Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni welcomed Ursula von der Leyen to an Italy-Africa summit in Rome in January 2024, a meeting aimed at stemming migration flows. This image reflects a broader trend: while Viktor Orbán may be absent from EU decision-making, his prejudices are now baked into the European political mainstream.
The Normalisation of Racist Narratives
For years, Viktor Orbán, with his anti-migrant and white Christian nationalist rhetoric, offered European leaders the comforting fiction that racism in the EU was the preserve of a few unsavoury individuals. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Racism is structural, woven into laws, political systems, economies, and social frameworks. It shapes access to jobs, housing, education, and justice, and informs policing, border controls, and foreign policy.
Structural Racism in Algorithms and Policies
Racialised biases are even stamped into AI tools. A major scandal in the Netherlands arose when algorithms used to process childcare benefits wrongly flagged thousands of Dutch parents as fraudsters, disproportionately affecting ethnic minority and migrant heritage families. Victims suffered severe debt, forced evictions, and wrongful prison terms.
Divisive “us and them” narratives are consistently reinforced by political and media conversations that frame diversity as a challenge. Discrimination in Europe today is rooted in age-old anxieties. Racial hierarchies evident in EU migration policies—such as the different treatment of black and brown refugees compared to white Ukrainians—date back to colonial arguments about a “superior white race”.
From Fringe Conspiracy to Mainstream Policy
The fear that Europe’s population will be “replaced” by those from the global south is no longer confined to fringe theorists. It is reflected in German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s calls for “very large-scale” deportations of irregular migrants, and Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s insistence on limiting “non-western” migration, framing Muslims as an existential threat.
Ursula von der Leyen’s migration policies have normalised deportations and deterrence through technocratic language like “risk management” and “returns”. Underlying these actions is a moral panic that borrows from the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Similar fear inspires EU efforts to fortify borders and externalise migration control via cash-for-deals with Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania.
The Politics of Exclusion
While Orbán openly champions whiteness, the EU’s politics of exclusion are cloaked in terms like “social cohesion”, “European values”, and debates on “integration”. This framing enables deeply prejudiced narratives about who “true” Europeans are. In foreign policy, von der Leyen has promoted “us and them” narratives, praising Ukrainian women as “heroes” while remaining silent on Palestinian women’s struggles, dehumanising some groups while elevating others.
Why Diversity Training Is Not Enough
Diversity training, action plans, and improved representation are not enough. Even without Orbán, EU leaders will reproduce racial hierarchy through border controls, policing, citizenship rules, and foreign policy. Changing this dynamic requires a deeper study of colonialism as part of collective memory, ensuring a shared reckoning of how Europe’s wealth and borders were built through empire and racial hierarchy. These truths must be embedded in education systems and cultural institutions.
Hadja Lahbib, the European commissioner for equality, acknowledged that racism “hides in habits, in assumptions, in systems we no longer question”. But the EU institutions she and António Costa run remain overwhelmingly Eurocentric and white. As a reporter in Brussels, I was told the EU was colour blind. After 9/11, questions about Islamophobia were dismissed. In 2020, after George Floyd’s killing, senior officials insisted the EU was not racist.
Today, questions on the EU’s colonial legacy are brushed off as a distraction. Yet without acknowledging Europe’s past, we cannot safeguard liberal democracy against external dangers and the whims of other Orbáns and Trumps—and the mainstream politicians who amplify their message.
