The
ruthlessly effective rebranding of Europe’s new far right
Across
the continent, rightwing populist parties have seized control of the
political conversation. How have they done it? By stealing the
language, causes and voters of the traditional left
Tuesday 1 November
2016 06.00 GMT
In April 2002,
Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned all of Europe by defeating the socialist
candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the first round of the French
presidential election, and advancing to the final round between the
top two candidates. Terrified by the prospect of a far-right victory,
the French left – including communists, Greens and the Socialist
party – threw their support behind the incumbent president, Jacques
Chirac, a pillar of the centre-right establishment who had served as
mayor of Paris for 18 years before becoming president in 1995. This
electoral strategy effectively isolated Le Pen’s Front National
(FN), depicting it as a cancerous force in the French body politic.
Two weeks later, on
5 May, Chirac won the election with an astronomical 82% of the vote,
trouncing Le Pen by the biggest margin in a French presidential
election since 1848. Raucous celebrations spilled into the streets of
Paris. “We have gone through a time of serious anxiety for the
country – but tonight France has reaffirmed its attachment to the
values of the republic,” Chirac declared in his victory speech.
Then, speaking to the joyous crowds in the Place de la République,
he lauded them for rejecting “intolerance and demagoguery”.
But May 2002 was
not, in fact, a moment of triumph. Rather it was the dying gasp of an
old order, in which the fate of European nations was controlled by
large establishment parties.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
was an easy target for the left, and for establishment figures such
as Chirac. He was a political provocateur who appealed as much to
antisemites and homophobes as to voters upset about immigration,
drawing his support largely from the most reactionary elements of the
old Catholic right. In other words, he was a familiar villain – and
his ideology represented an archaic France, a defeated past.
Moreover, he did not seriously aim for power, and never really came
close to acquiring it; his role was to be a rabble-rouser and to
inject his ideas into the national debate.
Europe’s new far
right is different. From Denmark to the Netherlands to Germany, a new
wave of rightwing parties has emerged over the past
decade-and-a-half, and they are casting a much wider net than
Jean-Marie Le Pen ever attempted to. And by deftly appealing to fear,
nostalgia and resentment of elites, they are rapidly broadening their
base.
Marine Le Pen
addresses the Front National (FN) party’s May day rally in Paris in
2012.
Deftly appealing to
fear, nostalgia and resentment of elites … the Front National May
day rally in Paris in 2012. Photograph:
Chamussy/SIPA/Rex/Shutterstock
Le Pen’s own
daughter is a prime example of the new ambitions of the right: unlike
her incendiary father, Marine Le Pen is running a disciplined
political operation and has already proven that her party can win
upwards of 40% of the vote in regions from Calais in the north to the
Côte d’Azur in the south. She and her Danish and Dutch
counterparts are not – as some on the left would like to believe –
neo-Nazis or inconsequential extremists with fringe ideas lacking
popular appeal.
These parties have
built a coherent ideology and steadily chipped away at the
establishment parties’ hold on power by pursuing a new and
devastatingly effective electoral strategy. They have made a very
public break with the symbols of the old right’s past, distancing
themselves from skinheads, neo-Nazis and homophobes. They have also
deftly co-opted the causes, policies and rhetoric of their opponents.
They have sought to outflank the left when it comes to defending a
strong welfare state and protecting social benefits that they claim
are threatened by an influx of freeloading migrants.
They have
effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left – from gay
rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism –
as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to
all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their
encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true
defenders of western identity and western liberties – the last
bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the
barbarians at the gates.
These parties have
steadily filled an electoral vacuum left open by social democratic
and centre-right parties, who ignored voters’ growing anger over
immigration – some of it legitimate, some of it bigoted – or
simply waited too long to address it.
They have shed some
of the right’s most unsavoury baggage while responding to both
economic anxiety and fear of terrorism by blending a nativist
economic policy – more welfare, but only for us – and tough
anti-immigration and border security measures. Their message is
beginning to resonate widely with a fearful population that believes
the liberal governing elite no longer listens to them.
Brexit was just the
start. Europe’s new far right is poised to transform the
continent’s political landscape – either by winning elections or
simply by pulling a besieged political centre so far in its direction
that its ideas become the new normal. And when that happens, groups
that would never have contemplated voting for a far-right party 10
years ago – the young, gay people, Jews, feminists – may join the
working-class voters who have already abandoned parties of the left
to become the new backbone of the populist right.
