Dateline: Dublin, Ireland – IN THIS MOST EUROPEAN OF CAPITAL CITIES,  I have a very effective viewing platform from which to look over all of Europe. But the view can sometimes be very disturbing.

News comes from Germany this week that the first of three big criminal trials involving an extremist, far-right conspiracy has opened in Stuttgart. The defendants are accused of plotting high treason and belonging to a terrorist organization.  

Right now, it is nine military members of the movement known as Reichsburgers who are being prosecuted.  ‘Reichsburgers’ literally translates as citizens of the Reich – that supposedly one-thousand-year entity promised by the Nazis, eighty-plus years ago. Next month, ten of its political leaders will also stand trial, this time in Frankfurt, and subsequently Munich will see a trial for eight further, lesser-ranking members.

The Reichsburgers could possibly have been seen as, well, a bit wacky – if it were not for that far right-wing shadow (always there, inevitably) of the country’s Nazi history. Foremost among them is a certain so-called “Royal” — Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss, a 72-year-old real estate agent from Frankfurt, and apparently the descendant of an aristocratic family. Allegedly, he was earmarked for the role of provisional head-of-state by supporters of the alleged coup.

Some evidence of how sophisticated such supporters might be, is that they’ve borrowed a leaf from the American right-wing playbook, and they’ve spent a lot of their time online spreading QAnon-style theories. Such as the supposedly long-existing German “Deep State” (sounds familiar?) that has been secretly killing the fatherland’s children and teenagers. Which explains, for the Reichsburgers, why such unprecedented flooding had been caused in the Ahr Valley 3 years ago, washing in a torrent through many government bunkers located there, bunkers where – they claimed – hundreds of young bodies had been hidden. Meteorologists, on the other hand, blamed climate change and extreme weather for the flooding.

The German public as a whole, and perhaps many law-enforcement officers too, owe their awareness of the Reichsburgers’ untoward beliefs to the work of a relentless investigative reporter, Tobias Ginsburg, He spent eight months digging, sometimes undercover, to discover the inner workings of the movement — and this resulted in a stunning book: “Journey to the Reich”

Ginsburg described the movement as  “an esoteric new-age cult … including biker gangs, monarchists, Vladimir Putin fan-boys and fan-girls – a whole heterogeneous mixture.”

 The daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung at first called the people standing trial “senile loons”. But Ginsburg says it’s wrong to underestimate them. He writes “could these people be killers? The answer is yes, and we should be very afraid.” He also, understandably perhaps, makes a comparison with the insurrectionists invading America’s Capitol, and the resulting deaths from that action.

SERIOUS CRIMES ARE CERTAINLY ALLEGED in the new and forthcoming court cases. On the armed action side of the charge-sheet, the evidence includes hundreds of military-grade weapons that were seized during police raids, along with thousands of ammunition rounds. And on the political side  … a recently prominent member of the Federal Parliament, Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who’s also been a judge, is said to have been the plotters’ choice for Justice Minister in a new Reichsbürger government. In parliament she represents the AfD party (Alternative for Deutschland) – which, to quote the reporter Ginsburg again, is “anti-immigration, anti-semitic and Islamophobic,” and fully in step with the Reichsburger movement in wanting what he calls “the fantasy of a homogenous society without aliens.“

Such views are common among all the modern incarnations of Nazis, like the German-American extremist who featured in a The Media Beat broadcast last September from Maine. This was Christopher Pohlhaus  (left, at a protest rally) who had planned a Nazi training-ground in a quiet backwater of the state – until some enterprising local journalists exposed the plan.

Throughout Europe, unlike the US, there’s widespread coverage of such people promulgating their poisonous ideology. The forthcoming European Parliament elections, due in June, are expected to exhibit a surge by far-right groups, according to a range of experienced political commentators across all 27 member-countries.

Professor Simon Hix, who studies comparative politics for the European University Institute, foresees that the broad far right-wing grouping that calls itself I.D. (initials that stand for, a bit questionably, Identity and Democracy) could almost double its seats in the assembly, to hold about one seventh of the total. The grouping includes Alternative for Deutschland, and France’s National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen.

Another grouping, which paints itself as somewhat less extreme, calls itself Conservatives and Reformists (another dubious coupling of labels) – and it stands to expand to a substantial 85 seats out of the chamber’s roughly 700 total. This grouping is the pan-European home for Italy’s ruling Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice Party  – again, perhaps I should say so-called Law and Justice. And I’ll note that it recently lost power nationally in Poland, but is still expected to increase its European parliamentary vote.

All told, Rightwingers including the populist, often violent far right, could end up holding a disturbing one-quarter slice of the political pie-chart in Europe’s parliament – that’s according to a new poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations.

That issue of immigration, which can angrily unite so many far-rightists, almost regardless of country, is making itself felt here in the mainstream politics of these two Western islands of Europe: Ireland and Britain. Indeed it’s turned into a new, noisy spat between the countries.

Rishi Sunak’s conservative government in London is ploughing ahead with its legally-challenged airlifting of asylum seekers, off to the east-central African country of Rwanda, to be “processed” there. To avoid this fate, many asylum seekers are fleeing to the Republic of Ireland – slipping across that porous, and seemingly endlessly controversial, land-border with Northern Ireland.

The Republic now wants to ship them back to mainland Britain, but Sunak’s response was expressed in language that (in former, less uncouth days, at least) would have been called undiplomatic.  “I’m not interested in that,” he told the national network news. “We’re not going to accept returns.” This was the language, however – very much the language – of a right-wing leader soon to face a highly disapproving public in a general election.

Today’s disastrous results in England’s largely local district elections re causing him even greater concern about the national vote that he will, by law, have to hold by next January at the latest – and inevitably it will be toward his country’s far-right that he will be hemorrhaging substantial support.