Author: Graeme Atkinson | Date: July 2009

Mixed fortunes but no unity for far right

There were some winners, some notable losers, but overall no surprises for the extreme right in the European Parliamentary election, in which 375 million people in 27 countries were eligible to vote for the parties to fill the 785 seats.

In general, the results signify a retrenchment rather than a radical-isation of the right. 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 the far right’s traditional themes of racism and immigration – or more accurately public concern and fears over it – that generated much of its vote. Many of the right-wing extremists standing had nothing to say about the economy, climate change or any of the other pressing issues. Unfortunately, as usual, over-excited media looked at the far right’s showing and hyperventilated about a surge forward for right-wing extremism without stopping to analyse the results properly or even, in many cases, to point out that the far right won only 37 seats in the whole parliament.

The undoubted far-right winners of the election were Geert Wilders and his anti-Islamic and bitterly anti-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 occupy four European seats.

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, enabling it to double its seats from one to two.

Matching the DFP’s success and coming from just 0.5% in 2004 was Finland’s bizarre right-wing populist True Finns party, which got one person elected, taking almost 10% of the vote on its own and nearly 14% jointly with its alliance partner the Christian Democrats.

Italy’s right-wing regionalist and racist Northern League won 3,126,915 votes, amounting to 10.2%, and nine parliamentary seats. It was not all plain sailing for the Italian far right, however, because the fascist Fiamma Tricolore and Nick Griffin’s convicted terrorist friend Roberto Fiore lost their seats and a very valuable cash lifeline.

The far-right star in eastern Europe was Jobbik, Hungary’s nazi party, which ran a virulently racist campaign against so-called “gypsy criminality”. In the run-up to polling day Krisztina Morvai, one of Jobbik’s leading candidates, spread vile racist and anti-Jewish abuse on the internet. That 427,000 people, 14.8% of the poll, voted for this party, whose uniformed private army swaggers through the streets in flagrant defiance of the law, disproves any suggestion that its supporters were simply making a protest. Jobbik is one of the British National Party’s closest allies in Europe, which says much about the BNP’s true nature.

The parties that passed the 10% mark were obviously the big winners, but there were also smaller successes. Among them is the BNP, of course, which will be represented by Griffin, the BNP leader, and his henchman Andrew Brons, whose early political career in an organisation the members of which burned down synagogues in the 1960s makes him eminently suitable for the task of building alliances with the likes of Jobbik.

Elsewhere, the smaller winners represented a patchwork of the varieties of fascist, racist, Islamophobic, homo-phobic and antisemitic bigotry that can be found across Europe. The Greek fascists of LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally) came in with two seats on the strength of 366,000 votes or 7.2%. In Slovakia and Romania, ultra-nation-alists won their first seats in European Parliamentary elections, one for the Slovak National Party and three for the Greater Romania Party.

The Greater Romania Party was the centre of controversy in 2007 when its five MEPs, who were allocated their seats on Romania’s accession to the EU but lost them in a subsequent election, split from the fascist Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty group in the European Parliament after being racially insulted by Alessandra Mussolini, an Italian MEP and granddaughter of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

In Bulgaria, which joined the EU on 1 January 2007 alongside Romania, the anti-EU and ultra-nationalist Ataka party won two seats. One of its main campaigns was a propaganda offensive against Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish minority.

The far right also had its losers. Top of the list was the League of Polish Families, which took ten seats in 2004. This time, the party threw in its lot with Libertas, the pan-European right-wing populist party founded by the Irish multi-millionaire Declan Ganley, but came unstuck, scoring an abysmal 1.1% and losing all its seats. The achievement in Poland was equalled in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Slovenia 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 extreme-right parties, the National Front (FN) and Flemish Interest (VB), came unstuck. Both lost seats and probably a degree of political influence among their fellow extremists. The FN, fighting financial meltdown and torn apart by fierce rows over who will succeed its veteran leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, lost 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 leaves the far right with its 37 seats won on a combined 10,073,000 votes is uncertain. 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 – 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.

Some will find it hard to enter into alliances. It is highly unlikely that the grass roots of either the Northern League or the FPÖ would tolerate any kind of long term alliance or even cooperation between the two parties because the territorial status of South Tyrol, a formerly Austrian region annexed by Italy after the First World War, is still a contentious issue for both of them.

Jobbik will no doubt be delighted to get down into the gutter with the BNP but will find its presence in the parliament less popular with the hardliners of the Slovak National Party and Greater Romania Party, whose campaigns relied on viciously attacking the presence of large minorities of ethnic Hungarians in both countries.

The various elected far-right parties are opposed to immigration, are racist and in some cases are antisemitic, but that does not make them identical. Wilders, for example, is Islamophobic but not antisemitic. On the contrary, he is an outspoken admirer of Israel, a position that is anathema to most of the others.

For the Danish People’s Party, forming a bloc with parties whose feet are firmly planted in the soil of fascism would be horrifying and any suitors from that direction are likely to be given short shrift. The Northern League has similarly rejected alliances with fascists.

The huge differences and tensions between the 37 far-right MEPs make it unlikely that they will manage to form an official group, which requires at least 25 MEPs from at least seven member states, putting the funding that group status would bring beyond their reach yet again. That said, their snouts will still be deep in the salaries, expenses and allowances trough and, although they embody the dreary politics of people who have failed to come to terms with the modern world, they will gain some dubious respectability from the mere fact that they are there.

Even so, they remain political outcasts, the descendants of the Nazis and fascists who perpetrated history’s greatest mass murders, who feed on hate and fear. Democracy’s fightback against them has to start immediately.

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