Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/011392/0113000.000

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 22

EUROPE

Surge to The Right


From the Atlantic to the Urals, politicians stir fear and
loathing of dark-skinned immigrants

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by James L. Graff/Vienna,
Margot Hornblower/Paris and Ann M. Simmons/Moscow


    They range from jackbooted skinhead youths assaulting
foreigners in Germany to sedately dressed middle-aged couples
dining off lace tablecloths at a banquet outside Amiens -- under
a poster urging the eviction of immigrants from France. Their
leaders include old nobility, yuppie types, an ex-paratrooper
who boasts of being born in a house with a dirt floor, and
former communists. But whatever their appearance or origin, the
far-right-wingers who are emerging across the European continent
share an alarming attitude, if not exactly an ideology: a
virulent nationalism expressed mainly as raw hatred of
foreigners, particularly immigrants. They also share momentum:
West and East, their influence is on the rise.

    That might seem paradoxical. In western Europe the
headlined trend is toward unprecedented economic and even
political unity. The fear of Bolshevism that played so great a
role in prompting the growth of European fascism between the two
world wars has virtually disappeared with the disintegration of
the Soviet empire in the East.

    But in the former communist satellite nations, the red
downfall has lifted the lid off long-suppressed ethnic
nationalism, while prompting some people with no tradition of
democracy to look for an alternative form of "strong"
government. In the West, right-wing movements have inherited
some of the generalized protest vote that used to go communist.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front does well these days in the
industrial suburbs of Paris that were long known as the Red
Belt.

    East and West, economic distress is also spurring the
rightist revival. In the East, the breakdown of command
economies has led to chaos and suffering that the painful birth
of free markets has not yet relieved. Western Europe, though far
more prosperous, nonetheless has been experiencing some of its
highest unemployment rates since World War II. It has been easy
for demagogues to blame immigrants who snatch away the jobs of
the native-born -- though that happens far more often in
right-wing mythology than in reality. The movement toward west
European integration has also provoked a nationalist backlash
in some countries. France's Le Pen lately has been drawing
cheers by sneering at unity-advocating "federasts."

    The power of the far right should not be exaggerated. In
no European country is an extremist party close to taking
power. Only in Austria, and possibly France, does it even have
an outside chance of muscling its way into a government
coalition. On the other hand, the rightists in some countries
are exercising more influence on mainstream politicians and
parties than their vote counts might indicate.

    And rightist sentiment is popping up in some unexpected
places. In Belgium the anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok party
increased its representation from two to 12 seats in November's
parliamentary elections. Sweden, long considered the socialist's
dream of the earthly paradise, gave its Social Democrats their
worst electoral defeat in 60 years in 1991. The European
Community warned at its Maastricht summit in December "that
manifestations of racism and xenophobia are steadily growing in
Europe."

    A rundown on that growth, from the Atlantic to the Urals:


    FRANCE. The right-wing National Front, according to a
mid-December poll, would win about 15% of the vote if
parliamentary elections were held today. That is only slightly
above what Le Pen personally polled in the 1988 presidential
election. But the mainstream parties have kept him from making
further inroads only by echoing some of his hostility to
immigrants, especially dark-skinned Muslim Arabs and Africans.
Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac has called for a moratorium on
allowing immigrants' families to join them and suggested denying
welfare payments to residents of non-French ancestry; former
President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has hinted at refusing
automatic citizenship to French-born children of immigrants. All
three ideas came straight out of Le Pen's platform. Even
Socialist President Francois Mitterrand once declared that
France had passed "the threshold of tolerance" in absorbing
African and Arab immigrants.

    Still, nobody can match Le Pen in playing on the
resentment of petits blancs (poor whites) toward the immigrants.
Now he is appealing to other kinds of discontent. He is making
a strong pitch to farmers worried that European integration will
strip away their accustomed subsidies, and is even putting out
feelers to ecological and animal-rights activists, who also have
been gaining among voters bored with the mainstream parties. It
is just conceivable that if the vote in the 1993 legislative
elections splinters widely, a coalition strong enough to form
a government could be put together only by including Le Pen.


    ITALY. Senator Umberto Bossi, a onetime leftist, hit the
big time in the spring of 1990 when his ultra-conservative
Lombard League won enough votes in industrial northern Italy to
become the second biggest party in the region. As leftist views
have gone out of style, discontented voters are turning to the
right to express their bitter disaffection with the government
in Rome. In a November election in the city of Brescia, the
league polled 24.4% to edge out the Christian Democrats for No.
1. In the next general elections, which could come as early as
this spring, the league plans to run candidates for Parliament
throughout Italy; some polls indicate that the league and
like-minded groups could collect 21% of the vote.

    That might seem surprising, since Bossi's league
originated as a separatist group urging the north to secede from
a central government that was bleeding it for the sake of the
poorer south. But voters up and down the peninsula are attracted
by the league's message of opposition to corruption and
confusion in high places, to government taxation and red tape,
and to every social ill from joblessness and drug peddling to
immigration. Bossi and some of his allies have voiced views
toward dark-skinned immigrants that are as racist as any in
Europe.


