Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right

Peter H. Merkl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The cold war may be over, but there is no shortage of enemies in a world beset by resurgent nationalism, ethnic conflict, and economic rivalry. Right-wing extremists from David Duke to Jean-Marie Le Pen know how to exploit the pressure points of race, religion, and culture in a bid to keep the national and international conflict industry cooking. Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right introduces us to the personalities as well as the systems of rightist repression. It shows, in clearly written and carefully documented essays, how radical right groups have made electoral headway in France, Germany, and Israel while increasingly making headlines in the United States, Great Britain, and other points East and West. The phenomenon is by no means limited to ail skinheads and jackboots; many official governments shelter radical rightism or even sponsor it outright. Reflecting a broad geographical distribution that includes Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the essays in this book lend themselves to comparative analysis on three important dimensions: the historical and intellectual backgrounds of various rightist groups, the way each group fits within the context of social movements theory, and the assessment of relative electoral participation and success. The book goes on to outline both the patterns and peculiarities of radical right action in the settings represented and concludes that it is no accident that the radical right is on the rise internationally, admonishing us of the movement's power without overstating its potential.

Part One
Western Europe

1
The National Front in France: from Lunatic Fringe to Limited Respectability

William Safran

The rapid rise of the National Front (Front National, or FN) from an obscure formation to the rank of an electoral force to be reckoned with is a key sign of the transformation of French politics. For three decades following the Liberation, the dominant ideology of the intellectual elite had been leftism; this fact was reflected in an electorally significant Communist party and (since about 1970) a revived and dynamic Socialist party. From 1958 and in the early 1970s, socialism (Marxist and non-Marxist) was partly eclipsed by Gaullism, which managed to combine nationalism, populism, and republicanism. In the 1980s both Marxism and Gaullism lost much of their appeal as France began to move in an "Anglo-American" direction. That move has been manifested by an acceptance by right-wing and leftwing mass parties of the same rules of the game and by a waning of old legitimacy crises; a growing area of agreement about the mix among dirigisme, market liberalism, industrial policy, and the welfare state; the growth of a technocratic ethos; and a general impatience with ideology.

Throughout most of this period, the Extreme Right posed no threat to the political order. Its leaders had been discredited during World War II; some of its themes—monarchism, Catholic "organic" nationalism, and militarism—had become outdated; others—opposition to Algerian independence—had become irrelevant; and still others—the celebration of the family, the nation, or the state—had been incorporated into the ideologies of the moderate prosystem parties. To be sure, Fascist, monarchist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic movements continued to exist; but they were small in membership, fragmented, impecunious, and lacking a reliable electoral base, so that they were hardly in a position to compete with "mainstream" political parties for national office.

The one exception was the Poujadist party, the electoral expression of the Union of Shopkeepers and Artisans (UDCA), which projected a mixture of antiparliamentary, anti-industrial, anti-Parisian, and anti-Semitic attitudes.¹ Capitalizing on the disaffection of those farmers and members of the petite bourgeoisie who were victims of economic modernization, the Poujadists sent about fifty deputies to the Assembly in 1956; but in 1958 the Poujadist movement, like many other political formations, was caught up in the Gaullist wave as many of its erstwhile supporters climbed on the general's bandwagon.

The chief heir of Poujadism is the FN. Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, it has functioned as collecting point of antirepublicans, authoritarians, Petainists, archconservative Catholics, imperialists—including former members of the terrorist military conspiracy, the Secret Army Organization (OAS), and other unforgiving proponents of Algerie française), of keeping Algeria French at any price—opponents of the welfare state, antiunionists, and racists. Between its founding and its first significant electoral showings in the early 1980s, the FN competed with, attracted members from, and gradually superseded a variety of extreme right formations.²

In the presidential elections of 1974, Le Pen, the candidate of the FN, received only 0.74 percent of the popular vote; and the party's performance in the parliamentary elections of 1978 and 1981 was equally poor. But in the municipal elections of March 1983, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, Le Pen's second in command, received 16.7 percent of the popular vote in Dreux, a small town near Paris, when the local Rassemblernent pour la République (RPR) and Union pour la Démocracie Française (UDF), the Gaullist and Giscardist parties, threw their support to him,³ At the same time, a Le Pen supporter received over 3 percent of the votes in Aulnay, another small town. Le Pen himself got 11.2 percent of the vote in a Paris district. In the elections to the European Parliament in 1984, the FN obtained 11 percent. In 1985, opinion polls suggested that in the parliamentary elections scheduled for March 1986, as many as 19 percent of the electorate might vote for the FN and predicted that the party would receive at least 7 percent of the popular vote. Polls also predicted that the Socialists would lose control over the Assembly. These forecasts encouraged the Socialist government to reintroduce proportional representation, for there was reason to believe that under such a system the FN would draw sufficient votes away from the Gaullist-Giscardist camp to prevent the victory of the latter, or at least to reduce its winning margins. In the 1986 elections, the FN received 9.7 percent of the vote—nearly as much as the Communist party—and entered the Assembly with thirty-five seats (out of 577). Two years later, in the first round of the presidential elections in April 1988, the FN obtained 14.4 percent of the popular vote. Many observers viewed that last result as a "political earthquake" that would permanently alter the French political landscape. They saw it as proof that fascism had come out of hibernation and was becoming respectable again.

However, the explanation of the rise in popularity of the FN is complex: It may be attributed in part to the personal appeal of its leader, the alleged failures of the major "republican" parties of the right and left, and the ambiguity of its ideology and platform. The FN adopted a multiple strategy: It kept the door open to the supporters of other extreme right organizations (most of them now discredited) without clearly identifying with them.⁴ At the same time, it attempted to draw off support from the RPR/UDF by presenting itself in a double guise: that of a party that is not so different from the RPR or UDF in its support of democratic institutions yet different enough in terms of its policy positions to deserve support (see Table 1.1).⁵

When it was first established, the FN labeled itself a "national, social, and popular Right" and signaled its intention to work for "a just and strong state."⁶ A close reading of Le Pen's writings reveals parallels between his thinking and that of Francois de la Rocque, the leader of the Croix de Feu, an organization composed largely of frustrated petit bourgeois types (many of them war veterans) who in the mid-1930s wanted to replace the republic by a Fascist regime.⁷ Unlike Fascist parties, however, the FN does not want to destroy the old order, with its social hierarchies; on the contrary, it wants to preserve them. Moreover, the majority of its supporters do not have an "integral statist" view of politics. Although clearly authoritarian and nationalist, antilabor and racist, the FN has adjusted its party line to fit the audience of the moment. The party's far right ideas tend to be conveyed in watered-down versions and by innuendo—and are often articulated not by Le Pen himself but by his associates and by supporters formally belonging to other organizations. Thus the FN stresses the importance of patriotism, family, and work—recalling Phillippe Pétain's "patrie, famille, travail"—but counterbalances this theme by an emphasis on private initiative and individual liberty. The FN rejects the idea of human equality as preached in the Bible and in the literature of the Enlightenment but does not oppose equality before the law (except insofar as it applies to foreigners).⁸ It charges immigrants with being the major contributing cause of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• PART ONE: WESTERN EUROPE
• PART TWO: EASTERN EUROPE AND ISRAEL
• PART THREE: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN DEMOCRACIES
• Notes
• About the Book and Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index