By Graeme Atkinson, European Editor Searchlight magazine
For the extreme right, the European Parliament (EP) elections brought mixed fortunes with some winners, some notable losers, but overall, no surprises in the election, in which 375 million people were eligible to vote in 27 countries and to decide which parties fill the Brussels/Strasbourg parliament’s 785 seats.
In general, the results signify a retrenchment rather than a radicalisation of the right in which conservative parties profited both from the failure of the left to come up with coherent answers to the economic crisis and from varying degrees of political disarray in EU member states.
If anything, it was “local national circumstances” and their traditional themes of racism and immigration – or more accurately, public concern and fears over it – that produced much of the far-right vote. Many of the right-wing extremists standing had nothing to say about the crisis, climate change or any of the other issues pressing on us all. Unfortunately, as usual, an over-excited media looked at the far-right’s showing and hyperventilated itself into twitter about a surge forward for right-wing extremism without stopping to analyse the results objectively or properly or even, in many cases, to point out that the far-right won only 37 seats out of the 785 contested!
The undoubted far-right winner in the ballot was Geert Wilders’ and his anti-Islamic and bitterly anti-European Union (EU) Party for Freedom which grabbed 17% of the vote in The Netherlands and catapulted itself into the position of the country’s second strongest party. It will now occupy four seats in the EP.
Another high scorer was the anti-immigrant, Islamophobic Danish People’s Party (DFP) whose vote rocketed from 6.8% in 2004 to just over 15% this time round, enabling it to double its seats from one to two.
Matching the DFP’s vote and coming from an almost nowhere vote of just 0.5% in 2004 were Finland’s bizarre right-wing populist True Finns party which got one person elected, scored almost 10% on its own account and, together with its alliance partners, the Christian Democrats, took almost 14% of the vote.
Also notching up double figures was Italy’s right-wing regionalist and racist Lega Nord, whose 3,126,915 votes worked out at 10.2% and gave it nine seats in the European parliament. It was not all plain sailing in Italy, however, because the fascist Fiamma Tricolore and Nick Griffin’s convicted terrorist friend Roberto Fiore lost their seats and a very valuable cash lifeline.
In terms of raw percentages, though the parties that passed the 10% mark were the big winners, in terms of making a breakthrough there were also smaller scale winners. First in this category was Hungary’s nazi party, Jobbik, which ran a virulently racist campaign against so-called “gypsy criminality”.
Even before Hungarian voters went to the polling stations, one of the party’s top candidates, Kirsztina Morvai, was busy spreading vile racist and anti-Jewish abuse on the internet. That 427,000 people – 14.77% – voted for this nazi party, whose uniformed private army swaggers through the streets in flagrant defiance of the law, rips apart any suggestions that those who voted for it were simply making a protest. It is quite fitting that Jobbik is one of the BNP’s closest allies in Europe: nazis spotting nazis across a crowded room, as it were.
Griffin’s outfit, of course, can also be numbered amongst the smaller winners and will be represented by Griffin himself and his henchman Andrew Brons who formerly belonged to an organisation that cheerfully burned down synagogues in the 1960s.
Elsewhere, the smaller winners represented a patchwork of the varieties of off-the-shelf fascist, racist, Islamaphobic, homophobic and antisemitic bigotry that can be found across Europe. Thus, for example, the Greek fascists of LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally) came in with two seats on the strength of 366,000 votes or 7.2%. Also, in Slovakia and Romania, ultra-nationalists won their first seats in elections to the European parliament: one seat in Slovakia for the Slovak National Party and three seats in Romania for the Greater Romania Party.
This latter party was the centre of controversy last year when it split from the fascist Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty group in the European Parliament after being racially insulted by no less a figure than fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter and former soft porn star, Alessandra. Also, in that part of the world, the anti-EU and ultra-nationalist Ataka party won two seats in Bulgaria. One of its main campaigns included a propaganda offensive against Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish minority.
