Black shirts and banned flags: Ultras push politics at Euro 2024

The instructions were concise and clear.

Those hoping to march to the stadium with Hungarian fans for their football team’s first match of the European Championship had to report no later than 10am sharp, five hours before kick-off.

There would be a strict dress code. Some could wear black. Others would have to stick to red, white and green, the colours of the country’s flag. There would be no ostentation whatsoever. “Gaudy colours, clown hats and bagpipes” were all banned. Prospective protesters were reminded that they were ‘going to a football stadium, not a circus.’

The frenetic and somewhat opinionated tone seemed shocking given the source of the orders: the official Facebook page of the Carpathian Brigade, a fiercely nationalist faction of hardcore fans – ultras, as such groups are known – that supplies the Hungarian national team of his vociferous and volatile support.

The Carpathian Brigade has become perhaps Europe’s most notorious ultra group in recent years, its reputation built on clashed with police, to shower opponents with racist abuse And displaying homophobic banners. In 2021, during the last European Championship, it had to reminding members to conceal Nazi-related tattoos so as not to violate German law.

None of that has stopped growth. If anything, it sped it up. Drawn to the eloquent Hungarian patriotism and unapologetic right-wing values ​​of the Carpathian Brigade – an ideology that both echoes and propagates the populist rhetoric of Viktor Orban, the country’s prime minister – the group may now be able to appeal to as many as 15,000 members.

Nor is it the only one. Black-clad ultras have been a fixture at Euro 2024 this month, with squads – some numbering in the hundreds, some a little larger – visible across Germany and at matches involving Albania, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia, among others.

Although some of these groups were formed in response to the Carpathian Brigade, in most cases they share neither its motives nor its precise political agenda. Moreover, no group poses the same threat.

However, their presence at the European Championship has been a problem for UEFA, the governing body of European football, which has fines imposed on a number of countries during the tournament, including multiple punishments for “conveying provocative messages inappropriate for a sporting event.” The groups not only provide a soundtrack and visual spectacle wherever and whenever their national teams play, they also hint at the rising tide of nationalism across Europe.

“It’s contagious,” said Piara Powar, the director of Fare, an anti-discrimination network that monitors extremism in football. “For many of them it’s more theater than anything else. But you have to be careful with these kinds of things, because the Hungarians play for real.”

The power of the Carpathian Brigade is certainly unmatched. In Cologne, as the group had demanded, the march to the stadium this month was orderly. There was no violence and no bagpipes.

A few days later, when Hungary faced Germany in Stuttgart, the group pushed the boundaries a bit. During that day’s march, the crowd sang the melody of Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours,” a song banned in Germany because the lyrics are often twisted to “Ausländer raus,” or “Down with the foreigners.”

Such reports obviously fit in with Mr Orban’s worldview.

A big football fan, he has long made the sport an important part of his politics: under his leadership, many Hungarian stadiums have been rebuilt, millions of dollars have been invested in clubs in neighboring countries with large ethnic Hungarian minorities and many of the country’s professional teams have been acquired by oligarchs with close ties to his ruling party, Fidesz.

He also repeatedly gave his approval, tacit or otherwise, to the activities of the Carpathian Brigade, even though fines and penalties were imposed for their actions.

For example, the Hungarian authorities have consistently lobbied UEFA to stop Fare, the anti-discrimination group, from monitoring the national team’s matches and have attempted to remove some of the favourite symbols of Fare’s Carpathian Brigade guide to ultranationalist imagery.

A spokesperson for Sculptureone of the few organisations in Hungary dedicated to promoting diversity, suggested in an interview that the Carpathian Brigade’s actions – even if they impose sanctions – benefit Mr Orbán because they reinforce his sense that “Hungary is oppressed by the rest of Europe”, and also offer insight into what Mr Orbán sees as Hungary’s “brutal true nature”.

The spokesperson asked that his name not be published for fear of reprisals from the Carpathian Brigade.

That political support is what sets the Carpathian Brigade apart from its rivals and imitators. The ultras that have coalesced around Albania, Croatia, Romania and the rest also wear black shirts, but only because ultras all over Europe do. “It’s a way to differentiate ourselves from regular fans,” says Juraj Vrdoljak, a Croatian writer and former ultra.

While Mr Vrdoljak acknowledged that most ultras lean politically to the right – “We cannot do anything other than that,” he said – few are as willing as the Carpathian Brigade to end such a harmful mix of racism, anti-Semitism and express homophobia.

Mr Vrdoljak said most ultras rejected all forms of authority and oversight, seeing their country’s football authorities, and often their governments, as “the main enemy”. Last year, Croatia’s largest ultras groups, which follow various club teams, met and decided to allow their members to attend national team matches for the first time since 2016. “They wanted a way to be visible, to get their message out,” Mr Vrdoljak said.

The same goes for Romania: during the country’s first match in Euro 2024, the ultras unveiled a banner protesting their own persecution. Ultras who for years despised the national team are present in Germany to “show people that we have to be against the police and against the federation,” said Cosmin, a Romanian ultra interviewed before the match in Munich who left alone out of fear wanted to give his first name. to attract the attention of the authorities.

While Romania’s ultra factions are resisting far-right presidential candidate George Simion’s attempts to associate with them — “Maybe he’s been to a few games, but he’s not an ultra,” Cosmin said — they have a decidedly nationalist weft.

This year, a match against Kosovo was almost cancelled due to persistent chants from Romanian ultras claiming that Kosovo belonged to Serbia and that ‘Bessarabia’ – Moldova’s eastern neighbour – belonged to Romania.

In Germany, Romanian fans have displayed the flag of Greater Romania, a geographical construct that denies sovereignty to neighboring Moldova. In other matches, this sense of dissatisfaction with history or geography has been expressed through standards that defend Greater Albania, Greater Serbia, and of course Greater Hungary.

Mr. Orban, who often travels abroad to cheer on his country’s national team, sometimes wears a scarf with a map of Greater Hungary. This area includes former Hungarian territory that now falls within the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine and Romania.

These motives have caused headaches for UEFA, which has spent much of the first two weeks of the tournament handing out fines to participating football associations as punishment for nationalist expressions from their fans. (The law for the Albanian League, for example, could soon surpass $100,000 after the supporters, who had already been accused of nationalist chants in two previous matches, pushed the boundaries for the third match in a row on Monday.)

Mr Powar said the increase in provocative expressions of nationalism was unlikely to be a problem that football authorities could solve alone with financial sanctions.

“The Russian war in Ukraine has created a real sense of danger” for countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Mr. Powar. But just as importantly, he said, it has also provided encouragement to those — like Mr. Orban’s unofficial foot soldiers in the Carpathian Brigade — who see it as an opening to express their own territorial ambitions.

“For a long time, this ‘Greater Hungary’ was something that even Orban did not talk about,” the Szubjektiv spokesperson said. “Now it is a bumper sticker that you see on perhaps one in five cars. It hangs on the wall in many offices.”

“With the ultrasounds, you can put on a black T-shirt and feel like you belong somewhere,” he added. “We’re going to see it more and more.”

Andrew Higgins and Andrew Das contributed reporting.