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# Tommy Robinson Is Not the Problem. He Is the Reckoning.
- URL: https://www.theglobalvoice.com/tommy-robinson-is-not-the-problem-he-is-the-reckoning/
- Published: 2026-09-09T13:18:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-10T12:38:52.000Z
- Description: The parties Europe once called fringe are no longer fringe. Europe is shifting to the right, as voters who feel their leaders stopped listening increasingly make their frustration clear at the ballot box
- Author: Amoghavarsha
- Tags: conflict, europe, The Day So Far, Op-Ed

On September 2025, somewhere between 110,000 and 150,000 people walked through central London behind a man the British state has jailed multiple times. His name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, famously known as Tommy Robinson. He stood on a stage near Whitehall and told the crowd that, “The silent majority will be silent no longer. Today is the spark of a cultural revolution.”

The Metropolitan Police called it one of the largest demonstrations London has ever policed. A man no broadcaster will put on air had pulled more people onto the streets than most parties can dream of at a general election. That, more than anything, is the story of Europe in 2026: a political class that kept treating him as an exception rather than the new political reality, and in doing so missed what the underlying symptom is.

Tommy Robinson has spent fifteen years as a man the establishment treats as beneath serious engagement. Broadcasters won't platform him; politicians won't debate him. By every rule of respectable politics, that exclusion should have starved him of relevance a decade ago.

It hasn't worked. He has grown instead. His September march was, by police estimates, the largest single-issue demonstration Britain has seen in a generation. His May 2026 follow-up drew hundreds of thousands more, that is not the profile of a man on his way out.

Tommy’s 2025 march came after a summer of protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, triggered by the arrest of an Ethiopian asylum seeker who was later convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Epping, Essex, on the outskirts of London. Many in the crowd were ordinary people who had grown angry after years of headlines about grooming gangs, asylum hotels and a state they felt was more concerned about offending newcomers than protecting its own children.

But Robinson is not the only figure benefiting from that anger. Nigel Farage did not need a march. By May 2026, Reform was polling at 28 %, ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives, after winning 14 % at the last election. For two years, it has been the strongest force in national polls. Even voters who disliked Farage often saw him as the most convincing voice on border control. That contrast rejected by the establishment but trusted on a major public concern captures the wider political shift.

And Britain is not an outlier. The same pattern is repeating country after country.

In Germany, the AfD doubled its vote share in the 2025 federal election, rising from 10.4 to 20.8 %, the best result for right leaning party in 75 years. By September 2026, it was polling at around 28 % nationally and had won 44 % in Saxony-Anhalt. Mainstream parties still refuse to form coalitions with it, but that political “firewall” has done little to slow its rise.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/c5/9bc51e60-58a6-4a20-a6fd-f93758107131/content/images/2026/09/Afd-Celebrating-the-victory-1.png)

AfD celebrating after their Saxony-Anhalt victory (Photo credit @ [alice.weidel](https://www.instagram.com/alice.weidel/?hl=en&ref=theglobalvoice.com)) 

In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is polling at around 35 % for the National Assembly, while party president Jordan Bardella leads polls for the 2027 presidential election. A country built around secularism and assimilation could now elect a party that has spent decades arguing that the assimilation model has failed.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom became the largest party in parliament in 2023, breaking decades of dominance by mainstream parties. In Austria, Herbert Kickl’s Freedom Party won the 2024 election on a hardline immigration platform. Other parties refused to govern with him, but instead of weakening the FPÖ, its support later rose to a record 38 %.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/c5/9bc51e60-58a6-4a20-a6fd-f93758107131/content/images/2026/09/Geert_Wilders_-1.png)

Geert\_Wilders\_- in CPAC Hungary 2024 (Photo credit @ Elekes Andor)

In Sweden, once known for its liberal politics, the Sweden Democrats now play an important role in supporting the government. Gang violence and failed integration have become major political issues, with hundreds of bombings linked to organised crime in recent years. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has built a strong and lasting government while sharply reducing irregular sea arrivals. Britain even sent officials to Rome in 2024 to study Italy’s approach.

