National Observer Home > No. 62 - Spring 2004 > Article

Europe: Resurgence of the Right

R.J. Stove

If Pauline Hanson lived in Europe, she either would probably be dictating terms to Cabinet Ministers in person, or would be herself a Cabinet Minister by now. That is the extraordinary conclusion that a disinterested student of today's European political scene must draw.

One would scan the average Australian newspaper in vain for a forthright admission of so simple a fact. Nevertheless, even modest expertise in European affairs makes it evident.

This situation has not changed, so far, through the admission on 1 May 2004 of ten new states to the European Union. (The states involved are these: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia. They bring European Union membership to a total of twenty-five.)

While the European Union periodically issues pious resolutions condemning "racism" and American capital punishment, its attempts to enforce such resolutions have been far less effective than its champions and its enemies alike imagine.

A brief look at Western European politics in our time indicates three developments above all:

• The hard Right's sheer strength, compared to its position even a decade ago (though in some countries where it enjoyed brief recent surges, such as the Netherlands which once produced a Pim Fortuyn, it is nowadays marginal).

• The fact that even the hard Right's worst foes have failed to provoke violence from it: we are not talking about skinheads or Ku Klux Klan cross-burners here.

• The extreme feebleness of the soft Right, the me-too Right, the Right which longs to be as indistinguishable from Blairist or Schroederist Fabianism as possible.

The latest and most spectacular soft-Right casualty has been José-María Aznar, who as Spain's 1996-2004 Prime Minister revealed much greater enthusiasm for giving homosexual couples full pension privileges¹  than for defending Christian society. (The soft Right did manage a success of sorts in Greece's last election, but given modern Hellenic history, a Prime Ministerial candidate named Karamanlis would find it more difficult to fail in Athens than to succeed.)

Where the soft Right has survived politically, as in France, it has done so principally by vowing in practice to meet several of Le Pen's demands, even as it demonises Lepenists themselves. Blair's Home Secretary David Blunkett, it should be noted, has done the same thing. Although carefully avoiding any threat to antagonise corporate-statist Big Business by reducing immigration in absolute terms, he has sharply censured illegal immigration, and has tried to use the illegals' inflow as a pretext for imposing identity cards on Britain as a whole.² 

In Scandinavia, Hansonism flourishes, though less in unctuously tolerant Sweden than among neighbouring lands. Then again, even Sweden felt till recently no need to apologise for its whiteness. Tage Erlander, Socialist Prime Minister 1946-69, bragged with justice in 1965 that, compared with an America newly convulsed by race riots, "We Swedes are in an infinitely better situation. Our population is homo-geneous, not just regarding race, but in many other aspects too."³  In Erlander's era, whilst the Swedish government exported social engineers like Gunnar Myrdal, it drew the line at encouraging Myrdal to spread on home soil the Caucasophobe poison he squirted into such accommodating receptacles as Earl Warren's Supreme Court.⁴

Today, the Stockholm area known as Botkyrka houses less than one per cent of Sweden's population, but more than 11 per cent of its Turks, many of them illegals; 65 per cent of its inhabitants are non-white, mostly Turkish and Arabic.⁵ By an amazing coincidence, it is Sweden's most crime-infested region. Thus far, though, One Nation's nearest Swedish equivalent - the Sweden Democrat Party - has yet to win a parliamentary seat.

Denmark's situation markedly differs. There, Hansonist and proto-Hansonist movements have routinely managed double-figure results at general elections since the mid-1970s. During November 2001 the Danish People's Party of Pia Kjaersgaard, who has astringently condemned Sweden's indulgence towards what she calls "Scandinavian Beiruts",⁶  increased its vote to 12 per cent, and its representation in the 179-seat parliament from 13 to 22. This outcome forced the major parties to limit entry for large numbers of Muslims, and to outlaw the Muslim terrorist organisation Hizb-u-Tahrir.⁷  (As The New York Times - renowned for that ethical authority which none can obtain save by hiring Jayson Blair - lamented: "The ultranationalist, xenophobic right is manifestly on the rise."⁸ ) Prime Minister A.F. Rasmussen has halved his country's pre-2001 levels of asylum permits,⁹  and now presides over Europe's toughest immigration laws.¹⁰ Norway - not a European Union member - has a similar situation today, with the anti-immigration Progress Party of Carl Hagen (26 parliamentary seats out of 165) holding the balance of power in Oslo.

Austria attained a rare burst of international notoriety in 2001 when Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider joined the ruling cabinet, and the yellow press on every side assured us that World War Three would break out, right down to the jackboots and goosesteps. When the sky failed to fall in, and when it became clear that Haider had lost his grip on even his own party, his name disappeared from world headlines; even the most hydrophobic race-relations apparatchiks took chill-pills. He may yet regain global prominence, given that the Freedom Party regained Carinthia's state governorship in March (with an impressive 42 per cent of the total ballots cast), and backed the successful candidate at the country's April presidential contest, while the main conservative candidate went nowhere.

