SUE REID: Rise of Europe's new far Right: From Spain to Greece, an army of young nationalists is on the march... so will they trigger an earthquake at the ballot box?

The young man swaggered along a side street in the Spanish capital. He was sporting tattoos, a thin moustache and wearing a T-shirt with the logo: 'The White Race. Save European Identity.'

He hailed from Valladolid, a provincial city still notorious as a sanctuary for fascists in their fight against the communists during the country's bitter civil war in the 1930s.

The 23-year-old had travelled to Madrid a few days ago to demonstrate over uncontrolled immigration to Spain which he says is destroying both the country's identity and its Christian roots.

Alongside him were hundreds more Spanish youngsters, dressed in black regalia, all of whom thought exactly the same way as him.

'It's not racist to protect my own people from extinction,' said the young man in the T-shirt, who refused to give his name but agreed to a photo, as he joined a noisy rally of the far-Right nationalist movement, Nucleo Nacional, which is growing in popularity among those in their late teens and twenties.

A papier-mache life-sized effigy of Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez is attacked with sticks at a protest in Madrid

A masked member of the far-Right nationalist movement, Nucleo Nacional, which is growing in popularity across Spain among those in their late teens and twenties

Just minutes before the rally at a rented hall in the north of the city, there were scuffles when a Left-wing gang appeared from nowhere to rough up those who were queuing to get in.

An 18-year-old was dragged down and given a bloody head wound before the gang fled round the corner as fast as they had arrived.

Inside the event, a muscle-honed man wearing a black mask declared from a stage: 'We must maintain our culture, traditions and customs implanted here by Christianity.

'Please come and volunteer with us. There are those who call us Nazis in disguise. They are wrong.'

His invitation was met with loud cheers from the mostly young, male audience. The same enthusiastic reaction greeted another Nucleo Nacional speaker who told the crowd: 'The control of our nation is in the hands of traitors, barbarians, and degenerates who promote transgenderism, the loss of Spanish jobs and opportunities for our young people.

'This has led to a disorder unimaginable for most in our society. We are at the beginning of a fight for a victory that will await us. Viva Espana!'

The rally's venue was hired from an extreme nationalist group, Falange, which was selling its own brand of regalia there. It has no parliamentary seats but exists in the shadows and has an infamous past.

It was a band of 250 Falangists in Valladolid who helped notorious Spanish dictator General Franco win the bloody, long-drawn-out civil war for the nationalists, giving him absolute rule over Spain until his death in 1975 finally paved the way, three years later, for a liberal democracy.

For decades after that, the far-Right in Spain never dared show its face in public. But that changed in 2019 when the fiercely anti-immigration Vox party won its first foothold in the Cortes, Spain's parliament.

Vox's fortunes have since soared. It now holds nearly a third of the seats in the Cortes after promising a populist agenda of tighter borders, stricter law and order, and the deportation of illegal migrants coming to Spain across the sea from North Africa.

An extraordinary 27 per cent of those under the age of 35 voted for the party in a national poll a year ago. And it's predicted that in other EU nations huge numbers of the young will follow their lead by shifting to the Right in elections for the European Parliament this June.

The fact is that, here in Spain, where one in three people under 25 are jobless and immigration is soaring, trust in mainstream politics has taken a hammering.

The T-shirted youth at the Sunday rally said he plans to cast a vote (yes, for Vox) in the forthcoming polls. But many young Spaniards have lost faith in the ballot box entirely.

They are instead staging media-grabbing protests all over the country in support of a far-Right credo of nationalism and populism.

The poster boy of this rebellion is a well-educated political science student in his twenties called Cesar Pintado.

Like the youth in the T-shirt, he comes from Valladolid with its unsavoury fascist past.

Pintado is linked to a rebel movement called Revolt which is fiercely critical of Spain's Left-wing leaders, and their woke-leaning liberal agenda. Since January, which was soon after Revolt first emerged as an entity via TikTok and other social media, the movement has staged noisy rallies of the young in 11 cities across the country — in every one denouncing the ruling Socialists and prime minister Pedro Sanchez.

Hundreds of Revolt supporters turned up on New Year's Eve at Sanchez's headquarters in Madrid waving Spanish national flags.

Provocatively, they threw around sex toys and Catholic rosaries to get attention from the Press. Out came a papier-mache life-size figure of the premier which they then beat with sticks — an act which his Leftist party denounced, predictably, as a hate crime.

Revolt has already gained 30,000 followers on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, with its messages online calling for 'pressure on the streets against a traitor government' intent on destroying Spain.

'We are gathering in a great patriotic wave to unify Spain. We embrace our Spanish identity. We reject wokeism as a movement defined by anti-racism, feminism, and in favour of LGBTQ rights, and Marxist global forces,' goes the Revolt propaganda machine.

