From QAnon to anti-vaccines through the "plandemic": map of conspiracy in Europe

“It is not a virus,” says Monique Lustig under an umbrella full of messages in Dutch against vaccination. In Germany, Hellmuth adds: “Covid is a fable of the international financial mafia.” “What if we were actually in a movie?” Asks Frenchman Christophe Charret. From The Hague to Stuttgart, passing through Paris, all of them claim that they fight against the “control of consciences”, against the “pedophile” networks, against the “plandemic” invented by a ruling caste with shady plans. “Alternative discourse” to the official truths and they follow the example of the American QAnon to capture their current conspiracy vision on social networks. They were expelled from Twitter or YouTube and feel persecuted. They have opted for secondary platforms to exchange information – most of it false – that, according to them, are hidden by the “conventional” media. AFP followed this conspiratorial breeding ground in Europe for months. There are the QAnon, the ultra-protesters, the anti-vaccines , right-wing populists, alternative therapy ecologists, businessmen, artisans, the unemployed and even doctors. A rising heterogeneous group that worries the intelligence services, who fear they will destabilize democracies. “The conspiracy is on the rise In social networks, we see that it is also organized in clandestine cells. Obviously it is a threat “, warns the French national intelligence coordinator Laurent Nunez, who acknowledges that” QAnon theories reach France. “On social networks, European QAnon groups or those linked to them swarm and gather. The Décodeurs in France have more than 30.000 subscribers on Telegram, German conspiratorial figures such as Attila Hildmann and Xavier Naidoo have more than 100,000, and the British Charlie Ward, who broadcasts pro-Trump montages to his followers almost every fifteen minutes, reaches almost 150,000. “There is a cocktail underway: the weakening of the socio-economic fabric, a strong oppositional movement of expression on digital platforms where it is easy to transmit conspiratorial speeches, and the electoral calendar,” a source from the intelligence community in France told AFP. “They are movements that have been around for more or less ten or fifteen years. They feed off an anti-establishment conspiracy. There is a porosity with ultra-right groups ”, analyzes a senior French intelligence official who recognizes that what is new is the inclusion of“ people from quite varied universes. ”They can destroy families that feel powerless in the face of the drift of their beings dear. This is what happened to Paul (the name has been changed) who tells AFP of his mother’s slow slide “to the other side.” “She lived in seclusion, spent an incredible amount of time on the internet looking for answers to her anger against the injustice of the world. He consumed YouTube 24 hours a day, the conspiracy channels were his only window to the world, ”says this 48-year-old bookseller. “Confinement was the icing on the cake. The covid, the confirmation of all his theories about the end of the world, “he adds. The obsession with Bill GatesIt is mid-March in the quiet town of Uithoorn, south of Amsterdam. Lange Frans unfolds his tape measure and, at a hurried pace, invites us into his recording studio. “There is no mask here”, loose, sly, this rapper who became known in the 90s.Between two musical metaphors, he proudly recounts the “clandestine concert” without measures of social distance in which he participated the day before. For a few years his podcasts have been successful in the Netherlands. In them, for two hours, he invites a personality to give an “alternative” vision of the present. Covid, the MH-370 plane crash, pedocriminality, UFOs … Everything has a place. “Keep track of the money!” Exhorts Lange Frans (“The Great Frans” in Dutch), between posters of Bob Dylan and guitars. “Take the case of Bill Gates. People should find out about him, he has no medical degree or vaccination experience. The only reason they pay so much attention to him is because he has money, ”he says in impeccable English. For this 40-year-old, whose YouTube channel is usually closed, the covid is a “soap opera” and an “exaggerated flu” that the media do not stop talking about. Skepticism That same Sunday, the eve of legislative elections in the Netherlands, 3,000 people were rallied in The Hague against anticovid restrictions. A carnival closely watched by the police. Weeks earlier, the Netherlands suffered several nights of unusual disturbances after the imposition of a curfew. Populist activists, people who denounced a world government, defenders of natural medicines participated in the demonstration. They are united by a common denominator: skepticism regarding the official discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic. «It is not a virus, it is a tool to use its power. The world elite organizes it, many think it is too crazy to be true, but they have been working on it for more than 20 years, “says restorer Monique Lustig.A little further afield, Jeffrey, a 21-year-old student, distributes leaflets denouncing the “Great Reset”, the World Economic Forum’s plan to reactivate the economy after covid-19 that, according to him, hides the control of freedoms and submission of the