Majorityrights Central > Category: European Nationalism

The Observer reports on an obscure mayoral election in Hénin-Beaumont, and the anticipated resurgence of FN under Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen’s daughter scents victory for resurgent far right

With a cheery “OK, let’s go,” Marine Le Pen leads her troop of activists down the steps of their campaign headquarters, through the narrow streets and into Hénin-Beaumont’s weekend market. Bottle-blond hair, white stilettoes clicking on the pavement, white jeans a sharp contrast to the tracksuits around her, the 40-year-old former lawyer and far-right politician offers handshakes, leaflets, smiles and encouragement in her smoker’s rasp.

By her side is Steeve Briois, the local boy and Front National (FN) candidate who she hopes will be the mayor of this depressed former mining town in northern France when the final count from the second round of Hénin-Beaumont’s municipal election is known at around nine o’clock tonight .

... For the Front National and Le Pen herself, a victory in Hénin-Beaumont would be “the start of a new era”. The FN would be running a municipal authority again for the first time in several years and for the first time in the blighted post-industrial political landscape of northern France.

Also, a first critical step will have been taken to reverse the steady decline since the heady days of 2002 when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the former paratrooper who founded the FN in 1972, made it to the second round run-off in national presidential elections with a countrywide vote of 18%. And finally, Le Pen fille will be established as the unchallenged “leader in waiting” of the party once her father, now 80, retires as promised next year. Le Pen and her team are confident. In the first round of voting a week ago the FN scored well above 40%, twice as many as the nearest challenger.

... In Hénin-Beaumont, run by the Socialists since 1953, things could not be much worse. This weekend’s poll follows the imprisonment of the serving mayor on wide-ranging charges of systematic corruption and the resignation of virtually all his colleagues. The fraud is reported to have cost the town colossal sums, leading to local taxes rising steeply while schools’ grants are cut. To make up the losses, taxes will have to rise even further or deep cuts be made in the municipal budget or both. To make things even easier for Briois and the FN, the local Socialists have split.

... First, Roget said, came unemployment and the crisis of the welfare state. “The kids in France have got no jobs at all and we are all being asked to work longer and have our pensions and benefits cut.” Then came the politicians and the Paris elite who “don’t give a stuff about ordinary people” and simply spend money on “fast trains or big planes”. They never listened to any “ordinary people”.

Third, there was globalisation and, specifically, the Chinese. “We had jobs in Hénin,” Roget said. “But now everything is made in China. We can’t compete with them. They have factories where it is slave labour. What are we going to do? Work like slaves ourselves?

... The strategy of hunting for votes on the left as well as the right has split the FN and the debates have mirrored those in the British National party. Three years ago Marine Le Pen persuaded her father to ditch the hardline anti-immigration language and tone down the borderline racism and implicit antisemitism. Instead, she argued, the FN could break the barriers placed in its way by traditional parties by becoming “respectable” and gain support by adapting its key message. “We have put the economy, the preoccupations of ordinary people, in the foreground. I’m happy to see that my strategy has worked.” The extremism of her father, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail of history” and called the Nazi occupation of France “relatively humane”, was part of the past, she said.

“It’s true that we have sometimes given our opponents a stick to beat us with but ... as regards immigration ... my father was a visionary, far ahead of his time, and was attacked because of the truths he told. Immigration - economic, humanitarian, of relatives, because of global warming - is going to be the number one issue in the 21st century.

Whatever works, I guess.

UPDATE 06.07.09

READ MORE...

When we originally covered the story of Jörg Haider’s death last October, several commenters were very quick to sieze upon the assassination angle.  Today, The Times carried a story titled, Investigative reporter offers murder theory over death of Jörg Haider:

When Jörg Haider died in a car crash last year, many Austrians mourned the complex, fast-living populist. He may have been an admirer of Hitler’s employment policies, but he seemed to many rightwingers, frustrated with the Vienna Establishment, to hold the key to a new Austria.

Now pressure is growing to reopen the investigation into his death, and at least one investigative reporter is asking whether the 58-year-old politician was murdered.

“There are too many open questions,” said Gerhard Wisnewski, the author of the book Jörg Haider: Accident, Murder or Assassination? that has been selling quickly in Austria since it was launched last Tuesday. “After eight months of research I am convinced that it is highly probable that Haider was the victim of a politically motivated assassination.”