On 6 May 2002, one
day after revellers filled the streets of Paris to celebrate Chirac’s
historic victory, the flamboyant and iconoclastic leader of the Dutch
far right, Pim Fortuyn, was gunned down by a radical animal rights
activist as he emerged from a radio interview. His assassin later
claimed that he had killed Fortuyn to stop him from using Muslims as
“scapegoats”. In national elections nine days later, Fortuyn’s
eponymous party – the Pim Fortuyn List – became the second
largest in the Netherlands with 17% of the vote.
Fortuyn, a former
communist and openly gay man who boasted of sleeping with Muslim
immigrants while calling for a ban on Muslim immigration, was an
electrifying figure in a country known for its staid politics. His
time in the limelight was short but transformative.
It was Fortuyn who
blazed the trail for the new generation of far-right leaders across
Europe. He may not have intended to be a pioneer, but his brand of
plain-spoken political incorrectness and his depiction of Islamic
culture as a “backwards” and reactionary threat to the hard-won
progressive values of western Europe would provide a potent template
for a modernised far right. His ideological inheritors in Dutch
politics, as well as the revamped Front National in France, the
Danish People’s Party and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland
have all emulated Fortuyn in their own ways.
Fortuyn proved that
the winning argument for the European far right was not a US-style
appeal to conservative religious values, but rather to claim it was
“defending secular, progressive culture from the threat of
immigration,” argues Merijn Oudenampsen of Tilburg University. The
Netherlands was a perfect laboratory for this new strategy because,
unlike France, it did not have a strong contingent of religious
traditionalists opposed to women’s liberation and gay rights.
Pim Fortuyn
Pim Fortuyn was an
electrifying figure in the Netherlands, a country known for its staid
politics. Photograph: Phil Nijhuis/AP
Before founding his
own party in 2002, Fortuyn had tried to join an establishment
centre-right party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy
(VVD), in the late 1990s. The party’s then-leader, Frits
Bolkestein, who had been one of the first figures to speak critically
about immigration in the early 1990s, remembers Fortuyn as a talented
but inflammatory politician. “He had a thoroughly theatrical
personality, and that played in his favour,” said Bolkestein, now
in his 80s, from his office overlooking the canals of Amsterdam. “I
didn’t want him to be in my parliamentary group, so I
cold-shouldered him … He would have acted as a fragmentation bomb.”
Fortuyn took his
explosive rhetoric elsewhere and, by creating a new type of far-right
politics in progressive garb – “a form of xenophobia ideally
suited to a nation that prides itself on its tolerance,” as a New
Yorker profile once described it – he redirected the entire
national debate in a way that has endured long after his death.
Two years after
Fortuyn was killed, the Netherlands was traumatised by another
political assassination. Early one morning in November 2004, the
filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a young Dutch-Moroccan,
Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot van Gogh eight times, slashed his throat
and then pinned a letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a
death threat aimed at the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan
Hirsi Ali – a vocal critic of Islam who was soon placed under the
protection of the Dutch security services.
The two
assassinations shook the Netherlands to its core and catapulted a
little-known and theatrically coiffed politician, Geert Wilders, to
popularity as an ideological successor to Fortuyn. Wilders had also
flirted with Bolkestein’s VVD, beginning his political career as a
staffer in the party office. In late 2004, he split off and formed
his own. With Hirsi Ali in hiding, he quickly became the most
prominent anti-immigration voice in the country – and has remained
so ever since.
For those who cared
to look, the political ground had already begun to shift. Six months
before Chirac’s trouncing of Le Pen and Fortuyn’s assassination,
Denmark had an election. On its surface the result was not a
historical watershed; the centre-right Venstre party ousted the
Social Democrats, handing power from one establishment party to the
other. What had changed was that the Danish People’s Party, which
had campaigned on an overtly anti-immigrant platform, took 12% of the
vote – transforming it into a kingmaker in parliament.
Unlike France, which
revelled in its triumph over the FN, or the Netherlands, where the
remains of Fortuyn’s party failed to become a real parliamentary
force, the DPP immediately became a serious player with real
influence over policy. And it was not only taking votes from the
right; it was also attracting disgruntled social democratic voters
who felt that their leaders had abandoned them.
The DPP had crafted
a social and economic policy that was in many ways more socialist
than that of the Social Democrats – promising better health care,
better care for the elderly, and more subsidised housing. As the
outgoing Social Democratic prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen told
me in 2002, a few months after his defeat: “They took a part of our
rhetoric and tried to sell it as a new package to the people, and
with some success, one may say.” Back then, Naser Khader, a Danish
member of parliament who immigrated from Syria as a child, argued
that “the best way to weaken the DPP is to give them influence”.
He was wrong.
