Football as a sounding board for new-right meta-politics?

PROBLEM CONSTELLATIONS AND RESISTANCE PRACTICES WITH A VIEW TO THE NORMALISATION OF RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM AND ANTISEMITISM

Lecture and discussion with Dr David Johannes Berchem (Reporting Office for Discrimination in Football in NRW)

Venue: Fritz Bauer Library, Feldmark 107, 44803 Bochum

Journalists often ask the staff of the Reporting Centre for Discrimination in Football in NRW (MeDiF-NRW) whether the „shift to the right“ in society as a whole can also be observed in the fan scenes, on the pitches of amateur clubs or in the stadium curve. With regard to the reporting structures of MeDiF-NRW, it can be stated that new right-wing actors are pursuing the goal of spreading misanthropic attitudes, ethno-fascist attitudes, subtle anti-Semitic language, conspiracy narratives and a world view based on ideologies of inequality with their right-wing extremist dynamics in football. The often cited „boundaries of what can be said“ are strategically shifted in the course of metapolitical appropriation processes in the „pre-political“ cultural terrain of football. The lecture takes an analytical look at these anti-democratic normalisation processes. The analysis is also historically informed, as football has been increasingly used by new-right actors as a field of agitation for decades in order to achieve cultural hegemony. In a final step, the focus shifts to the resistance practices of political education, which proactively counter far-right normalisation tendencies in a resilient democracy.

Dr David Johannes Berchem is project manager at the Reporting Centre for Discrimination in Football in NRW (MeDiF-NRW) and lecturer for special tasks at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ruhr University Bochum.

An event organised by the Fritz Bauer Forum in cooperation with the Reporting Centre for Discrimination in Football (MeDiF-NRW) as part of the Education and Action Weeks against Anti-Semitism 2024