14
PARTISAN REVIEW
political corruption of the establishment in Rome, flock to the populist
Lombard League.
In
West Germany, alongside the backlash against im–
migrants and guest-workers, there is unexpectedly deep resentment to–
wards East Germans, blamed for the costs of unification and a temporary
decline in the standard of living.
The populist demagogues flourish, as always, in a climate of fear -
fear of unemployment and recession, fear of the alien and different, fear
for the future.
In
France, Le Pen's Front National has consistently won
between twelve and fourteen percent of the vote in regional, cantonal,
and national elections. With 60,000 members and 239 regional council–
lors (out of a total of 1,829), with strong bases in Province, Alpes, Cote
d'Azur and lie de France, the radical right in France is solidly implanted.
Its campaign against immigration has played no small role in bringing
the present French government of the conservative right to adopt
draconian legislation whose declared aim is zero-immigration in what
was traditionally Europe's most hospitable country.
In Germany, the Republikaner did not do well in the recent na–
tional elections, due to internal divisions, but they have a potential sup–
port base of around ten percent of the electorate. The pressure of the
radical right forced the German government to drastically modifY its lib–
eral asylum laws. In Austria, Jorg Haider's Freedom Party enjoys the sup–
port of nearly twenty-five percent of the electorate and is threatening to
replace the Conservatives as the second largest party. Its rhetoric about
the threat of
Umvolkung
(ethnic transformation) resulting from further
immigration from the South or East is redolent of the vocabulary of the
Third Reich. In Belgium, too, the far-right Vlaams Block, which adopts
an extreme anti-immigrant stance, is well-positioned. In Antwerp in 1991
it won twenty-five percent of the vote in the last general elections and
this could increase the next time around. Significantly, as in some other
European countries, the populist right is openly supported by neo-Nazi
groups.
It
is tempting to dismiss the neo-Nazi movements and violent skin–
head gangs who have envenomed race relations in Europe in recent years
as politically insignificant in view of their small size, their lack of leader–
ship, coherent organization or ideology. Apart from Germany, their
numbers are small in most individual European countries (they are gener–
ally in the age fourteen to twenty-five group) - and they have no influ–
ence on electoral politics. But the wave of racist violence in Germany in
the last few years - with brutal attacks on Turks, Third World immi–
grants, handicapped people, as well as the desecration ofJewish cemeter–
ies and Holocaust sites - has been a chilling reminder of the fascist po–
tential still lurking in the lower depths of European society. In 1992