The headquarters of
the Front National sits on a quiet street in the unassuming Paris
suburb of Nanterre, near a car repair shop and a Portuguese
restaurant. Only when you approach the grey building with its mostly
closed blue shutters do the armed guards come into view. In her
modest second-floor office, surrounded by books and a cloud of vape
smoke, Marine Le Pen explained earlier this year how she transformed
a party previously known for calling the Holocaust a “detail of
history” into a genuine contender for the presidency.
“Voluntarily or
not, he gave ammunition to our adversaries,” Le Pen said of her
father. But she insisted that she has now cleaned house. “I fired
them all … all those people who expressed an ideology or held views
that I found unacceptable.”
Julien Rochedy, a
28-year-old who headed the FN’s youth wing but has since left the
party, told me that he believes the changes are real. Whereas the
party’s former leader used to pepper his speeches with lines that
made Jews’ hair stand on end, today, if someone tells a racist joke
within the party, “you will be attacked straight away,” Rochedy
said. “There is such self-discipline these days. They are so afraid
they’ll be accused once again of being antisemitic or racist.”
Still, the party’s
detractors continue to level the same charges at the FN, which
outrages Marine Le Pen. “Today our adversaries no longer have that
ammunition, and they repeat on loop” old tropes about fascists and
racists. “At a certain point this argument loses its force,” she
continued, “because voters see clearly that there’s absolutely
nothing in our platform that remotely resembles fascism or racism.”
Le Pen has done more
than kick out the most blatant racists and antisemites. She has
consciously crafted a campaign designed to appeal to voters of the
centre and left – and other constituencies – who could never have
imagined voting for her father’s Front National.
Graffiti on a FN
campaign office reading ‘Racism, xenophobia, Marine and co, clear
off!’
Anti-racist
graffiti on a FN campaign office … but Le Pen claims that ‘this
argument loses its force because voters see clearly that there’s
nothing in our platform that resembles fascism or racism’.
Photograph: Pascal Pavani/AFP/Getty Images
As Le Monde’s
Olivier Faye has written, she is “trying to erase another image
that has stuck to the skin of the FN – that of homophobia”. And
it is working: a survey showed that her share of the vote among
married gay couples in the 2015 regional elections was over 32% –
up from just 19% in a similar poll from 2012.
As Le Pen has filled
her inner circle with more and more openly gay advisers and party
leaders, she has also made her pitch to Jewish voters more explicit:
“For a lot of French Jews, the FN appears to be the only movement
that can defend them from this new antisemitism nourished in the
banlieues,” Le Pen told me. “In a very natural way they have
turned toward the FN, because the FN is capable, I think, of
protecting them from that.”
Among French voters
threatened by the country’s new diversity, rejection of a
multicultural society increasingly takes the form of longing for a
bygone era. And peddling nostalgia is the centrepiece of many new
far-right parties across Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen has
promised a return to a time when the French had their own currency
and monetary policy, when there were fewer mosques and less halal
meat, when no one complained about nativity scenes in public
buildings, and when French schools promoted a republican ethos of
assimilation.
“A growing number
of French people feel uncomfortable in their own country,” the
prominent philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut, declared in January during
a debate with the centre-right presidential candidate Alain Juppé –
who has taken a less strident line on Islam and migration than his
rival Nicolas Sarkozy. Finkielkraut depicted contemporary France as a
country of halal butchers and tea shops filled only with men,
pleading that “the public good isn’t in the clouds, it’s made
from tangible things – the French of Proust and Montaigne … the
Jardin du Luxembourg and the cows of Normandy”.
Finkielkraut, a
67-year-old Jewish liberal, is not an admirer of the Front National,
but Marine Le Pen’s deliberate appeals to Jews and gay people have
given political expression to an argument that he first made more
than a decade ago – that the left, with its indulgence of Islam,
poses a greater threat to France than the far right. After Chirac
“saved” the republic from Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, Finkielkraut
watched the celebrations in the streets and warned that the victors
were the real danger: “The future of hate is in their camp and not
in the camp of those nostalgic for Vichy,” he wrote, “ … in the
camp of the multicultural society and not that of the ethnic nation –
in the camp of respect, not that of rejection.”
Fourteen years
later, after the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and
Nice, Finkielkraut is even more certain he was correct. “Anti-racism
today frequently serves as a pretext for not seeing the true danger
that threatens us,” he told me when we met in his Paris apartment
this summer. While he is still no fan of the FN, he believes it has
changed and argues that it “should be resisted, but for what it is
today and not what it was in the past, and not in the name of
anti-fascism”. The French must, he insisted, “avoid simplistic
analogies with the 1930s. We must not mistake what era we live in.
