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Fascist Family FeudWhy Europe's xenophobes just can't get along.

By Reihan Salam
Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2002, at 2:54 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

Two weeks ago, former leader of Austria's Freedom Party Jörg Haider called for a pan-European coalition uniting anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-EU forces around the continent. Apparently Jean-Marie Le Pen's crushing defeat at the hands of Jacques Chirac hasn't stopped Haider from dreaming of a Nationalist International. And with rising anti-immigrant sentiment across the continent, you can see why. But Haider's vision faces a rather large problem: The Continent's anti-immigrant parties hate one another just as much as they hate Davos Man. Europe's nationalist politicians spend so much of their time condemning other nationalist politicians that they're losing sight of their core competency: the relentless demonization of Muslims and other foreign elements. It's a veritable Fascist Family Feud.

In a strange game of less-extreme-than-thou, Haider has distanced himself from Le Pen, calling the unreconstructed Vichyite's positions "indefensible" and accusing him of having "racist positions in his program." Belgium's Flemish-supremacist Filip Dewinter, on the other hand, loves Le Pen, calling him a "brother in arms," but has described Haider disapprovingly as "very moderate" despite his "provocative statements" (though Dewinter's Vlaams Blok would reportedly "have no objection to an alliance with the Freedom Party"). Others take the pox-on-both-your-houses position: Italy's Mussolini-loving Gianfranco Fini condemns Le Pen as "an ultra-nationalist, anti-European fascist" and refuses to contemplate any alliance with Haider, while in the Netherlands the late Pim Fortuyn's party maintains that it "does not want to associate with people like Le Pen or Haider." Pia Kjærsgaard's Danish People's Party goes even further, refusing to countenance any kind of cross-border cooperation: "We defend Danish interests and we have no plans to create a pan-European party."

This wasn't what Haider envisioned at all. With his Hasselhoffian good looks and magnetic charm, Haider was long considered the far-right boogeyman to beat. But since Haider's debut on the world stage, he's slipped into obscurity, occasionally crawling out of his native Carinthia to hobnob with the likes of Saddam Hussein. Le Pen's success convinced Haider he could return to glory by uniting Europe's far-right parties under the name "New Europe." But Haider wanted center stage all to himself, so he pointedly excluded Le Pen, the grand old man of European hate, from his proposed coalition.

Haider claimed that, unlike Le Pen, he was not racist, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic. "His verbal excesses are completely alien to me," says Haider, the man perhaps best known for praising Hitler's "proper employment policy." By isolating Le Pen, who had replaced him as Europe's villain of choice, Haider had reason to believe that other anti-immigrant politicians would rally around him. So, instead of building on his archrival's success, Haider looked to the far-right's "enormous potential in Denmark, Holland, and Italy," a first step toward a "consolidation" of Europe.

But Haider faces a few obstacles in fulfilling this grand design, namely the Danes, the Dutch, and the Italians. "We have deliberately refused all contact with far-right parties," says Peter Skaarup, the deputy leader of the Danish People's Party. (Despite Skaarup's claim, a delegation of DPP members traveled to Austria in the summer of 2000 to meet with—who else?—Jörg Haider's Freedom Party but were sent packing, quite possibly for being too "far-right.") As for the Dutch, Pim Fortuyn angrily rejected comparisons to Haider and Le Pen, arguing before he was assassinated that "Right-wing in Holland is to the Left of the Tories in England." And a spokesman for Italy's National Alliance, when asked about Haider's proposed pan-European party, said, "There is not the slightest possibility of collaborating either with Le Pen's party or Haider's." (The party, as you can see, has come a long way since 1994, when leader Gianfranco Fini identified Benito Mussolini as "the greatest statesman of the 20th century.")

None of this should come as a surprise. Just as Europe's Third Way politicians tried to rid themselves of socialism's sharper edges, those castigated as its Third Reich wannabes are successful precisely to the extent they project an image of sober-minded moderation. Goose-stepping around town in paramilitary gear isn't going to win votes, and neither will associating with foreign politicians lambasted in the press as neo-Nazis—even if those politicians share the exact same views. In February 2000, Haider named not Le Pen or Slobodan Milosevic as his inspiration, but rather a very different European politician: "I will be prepared to lead a government of reform under the Freedom Party and we will take ideas from the program of Tony Blair."

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Reihan Salam is an editor at the Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


It's hardly surprising that, while left-wingers have their Socialist International (and call themselves some version of "Labo[u]r", "Socialist" or "Social Democrat" in virtually every democracy), right-wingers are unwilling and/or unable to link up across national boundaries (and note the much wider variety of names for conservative parties: they rarely if ever coincide).

After all, part of being a conservative nationalist is believing that everyone outside the national family isn't quite up to scratch. This is why English right-wingers sniff at the rude, etatist French, while French Gaullists are rude to Thatcherites in turn. In Australia, our conservatives call themselves "Liberals". If you asked a British Tory "are you a federalist or a republican?" you'd get an angry "No!'--yet that's exactly how the much-venerated Ronald Reagan would have categorized himself.

--Tom Round

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


Is the lack of success of Mr. Haider and others to consolidate Europe's isolationist factions really so surprising? Like any good extremist demagogue, he has no real position of his own, he simply attempts to create popularity by opposing something that people fear--an influx of non-European immigrants and loss of national identity to the European Union. Since the very point of any one such group is to promote localized hegemony, how are they supposed to create an international coalition? Nothing unites people like hatred of a good common enemy, of course, but the EU as a concept is a little hard to work up a good lather over. The only way to put it into visceral terms that other people can grasp and loathe is to present it as "foreigners," which is unfortunately what the other people are with whom they propose to band. Anyway, if the xenophobes could somehow form a coalition, would not their ability to do so argue against the very viewpoint that each is trying to promote as dangerous and impracticable within their own national debates? Catch 22 lives. Haider is the new Yosarian, Le Pen can be Milo Minderbinder, and despite Haider's admiration for Tony Blair, I really think that former British Prime Minister John Major is the man who was born to play the role of . . . Major Major.

--The Bell

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(5/15)

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