MARTA HALPERT
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well as immigrants from Turkey, Albania, and Romania to the rich
fortress of European Union countries.
2)
The increase in organized or individual crime aggravates the feeling
of insecurity. The newcomers are being blamed for this negative impact.
3) Unemployment in a world of rapidly growing globalization is
being easily associated with unwanted competitors for the same jobs.
4)
Anti-European: In this context one has to see the reluctance to
move swiftly forward with the inclusion of another ten European coun–
tries into the Union. Polls show that those within the fifteen member
states are not too enthusiastic about the prospect of "sharing the loot."
5) The cozy consensus (in France the "cohabitation"), with mostly
two main parties of right and left sharing power and patronage for
decades, gave many the feeling that they lacked choice.
The end of the Cold War and the demise of communism made the
mainstream parties of the right and left move more tightly to the center,
often diminishing choice for ordinary people, whose fears were being
ignored. Nearly all the established mainstream parties lack charismatic
personalities: There is no Willy Brandt, no Bruno Kreisky, no Olaf
Palme. Instead you find pale "managers of power" making the possible
come true.
But there are others nowadays who do fill this gap: A tanned
Jbrg
Haider driving a Porsche or an eccentric cigar-smoking Pim Fortuyn meets
the needs of a greedy photo-finish audience. These politicians apparently
offer simple solutions to complicated topics. They command language
which is easily understood, and they radiate an aura of stability in an inse–
cure world. Stopping immigration is the popular answer to containing
crime and making one feel safe and strong within one's national walls.
Blunt chauvinism paired with national provinciality is the basis for
populist political parties to instrumentalize the angst of their voters. For
instance, to jeopardize the sale of national water plants in Austria, nat–
ural resources were defined as "sacred property" and a tabloid ran the
slogan "our clear, good water must not be owned by foreigners!"
The most valid and recent example of how the "right populists infil–
trated the mainstream" of government and society is Austria: In Febru–
ary
2000
the third-ranking Christian-conservative Peoples Party formed
a government with
Jbrg
Haider's Freedom Party, which won second
place to the Social Democrats with
27
percent of the vote in the national
elections. Disregarding local and European-wide protests, the Austrian
conservatives were the first to break this taboo in Western Europe: A
party with far-right populist ideas, inciting resentment against foreign–
ers and European ideas, was legitimized by joining a government in a