Europe doesn’t only have demons; it also has enemies, and it needs
to know how to fight those enemies.”
He worries that
integration has been such a failure that France will have to
“reconquer” its “lost territories” – by which he means the
suburbs surrounding Paris. “Integrating people is not telling them
‘You are how you are and we are how we are’ … Integration means
making them an integral part of our civilisation.” And if that
doesn’t happen, he warned darkly, “at best we’ll have secession
and at worst civil war”. Continued immigration from Muslim
countries, he argues, is nothing less than the “planned demise of
Europe”.
Across the country,
nostalgia for an older, whiter France has become a potent political
force. In the southern city of Béziers, Mayor Robert Ménard, a
former Trotskyist who cofounded the press freedom group Reporters
Without Borders, is seeking to place a moratorium on the opening of
kebab shops and has renamed a street after one of the French officers
who joined a failed coup against De Gaulle in 1961 to prevent
Algerian independence. Ménard comes from a family of pieds-noirs,
French settlers in Algeria. He regards the Evian accords that ended
the Algerian war as a “capitulation”, and those who tried to
preserve French Algeria as heroes.
Marine le Pen with
young FN supporters.
Whereas young
Britons overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU, and the elderly
voted to leave, in France it’s the opposite. Photograph: Franck
Pennant/AFP/Getty Images
This nostalgia has
an unmistakable appeal, but not necessarily for the sort of voters
one might expect. Whereas young Britons overwhelmingly voted to
remain in the EU and the elderly voted to leave, in France it is the
opposite. According to Julian Rochedy, the former FN youth leader,
appeals to nostalgia work better with the young in France – who
dream of an era they never witnessed – than with the old, who lived
through the era Marine Le Pen promises to restore. It is older
voters, Rochedy argues, who are the greatest obstacle to Le Pen’s
victory. “They are afraid of leaving the euro,” he says. “They
are afraid of huge changes.” Rochedy is convinced that the FN will
never win simply by fetishising the past. “They just want to go
back 30 years,” he said of his erstwhile colleagues. “It’s a
discourse that doesn’t at all take into account the world as it is
and what France has become.”
Even if Le Pen
cannot win over enough older voters for her to become president,
there is one ageing constituency that has already moved significantly
to the right – the former members of what used to be the largest
communist party in western Europe.
As the French
Communist party collapsed, its supporters were left rudderless.
According to Andrew Hussey, a Liverpool-born academic who teaches in
Paris, the technocratic leaders of the Socialist party – many of
them graduates of the ultra-elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration
– “are so disconnected from ordinary people” that even former
Marxists won’t consider voting for them. Distrustful of the
establishment and searching for a state that protects them, many have
turned to the FN. “I think you’ve got a big political question
here about who looks after you,” Hussey said. “This is a very
communist way of thinking.”
Le Pen knows that
she is attracting these people. Many of her supporters “used to be
socialists, but they aren’t any more”, she told me. Although she
prefers to avoid the phrase welfare state – “That’s a socialist
concept,” she insisted – Le Pen has appealed directly to this
yearning for a large and nurturing state that fights for the common
man and not the rich.
“I defend
fraternity – the idea that a developed country should be able to be
able to provide the poorest with the minimum needed to live with
dignity as a human being. The French state no longer does that,”
she told me. “We’re in a world today in which you either defend
the interests of the people or the interests of the banks.” And she
has seen results. She points to the northern Pas-de-Calais region.
“It was socialist-communist for 80 years,” she says. “I won
45%.”
At the same time as
Marine Le Pen was working to “de-demonise” the FN, the leaders of
the Dutch far right successfully seized the mantle of radicalism by
positioning itself as the only force that dares to challenge an
out-of-touch political establishment, and the only party willing to
speak out about what many voters fear: extremist Islam.
Geert Wilders and
his Party for Freedom (PVV) have surpassed the Dutch Labour party to
take up a close second place in polls ahead of the March 2017
election. Last September, Wilders declared that Europe was facing an
“Islamic invasion” – the sort of comments that landed him in
court this week on charges of inciting racial hatred, which he
dismisses as an attack on freedom of expression.
The presence of
“masses of young men in their 20s with beards singing ‘Allahu
Akbar’ across Europe”, Wilders warned at the peak of last year’s
refugee crisis, posed a dire threat to “our prosperity, our
security, our culture and identity”. Across the country, grassroots
groups responded to Wilders’s warning, attempting to block the
resettlement of asylum seekers in their towns. Last October, Klaas
Dijkhoff, the deputy minister responsible for refugee resettlement,
arrived for a visit to the tiny north-eastern village of Oranje,
where the Dutch government had decided to place 700 refugees.