    GERMANY. Alienated youths known as skinheads have shown
terrifying power to unleash violence against foreigners,
especially in what was formerly East Germany. There the populace
went from Nazi to communist totalitarianism without any
democratic interval. So far, unification has brought economic
instability rather than prosperity and has wiped out the
state-subsidized clubs that used to keep the young off the
streets.

    With little else to do, many have turned to random -- and
racially motivated -- violence. The national government counted
2,074 crimes motivated by hatred of foreigners in 1991, vs. only
246 in 1990. A Mozambican immigrant was thrown out of a trolley
car to his death in Dresden; a Vietnamese was stabbed nearly to
death in Leipzig; some Soviet children who survived the
Chernobyl nuclear accident and were convalescing in a special
children's home in Zittau, 150 miles south of Berlin, were
assailed by a gang of stone-throwing drunks who shouted, "Jews,
die!"

    But the right's ability to make noise far exceeds its
power to win votes. Unification has actually undercut the
electoral appeal of right-wing parties. The biggest, Die
Republikaner, won 7.5% of the vote in West Berlin in 1989 but
polled only 2.1% in the nationwide Bundestag elections in 1990.
Its adherents have no seats in parliament or in any state
legislatures. That could change if the rightists can find a
charismatic leader; so far, it has none.


    AUSTRIA. Exactly the opposite is true here, where Jorg
Haider, an articulate young (43) David Duke look-alike, is
smooth enough to be described as a "yuppie fascist." Last summer
he declared that the Nazis "had a proper employment policy in
the Third Reich," then had to resign his provincial governorship
in the protest that ensued. But he has led his Austrian Freedom
Party to a higher share of the vote in 13 straight provincial
and national elections, and in November the party won a
startling 23% of the ballots in staunchly Socialist Vienna. It
just might poll enough in the next national elections in 1994
to force Haider's inclusion in a government coalition.

    The party pushes some respectable causes: deregulation of
industry and an end to tenure for government bureaucrats. But
as everywhere else in Europe its main appeal is to hostility
against immigrants. Freedom Party posters in the capital,
pandering to a fear that immigrants are prone to crime,
exhorted, DON'T TURN VIENNA INTO CHICAGO. Such fears seem more
than passing strange. Almost 510,000 registered foreigners
represent 6.5% of the total Austrian population; 100,000 more
are thought to have entered the country illegally. But Austria
has prospered despite the influx. Through most of the 1980s, it
boasted the lowest unemployment rate in Europe outside tiny
Luxembourg. Since the immigrants come mostly from
Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, they "aren't greatly
different in cultural and religious terms" from native
Austrians, says political scientist Anton Pelinka. That they
should nevertheless encounter such strong resentment, he says,
"doesn't bode well for a united Europe."


    EASTERN EUROPE. While Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia
strive more or less successfully to replace communism with
Western-style democracy, in other former Soviet satellites the
alternative to red rule seems to be a mystic nationalism based
on blood and soil. That holds particularly true for the main
antagonists in the Yugoslav civil war. Serbian President
Slobodan Milosevic, still nominally a socialist, has led his
people to war in the name of a virulent ethnic nationalism that
has nothing in common with the international brotherhood of
workers to which he once professed allegiance. For his major
opponent, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, democratic
principles merely temper a style reminiscent of a Latin American
caudillo, complete with ceremonial-sashed portrait displayed in
all police stations and paternalistic rhetoric reminiscent of
Peron or Pinochet. Yet his major internal opposition comes from
an even more extreme group: the Croatian Party of Rights, which
unabashedly honors the memory of the fascist, Hitler-backed
state that flourished briefly during World War II.

    In Romania several extreme nationalist parties blame
ethnic minorities -- Hungarians, Jews and gypsies -- for the
country's severe economic troubles. Though these parties do not
yet exercise any real power, President Ion Iliescu has felt
obliged to court their support.


    RUSSIA. "Since 1917 we have been living under the
occupation of Jewish fascists," says Valeri Yemelyanov, leader
of one of several so-called patriotic groups. His view is
totally false: though some leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution
were Jewish, Joseph Stalin and his successors practiced
anti-Semitism almost as zealously as the czars. No matter: many
Russians are looking for someone to blame for the shortages and
hunger that have followed the collapse of communism, and some
are finding that all-purpose, historic scapegoat, the Jew.
Others focus on the Central Asians and residents of the Caucasus
area who sell many of the scarce meats and vegetables that turn
up in Moscow farm markets, sometimes at exorbitant prices.

    These hatreds are harnessed by a variety of movements,
many of them grouped under an umbrella organization called
Pamyat, which preaches a sacred nationalism looking toward an
authoritarian Russia purged of all foreign influences. The
leader of one such group, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, though widely
regarded as a clown, placed third in a field of seven in the
Russian presidential election last June -- and that was before
the political disintegration and economic collapse had reached
anything like their present stage.

    For all that, the continent-wide rise of the right is more
a nagging worry than an imminent danger. Even in France or
Austria, where right-wing attitudes have enflamed the public
debate, heavy majorities of voters want no part of the right as
ruler. But the right has shown enough strength in enough places
so that it cannot be ignored. Democratic governments can put it
down, but only if they demonstrate the strength to bring about
renewed prosperity and the ability to offer a vision more
compelling than the right's mean and narrow -- but unfortunately
still attractive -- nationalism of blood and soil.