Across seven very different countries, the pattern is the same: parties that speak more openly about immigration and cultural cohesion keep gaining support, whether they come to power or not.

But this was not just about the numbers, but what they told voters. Britain’s net migration reached a record 944,000 in the year to June 2023, far above levels seen in the previous decade. It has since fallen sharply, but for many voters the damage was already done. After years of governments promising to bring migration below 100,000, they had watched it rise close to a million. The message they took from it was simple: the government had lost control.

Britain’s Muslim population rose from 2.7 million in 2011 to 3.9 million in 2021, a 44 % increase, while the country’s overall population grew by just 6.3 %. The pace of demographic change has been so much faster that it is difficult for Britain’s society to wrap their head around it.

Then came the grooming gangs scandal: years of organised sexual exploitation of children, many of them white working-class girls. A 2025 review led by Baroness Louise Casey found that, where ethnicity was recorded, Pakistani men were disproportionately represented among suspects. In Rotherham, nearly two-thirds of 323 suspects were of Pakistani heritage. The deeper scandal was how authorities handled it: police often failed to record ethnicity, victims said they were ignored, and some officers were themselves accused of abuse. A £65 million statutory inquiry finally began in April 2026, more than a decade after the Rotherham scandal came to national attention.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/c5/9bc51e60-58a6-4a20-a6fd-f93758107131/content/images/2026/09/Convicted-Grooming-gang-members-1.png)

Seven men have been given prison sentences totalling 174 years after a GMP investigation into grooming of two vulnerable girls in Rochdale (Photo credit @ gmp.police.uk)

That mix of real abuse and authorities being afraid to speak openly about it for fear of being called racist became the issue Robinson built his politics around. He might have exaggerated the story, but the underlying problem was real. And because the establishment was so reluctant to confront it, he became one of the loudest voices talking about it.

The dynamic is not limited to Britain. The same pattern appears elsewhere. Germany’s AfD is strongest in eastern states with relatively few immigrants, but it points to the problems of more diverse western cities as a warning of what could come. In France, the National Rally has long argued that strong religious and cultural identities can clash with the country’s secular model. Even Emmanuel Macron warned about “Islamist separatism” creating parallel communities within France.

There were real and visible failures across Europe The grooming gangs of England, gang violence in Sweden, radicalisation networks in France and Belgium, and the parallel social structures that Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy had themselves warned about more than a decade ago. These problems were concentrated in certain places, but they exposed weaknesses in policies European leaders had spent thirty years saying were working. Voters were not wrong to notice the gap. The problem was that many felt they could not talk about it without being called racist or intolerant.

That brings us to the part Europe’s leaders still seem unwilling to accept: on immigration, the gap between what voters think and what their leaders think is huge. Research has found immigration to be one of the issues where public and elite opinion differ most. And that gap is not accidental. The way political leaders talk about immigration can shape how people feel about it. For much of the past three decades, that often meant pushing uncomfortable concerns out of acceptable public debate.

That silence was tied to multiculturalism, which for years was treated not just as a policy, but almost as a moral test. To question it was often seen as a sign of intolerance.

That is the echo chamber. European leaders know the public is angry. Merkel knew it, Cameron knew it, and governments across Europe have seen the polling. The problem is not that they lack information. It is that they recognise the problem and then return to many of the same policies that created it, often because those making the decisions do not experience the consequences themselves. So when Farage gains ground or the AfD wins more votes, the establishment reacts with surprise, even though the anger has been building for decades.

Europe can keep calling these movements extreme, building political firewalls around them and refusing to engage. But that does not answer the question that matters: why are more voters turning to them?

The answer is not that millions of Europeans suddenly became radical. It is that many stopped trusting parties that promised control, dismissed concerns about immigration and integration, and treated uncomfortable questions as unacceptable.

Tommy Robinson, Farage, the AfD, Le Pen and Wilders are not the cause of this crisis. They are the consequence of it.

Europe can keep fighting the symptoms, or finally confront what created them.

Because the real warning from that London crowd was not that Tommy Robinson had become powerful. It was that millions of people no longer believed anyone else was listening.