Outraged locals blocked the road leading to town, kicked Dijkhoff’s
car and tore off its rearview mirrors. A few days later, near
Utrecht, an asylum centre was attacked by masked men with smoke bombs
and fireworks.
A 2010 rally in
support of Geert Wilders during his trial for inciting racial hatred,
with posters reading ‘Freedom Yes, Islamisation No’ and ‘Geert
is Great’
A 2010 rally in
support of Geert Wilders during his trial for inciting racial hatred,
with posters reading ‘Freedom Yes, Islamisation No’ and ‘Geert
is Great’. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP
In the decade
following the assassinations of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, the integration
of Muslim immigrants became the most divisive issue in Dutch
politics. Suddenly, Turkish and Moroccan-born Dutch citizens became
“Muslims”. And as the public debate over Islam and migration grew
even more hostile, even the most basic forms of visible religious
observance – wearing the hijab, buying halal meat, fasting during
Ramadan – became politically loaded.
The Dutch Labour MP
Ahmed Marcouch, who came to the Netherlands from rural Morocco when
he was 10, recounted how controversies have erupted everywhere from
supermarkets to classrooms. It is a jolt to the traditionally liberal
Netherlands when teenage girls tell their male teachers they can’t
shake hands, or that they fast and pray while many other Dutch kids
are out drinking and having sex. As Marcouch remarked, it runs
against everything that Dutch youth culture promotes.
Wilders’s PVV has
capitalised on this cultural angst by using simple and deliberately
brash slogans about immigration, crime, and refugees – one of his
latest memes is simply “De-Islamise” – to win over voters who
feel that everything familiar to them is slipping away.
By framing its
anti-migrant politics as a battle against imperious elites and
political correctness, the PVV has been able to capitalise on a
panoply of grievances, from anger over asylum seekers to
Euroscepticism. Meanwhile, many causes of the radical left –
including anti-racism and anti-colonialism – have now become
establishment thinking in the Netherlands. “Idealism has been
bureaucratised,” argues the journalist Bas Heijne, who writes a
column in the liberal daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “And when
the establishment enforces universalism, you react against it.”
That’s why there is such a strong anti-PC tone to the Dutch right:
do not tell us what to say, what to celebrate and who we must live
next to.
Just as Marine Le
Pen’s FN has become a huge presence on social media in France, the
right is in the midst of colonising the Dutch media. Geen Stijl (“No
Style”), a popular Breitbart-style news site featuring abrasive
articles and videos, encourages its best and angriest commenters to
visit mainstream news sites and go on the attack. “It is massively
important,” says Tilburg University’s Merijn Oudenampsen, “like
a social movement”. The site began as a blog dedicated to those who
felt politically homeless after Fortuyn’s murder, and has since
become a ubiquitous presence in Dutch public debate, with an army of
“reactors” on Twitter. According to Oudenampsen, some politicians
have told him that Geen Stijl is the first site they check in the
morning.
The right’s
newfound media clout has also helped shape what the journalist Kustaw
Bessems, from the leftwing Volkskrant newspaper, sees as a new,
inverted, form of political correctness. In the old days, he says,
there were taboos enforced by the left: badmouth immigrants and “you
were immediately called a racist and extreme right and basically
pressured to shut up”. Now, it’s the other way around. “As soon
as you say anything other than ‘immigration is a problem’ or
‘Islam is the cause of terrorism’ … the thought police
immediately jump on your neck to correct you.”
A Dutch government
official who focuses on security issues complained that even as the
integration of Muslim immigrants and the threat of radical Islam had
become the most heated and polarising issues in the Netherlands,
almost none of the feverish public debate was informed by knowledge
of Islamism or terrorism. While politicians fan the flames of fear,
the official said, “the economists look for the economic roots of
the problem, sociologists look for social causes and the
anthropologists try to explain jihadi culture – but none of them
have any idea about theology”. Even scholars of radicalisation tend
to study today’s extremists through the historical lens of the
European radical left – which does little to explain what leads a
small number of young Muslim men such as Van Gogh’s killer, Mohamed
Bouyeri, to devote themselves to the cause of jihad. “It’s easy
to be a Marxist,” the security official quipped. “It’s fucking
hard to be a salafi.”
