Charlie Kirk’s death sparks outrage and shock among European leaders

The death of US conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, 31, reverberated far beyond the United States, reaching the hemicycle of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Kirk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, was shot in the neck on Wednesday while he was speaking on a Utah college campus and died at the hospital soon after.

His assassination resulted in an outpouring of condolences from Trump and some European leaders.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni called it “shocking” and “a deep wound for democracy” and “for all who believe in freedom,” while France’s foreign affairs ministry expressed “its deep emotion following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said she was “shocked at the absolutely horrific assassination.”

But Kirk’s death also triggered clashes and vivid reactions coming from his many European fans, who used the opportunity to condemn the rise of political violence and lash out against what they saw as an attack from left-wing forces.  

“My mind is filled with the horrendous images yesterday of the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” Nigel Farage, the British MP and leader of the Eurosceptic Reform UK told the House of Commons in a video posted on his X account. “I absolutely believe in free speech but we all understand there are limits to free speech.”   

In France, Marion Maréchal, the leader of the far-right Identity–Liberties (IDL) and vice-president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) in the European Parliament conceded that the suspect of Kirk’s murder was still “at large”.

Maréchal also acknowledged that “here, as in the United States, the radical left wants civil war. And now, it even resorts once again to political assassinations.” Maréchal referred to recent cases of “physical assaults” against the “Nemesis collective,” a group of feminist women who are said to be close to France’s far-right National Rally party (RN).

Skirmish over minute of silence

On Thursday, Kirk’s death even resulted in a clash among MEPs at a plenary session in the European Parliament.

When Charlie Weimers, an MEP from the radical right Sweden Democrats party who described Kirk as a “loving father and patriot” called for a minute of silence in commemoration of Kirk’s death, Katarina Barley, the vice-president of the Parliament, who was leading the session, spoke out to say Metsola “had said ‘no’”.

Parliament officials told Euronews that minutes of silence are announced by the president and must be requested by political groups at the opening of a plenary session.

Yet Metsola’s refusal drew the ire of some of the participants to the minute of silence for Kirk.

One of them, András László, an MEP from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party Fidesz, posted the video of the sequence on X and argued that the Parliament had stood up for George Floyd, the black American man whose murder by a police officer had triggered a wave of protest against police brutality and racial injustice.

“But refused to do it for Charlie Kirk,” Laszlo said. “We must rid Europe of woke ideology.”

Some of the MEPs involved later posted an “I am Charlie” image on their X accounts, a slogan that became a unifying cry for free speech after the 2015 terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.