Why U.S. White Suprema­cists Are Ecsta­t­ic Over Euro­pean Elec­tion Results
Dreams of repli­cat­ing what hap­pened in the EU in the US.

http://www.alternet.org/world/us-white-supremacists-are-ecstatic-over-european-election-results-empowered-far-right?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

June 10, 2014 | Like this arti­cle?
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In late May, the BBC report­ed that “Euroscep­tic and far-right par­ties have seized ground in elec­tions to the Euro­pean par­lia­ment, in what France’s PM called a ‘polit­i­cal earth­quake’.” After­shocks from the far-right’s Euro­pean “polit­i­cal earth­quake” are being felt in the Unit­ed States, as Amer­i­ca’s White suprema­cists are cel­e­brat­ing like it’s 1999.

It takes an expe­ri­enced researcher and writer with an inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive to dis­sect the recent Euro­pean par­lia­ment elec­tions and try and under­stand what it means to, and for, the far right in the Unit­ed States. And, Devin Burghart is the per­fect per­son for the job. In a recent post at the web­site of the Insti­tute For Research & Edu­ca­tion On Human Rights (IREHR), Burghart point­ed out that for the most part, Amer­i­ca’s far right is rejoic­ing over the results of the elec­tions.

“Many on the Amer­i­can far right, from the Tea Par­ty to hard­ened white nation­al­ists, paid close atten­tion to the Euro­pean results,” Burghart, vice pres­i­dent of IREHR, wrote in a sto­ry titled, Amer­i­can Far Right Jubi­lant Over Euro­pean Elec­tion Results. “Look­ing at these votes for nation­al­ist, anti-immi­grant, racist, anti-Semit­ic, and anti-Euro­pean Union polit­i­cal par­ties — the Amer­i­can hard right saw hope for the future here at home.”

Burghart point­ed to sev­er­al emer­gent themes includ­ing: “1) nation­al­ist, anti-glob­al­ist argu­ments in the age of aus­ter­i­ty and finan­cial tur­moil, 2) anti-immi­grant pol­i­tics as a win­ning mes­sage, and 3) the neces­si­ty of a white elec­toral strat­e­gy here at home.”

Rela­tion­ships between Amer­i­ca’s far-right orga­ni­za­tions and their Euro­pean coun­ter­parts have “ebbed and flowed” over the years, gen­er­al­ly reflect­ing elec­toral real­i­ties in the US and in Europe. Accord­ing to Burghart, “For years, far right activists in the Unit­ed States, par­tic­u­lar­ly those inter­est­ed in main­stream­ing their par­tic­u­lar brand of big­otry in the polit­i­cal are­na, have looked to Europe as a source of hope and inspi­ra­tion. They have also devel­oped long-stand­ing mul­ti­lat­er­al rela­tion­ships with their Euro­pean coun­ter­parts.”

Amer­i­ca’s right responds with jubi­la­tion

The “Euro­pean right-wing comes of age,” declared the Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens (CofCC), one of the largest white nation­al­ist groups in the Unit­ed States. “Folks, I’m here to tell you that this week’s elec­tion results in Europe have giv­en me a lot of hope,” pro­claimed Ten­nessee white nation­al­ist talk show host, James Edwards. The Vir­ginia white nation­al­ist think-tank, Amer­i­can Renais­sance, called the elec­tions “a promis­ing shift to the Right” and hoped that “we are per­haps see­ing the first rays of a new dawn after a long night.”

David Duke, for­mer Grand Wiz­ard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and for­mer Repub­li­can Louisiana State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, went straight to the anti-Semit­ic card. Duke wrote that, “the results of Euro­pean Par­lia­ment elec­tions held last week have at last shown that in many parts of Europe, resis­tance to the ide­olo­gies enforced by Jew­ish Suprema­cists — mass immi­gra­tion and glob­al­iza­tion — are being deci­sive­ly reject­ed.”

Duke added: “All free­dom-lov­ing peo­ple around the globe can draw solace from the fact that the lat­est Euro­pean Par­lia­ment elec­tions have now at last shown a def­i­nite step away from this Jew­ish Suprema­cist glob­al­ist agen­da. There is still much work to do, but every jour­ney begins with that first step!”

In a piece for the Occi­den­tal Observ­er web­site, anti-Semit­ic pro­fes­sor Kevin Mac­Don­ald wrote “It’s no secret that Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tions have been strong­ly in favor of the EU and its poli­cies pro­mot­ing immi­gra­tion and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. So it’s no sur­prise that they are quite neg­a­tive about the results of the elec­tions for the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment.” Mac­Don­ald added: “What is miss­ing in this oppo­si­tion is any glim­mer­ing that native Euro­peans have a legit­i­mate inter­est in pre­serv­ing their cul­ture and their demo­graph­ic dom­i­nance in areas they have inhab­it­ed for thou­sands of years. The poli­cies advo­cat­ed by Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tions will result in the death of Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion.”

Burghart point­ed out that “In a May 23 col­umn, [Pat] Buchanan con­tend­ed that the elec­toral suc­cess by the far right meant that Euro­peans were vot­ing to pre­serve their ‘sep­a­rate and unique eth­nic and cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty.’ ” Buchanan, a long­time sup­port­er of the Euro­pean far right, saw a return to “tra­di­tion­al­ism and cul­tur­al con­ser­vatism, rev­er­ence for the reli­gious and cul­tur­al his­to­ry and her­itage of the nation and its indige­nous peo­ple.”

As Burghart not­ed, “The Euro-Elec­tion results give a boost to efforts by white nation­al­ists to push their ‘white Amer­i­ca’ strat­e­gy on the move­ment — also known as the ‘Major­i­ty Strat­e­gy’ — .... the [con­tro­ver­sial] argu­ment holds that Repub­li­cans should aban­don efforts to reach-out to com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, and instead adopt an explic­it­ly racist pol­i­tics to appeal to white vot­ers.”

“For some Amer­i­can white nation­al­ists, far right suc­cess in the Euro­pean elec­tions has rekin­dled an inter­est in elec­toral cam­paign­ing and re-engag­ing in the debate around immi­gra­tion reform,” Burghart wrote. “At the same time, a seg­ment of the move­ment has shunned elec­tion­eer­ing and seeks instead to con­struct a dif­fer­ent type of inter­na­tion­al net­work of racists and anti-Semi­tes.”

It is clear that many Amer­i­can white suprema­cists are hope­ful that the results of the Euro­pean par­lia­men­tary elec­tions can some day be repli­cat­ed in the home­land. To achieve this, they intend to main­stream their anti-Black, anti-Semit­ic, anti-immi­grant ideas. How they will do that remains to be seen.

Bill Berkowitz is a long­time observ­er of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment

Here’s an arti­cle on the results of an Aus­tri­an poll ask­ing about atti­tudes towards the Nazis. The poll was con­duct­ed last last year so the results may no longer be valid. Let’s hope so:

The Inde­pen­dent
Over half of Aus­tri­ans think the Nazis would be elect­ed if the par­ty was read­mit­ted to pol­i­tics

Tony Pater­son, Berlin

Sun­day 10 March 2013

As Aus­tria pre­pares to mark the anniver­sary of its annex­a­tion by Nazi Ger­many, an opin­ion poll has shown that more than half of the pop­u­la­tion think it high­ly like­ly that the Nazis would be elect­ed if they were read­mit­ted as a par­ty.

A fur­ther 42 per cent agreed with the view that life “wasn’t all bad under the Nazis”, and 39 per cent said they thought a recur­rence of anti-Semit­ic per­se­cu­tion was like­ly in Aus­tria.

The dis­turb­ing find­ings were con­tained in a poll con­duct­ed for the Vien­na news­pa­per, “Der Stan­dard” in advance of Tuesday’s 75th anniver­sary of Austria’s Nazi annex­a­tion — a date which still counts as one of the most shame­ful and con­tro­ver­sial in the country’s his­to­ry.

Tens of thou­sands of Aus­tri­ans gave Adolf Hitler and his troops a rap­tur­ous wel­come when they invad­ed the coun­try unop­posed in March 1938. Aus­tria fought World War II as part of Nazi Ger­many and many Aus­tri­ans helped run Nazi death camps. Yet for decades, post-war Aus­tria fre­quent­ly per­pet­u­at­ed the myth that it was a vic­tim of Nazi oppres­sion. Der Stan­dard said its poll was designed to show how today’s Aus­tri­ans judged Nazi rule.

Neigh­bour­ing Germany’s pop­u­lar “Stern” mag­a­zine described the poll’s find­ings as shock­ing today. The poll also showed that 61 per cent of Aus­tri­an adults want­ed to see a “strong man” in charge of gov­ern­ment, and 54 per cent said they thought it would be “high­ly like­ly” that the Nazis would win seats in they were allowed to take part in an elec­tion.

Some 46 per cent of those polled said they believed Aus­tria was a vic­tim of Nazi oppres­sion in 1938, while 61 per cent said they believed that “enough” had been done to reap­praise Austria’s Nazi past.p

...

Here’s a youth trend that the AfD must be lov­ing: Ger­man ‘nip­sters’:

Rolling Stone
Heil Hip­ster: The Young Neo-Nazis Try­ing to Put a Styl­ish Face on Hate
Inside the tote-bag friend­ly, “Harlem Shake”-happy world of Ger­many’s “nip­sters”

By Thomas Rogers
June 23, 2014 10:00 AM ET

It’s a rainy Sun­day evening in May, in the town of Wei­den, in north­east­ern Bavaria, and Patrick Schroed­er, whom the Ger­man press has dubbed the “Nazi-hip­ster,” is prepar­ing for his big web­cam entrance. As the open­ing sequence for his week­ly Inter­net TV show, FSN.tv, plays silent­ly in the back­ground, he ties a ban­dana stitched with the slo­gan “H8” around his mouth and fid­dles with his mouse. A map of Ger­many in 1937 hangs on the wall above him.

It’s hard to get the tim­ing for the intro “just right,” he explains, and once the graph­ics stop play­ing, he strides into frame and rais­es his arm, curl­ing his hand into a fist and wish­ing his view­ers, a few hun­dred mem­bers of Ger­many’s extreme right, a love­ly evening. He calls this ges­ture his “pro­fes­sion­al wrestling entrance move,” which he claims was inspired by WWE-style the­atrics, though it also, not incon­ve­nient­ly, looks a bit like a heil Hitler Nazi salute.

Schroed­er is 30 years old, about six feet tall, with the boxy mus­cu­la­ture of an MMA fight­er, his blond hair shaved except for a jaun­ty strip along the top of his head. He’s dressed all in black, wear­ing arm­bands slight­ly rem­i­nis­cent of those favored by vin­tage Avril Lav­i­gne and speaks quick­ly and loud­ly, with a strong Bavar­i­an lilt. When he laughs, his upper right lip ris­es up, mak­ing him look both threat­en­ing and inse­cure. “If the Third Reich was so bad, it would have been top­pled,” he argues, before the film­ing begins. “Every half-intel­li­gent per­son knows there is no sys­tem where every­thing was bad.”

He won’t elab­o­rate, for legal rea­sons, but he’ll hap­pi­ly share his topline thoughts about every­thing from Oba­ma (whom he gross­ly describes as Amer­i­ca’s “neger pres­i­dent”) to why black peo­ple don’t belong in Ger­many (“It’s against nature — there’s a rea­son we’re not walk­ing around in the sun, in Ghana, with our skin col­or”), to why Amer­i­can neo-Nazis are “prim­i­tive” (“It’s like they’re always dress­ing up for a cos­tume par­ty”) and — because, just like many oth­er Ger­mans, he loves Amer­i­can TV — his strong feel­ings about the series finale of How I Met Your Moth­er (“The moth­er dying was a good reminder that the world isn’t a great place”).

Inane rhetoric notwith­stand­ing, Schroed­er comes across first and fore­most as a ded­i­cat­ed self-pro­mot­er, and he clear­ly enjoys putting on a show: For the next two hours, he sits at the com­put­er and chats with his remote co-host about the lat­est Nazi news — recent­ly banned groups, Euro­pean elec­tions — and riffs on pop cul­ture. He pep­pers his state­ments with self-dep­re­cat­ing asides and eye-rolls, and he occa­sion­al­ly inter­rupts the chat­ter to play Rech­strock, neo-Nazi rock songs.

FSN.tv is Ger­many’s only neo-Nazi Inter­net TV show, and in the two years since it has exist­ed it has turned Schroed­er into a well-known, if high­ly con­tro­ver­sial, fig­ure in the Ger­man extreme right, large­ly because he has been open about his desire to give the Ger­man neo-Nazi move­ment a friend­lier, hip­per face. Schroed­er some­times con­ducts sem­i­nars show­ing neo-Nazis how they can dress less threat­en­ing­ly and argues that any­body from hip-hop fans to hip­sters in skin­ny jeans should be able to join the scene with­out chang­ing the way they look, an idea that, for many old­er mem­bers, is an affront to their anti-main­stream val­ues.

Over the past year, part­ly because of lead­ers like Schroed­er and part­ly because of the unstop­pable glob­al­iza­tion of youth cul­ture, the hip­ster­i­fi­ca­tion of the Ger­man neo-Nazi scene has begun to gain steam. This win­ter, the Ger­man media came up with a new term, “nip­ster,” to describe the trend of peo­ple dress­ing like Brook­lyn hip­sters at Nazi events. Experts have not­ed that the Ger­man neo-Nazi pres­ence on Tum­blr and oth­er social net­work­ing sites has become sleek­er and more sophis­ti­cat­ed. Neo-Nazi cloth­ing has become more styl­ish and dif­fi­cult to rec­og­nize. There’s even a veg­an Nazi cook­ing show. “If the def­i­n­i­tion of the nip­ster is some­one who can live in the main­stream,” Schroed­er explains, “then I see it as the future of the move­ment.”

These are strange times to be a neo-Nazi in Ger­many. The Fed­er­al Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court is gear­ing up for a hear­ing on the lat­est attempt to ban the Nation­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty of Ger­many (NPD), the coun­try’s old­est and biggest extreme-right polit­i­cal par­ty. Regard­less of the ver­dict, the par­ty is close to run­ning out of mon­ey and Nazi oppo­nents have become suc­cess­ful at shut­ting down its pub­lic appear­ances (in April, a high-pro­file Berlin NPD march was suc­cess­ful­ly block­ad­ed by sev­er­al thou­sand pro­test­ers). The mur­der tri­al of the lone sur­viv­ing core mem­ber of the Nation­al Social­ist Under­ground, a far-right ter­ror cell that is accused of killing 10 peo­ple between 2000 and 2007, is also ongo­ing in Munich, and focus­ing the nation’s atten­tion on extreme-right crimes, and a recent study found that the num­ber of peo­ple with extreme-right sym­pa­thies has sunken from 9.7 to 5.6 per­cent in the last 12 years.

At the same time, Ger­many and Ger­man cul­ture have become more porous and inter­na­tion­al than ever: A fed­er­al sur­vey found that near­ly 20 per­cent of Ger­mans have an immi­grant back­ground, and anoth­er new study found that immi­grants and Ger­mans are becom­ing increas­ing­ly sim­i­lar. Ger­man TV broad­casts The Real House­wives, the Top 20 pop charts include songs by Calvin Har­ris, Cold­play and Pit­bull and thanks to the Inter­net, teenagers can pirate the lat­est episode of Girls a few hours after it airs in Amer­i­ca. And now anoth­er Amer­i­can export has arrived: In 2012, the dai­ly Welt her­ald­ed the “hip­ster” as Ger­many’s “new object of hate” and just this Feb­ru­ary, the coun­try’s biggest tabloid, Bild, offered a guide to “hip­ster types” for its read­ers. (Exam­ple: “The fixed-gear fanat­ic nev­er goes any­where with­out his bike.”)

For peo­ple like Andy Knape, the rise of the Ger­man hip­ster presents both an oppor­tu­ni­ty and a dilem­ma. For the past two years, the 28-year-old Knape has been the head of the Junge Nation­aldemokrat­en (JN), the youth wing of the NPD. His office is locat­ed in the state par­lia­ment of Sax­ony, in the east­ern part of Ger­many, and over­looks the city’s majes­tic opera house, which large­ly burnt down after the city’s fire­bomb­ing and was rebuilt after the war. A poster of an elder­ly woman with a shot­gun and the words “dras­tic secu­ri­ty mea­sures” hangs on the wall, next to a pho­to of sev­er­al steely-eyed white peo­ple smil­ing.