As the perception
that the state is helpless to prevent the radicalisation of Muslim
teenagers deepens and the fear of terrorism increases, so does the
share of voters who are newly receptive to the far right’s tirades
about “Islamisation”. These days it is not only anti-migration
activists pushing back against the bureaucratised consensus. There
are also many disappointed progressives – the people who saw the
cultural victories of the 1960s and 1970s as major battles that had
long since been won, making sexual freedom, feminism and gay rights
an unquestioned part of Dutch society. Suddenly those old victories
seem tenuous. “There is a sense that, ‘We are welcoming and then
they do this,’ says Bas Heijne. “They have been terribly let down
in their good intentions.” And in such an environment,
traditionally leftist constituencies such as gay people and Jews feel
threatened – and some have become reflexively suspicious of
Muslims.
The stereotype that
observant Muslims hate gay men and lesbians has become so entrenched
in the Netherlands that neither side can fathom evidence to the
contrary. When the Moroccan-born Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch first
joined in Amsterdam’s legendary gay pride parade, he was, as he
puts it, the “first hetero-active Muslim” to participate. The gay
community feared violence from extremists; conservative Muslims were
baffled and angry. Both groups concluded, “Oh, maybe Marcouch is
homosexual too,” he says with a laugh. Neither group could imagine
a straight Muslim doing what he did.
But public displays
of solidarity such as Marcouch’s are rare. Among openly gay couples
and religious Jews alike, there is a palpable fear of being targeted
by homophobic or antisemitic young Muslim men. Much as in France,
this fraught atmosphere has made far-right parties seem a palatable
option for groups who would never previously have considered voting
for them.
In Amsterdam earlier
this year, I had several meetings with a staunch Jewish supporter of
Wilders’s PVV, who insisted on remaining anonymous. He described
his own backing for the far right in terms that echoed Alain
Finkielkraut. “It’s an outdated reflex for Jews to always say the
problem is the extreme right,” he told me. “We have new enemies
and we need new ideas.”
The experience of
his own family during the second world war has convinced him that
Europe’s capacity for murderous violence is always lurking beneath
the surface. “Anne Frank wasn’t betrayed by the Germans,” he
argued. “But by Dutch people. Regular Dutch.” Jews need to find
new allies in a new war, he argues, because they will never be safe.
“The trains for the Jews will always come,” he added, ominously.
“I’d rather be wrong than be too calm and end up on the trains.”
He is not
unsympathetic to the plight of European Muslims, and told me that he
even sees parallels with the persecution his own family faced. “If
I were a Muslim in Europe at this moment I’d be very uneasy,” he
admitted. “If Europeans regain their manhood, it could be bad. It’s
the history of Europe to treat foreigners terribly. We Jews know
that.”
For that reason, he
argues, Muslims should regard Wilders as a lesser evil. “Every
Muslim should be happy Geert Wilders exists. If someone else
channelled these hateful feelings it would be much worse,” he told
me menacingly. “Wilders is civil. He is a democrat. He is not the
new Hitler.”
To Frits Bolkestein,
who led the Netherlands’ centre-right VVD in the 1990s – and was
briefly Wilders’ boss when he was a young aide in the party office
– the rise of the far right is as much about class as it is about
Islam. The Dutch Labour party, he argues, gave up on its
working-class base: “They made a major mistake,” he says of his
old rivals, with a tinge of satisfaction. Faced with “the choice
between the foreign-born and the labour classes, they chose the
foreign-born … and they’ve paid for it dearly”. Current polls
project that the party will drop from the 36 seats it now holds (out
of 150) to just 10.
Marcouch concedes
that, like the old leftists in France, many former Labour voters now
back Wilders. Moreover, he says, they still live in the very
neighbourhoods that families such as his own moved into in the 1980s,
as many white Dutch families were moving out. “Their message to the
Labour party,” he said, “is: ‘You ignored us. You let it
happen.’”
The Danish People’s
Party has been seeking out such voters for years, and they have
masterfully leveraged anti-immigrant sentiment to siphon away the
Social Democrats’ traditional base – people who fear that the
“bread will be buttered more thinly”, as the Danish journalist
Lars Trier Mogensen puts it.
Kristian Thulesen
Dahl, leader of the Danish People’s Party
Kristian Thulesen
Dahl, leader of the Danish People’s Party. Photograph: Linda
Kastrup/AFP/Getty Images
The DPP has
effectively combined anti-immigrant rhetoric with a strong
pro-welfare message that stresses quality health benefits and good
care for the elderly. Søren Espersen, the DPP’s deputy leader,
doesn’t think that former Social Democrats will ever go back. “When
one of those takes the step to vote for us, it is a very, very huge
step he is taking,” he says of voters who supported the Social
Democrats all their lives. “And why should he go back? I mean, to
come over this first hurdle of voting for us, then he’s done it.”
