Gutmensch / Slechtmensch, 2015-2020
For 5 years, Gert Jochems travelled across Western Europe, reporting on the rise of extreme right-wing parties and ideas, the resurgence of nationalism and identitarian withdrawal.
While the Rassemblement National party came second atf the last French elections, Italy elected the anti-immigration Brothers of Italy party as head of the Council of Ministers in 2022. In Flanders, the far-right Vlaams Belang party has benefited from a record success in recent years, winning over 18% of the vote in the 2019 regional elections, especially for its stance on immigration. More recently, the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2023 were won by Geert Wilders’ far-right party.
Furthermore, nationalist groups are winning over more and more people. The German association PEGIDA, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, has grown since its creation in 2014, also expanding into France, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium. The Flemish group Voorpost, which claims to be nationalist, organizes numerous anti-immigration demonstrations as well.
What these different movements have in common is that they exploit their fellow citizens’ fear of the arrival of refugees and migrants, ignoring the various reasons for their arrival: economic, political and climatic.
Exacerbating the idea that we’re on the brink of a civilizational war, far-right circles have begun to refer, not without sarcasm, to left-wing people as “Gutmenschen”, good men, to emphasize their naivety. This candid term implies, by contrast, the existence of “slechtmenschen”, bad men, whose identity the photographer attempts to reveal.
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