European politics dances to the drum of the far right

Instead of championing the EU and the economic benefits of immigrants, Europe’s mainstream parties are moving further to the right. David Cameron’s clampdown on immigrant benefits was one policy designed to win back votes from far-right party UKIP.

Instead of championing the EU and the economic benefits of immigrants, Europe’s mainstream parties are moving further to the right. David Cameron’s clampdown on immigrant benefits was one policy designed to win back votes from far-right party UKIP.

There is mounting panic among Europe’s mainstream political parties at the rising popularity of extreme-right parties. But instead of meeting the extremism head on with reasoned argument, traditional parties are allowing the far right to hijack the political agenda. The mainstream parties are moving further right and changing their policies to win back votes.

A number of factors have combined to create these high tensions in European politics. The financial crisis has made the working-class fear for their jobs. At the same time, migration within the EU has intensified since Poland and seven other East European countries won full rights within the EU in 2004. Since then, Bulgarians and Romanians have earned the same rights. The OECD has calculated that the number of people moving within the EU has “soared” to close to a million per year.  

Increasing resentment against immigrants has gone hand in hand with the growth of far-right parties. In the UK, the anti-EU, anti-immigrant UKIP party received 36% of the vote, and 24 of the UK’s 73 seats, in May’s European Parliament (EP) elections. A measure of UKIP’s progress is that it won 1% of the vote in its first EP election 20 years ago. UKIP leader Nigel Farage has not been afraid to make incendiary statements, telling one interviewer that he would feel “uncomfortable” living next door to a Romanian family.

The major parties have been scrambling to claw back votes from UKIP. When British PM David Cameron recently announced that dole for unemployed EU migrants would be reduced from six months to three months, his justification sounded like quintessential Farage: Cameron claimed to be “addressing the magnetic pull of Britain’s benefits system”. He also announced a ban on overseas-only recruitment and “massive” restrictions on the number of jobs automatically advertised on an EU jobs portal. “This is about putting British residents first,” he said.

There is a transparent link between the anti-immigrant policy moves of the mainstream parties and the rising popularity of the far right, according to Professor John Gaffney, author of Political Leadership in France: From Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy.

[quote] “A great deal of the policy proposals of the ruling Tory party in the months before the 2015 general election will be connected to the success of UKIP at the EP elections. Cutting dole from six to three months was an attempt to go after the UKIP vote,” he said. [/quote]

The British left also feels under siege from UKIP. Labour leader Ed Milband said UKIP’s popularity in working-class constituencies could cost his party victory in the general election. “It’s causing enormous stress in the Labour Party because the leadership feels the need to respond to immigration concerns,” said Gaffney. “Key labour strategists, such as Phillip Blonde, have developed a view of old-fashioned communities harking back to an idealized pre-war period. But part of this movement towards a ‘British’ sense of community, decency, and family, is hostility towards outsiders. So it’s not just the Tories being influenced by UKIP. More broadly, it is part of a much wider European reaction to the success of right-wing populist parties.”

In France, the extreme right Front National (FN) is more firmly entrenched than UKIP and has been influencing mainstream debate for 30 years. But it is more popular than ever before. In the EP elections, the FN won a nationwide vote for the first time. FN’s 25% share comfortably surpassed both Nicholas Sarkozy’s UMP right-wing party and the French Socialists who won only 13% under President François Hollande.  

A similar pattern was found in Greece, where the anti-Europe Syriza Party topped the polls with 27% of the EP vote and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party earned around 9%. The extremist anti-Islam Danish People’s Party also came first in Denmark’s EP elections.  

Gaffney distinguishes between fascist parties, such as Golden Dawn, and the populist far right, such as UKIP and even the FN. The latter two parties have increased their legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate by cleaning up their image.  

[quote] “Farage comes across on TV as a regular guy who likes going down the pub. Most people would prefer a drink with him than David Cameron, or Ed Miliband,” said Gaffney. “But he’s nothing like the image he presents. He’s a member of the privately educated stockbroker elite. Similarly, Marine Le Pen has tried to present a softer, less xenophobic image than her father Jean-Marie, who was leader until 2011. She recently criticized him for making anti-Semitic remarks and sounding too much like the old far right.” [/quote]

A strong media presence has helped to legitimize the far right. In France, this process began for the FN back in the 1980s. “A crucial change for the FN came in 1982 when Jean-Marie Le Pen was allowed onto the TV show L’heure de Véritée, which was followed by a notable rise in his rating,” said Roger Eatwell, a professor of politics at Bath University.