The Social Democrats
first began to lose their dominance in and around the major cities in
the 1990s, with many of their votes going to the DPP. One of those
places is the small satellite town of Herlev, about 10 miles west of
Copenhagen. The 41-year-old Social Democratic mayor, Thomas Gyldal
Petersen, has lived there all his life, and he is adamant that
controlling immigration numbers is the only way to reverse his
party’s political misfortunes.
For Gyldal Petersen,
the key to successful integration is a demographic balance. As soon
as a school or housing estate becomes majority immigrant – or
majority unemployed – he says, problems start to arise. He blames
his own party’s leaders: “Mayors in the 80s, they were warning,
something is going wrong, you have to change.” But the party
leadership “shut their eyes”, he says.
Then came the
Muhammad cartoons. In 2005, the editors at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s
largest newspaper, invited a group of well-known cartoonists to draw
the prophet. The initial response was underwhelming, but within a few
months – through a combination of diplomatic pressure, a dismissive
response from the Danish government, and a concerted campaign by
local imams – the cartoons became a full-blown crisis, with
boycotts of Danish products and violent protests occurring throughout
the Middle East. Danes who had never contemplated voting for the DPP
now saw their embassies on fire and death threats against some of
their best-known journalists. Suddenly, the DPP’s platform was
making sense. They had warned that Muslims were extremists in
waiting, and now those warnings seemed to come true. Politicians such
as Naser Khader, who once warned that giving the DPP influence would
weaken them, found themselves moving steadily to the right of the
political spectrum. When Khader founded a new organisation called
“Democratic Muslims” in the wake of the cartoon controversy, he
received death threats.
Those at the top of
the Social Democrats are now taking a tough stance, too. Earlier this
year the party leader, Mette Frederiksen, went to Stockholm to meet
with fellow Scandinavian social democrats. There she gave a speech
that rattled her colleagues. “We social democrats must accept that
there is a clash,” she declared. “It is a very strong part of our
identity that we help when people need help … but just as strong is
our value that we must have a well-functioning welfare state.”
Frederiksen continued: “My position is that a universally funded
Scandinavian welfare state with free and equal access to healthcare,
education and social subsidies is not compatible with an open
immigration policy.”
But in its zeal to
get tough on migration, Denmark has damaged its international
reputation as a bastion of progressivism – the sort of place that
Bernie Sanders liked to mention at campaign rallies. In January, just
three months after the refugee crisis peaked, Denmark passed what
became known as the “jewellery law”, which stipulated that any
refugees carrying valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner (£1,200)
would have them confiscated to fund the cost of accommodating
asylum-seekers. Editorial pages and columnists across the world lined
up to condemn the law. According to Kenneth Kristensen Berth, a
babyfaced MP for the DPP, it was about deterrence. “The goal was,
of course, that we should try to tell people that they should not
seek asylum in Denmark,” he said. The jewellery provision was a
minor part. “More important is the fact that many people will be
waiting longer for family reunification, like waiting three years,”
he added. And it wasn’t just the DPP and government who supported
it – the Social Democrats voted for it, too.
Bent Melchior,
Denmark’s 87-year-old former chief rabbi, was outraged. He bristled
at the suggestion that refugees are rich because they flee with some
money in their pockets. He would know: although Denmark is always
hailed for saving its Jews during the second world war, it is often
forgotten that Danish Jews paid fishermen huge sums to ferry them
across to Sweden. Melchior’s family paid the equivalent of “almost
a year’s rent of a six-room flat” just for his own passage.
“Denmark is not a poor country, for God’s sake,” Melchior says.
“There’s food for everybody here, and even if we get a few tens
of thousands more people, there will still be food for everybody.”
The road that led a
centre-left party to support such a law has been long and tortuous,
but the trajectory has been clear. The Scandinavian welfare system
has always been premised on solidarity, with everyone paying their
fair share and receiving what they deserve. As the country has become
more diverse, some of the trust sustaining it has broken down. There
has been abuse of the system by immigrants, and there has been even
more tabloid fearmongering depicting immigrants as cheats and leeches
sucking the system dry. But the larger issue, as the Oxford economist
Paul Collier has argued, is the growing unwillingness of natives to
subsidise those seen as the foreign poor.
Herlev’s mayor
does not oppose asylum, but he insists that the numbers have to be
capped. “We have to help refugees, and we have to take refugees to
Denmark in a number that we can help. If the balance tips, the
welfare society cannot hold together,” Petersen warns.
