QAnon is thriving in Europe, to delight of far right

BERLIN — Early in the pandemic, as thousands of American troops began NATO maneuvers in Germany, Attila Hildmann did a quick YouTube search to see what it was all about. He quickly came across videos posted by German followers of QAnon.

In their telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President Donald Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government — something they applauded.

“The Q movement said these are troops that will free the German people from Merkel,” said Hildmann, a vegan celebrity cook who had not heard of QAnon before last spring. “I very much hope that Q is real.”

In the United States, QAnon has already evolved from a fringe internet subculture into a mass movement veering into the mainstream. But the pandemic is supercharging conspiracy theories far beyond American shores, and QAnon is metastasizing in Europe as well.

Groups have sprung up from the Netherlands to the Balkans. In Britain, QAnon-themed protests under the banner of “Save Our Children” have taken place in more than 20 cities and towns, attracting a more female and less rightwing demographic.

But it is in Germany that QAnon seems to have made the deepest inroads. With what is regarded as the largest following — an estimated 200,000 people — in the non-English-speaking world, it has quickly built audiences on YouTube, Facebook and the Telegram messenger app. People wave Q flags during protests against coronavirus measures.

And in Germany, like in the United States, far-right activists were the first to latch on, making QAnon an unexpected and volatile new political element when the authorities were already struggling to root out extremist networks.

“There is a very big overlap,” said Josef Holnburger, a data scientist who has been tracking QAnon in Germany. “Far-right influencers and groups were the first ones to aggressively push QAnon.”

Officials are ba±ed that a seemingly wacky conspiracy theory about Trump taking on a “deep state” of Satanists and pedophiles has resonated in Germany. Polls show that trust in Merkel’s government is high, while the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, has been struggling.

“I was astonished that QAnon is gaining such momentum here,” said Patrick Sensburg, a lawmaker in Merkel’s conservative party and member of the intelligence oversight committee. “It seemed like such an American thing. But it’s falling on fertile ground.”

The mythology and language QAnon uses — from claims of ritual child murder to revenge fantasies against liberal elites — conjure ancient anti-Semitic tropes and putsch fantasies that have long animated Germany’s far-right fringe. Now those groups are seeking to harness the theory’s viral popularity to reach a wider audience.

QAnon is drawing an ideologically incoherent mixture of vaccine opponents, fringe thinkers and ordinary citizens who say the threat of the pandemic is overstated and government restrictions unwarranted. Not everyone who now aligns with QAnon believes everything the group espouses, or endorses violence.