... “This case has to be reopened with an independent prosecutor . . . and with the involvement of international experts,” said Stefan Petzner, the former spokesman for Mr Haider and a leading figure in the right-wing BZOe party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria. He is threatening to mobilise a referendum on the issue unless the Justice Minister complies.

Mr Haider’s wife, Claudia, has also joined in the critical chorus, questioning the narrative provided by the police investigation team in the week after the crash. The police version, much of it leaked to the press before the official report, was that Mr Haider had visited various bars, including a reputedly gay hangout, on the night of Saturday October 10, in the town of Klagenfurt. He had drunk the equivalent of a bottle of vodka, according to blood sampling, and had driven at 142 kilometres per hour.

The car, a Phaeton limousine, had ricocheted from a fire hydrant into a noise-protection wall, against a tree and then bounced back on to the road about 100 metres farther along. Claudia has always denied rumours that her mercurial husband, the father of her two daughters, was gay and doubts many of the other details.

Interestingly, the story does not appear to have been reported at all by the English-language Austrian Times.  It might also be interesting to know who owns that publication, and whether Herr Wisnewski’s thesis has been reported by other national media in Austria.

The BNP is currently engaged on posting a series of brief résumés of it policy positions.  Recently we had one on immigration policy.

But a few days ago the party set out a number of attractive proposals on civil liberty.  Unquestionably, a future British National Party government enacting these into law would command wide popular support.  The Human Rights Act would be removed from the statute book, naturally.  We would see an end to those monumentally unloved ID cards, the national DNA database and the spiders web of the surveillance society.  On the new legislation side, the country would gain a parliament for England, binding referenda on major, probably constitutional issues, and a Bill of Rights.

All these would be highly significant undertakings, particularly the parliament which could well create a permanent English consensus against the Labour Party.  But none of them are anti-liberal in any systemic or revolutionary sense.  They would not act like acid on the radical individualist template on which multi-ethnicism is scored, burning both radical individualism and race-replacement out of politics in Britain for all time.

Instead, the party hierarchy (for which read Nick Griffin) seems to be relying in an Inevitablist fashion on the people freeing themselves.  Plenty of “patriotic feeling” and “good common-sense” is expected to be released by two other proposals in that civil liberties post:-

Abolish all restrictions on traditional free speech - common law provisions against incitement to violence are the only proper limits in a free society;

Abolish “anti-discrimination” laws which prevent people from making a free choice.

READ MORE...

So the affair of the leaked BNP membership list has already led to a Merseyside policeman being investigated and the Talksport DJ Rod Lucas getting the sack.  But worse will likely come to some:-

If that info gets a bit more public, this could be the end of the BNP - home demos, leafleting neigbours, alterting workplaces etc - we could seriously fuck the BNP up!

Come on, do the right thing - give us those addresses

(A) Sab x

The list itself is of dubious currency.  Excluding family members under eighteen, there are 12,215 names on it, many of whom are lapsed members.  The latest entries are June 2008, but most relate to the 2007 membership (apparently there is a very fast turnover of the BNP membership).

So, who did it?

Theory One: The list was leaked by a former party-member

Actually, a “hard-liner” who, according to Nick Griffin, “didn’t like the direction the party was going and broke away, taking the list with him”.

But EnoughisEnough has issued a rapid and firm denial, together with a demand for an apology to former Head of Administration, Kenny Smith.  There was a report that Griffin is now backing away from this theory, but I can’t locate the link.

Theory Two: The list was leaked by another left-wing mole in the party

The workaday explanation.  Well, we’ve had Jason Gwynne.  We’ve had Ian Cobain.

Theory Three: The list was leaked by an agent of MI5 within the party

The rationale here is that the BNP is on the verge of a “national breakthrough”, and could well grab a seat in the election to the European Parliament next June.

Just yesterday we heard how the party was planning an assault on the first direct elections for police authorities.

“We will be having a real go, there’s no doubt about that,” said Simon Darby, deputy leader of the BNP. “We have a staunch core of voters who are guaranteed to turn out and they could be enough to win us seats in these circumstances:-

“Crime will undoubtedly rise in the recession – burglaries go up, car theft rises, there will be problems with drug pushers. People don’t want to put up with that and they’ll want something done about it.

That reference to an increase in popularity as the recession bites was a major point of interest at last week’s BNP national conference in Blackpool, and might also be weighing on minds in high places.

This would be a good moment, then, to release sensitive information that could starve the party of membership and members’ party fees.  But ... why would an intelligence agent use an old list?

