of very recent provenance. But all of them had proven unexpectedly adept at exploiting ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment.
Whether, like the British National Party, they railed against ‘ethnic minorities’ or, like the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, they targeted ‘immigrants’—in German the preferred term was ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’—the parties of the far Right found rich pickings in these years. On the one hand slower growth combined with vulnerability to global economic forces was exposing many working people to a level of economic insecurity unprecedented in living memory. On the other hand the old organs of the political
The presence in increasing numbers of a visible and culturally alien minority in their midst—and the prospect of even more foreigners feeding at the welfare trough or taking ‘our’ jobs once the floodgates from the East were opened—was icing on the cake for the new Right. Charging that the ‘boat is full’—or that their governments had abandoned control of its frontiers to ‘cosmopolitan interests’ or the ‘bureaucrats of Brussels’— populist demagogues promised to stop immigration, repatriate ‘foreigners’ and return the state to its embattled white citizenry, outsiders in their own country.
Compared with the Fascism of an earlier age this latest manifestation of xenophobia might appear mild— though Germany saw a wave of hate crimes against foreigners and minorities in the early Nineties that prompted some commentators to raise broader concerns: Gunter Grass pointed accusingly to the self-centered indifference of West German political culture and the country’s myopic enthusiasm for an ‘unmerited’ unity, arguing that responsibility for the racist violence (especially in the festering, defunct industrial towns of the former GDR where anti-foreigner feeling was most intense) should be placed squarely at the feet of the country’s complacent and amnesiac political elite.
But even if the level of violence was contained, the scale of public support for the new Right was cause for serious concern. Under Jorg Haider, its youthful and telegenic leader, the Freedom Party (FP) in neighbouring Austria—heir to the postwar League of Independents but ostensibly purged of the latter’s Nazi associations—rose steadily in the polls, presenting itself as the defender of the ‘little people’ left behind by the mutually beneficial collaboration of the two big parties and threatened by the hordes of ‘criminals’, ‘drug-users’ and other ‘foreign rabble’ now invading their homeland.
To avoid falling foul of the law, Haider was generally careful to avoid behaviour that would tar him too obviously with the brush of Nazi nostalgia. For the most part the Austrian (like Jean-Marie Le Pen) revealed his prejudices only indirectly—for example, by naming, as instances of whatever it was in public life that offended him, people who just happened to be Jewish. Both he and his audiences were more comfortable with newer targets like the European Union: ‘We Austrians should answer not to the EU, not to Maastricht, not to some international idea or other, but to this our Homeland’.
In the Austrian parliamentary elections of 1986, Haider’s Freedom Party won 9.7 percent of the vote. Four years later it had risen to 17 percent. In the elections of October 1994 it rocked the Viennese establishment by reaching 23 percent, just four points short of the People’s Party which had governed the country for the first twenty-five years after the war and which still dominated Austria’s rural provinces. Even more ominously, Haider had bitten deep into the traditionally Socialist electorate of working-class Vienna. Considering that (according to 1995 opinion polls) one Austrian in three believed with Haider that ‘guest-workers’ and other foreigners in Austria had too many benefits and privileges, this was hardly surprising.
Haider’s influence peaked at the very end of the century, in the wake of the elections of October 1999 when his party received the backing of 27 percent of Austria’s voters: pushing the People’s Party into third place and coming within 290,000 votes of the first-place Socialists. In February 2000, to somewhat exaggerated gasps of horror from Austria’s European partners, the People’s Party formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party (though not including Haider himself). But the new Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schussel, had made a shrewd calculation: the Freedom Party was a movement of protest, an anti-‘them’ party that appealed to ‘the ripped-off, lied-to little people’ (to quote Pierre Poujade, the eponymous populist prototype). Once in government, exposed to the wear and tear of office and constrained to share responsibility for unpopular policies, it would soon lose its appeal. In the elections of 2002 the FP scored just 10.1 percent (while the People’s Party had risen to nearly 43 percent). In the European elections of 2004 Haider’s party was reduced to 6.4 percent of the vote.
The rise and decline of Haider (who remained nevertheless a popular governor of his native Carinthia) was emblematic of the trajectory of anti-foreigner parties elsewhere. After winning 17 percent of the vote in 2002, in the wake of its leader’s assassination, the List Pim Fortuyn rose briefly into the ranks of Dutch government only to see its support collapse to just 5 percent at the subsequent election and its parliamentary representation fall from 42 to 8. In Italy the Lega Nord’s ascent into government under the wing of Berlusconi precipitated a steady fall in its support.
In Denmark, the Dansk Folkeparti had risen from obscure beginnings in 1995 to become by 2001 the country’s third-largest parliamentary group. By staying out of office and focusing almost exclusively on the immigration issue, the party and its leader Pia Kj?rsgaard were able to leverage their influence out of all proportion to size. Both the leading Danish parties—Liberals and Social Democrats—now competed to outbid the other in their newfound ‘firmness’ on laws governing asylum and foreign residents. ‘We’—as Kj?rsgaard put it after her party won 12 percent of the vote in the elections of 2001—‘are in charge’.[382]
In the sense that there was now almost no mainstream politician of Left or Right who dared appear ‘soft’ on such issues, she was right. Even the tiny, thuggish British National Party (BNP) was able to cast a shadow on the policies of New Labour governments in the UK. Traditionally marginal—its best recent performance had been 7 percent of the vote in 1997 in an East London district where Bengalis had replaced Jews as the local ethnic minority—the BNP won 11,643 votes (14 percent) four years later in two districts of Oldham, a former mill town in Lancashire where race riots had broken out shortly before the elections.
These were negligible figures compared with developments on the Continent and the BNP came nowhere near winning a parliamentary seat. But because (according to opinion polls) its concerns appeared to reflect a widespread national unease, the hard Right was able to frighten Prime Minister Tony Blair into tightening still further the UK’s already ungenerous provisions for would-be immigrants and refugees. It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party.
France was another matter. There the Front National had an issue—immigrants; mass backing—2.7 million voters at the general elections of 1986; and a charismatic leader brilliantly adept at converting generalized public dissatisfaction into focused anger and political prejudice. To be sure, the far Right would never have done so well had Mitterrand not cynically introduced into France in 1986 a system of proportional representation designed to engineer the parliamentary success (and thus national visibility) of the
But the fact remains that 4.5 million French voters backed Le Pen in the presidential elections of 1995: a number that rose to 4.8 million in April 2002 when the FN leader achieved an unprecedented success, taking second place in a presidential election with 17 percent of the vote and forcing the Left’s candidate, the hapless Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, out of the race. In France, too, the conclusion reached by mainstream politicians was that they must somehow draw the sting of Le Pen’s appeal by appropriating his concerns and promising tough measures to address ‘security’ and immigration, without explicitly condoning either Le Pen’s language—or his program (‘France for the French’ and repatriation for everyone else).
Despite Le Pen’s own links to an older tradition of far-Right politics—through his youthful support for the Poujadists, his passage through the shadowy organizations of the far-Right during the Algerian war, and his carefully phrased defense of Vichy and the Petainist cause—his movement, like its counterparts all across the continent, could not be dismissed as simply an atavistic, nostalgic regurgitation of Europe’s Fascist past. Certainly Fortuyn or Kj?rsgaard could not be categorized thus. Indeed both took care to emphasize their desire to preserve their countries’ traditional tolerance—under threat, they asserted, from the religious fanaticism and retrograde cultural practices of the new Muslim minorities.