As head of the JN, Knape’s job is to make the NPD, and its extreme-right pol­i­tics, appeal­ing to young peo­ple (one of his biggest goals, he explains, is to “pre­serve Ger­man cul­ture”) and he’s a good sales­man — 5′8″, fit and dressed in a grey T‑shirt and Con­verse-style sneak­ers, he would­n’t look out of place on an Amer­i­can col­lege cam­pus. He first entered the scene when he was 13, in Magde­burg, because his broth­er was also “right-wing ori­ent­ed” and he “start­ed to ask him­self lots of ques­tions.” Even­tu­al­ly, he says, he began going to NPD demon­stra­tions, and got more involved. Although his eyes betray a pal­pa­ble aggres­sive­ness and many of his talk­ing points seem clear­ly rehearsed, for a man in charge of an orga­ni­za­tion being mon­i­tored by the Bun­desver­fas­sungss­chutz — Ger­many’s domes­tic secu­ri­ty agency — he is sur­pris­ing­ly soft-spo­ken. When he speaks he tends to curl up in his chair.

Like Schroed­er, whom he sees as an acolyte, Knape wants to give “nation­al­ism” a friend­lier, cool­er face (in the NPD, and many oth­er extreme-right orga­ni­za­tions, “nation­al­ist” often func­tions as a polit­i­cal­ly accept­able euphemism for “Nazi”). For Knape, who grew up with Amer­i­can pop cul­ture, the idea of polic­ing what young mem­bers of the scene watch or lis­ten to is sil­ly — he’d much rather hijack it, and use it to bring young peo­ple into the fold. Michael Schae­fer, the JN’s excitable 31-year-old press per­son, chimes in: “We’ve tak­en over the nip­ster,” he says, gid­di­ly, before catch­ing him­self. “I mean nation­al­ist hip­ster, not Nazi hip­ster.”

...

So this just hap­pened:

TPM Livewire
Neo-Nazi Holo­caust Denier Joins EU Par­lia­ment Civ­il Rights Com­mit­tee

Caitlin Mac­Neal – July 8, 2014, 11:54 AM EDT

A neo-Nazi from Ger­many’s ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Nation­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty joined the Euro­pean Union’s par­lia­ment in May and on Mon­day took a seat on the body’s Civ­il Rights Com­mit­tee, accord­ing to Jew­ish World News.

Udo Voigt has praised Adolf Hitler as “a great Ger­man states­man” and once claimed that “no more than 340,000” Jews died in the Holo­caust, as opposed to the 6 mil­lion fig­ure agreed on by his­to­ri­ans, accord­ing to the Guardian.

Voigt led the NDP from 1996 to 2011, and dur­ing that time he led the par­ty in an increas­ing­ly nation­al­ist direc­tion. In 2009, he was con­vict­ed of glo­ri­fy­ing the Waf­fen SS. The Ger­man court unsuc­cess­ful­ly attempt­ed to out­law the par­ty in 2006, and anoth­er attempt is cur­rent­ly under­way.

Voigt in 2007 con­sid­ered nom­i­nat­ing Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, for a Nobel Peace Prize. The Guardian has an exten­sive account of his incred­i­bly con­tro­ver­sial actions and state­ments here.

Fol­low­ing out­rage over Voigt’s assign­ment to the Civ­il Rights Com­mit­tee, EU Pres­i­dent Mar­tin Schulz denounced Voigt’s beliefs.

...

A spokesman for the Euro­pean Jew­ish Con­gress called for mem­bers of the EU par­lia­ment to keep Voigt from gain­ing pub­lic­i­ty for his views.

“It does the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment no cred­it to have peo­ple sit­ting on its civ­il lib­er­ties com­mit­tee who have obvi­ous­ly not only shown no com­mit­ment to civ­il lib­er­ties, but have sought to under­mine them and to pur­vey a racist and intol­er­ant agen­da through­out their polit­i­cal career,” a spokesman told EurAc­tiv.

This pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words:

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.607302.1406387975!/image/1432576168.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/1432576168.jpg

Thou­sands protest Gaza oper­a­tion in Paris, some with Nazi-like ‘quenelle’ salute
France’s inte­ri­or min­is­ter urges pro­test­ers to observe the order, fear­ing anti-Semit­ic vio­lence.
By Haaretz | Jul. 26, 2014 | 6:14 PM

Sev­er­al thou­sand gath­ered in Place de la République in Paris, France to protest the Israeli oper­a­tion in the Gaza Strip on Sat­ur­day, defy­ing a state ban on the demon­stra­tion.

Pro­test­ers chant­ed “Israel is an assas­sin, Hol­land is an accom­plice” and “we are all Pales­tini­ans,” and some were seen ges­tur­ing the quenelle, a reverse Nazi-salute, AFP report­ed. Ten­sion mount­ed as hun­dreds of pro­test­ers, some masked, began throw­ing stones and pro­jec­tiles at police who respond­ed with tear gas.</b?

“This event is ille­gal, but for us it is more than legit­i­mate. This is to show our sol­i­dar­i­ty with peo­ple who are now being mas­sa­cred,” Hugo, a New Anti-Cap­i­tal­ist Par­ty (NPA) activist, told AFP.

The NPA decid­ed to defy the ban and hold the protest as planned in an asser­tion of the par­ty’s “sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple,” NPA leader Olivi­er Besan­cenot said.

Ear­li­er, France’s inte­ri­or min­is­ter called on the protest’s orga­niz­ers to observe the order, fear­ing anti-Semit­ic vio­lence.

Bernard Cazeneuve made his pub­lic appeal short­ly before Sat­ur­day’s demon­stra­tion in Paris was to start. Hours ear­li­er, the Coun­cil of State, France’s top admin­is­tra­tive body, ruled the protest ban was legal.

A court had ruled like­wise, but orga­niz­ers said they still planned to hold the protest.

France has West­ern Europe’s largest Jew­ish and Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions. Two banned pro-Gaza protests last week­end, in Paris and Sar­celles, to the north, degen­er­at­ed into vio­lence and attacks on syn­a­gogues. On Wednes­day, an autho­rized demon­stra­tion was peace­ful.

Cazeneuve said chat­ter on social net­works indi­cat­ed a risk that Sat­ur­day’s protest could become a “cortege of vio­lence.”

AP con­tributed to this report

This pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words:

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.607302.1406387975!/image/1432576168.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/1432576168.jpg

Thou­sands protest Gaza oper­a­tion in Paris, some with Nazi-like ‘quenelle’ salute
France’s inte­ri­or min­is­ter urges pro­test­ers to observe the order, fear­ing anti-Semit­ic vio­lence.
By Haaretz | Jul. 26, 2014 | 6:14 PM

Sev­er­al thou­sand gath­ered in Place de la République in Paris, France to protest the Israeli oper­a­tion in the Gaza Strip on Sat­ur­day, defy­ing a state ban on the demon­stra­tion.

Pro­test­ers chant­ed “Israel is an assas­sin, Hol­land is an accom­plice” and “we are all Pales­tini­ans,” and some were seen ges­tur­ing the quenelle, a reverse Nazi-salute, AFP report­ed. Ten­sion mount­ed as hun­dreds of pro­test­ers, some masked, began throw­ing stones and pro­jec­tiles at police who respond­ed with tear gas.

“This event is ille­gal, but for us it is more than legit­i­mate. This is to show our sol­i­dar­i­ty with peo­ple who are now being mas­sa­cred,” Hugo, a New Anti-Cap­i­tal­ist Par­ty (NPA) activist, told AFP.

The NPA decid­ed to defy the ban and hold the protest as planned in an asser­tion of the par­ty’s “sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple,” NPA leader Olivi­er Besan­cenot said.

Ear­li­er, France’s inte­ri­or min­is­ter called on the protest’s orga­niz­ers to observe the order, fear­ing anti-Semit­ic vio­lence.

Bernard Cazeneuve made his pub­lic appeal short­ly before Sat­ur­day’s demon­stra­tion in Paris was to start. Hours ear­li­er, the Coun­cil of State, France’s top admin­is­tra­tive body, ruled the protest ban was legal.

A court had ruled like­wise, but orga­niz­ers said they still planned to hold the protest.

France has West­ern Europe’s largest Jew­ish and Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions. Two banned pro-Gaza protests last week­end, in Paris and Sar­celles, to the north, degen­er­at­ed into vio­lence and attacks on syn­a­gogues. On Wednes­day, an autho­rized demon­stra­tion was peace­ful.

Cazeneuve said chat­ter on social net­works indi­cat­ed a risk that Sat­ur­day’s protest could become a “cortege of vio­lence.”

AP con­tributed to this report

fac­toids, sur­veys, sta­tis­tics, sci­ence:

http://global100.adl.org/did-you-know

http://global100.adl.org/#compare

Qatar’s scores are right where Dave would expect them to be com­pared to oth­er reich-cor­po­rate-sta­tist fronts like Paraquay, but Uruguay is near­ly equiv­a­lent to Qatar with respect to Holo­caust intol­er­ance.

But Brazil beats Qatar — and Ger­many is even!

Jews still talk too much about what hap­pened to them in the Holo­caust:

some exam­ples...

(go to the link and run com­par­isons, click the ‘see more’ links below each sur­vey ques­tion to expand per­cent results)

62% ‑Poland
61% ‑Hun­gary
57% ‑Brazil
52% ‑Qatar
52% — Ger­many
48% ‑Ukraine
38% ‑Rus­sia
31% ‑Chi­na
26% ‑India
23% ‑Egypt
22% ‑USA
18% ‑Iran
16% ‑Indone­sia

Per­cent respond­ing “prob­a­bly true”

*Note the ADL sur­vey above is ref­er­enced in this alarm­ing arti­cle — par­tici­ple)

Anti­semitism on rise across Europe ‘in worst times since the Nazis’

Experts say attacks go beyond Israel-Pales­tin­ian con­flict as hate crimes strike fear into Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties

Jon Hen­ley
The Guardian, Thurs­day 7 August 2014 15.12 EDT

In the space of just one week last month, accord­ing to Crif, the umbrel­la group for France’s Jew­ish organ­i­sa­tions, eight syn­a­gogues were attacked. One, in the Paris sub­urb of Sar­celles, was fire­bombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher super­mar­ket and phar­ma­cy were smashed and loot­ed; the crowd’s chants and ban­ners includ­ed “Death to Jews” and “Slit Jews’ throats”. That same week­end, in the Barbes neigh­bour­hood of the cap­i­tal, stone-throw­ing pro­test­ers burned Israeli flags: “Isra­hell”, read one ban­ner.

In Ger­many last month, molo­tov cock­tails were lobbed into the Ber­gis­che syn­a­gogue in Wup­per­tal – pre­vi­ous­ly destroyed on Kristall­nacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to “destroy the Zion­ist Jews … Count them and kill them, to the very last one.” Bot­tles were thrown through the win­dow of an anti­semitism cam­paign­er in Frank­furt; an elder­ly Jew­ish man was beat­en up at a pro-Israel ral­ly in Ham­burg; an Ortho­dox Jew­ish teenag­er punched in the face in Berlin. In sev­er­al cities, chants at pro-Pales­tin­ian protests com­pared Israel’s actions to the Holo­caust; oth­er notable slo­gans includ­ed: “Jew, cow­ard pig, come out and fight alone,” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”</b?

Across Europe, the con­flict in Gaza is breath­ing new life into some very old, and very ugly, demons. This is not unusu­al; police and Jew­ish civ­il rights organ­i­sa­tions have long observed a notice­able spike in anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents each time the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict flares. Dur­ing the three weeks of Israel’s Oper­a­tion Cast Lead in late 2008 and ear­ly 2009, France record­ed 66 anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents, includ­ing attacks on Jew­ish-owned restau­rants and syn­a­gogues and a sharp increase in anti-Jew­ish graf­fi­ti.But accord­ing to aca­d­e­mics and Jew­ish lead­ers, this time it is dif­fer­ent. More than sim­ply a reac­tion to the con­flict, they say, the threats, hate speech and vio­lent attacks feel like the expres­sion of a much deep­er and more wide­spread anti­semitism, fuelled by a wide range of fac­tors, that has been grow­ing now for more than a decade.

“These are the worst times since the Nazi era,” Dieter Grau­mann, pres­i­dent of Ger­many’s Cen­tral Coun­cil of Jews, told the Guardian. “On the streets, you hear things like’the Jews should be gassed’, ‘the Jews should be burned’ – we haven’t had that in Ger­many for decades. Any­one say­ing those slo­gans isn’t crit­i­cis­ing Israeli pol­i­tics, it’s just pure hatred against Jews: noth­ing else. And it’s not just a Ger­man phe­nom­e­non. It’s an out­break of hatred against Jews so intense that it’s very clear indeed.”

Roger Cukier­man, pres­i­dent of France’s Crif, said French Jews were “anguished” about an anti-Jew­ish back­lash that goes far beyond even strong­ly felt polit­i­cal and human­i­tar­i­an oppo­si­tion to the cur­rent fight­ing: “They are not scream­ing ‘Death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris,” Cukier­man said last month. “They are scream­ing ‘Death to Jews’.” Cri­f’s vice-pres­i­dent Yonathan Arfi said he “utter­ly reject­ed” the view that the lat­est increase in anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents was down to events in Gaza. “They have laid bare some­thing far more pro­found,” he said.

Nor is it just Europe’s Jew­ish lead­ers who are alarmed. Ger­many’s chan­cel­lor, Angela Merkel, has called the recent inci­dents “an attack on free­dom and tol­er­ance and our demo­c­ra­t­ic state”. The French prime min­is­ter, Manuel Valls, has spo­ken of “intol­er­a­ble” and clear­ly anti­se­mit­ic acts: “To attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France. To attack a syn­a­gogue and a kosher gro­cery store is quite sim­ply anti­semitism and racism”.

Police at the site of a shoot­ing at the Jew­ish Muse­um in Brus­sels
Police at the site of a shoot­ing at the Jew­ish Muse­um in Brus­sels, Bel­gium, where four peo­ple were killed. Pho­to­graph: Eric Vidal/REUTERS

France, whose 500,000-strong Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty is one of Europe’s largest, and Ger­many, where the post-war exhor­ta­tion of “Nev­er Again” is part of the fab­ric of mod­ern soci­ety, are not alone. In Aus­tria last month, a pre-sea­son friend­ly between Mac­cabi Haifa and Ger­man Bun­desli­ga team SC Pader­born had to be resched­uled after the Israeli side’s pre­vi­ous match was called off fol­low­ing an attempt­ed assault on its play­ers.

The Nether­lands’ main anti­semitism watch­dog, Cidi, had more than 70 calls from alarmed Jew­ish cit­i­zens in one week last month; the aver­age is nor­mal­ly three to five. An Ams­ter­dam rab­bi, Bin­jamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned, and two Jew­ish women were attacked – one beat­en, the oth­er the vic­tim of arson – after they hung Israeli flags from their bal­conies. In Bel­gium, a woman was report­ed­ly turned away from a shop with the words: “We don’t cur­rent­ly sell to Jews.”

In Italy, the Jew­ish own­ers of dozens of shops and oth­er busi­ness­es in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jew­ish slo­gans daubed on shut­ters and win­dows.One slo­gan read: “Every Pales­tin­ian is like a com­rade. Same ene­my. Same bar­ri­cade”; anoth­er: “Jews, your end is near.“Abd al-Barr al-Rawd­hi, an imam from the north east­ern town of San Donà di Piave,is to be deport­ed after being video-record­ed giv­ing a ser­mon call­ing for the exter­mi­na­tion of the Jews.

There has been no vio­lence in Spain, but the coun­try’s small Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion of 35,000–40,000 fears the sit­u­a­tion is so tense that “if it con­tin­ues for too long, bad things will hap­pen,” the leader of Madrid’s Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, David Hatch­well, said. The com­mu­ni­ty is plan­ning action against El Mun­do after the dai­ly paper pub­lished a col­umn by 83-year-old play­wright Anto­nio Gala ques­tion­ing Jews’ abil­i­ty to live peace­ful­ly with oth­ers: “It’s not strange they have been so fre­quent­ly expelled.”

Stud­ies sug­gest anti­semitism may indeed be mount­ing. A 2012 sur­vey by the EU’s by the Fun­da­men­tal Rights agency of some 6,000 Jews in eight Euro­pean coun­tries – between them, home to 90% of Europe’s Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion – found 66% of respon­dents felt anti­semitism in Europe was on the rise; 76% said anti­semitism had increased in their coun­try over the past five years. In the 12 months after the sur­vey, near­ly half said they wor­ried about being ver­bal­ly insult­ed or attacked in pub­lic because they were Jew­ish.

Jew­ish organ­i­sa­tions that record anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents say the trend is inex­orable: France’s Soci­ety for the Pro­tec­tion of the Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty says annu­al totals of anti­se­mit­ic acts in the 2000s are sev­en times high­er than in the 1990s. French Jews are leav­ing for Israel in greater num­bers, too, for rea­sons they say include anti­semitism and the elec­toral suc­cess of the hard-right Front Nation­al. The Jew­ish Agency for Israel said 3,288 French Jews left for Israel in 2013, a 72% rise on the pre­vi­ous year. Between Jan­u­ary and May this year, 2,254 left, against 580 in the same peri­od last year.