So, I favour Theory Two for now.  But the police have been called in, so perhaps we shall eventually learn who is the guilty party.

Only two weeks after the Austrian electorate put Jörg Haider back on the national stage, he is reported to have died in a car crash near his home town of Klagenfurt:-

Mr Haider, 58, who earned worldwide notoriety for making statements sympathetic to Hitler’s Nazi regime, suffered fatal head and chest injuries after the car he was driving plunged down an embankment near his home town of Klagenfurt.

Detectives are still investigating the cause of the crash, but said he was driving alone at the time in a government-owned vehicle.

The death of Mr Haider, who was governor of Carinthia province in southern Austria, comes less than a fortnight after a major resurgence in the far right’s political support in the country, riding on a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-European Union sentiment.

At parliamentary elections last month, Mr Haider’s Alliance for the Future of Austria polled 11 per cent of the vote, while the similarly-aligned Freedom Party, which Mr Haider founded but then split from, polled 18 per cent. The results meant nearly in three Austrians had voiced support for far-right movements, dismaying the country’s liberal politicians.

Mr Haider’s death may prompt concerns that political support will pass from him to the current Freedom Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, who is seen as a much more hardline figure. Mr Haider was originally Mr Strache’s political mentor, but the two fell out as Mr Haider chose to pursue more moderate policies in recent years.

Mr Haider’s spokesman, Stefan Petzner, said that he had been heading to a town near Klagenfurt for a gathering of his family to mark his mother’s 90th birthday.

“This is for us like the end of the world,” he added.

Born in Upper Austria, Mr Haider’s father was a former member of Hitler’s brown-shirted storm troopers, while his mother was a teacher who had been a Hitler Youth leader. Involved in politics since his teenage years, he caused an international outcry with a series of remarks where he appeared to imply an admiration for the Nazi era.

He once compared the employment policies of Austria’s government with the “proper labour policies” of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and on another occasion he referred to Nazi concentration camps as “penal camps” rather than death camps.

Visits to see despots such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Colonel Gaddafi in Libya heightened his image as a pariah politician.

Such was the opprobrium he earned among fellow European statesmen that when the Freedom Party entered into a coalition government with the conservative People’s Party in 2000, it triggered temporary European Union sanctions against Austria.

The coalition deal then fell apart, leading to an early election in 2002 in which the Freedom Party lost heavily, followed by a remake of the coalition.

Mr Haider then formed the breakaway Alliance for the Future of Austria in 2005, courting greater public acceptance by pursuing more moderate policies, but in a national election in 2006, the Alliance only just scraped past the 4 percent threshold to enter parliament.

Mr Haider is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Today the quality British papers have carried articles uniformly decrying the Austrian election result.  As one would expect, it’s all “far right” this and “extremist” that.  But I’ve been struck by how many readers commenting on the threads take issue with these sentiments.  Ten or fifteen years ago, any sympathy for Germanic nationalism would have been completely beyond the pale.  Eight years ago, when Haider’s Freedom Party entered government with Wolfgang Schüssel’s People’s Party, the mandarins of the EU felt bold enough to issue sanctions against Austria for voting “wrongly”.  Today that is beyond the pail.

Now, I’m no Inevitablist, and should a wave of mass revulsion of the MultiCult actually sweep Europe’s nationalists into office over the next decade, my immediate concern would be that their intellectual roots are too shallow to give the required coup de grace to liberalism and all its works (and its workers).  But it is impossible to explain to a man who has been confined for so very long that the first openings of the door aren’t the beginnings of his freedom.  He is going to will it to be anyway.

Here are some thread comments to illustrate the point that there is a crack in the door.  They are taken from the thread to a confused and rambling but PeeCee piece in the Telegraph titled “Far-Right’s showing in Austria’s election is worrying”.

To wring hands about this is just so hypocritical and, frankly, missed-the-boat journalism.

For years, the so-called Political ‘Elite(what a misnomer!)AND the MSM have combined in a cosy and sinister cartel to keep the issues of Immigration and Integration of Europe OFF the discussion list of voters ; anyone with half a brain(many of the electorate, sad to say)could see that in the event of an economic downturn, this would come back viciously to rebound, especially on the corrupt and smug political parties who can hardly be separated by a cigarette paper in their policies on BOTH of these subjects.