But in the UK, the British National Party (BNP) failed to achieve the same media breakthrough. The party was largely excluded from TV until it won two seats in the 2009 European elections and BNP leader Nick Griffin began to appear on Question Time, a BBC political discussion programme watched by millions. “But the uncharismatic Griffin was pilloried and he did not have the breakthrough Le Pen had in 1982 on TV. The BNP never shook off its fascist-thug image, which stopped it expanding,” said Eatwell.

In contrast, the charismatic Nigel Farage has proved a great hit with the media. Since 2010, he has made far more appearances on Question Time than any other politician. “The media tend to be attracted to ‘personalities’. Jean-Marie Le Pen was charismatic and Farage is media-attractive and savvy too. Other leaders who benefited from media coverage included Jörg Haider in Austria and Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands.”

Eatwell says Farage possesses ‘centripetal’ charisma, meaning he embodies party values. Jean-Marie Le Pen was another leader able to bring together a diverse following and gloss over gaps in policy. “In part this involves the ability to attract media attention, but it also involves the ability to develop a legitimate discourse,” said Eatwell. “Jean-Marie Le Pen cleverly exploited aspects of the French Republican tradition by promoting secularism, which was aimed at Muslim dress codes, and preaching assimilation rather than multi-culturalism. He also added aspects of Vichy rhetoric about ‘work, family, and loyalty to la Patrie’, which appealed to the right. At times, he openly developed a ‘ni droite, ni gauche’ line, meaning his party belonged neither to the right nor left.”

These charismatic leaders derive part of their force from being allowed to set the political agenda. John Gaffney says the mainstream parties need to stop reacting to the far right’s discourse and promote the European cause, as well as the economic and social benefits of immigration. But they rarely do so.

[quote] “The strategy adopted by the mainstream parties is the wrong one. All they are doing is making people more likely than less to vote for the far right,” said Gaffney. “If they want to be in Europe, they’ve got to champion it. But none of them want to because the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party, or the UMP in France, and even in the French Socialist Party and the Labour Party, start to pull the party apart. So everyone either shuts up about Europe, or is mildly critical. But if you stay in Europe and moan about it, the far right will just keep on coming. You’ve got to face them down and uphold your own ideology. But it’s hard to find any politicians championing the opposite argument to Marine Le Pen, or Farage.”  [/quote]

A vital, and neglected, message is that abandoning Europe would leave the UK, or France, politically and economically marginalized. “They should tell people what the merits of being in Europe are and what the demerits of leaving would be,” said Gaffney. “We’d lose all our markets and we’d lose our international clout. The idea that the Russians, Chinese and even the Americans would want to talk to us as a small country of 60 million, instead of the largest trading block in the world, is farcical.”

The threat of the far right to EU unity is deeper in France than the UK. The French presidential system irrigates the far-right, whereas the first-past-the-post British system works against small parties. “In France, there is a first-round vote for all parties, then the second-round is between the two most popular candidates. It looks like that Marine Le Pen is already certain to reach the second round of the 2017 election, which would transform French politics,” Gaffney said.

Reaching the second round would emulate the achievement of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who knocked out the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round in 2002. But Le Pen then suffered an 82-18% loss to Jacques Chirac as mainstream voters from right and left banded together. “Marine Le Pen might not win next time, but she might feasibly win the time after that if the major parties continue their decline. It’s possible we could be looking at a French far-right president in 10 or 12 years time,” said Gaffney.

The ongoing Eurozone crisis has fuelled a lot of the anti-immigrant, anti-EU discourse. But Gaffney says the mainstream parties must not ignore the legitimate concerns of working-class communities. “I have a decent job but if I was an ordinary guy with few qualifications and I was thrown out of work and the guy next door was Romanian and had a job, I would be pissed off. And the mainstream parties should be responding to that. We’ve got to make sure that ordinary people are looked after.

“An awful lot of Brits are going abroad to work, but the problem is you’ve got welfare systems in France and the UK that are better developed than places like Romania and Bulgaria. Pro-Europeans should address those problems rather than shooting from the hip and making people feel hostile to outsiders.”

Gaffney maintains that immigration has brought enormous economic benefits to the UK and other European countries. The evidence is mixed, however. A report last year by University College London concluded that European migrants contributed £8.8 billion more to the British taxpayer than they received over a 16-year period, although a recent OECD study questioned the findings, concluding that migrants have had a “broadly neutral impact in OECD countries”.  

Gaffney’s solution to the problem of the far right is more European integration, not less. [quote] “The problems need facing and we’ve got the brains to face them. We just need the political courage. That’s where the French Socialists and the British Labour Party disappoint. They are not addressing these problems in as intelligent a way as they should,” he said. [/quote]