(*see ADL sur­veys and arti­cle above — par­ti­co)

In a study com­plet­ed in Feb­ru­ary, Amer­i­ca’s Anti-Defama­tion League sur­veyed 332,000 Euro­peans using an index of 11 ques­tions designed to reveal strength of anti-Jew­ish stereo­types. It found that 24% of Euro­peans – 37% in France, 27% in Ger­many, 20% in Italy – har­boured some kind of anti-Jew­ish atti­tude.

So what is dri­ving the phe­nom­e­non? Valls, the French prime min­is­ter, has acknowl­edged a “new”, “nor­malised” anti­semitism that he says blends “the Pales­tin­ian cause, jihadism, the dev­as­ta­tion of Israel, and hatred of France and its val­ues”.

Mark Gard­ner of the Com­mu­ni­ty Secu­ri­ty Trust, a Lon­don-based char­i­ty that mon­i­tors anti­semitism both in Britain and on the con­ti­nent, also iden­ti­fies a range of fac­tors. Suc­ces­sive con­flicts in the Mid­dle East he said, have served up “a crush of trig­ger events” that has pre­vent­ed tem­pers from cool­ing: the sec­ond intifa­da in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, and the three Israel–Hamas con­flicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have “left no time for the sit­u­a­tion to return to nor­mal.” In such a cli­mate, he added, three bru­tal anti­se­mit­ic mur­ders in the past eight years – two in France, one in Bel­gium, and none coin­cid­ing with Israeli mil­i­tary action – have served “not to shock, but to encour­age the anti­semites”, leav­ing them “seek­ing more blood and intim­i­da­tion, not less”.

In 2006, 23-year old Ilan Hal­i­mi was kid­napped, tor­tured and left for dead in Paris by a group call­ing itself the Bar­bar­ians Gang, who sub­se­quent­ly admit­ted tar­get­ing him “because he was a Jew, so his fam­i­ly would have mon­ey”. Two years ago, in May 2012, Toulouse gun­man Mohamed Mer­ah shot dead sev­en peo­ple, includ­ing three chil­dren and a young rab­bi out­side their Jew­ish school. And in May this year Meh­di Nem­mouche, a French­man of Alger­ian descent thought to have recent­ly returned to France after a year in Syr­ia fight­ing with rad­i­cal Islamists, was charged with shoot­ing four peo­ple at the Jew­ish muse­um in Brus­sels.

If the French estab­lish­ment has har­boured a deep vein of anti-Jew­ish sen­ti­ment since long before the Drey­fus affair, the influ­ence of rad­i­cal Islam, many Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers say, is plain­ly a sig­nif­i­cant con­tribut­ing fac­tor in the coun­try’s present-day anti­semitism. But so too, said Gard­ner, is a straight­for­ward alien­ation that many young Mus­lims feel from soci­ety. “Often it’s more to do with that than with Israel. Many would as soon burn down a police sta­tion as a syn­a­gogue. Jews are sim­ply iden­ti­fied as part of the estab­lish­ment.”

While he stressed it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of Mus­lims, Peter Ulrich, a research fel­low at the cen­tre for anti­semitism research (ZfA) at Berlin’s Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, agreed that some of the “anti­se­mit­ic ele­ments” Ger­many has seen at recent protests could be “a kind of rebel­lion of peo­ple who are them­selves exclud­ed on the basis of racist struc­tures.”

Arfi said that in France anti­semitism had become “a port­man­teau for a lot of angry peo­ple: rad­i­cal Mus­lims, alien­at­ed youths from immi­grant fam­i­lies, the far right, the far left”. But he also blamed “a process of nor­mal­i­sa­tion, where­by anti­semitism is being made some­how accept­able”. One cul­prit, Arfi said, is the con­tro­ver­sial come­di­an Dieudon­né: “He has legit­imised it. He’s made accept­able what was unac­cept­able.”

A sim­i­lar nor­mal­i­sa­tion may be under way in Ger­many, accord­ing to a 2013 study by the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail let­ters, emails and fax­es sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Cen­tral Coun­cil of Jews in Ger­many, Pro­fes­sor Moni­ka Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were writ­ten by edu­cat­ed, mid­dle-class Ger­mans, includ­ing pro­fes­sors, lawyers, priests and uni­ver­si­ty and sec­ondary school stu­dents. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and address­es – some­thing she felt few Ger­mans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

Almost every observ­er point­ed to the unpar­al­leled pow­er of unfil­tered social media to inflame and to mobilise. A stream of shock­ing images and Twit­ter hash­tags, includ­ing #Hitler­Was­Right, amount, Arfi said, almost to indoc­tri­na­tion. “The log­i­cal con­clu­sion, in fact, is rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion: on social media peo­ple self-select what they see, and what they see can be pure, unchecked pro­pa­gan­da. They may nev­er be con­front­ed with opin­ions that are not their own.”

Addi­tion­al report­ing by Josie Le Blond in Berlin​, Kim Will­sh­er in Paris, John Hoop­er in Rome and Ashifa Kas­sam in Madrid

• This arti­cle was amend­ed on Fri­day 8 August to cor­rect the name of the Madrid Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty leader David Hatch­well. This arti­cle was fur­ther amend­ed to cor­rect the num­bers of Jews who left France for Israel in 2013.

Here’s a reminder that France is poten­tial­ly an elec­tion away from an FN-run gov­ern­ment:

The Guardian
Unprece­dent­ed in France: Front Nation­al’s Le Pen tops pres­i­den­tial poll for first time

Polls out in the past few days in France have shown far-right Front Nation­al leader Marine Le Pen top­ping a pres­i­den­tial poll for the first time. This mat­ters as sup­port­ers of main par­ties may no longer be dou­bling up to push out Front Nation­al. Mean­while, Pres­i­dent Hollande’s pop­u­lar­i­ty has hit an unprece­dent­ed low.

Alber­to Nardel­li
Mon­day 8 Sep­tem­ber 2014 07.14 EDT

An Ifop poll released by Le Figaro on Fri­day placed far-right Front Nation­al (FN) leader Marine Le Pen ahead of Pres­i­dent François Hol­lande in a hypo­thet­i­cal sec­ond round runoff. It is the first time the FN tops a pres­i­den­tial poll against one of France’s two main par­ties, the Social­ist Par­ty (PS) and the cen­tre-right Union for a Pop­u­lar Move­ment (UMP).

Ifop @Le_Figaro poll: Le Pen ahead in all I round sce­nar­ios, for the first time ahead against Hol­lande in II round pic.twitter.com/MXbUnl9l8e— Alber­to Nardel­li (@AlbertoNardelli) Sep­tem­ber 5, 2014

This poll comes off the back of May’s Euro­pean Par­lia­ment elec­tions where the FN, for the first time ever in a nation­wide vote, emerged as the largest par­ty with 25%.

The Le Pen poll mat­ters

France isn’t of course due a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion until 2017, and if a vote took place today, despite the UMP’s judi­cial chal­lenges and appar­ent inabil­i­ty in find­ing a new leader, Hol­lande would unlike­ly reach a sec­ond round.

This impor­tant caveat to one side, the Le Pen poll is sig­nif­i­cant. There has long been an unwrit­ten rule in French pol­i­tics: the sup­port­ers of the two main par­ties have his­tor­i­cal­ly coa­lesced against FN can­di­dates in sec­ond round votes. The clear­est exam­ple in 2002’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion when Jacques Chirac defeat­ed Jean-Marie Le Pen 82–18%.

Poll after poll this tac­it agree­ment appears to be com­ing less. This mat­ters. While as things stand a Le Pen pres­i­den­cy is unthink­able, the FN is mak­ing break­throughs that few would have pre­dict­ed. In local elec­tions held ear­li­er this year, the par­ty achieved its best result ever — despite run­ning in a frac­tion of the 36,680 munic­i­pal­i­ties, the FN won more than 1,500 coun­cil­lors and 12 cities, reached a record 229 sec­ond round runoffs (from less than 600 lists pre­sent­ed). Le Pen’s par­ty also made sig­nif­i­cant inroads into many larg­er cities, win­ning about 30% of the vote in Mar­seille.

In par­al­lel to the FN’s grow­ing sup­port, the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Pres­i­dent Hol­lande has reached a new record low. Less than 20% of vot­ers now approve of the pres­i­dent.

The pres­i­dent has been unable to get eco­nom­ic growth up and unem­ploy­ment down, a pledge on which he bet his pres­i­den­cy. Accord­ing to TNS polls, Hol­lande is the most unpop­u­lar pres­i­dent of the Fifth Repub­lic.

...

2017 is a ways away, so hope­ful­ly things will change before we see France go fas­cist. But with Hol­land’s deeply unpop­u­lar admin­is­tra­tion large­ly stuck with the euro­zone’s aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies and the UMP nev­er real­ly waver­ing from sup­port­ing aus­ter­i­ty either it’s unclear what’s going to pre­vent the con­tin­u­ing rise of the Nation­al Front in com­ing years. And, of course, the UMP’s uni­lat­er­al dis­card­ing of the “Repub­li­can Front” agree­ment to unite against fas­cism and increas­ing embrace of Nation­al Front poli­cies isn’t help­ing either:

France24
France’s ‘Repub­li­can Front’ in tat­ters as FN surges

Lat­est update : 2014-03-25
The decades-old unwrit­ten agree­ment between France’s right- and left-wing par­ties to keep the far-right Nation­al Front out of pow­er appears to have come to an end.

by Joseph BAMAT

Nation­al Front (FN) can­di­dates claimed his­toric gains in munic­i­pal elec­tions across France on Sun­day, and even before all the votes were tal­lied, there were renewed calls to forge a so-called “Repub­li­can Front” to keep the FN out of as many city coun­cils as pos­si­ble.

“Wher­ev­er the FN has a pos­si­bil­i­ty to win the sec­ond round of the elec­tions, all of the demo­c­ra­t­ic and repub­li­can forces have the duty to stop them,” French Prime Min­is­ter Jean-Marc Ayrault, a Social­ist, warned in a tele­vised speech on Sun­day evening.

How­ev­er, while alarm over the advance of the FN was raised, sup­port for the Repub­li­can Front among the main­stream right seems to be as weak as ever, and embar­go­ing the FN has become a divi­sive issue among mem­bers of the Union for a Pop­u­lar Move­ment (UMP).

A crazy idea

Nation­al Front Vice Pres­i­dent Louis Aliot hap­pi­ly announced on Sun­day that vot­ers “no longer lis­tened” to calls to form a Repub­li­can Front, but the pro­nounce­ment could just be wish­ful think­ing. With 34.20 per­cent sup­port, Aliot won the most votes on Sun­day in the south­ern city of Per­pig­nan, but stands to lose the sec­ond round if the main­stream can­di­dates agree to unite forces.

The incum­bent UMP may­or Jean-Marc Pujol, who fin­ished in sec­ond place with 30.57 per­cent, has called on the Social­ist can­di­date to respect the Repub­li­can Front and pull out of the three-way runoff. If left-lean­ing vot­ers in Per­pig­nan decide to shift their sup­port behind Pujol, it is like­ly he will defeat the FN’s Aliot in the end.

But while the main oppo­si­tion UMP par­ty stands to win Per­pig­nan and a hand­ful of oth­er cities thanks to a new Repub­li­can Front, oth­er right-wing lead­ers are unwill­ing to endorse the old anti-FN arrange­ment.

UMP chief Jean-François Copé said on Mon­day that there will be no calls from par­ty lead­ers to vote for a Social­ist may­oral hope­ful in order to keep an FN can­di­date from office. He also assured his par­ty would seek no deals with the far-right, anti-immi­gra­tion par­ty.

The UMP’s “nei­ther FN, nor Social­ist” posi­tion was first imple­ment­ed dur­ing leg­isla­tive elec­tions in June 2012. It appears to be the party’s new elec­tion mantra.

Fur­ther­more, the most con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers with­in the UMP have said the Repub­li­can Front needs to be buried fol­low­ing Sunday’s results.

Law­mak­er Hen­ri Guaino called it a “crazy idea” on Mon­day, adding that it was wrong “not to lis­ten” to vot­ers who cast a bal­lot for the Nation­al Front. Geof­frey Didi­er, a UMP region­al coun­cil­man from the Paris region, was more cat­e­gor­i­cal: “There is no Repub­li­can Front, it was smashed to bits a long time ago.”

...

Cross­ing the red line

Accord­ing to Olivi­er Rouquan, a French polit­i­cal ana­lyst, the Repub­li­can Front was sig­nif­i­cant­ly weak­ened dur­ing for­mer pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy’s 2007–2012 man­date.

“The Sarkozy years were clear­ly marked by a change in polit­i­cal dis­course. Sarkozy warmed up to the FN’s ideas, he some­times adopt­ed them out­right,” not­ed Rouquan. “Since UMP lead­ers adopt­ed posi­tions sim­i­lar to those of the FN, it fol­lows that the party’s sym­pa­this­ers have been tempt­ed to cross that red line.”

At the same time, Marine Le Pen, who suc­ceed­ed her father as the FN’s pres­i­dent in 2011, has gone to great lengths to soft­en the party’s image among vot­ers. While con­tin­u­ing to rage against alleged ram­pant immi­gra­tion, she has shunned the anti-Semit­ic speech her father was infa­mous for.

So while the UMP has moved far­ther to the right, the FN itself has knocked down some of the bar­ri­ers that once sep­a­rat­ed it from the main­stream right. Increas­ing­ly, they appear to be com­pet­ing for the same con­stituents.

For Rouquon, the UMP’s hes­i­ta­tion between safe­guard­ing and for­get­ting the Repub­li­can Front is no small elec­toral dilem­ma, but cuts to the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion about the party’s future.

“The elec­tion results and fore­casts appear to indi­cate that the FN will become increas­ing­ly present at dif­fer­ent lev­els of gov­ern­ment, and the UMP will have to deal with that real­i­ty,” Rouquan said. “The major chal­lenge of the UMP in the com­ing years will be decid­ing if it will final­ly forge ties with the Nation­al Front.”

“The major chal­lenge of the UMP in the com­ing years will be decid­ing if it will final­ly forge ties with the Nation­al Front.”

Mis­sion accom­plished:

France’s far-right grabs first ever Sen­ate seats

Sep­tem­ber 28, 2014 2:22 PM

PARIS (Reuters) — The far-right Nation­al Front won its first ever seats in France’s upper house of par­lia­ment on Sun­day, as Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hol­lan­de’s Social­ist par­ty lost its Sen­ate major­i­ty.

The left still con­trols the low­er house, which is the dom­i­nant leg­isla­tive body in France, but Sun­day’s bal­lot under­lined the unpop­u­lar­i­ty of the pres­i­dent and the con­tin­ued rise of the anti-immi­gra­tion, anti-euro Nation­al Front.

The par­ty, led by Marine Le Pen, took two seats in the august Sen­ate, fol­low­ing on from its sur­prise vic­to­ry in Euro­pean par­lia­men­tary elec­tions in May and its strong show­ing in munic­i­pal elec­tions in March.

“These results are beyond what we hoped for,” said Le Pen. “Each day that pass­es, our ideas are increas­ing­ly being adopt­ed by the French peo­ple... We have great poten­tial.”

Half of the Sen­ate’s 348 seats were up for grabs on Sun­day, with only some 158,000 peo­ple, the vast major­i­ty local coun­cil­lors, able to vote.

Ear­ly results showed that the main oppo­si­tion par­ty, the UMP, and the cen­ter-right UDI par­ty took at least 20 seats from the left, which had a Sen­ate major­i­ty of just six head­ing into the elec­tion. Final results were due lat­er on Sun­day.

“There is a com­plete rejec­tion of Social­ist poli­cies,” UMP sen­a­tor Roger Karoutchi told BFM TV.

Hol­lan­de’s pop­u­lar­i­ty fell to a record low this month, with only 13 per­cent of those sur­veyed say­ing they were sat­is­fied with the per­for­mance of pres­i­dent, who has strug­gled to revive the stag­nant econ­o­my.

...

“There is a com­plete rejec­tion of Social­ist poli­cies,” UMP sen­a­tor Roger Karoutchi told BFM TV. LOL! Yes, while it’s true that the aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies France’s pub­lic is rail­ing against have indeed been imple­ment­ed by Hol­lan­de’s Social­ist gov­ern­ment, it’s worth keep­ing those Berlin-man­dat­ed “Social­ist” aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies were part of Nicholas Sarkozy’s elec­toral plat­form. Sarkozy lost and yet he won. It helps to have friends in high places.