The vote in Austria may be tut-tutted by both media and Politicians of the centre left, but it won’t go away - neither will the increasing anger in other parts of Europe about these issues. The day of the Soft-left is coming to an end, caused in no small way by their stupid and unsustainable policies of Lending to those who cannot afford to repay loans but who can be relied on to vote for them ; Clinton began this policy by repealing the Glass-Steaghal Act in 99, and the financial melt-down currently rocking the world is a direct result of this - Doubtless, Democrat-leaning media in both the USA & UK will try to whitewash this, but the fact remains.

As times become harder and jobs scarcer, the simmering resentment over unchecked Immigration will turn and devour the Left ; the future looks increasingly frightening and it is ALL the fault of Liberal woolly thinking.

Posted by King Canute on September 30, 2008 3:25 AM

Why should it be sinister that people want an end to uncontrolled economic migration to their corner of the globe?

It seems to be a point that eludes the vast majority of politicians and the MSM.
Posted by Jabba the Cat on September 30, 2008 7:25 AM

Nationalism is a perfectly logical reaction to counter the EU liberal Lib/Lab/Con communism.

It’s coming to a place near you, but you still don’t get it!
Posted by Rocket Scientist on September 30, 2008 7:29 AM

austrians will always tell you -hitler -was a german and beethoven an austrian, from what i hear from friends in austria the would welcome the nazi party under a different name. this is because of immigration but like the elephant in the room as in u.k. no one dare mention it,i was told by friends the fear is losing their national character as a people and high taxes to pay for benefits for the immigrants.sounds familiar?.
Posted by londoner432 on September 30, 2008 8:20 AM

READ MORE...

The first national elections since the bank collapse really went critical have taken place in Austria today.  The news is: significant gains for the two nationalist parties.  Heinz-Christian Strache’s Freedom Party (FPOe) and Jorg Haider’s Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZOe), have taken 29% of the vote between them.  Of that, the Freedom Party took 18 per cent of the vote - up from 11% in 2006 despite suffering accusations of xenophobia during the election campaign.  The Alliance for the Future of Austria won 11 per cent of the vote - up from 4%.  So it’s an even split of 7 percentage points gained apiece.

The official result will only be announced on October 6th.

It is possible but, of course, unlikely that nationalist parties will be invited into government, as they were in 2000.  On the other hand, the Austrian public will not smile upon a repeat of the centrist double act of the People’s Party and the Social Democrats.  Most likely to emerge from the inevitable period of political horse-trading is a “grand coalition” of the Social Democrats, who won the largest share of the votes with 28%, the Greens and one of small parties.

Following on the Northern League’s coup of joining the governing coalition in Italy last April, achieved with only an 8% vote share, this is a heartening result.  One should always remember, though, that it has come about for negative reasons: electoral disenchantment with the governing duo and with aspects of Austria’s membership of the EU, and discontent with immigration.  This negativity is a weakness of European nationalism.  Of course, nationalists have to believe in the “certainty” that voter dissatisfaction with the Establishment parties will escalate and keep on escalating, delivering power to them as an inevitable product of the postmodern hell.  Thusfar, however, it has proved impossible for nationalists to sustain the gains they have made, and all too easy for the default mainstream to adapt à la Sarkozy.

The lesson would appear to be that a positive, communicable vision has to run alongside the standard mix of critical rhetoric and vote-buying managerial politics.

Politics is … the shaping of the future through power over the present.  That’s it, really.  But already in that simply formulation there is an inherent contradiction.  If we survive into the future, it will necessarily contain us.  But who is shaping it?  In whose interests?  And exactly what future are they shaping?

The realisation that the “we” in this are the people, our own people, and that not only is the hand on the lever of power not ours, but our allotted future is not one we would ever wish upon ourselves … that realisation is the wellspring of all nationalist dissidence in the modern age.  It’s the reason why political nationalism throughout Europe today is centred on a principled defence against mass immigration.

But obviously, the impulse itself predates all political “isms” by tens of thousands of years, predates the nation state, predates the sovereign king.  In its evolutionary essence it is as pure an affirmation of life as was ever made.

It is also an affirmation of the sacred tie between the people and the land.  But we are not talking about mere patriotism here.  Patriotic pride is fully acceptable to the enemies of Europe’s people.  There is not enough such pride in the whole world to fill the heart of one man or woman who rediscovers the love of and sense of belonging to his or her own people.  To borrow from a rather well-known if propagandistic Hollywood call to arms:-

READ MORE...