A few weeks ago, on a bridge in Nicosia, a banner appeared bearing the slogan "White Lives Matter" and beside it a cross inside a circle. The symbol, known as the Celtic Cross or Sun Cross, constitutes one of the most widespread emblems of modern neo-Nazism worldwide, precisely because it retains enough ambiguity to avoid direct legal charges. It is, however, sufficiently recognisable within the movements to function as a badge of identity. The slogan beside it belongs to a widespread far-right tactic of inverting the language of anti-racist movements, with the aim of constructing a narrative of victimhood for the dominant group. The question is how these symbols got here and what conditions normalise them.
Dr Giorgos Venizelos, assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Marketing of the Cyprus University of Technology, speaking to "P", offers an observation: "The Far Right in Cyprus did not emerge as a reaction to a vacuum left by the Centre-Right. It grew strong before it, shaping the very terms within which the Centre-Right is now forced to move. How this happened has to do with a combination of local conditions and international infrastructure."
The local condition includes what Mr Venizelos describes as "diffuse racism", a pre-existing social reality in which suspicion towards the Other, whether a migrant or a foreigner, was tolerated and to a great extent pervasive. Racism thus created fertile ground. In this way, and with the influence of globalisation and the internet, racism acquired a language, symbols and a network.
Easy radicalisation
The international infrastructure is the key to understanding the mechanism of transmission. The ideology of the Great Replacement, the theory that white Europeans are being systematically replaced through migration with the tolerance or even encouragement of political elites, reaches Cyprus through algorithms, as Dr Venizelos explains. It arrives through closed groups on platforms where radicalisation requires no physical contact with any organisation or leading figure. A person in Nicosia or Limassol can be ideologically absorbed into a global white supremacist movement without ever meeting a single one of its ambassadors.
This condition is fed by an ideological mechanism that the Far Right has developed with great communicative sophistication and which research of recent decades has begun to systematically deconstruct. At its core lies what sociologist Michael Kimmel, in Angry White Men (2013), called "aggrieved entitlement", the fusion of a sense of entitlement with a sense of injustice. It is a specific psychosocial state in which individuals find themselves, mainly young men, who perceive that advantages to which they considered themselves entitled have been taken from them, and attribute this loss not to structural economic changes but to specific groups, such as migrants, minorities, feminists and the economic "elite". The result is an anger constantly in search of scapegoats.
The shift
Dr Venizelos identifies as a structural characteristic of the modern Far Right the transfer of the rhetoric of the victim from historically oppressed groups to the dominant group itself. Political scientist Cas Mudde, among the most recognised scholars of the Far Right worldwide, has described this strategy as the defining feature of the "fourth wave" of the post-war Far Right. Since the 1970s, as documented in research published in Political Communication (2024), these rhetorical points, namely that whites are persecuted by affirmative action policies, that they are not permitted to express pride in their identity, that something has been taken from them, have diffused from the far-right margin into mainstream political discourse. This communicative structure also has a systemic dimension that Dr Venizelos highlights with concern, since the very communicative tactic of the Far Right leads to normalisation and ultimately to violence.
The role of the Left
Here lies one of the most complex problems. The Left has not developed the capacity to put forward an effective counter-argument. It is a deeper weakness in the field the Far Right has conquered: identity, community, the sense of belonging. And the answer to this cannot be only legislative or institutional. It must be cultural, social, educational, and it requires, as he puts it, the normalisation of a specific, that is to say open, society as a counterweight. The Left has not found an equivalent vehicle for the digital age. The algorithms of social networks favour emotionally charged content that polarises. The Far Right functions naturally in this environment. Anger, indignation and the sense of danger spread with great speed.
Musk's Twitter
The counter-argument of tolerance, complexity and solidarity does not have the same speed of diffusion. One example is that of Twitter, the platform bought by Elon Musk in October 2022 and renamed "X". Musk's first decisions were the abolition of policies on pandemic disinformation, the purchase of verification for a fee instead of assessment and, above all, a general amnesty that restored thousands of accounts that had been excluded for rule violations, among them nationalists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists. According to independent researchers who monitored the reinstatements, among the restored accounts were leading figures of American white nationalism and participants in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, one of the most violent far-right gatherings in the US in recent decades.
Research by the University of California, Berkeley, published in the scientific journal PLOS One in February 2025, examined 4.7 million English-language posts from the start of 2022 to June 2023. The weekly rate of hate speech increased by approximately 50% compared with the months before the takeover, with rises in racist, homophobic and transphobic content, and the number of "likes" on hate posts increased by 70%, suggesting that this content was circulating widely.
Other research by the Harvard Kennedy School found that engagement with accounts active in far-right networks increased disproportionately relative to the general rise in platform use, indicating algorithmic amplification of far-right content. "X" subsequently blocked academic researchers' access to its API, making the continuation of equivalent independent research impossible.
The consequences
The consequences for young people are particularly worrying. International opinion surveys show that a significant majority of young people are exposed to hate content on social networks, and the data indicate that this exposure has measurable effects on relationships and the process of socialisation. What has changed structurally is the normalisation of exposure to racist symbols and hate rhetoric. As this circulates in the same environment as news, entertainment and social communication, it ceases to be treated as something unusual and begins to appear on banners and slogans in the most "remote" parts of the world, with Cyprus constituting not an exception but a place that confirms the rule.