While big­otry is always dis­turb­ing, it’s the mid­dle class big­ots that are often the most dis­ap­point­ing:

CBS News
Anti-Semi­tism spike in Ger­many rais­ing old fears

By Mark Phillips

Octo­ber 3, 2014, 7:44 PM

FRANKFURT — Armed guards have been post­ed at syn­a­gogues through­out Ger­many for the start of Yom Kip­pur, the Day of Atone­ment. Anti-Semi­tism is once again on the rise in Europe, espe­cial­ly in Ger­many.

The ten­sions have been build­ing in Ger­many since demon­stra­tions against last sum­mer’s Gaza war exposed a clear anti-Jew­ish sen­ti­ment. Chants were heard that echoed from Ger­many’s dark­est times.

“Jew, Jew! Cow­ard­ly pig,” they said.

“We haven’t had this dimen­sion at all before,” said Deit­er Grau­mann, pres­i­dent of the Cen­tral Coun­cil of Jews in Ger­many. “When you imag­ine in Ger­man streets, peo­ple here chant­i­ng — a roar­ing mob chant­i­ng — Jews to be gassed, to be slaugh­tered, to be burned.”

He said he does­n’t quite believe the sen­ti­ments have spiked because of pas­sions that were stirred up by the events in Gaza.

“It is cit­ed as a rea­son for that but I don’t think it’s a rea­son,” Grau­mann said. “It’s a pre­text. It’s an occa­sion to let it out.”

Much more of the incen­di­ary street rhetoric has come from Ger­man Mus­lims, many of whom are recent immi­grants.

But Moni­ka Schwartz Friesel, of Berlin’s Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, has stud­ied thou­sands of anti-Semit­ic emails sent to Ger­man-Jew­ish insti­tu­tions and made a dis­turb­ing dis­cov­ery.

“We saw that more than 60 per­cent of the writ­ers, who clear­ly evoke anti-Semit­ic stereo­types, come from the mid­dle of soci­ety and many of them are high­ly edu­cat­ed,” she said.

...

In relat­ed news...

Ger­man par­ty expelling offi­cial over anti-Semi­tism
Sep. 29, 2014 7:10 AM EDT

BERLIN (AP) — A new Ger­man par­ty that recent­ly won seats in sev­er­al region­al leg­is­la­tures is mov­ing to expel an offi­cial accused of post­ing an anti-Semit­ic car­toon on his Face­book page.

The Alter­na­tive for Ger­many, or AfD, par­ty’s branch in east­ern Bran­den­burg state said Mon­day it decid­ed to start expul­sion pro­ceed­ings against Jan-Ulrich Weiss.

He already was exclud­ed from the par­ty’s new­ly elect­ed 11-mem­ber cau­cus in the state leg­is­la­ture, with region­al AfD leader Alexan­der Gauland accus­ing Weiss of post­ing a car­i­ca­ture in the style of Nazi news­pa­per “Der Stuer­mer.”

AfD, launched last year, ini­tial­ly focused on an anti-euro stance and has expand­ed its plat­form to appeal to protest vot­ers with tough talk on crime and immi­gra­tion. Some oppo­nents accuse of it of doing too lit­tle to dis­tance itself from far-right sym­pa­thiz­ers.

From the “suck but could be worse” news depart­ment: The UMP came out on top in France’s local elec­tions. The Nation­al Front, which was expect­ed to do well, came in a close sec­ond, with the Social­ists com­ing in a dis­tant third. Sucks, but could be worse!

Bloomberge News
Sarkozy’s UMP Tops French Local Vote With Le Pen’s Gains Capped

by Gre­go­ry Vis­cusi and Mark Deen
4:09 PM CDT March 22, 2015

(Bloomberg) — For­mer Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy’s UMP par­ty won the most votes in the first round of French local elec­tions on Sun­day, as a high­er-than-antic­i­pat­ed turnout denied the anti-euro Nation­al Front an expect­ed first place.

The UMP took 29.7 per­cent in the first round, accord­ing to exit polls by Ifop, with Marine Le Pen’s Nation­al Front on 26.4 per­cent, and Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hollande’s Social­ist Par­ty at 20.9 per­cent. CSA, anoth­er polling com­pa­ny, had sim­i­lar pre­dic­tions. Offi­cial results will be announced today by the Inte­ri­or Min­istry.

Pre-elec­tion polls had shown the UMP and Nation­al Front run­ning neck-and-neck.

“This first round shows the French people’s pro­found desire for clear change,” Sarkozy said in a tele­vised state­ment short­ly after polls closed. “To all those who vot­ed for the Nation­al Front, I say that we hear their exas­per­a­tion, but this par­ty, which has the same eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy as the extreme left, does not rep­re­sent an alter­na­tive.”

Nine­ty-eight of France’s 101 “depart­ments” vot­ed to select 4,108 rep­re­sen­ta­tives to serve six-year terms on coun­cils, which have respon­si­bil­i­ty for local trans­port and some health and edu­ca­tion spend­ing. Vot­ing took place in 2,054 “can­tons,” with each select­ing one man and one woman. Can­tons where no one won a major­i­ty with hold run-offs next Sun­day.
Gov­ern­ment Sanc­tioned

Fred­er­ic Dabi, deputy direc­tor gen­er­al of Ifop, said on i‑Tele tele­vi­sion that the Social­ists and their allies, who cur­rent­ly con­trol 61 of the country’s depart­ments, will prob­a­bly be left with around 20 after the sec­ond round. The UMP and its allies will con­trol almost all the oth­ers. He said it was too ear­ly to judge whether the Nation­al Front will win its first ever depart­ments.

“The rever­sal for the left will be very very big.” Dabi said. “This is a vote that sanc­tions the gov­ern­ment.”

An Opin­ion­Way poll released March 19 said that after the sec­ond round the UMP would run 66 depart­ments, the left would hold on to 20, and the rest were too close to call or would pro­duce no major­i­ty. The poll ques­tioned 2,274 peo­ple.

About 51 per­cent of the French went to polls Sun­day, where­as pre-elec­tion polls had said less than half would vote. Prime Min­is­ter Manuel Valls had repeat­ed­ly said dur­ing the week that a first place fin­ish for the Nation­al Front would be a dis­as­ter for France’s image.

‘Hon­or­able Score’

Both Sarkozy and Valls called for a greater turnout in the sec­ond round.

In run-offs between Nation­al Front and Social­ist can­di­dates, Sarkozy said he won’t tell his sup­port­ers how to vote. Valls said Social­ist vot­ers should vote against Nation­al Front can­di­dates, even where left­ist can­di­dates don’t make the sec­ond round.

“Every­where, put up bar­ri­ers against the Nation­al Front,” Social­ist Party’s first sec­re­tary Jean-Christophe Cam­badelis said in tele­vised com­ments after the vote.

The poor result for the Social­ists was expect­ed with an econ­o­my that has bare­ly grown in three years and near-record job­less­ness. Valls called it an “hon­or­able score.”

Com­bined with far-left and ecol­o­gist par­ties, the Social­ists took 34.7 per­cent, Ifop said. Com­bined with cen­trist allies, the UMP took 37.5 per­cent, putting it in a stronger posi­tion for the sec­ond round.

...

“This first round shows the French people’s pro­found desire for clear change,” Sarkozy said in a tele­vised state­ment short­ly after polls closed. “To all those who vot­ed for the Nation­al Front, I say that we hear their exas­per­a­tion, but this par­ty, which has the same eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy as the extreme left, does not rep­re­sent an alter­na­tive.”

Enjoy your ‘clear change’, France.

A Hun­gar­i­an cam­er­a­woman recent­ly became part of the sto­ry she was film­ing when she was caught by anoth­er cam­era­man trip­ping and kick­ing Syr­i­an refugees as they were flee­ing a refugee. It turns out she worked for a Job­bik-run TV net­work:

The Tele­graph
Hun­gar­i­an TV cam­er­a­woman fired for trip­ping Syr­i­an migrants
Petra Laz­lo, work­ing for local TV sta­tion N1TV, run by the anti-immi­gra­tion far-Right Job­bik par­ty, caught on cam­era kick­ing refugees flee­ing a camp

By Josie Ensor, Video source: @Stephan Richter

9:22PM BST 08 Sep 2015

A Hun­gar­i­an cam­er­a­woman has been fired after being filmed delib­er­ate­ly trip­ping up a Syr­i­an refugee car­ry­ing a child as they ran away from police near the Ser­bian bor­der.

Petra Laz­lo, work­ing for local TV sta­tion N1TV, which is run by the anti-immi­gra­tion far-Right Job­bik par­ty, was caught on cam­era kick­ing refugees flee­ing a camp, includ­ing a young girl.

Anoth­er cam­era­man cap­tured the moment Ms Laz­lo films the refugees run­ning away from charg­ing police offi­cers at the bor­der vil­lage of Roszke before stick­ing her leg out as a father car­ry­ing his son runs past, caus­ing them both to fall to the ground.

...

The sta­tion issued a state­ment on Tues­day, say­ing: “The N1TV col­leagues today behaved unac­cept­ably in Roszke col­lec­tion point. Our work­ing rela­tion­ship with the cam­er­a­woman has end­ed. The case was con­sid­ered closed our part.”

Sev­er­al hun­dred migrants broke through police lines at the tense main bor­der cross­ing with Ser­bia on Tues­day.

The migrants were part of a group of 1,500 peo­ple who had been wait­ing for hours at a refugee col­lec­tion point near the Roszke cross­ing, the first stop before peo­ple are brought to a reg­is­tra­tion camp.

There no short­age of sym­bol­ism there! A nei­ther, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is there a short­age of nations across Europe where sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments are either already the dom­i­nant sen­ti­ment or grow­ing:

The New York Times
Migrant Influx May Give Europe’s Far Right a Lift

By STEVEN ERLANGER and ALISON SMALE
SEPT. 7, 2015

LONDON — As Europe basks in good feel­ings over its gen­eros­i­ty to thou­sands of migrants and asy­lum seek­ers last week­end, crit­i­cal voic­es from the polit­i­cal right and far right are poised to become among the biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the con­tin­u­ing flow.

Par­ties that have been grow­ing in oppo­si­tion to immi­gra­tion, the influ­ence of Islam and the Euro­pean Union seized on the deci­sion by Aus­tria and Ger­many to wel­come the migrants, point­ing out the dif­fi­cul­ty of now shut­ting the migrant tap.

And after the sham­bles of Greece, the image of a Euro­pean Union seem­ing­ly inca­pable of defend­ing its bor­ders, while try­ing to impose manda­to­ry quo­tas on nations for accept­ing refugees, fit Euroskep­tics’ por­tray­al of Brus­sels as a Euro­pean Union cap­i­tal at once incom­pe­tent and dom­i­neer­ing.

“Ger­many, Swe­den, and Aus­tria deserve great cred­it for their will­ing­ness to accept refugees, but else­where on the Con­ti­nent the reac­tion ranges from pas­siv­i­ty to out­right hos­til­i­ty,” said Michael Haltzel, a vis­it­ing senior fel­low at the Finnish Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al Affairs who advised Joseph R. Biden Jr., now vice pres­i­dent, when he served in the Sen­ate. “There is a con­sid­er­able dan­ger of over­load. And I fear that the polit­i­cal ben­e­fi­cia­ries in many coun­tries will be right-wing ultra­na­tion­al­ists.”

Carl Bildt, Sweden’s for­mer for­eign min­is­ter, expressed some of the anx­i­ety felt by gov­ern­ing par­ties when he said that “at the end of the day, every coun­try is ner­vous” about this large group of new migrants, “though some pre­tend not to be.”

Right now “there is a ten­den­cy to blame every­one else,” he said, “but this will be a chal­lenge to every coun­try.”

The process of inte­gra­tion into a West­ern soci­ety is dif­fi­cult and takes time, Mr. Bildt said. “It’s far more than pro­vid­ing the first tent.”

Even in Swe­den, he not­ed, which has been the Euro­pean coun­try most open to Syr­i­an refugees and asy­lum seek­ers, the anti-immi­gra­tion, anti-Euro­pean Union Swe­den Democ­rats are now ahead of the two largest par­ties in the opin­ion polls with about 25 per­cent, after hav­ing won a record 12.9 per­cent of the vote in last September’s elec­tions.

“It’s a tremen­dous break­through for us,” Tom­my Nils­son, par­ty man­ag­er for south­ern Swe­den, told the Dai­ly Tele­graph. “There’s too much immi­gra­tion and too many beg­gars from East­ern Europe. Peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that this is a seri­ous prob­lem for Swe­den.”

The new right­ist gov­ern­ment in Den­mark has tak­en out adver­tise­ments in the Lebanese press warn­ing refugees not to come, that the gov­ern­ment has tough­ened immi­gra­tion laws and cut ben­e­fits.

In France, in a speech on Sun­day to her Nation­al Front par­ty, which warns about Islam, immi­gra­tion and a pow­er­ful Ger­man-dom­i­nat­ed Brus­sels, Marine Le Pen accused Ger­many of open­ing its doors to refugees to exploit them for cheap labor, while impos­ing its immi­gra­tion poli­cies on its neigh­bors.

...

The Syr­i­an civ­il war is now in its fifth year, and the num­bers are stag­ger­ing. More than four mil­lion Syr­i­ans have fled the coun­try and are reg­is­tered as refugees, while anoth­er 6.5 mil­lion are inter­nal­ly dis­placed, accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees. There are more than 1.9 mil­lion Syr­i­an refugees in Turkey alone, anoth­er 1.1 mil­lion in Lebanon and more than 629,000 in Jor­dan.

Europe can­not take them all.

In Ger­many, Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel voiced some­thing close to pride on Mon­day that Ger­many is now seen as a desir­able and wel­com­ing des­ti­na­tion for refugees. “That is some­thing very valu­able, if you look at our his­to­ry,” she said.

But many fear a back­lash. She spoke only hours after anoth­er arson attack — the lat­est in more than 200 attacks on asy­lum seek­ers or their shel­ters this year in Ger­many. Six peo­ple were injured when a fire broke out at 2 a.m. in a facil­i­ty hous­ing 84 peo­ple in the pret­ty south Ger­man town of Rot­ten­burg am Neckar.

A day ear­li­er, even the part­ners in Ms. Merkel’s cen­ter-right bloc, the Chris­t­ian Social Union, open­ly crit­i­cized her for allow­ing in tens of thou­sands of migrants from Hun­gary and Aus­tria. That “sends the wrong sig­nal to indi­vid­ual coun­tries,” said Ger­da Has­selfeldt, the party’s leader in the fed­er­al Par­lia­ment.

The C.S.U. wel­comed a gov­ern­ment deci­sion late Sun­day to reduce cash allowances for refugees as a vic­to­ry for their hard­er line. “There will be less incen­tive in the future for unfound­ed appli­ca­tions for asy­lum,” said the party’s gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Andreas Scheuer.

Sig­mar Gabriel, the leader of the Social Democ­rats and vice chan­cel­lor, acknowl­edged that beyond the cheers and hand­outs of choco­lates and toys, there were what he called very real wor­ries, fears and con­flicts.

“We have to be real­is­tic about this from the start to avoid dis­ap­point­ments,” he said. “We’ll man­age to take in 800,000 this year, accom­mo­date and inte­grate them, too. But it is also clear for every­one that that can­not repeat every year.”

Ger­many so far has lit­tle trou­ble with far-right polit­i­cal par­ties. The nation­al­ist Alter­na­tive for Ger­many has split; the anti-immi­grant march­es have also died down. But neo-Nazis open­ly bat­tled police at an asy­lum facil­i­ty at Hei­de­nau, near Dres­den, last month.

In Aus­tria, arson attacks are rare. But a strong pop­ulist par­ty, the right-wing Free­dom Par­ty, has made notice­able gains in the months of refugee cri­sis.

Aus­tria expects the same pro­por­tion of asy­lum appli­ca­tions, 1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, as Ger­many. In bell­wether elec­tions in Vien­na in Octo­ber, the Free­dom Par­ty now threat­ens to out­per­form the Social Democ­rats, mak­ing inroads par­tic­u­lar­ly among low­er class­es with stri­dent anti-Mus­lim rhetoric.

Some observers believe the sym­pa­thy shown to refugees may have tipped the scales away from the right­ists.

“These feel­ings are tran­si­to­ry, of course, but they won’t fade with­out leav­ing some trace,” said Georg Hoff­mann-Osten­hof, a colum­nist for the cen­ter-left week­ly Pro­fil.

Aus­tri­ans have tra­di­tion­al­ly wel­comed migrants and felt good doing so this week­end, par­tic­u­lar­ly since almost none of the arriv­ing thou­sands planned to stay, he said. “For us, this feel­ing of doing good has come almost for free — at least for the time being.”