population Who created the pandemic? Each one gives a different answer, but they often cite two avatars of global capitalism: World Economic Forum organizer Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates. “The global elite is taking advantage of the situation to create a new society. There are thousands of us here convinced that it is not a pandemic, “adds Ard Pisa, a former banker turned into advocating for alternative medicine to cure cancer.” Eight million children disappear every year. This is part of our world, we must not close our eyes, there are many silenced cases of pedophilia, “he continues, addressing one of the favorite themes of QAnon supporters. This figure, regularly transmitted by the child protection NGOs, actually includes all reported disappearances, including escapes, the vast majority of which are resolved. “Deep state” The Hague demonstration is no exception in Europe . In protests against the anticovid restrictions there are usually many adherents of conspiracy theories. In Denmark, members of the group ‘Men in Black’ claim that the coronavirus is a “scam”. In Berlin, QAnon flags abound in these concentrations that can gather 10,000 people. A handful of them even tried to break into Parliament last August. According to a study published in September 2020, a third of Germans believe that “secret powers” control the world.QAnon’s favorite themes are staple ingredients in this conspiratorial pot. “QAnon is a convergence point for far-right groups, people who believe in UFOs, those who think that 5G will be used to control people,” explains Tom de Smedt, a Belgian researcher who has authored several studies on the rise of the movement in Europe. Public opinion learned of the existence of this movement, born in the United States, during the invasion of the Capitol in January. It is named for the cryptic messages published by a certain subject who calls himself “Q “Supposedly a senior US official close to Trump. Very active in the United States since 2017, he defends the idea that a “deep state” piloted by a handful of elites governs the world order. The fake Pizzagate scandal in which Democrats were accused of being in charge of a pedophile ring is one of the foundations of their fight, even now one of their latest fake news circulating refers to the same topic: more than 1,000 children they would have been released from the holds of the ship “Ever given” that blocked the Suez Canal, as part of an international traffic promoted by Hillary Clinton. “Tipping point” “Q’s messages are the conspirator’s bible!” with a smile Christophe Charret. This affable and athletic businessman who welcomes AFP to his modern home in the suburbs of Paris describes himself as a “moderate conspirator.” It is almost 8:00 p.m. and Prime Minister Jean Castex has just announced that he will be re-imposed the confinement in part of France. But in Charret’s living room the television is off.Everything takes place in his small office, in the basement, where he prepares to intervene in the newscast of the Human Alliance, an association with 12,000 subscribers on the Telegram network that deciphers current affairs under a conspiratorial prism. Under the sound of music worthy of the Hollywood movies, the images flash by: Kennedy, September 11, 5G, the vaccine, Donald Trump, the French epidemiologist Didier Raoult and, of course, Bill Gates. “The world is run by a financial conglomerate -technological that controls the sovereignty of the peoples. Technology allows worrying things to be done, the control of consciousness in particular is not a myth, ”says Charret. Behind him is a “Q” made with a luminous garland. That night, in a video close to 30,000 views, he intervened to talk about vaccines, Joe Biden and the humanitarian actions of the association that raises funds for needy students “We are at a turning point in the world, two sides are facing each other and those who are in charge are not our friends. They will do everything possible not to let them go, but there are forces working for a future D-Day “, he concludes, insisting on his peaceful commitment and on the rejection of violence. Repost on TelegramThe QAnon at all costs are quite discreet and scarce in Europe. The movement’s DNA remains deeply American. But their heirs from the Old Continent retake the ideological base. “All European QAnon support the official narrative, that is, support for Trump and the ideas of the extreme right, but each group adapts these messages to local interests,” says the director of strategy. from Israeli cybersecurity company ActiveFence, Nitzan Tamari.”Among the issues on which there is consensus among the different groups we find the covid-19 and conspiracies about the vaccine that are the bulk of the messages exchanged, but also the plots about the deep state and pedocriminality,” explains the Israeli. «QAnon is a kind of wounded crab that retreats into its shell. Twitter has done an enormous job deleting accounts, “recalls researcher Tom de Smedt. But this digital sweep has not reached the roots of the success of these theories. “There is a feeling of anger that is neither left nor right, but anti-elite. And that feeling has not disappeared, “adds Tom de Smedt. Contamination of public debate The amount of rumors that spread among Telegram groups often overwhelm this conspiratorial” hard