When cartoons of
the prophet Muhammed in a Danish newspaper led to protests across the
world in 2006, the DPP’s anti-Islamic rhetoric gained more
traction. Photograph: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images
But such balance may
only help so much. Aydin Soei, a Danish sociologist and the son of
immigrants from Iran, believes there is a larger blind spot in the
thinking of the Danish government – one that native Danes who have
never been on the receiving end of the state’s integration policy
have failed to see. “A lot of refugees were just parked on social
welfare instead of [the state] recognising their education and their
skills,” Soei told me, citing the case of his own mother, who
arrived in Denmark with a physics degree that was regarded as
worthless. “If your motivation is to create a liberal society where
the individual can create a good life for him or herself, then you
would have solved this problem years ago,” he argues.
Instead the state
has effectively provided newcomers with an allowance and keys to an
apartment, and ignored them – assuming that its work was done. The
problem, Soei claims, is that there is no political incentive to
integrate asylum seekers into the job market. “It doesn’t have
consequences for the politicians … because they don’t have the
right to vote.” Either way, it plays into the DPP’s argument.
“Immigrants can’t do right,” said Gyldal Petersen. “When
they’re unemployed they’re a burden to society. When they’re in
a job, they just stole the job from a Dane.”
Whether or not
Marine Le Pen wins next year’s French election or Wilders’ PVV
becomes the largest party in the Netherlands, the new far right is
not going away. The reflex among many establishment parties – and
media institutions – has been to dismiss them, sideline them or
mock them. Others, however, have begun to mimic them in an effort to
win their old voters back.
Rhetoric might, in
the long run, matter more than election results. When I spoke again
recently with the Jewish Wilders supporter from Amsterdam, he was
convinced that the battle has in some ways already been won –
regardless of the outcome of next year’s elections. “The PVV has
shifted the whole political discussion to the right. The Labour party
is saying almost exactly the same thing Wilders said five years ago,”
he told me. “You can have a lot of influence in politics by
steering the debate.”
If traditional
political parties want to win, they must first abandon the old
strategy of marginalising populist movements and instead engage them
on the merits – and flaws – of their policies and counter their
messages of fear.
Not least among the
lessons of Brexit was that, for millions of disaffected voters,
immigration is just one more thing nobody asked them about. This is
what makes the issue an especially potent weapon: it combines the
resentful energies of nativism, economic instability, and hatred of a
remote and unaccountable political elite. And the leaders of the new
far right have learned to wield it effectively. They know better than
to let themselves be dismissed, as Jean-Marie Le Pen was, as
antisemites or racists.
In France, the new
majority Marine Le Pen hopes to build is strikingly similar to the
coalition that brought the Brexit campaign victory. In a park near
Calais’ castle-like town hall in May, Samuel and Pascal, activists
from a group named Retake Calais, railed against the town’s
centre-right mayor. They blamed her for the growth of the sprawling,
trash-strewn tent city known as the Jungle, which sat three miles
east of the town until it was dismantled this month. “Those who
govern us are completely against us. The illegals, who aren’t
French, can do whatever they want,” they told me. For them, even
Marine Le Pen is “too soft”.
If resettlement
programmes take refugees away from Calais to other parts of France,
as dozens of buses have in the past week since the destruction of the
camp, they would not be any happier. “They’re sending them to all
the little villages in France,” says Samuel. After they start to
open businesses and bring family members, “in two years the village
will be dead”.
About a mile down
the road, the Calais ferry terminal lies behind layers of tall steel
fences and coiled barbed wire. I met Rudy Vercucque and Yohann
Faviere, the local FN leaders, on a blustery morning in June outside
the terminal, where they were anxiously awaiting a visiting EU
dignitary. Giant seagulls circled and squawked above as they
denounced the mayor, Natacha Bouchart, a member of Sarkozy’s
Republicans party.
“It’s she who
has permitted this,” Vercucque, a portly 35-year-old, fumed. And it
was Sarkozy, he reminded me, who negotiated the notorious Le Touquet
accords, effectively moving the British border to where we were
standing. Calais depends on British tourism and revenues are down
sharply. The result is crippling economic and social malaise: “Find
a doctor who wants to move to Calais. Find a surgeon who wants to
move to Calais,” Vercucque exclaimed. “You work your whole life,
you pay off your house and you lose money. It’s intolerable.”
Their support locally may have once been a protest vote, said
Faviere, but no longer. “Today we really have people who adhere to
our ideas.”
Vercucque was more
blunt: “We say out loud what people think deep down.”