The issue is sen­si­tive in Britain, too, which last year had net immi­gra­tion of 330,000 peo­ple and where Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is under pres­sure from his own par­ty and from the U.K. Inde­pen­dence Par­ty to bring down the num­bers or with­draw from the Euro­pean Union.

Under pub­lic pres­sure, Mr. Cameron has now agreed to take up to 20,000 Syr­i­an refugees from camps in the region over the next five years as a human­i­tar­i­an ges­ture, and will increase to 1 bil­lion pounds a year human­i­tar­i­an aid to Syr­ia.

Mr. Cameron has promised a ref­er­en­dum on con­tin­ued British mem­ber­ship in the Euro­pean Union by the end of 2017, but pos­si­bly to take place next autumn. But what appears to be a Euro­pean mess and more immi­gra­tion has been a boon for those opposed to con­tin­ued British mem­ber­ship.

Mr. Bildt, of Swe­den, says that in the long run, the Euro­pean Union will come up with some bet­ter solu­tions. “But we have to find a coher­ent Euro­pean response. Con­trol­ling the out­er bor­der of Schen­gen is vital to the sys­tem,” he said, refer­ring to the pass­port-free zone with­in Europe. “It is uncom­fort­able but nec­es­sary, and it needs to be done.”

“But we have to find a coher­ent Euro­pean response. Con­trol­ling the out­er bor­der of Schen­gen is vital to the system....It is uncom­fort­able but nec­es­sary, and it needs to be done.”
It looks like Don­ald Trump has a back up option if he does­n’t win the GOP pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion. At least the poten­tial appeal is obvi­ous. Sure, he’d have to immi­grate to a Europe coun­try before run­ning for office there but that prob­a­bly would­n’t be a prob­lem.

So, uh, accord­ing to a recent poll of 1,000 French adults, 40% would sup­port a dic­ta­tor and two thirds want unelect­ed tech­nocrats

Newsweek
Poll: 40% of French Would Wel­come Author­i­tar­i­an Lead­er­ship

By Damien Sharkov
11/3/15 at 3:29 PM

Democ­ra­cy may have had its day in La République accord­ing to a new poll that shows 40 per­cent of French peo­ple believe that an author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment could be the solu­tion to the coun­try’s prob­lems. The major­i­ty of respon­dents also said they would agree to be gov­erned by unelect­ed experts and tech­nocrats, as opposed to career politi­cians.

The study, com­mis­sioned by French news site Atlanti­co and con­duct­ed by one of the coun­try’s major poll­sters Ifop, inter­viewed 1,000 French adults, ask­ing them whether or not they agreed with sev­er­al sweep­ing state­ments con­cern­ing nation­al pol­i­tics.

The respon­dents, who were divid­ed between sup­port­ers of France’s rul­ing Social­ist Par­ty, oth­er left-wing move­ments, the main oppo­si­tion Repub­li­can par­ty and the far-right, resur­gent Nation­al Front were asked how far they agreed with the fol­low­ing state­ment:

“Some peo­ple think that France should under­go deep reforms to avoid decline but not a sin­gle politi­cian elect­ed by uni­ver­sal major­i­ty vote has the courage to make good on these reforms; and in this respect the future direc­tion of the coun­try has to be entrust­ed to an author­i­tar­i­an polit­i­cal pow­er, which may even weak­en the demo­c­ra­t­ic meth­ods of con­trol [of the peo­ple] over the gov­ern­ment.”

40 per­cent of all respon­dents either “entire­ly agreed” or “some­what agreed” with this.

The author­i­tar­i­an idea appeared most pop­u­lar with Nation­al Front vot­ers, 60 per­cent of whom endorsed the idea. Sup­port­ers of Nico­las Sarkozy’s Repub­li­cans were the sec­ond biggest group to back the state­ment, with 47 per­cent, while the rul­ing Social­ist Par­ty’s sup­port­ers were slight­ly more reserved about the idea—only 33 per­cent of the them agreed.

Anoth­er con­tro­ver­sial state­ment, ask­ing if respon­dents agreed that “unelect­ed experts who would put in place nec­es­sary but unpop­u­lar reforms” should gov­ern the coun­try instead of elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives, appealed to the major­i­ty, with 67 per­cent of respon­dents agree­ing.

Con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can sup­port­ers expressed the most enthu­si­asm about this idea as 80 per­cent of them agreed with it. 76 per­cent of Nation­al Front sup­port­ers also agreed, while only 54 per­cent of the rul­ing Social­ist Par­ty’s elec­torate agreed with the state­ment.

...

The over­whelm­ing sup­port of author­i­tar­i­an­ism and unelect­ed tech­nocrats among the right-wing is cer­tain­ly dis­turb­ing, albeit not espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing, but a third of Social­ist Par­ty sup­port­ers also sup­port the idea?! And 54 per­cent of the Social­ists (and 80 per­cent of Con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans) agree with the idea that “unelect­ed experts who would put in place nec­es­sary but unpop­u­lar reforms”?! Wow. So the col­lec­tive response to the frus­tra­tions that have been build­ing for years in France is to basi­cal­ly hand over pow­er to its own ver­sion The Troi­ka. And this is the same nation that hand­ed the Nation­al Front, a par­ty with a plat­form to take France out of the euro­zone, a major­i­ty of the votes in the 2014 EU par­lia­men­tary elec­tions as part of a revolt against aus­ter­i­ty.

Of course, the Nation­al Fron­t’s surge in sup­port isn’t just an anti-aus­ter­i­ty vote. It’s an anti-immi­grants/refugees vote and it’s that xeno­pho­bia that’s prob­a­bly dri­ving the sup­port for author­i­tar­i­an­ism more than any­thing else giv­en Europe’s col­lec­tive refugee freak out. So it looks like a grow­ing num­ber of French vot­ers want to have France leave the euro­zone so the coun­try can get its own dic­ta­tor that will pre­sum­ably appoint tech­nocrats to “put in place nec­es­sary but unpop­u­lar reforms” involv­ing abus­ing or expelling immi­grants. And they’ll put a par­ty run by the Le Pens in pow­er to do it. It’s always hard to say just how awful the blow­back on French soci­ety is going to be when the pop­u­la­tion col­lec­tive­ly embraces the Dark Side, but when the Le Pens are your path to nation­al renew­al the blow­back isn’t going to be pret­ty.

Score anoth­er vic­to­ry for the reform­ing pow­er of aus­ter­i­ty

The New York Times
The Con­science of a Lib­er­al

That 30s Show

Paul Krug­man
Decem­ber 7, 2015 7:09 am

A few years ago de Brom­head, Eichen­green, and O’Rourke looked at the deter­mi­nants of right-wing extrem­ism in the 1930s. They found that eco­nom­ic fac­tors mat­tered a lot; specif­i­cal­ly,

what mat­tered was not the cur­rent growth of the econ­o­my but cumu­la­tive growth or, more to the point, the depth of the cumu­la­tive reces­sion. One year of con­trac­tion was not enough to sig­nif­i­cant­ly boost extrem­ism, in oth­er words, but a depres­sion that per­sist­ed for years was.

How’s Europe doing on that basis?

...

And now the Nation­al Front has scored a first-place fin­ish in region­al elec­tions, and will prob­a­bly take a cou­ple of regions in the sec­ond round. Eco­nom­ics isn’t the only fac­tor; immi­gra­tion, refugees, and ter­ror­ism play into the mix. But Europe’s under­per­for­mance is slow­ly erod­ing the legit­i­ma­cy, not just of the Euro­pean project, but of the open soci­ety itself.

Yes, the Nation­al Front just scored first in region­al elec­tions and is poised for sim­i­lar results in the next round. And as Krug­man points, eco­nom­ics isn’t the only fac­tor dri­ving the Nation­al Front to vic­to­ry, but it’s hard to see how the ongo­ing aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies that have now dri­ven France’s unem­ploy­ment rate above the euro­zone aver­age for the first time since 2007 haven’t played a sig­nif­i­cant role, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing it was France’s poor­est regions that just vot­ed the Nation­al Front into pow­er.

So it was quite a vic­to­ry for the Nation­al Front. But as we can see below, for Nico­las Sarkozy’s con­ser­v­a­tive “Les Repub­li­cains”, the threat of a big vic­to­ry for the Nation­al Front does­n’t actu­al­ly seem to be seen as much a defeat by Sarkozy and his par­ty. At least, that’s one way to inter­pret Sarkozy’s refusal to accept the Social­ists’ offer of a “repub­li­can bloc” (where the cen­ter-left and cen­ter-right strate­gi­cal­ly remove their can­di­dates from the bal­lot in an attempt to pool votes and pre­vent a far-right vic­to­ry). And much of the Nation­al Fron­t’s surge in sup­port is com­ing from Sarkozy’s tra­di­tion­al base of sup­port. It’s a reminder that France’s grow­ing accep­tance of the far-right prob­a­bly isn’t lim­it­ed to French vot­ers:

Politico.eu
5 take­aways on France’s region­al elec­tions

The Nation­al Front con­tin­ues to rise, the estab­lish­ment is in big trou­ble.
By

Pierre Bri­ançon

12/7/15, 12:18 AM CET

Updat­ed 12/7/15, 5:14 PM CET

The far-right Nation­al Front’s vic­to­ry in the first round of French region­al elec­tions on Sun­day will have an impact far beyond the com­po­si­tion of local gov­ern­ments and the shock it will have sent through the French polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment.

In every sin­gle Euro­pean cap­i­tal, politi­cians will pon­der the results and won­der how an anti-immi­gra­tion, anti-Euro­pean move­ment could become France’s first polit­i­cal par­ty. They will also wor­ry about what it means for Europe in a time of cri­sis — eco­nom­ic and exis­ten­tial.

The Nation­al Front may take over two, three or even more French regions after a sec­ond round of vot­ing on Decem­ber 13, but for many, the dam­age has been done.

1. Le Pen’s main­stream push pays off

Marine Le Pen, the Nation­al Front’s cur­rent leader and daugh­ter of the party’s founder Jean-Marie, is reap­ing the rewards for her strat­e­gy of pulling the par­ty away from the far-right fringes, rid­ding it of its extrem­ist stig­ma, and court­ing the dis­en­fran­chised work­ing class she says is being aban­doned by the main­stream polit­i­cal par­ties of both right and left.

She stands a good chance of win­ning and then run­ning the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, an area more pop­u­lous than 12 EU coun­tries. Her per­son­al vic­to­ry, win­ning more than 40 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote in an indus­tri­al area that was his­tor­i­cal­ly a strong­hold of the Com­mu­nist and Social­ist par­ties, shows how many vot­ers have drift­ed away from the rul­ing left, after sev­en years of eco­nom­ic cri­sis.

Le Pen’s niece, Mar­i­on Maréchal-Le Pen, who is seen as more con­ser­v­a­tive than her aunt, notably on social issues, did even bet­ter in the Provence region. Oth­er lead­ing can­di­dates also did bet­ter than expect­ed, show­ing that the par­ty has devel­oped a grass­roots fol­low­ing far beyond mere adhe­sion to Marine Le Pen her­self.

2. Left-right may have to join forces to stop Le Pen

The Social­ist par­ty decid­ed late Sun­day to with­draw its can­di­dates from the sec­ond round of vot­ing in regions where they had fin­ished third in the first round. It also called on vot­ers to back con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates in a week’s time in order to pre­vent the Nation­al Front from win­ning.

That is par­tic­u­lar­ly the case in the North, in Provence and in Alsace, where Le Pen’s close aide and a par­ty vice pres­i­dent, Flo­ri­an Philip­pot, came in first with 35 per­cent of the vote.

The Nation­al Front could still be defeat­ed in the sec­ond round if all or most Social­ist vot­ers decide to back the cen­ter-right. It would, how­ev­er, allow Le Pen to denounce, as she has long been doing, the main­stream par­ties for col­lud­ing to keep her out of pow­er.

By pulling its can­di­dates in the name of what has been dubbed a “Repub­li­can Front” against Le Pen, the Social­ists stand in stark con­trast to Nico­las Sarkozy, the con­ser­v­a­tive oppo­si­tion leader. Ear­li­er Sun­day, Sarkozy reject­ed such tac­tics and said he didn’t want his Les Répub­li­cain party’s can­di­dates to with­draw, or join forces with their Social­ist rivals.

As soon as the sec­ond round is over on Decem­ber 13, expect the blame game to begin on who is respon­si­ble for hand­ing over regions to the Le Pens.

3. Hol­lande and Sarkozy are both losers

Pres­i­dent François Hol­lande enjoyed a boost in pop­u­lar­i­ty in the wake of the Novem­ber 13 Paris attacks. But it mat­tered lit­tle on Sun­day.

The new empha­sis on secu­ri­ty ques­tions, with calls for a tougher stand on migrants and refugees, leaves Hol­lande exact­ly where he was before: an unpop­u­lar pres­i­dent who seems unable to find ways to address high unem­ploy­ment — which is now, for the first time, above the euro­zone aver­age.

The defeat is also a per­son­al one for Hol­lande, who when in oppo­si­tion five years ago led the Social­ist par­ty to a resound­ing vic­to­ry in local elec­tions, with his par­ty tak­ing over all but one of the country’s then 21 regions.

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But Hollande’s loss is not a win for his long-time rival Sarkozy. The for­mer pres­i­dent was also one of the day’s losers.

In many regions, long-time main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers desert­ed to Le Pen. That was the case in Provence, where Sarkozy ally Chris­t­ian Estrosi pulled less than 25 per­cent of the vote against Maréchal-Le Pen’s 42 per­cent.

Sarkozy’s strat­e­gy of tough talk­ing in a bid to com­pete with the Nation­al Front’s rhetoric didn’t con­vince many vot­ers.

4. Eyes on the 2017 prize

With 18 months to go before pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, the result of Sunday’s vote will be scru­ti­nized to assess the chances of poten­tial can­di­dates. But even if France has become a three-par­ty coun­try, it’s clear that a lot could hap­pen before May 2017.

The pre­lim­i­nary results on Sun­day night showed that par­ties from the left, includ­ing the Social­ists and their frac­tious allies such as the Greens, received around 35 per­cent of the vote. The main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives — Les Répub­li­cains and oth­ers — won between 30 and 32 per­cent, and the Front Nation­al won between 29 and 31 per­cent.

Social­ist lead­ers began to spin that the left is still France’s main polit­i­cal move­ment. That may show they were right to push for joint can­di­dates in the region­al elec­tions — but illus­trates their fail­ure in con­vinc­ing oth­er par­ties to join them.

The secret hope of both Social­ists and con­ser­v­a­tives is that the Nation­al Front fails at what it has nev­er done before: wield exec­u­tive pow­er in a large region.

The par­ty has no expe­ri­ence of man­age­ment, and vot­ers will get a chance to see them raise tax­es, man­age bud­gets, sit on school boards and inter­act with oth­er local and region­al gov­ern­ments.

See­ing the Nation­al Front at work, the oth­er par­ties hope, will open the eyes of vot­ers.

5. What hap­pens in France doesn’t stay in France

Marine Le Pen refrained from any men­tion of Europe or the ills she believes it brings on France in her vic­to­ry speech on Sun­day night. That may be the surest sign yet that she has already start­ed her pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. But her under­lings didn’t show the same restraint, and denounced Europe, the mar­ket econ­o­my and a “U.S. influ­enced for­eign pol­i­cy” as soon as the results were in.

It’s easy to see how the Nation­al Front’s self-pro­claimed sta­tus as the country’s main par­ty will have an impact on the gen­er­al debate about Europe — on top­ics such as the refugee cri­sis, the country’s eco­nom­ic prob­lems or the role of Ger­many in the EU, to name but a few.

Sarkozy’s speech­es already show the influ­ence of the Nation­al Front. He has been pick­ing up ideas straight from his far-right com­peti­tor: a tough on crime, tough on immi­gra­tion line, com­plete with the end of Schen­gen and the empha­sis on nation­al pow­ers as opposed to pan-EU ones.

Whether it influ­ences Hollande’s rhetoric and poli­cies remains to be seen. The most like­ly sce­nario is that any reform agen­da will be put on ice to avoid con­tro­ver­sy. Hol­lande will then have to rely on for­eign pol­i­cy, where there are few votes to be gained, and hope that an eco­nom­ic recov­ery might curb unem­ploy­ment before the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign starts in earnest.

Mean­while, France’s Euro­pean part­ners would be for­giv­en for think­ing that 18 months is a short time to turn around such a sit­u­a­tion.

