Political violence has no noble side. It is always repugnant, always undemocratic and always worthy of unreserved condemnation. In a mature democracy, public security and the defense of the rule of law cannot fluctuate according to ideological sympathies, nor depend on the partisan color of those who attack, set fire to, intimidate or destroy.
A relevant part of the media and political commentary insists on looking at far-left violence with an unsettling indulgence, as if it were less serious, more explainable or more politically tolerable. As if it were more acceptable when it was done in the name of supposedly noble causes. As if intimidation, sabotage or terror gained a kind of moral veneer by being practiced against “the system”, “capitalism” or “power structures”. Since when did the use of violence cease to be intolerable just because those who practice it proclaim themselves to be anti-fascist, anti-capitalist or revolutionary?
In the European context, this is not an argument or a rhetorical exaggeration. It is a reality already identified by European institutions and already debated in the European Parliament itself. Presentation of the report TE-SAT 2025 in the LIBE commission showed that left-wing and anarchist violence continues to have a concrete expression in the Union. According to the Europol report TE-SAT 2025relative to the year 2024, 58 terrorist attacks were recorded in the European Union. Of these, 24 had a jihadist motivation, 21 resulted from left-wing and anarchist violence, 1 was attributed to the extreme right, 4 had an ethnonationalist or separatist character, and 8 fell into other categories or were left unspecified. Of the 21 leftist and anarchist attacks, 17 were actually carried out, mainly in Italy – with 18 incidents in total – and in Greece. Targets included the industrial sector, critical infrastructure and symbols of the economic system.
The violent far left is no less dangerous than the far right. It is not so in its contempt for pluralism. It is not so in its hostility to freedom. It is not so in its authoritarian impulse. Both reject rational debate, both despise the opponent’s legitimacy. The difference is often just in the packaging.
Far-right violence is, as a general rule, immediately recognized as a threat. And well. But the violence of the extreme left continues to benefit, in too many media and cultural spaces, from a kind of moral discount. It is described with euphemisms, framed with semantic caution, relativized by sociological analyses.
It is also up to the media to recognize this reality without comfort filters. The violence of the extreme left is not an academic abstraction, nor a footnote detail: it is a real, growing and ideologically shielded problem by intellectual and journalistic sectors that have for decades given it the benefit of the doubt that they would never grant to the opposite side.
Write according to the old Orthographic Agreement.
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