The Global Far-Right Is Making Charlie Kirk a Martyr

AfD politicians Beatrix von Storch and Kristin Brinker at a September 11 vigil for Kirk.Manuel Genolet/dpa/Zuma

After last week’s murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, hundreds of people gathered in front of Berlin’s American embassy to honor him with a candlelight vigil, at least one of them in a red MAGA hat. The group included several members of Germany’s far-right AfD party^[2], including Beatrix von Storch, its deputy parliamentary leader. Von Storch told the crowd^[3] that Kirk’s “compass was God,” and that it was on them to carry his work forward. On Facebook, she shared a photograph of Kirk^[4], overlaid with the words, in German, “The death of Charlie Kirk is a turning point in our fight for civilization.” Afterwards, the AfD uploaded video of the rally to YouTube, helpfully dubbed into English, which offered praise for Kirk’s fight against “mass migration” and “left-wing ideology.” 

Across the world, and especially in the European Union, far-right parties are using the murder of Kirk as a recruitment tool, a rallying cry, and a symbol of everything they claim to be fighting against. As the Guardian pointed out,^[5] few far-right leaders outside the United State had ever used Kirk’s name before his death; but now he’s on all of their lips, memorialized as a martyr—and used as a potent and highly effective way to unite their bases. Far-right leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have expressed mourning and outrage over the killing,^[6] with Orbán explicitly blaming “the hate-mongering left.” As the week continued, the news site Euractiv noted^[7] that ultra-nationalist parties across the EU were using Kirk’s murder as a central messaging strategy, “piling pressure on the centre-right parties that dominate national governments.” 

Many of those nationalist parties were gathered in Madrid over the past weekend for Europe Viva 2025, a conference of so-called “patriots” groups; there, André Ventura, the leader of Portugal’s far-right Chega party, told the New York Times that Kirk’s murder is “mobilizing^[8].” In London this past weekend, Elon Musk was among those participating in a huge far-right rally^[9] where Kirk was honored, telling the crowd in a virtual address that “the left” is “the party of murder, and celebrating murder.” He later added that “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.” In Bordeaux, France, Kirk was memorialized with a standing ovation^[10] at an event supporting the right-wing National Rally party. In Paris, members of a conservative student group wheat-pasted a photo of Kirk raising his fist^[11] onto a wall, below the word, in English, “FIGHT.” 

Outside of Europe, conservative and far-right groups have also found ways to graft Kirk’s murder to their country’s politics, even where it may be an awkward fit. In Orania, South Africa, often described as a whites-only Afrikaner enclave, the town council flew their flag at half-mast to pay respect to Kirk and to draw attention to what they described in a Facebook video as “the plight of Christians worldwide^[12].” The same video drew attention to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a white Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death in North Carolina in August in an unprovoked attack by Decarlos Brown Jr., who is Black. Her killing, too, has been held up by ultra-nationalist and white supremacists worldwide as a symbol of what they see as an attack on white people.

Yet as columnist Rebecca Davis of South Africa’s Daily Maverick^[13] pointed out, many of the issues that Kirk focused on have no real relevance in that country. “How could the exhausting debate about trans people in male and female bathrooms even get off the ground in a country where there are still 141 schools^[14] with only pit toilets?,” she wrote. “How could the ‘war on woke’ have any possible meaning in a country where elderly women with dementia are beaten to death^[15] on suspicion of being witches?” 

The irony here is hard to ignore: ultra-nationalist groups that often decry globalization are adopting an international message based on American politics. Yet Kirk, too, had begun to see the international potential of his efforts. Days before his murder, he had been working to build relationships in other countries by attending conservative gatherings^[16] in Tokyo and Seoul. In Seoul, he cheered “the phenomenon of young people, especially men, turning conservative” which he said “is occurring simultaneously across multiple continents.” In Tokyo, he spoke at an event hosted by the Sanseito party, a far-right anti-immigrant grouping that has promised to fight a “silent invasion of foreigners^[17].” After his death, Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya, who has promoted^[18] Covid and vaccine skepticism and anti-LGBT rhetoric among other inflammatory ideas, called Kirk^[19] a “comrade committed to building the future with us” in a Twitte​​r/X post that portrayed him as a budding collaborator: “We had promised to meet again at his year-end event and had begun to imagine the work we would take on together.”

“Charlie left us with a wealth of vital messages,” Kamiya continued. “Though his life was taken, no one can take his convictions or silence the message he carried.”