In January, a far-left group attacked the German electricity system and Berlin suffered the biggest blackout since World War II. 45,000 families were left without power in a month with negative temperatures.
This act of sabotage, with an operational sophistication unparalleled in recent decades, led the German authorities to allocate more resources to combating the extreme left.
In Italy, worrying episodes are also emerging. Just over a week ago, two young anarchists were found dead in the rubble of an abandoned house in Rome. The explosive device they were making detonated unintentionally.
The bomb would be intended for the railways. According to the Italian Ministry of the Interior, attacks on this type of infrastructure increased by 450% between 2024 and 2025.
In Portugal, where the far left is treated as a fantasy invented by ill-intentioned people, an individual with anarchist motivations launched an incendiary device against an anti-abortion march in Lisbon. Only the attacker’s ineptitude prevented a tragedy.
Despite the growth of the extreme right in Europe, the numbers show a higher incidence of violence from the opposite political camp. In 2024, Europol identified 58 acts of terrorism, of which 24 were of a jihadist nature, 21 of an extreme left and anarchist nature, 4 separatist and only 1 of an extreme right – in addition to 8 incidents without an established motive.
The most recent years show similar distributions and orders of magnitude. For example, in 2023, also according to Europol, out of 120 terrorist incidents, the far left was responsible for 32, which compares to 2 for the far right.
This takes us to a past that we thought had been archived, that of the third wave of international terrorism, between the 1960s and 1980s. The vast majority of organizations active in this period subscribed to far-left agendas and were, essentially, extra-parliamentary movements, with little or no representation in democratic institutions. They were unable to elect candidates in free and plural elections, or they simply rejected democracy and its procedures.
It was no coincidence that the peak of terrorism in Spain occurred in the 1980s, a stage in which the party system was consolidated at the center, with voters pushing extremism to the margins of the political arena. The strong eruption of the FP-25 in Portugal followed a similar dynamic, especially after the defeat of Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho in the 1980 presidential election.
Terrorism does not lend itself to simple causalities. And we are far from the spiral of violence that devastated the European continent half a century ago. Yet, in the present moment, the past seems to be repeating itself. There is some correlation between Europe’s shift to the right in elections and the rise in left-wing and anarchist terrorist incidents.
In the United States of America, where far-right violence has been dominant, recent studies suggest some correlation between Trump’s victory and the growth of violent episodes with left-wing motivations.
Therefore, a hypothesis appears: similar to what happened 50 years ago, the extreme left, faced with electoral failures and the rise of parties they consider illegitimate, see the political context as an incentive to violence. Especially because political polarization is one of the most immediate consequences of a terrorist act.
What is certain is that today, as in the past, these leftists act in the name of the people while ignoring the will expressed by them at the polls. It is also certain that the evidence is sufficient for attention to be finally given to the matter. They are not perceptions.
Write without applying the new Orthographic Agreement.
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