Europe’s far-right leaders have jumped on the violence that rocked numerous cities last weekend, framing it as the inevitable consequence of failed liberal governance and open-border policies and insisting only they can restore law and order.

Months away from key elections in Spain, France and Italy, authoritarian nationalists are eager to weaponise the wave of street unrest, originating in peaceful protests over the cost of living and deteriorating public services but hijacked by violent rioters.

Those in opposition have not held back. In France, where cities such as Paris, Marseille and Lyon faced widespread rioting and looting, the far-right National Rally (RN) has denounced centrist incompetence and promised a crackdown.

The government, the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, said, was “impotent”. Its leader, Marine Le Pen, said on Wednesday the state was “collapsing” and had “lost control of everything” amid “migratory, budgetary and security chaos”.

Ahead in presidential polls and seeking voters beyond her base, Le Pen has resisted explicitly racialising the unrest, but has framed it more broadly as a result of state and policy failures leading to “anarchic immigration” and “a total loss of authority”.

In Germany – where there were no major protests – the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has stoked fears rioting could spill over the border. Its co-leader Alice Weidel said France’s “violent excesses” were a “warning for Germany”.

Weidel also linked the unrest to immigration, posting: “The dangerous mix of mass migration and leftwing extremism threatens to lead to civil war-like conditions here too … There will only be a turnaround on migration with the AfD!”In Portugal, populists have used peaceful housing and cost-of-living protests to warn against “importing” instability. André Ventura of the far-right Chega party said the nation must “refrain from importing into Portugal climates of instability and protest”.

In Spain, where the housing crisis has led to huge protests and a Madrid encampment, and prompted the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, to call a snap election next month, the far-right Vox party has sought to demonise the protesters.

“They’re not defending the right to housing, or asking for work, they’re serving Pedro Sánchez,” the party’s leader, Santiago Abascal, said. “They’re Sánchez’s militias.”Vox has also attempted to link the housing issue to migration.

In a message posted on social media last month, the party falsely suggested that the 87-year-old woman whose eviction sparked the mammoth protests would have had a home had she been an immigrant from north Africa.

In Belgium, where cost-of-living protests also escalated into street clashes in Brussels and Liège, the far-right Flemish nationalists of Vlaams Belang framed the rioting as a failure of integration and open borders, characterising it as “imported violence”.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has adopted another strategy – as head of a far-right government she has headed for four years, she cannot simply blame failures of the state. Instead, Meloni has expanded her law-and-order agenda, and framed rioters as extremists.

“Demonstrating is a right, but setting our cities ablaze is not,” Meloni said after rioting in Milan and Bologna. “Hooligans have exploited the protests to sow chaos, attack those responsible for ensuring security, and hold entire cities hostage.”Meloni has previous enacted sweeping security measures aimed at hindering public dissent, including jail terms for blocking roads, tough sentences for resisting police officers, and pre-detention for demonstrators thought likely to cause trouble.

This week she passed emergency decrees creating an offence of violent participation in a demonstration, imposing tougher penalties on rioters and organisers of violent groups, and penalising parents whose children take part in vandalism and looting.

But she too has highlighted immigration as a factor, noting that “nearly half of those stopped or arrested” after the Milan riots were “of immigrant background, including individuals born abroad and second-generation children of immigrant families”.

Beyond Europe’s orthodox far-right parties, anti-immigration polemicists have gone further, interpreting the violence not as state and policy failure but as evidence of a looming civilisational war fuelled by multiculturalism and non-EU immigration.

Éric Zemmour, the founder of France’s Reconquête! (Reconquest) party, demanded an immigration halt and the deportation of “foreign delinquents”, declaring: “These are not riots, but the warning shots in an ethnic war. Either we establish absolute order or we yield.”The far-right narrative has been reinforced by similar comments from across the US, where both the president and vice-president have sought to turn the unrest in France in particular into a cautionary tale for voters before midterm elections.

Donald Trump described France as a once-great nation that had been “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists”, adding on social media that immigration “has shattered that once great country”.

JD Vance echoed the same view, saying: “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion.”In doing so, they “ignored fundamental questions about assimilation and compatibility”, he said.

Deborah Cole in Berlin, Angela Giuffrida in Rome and Sam Jones in Madrid contributed reporting