All over Europe, the new, populist far-right parties have become part of the political scene. They’re not defined, as the old far-righters used to be, by what they want, but by what they don’t want.
by Jean-Yves Camus
Extensive research into far-right populism over the last 30 years has yet to find a precise, workable definition for this catchall term, and we need more information on the political category it covers. Since 1945 Europeans have used “far right” to mean a range of very different phenomena: xenophobic and anti-system populism, nationalist-populist political parties, and even religious fundamentalism. But the term should be used with caution because, for militant rather than objective reasons, movements labelled as far-right are often assumed to be a continuation (adapted to contemporary circumstances) of nationalist-socialist, fascist or nationalist-authoritarian ideologies, which is not the case.
German neo-Nazism — and to some extent the National Democratic Party — and Italian neo-Fascist movements (CasaPound Italia, Fiamma Tricolore and Forza Nuova, which together represent only 0.53% of voters), certainly follow their models’ ideology. So do the modern avatars of movements that emerged in central and eastern Europe in the 1930s: the League of Polish Families, the Slovak National Party and the Greater Romania Party. But in western European elections, only the now defunct Italian Social Movement, which became the National Alliance in 1995 after its leader Gianfranco Fini steered it in a more conservative direction, has managed to bring the far right out of marginality (1). In eastern Europe the far right is stagnating (see map): though the success of Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary (2) show it is not dead, it is very much a minority.
The values of this traditional far right are unsuited to an age that does not seek grand ideologies preaching a new humanity or a new world. The cult of the leader and of the single party does not satisfy the demands of fragmented, individualist societies in which public opinion is formed by televised debates and social networking. But the ideological legacy of the old-fashioned far right remains fundamental. It is primarily an ethnic view of peoples and national identity, from which stems a hatred of enemies both external (individual foreigners and foreign states) and internal (ethnic and religious minorities and all political opponents). But it is also an organic, often corporatist, social model founded on a political and economic anti-liberalism that denies the importance of individual freedoms and the existence of social antagonisms, except those between the “people” and the “elite”.
To the populist and radical right
In the 1980s another category of populisms began to have electoral success, and the media and commentators called them far-right too. Yet some sensed that comparing them with the fascist movements of the 1930s was no longer valid, and would prevent the left from developing a proper response. How were we to refer to xenophobic populism in Scandinavia, the Front National in France, Vlaams Blok in Flanders or the Freedom Party of Austria? The political scientists’ battle over terminology began: “national populism” (used by Pierre-André Taguieff) (3), “radical right”, “far right”. It would take a whole book to analyse the semantic arguments, so let us just say that these parties shifted from the far right to the populist and radical right. The difference is that formally, and usually sincerely, radical-right parties accept parliamentary democracy and elections as the only route to power. But though their institutional plans are vague, they emphasise direct democracy through popular referendum, rather than representative democracy. They all have slogans referring to a clean sweep, and to removing from power elites (meaning social democrats, liberals and the conservative right) they deem to be corrupt and out of touch with the people.
To these parties, the “people” form a trans-historical entity that includes the dead, the living and generations yet to come, linked by an unchanging, homogeneous cultural background. This leads to a distinction between “pure-bred” nationals and immigrants (especially non-European), whose right of residence and economic and social rights the parties wish to restrict. The traditional far right remains anti-Semitic and racist, but the radical right has found a new enemy, internal and external, in Islam, with which it associates all who come from countries with a Muslim culture.
Radical right parties defend the market economy because it allows individuals to exercise a spirit of enterprise, but the capitalism they promote is exclusively national, which explains their hostility to globalisation. They are national-liberal parties, believing that the state should intervene not only in areas of traditional state competence, but also to protect those left behind by a globalised economy; this is evident from the speeches of Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National.
Happy to participate
The radical right differs most from the far right in showing less hostility towards democracy. Political scientist Uwe Backes (4) has shown that German law accepts radical criticism of the existing economic and social order as legitimate, but defines extremism — which rejects the values embodied in basic law — as a threat to the state. So we could define movements that totally reject parliamentary democracy and the ideology of human rights as belonging to the far right — and those that accept them, to the radical right.
The two groups also occupy different political positions. The far right is in the position of what Italian researcher Piero Ignazi calls the “excluded third” (5). It glories in its non-participation and draws strength from it. The radical right would be happy to participate in government, either as partners in a government coalition — like the Northern League in Italy, the Democratic Union of the Centre in Switzerland or the Progress Party in Norway — or to vote with a government in which it does not participate — like Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands or the Danish People’s Party. These parties exist between marginality, which if prolonged prevents them from winning many votes at elections, and normalisation, which if too obvious can lead to a decline. Can they survive?