Protesters with pre-constitutional Spanish flags, associated with the dictator Franco, in Madrid

A group of young men attend Nucleo National political rally in Madrid earlier this month... supporters of the movement dress in black regalia

The Nucleo National movement is growing in popularity among the young, driven by rhetoric over rising levels of immigration to Spain

There is an anti-EU message too. Europe, it claims, is killing the 'uniqueness of individual nations'. The bloc 'promotes massive and uncontrolled immigration... which will lead to a continent where Europeans lose control of their own countries'.

Pintado, a rousing orator, has said at rallies: 'Young people now have the opportunity, and responsibility, to stand up and organise a great revolt to reclaim Spain.'

Spain, of course, is not the only EU country where a nationalist fervour is rising. There has been a dramatic turn against liberal conservatism across the bloc, particularly among the under-30s. 

In Germany last week, a survey showed the hardline Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the most popular party among under-30s.

The survey notes that politically conservative and xenophobic statements have increased among this age group as they object to mass 'refugee flows' causing lack of housing, overburdened medical services and social division.

And even in the mild-mannered Netherlands the message is the same.

Twenty-seven-year-old political activist and 'darling of the young Right' Eva Vlaardingerbroek said on Friday in a speech aired on social media: 'If we don't start to fight for our continent, the time in which we live will go down in history as the time Western nations didn't need to be invaded to be conquered. Our (EU) corrupt elite invited the invaders in.'

According to respected website Politico, Right-wing and far-Right members of the European parliament — where 705 seats are up for grabs in seven weeks' time — are artfully using TikTok and other social media to woo young voters.

'The Left can't 'meme' well,' says Romain Fargier, an expert on political radicalisation at France's Montpellier University. By 'canvassing' on the internet, he explains, the Right hopes to win over young hearts and minds.

Spain is following a path set by Greece which last year became the first EU country to elect a far-Right bloc of politicians in national elections.

Three parties, dramatically named Spartan, Greek Solutions, and Victory, scooped eleven per cent of the 300 parliamentary seats. And Konstantinos Bogdanos, a former MP of the ruling conservative New Democracy party, is not surprised at their success. He explained in the capital Athens last week: 'Many Greeks, whatever their age, are tired of being let down by mainstream politicians and afraid for the future.

'They are sickened by democracy. Society is getting poorer by the day. The country has the biggest debt in the EU. They object to a government handout policy where even a recently arrived migrant family gets more money a month from the state than a Greek one.'

Mr Bogdanos, 44, claims that a particularly widespread gripe among Greeks is their view that the government is subsidising jobs for newcomers. 'This is seen as unfair,' he said.

'If I, as a white male applied for a job, I would also be pushed down the queue in favour of someone from a minority, including a migrant. The centre of Athens now resembles the city of Karachi in Pakistan. It is so full of new arrivals that Greeks nickname the area 'Athenobad'.

Mr Bogdanos believes voters are inevitably being pushed towards the far-Right as a result.

'Greece will lose its identity, language, and religion in less than half a century. Unless something changes, we will become extinct,' he argues.

A stark warning — and one which I have heard here before. Twelve years ago, I met members of the first far-Right party to be democratically elected to the Greek national parliament.

They belonged to Golden Dawn, an outfit that is now utterly discredited and defunct. Many of their former leaders today languish in prison, convicted of corruption and other misdeeds.

Yet back then, this party of neo-fascist MPs was on a roll. In the parliament building they arrogantly puffed on cigarettes even though smoking was banned there.

They wore short-sleeved black shirts with the word 'Hooligans' embroidered on them, had tattoos on their arms, although they denied accusations they were neo-Nazis, insisting they were nationalists fighting to save Greece for the Greeks. 

They wanted every illegal immigrant rounded up and sent home and even suggested those arriving illegally could be blown up by mines at the border.

Last week, at the offices of the new right wing parties in the same Greek parliament, there were no tattoos nor hooligan logos. The leaders were quietly voiced middle-aged men in grey suits. 

But they were saying much the same things as Golden Dawn once did.

Spartan's founder and MP Ioannis Kontis, a 65-year-old former mover and shaker in the international football industry, insisted: 'The Greeks are not racist. But three million foreigners, many of an extreme religion, are now living here or have arrived and travelled through Greece illegally to the rest of the EU in recent years. You have to expect a reaction.'

Along the parliament corridor, those at Greek Solutions agreed. MP and former journalist Konstantinos Chitos, 50, said: 'A modern-day 'Islamic conquest' of Europe is underway. Yet there is still no plan to close the borders by our government.

'We believe in the nation state and that those in Greece illegally should go back. It's not too late to do something.'

However, 59-year-old Nikos Vrettos, a founder of Victory, the third Right-wing party in Greece, worries it might be. 'Educated young Greeks are so fed up they are leaving for Germany and England,' he says. 'It is a tragic loss of talent.'

He cheers up when talk turns to the EU elections. 'They'll be amazing,' he surmises, letting slip a little smile. For he thinks, as many do in Greece, Spain and across Europe, that the day of the new-style far-Right has come.