On August 10, 2019, a conference took place in Lisbon, Portugal that brought together several of Europe’s most notorious far-right and neo-Nazi movements.
The event, which was attended by approximately 70 people, included speakers from extremists movements in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Poland and Bulgaria. Among the most notable far-right speakers were Matthias Deyda, a representative for the German far-right minority party Die Rechte (“The Right”), Yvan Benedetti, a member of the Nationalist Party of France, and Blagovest Asenov, the leader of Bulgaria’s infamous neo-Nazi group known as the National Resistance.
Asenov—an ultranationalist linked to the international neo-Nazi organization Blood and Honour—has used his National Resistance group to target ethnic minorities in Bulgaria, including Turks, Roma, Armenians and the Jewish community. He also pledged to protect Bulgaria from “foreign ideologies” such as parliamentary democracy, moral decay including “strongly propagandized sodomy,” and the “parasitism of minorities,” according to Human Rights Watch. Asenov also described immigrants as “social parasites” at an anti-refugee demonstration in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2017.