In his mercurial way, by turns glib and menacing, Haider epitomizes Europe’s new breed of upscale, far-right politicians. Compared with the bullies of the past, today’s xenophobes like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and Germany’s Franz Schonhuber and populists like Italy’s Umberto Bossi tend to be articulate and relatively presentable. Their message is authoritarian and sometimes racist. But they speak for great numbers of Europeans who have lost faith in more moderate political parties, who are disoriented by post-communist upheavals and who fear interlopers from other countries and other cultures. The threat of alien “otherness” is a potent right-wing message that has moved onto the agenda of mainstream politics.
In recent months, far-right parties have scored striking advances in city and regional elections in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Denmark. Moderate politicians don’t know how to respond effectively. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl keeps insisting that “Germany is not an immigration country” when in fact it is deluged with refugees. Former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a centrist leader, complained recently about an “invasion” of foreigners and said the law should be changed so that citizenship would be given only to children of French parents, and not to children born on French soil to foreign parents. “The French Socialists are speaking like the French conservatives did five years ago, and the French conservatives are sounding like the ultra right did,” says Anton Pelinka, director of Vienna’s Institute for Conflict Research. “The whole political spectrum has shifted to the right.”
Even as their ideas move into the mainstream, some far-right politicians quietly maintain ties to the neo-Nazi “skinheads” who are responsible for widespread violence against outsiders (box, page 34). In Germany, where the skinheads are most active, low-level functionaries of Schonhuber’s Republican Party and the German People’s Union, another far-right organization, hang out at skinhead clubs, organize and participate in marches, and offer odd jobs to the storm troopers. In Austria, Haider stays away from the neo-Nazis and professes a distaste for violence. But many officials of his own party have had contacts with the neo-Nazi National Party of Germany. Haider’s confidant Andreas Molzer, the Freedom Party political and ideology director, used to publish a magazine that described the Holocaust as “a lie without end.” And Haider himself can find a kind word for fascism. When a parliamentary heckler compared his economic theories to those of Adolf Hitler, Haider slashed back: " Well at least in the Third Reich they had an orderly employment policy!"
One irony of the far-right resurgence in Europe is that many countries, including Germany and France, have largely closed the door on non-European immigration for more than 15 years. Apart from a small number of legal and illegal immigrants, most of the “aliens” who now arouse such complaints are citizens, the descendants of earlier immigrants and guest workers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. So far, the main problem is race, not immigration. The “outsiders” look, talk and worship differently; Jacques Chirac, the conservative mayor of Paris, points out that they even have “smells” of their own.
Now, with the collapse of communism, Western Europe is battening down for a new round of immigration from Eastern Europe. The predicted tidal wave of refugees hasn’t materialized yet. But at a time of economic stress and high unemployment, any new arrivals will be resented even ethnic Germans who want to settle in Germany. This year Germany expects 400,000 would-be immigrants to apply for residence under a law that grants asylum to the victims of oppression. As in the United States, many citizens complain that the refugees are fleeing economic hardship, not tyranny, and should be kicked out.
Eventually, 95 percent of the applicants will be rejected, but many will stay on for years while their claims are processed. Because of widespread abuse, Germany is expected to scrap the asylum policy soon. Still, many people believe that fraudulent refugees benefit from favoritism. “People who claim to be politically persecuted get an apartment right away,” insists Werner Rutschman, who lives in a Stuttgart suburb where 30 percent of the electorate voted Republican last month. “Our children will need apartments. Are they supposed to immigrate to the United States to find one? "
Most far-right voters are not fascists or even right wingers, necessarily. “They are unhappy people, victims of cultivated fear,” says Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Few Italians want to bring back Mussolini; only about 6 percent of them voted for his granddaughter Alessandra’s party this month. But many are fed up with the ineptness and corruption of Italy’s coalitions. In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution estimates that 35,000 people belong to extreme right-wing organizations, a figure that has increased only slightly in recent years. But in a single German state, Baden-Wurttemberg, 530,000 people voted last month for the Republican Party, which produced a racist campaign poster showing stereotyped Africans, Arabs and Chinese tumbling out of a boat labeled the “Ark of Germany.”
Although there are politically significant far-right parties in most countries of Western Europe (Britain and Portugal are the most notable exceptions), their politics are less nationalistic than regional–sometimes almost tribal. Says Le Pen: “I prefer my daughters to my nieces, my nieces to my cousins, my cousins to my neighbors, my neighbors to my fellow citizens, my fellow citizens to foreigners. What’s wrong with that?” Le Pen’s National Front appeals mainly to the anti-big-government strain that has been a constant in French politics for centuries. In Belgium, the Flemish Bloc, which won 25 percent of the seats on the Antwerp city council last November, is a new manifestation of the ancient hatred for French-speaking Walloons. Like Flemish separatists of the 1930s, the party is unabashedly anti-Semitic and authoritarian. Bossi’s Lombard League, based in northern Italy, likes to take swipes at “foreigners” (including southern Italians), but its main demand is for regional autonomy.
According to a recent French study, far-right voters are likely to live near, but not in, racially mixed areas. They may feel threatened by change they see bearing down on them. They complain about cultural diversity, which they think is being imposed upon them by their own central governments and by the European Community (EC). For some, America is a favorite whipping boy. They use “New York” as a code word for the supposed horrors of a multicultural society. Washington is assumed to be in the grip of the “Jewish lobby.” Brussels, the home of the EC bureaucracy, is for them another symbol of what’s wrong with the world. Haider rails against the “European-unity Mensch,” a homogenizing agent that he compares to the “multiethnic experimentation” in the former Soviet Union.
What the far-right parties and their supporters overlook is that even the most homogeneous European countries have long since crossed the multicultural Rubicon. Homogeneity ended when colonialism began and technology started to shrink the world. It is too late now for cultural purity, even on a local scale. “Europeans are used to sending emigres out into the world, not accepting immigrants from elsewhere,” says Willibald Pahr, Austria’s commissioner for refugees and migration. “For European governments to undo centuries of practice and accept that there is immigration into Europe, and that it will continue whether they like it or not, requires political courage.” The far right will continue to grind its ethnic ax, as it has done for decades. The courage to resist must come from leaders in the political mainstream.
