Europe’s Left Courts Muslim Voters as Gaza War Reshapes Politics

Often described as the “Red-Green Alliance,” the growing political alignment between Europe’s far-left parties and Islamist groups is exerting greater influence on policymaking, especially on Israel. Critics say the partnership is contributing to an alarming increase in antisemitism across the continent.

As the number of Muslim voters rises across Europe, parties on the left and far left are increasingly responding to the priorities of a voting bloc that has become more politically significant.

In the U.K. last week, critics accused the left-wing Labour government of imposing sanctions on Israel in an effort to regain Muslim voters who had shifted toward the far-left, anti-Israel Green and Independent parties. Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat described the sanctions announcement as “performative politics.”

In Sweden’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, exit polling from the state broadcaster indicated that votes cast by non-European Swedes had given a left-wing alliance a slim three-seat advantage over a right-leaning coalition led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

One Swedish political researcher, Tobias Hübinette, pointed to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City and said that the numbers in the Swedish election show that this “election meant a ‘Mamdanification’ of urban Sweden, and the gap between city and country is now larger than ever before,” he wrote on X.

“They should be in disagreement,” Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ senior envoy to Europe, told News Media. “But the Islamists are very capable of covering that up for political purposes… The antisemitism that we have today, in particular in Western Europe, is definitely fed far more (by) the far left’s discourse.”

Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society in the U.K., said Europe has spent a decade focusing much of its concern on the far right. While he said that scrutiny is justified, it has created a blind spot elsewhere. “Antisemitism is not less dangerous because it arrives waving a progressive banner,” Mendoza said.

Janek Treiber, a research fellow at Germany’s Dresden University of Technology, said there is “indeed an intriguing alliance between the supposedly progressive left and regressive forces within Islamism.” Speaking to News Media, he said the shared element is “a kind of victimization narrative.” For left-wing supporters of the Palestinian cause, he said, Muslims are viewed as oppressed while the West, including Israel, is cast as the oppressor. “Whether Muslims hold conservative-religious views in this context is irrelevant,” he said.

Berlin voters will go to the polls this Sunday, with surveys showing the far-left Die Linke party — whose name translates literally as “The Left” — two points ahead of the center-right Christian Democratic Union.

“In Berlin, a party polling at the top of the field has factions that share platforms, demonstrations and slogans with networks the German security services themselves link to Hamas and the PFLP,” Mendoza claimed. “When ‘Death to the IDF’ and ‘Intifada’ are chanted at an election event, and the response from parts of the party is to defend the man who led them, the red line has been erased, not crossed.”

Rodan-Benzaquen says that while Germany’s political “firewall” against far-right parties like the AfD “seems to work more or less on the right, it doesn’t on the left,” because, “there is a perception that whatever comes from the left, even the far-left, is not morally as repugnant as anything that comes from the right.”

Germany and the U.K. are not alone. The far-left Sumar Party in Spain is part of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s ruling coalition. Their support in the last election was strongest in areas with high Muslim populations, with party members attending demonstrations with Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent groups and Gaza protests organized by Islamist-leaning networks. Members have also pushed for Spain to recognize a Palestinian state while also referring to Israel as an “apartheid state.” Spain recognized a Palestinian state in 2024.

The far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) Party in France has been accused by academics and ministers of “Islamo‑leftism” after their de facto leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization and party members marched with Islamist-linked NGOs during Gaza protests. The LFI’s popularity has been on the rise in polling ahead of next year’s presidential election and, according to French newspaper Le Monde, the LFI’s electoral strength lies in Muslim-majority suburban districts.

Israeli Ambassador to France Joshua Zarka recently told News Media that, “The way [LFI leader] Jean-Luc Mélenchon speaks in front of a crowd reminds me of Hitler. The way he uses the idea of uniting against one enemy by speaking of Israel is similar to the way Hitler used to speak about the Jews.”

Commenting on the sanctions imposed by the U.K. government on Israel, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis called the announcement on X “a truly dark day for British Jews.” His statement continued in part, “Gesture politics of this kind feeds into an increasingly hostile discourse about Israel,” he wrote, warning that the cumulative effect of such policies could “further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews.”

Pointing to the U.K., Rodan-Benzaquen said the alliance grew while Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour Party leader. “You have this far left anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, opposition to American power and, of course, to Israel itself. An alliance with Islamist organizations and movements that sort of adopt a common language, despite the fact that on many topics they are in certain disagreement… They have basically turned themselves from a party that cared about class, that cared about improving (lives), social rights, etcetera, into a party that is basically looking at identity politics and is trying to appeal to certain voters.”

She said the red-green alliance is nothing new. “We’ve seen it for a long time. We’ve actually seen it in the Islamic Republic of Iran when the Islamic Revolution happened.”

Europe’s Muslim population is estimated to be 45–46 million, up by 15.9% from 2010, based on Pew Research Center projections. That same study revealed the population of European Jewry had fallen to under 1.3 million — down 8% from 2010. 

Rodan-Benzaquen says of European Jews, “electorally, we don’t weigh,” so they have again become a political football. She says when left and far-left parties say, “Oh, we want to fight against antisemitism. The only reason why they’re saying it is because it’s a tool to attack the far-right.”