Whether Italy's Forza Italia coalition of soft-Right (Berlusconi) and hard-Right (Umberto Bossi) ministers can survive the next general election is unclear. Rome's incumbents need not face voters again till 2006, but their preferred candidates did badly in June's European parliamentary election; opinion polls show the leftist Olive Tree opposition in the lead these days at national and regional levels also. Unlike Berlusconi's placative Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, the irascible Bossi - who brought down Berlusconi's first cabinet ten years ago - has repeatedly mocked the liberal consensus on matters from illegal immigration to sex. Milan's Corriere della Sera quoted Bossi as saying of anti-boat-people measures in June 2003 (he later, unconvincingly, pleaded misreporting):¹¹ 

Abominating the gifts of Belgian pervert and multiple murderer Marc Dutroux (sentenced last June to life imprisonment)¹² as standover man for terrorising Brussels bureaucrats ever since the mid-1990s, Bossi called the European Union's leaders "filthy pigs" wanting to "make paedophilia as easy as possible."¹³  Turin's La Stampa, four days after the Telegraph article where this complaint occurred, ran the following Bossi comments: "I am against the Second Vatican Council. I define myself as a Catholic traditionalist ... The Church has lost Europe and now risks going toward the abyss." Bossi's resignation from Italy's legislature in July 2004 - he had suffered a massive stroke¹⁴  - aggravates the uncertainty over Berlusconi's future.

By contrast with Bossi, Sydney's Cardinal Pell saw nothing amiss with inviting to an "interfaith prayer meeting" one Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and allowing him to strut around St Mary's Catholic Cathedral.¹⁵  Appropriately enough, this exercise in ecclesiastical spinelessness occurred on April Fools' Day. Bossi's attitude proclaims the gulf between countries which have in their history a vague, atavistic, often lost concept of Christendom, and countries which (like our own) never had it to lose. So does the situation in Portugal, where quasi-Hansonist Popular Party leader Paulo Portas is now the ruling coalition's Defence Minister; he held a much-reported press conference last year with Donald Rumsfeld.¹⁶  Portas' movement controls fourteen seats (from a parliamentary total of 230) in its own right.

Yet in Belgium - once as overtly devout as Portugal still is - Bossi- or even Portas-type statements are largely the province of the Vlaamse Blok, now banned: despite or because of its eighteen seats in Brussels' parliament, as of the 2003 general election.¹⁷  We must assume that the Vlaamse Blok's call for the political defence of mere law-abiding white Christians is far more dangerous to Belgium's governing class than is, say, Dutroux.

Even in Britain, the hard Right has made inroads. Official anti-Blair forces were objects of derision well before Blair first battered them in 1997 (remember the steady procession of John Major's sex fiends, notably Stephen Milligan, the young Conservative Lochinvar whom police found wearing women's stockings, a noose around his neck, and a black rubbish-bin liner over his head?). With a Tory party now onto its fourth despised talking-head in seven years - and demonstrably incapable of purging from its ranks the slick nihilists whose deleterious presence doomed it in 1997 and 2001 - it is no wonder that, as even Haa'retz correspondent Melanie Phillips (a self-confessed defender of the Tories' latest sacrificial victim, Michael Howard) admitted:¹⁸ 

Meanwhile the British National Party ("the B.N.P.") has picked up seventeen council seats without causing outrage. This is a marked change from when the B.N.P. scored one seat on a council in 1993, and thereby dominated Britain's front pages for days.

Michael Howard makes up for his inability to land a glove on even the most vulnerable Blair ministers by praising homosexual partnerships (what, that surprised you?),¹⁹  and by consistently abusing B.N.P. insurgents, whom he calls "a bunch of thugs dressed up as a political party."²⁰ Since the Camp of the Saints situation whereby illegals flourish on British soil is unlikely to have arisen but for the incompetence of Howard as Major's Home Secretary, observers have no grounds for supposing that the shift of disgusted former Tory voters and even former Tory aldermen to the B.N.P. will end in time for Howard to have a chance of anything more than tapping Blair on the wrist in 2006's general election. (Nor should the U.K. Independence Party, which scored a remarkable sixteen seats in the same European parliamentary election that disappointed Berlusconi, be complacent about the B.N.P. After all, the U.K.I.P. is a single-issue movement, devoted to attacking Brussels, and silent on other matters. The B.N.P.'s ambitions are somewhat wider than that.)

A far better method of attracting official attention than trusting Howard is to threaten a tax revolt, as the ratepayers of Cottenham - near Cambridge - lately did in the hope of deflecting the gypsy invasion of their homes. Of course Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott responded by threatening to imprison not the gypsies, but the ratepayers.²¹  Meanwhile Swansea's Mayor Richard Lewis dared to cast public doubts on the allegiance of Bangladesh's High Commissioner to Cardiff:²²

A few years ago Lewis would have felt obliged to grovel an apology for this "insensitive" utterance. Now he refuses to do any such thing, and though forced to resign the office of mayor, he departed in an unrepentant spirit.

