigrant activist from Erfurt, eastern Germany, who stood behind the closed-down Anonymous.Kollektiv Facebook page and the vanished Migrantenschreck.ru website that spread fake anti-migrant news and who hawked illegal firearms from a Budapest-registered address. Sacked by the German far-right news outlet Compact for being too extreme – and now on the run from the German police – Rönsch is purportedly in Crimea but believed to be still in Hungary. In January, German police raided 29 homes and premises and recovered 40 guns he sold.


Paul Ramsey

Using the screen name Ramzpaul, Paul Ramsey is an American white nationalist content
creator currently based in Hungary. Formerly a Republican, he has been producing hate-filled videos since 2009 and
currently has over 40,000 subscribers on YouTube. While he styles himself as a satirist and tries to couch his content in humour, it is regularly racist and misogynist. In October 2015 he tweeted: “If I were the EU president I would appoint Breivik as head of the refugee commission. We need some creative solutions.”

He has extensive links within the so-called alt-right and international far right and, in 2016, he attended the National Policy Institute ‘Identity Politics’ conference and spoke on the rise of the alt-right. In 2017 he attended the EtnoFutur conference in Estonia that was organised by the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) and its youth wing ‘Blue Awakening’ (Sinine Äratus) and the international alt-right conference Identitarian Ideas IX in Stockholm, Sweden.


Matthew Forney

Forney is an alt-right blogger and radio host associated with the ‘manosphere’, an online anti-feminist male subculture site that emphasises male victimhood.

Forney has written for a number of alt-right and right-wing publications including Taki’s Magazine, Alternative Right, Return of Kings, Right On and The Right Stuff. Forney was also the editor at the now-defunct manosphere gaming blog, Reaxxion.

Forney founded his website mattforney.com in April 2012, which has become his primary outlet for articles such as “The Case Against Female Self-Esteem”. He also hosts an active YouTube page, although his viewership remains small.

Forney ran the online magazine Mala Fide from 2009 to 2012, compiling over 60 blog posts into a book Three Years of Hate. He has also authored books such as Trolling for a Living and Do the Philippines, which offers, among other things, “a thorough analysis of Philippine culture, to better help you bang girls”.

Forney spoke at the Ideas IX conference in Stockholm, 25 February 2017.

He was raised in Syracuse, New York, and graduated from the private prep school, the Christian Brothers Academy, before training in English and journalism at SUNY in Albany. Forney now lives in Budapest.

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