THE Flemish city of Ghent is so packed with medieval antiquities that it is in no danger of forgetting its history. Nonetheless, cultural identity is a burning political issue there. On March 22nd marchers led by a conservative Flemish student group, the Nationalist Student Union (NSV), filed into the square of the Cathedral of St Bavo. The march was a protest over the large number of murders of white South African farmers by blacks. It was also part of a growing movement led by young European activists aimed at reshaping identity politics, long the province of the left, into a right-wing cause.

White Afrikaners, like Flemings, speak a form of Dutch, so there is a cultural bond. The NSV, founded in 1976 as part of the Flemish independence movement, wanted to show solidarity with them, said Bavo Janssens, one of the group’s leaders. Behind him flew flags bearing the Flemish lion and a banner reading “ANC murderers”. In a jab at multiculturalism everywhere, Mr Janssens said the Belgian media were too politically correct to admit that “the rainbow nation of Nelson Mandela has failed.”

All over Europe, studious youths with neat haircuts are changing the face of right-wing activism. Some embrace the new populist parties that have sprung up across Europe, like the Netherlands’ Forum for Democracy (FvD) or Italy’s CasaPound (after the fascist-sympathising poet Ezra). Others become social-media personalities, or run websites and publishing houses like Sweden’s Red Ice and Arktos.

This new “identitarian” right sprawls across borders; activists from Scandinavia, Italy, Germany and America often collaborate. In electoral terms, it is tiny. But it also aims to change politics by spreading ideas and setting the terms of political debate. Its activists call this “metapolitics”, a concept borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the 1920s and 1930s.

Western Europe’s elections last year were widely seen as dealing a blow to populism. But they also brought victory to new parties focused on identity. In the Netherlands Thierry Baudet, the leader of the FVD, which won two seats in parliament, has warned that immigration may mean the “homeopathic watering-down” of Dutch culture. In Germany the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party brought far-right nativism into the Bundestag. In Italy this year the two big winners, the Northern League and the Five Star Movement, propose strict limits on immigration. Increasingly, identity is a key issue in European elections, and the identitarian right is starting to frame the debate.

One way it gains influence is by prompting authorities to overreact. In early March Martin Sellner, an Austrian identitarian activist, was barred from entering Britain, where he had planned to deliver a speech in Hyde Park. Mr Sellner’s expulsion was big news on alt-right and identitarian websites for weeks. He condemned it as “a new totalitarianism”: “We are being replaced, conquered by radical Islam, and we are not allowed to talk about it!”

Mr Sellner is among the biggest figures in the Identitarian Movement (IM), a network with branches in most European countries. The movement, which began in France in 2003, often uses a black-and-yellow flag with a symbol that represents the Spartans’ shields at the battle of Thermopylae (when Europeans resisted a Persian horde). They share common ideas: the need to stop mass immigration, the undesirability of Islam and the corrupt authoritarianism of the EU. The IM does not endorse parties. Instead it stages politically charged stunts, such as disrupting a play by a Jewish playwright with refugee actors in Vienna. The most ambitious IM action yet was Defend Europe, a project last August by the movement’s Italian branch, which hired a boat to discourage NGOs from rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. The influence of far-right media is just as significant. The website Red Ice, based in both Sweden and Texas, connects European identitarians to American alt-righters.

Boomerang

Identitarians largely avoid old-fashioned national conflicts by concentrating instead on what they see as the civilisational clash between Europe and other continents. Many of them even advocate a European-level political body that can hold its own against superpowers like America and China. But they disagree about liberalism. Some see it as part of Europe’s identity, threatened by Muslims who do not respect women or gay people. Others, including Daniel Friberg, the Swedish CEO of Arktos, see liberalism as the “disease” that made Muslim immigration easy in the first place.

Such attitudes, and the ironic tone of much far-right discourse, make for strange detours. In the social-media channels where identitarians congregate, on Twitter, Gab and 8chan, a pseudo-movement calling itself NazBol has popped up, combining Nazi and Bolshevik iconography. No one knows whether it is serious.

There is not much risk of NazBols marching through the streets of Ghent. Much more important is how identitarian language migrates from these fringe groups towards the political centre. In the Dutch municipal elections this month, ads for the governing Liberal party assured voters that they were “not racist” for celebrating the holiday of Sinterklaas in blackface. The German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, announced this month that Islam “is not a part” of Germany, forcing Angela Merkel to contradict him. In Denmark the Social Democrats now want to ship even legitimate asylum-seekers back to the regions they come from. The metapolitics, as the identitarians put it, is working.