Out goes France’s “Repub­li­can Front” against the far-right:

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The Nation­al Front could still be defeat­ed in the sec­ond round if all or most Social­ist vot­ers decide to back the cen­ter-right. It would, how­ev­er, allow Le Pen to denounce, as she has long been doing, the main­stream par­ties for col­lud­ing to keep her out of pow­er.

By pulling its can­di­dates in the name of what has been dubbed a “Repub­li­can Front” against Le Pen, the Social­ists stand in stark con­trast to Nico­las Sarkozy, the con­ser­v­a­tive oppo­si­tion leader. Ear­li­er Sun­day, Sarkozy reject­ed such tac­tics and said he didn’t want his Les Répub­li­cain party’s can­di­dates to with­draw, or join forces with their Social­ist rivals.

As soon as the sec­ond round is over on Decem­ber 13, expect the blame game to begin on who is respon­si­ble for hand­ing over regions to the Le Pens.
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And in comes ... all sorts of far-right ideas:

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It’s easy to see how the Nation­al Front’s self-pro­claimed sta­tus as the country’s main par­ty will have an impact on the gen­er­al debate about Europe — on top­ics such as the refugee cri­sis, the country’s eco­nom­ic prob­lems or the role of Ger­many in the EU, to name but a few.

Sarkozy’s speech­es already show the influ­ence of the Nation­al Front. He has been pick­ing up ideas straight from his far-right com­peti­tor: a tough on crime, tough on immi­gra­tion line, com­plete with the end of Schen­gen and the empha­sis on nation­al pow­ers as opposed to pan-EU ones.

Whether it influ­ences Hollande’s rhetoric and poli­cies remains to be seen. The most like­ly sce­nario is that any reform agen­da will be put on ice to avoid con­tro­ver­sy. Hol­lande will then have to rely on for­eign pol­i­cy, where there are few votes to be gained, and hope that an eco­nom­ic recov­ery might curb unem­ploy­ment before the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign starts in earnest.
...

Keep in mind that Sarkozy has been push­ing for rescind­ing the Schen­gen zone for over a year. Fol­low­ing the far-right’s lead isn’t any­thing new. But now that the Nation­al Front is the new unri­valed polit­i­cal trend­set­ter, it’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how many oth­er Nation­al Front-brand ideas start get­ting co-opt­ed by Sarkozy’s con­ser­v­a­tives, espe­cial­ly giv­en their refusal to form a “Repub­li­can Front” with the Social­ists. That sure sounds like the con­ser­v­a­tives want to win back their vot­ers who were flee­ing the the Nation­al Front by becom­ing more like them.
Still, also keep in mind that Sarkozy’s par­ty was on track to be the big win­ner last month, before the Paris attacks. And that’s why it’s going to be so inter­est­ing to see how close­ly Sarkozy’s con­ser­v­a­tives remold them­selves in the Nation­al Front mod­el. For instance, the Nation­al Front is explic­it­ly opposed to a num­ber of aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies, which is a big part of its appeal. Sarkozy’s “blood, sweat, and tears” aus­ter­i­ty plans of 2011, on the oth­er had, was sup­posed to bring the deficit down to 0% by 2016 pri­ma­ry by rais­ing tax­es on the poor and cut­ting ben­e­fits.

So we have a dynam­ic emerg­ing in France where the top two par­ties, the far-right Nation­al Front and almost-as-far-right “Les Repub­li­cans” are basi­cal­ly the top two forces in France, and as they become clos­er and clos­er on issues like immi­gra­tion and Schen­gen zone, it’s increas­ing­ly going to be eco­nom­ic poli­cies that con­trast the two par­ties in the minds of increas­ing­ly pissed off and xeno­pho­bic vot­ers. How’s that going to work out.

Check out which EU coun­try Poland’s new right-wing gov­ern­ment appears to be using as a role mod­el after tak­ing pow­er in Novem­ber: Vik­tor Orban’s Hun­gary

Vice News
Poland’s Right-Wing Gov­ern­ment Scares Europe by Going After the Media

By Ola Cichowlas
Jan­u­ary 9, 2016 | 4:05 pm

Poles took to the streets Sat­ur­day in freez­ing tem­per­a­tures to protest a new media law that allows the gov­ern­ment to take con­trol of state tele­vi­sion and radio broad­cast­ers, which many fear is a step toward an author­i­tar­i­an state. Crit­ics say the move by the Law and Jus­tice par­ty in pow­er infringes on civ­il lib­er­ties and threat­ens the young democ­ra­cy that emerged from the fall of Com­mu­nism on 1989.

Despite crit­i­cism from the Euro­pean Union and inter­na­tion­al media watch­dogs, Poland’s Pres­i­dent Andrzej Duda signed the law into effect. It comes just two weeks after Duda approved a bill legit­imiz­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s appoint­ment of its own judges to Poland’s high­est court, a move that pro­voked mass demon­stra­tions across the Cen­tral Euro­pean coun­try.

The attack on pub­lic media is the lat­est leg­is­la­tion rushed through since the con­ser­v­a­tive Law and Jus­tice par­ty (PiS) led by for­mer prime min­is­ter Jaroslaw Kaczyn­s­ki took office in Novem­ber. On Fri­day, the gov­ern­ment ignored EU warn­ings and appoint­ed a man who once described him­self as Kaczyn­ski’s “bull ter­ri­er,” Jacek Kurs­ki, as the new head of pub­lic TV.

The roots of the prob­lem lie deep. Twen­ty-sev­en years since the col­lapse of com­mu­nism, Poland has failed to cre­ate impar­tial state insti­tu­tions, enabling suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments to install loy­al­ists in top posi­tions. But many Poles fear Law and Jus­tice is going fur­ther.

Much of the anger has been direct­ed at the pres­i­dent for sign­ing suc­ces­sive con­tro­ver­sial laws into effect. Pro­test­ers accuse Duda of being whol­ly sub­or­di­nate to Kaczyn­s­ki and fail­ing in his duty to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion. Though Duda and Prime Min­is­ter Bea­ta Szyd­lo occu­py the high­est polit­i­cal posts, “the Chair­man” — as Kaczyn­s­ki is known in Poland — remains par­ty leader and the most pow­er­ful man in the coun­try.

In just over two months, PiS has tight­ened its grip on the secu­ri­ty ser­vices, the courts and the civ­il ser­vice. The gov­ern­ment made no secret that a purge in the state-owned media was next. Long advo­cat­ing their dis­taste for Pol­ish main­stream media, PiS min­is­ters do not shy away from express­ing what they think of crit­i­cal press cov­er­age.

“If the media imag­ine they will occu­py Poles by crit­i­ciz­ing our changes, then this has to be stopped,” said Ryszard Ter­lec­ki, head of the par­ty’s par­lia­men­tary cau­cus.

“Instead of cre­at­ing a media shield for the Pol­ish nation­al inter­est, jour­nal­ists often sym­pa­thize with neg­a­tive opin­ions about Poland,” claimed Elz­bi­eta Kruk, anoth­er PiS min­is­ter.

Tak­ing effect imme­di­ate­ly, the media law empow­ers the trea­sury min­is­ter to hire and fire broad­cast­ing direc­tors of pub­lic tele­vi­sion net­work TVP and pub­lic radio Pol­skie Radio. Pre­vi­ous­ly, a media super­vi­so­ry board made such appoint­ments. As par­lia­ment passed the law on New Year’s Eve, TVP man­agers resigned and Pol­ish Radio began protest­ing by air­ing the nation­al and EU anthems alter­na­tive­ly every hour.

Pol­ish pri­vate media com­pa­nies do not feel entire­ly safe either. PiS has spo­ken of “re-Pol­o­niz­ing” the coun­try’s press, com­plain­ing that Pol­ish out­lets have too many for­eign share­hold­ers. Kaczyn­s­ki blamed mount­ing crit­i­cism towards of his par­ty on Pol­ish media being “in Ger­man hands.”

In Decem­ber, Pres­i­dent Duda ignored protests at home and alerts from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion­er of Human Rights and signed a con­tro­ver­sial law lim­it­ing, in effect, the author­i­ty of the Pol­ish con­sti­tu­tion­al tri­bunal. This time, the EU warned of a vio­la­tion of “Euro­pean val­ues.”

The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, the union’s exec­u­tive arm, plans a debate on the sit­u­a­tion in Poland for next week. The Com­mis­sion is wor­ried that Poland is turn­ing into anoth­er Hun­gary, a fel­low EU mem­ber where Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán has estab­lished what he him­self calls an “illib­er­al democ­ra­cy”.

But Poland going rogue with­in the Union is a far more seri­ous affair. It has almost four times the pop­u­la­tion of Hun­gary and has grown into a major EU play­er, with a large, grow­ing econ­o­my and an impor­tant voice in the con­fronta­tion with Rus­sia since the war in east­ern Ukraine began. As the EU con­tin­ues to face crises that require coop­er­a­tion between mem­ber states, it is wary of see­ing a key play­er reject its ideals — espe­cial­ly a coun­try long seen in the West as a mod­el of tran­si­tion to democ­ra­cy from Com­mu­nism.

In a move that appeared to con­firm such fears, Orbán trav­elled to south­ern Poland this week to meet with Kaczyn­s­ki. In a meet­ing attend­ed by nei­ther Pres­i­dent Duda, Prime Min­is­ter Szyd­lo nor any press and that lat­er described by PiS min­is­ters as “pri­vate,” the two men — who have long been mutu­al admir­ers if not polit­i­cal allies — may well have spo­ken about deal­ing with pres­sure from Brus­sels.

Orbán faced sim­i­lar warn­ings in 2010, when he took con­trol of the courts and the media to cement his Fidesz par­ty’s posi­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly to the cur­rent light-speed pace of reform in Poland, Fidesz sought to imple­ment its most con­tro­ver­sial projects as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. PiS has passed a num­ber of bills in late-night votes, over protests by the oppo­si­tion that it did not even have time to famil­iar­ize itself with pro­posed leg­is­la­tion.

Orbán and Kaczyn­s­ki have sim­i­lar ide­o­log­i­cal nar­ra­tives of nation­al “recon­struc­tion” for their for­mer East­ern Bloc coun­tries, which joined the EU at the same time, in 2004. Both pop­ulist politi­cians dis­like the West­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues gen­er­al­ly labeled as “lib­er­al­ism” in Europe, and exploit his­tor­i­cal sen­si­tiv­i­ties to strength­en dis­trust of the EU. Since Orbán’s rise to pow­er, Hun­gary has become a mod­el for the Pol­ish right wing. As leader of the oppo­si­tion, Kaczyn­s­ki promised to “build a Budapest in War­saw.”

But unlike Orbán, who mor­phed from lib­er­al dis­si­dent into an author­i­tar­i­an leader, Kaczyn­ski’s beliefs have stayed con­stant. Even under Com­mu­nism, when he was fight­ing the regime, he dis­agreed with the lib­er­al wing of Sol­i­dar­i­ty, the under­ground trade union move­ment that suc­ceed­ed in over­throw­ing the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment. Instead, what he want­ed for Poland was a “Fourth Repub­lic” — the cur­rent one is the third — built on a con­ser­v­a­tive rev­o­lu­tion reshap­ing state insti­tu­tions accord­ing to a tra­di­tion­al­ist, as he called it, “moral code.”

...

“In a move that appeared to con­firm such fears, Orbán trav­elled to south­ern Poland this week to meet with Kaczyn­s­ki. In a meet­ing attend­ed by nei­ther Pres­i­dent Duda, Prime Min­is­ter Szyd­lo nor any press and that lat­er described by PiS min­is­ters as “pri­vate,” the two men — who have long been mutu­al admir­ers if not polit­i­cal allies — may well have spo­ken about deal­ing with pres­sure from Brus­sels.”

As you might imag­ine, the rest of the EU isn’t exact­ly thrilled by Poland sud­den veer­ing to the far-right, espe­cial­ly giv­en the EU’s sud­den veer­ing towards a new Cold War with Rus­sia:

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The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, the union’s exec­u­tive arm, plans a debate on the sit­u­a­tion in Poland for next week. The Com­mis­sion is wor­ried that Poland is turn­ing into anoth­er Hun­gary, a fel­low EU mem­ber where Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán has estab­lished what he him­self calls an “illib­er­al democ­ra­cy”.

But Poland going rogue with­in the Union is a far more seri­ous affair. It has almost four times the pop­u­la­tion of Hun­gary and has grown into a major EU play­er, with a large, grow­ing econ­o­my and an impor­tant voice in the con­fronta­tion with Rus­sia since the war in east­ern Ukraine began. As the EU con­tin­ues to face crises that require coop­er­a­tion between mem­ber states, it is wary of see­ing a key play­er reject its ideals — espe­cial­ly a coun­try long seen in the West as a mod­el of tran­si­tion to democ­ra­cy from Com­mu­nism.
...

So what’s the EU going to do now that Poland is demon­strat­ed a hunger for Hun­gar­i­an-style anti-EU nation­al­ist author­i­tar­i­an­ism? Well, an EU probe of Hun­gary’s new poli­cies is going to be part of the solu­tion. But as Jean-Claude Junck­er laments below, actu­al­ly penal­iz­ing Poland for any “seri­ous breach­es of EU val­ues” is sort of a “nuclear option”. So while there’s an EU probe of Poland tak­ing place, that’s prob­a­bly going to be the extent of it:

Reuters
EU takes on Poland, launch­es rights probe over court, media
BRUSSELS | By Gabriela Baczyn­s­ka and Jan Strupczews­ki

Wed Jan 13, 2016 12:14pm EST

The Euro­pean Union began an unprece­dent­ed inquiry on Wednes­day into whether Poland’s new con­ser­v­a­tive, Euroscep­tic gov­ern­ment has breached the EU’s demo­c­ra­t­ic stan­dards by tak­ing more con­trol of the judi­cia­ry and pub­lic media.

The first use of the EU exec­u­tive’s new Rule of Law Frame­work could in prin­ci­ple even­tu­al­ly lead to sanc­tions such as the sus­pen­sion of Poland’s vot­ing rights. But the main impact now may be to fur­ther sour rela­tions among EU mem­ber gov­ern­ments already strained by mul­ti­ple crises and mount­ing nation­al­ism.

“The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion does not wish to put into ques­tion any of the demo­c­ra­t­ic choic­es made by the Pol­ish peo­ple,” its deputy head, Frans Tim­mer­mans, wrote to the Pol­ish jus­tice min­is­ter in a let­ter on Wednes­day that was seen by Reuters.

“How­ev­er, the Euro­pean Union is found­ed on a com­mon set of val­ues ... which include in par­tic­u­lar the respect for the rule of law,” he added. “There can be no democ­ra­cy and respect for fun­da­men­tal rights with­out respect for the rule of law.”

The deci­sion, by con­sen­sus, fol­lowed intense debate at the week­ly meet­ing of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion.

Its 28 mem­bers, one from each EU state, weighed whether to con­tin­ue infor­mal talks with War­saw or launch a for­mal con­fronta­tion which might hard­en atti­tudes with­in Jaroslaw Kaczyn­ski’s rul­ing Law and Jus­tice (PiS) par­ty.

Com­mis­sion Pres­i­dent Jean-Claude Junck­er has said it should not be seen to be “bash­ing Poland” and offi­cials had indi­cat­ed the exec­u­tive might hold off on trig­ger­ing a for­mal review.

But diplo­mats said War­saw did itself no favors in Brus­sels by its com­bat­ive reac­tions ahead of the Com­mis­sion debate.

One key min­is­ter dis­missed crit­i­cism from EU pow­er­house Berlin as “sil­ly” and remind­ed Ger­mans of their World War Two crimes in Poland, while a pro-gov­ern­ment mag­a­zine depict­ed Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel as Hitler on its cov­er, and Junck­er as a Nazi gen­er­al.

Tim­mer­mans, who has respon­si­bil­i­ty for human rights on the exec­u­tive, pushed his col­leagues hard to launch the pro­ce­dure, sources famil­iar with the meet­ing told Reuters. The Dutch­man pro­mot­ed the mech­a­nism when he was for­eign min­is­ter in The Hague in 2014 as a response to crit­i­cism the EU had failed to curb author­i­tar­i­an mea­sures by Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban.

WARSAW UNFAZED

The Pol­ish gov­ern­ment played down the Com­mis­sion’s move. A spokesman called it “stan­dard pro­ce­dure” and a “fact-find­ing oper­a­tion by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion on the basis of some spec­u­la­tion that has sur­faced in west­ern Europe”.

Deputy For­eign Min­is­ter Kon­rad Szy­man­s­ki, vis­it­ing the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, said: “We are ready for dia­logue.”

For­eign Min­is­ter Witold Waszczykows­ki told Reuters he found Tim­mer­mans’ state­ments “con­tra­dic­to­ry”, how­ev­er, and Szy­man­s­ki said the EU risked “tak­ing sides” against PiS in Pol­ish pol­i­tics fol­low­ing its elec­tion vic­to­ry in Octo­ber.