core “and end up sneaking into the public debate. Last January, in Germany, in a formidable case study of telephone propagation, thousands of messages suddenly denounced in various networks the desire to create “masturbation rooms” for minors in a kindergarten in Teltow, south of Berlin. By hundreds of elected officials from the far-right AfD party, he led a deputy from the ruling majority to criticize this initiative. It all actually stemmed from a local newspaper article whose misinterpreted quotes were exponentially amplified on social media: In France, the documentary Hold-Up, a nearly three-hour jumble that offers a rostrum to conspiratorial tales of doctors, deputies, researchers and sociologists, has been seen by several million people.Branded by many elected officials of the government majority of “conspiracy propaganda”, it became a reference for all those who doubt, regardless of their political orientation. “This film is a synthetic work of all the plot dynamics of the moment. They have a repeater of the word everywhere. We should have it too, “says a head of the ruling majority in France one year before the presidential election. In 2019, a study by the Jean Jaurès Foundation showed that the electorate of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French extreme right, It is by far the most permeable to conspiracy theories. The Blessing of the Populists In the Netherlands, after a campaign focused on hostility to anticovid measures that opted for vagueness about conspiracy speeches, the populist formation Forum for Democracy quadrupled its number of legislative seats. In Urk, a small fishing town in the ultra-Protestant “Bible Belt,” where measles was still raging in 2019, the Forum climbed into the third force. Like the Forum, some European populist parties do not officially embrace conspiracy rhetoric, but maintain a speech ambiguous and attractive enough for this electorate often disgusted with politics. “People here have doubts about the vaccine. There are medical reasons – its effects are unknown – but also religious ones. Do you believe in God or in the vaccine? God has given us health and sickness. Can we interfere with their plans? “Asks the Reverend Alwin Uitslag, who receives AFP in his house next to one of the many churches in the borough.Far from the sea, 500 kilometers from Urk, in the land (state) of Baden-Württemberg, a German stronghold of the protest against sanitary measures, Christina Baum is campaigning under the bright sun. A few days before the elections in this region, this regional spokesperson on health issues for the far-right German party AfD, speaks with her supporters, without mask or taboos, about the covid. One of them, Hellmuth, attacks this “fable of the criminal international financial mafia ». Baum refuses to contradict this speech: in the AfD, all opinions are welcome. Election calendar “With the covid, theories that I had never heard of have come to light. And I find it exciting. What do you want to do with these people? Do you mean to tell them that we completely cut them off from society? It’s not possible. We must seek dialogue with everyone, “Baum tells AFP.” Those who vote for the far-right parties have a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories linked to the covid. This is the case of one in five AfD voters, “says a February 2021 report by various NGOs, including the Amadeu Antonio Foundation. Speeches that find an echo in France, especially among the” Patriots “, a small sovereignist party whose leader Florian Philippot denounces the “Coronalocura” in demonstrations across the country every Saturday. Although at the moment it is limited to some populist political formations and sporadic demonstrations, this cocktail of multiple plotist speeches worries the European intelligence services.In Germany the ‘Querdenken’ movement, which opposes anticovid measures, is under reinforced surveillance in several regions, due to its links with close movements of the extreme right, whose speech calls into question the Constitution. ‘We work on a group of clearly delimited people, who, we find, have contacts with extremists. Plot theories can act as a catalyst for radicalization and a gateway to extremism, “explains an intelligence officer in Baden-Württemberg. Conspiracy theories, which have crept into public debate and on social media, could they open the door to the destabilization of our democracies? “We are concerned about the move to violent acts of these individuals,” says a senior French intelligence official who blames the “Russian state media interference” on the matter from the “Russia chains Today and Sputnik “. Telegram and VK, two of the main social networks where the plotters have withdrawn, share the same creators: the Russian brothers Durov. In Germany,” recently, the atmosphere in the demonstrations has become much more aggressive ” says the person in charge in Stuttgart. «For me, the most dangerous thing is not a few radicals, but this kind of background sea that arouses increasing distrust in the i Institutions “, French researcher Sylvain Delouvée fears.” The challenge is to know whether or not the (presidential) election will channel this will to express protest, “concludes the French intelligence source. France and Germany will offer a first response in the coming months.