Why is such temerity possible now in European politics, but not in American? Indeed, why is the European hard Right in general so much stronger than the hard Right in freedom-loving America? Two reasons suggest themselves: the nature of Europe's parliamentary procedures, and the nature of its schooling.

To take the former first: the long-standing European legislative observance of proportional representation, which favours minor parties, and consequently facilitates multi-party coalitions. This has two advantages. It aids the task of major parties wishing to keep out from their own ranks the sort of Marxist extremists who infiltrated British Labour during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, it ensures that at least Europe is less likely than the English-speaking world to have millions of potential voters disenfranchised by their sheer (and in most cases justified) detestation of two-party systems. To cite the words ostensibly used by a Republican congressional staffer:²³ 

Still, proportional representation might well have failed to provide serious political choice in Europe, except for another social factor: the comparatively high standard of European education, and the need for any Europeans with the smallest career ambitions to escape from that intellectual and spiritual dungeon which is monolingualism. Dire though the worst European pedagogy is, it has not reached the undiluted horror of American state schools, with their corps de ballet of Ritalin-consumers, drug-takers and proponents of violence.

So there we are. There is an ideological trend that in some European countries is very strong, in other countries almost nonexistent, but a trend nonetheless, for good or ill. Whether we in this country salute it or deplore it is of no consequence whatsoever: it is simply there, and on present indications will continue to be there. Do not hold your breath waiting for Australia's mass media - given their obsessions with the latest pop starlet and footballers on the one hand and with the politically-correct on the other hand - to cover it. Do not hold your breath waiting for Australia's politicians to take it seriously either; their own emotional investments in something called "Asia", whatever that may be, are far too large for any save the most seismic European events to impinge on their attention.

And yet, compiling this modest survey of the European Right has required neither years of research nor an exalted I.Q. What a fascinating world of political news lurks out there for those who, however great our intellectual defects, have at least avoided on moral grounds the ignominy of becoming mainstream twenty-first-century Australian journalists!

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 1. "National calm, regional turmoil", The Economist, 23 November 2000.

 2. "Blunkett pressing on with I.D. cards", B.B.C. News, 22 September 2003.

 3. Mikael Widmark, "Race in Scandinavia", American Renaissance, December 2003.

 4. The co-opting of Myrdal by (mostly white) American socialists and communists, eager to promote revolutionary judicial activism in their homeland - a co-opting which acquired extra significance once the Supreme Court had handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision - has been spelt out in William F. Jasper, "An American Deception", The New American, 21 July 1997.

 5. Widmark, op. cit.

 6. Eva Matter Schaffner, "'Freed from a mental yoke': Denmark tightens its immigration laws", Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 19 June 2002.

 7. Widmark, op. cit.

 8. Tony Judt, "America's Restive Partners", The New York Times, 28 April 2002.

 9. Derek Turner, "The state of the European Right: a wide variety of fortunes for a wide variety of parties", The Occidental Quarterly, Winter 2003-04.

 10. Andrew Osborn, "Danes justify harshest asylum laws in Europe", The Guardian, 29 June 2002.

 11. Fabio Cavalera, "Basta rinvii, cacciare i clandestini con la forza", Corriere della Sera, 16 June 2003.

 12. Jean-Claude Vantroyen, "Le procès est fini: et maintenant?", Le Soir [Brussels], 23 June 2004.

 13. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "E. U. elite are filthy pigs, says Bossi", The Daily Telegraph [London], 23 October 2003.

 14. Peter Popham, "Blow to Berlusconi as Bossi resigns after stroke", The Independent [London], 20 July 2004.

 15. "Christians, Muslims, Jews gather in prayer for peace", The Catholic Weekly [Sydney], 18 April 2004.

 16. "Rumsfeld blames Hussein loyalists for Iraq violence", Globe and Mail [Toronto], 10 June 2003.

 17. Stephen Pollard, "I've seen the future: it's scary and Belgian", The Times, 24 April 2004.

 18. Melanie Phillips, "The chosen person", Haa'retz, 7 November 2003.

 19. Nicholas Watt, "Howard endorses gay partnerships", The Guardian, 10 February 2004.

 20. Hamish Macdonnell, "Tories attack B.N.P. in party heartland", The Scotsman, 20 February 2004.

 21. David Sapsted and David Millward, "Jail threat to traveller protest villagers", The Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2004.

 22. Robin Turner, "New mayor ditched over racism row", Western Mail [Cardiff], 4 June 2004.

 23. Peter Brimelow, "Immigration policy stupid, evil and hurting Americans", Contra Costa Times [California], 4 December 1999.

National Observer No. 62 - Spring 2004