Wherever there are winners there are also losers and in this election some of the more usual suspects on the far right produced results that will have caused them a loss of prestige, not to mention parliamentary seats in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Top of the losers’ list was undoubtedly the League of Polish Families which took ten seats in 2004. This time round, this outfit jumped on board Irish multi-millionaire Declan Ganley’s right-wing populist Libertas chariot and politically fell off it, scoring an abysmal 1.14% and losing all its seats. The achievement in Poland was equalled in Germany, Sweden, Spain and Portugal where the far-right emerged empty-handed. Likewise in the Czech Republic, the BNP’s friends in the Czech National Party – who called in May for “a final solution to the Gypsy issue” could not even pass the 1% mark.
In France and Belgium, Europe’s two most professionally organised right-wing extremist parties, the Front National (FN) and Vlaams Belang (VB) respectively came unstuck and lost seats and probably some degree of political influence among their fellow right-wing extremists. The FN, fighting financial meltdown and torn apart by fierce rows over who will succeed its veteran boss, the volcanic Jean-Marie Le Pen, lost no fewer than four of its previous seven seats while the VB watched its support ebb away to its main rival on the right, the more moderate, populist DeDecker List, losing one of its three seats.
Where this leads the far right with its 37 seats won on a combined tally of 10,073,000 votes is not clear. At the time of writing the DFP, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which got two seats, the FN, the VB, Ataka and the BNP were all taking soundings – and not necessarily with each other – about possible allies. The Latvian fans of the Waffen SS, the LNNK (For Fatherland and Freedom) will not be rushing to take part in the scramble for allies because its lone MEP is already in the warm embrace of the rightward-moving British Conservative Party and its leader David Cameron.
As to the rest of them, it is hard to tell where they are going to get an alliance from. Polite chitchat excluded, it is highly unlikely that the grass roots of either the Lega Nord or the FPÖ would tolerate any kind of long term alliance or even cooperation between the two parties because the territorial status of the disputed currently Italian South Tyrol region is still a contentious issue for both of them.
Jobbik will no doubt be delighted to get down and dirty in the gutter with its two pals in the BNP but will find its presence in the parliament less than popular with the hardliners that represent the Slovak National Party and the Greater Romania Party, whose campaigns were built on viciously attacking the presence of a large minority of ethnic Hungarians in both countries.
All of the elected hotchpotch of far-right parties are opposed to immigration, are racist and are, in some cases, antisemitic but that does not make them identical. Wilders, for example, while Islamophobic, is not antisemitic. On the contrary, he is an outspoken admirer of Israel, a position that is anathema to the likes of the BNP, the FN, Jobbik and most of the others.
For the Danish People’s Party, the thought of forming an bloc with parties whose feet are firmly planted in the soil of fascism is horrifying and any suitors coming from that direction are likely to be given the same short shrift that some of them have already been given by the Lega Nord.
Any possibility of this latest consignment of far-rightist MEPs cementing a stable and long-term alliance is a non-starter and puts their hopes of hitherto undreamt-of funds beyond their reach yet again. That said, their snouts will still be deep in the lucrative salaries, expenses and allowances trough and, though they embody the dreary politics of people who have failed to come to terms with the modern world, they will have the mantle of dubious respectability derived from the mere fact that they are there.
As said above, they are thirty-seven out of seven hundred and eighty-five and should be treated as what they really are: political outcasts and no hopers, the twisted spawn of history’s losers addicted to the politics of fear, hate and violence
Democracy’s fightback against them has to start immediately.
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Graeme Atkinson has worked with the international anti-fascist magazine Searchlight since its first edition as a magazine in 1975 and worked for it professionally since 1986. In 1989, he moved to Germany – where he has resided ever since – to assist in building up a network of European anti-fascist researchers and activists and to work as the magazine’s European editor. In addition to his role as a journalist for Searchlight, he authored an official report of the European Parliament on the dangers of right-wing extremism and was assistant producer of the award-winning anti-fascist documentary The Truth Sets You Free. www.searchlightmagazine.com —————————————— *Guest blogger posts are the sole responsibility of their authors. The opinions expressed by guest bloggers do not necessarily represent the opinions of Imagine 2050 editors or regular contributors.