Tim­mer­mans said the Rule of Law Frame­work would ush­er in a “struc­tured dia­logue” with War­saw. He and the Com­mis­sion would review Pol­ish respons­es by mid-March, after work­ing with the Coun­cil of Europe, the pan-Euro­pean human rights watch­dog.

Crit­ics accuse Kaczyn­s­ki and his par­ty ally Prime Min­is­ter Bea­ta Szyd­lo of rolling back judi­cial inde­pen­dence and free­dom of speech. Sup­port­ers say the gov­ern­ment is enti­tled to uphold Catholic and nation­al val­ues, inde­pen­dent of Brus­sels.

PiS has packed the con­sti­tu­tion­al court with its appointees and changed the court’s vot­ing sys­tem, curb­ing its abil­i­ty to cen­sure leg­is­la­tion. It has also passed a law giv­ing the gov­ern­ment direct con­trol over the appoint­ment of pub­lic media chiefs.

The pro­ce­dure pits the Com­mis­sion against by far the biggest of the ex-Com­mu­nist east­ern states that joined the EU a decade ago. Poland’s seat on the Com­mis­sion is held by a for­mer min­is­ter in the pre­vi­ous, pro-Euro­pean, cen­ter-right gov­ern­ment.

The row comes at a time when the Union may be more divid­ed than at any time in its six-decade his­to­ry, includ­ing between east and west and rich and poor states, over a vari­ety of major crises, includ­ing how to han­dle a big influx of Syr­i­an refugees.

Sev­er­al east­ern lead­ers have cit­ed pop­u­lar rejec­tion of Mus­lims to jus­ti­fy oppos­ing efforts by Brus­sels and Berlin to force all EU states to take in quo­tas of asy­lum-seek­ers.

Senior EU offi­cials have not­ed that, unlike Orban in Hun­gary, the Pol­ish gov­ern­ment has already faced sub­stan­tial domes­tic protest at its actions, includ­ing demon­stra­tions.

Penal­iz­ing a state for a “seri­ous breach of (EU) val­ues” under Arti­cle 7 of the EU treaty by, among oth­er things, sus­pend­ing its right to vote in EU coun­cils is a “nuclear option” that has so far nev­er been used. Junck­er says it is unlike­ly to be applied against Poland, which leaves the bloc with few means except per­sua­sion.

...

“Penal­iz­ing a state for a “seri­ous breach of (EU) val­ues” under Arti­cle 7 of the EU treaty by, among oth­er things, sus­pend­ing its right to vote in EU coun­cils is a “nuclear option” that has so far nev­er been used. Junck­er says it is unlike­ly to be applied against Poland, which leaves the bloc with few means except per­sua­sion.”

We’ll see what hap­pens with the probe, but one thing is clear: There’s prob­a­bly going to be a lot more probes of that nature in the future. Includ­ing the not too dis­tant future.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/secret-hitler-the-bluffing-game-for-people-who-hate-bluffing-games/

It’s also a bad sign for the future of a soci­ety when­ev­er the far-right starts surg­ing, as is the case with the sud­den surge of the AfD in Ger­many’s region­al elec­tions. But the future is actu­al­ly look­ing extra omi­nous in Ger­many fol­low­ing those results. Why? Because it was­n’t old­er vot­ers or pen­sion­ers ral­ly­ing around the AfD. It was the youth:

The Aus­tralian

Dis­il­lu­sioned Ger­man youth dri­ve rise of anti-immi­grant par­ty

The surge of Germany’s new pop­ulist anti-immi­grant par­ty has been fuelled by thou­sands of young vot­ers, many of whom have nev­er cast a bal­lot before, accord­ing to a research insti­tute in Berlin.

David Char­ter
March 16, 2016 11:00AM

In a wor­ry­ing trend for the estab­lished par­ties, Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) was the top choice of vot­ers aged between 18 and 44 in the east­ern state of Sax­ony-Anhalt, where the par­ty won one in four votes to trans­form the polit­i­cal land­scape.

AfD has har­nessed dis­con­tent with Angela Merkel’s gen­er­ous refugee pol­i­cy, but it was the left-of-cen­tre Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty which lost the most vot­ers to the hard right, accord­ing to analy­sis by Infrat­est dimap, on behalf of the broad­cast­ers ARD.

The SPD, in a coali­tion gov­ern­ment with Mrs Merkel’s Chris­t­ian Demo­c­ra­t­ic Union (CDU), is seen as out of touch with grass­roots sup­port­ers.

Vot­ers desert­ed all the estab­lished par­ties to back AfD, which was launched in 2013 and last year switched its focus from call­ing for a break-up of the euro to cam­paign­ing for Germany’s bor­ders to be closed, after the arrival of 1.1 mil­lion migrants.

By far the biggest group of AfD vot­ers were those who had nev­er vot­ed before, the analy­sis showed. They believed politi­cians were liars and that vot­ing would make no dif­fer­ence; a com­mon theme among the young male pop­u­la­tion of Sax­ony-Anhalt, which has the third-high­est unem­ploy­ment rate of all 16 Ger­man states.

...

Asked how sim­i­lar her par­ty was to the Nation­al Front in France, and the Free­dom Par­ty in Aus­tria, Ms Petry said she did not wish to engage in “a debate on labels”.

The par­ty attract­ed wide­spread crit­i­cism after Ms Petry said in Jan­u­ary that bor­der police should, as a last resort, shoot migrants ille­gal­ly cross­ing the Ger­man bor­der.

AfD was cho­sen by 26 per cent of votes aged 18 to 24 in Sax­ony-Anhalt, com­pared with 16 per cent for the CDU and 11 per cent for both the Greens and SPD. For those aged 25 to 44 it was a sim­i­lar sto­ry, with 29 per cent choos­ing the AfD against 23 per cent for the CDU and 9 per cent for SPD. The only age group which stuck with Mrs Merkel’s par­ty was the over-60s — 35 per cent vot­ed CDU and 18 per cent AfD.

Women were much more like­ly to sup­port the CDU, while AfD was the most pop­u­lar among men, win­ning 29 per cent of the male vote in the state.

AfD was equal­ly pop­u­lar with work­ers and the unem­ployed, while the CDU was most favoured by pen­sion­ers.

“AfD was cho­sen by 26 per cent of votes aged 18 to 24 in Sax­ony-Anhalt, com­pared with 16 per cent for the CDU and 11 per cent for both the Greens and SPD. For those aged 25 to 44 it was a sim­i­lar sto­ry, with 29 per cent choos­ing the AfD against 23 per cent for the CDU and 9 per cent for SPD. The only age group which stuck with Mrs Merkel’s par­ty was the over-60s — 35 per cent vot­ed CDU and 18 per cent AfD.”
Yeah, that’s not a great sign for Ger­many’s future. Or Europe’s future. Of course, if the euro­zone had­n’t already become a mech­a­nism for neolib­er­al aus­ter­i­ty on autopi­lot and one of the key dri­ving forces fuel­ing trends like high youth unem­ploy­ment and gen­er­al despair, the sit­u­a­tion would be even worse by not being so awful to begin with. Still, as awful as Europe’s lead­er­ship has gen­er­al­ly been over the last decade, it can get a lot worse.

Oh look, it turns out immi­grants aren’t the only group in the AfD’s crosshairs. Hand­i­capped chil­dren, sin­gle moth­ers, the men­tal­ly ill, and drug addicts also made it on the AfD’s list of unde­sir­ables who should see state assis­tance reduced or out­right pun­ish­ment. And don’t for­get his­to­ry teach­ers who say too many unpleas­ant things about Nazi Ger­many. Bil­lion­aires are also in the AfD’s crosshairs, but those hap­pen to be mas­sive tax-cut­ting crosshairs. Go fig­ure:

The Inde­pen­dent
Revealed: the neo-Nazi man­i­festo tar­get­ing sin­gle moth­ers and men­tal­ly ill that AfD does­n’t want you to see
Alter­na­tive Fur Deutsch­land has been attract­ing vot­ers as though it were a main­stream par­ty. But a leak of its poli­cies — includ­ing tar­get­ing the men­tal­ly ill and sin­gle moth­ers — has exposed the scale of its extrem­ism

Tony Pater­son Berlin
Fri­day 18 March 2016

A leaked elec­tion man­i­festo has revealed that Germany’s vote-win­ning new anti-immi­grant par­ty has plans for dra­con­ian laws which would dis­crim­i­nate against hand­i­capped chil­dren, sin­gle moth­ers, and the men­tal­ly ill – and oblige his­to­ry teach­ers to end a per­ceived “over-empha­sis” on the Nazi era in schools.

The rad­i­cal pro­pos­als are con­tained in an elec­tion man­i­festo pro­duced by the right-wing pop­ulist Alter­na­tive für Deutsch­land (AfD) par­ty, which made sweep­ing gains in three state elec­tions last week­end in a show of pub­lic oppo­si­tion to Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee pol­i­cy.

The AfD’s suc­cess meant that the par­ty is now rep­re­sent­ed in eight of Germany’s 16 state par­lia­ments. A poll pub­lished by YouGov showed that more than 70 per cent of Ger­mans now believe that the AfD is firm­ly on course to win seats in Germany’s nation­al Bun­destag par­lia­ment next year, when it will con­test a gen­er­al elec­tion for the first time.

The pre­vi­ous­ly secret draft nation­al man­i­festo, which is due to be approved by a full AfD par­ty con­gress at the end of April, has been pub­lished by the not-for-prof­it Ger­man research group Correctiv.org. It shows that the AfD is far more than the sin­gle issue anti-immi­gra­tion par­ty por­trayed in recent cam­paign­ing.

The party’s man­i­festo makes it clear that the AfD wants a return to what it calls “nation­al” val­ues in Ger­many. It says it “sees the tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly” as the only mod­el which can reverse the country’s declin­ing birth rate. To this end the par­ty pledges to take steps to ban abor­tion and make divorce more dif­fi­cult. By con­trast, Ger­man fam­i­lies which pro­duce chil­dren should be reward­ed with finan­cial incen­tives, it says.

It regards sin­gle-par­ent moth­ers as a bur­den upon tax­pay­ers and a dis­in­cen­tive to healthy fam­i­ly life, and says it would end the pro­vi­sion of state ben­e­fits for them. “The AfD is against the state financ­ing the self-cho­sen sin­gle par­ent life mod­el,” the man­i­festo says. It also advo­cates an end to the fund­ing of state-run kinder­gartens, and favours young chil­dren remain­ing at home to be looked after by a par­ent.

Fur­ther social­ly dis­ad­van­taged tar­gets include the men­tal­ly ill. The par­ty argues: “Ther­a­py-resis­tant alco­holics, drug addicts and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly ill per­pe­tra­tors should not be kept in psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tals but be put under lock and key.”

The AfD also sug­gests that hand­i­capped chil­dren should not be includ­ed “at all costs” as pupils in reg­u­lar schools because, it claims, their pres­ence can impede oth­er pupils’ progress. It wants the age of crim­i­nal respon­si­bil­i­ty to be reduced from 14 to 12. The par­ty also favours dra­mat­i­cal­ly cut­ting state ben­e­fits and intro­duc­ing a flat 20 per cent tax rate, which would pri­mar­i­ly ben­e­fit the wealthy.

The AfD’s pro­pos­als for his­to­ry teach­ing in schools are equal­ly rad­i­cal. The par­ty aims to end what it describes as the “cur­rent lim­i­ta­tion” of his­to­ry teach­ing to “the peri­od of Nation­al Social­ism”. Instead it pro­pos­es a “wider con­sid­er­a­tion of his­to­ry” which includes more “pos­i­tive aspects” of Germany’s past.

AfD elec­tion man­i­festos pub­lished in the run-up to last weekend’s state elec­tions also con­tained pro­pos­als to com­pel muse­ums and the­atres to strength­en their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with “Ger­man” as opposed to “for­eign” cul­ture.

The Social Demo­c­rat Par­ty leader Sig­mar Gabriel argues the AfD’s ideas and lan­guage are “a fatal reminder of the vocab­u­lary used in the 1920 and 1930s”, in a ref­er­ence to the peri­od dur­ing which the Nazi Par­ty came to pow­er in Ger­many. He added: “The AfD is try­ing to estab­lish a nation­al­is­tic soci­ety based on the idea of exclud­ing peo­ple.”

Beat­rix von Storch, a lead­ing AfD politi­cian who helped to draft the man­i­festo, has argued that the AfD should move beyond its oppo­si­tion to the euro and asy­lum-seek­ers, to con­cen­trate instead on oppos­ing Islam.

The man­i­festo says the state should set “lim­its” on the prac­tice of the Mus­lim faith. Minarets should be banned along with the wear­ing of the bur­ka and niqab in pub­lic. Mus­lim organ­i­sa­tions should have tax ben­e­fits cut. Male cir­cum­ci­sion should be out­lawed and a ban be imposed on the slaugh­ter of ani­mals with­out anaes­thet­ic.

Com­men­ta­tors and politi­cians in Germany’s main­stream par­ties have accused the AfD of resort­ing to lan­guage and ter­mi­nol­o­gy once used by Hitler’s Nation­al Social­ists. How­ev­er the AfD has yet to defend its leaked man­i­festo in pub­lic.

Frauke Petry, the AfD’s leader, who recent­ly sparked out­rage after she insist­ed that firearms should be used to deter migrants at Germany’s bor­ders, was at the cen­tre of a row on Fri­day after appar­ent­ly refus­ing to appear on a break­fast chat show on Germany’s ZDF pub­lic tele­vi­sion chan­nel. She had been due to answer ques­tions posed by an award-win­ning Iraqi-born jour­nal­ist, Dun­ja Hay­ali.

...

“The Social Demo­c­rat Par­ty leader Sig­mar Gabriel argues the AfD’s ideas and lan­guage are “a fatal reminder of the vocab­u­lary used in the 1920 and 1930s”, in a ref­er­ence to the peri­od dur­ing which the Nazi Par­ty came to pow­er in Ger­many. He added: “The AfD is try­ing to estab­lish a nation­al­is­tic soci­ety based on the idea of exclud­ing peo­ple.””
Gee, and they seemed so nice until now. So what’s the AfD going to do pol­ish up its image, assum­ing it even cares? The obvi­ous: Revise the man­i­festo and pre­tend that leaked man­i­festo was just a big “oops” that did­n’t tru­ly reflect how nice they actu­al­ly are:

Deutsche Welle
AfD soft­ens man­i­festo fol­low­ing leak

The Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) par­ty has weak­ened some of the con­tentious ele­ments of its man­i­festo in a new draft. The pop­ulist right-wing par­ty is strug­gling to clean up its image after far-right links were exposed.

Date 28.03.2016
Author Ben Knight

The AfD no longer wants to pri­va­tize unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits and state media orga­ni­za­tions, or stop sup­port for sin­gle par­ents, accord­ing to a new­ly-released 74-page draft man­i­festo, to be vot­ed on at the par­ty’s con­fer­ence on April 30.

An ear­li­er ver­sion of the man­i­festo was leaked by the inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist group “Cor­rec­tiv” just ahead of the March 13 elec­tions in which the AfD won sig­nif­i­cant rep­re­sen­ta­tion in three state par­lia­ments.

The leaked ver­sion con­tained a num­ber of points that were wide­ly crit­i­cized in the Ger­man media — not least the call to end state ben­e­fits for sin­gle par­ents. “Those who have fall­en into this sit­u­a­tion through no fault of their own of course deserve our empa­thy and the sup­port of the com­mu­ni­ty,” the ear­li­er draft of the man­i­festo said. “But we reject any state financ­ing of the self-cho­sen lifestyle ‘sin­gle par­ent.’ ”

Tra­di­tion­al fam­i­lies

In the amend­ed ver­sion, the AfD has writ­ten that it only wants to “cor­rect” the “finan­cial bur­dens” of sin­gle par­ents, by cre­at­ing a “legal sys­tem that takes into account the work of rais­ing chil­dren.” But the AfD remains con­vinced that the state should incen­tivize the “tra­di­tion­al” fam­i­ly mod­el, which it calls the “nucle­us of soci­ety.”

Not only that, “we are strong­ly against the attempts of orga­ni­za­tions, media, and politi­cians to prop­a­gate sin­gle par­ent­hood as a nor­mal, pro­gres­sive, or even desir­able lifestyle,” the man­i­festo goes on to say. AfD leader Frauke Petry is her­self sep­a­rat­ed from her hus­band, with whom she has four chil­dren, while her new part­ner, AfD Euro­pean par­lia­ment mem­ber Mar­cus Pret­zell, is also sep­a­rat­ed from the moth­er of his four chil­dren.

