I.
The European elections confirmed a tendency that has been apparent for
some years across most of the continent: the spectacular rise of the far
right. This is a phenomenon without precedent since the 1930s. In many
countries this movement obtained between 10 and 20 percent of the vote;
today in three countries (France, United Kingdom, Denmark) is has
already reached 25 to 30 percent. Moreover, its influence is greater
than its own electorate: its ideas contaminate also the ‘classical’
right and even part of the social-neoliberal left. The French case is
the most serious, with the Front National’s breakthrough exceeding even
the most pessimistic predictions. As the website Mediapart wrote in a recent editorial, ‘it’s five minutes to midnight’.
II.
This far right is very diverse, a variety ranging from openly neo-Nazi
parties like ‘Golden Dawn’ in Greece to bourgeois forces who are
perfectly well integrated into the institutional political game, such as
Switzerland’s UDC. What they have in common is their chauvinist
nationalism, xenophobia, racism, hatred of immigrants – particularly
‘non-Europeans’ – and Roma (the continent’s oldest people), Islamophobia
and anti-communism. To that we could add, in many cases, anti-semitism,
homophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, disdain for democracy and
Europhobia. On other questions – for example their stances for or
against neoliberalism or secularism – this movement is more divided.
III.
It would be mistaken to believe that fascism and anti-fascism are
phenomena belonging to the past. Of course, today we do not see mass
fascist parties comparable to the NSDAP in the Germany of the 1930s, but
already in that period fascism was not limited to this model only:
Spanish Francoism and Portuguese Salazarism were very different from the
Italian and German models. A significant part of today’s European far
right has a directly fascist and/or neo-Nazi framework: this being the
case for Greece’s ‘Golden Dawn’, Hungary’s Jobbik and the Ukrainian
parties Svoboda and Right Sector; but also, in a different way, France’s
Front National, Austria’s FPÖ, and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, among
others, whose founding leaders had close links with historical fascism
and the forces that collaborated with the Third Reich. In other
countries – such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and Denmark –
the far-right parties do not have fascist origins but do share in their
racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. One of the arguments used to show
that the far right has changed and no longer has much to do with fascism
is its acceptance of parliamentary democracy and the electoral route to
power. Though we might remember that a certain Adolf Hitler made it to
the German Chancellery by a legal vote in the Reichstag, and that
Marshal Pétain was elected Head of State by the French Parliament. If
the Front National made it to power by electoral means – a hypothesis
that can sadly no longer be dismissed – what would remain of democracy
in France?
IV. The economic crisis that has riven Europe since
2008 has almost everywhere (with the exception of Greece) favoured the
far right more than the radical left. The two forces are totally out of
proportion, contrary to the European situation of the 1930s where in
many countries the anti-fascist left rose in parallel to fascism. The
current far right has without doubt profited from the crisis, though
this does not explain everything: in Spain and Portugal, two of the
countries hit hardest by the crisis, the far right remains only
marginal. And in Greece, though ‘Golden Dawn’ has enjoyed exponential
growth, it has very much been left in the wake of Syriza, the Coalition
of the Radical Left. In Switzerland and Austria, two countries largely
spared by the crisis, the racist far right often gets above 20 percent
support. Thus we should avoid the economistic explanations often
advanced by the left.
V. Historical factors have without doubt
played some role: a long anti-semitic tradition widespread in certain
countries; the persistence of those currents who collaborated during the
Second World War; and the colonial culture that impregnates attitudes
and behaviours long after decolonisation – not only in the former
empires, but in almost all European countries. All these factors are at
work in France and contribute to explaining the success of Le Pen’s
party.
VI. The concept of ‘populism’ employed by certain political
scientists, the media and even part of the left, is wholly inadequate
to explaining this phenomenon, serving only to sow confusion. If in the
Latin America of the 1930s to ‘60s the term populism corresponded to
something quite specific – Vargas-ism, Peronism, etc. – its European
usage from the 1990s onward is ever more vague and imprecise. Populism
is defined as ‘a political position that takes the side of the people
against the elites’, which goes for almost any political party or
movement. When applied to the parties of the far right, this
pseudo-concept leads – whether deliberately or not – to legitimising
them, making them more acceptable, or even appealing – who isn’t for the
people against the elites? – while carefully avoiding the troubling
terms racism, xenophobia, fascism, and far right. ‘Populism’ is also
used in a deliberately mystifying fashion by neoliberal ideologues in
order to make an amalgam between the far right and the radical left,
characterised as ‘right-wing populism’ and ‘left-wing populism’, since
they are both opposed to neoliberal policies, ‘Europe’, etc.
VII.
The left as a whole, with only a few exceptions, has severely
underestimated this danger. It did not see the brown wave coming, and
thus did not see the need to take the initiative of an anti-fascist
mobilisation. For certain currents of the left, seeing the far right as
nothing more than a side-effect of the crisis and of unemployment, it is
these causes that must be attacked and not the fascist phenomenon
itself. Such typically economistic reasoning has disarmed the left in
the face of the far right’s racist, xenophobic and nationalist
ideological offensive.
VIII. No social group is immune to the
brown plague. The ideas of the far right, in particular racism, have
contaminated a significant part of not only the petty bourgeoisie and
the unemployed, but also the working class and young people. This is
particularly striking in the French case. These ideas have no relation
to the reality of immigration: the vote for the Front National, for
example, was particularly high in certain rural areas that have never
seen a single immigrant. And Roma immigrants, recently the object of a
hysterical racist campaign that made some impression – with the generous
participation of the ‘socialist’ Interior Minister of the time, Mr.
Manuel Valls – number less than twenty thousand across the whole of
France.
IX. Another ‘classic’ left-wing analysis of fascism is
that which explains it essentially as an instrument of big capital to
crush the revolution and the workers’ movement. Since today the workers’
movement is very much weakened and the revolutionary threat
non-existent, big capital has no interest in supporting far-right
movements and thus the risk of a brown offensive is non-existent. This
is, once again, an economistic reading that does not take account of the
autonomy of any political phenomenon – electors can, indeed, choose a
party that does not have the big bourgeoisie’s backing – and one that
seems to ignore the fact that big capital can accommodate to all sorts
of political regimes without too much soul-searching.
X. There is
no magic recipe for fighting the far right. We must be inspired – with a
proper critical distance – by the anti-fascist traditions of the past,
but we must also know how to innovate in order to respond to the new
forms of this phenomenon. We must know how to combine local initiatives
with solidly organised and structured unitary socio-political and
cultural movements, at both the national and continental levels. It is
sometimes possible to unite with the ghost of ‘republicanism’, but any
organised anti-fascist movement will only be effective and credible if
it is driven by forces situated outside of the dominant neoliberal
consensus. This means a struggle that cannot be limited within the
borders of a single country, but must be organised at the level of
Europe as a whole. The struggle against racism, as well as solidarity
with its victims, is one among the essential components of this
resistance.