In Greece’s 2012 legislative elections, the neo-Nazi movement Golden Dawn won nearly 7% of the vote (6), after nearly 30 years as a tiny group. This does not mean that its esoteric Nazi racism suddenly won over 416,000 voters: those voters had initially preferred the traditional far right, the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), which had held seats in the Greek parliament since 2007. But there was a key development between the two elections in 2012: LAOS joined the national unity government led by Lucas Papademos, whose goal was to get parliament to approve the new rescue package agreed by the troika (7) in return for drastic austerity measures. Having become a radical right party (8), LAOS had lost some of its appeal compared with Golden Dawn, which had refused to make any concessions.
But in most European countries, the radical right has either supplanted its far-right rivals (Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands) or succeeded, like the True Finns (now the Finns Party), in establishing itself where the far right has failed.
Lately, the radical right has met electoral competition from parties founded on sovereignty agendas that centre on leaving the European Union, and exploit national identity, immigration and cultural decline, yet are not regarded as extremist or racist. They include the Alternative for Germany, the UK Independence Party, Team Stronach in Austria and Debout la République, led by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, in France.
Defined by dissent
The term populism is often misused, especially to discredit criticism of the neoliberal ideological consensus, questioning of the polarisation of European political debate between conservative neoliberals and social democrats, or any expression at elections of popular discontent with the failings of representative democracy. Academic Paul Taggart, despite his fairly precise definition of rightwing populism, cannot resist comparing it with the anti-capitalist left, overlooking the basic difference between it and the radical right — the right’s explicit or latent racism (9). For Taggart, as for many others, the radical right is not defined by ideology but by its position of dissent within a political system where the only legitimate choice is seen as between liberal and centre-left parties.
Giovanni Sartori’s theory is that the political game revolves around the distinction between consensus parties and protest parties. Consensus parties can exercise power and are acceptable as partners in a coalition, and they illustrate the problem of democracy by co-option in a closed system: if the source of all legitimacy is the people, and a significant proportion of the people (15-25%) vote for a populist and anti-system radical right, how can we justify protecting democracy from itself by keeping that right away from power — though without, in the long term, managing to reduce its influence?
This question is important: it also concerns the attitude of opinion leaders to the alternative and radical left, which is delegitimised because it wants to transform society rather than adjust it. The radical left is often referred to as the mirror image of the radical right. Political scientist Meindert Fennema has defined a vast category of protest parties, opposed to the political system and blaming it for all ills, while offering no specific answers. (Is there, in fact, any specific answer to the issues the social democrats and neoliberal-conservative right have failed to resolve?)
Europe’s problem may be the rise of the radical right, or it may be a change in the right’s ideological paradigm. Significantly, over the past decade, the traditional right has become less reluctant to accept radical groups as partners in government (10). This is more than electoral tactics and arithmetic. In France, voters now often move back and forth between the Front National and the Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire, and the old model of rightwing movements with different ideologies no longer gives a true picture. France will probably now have two competing right wings — one nationalist-republican (morally conservative and grounded in sovereign issues, synthesising the plebiscitary tradition and the radical right in the form of the Front National, a return to the idea of the national family); the other a federalist, pro-European, pro-free trade and socially liberal right.
All over Europe, the power struggle between rightwing movements is happening along similar lines, with local variations — nation state versus European government; “One land, one people” versus multicultural society; “total subordination of life to the logic of profit” (11) or primacy of the community. Europe’s left will have to recognise that its adversaries have changed before considering how to beat the radical right at the ballot box. And there it has a long way to go.
Jean-Yves Camus
Translated by Charles Goulden
Jean-Yves Camus is a research associate at France’s Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (IRIS). His latest book is Les Droites Extrêmes en Europe (The Far Right in Europe),Seuil, Paris (forthcoming).
(1) His current party, Future and Liberty for Italy, won 0.47% of the vote in the February 2013 election.
(2) See G M Tamas, “Hungary without safety nets”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2012.
(3) Pierre-André Taguieff, L’Illusion populiste (The Populist Illusion), Berg International, 2002.
(4) Uwe Backes, Political Extremes: a Conceptual History from Antiquity to the Present, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011.
(5) Piero Ignazi, Il Polo Escluso: Profilo del Movimento Sociale Italiano (The Excluded Pole: a Profile of the Italian Social Movement),Il Mulino, Bologna, 1989.
(6) The May 2012 legislative election failed to produce a majority capable of forming a new government and a further election was held a month later.
(7) The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.
(8) Its leader, Georgios Karatzaferis, was formerly a member of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy party.
(9) Paul Taggart, The New Populism and the New Politics:New Protest Parties in Sweden in a Comparative Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1996.
(10) The Northern League in Italy, the Freedom Party of Austria, the League of Polish Families, the Greater Romania Party, the Slovak National Party and the Progress Party in Norway.
(11) Robert de Herte, Eléments, no 150, Paris, January-March 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment