The times we are in are tough times, especially here in Europe and especially for immigrants.
What make it tough? You may ask, well, as we actually read and listen to on the news this is the growth of the far right parties across Europe.
The economical crisis that arose in Europe in 2008 where the imminent collapse of the euro which resulted from a combination of complex factors, including the easy credit conditions during the 2002–2008 period that encouraged high-risk lending and borrowing practices; the international trade imbalances; real-estate bubbles that burst; and bail outs of troubled banking industries and private bondholders, assuming private debt burdens or socializing losses are some of the reasons for the Euro zone crisis. moving on from here
I guess you will be asking yourself what does the crisis or recession has to do with the rise of the far right mentalism. The growth in support for far-right means the increase of anti-European, anti-immigrant parties which has been fed by the worst world recession since at least the 1930s – mass unemployment and falling living standards, made worse by the self-defeating austerity obsession of European leaders. Partie sympathetic with fascism and Nazism are re-emerging, such as the party of Marine Le Pen, leader of the French national party; the Dutch far-right leader shows hostility against Muslim immigrants. Like Le Pen, Wilders also focuses on the alleged threat to national identity from the European Union. This is also t is a chorus echoed in other countries by the Danish People's party, the Finns party and the Flemish Vlaams Belang, among others.
For now, the French and Dutch populists are carefully keeping their distance from openly neo-Nazi parties such as the Greek Golden Dawn, whose paramilitary Sturmabteilung has terrorised refugees and immigrants in Greece, and the swaggering Hungarian Jobbik, which targets the Roma minority.
More worrying than the growth of the far right are the temporising gestures to the racists and anti-immigrants now coming from mainstream Conservative and even Liberal Democrat politicians and from some of the new "Blue Labour" ideologues. The warning from the likes of David Blunkett that hostility to Roma immigrants might lead to a popular "explosion" is reminiscent of Enoch Powell's rhetoric.
An antidote to the far right requires that the European left articulates and pursues a comprehensive alternative to economic stagnation, an ever-widening income and wealth gap and the degradation of our social standards, civil liberties and democratic rights. But that alternative has to be fought for at European as well as national and local levels, and will require more, not less, European integration.
The rise of the French NF mirrors the growth in support for nationalists across Europe, with the far-right in Austria, Poland and Austria also registering high in the polls on current projections. Dutch anti-Muslim populist Geert Wilders is polling well and Greek Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is now the third biggest party in Greek politics.
“Fear of immigration, crises of identity and recession combined have created a climate propitious to ultranationalist, anti-European ideology,” writes Le Nouvel Observateur columnist Jean-Gabriel Fredet.
The rise of the far-right in Europe, and in France in particular, is no reason for liberals this side of the Channel to feel smug, however. The past year has seen the growth of our own anti-immigration and anti-EU party in the form of UKIP, and a 2011 poll found that half of British people would support a party of the far-right if it eschewed violence.
Ironically, France’s FN has grown in popularity as the party has combined anti-immigrant sentiment with the sort of anti-globalisation, anti-market rhetoric that is usually the preserve of the left. This explains why the French Socialist Party is losing just as many voters to Len Pen as the centre-right UMP.
It also reflects a wider phenomenon. Across Europe, as the political mainstream has converged on an increasingly narrow strip of political territory popularly known as the ‘centre ground’, movements of the far-right have co-opted some of the old economic causes of the left and fused them with more traditional far-right grievances. As Cecile Alduy puts it in the Atlantic, “whereas [former FN leader] Jean-Marie was anti-abortion, socially conservative, and a staunch advocate of small government, Marine is pro-choice, gay-friendly, and economically interventionist”.
The combination of anti-market rhetoric and extreme right-wing ideology in part explains the surge in support for leaders such as Le Pen. It is not simply that people become more hostile to outsiders during crisis (although they do), it is that people also look more to the government for solutions, which the far-right is professing to offer in the form of greater intervention in the economy.
The fact that the extreme-right is able to offer more radical sounding economic proposals is helped by the fact that in most instances it remains on the political margins.
This combination of economic populism, anti-establishment rhetoric and xenophobia is not new – 20th century fascism was well known for it - but it has become an increasingly effective tool of the far-right as mainstream parties of the left have come to be seen as just as much a part of the establishment as their conservative counterparts.
In Britain, the British National Party (BNP) may be experiencing a slump, but politically its platform resembles the mainland European extreme right in its combination of racism and economic populism. The party opposes British membership of the EU, is “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration,” yet runs candidates on a platform of an interventionist economic policy which supports import tariffs.
This is why the far-right in its current form is so dangerous: it is much harder to oppose a party which papers over its racism and xenophobia with populist dressing of the left and centre.
The BNP has failed to make significant gains in Britain, but there is very little reason to think a party which combined hostility to foreigners (usually Muslims) with populist economic intervention could not make electoral progress. According to a number of polls, the public supports the nationalisation of things like the trains and the utilities, but there is also widespread hostility toward immigration and the EU.
This presents a dilemma for a generation of professional politicians trained to triangulate and seek out the centre ground between right and left. Rather than pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment, to ward off the threat from the far-right the British and European left will at some point have to rediscover its own anti-establishment credentials and persuade sceptical electorates that they can make the market work again.
This is what is really going on in Europe but this leaves us with various questions: how do the democratic governments tackle this problem, in fact are they really interested in tackling it? Why do many Europeans support these parties, what do they gain? Do all immigrants go back to our countries? If so, I guess we need to go back with all our products, knowledge and multiculturalism?
