Right-Wing Extremism in Europe

Abstract

racists and neo-Nazis in the German cities of Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Molln and Solingen.) Violent actions have been accompanied by an increase in support for right-wing organizations. In 1991 Jorg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party gained 22.6% of the vote in Vienna's municipal elections. In France, Jean-Marie LePen and his nationalist Front National received 14% of the vote during the first round of the 1988 presidential elections. The nationalist Flemish Bloc obtained 12 seats during Belgium's parliamentary elections in 1991 (and received 20% of the vote in Antwerp). In Germany, Franz Schonhuber's Republican Party received 10.9% of the vote in Baden-Wurttemberg and recently polled 20% of the vote in local elections in Hamburg. In 1993, Alessandra Mussolini, II Duce's grand-daughter, received 44% of the vote in the mayoral elections in Naples; and in the 1994 general elections, the neo-fascist MSI became one of the founding elements of Italy's new governing coalition. Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party won the 1993 Serbian elections on an ultra-nationalist platform. Every fourth Russian voter chose Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party in 1993, making this overt anti-Semite the leader of the largest single party in the new Russian national assembly (Merkl & Weinberg, 1993). What does this flare-up of intolerance and ethnic violence in Europe mean? What sentiments and social alliances do the growing right-wing parties represent? What conditions produce them? And what popular sentiments fuel them? 2. An Anatomy of Right-Wing Politics The extreme right-wing movements in contemporary European politics share several traits with the fascist movements which appeared in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. First, these movements reject existing forms of representative government and the liberal, democratic values which inform them. Right-wing movements attack the extant division of power of government. They ridicule liberal freedoms. They reject minority rights and due process of law. These movements display attitudes which deny egalitarian values and which oppose political and cultural pluralism. Second, they are populist in the sense that they criticize the activities of elites - economic, political or cultural - while emphasizing ordinary people's untrammelled right to determine the content of politics. Third, right-wing politics are nationalist. Right-wing groups tend to perceive nations as unequal; they rank nations by worth, placing their own on top. They insist on the excellence of their own nation; they emphasize its history as particularly glorious; they include allusions to its past in their political discourse. This reliance on national history means that right-wing move