Oth­er con­tro­ver­sial points that have dis­ap­peared from the man­i­festo are the lib­er­al­iza­tion of drug pol­i­cy, the ban on non-med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion, and the pri­va­ti­za­tion of state media (which it now only wants to reform).

But plen­ty of oth­er aspects of the leaked man­i­festo have sur­vived into the final draft — includ­ing low­er­ing the age of crim­i­nal respon­si­bil­i­ty to 12 and scrap­ping Ger­many’s Renew­able Ener­gy Act, designed to admin­is­ter the coun­try’s tran­si­tion to renew­ables.

Dam­age lim­i­ta­tion

There are signs that the AfD is try­ing to con­tain the tur­moil that fol­lowed its dra­mat­ic elec­toral suc­cess­es on March 13. On March 24, the par­ty dis­band­ed its branch in the state of Saar­land after a mag­a­zine pub­lished evi­dence that par­ty lead­ers in the state had main­tained con­tact with neo-Nazis and attempt­ed to woo polit­i­cal sup­port from far-right activists.

...

But as well as clean­ing up its image, the AfD is try­ing to broad­en its poli­cies beyond the oppo­si­tion to allow­ing refugees into the coun­try. The par­ty wants to weak­en Euro­pean inte­gra­tion, scrap the euro — one of its found­ing prin­ci­ples — and grad­u­al­ly reduce the Euro­pean Union to a free trade zone. At the same time, the par­ty wants to strength­en Ger­many’s army — through com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice.

“There are signs that the AfD is try­ing to con­tain the tur­moil that fol­lowed its dra­mat­ic elec­toral suc­cess­es on March 13. On March 24, the par­ty dis­band­ed its branch in the state of Saar­land after a mag­a­zine pub­lished evi­dence that par­ty lead­ers in the state had main­tained con­tact with neo-Nazis and attempt­ed to woo polit­i­cal sup­port from far-right activists.”
So days before the March 13 elec­tions the AfD’s neo-Nazi man­i­festo gets leaked, then it goes on to his­toric wins any­way, and then a week and a half lat­er it has to dis­band one of its branch­es after its branch leader is found to have close ties to the NPD. Oh, and they want to bring back com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice. But, hey, at least they don’t want to kick sin­gle par­ents quite a much as before. So if you’re liv­ing in Ger­many but don’t fall into one of the AfD’s offi­cial­ly accept­able cat­e­gories of human beings, there’s noth­ing to wor­ry about.

If it was­n’t clear that Aus­tria was fac­ing a polit­i­cal cri­sis last month when Nor­bert Hofer of the Free­dom Par­ty scored a strong first place fin­ish in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and now has a May 22 runoff against the Green par­ty’s dis­tant sec­ond place fin­ish­er, it should be clear now:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

Aus­tri­an Chan­cel­lor Wern­er Fay­mann Quits as Migrant Cri­sis Roils Euro­pean Pol­i­tics
Abrupt res­ig­na­tion comes amid rise of anti-immi­grant par­ties in Aus­tria and else­where in Europe

By Anton Troianovs­ki
Updat­ed May 9, 2016 1:35 p.m. ET

BERLIN—Austrian Chan­cel­lor Wern­er Fay­mann resigned on Mon­day, becom­ing one of the most promi­nent casu­al­ties of the polit­i­cal upheaval sweep­ing Europe amid the migra­tion cri­sis.

Mr. Fay­mann, 56, a cen­ter-left politi­cian who had been chan­cel­lor since 2008, said he was giv­ing up his post as head of the Alpine country’s gov­ern­ment because he had lost the sup­port of his Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. The party’s sting­ing loss in last month’s pres­i­den­tial elections—in which the anti-immi­grant Free­dom Par­ty scored its best-ever result in a nation­al vote—threw the Social Democ­rats into cri­sis and prompt­ed many mem­bers to ques­tion Mr. Faymann’s lead­er­ship.

“This coun­try needs a chan­cel­lor whose par­ty is com­plete­ly behind him,” Mr. Fay­mann said in Vien­na. “This gov­ern­ment needs a new start.”

It was yet to be deter­mined, Mr. Fay­mann said, who his long-term suc­ces­sor will be. Vice Chan­cel­lor Rein­hold Mit­ter­lehn­er was sworn in as inter­im head of the gov­ern­ment Mon­day evening and said he didn’t see a need for new elec­tions. But with the next reg­u­lar par­lia­men­tary elec­tions not sched­uled to take place until 2018, Aus­tri­an media spec­u­lat­ed that a move to call new elec­tions might still come in the com­ing days.

Mr. Faymann’s sur­prise res­ig­na­tion threw a spot­light on the tur­moil fac­ing main­stream polit­i­cal lead­ers across Europe as migra­tion and eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty ener­gize pop­ulist move­ments.

Aus­tria, whose pop­u­la­tion of about 8.5 mil­lion peo­ple is rough­ly equal to that of New York City, typ­i­cal­ly holds lim­it­ed sway in the Euro­pean Union. But its polit­i­cal swing to the right has made it a bell­wether for the rest of Europe, as a back­lash against migrants com­bines with eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty to dri­ve vot­ers away from the pro-EU estab­lish­ment.

In France, polls show right-wing pop­ulist leader Marine Le Pen appears poised to win the first-round pres­i­den­tial vote next year. In Den­mark, the anti-immi­grant Dan­ish People’s Par­ty achieved stronger-than-expect­ed elec­tion results last year, push­ing the cen­trist gov­ern­ment to take tougher mea­sures to keep migrants out. In Ger­many, the upstart Alter­na­tive for Ger­many par­ty made land­mark gains in state elec­tions in March and now polls at 15%, cement­ing its sta­tus as the most suc­cess­ful right-wing par­ty in Ger­many since World War II.

In Austria’s first-round pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in April last month, Free­dom Par­ty can­di­date Nor­bert Hofer ran on an anti-free-trade and anti-immi­gra­tion plat­form to gar­ner 35.1% of the vote. The total was more than triple what Austria’s two main­stream, gov­ern­ing parties—the Social Democ­rats and the cen­ter-right Aus­tri­an People’s Party—each achieved.

“The ques­tion is, does one, in these times of great challenges…have the strong back­ing of one’s par­ty?” Mr. Fay­mann said in his brief res­ig­na­tion speech Mon­day. “I must answer the ques­tion with a ‘No.’”

Mr. Faymann’s move high­light­ed the chal­lenge of gov­ern­ing from the cen­ter as Europe faces a series of crises. After ini­tial­ly echo­ing Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s wel­com­ing stance toward refugees, Mr. Fay­mann did an about-face this win­ter as the Free­dom Par­ty rose in the polls. He backed tough bor­der con­trols and strict lim­its on how many asy­lum-seek­ers his coun­try would accept, anger­ing Ms. Merkel and Euro­pean Union offi­cials in Brus­sels.

The rever­sal did lit­tle to slow the Free­dom Party’s rise—in part, poll­sters said, because Mr. Fay­mann appeared to vin­di­cate the pop­ulist party’s posi­tion. At the same time, Mr. Faymann’s tougher migra­tion pol­i­cy out­raged mem­bers of his left­ist base, some of whom whis­tled and booed when he gave his tra­di­tion­al May Day address in Vien­na last week.

...

Now, the lead­ers of Mr. Faymann’s par­ty will have to decide whether to tack fur­ther to the right in the hopes of pre­vent­ing more vot­ers from drift­ing off to Mr. Strache—or whether to move in the oth­er direc­tion to pre­vent sup­port­ers from swing­ing to the left-of-cen­ter Greens. The quandary reflects Europe’s grow­ing polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion.

“If it hews too close­ly to the Free­dom Par­ty, it will lose vot­ers to the Greens; if it hews to close­ly to the Greens, it will con­tin­ue los­ing vot­ers to the Free­dom Par­ty,” said Anton Pelin­ka, an Aus­tri­an polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Cen­tral Euro­pean Uni­ver­si­ty in Budapest. The Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, he added, “is scarce­ly able to sus­tain any longer the broad elec­toral coali­tion that it used to have.”

The Free­dom Party’s Mr. Hofer faces inde­pen­dent can­di­date Alexan­der Van der Bellen, who favors open­ness toward accept­ing refugees, in run-off pres­i­den­tial elec­tions on May 22. Either can­di­date would become the first Aus­tri­an president—a large­ly cer­e­mo­ni­al position—in the post­war era not to be backed by one of the two main­stream par­ties.

...

“It was yet to be deter­mined, Mr. Fay­mann said, who his long-term suc­ces­sor will be. Vice Chan­cel­lor Rein­hold Mit­ter­lehn­er was sworn in as inter­im head of the gov­ern­ment Mon­day evening and said he didn’t see a need for new elec­tions. But with the next reg­u­lar par­lia­men­tary elec­tions not sched­uled to take place until 2018, Aus­tri­an media spec­u­lat­ed that a move to call new elec­tions might still come in the com­ing days.”
Col­laps­ing gov­ern­ments and ear­ly elec­tions at a time when the Free­dom Par­ty is at his­toric highs. That’s def­i­nite­ly a cri­sis.

Paul Krug­man points us towards a recent pair of exam­ples of ongo­ing and increas­ing­ly dan­ger­ous dumb­ing down of eco­nom­ic com­mon wis­dom. The sec­ond exam­ple, from Deutsche Bank econ­o­mist David Fouk­erts-Lan­dau, is par­tic­u­lar­ly dan­ger­ous­ly dumb:

The New York Times
The Con­science of a Lib­er­al

Is Our Econ­o­mists Learn­ing?

Paul Krug­man
Jun 18, 9:44 AM

Bernie is doing his long — very, very, very long — good­bye; Trump appears to be flam­ing out. So, time to revis­it some macro­eco­nom­ics.

Brad DeLong has an excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion on the sad his­to­ry of belief in the con­fi­dence fairy and its dire effects on pol­i­cy. One of his themes is the bad behav­ior of quite a few pro­fes­sion­al econ­o­mists, who invent­ed new doc­trines on the fly to jus­ti­fy their oppo­si­tion to stim­u­lus and desire for aus­ter­i­ty even in the face of a depres­sion and zero inter­est rates.

...

Any­way, two things crossed my vir­tu­al desk today that rein­force the point about how bad­ly some of my col­leagues con­tin­ue to deal with fis­cal pol­i­cy issues.

First, Greg Mankiw has a piece that talks about Alesina-Ardagna on expan­sion­ary aus­ter­i­ty with­out men­tion­ing any of the mul­ti­ple stud­ies refut­ing their results. And wait, there’s more. As @obsoletedogma (Matt O’Brien) notes, he cites a 2002 Blan­chard paper skep­ti­cal about fis­cal stim­u­lus while some­how not men­tion­ing the famous 2013 Blan­chard-Leigh paper show­ing that mul­ti­pli­ers are much big­ger than the IMF thought.

Sec­ond, I see a note from David Folk­erts-Lan­dau of Deutsche Bank lam­bast­ing the ECB for its easy-mon­ey poli­cies, because

by appoint­ing itself the eurozone’s “what­ev­er it takes” sav­iour of last resort, the ECB has allowed politi­cians to sit on their hands with regard to growth-enhanc­ing reforms and nec­es­sary fis­cal con­sol­i­da­tion.

There­by ECB pol­i­cy is threat­en­ing the Euro­pean project as a whole for the sake of short-term finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty. The longer pol­i­cy pre­vents the nec­es­sary cathar­sis, the more it con­tributes to the growth of pop­ulist or extrem­ist pol­i­tics.

Yep. That “cathar­sis” worked real­ly well when Chan­cel­lor Brün­ing did it, didn’t it?

What strikes me is the con­trast with the 1970s. Back then the expe­ri­ence of stagfla­tion led to a dra­mat­ic revi­sion of both macro­eco­nom­ics and pol­i­cy doc­trine. This time far worse eco­nom­ic events, and pre­dic­tions by fresh­wa­ter econ­o­mists far more at odds with expe­ri­ence than the mis­takes of Key­ne­sians in the past, seem to have pro­duced no con­ces­sions what­so­ev­er.

“There­by ECB pol­i­cy is threat­en­ing the Euro­pean project as a whole for the sake of short-term finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty. The longer pol­i­cy pre­vents the nec­es­sary cathar­sis, the more it con­tributes to the growth of pop­ulist or extrem­ist pol­i­tics.”
So that was the advice from Deutsche Bank econ­o­mist David Fouk­erts-Lan­dau: The ECB needs to let the euro­zone economies under­go “cathar­sis”, which is a euphemism for just let­ting things eco­nom­i­cal­ly fall apart and imple­ment­ing aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies in response, in order to avoid the rise of pop­ulist or extrem­ist pol­i­tics. He actu­al­ly said that.

Aus­ter­i­ty. Is there any­thing it can’t do? Nope!

It looks like Aus­tria is going to give the EU an ear­ly test of the polit­i­cal appeal of far-right par­ties in the post-Brex­it envi­ron­ment: Aus­tri­a’s far-right Free­dom Par­ty, which nar­row­ly lost a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in May, demand­ed a new elec­tion fol­low­ing charges of vot­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties. And a new elec­tion is indeed hap­pen­ing:

Reuters

Aus­tri­an far right gets sec­ond chance at pres­i­den­cy with vote re-run

VIENNA | By Fran­cois Mur­phy and Kirsti Knolle
Fri Jul 1, 2016 10:29am EDT

Aus­tri­a’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion runoff must be held again, the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court ruled on Fri­day, hand­ing the Free­dom Par­ty’s nar­row­ly defeat­ed can­di­date anoth­er chance to become the first far-right head of state in the Euro­pean Union.

The ver­dict comes a week after Britain delight­ed anti-EU groups by vot­ing to leave the bloc. Con­cerns about immi­gra­tion and jobs fea­tured promi­nent­ly in that ref­er­en­dum, as they did in Aus­tri­a’s knife-edge elec­tion.

Nor­bert Hofer of the anti-immi­gra­tion and anti-EU Free­dom Par­ty (FPO) lost the May 22 vote to for­mer Greens leader Alexan­der Van der Bellen by less than one per­cent­age point, or around 31,000 votes, in the race for what is large­ly a cer­e­mo­ni­al posi­tion.

The court found more than twice that num­ber of postal bal­lots had been affect­ed by breach­es of the elec­toral code, forc­ing it to order a re-run.

Irreg­u­lar­i­ties includ­ed bal­lots being processed before the offi­cial start of the count the morn­ing after the elec­tion, and counts being car­ried out in the absence of par­ty observers, often because offi­cials were rac­ing to pro­vide a result quick­ly.

Rul­ing on a chal­lenge brought by FPO leader Heinz-Chris­t­ian Stra­che, the court found no proof that the result had been manip­u­lat­ed, but the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it might have been affect­ed was enough for a chal­lenge to suc­ceed.

The re-run will reopen a debate that split Aus­tria almost even­ly, pit­ting town against coun­try, and blue-col­lar work­ers wor­ried about immi­gra­tion and falling liv­ing stan­dards against the more high­ly edu­cat­ed.

How the out­come might change in a Euro­pean polit­i­cal cli­mate col­ored by the Brex­it vote is unclear. Wide­spread frus­tra­tion with tra­di­tion­al par­ties of pow­er has been a fea­ture of both votes, and fueled sup­port for anti-immi­gra­tion groups.

Aus­tria was swept up in Europe’s migra­tion cri­sis last autumn when it and Ger­many opened their bor­ders to hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple flee­ing war and pover­ty in the Mid­dle East and else­where, only to reverse course as pub­lic opin­ion turned.

Hofer­’s near-vic­to­ry was wide­ly seen as part of a ris­ing tide of pop­ulism that has since reached Britain. The Brex­it vote could buoy sup­port for Hofer — or the eco­nom­ic fall­out, includ­ing a sharp drop in ster­ling, could under­mine him.

“Brex­it is a cur­rent issue. It will still be a cur­rent issue in the autumn,” Van der Bellen, a chain-smok­ing 72-year-old, told a news con­fer­ence.

The irreg­u­lar­i­ties that have come to light dur­ing tes­ti­mo­ny to the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court have dis­mayed the Aus­tri­an pub­lic.

“There was slop­pi­ness,” Inte­ri­or Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Sobot­ka, whose min­istry over­sees elec­tions and was accused by sev­er­al wit­ness­es of putting pres­sure on offi­cials to pro­vide a rapid count, told reporters after the ver­dict.

The cen­trist coali­tion gov­ern­ment must now set a date for the re-run. Pres­i­dent Heinz Fis­ch­er, whose term runs out on July 8, has said it will most like­ly be in the autumn.

In the mean­time, the posi­tion will be held by the three pres­i­dents of the low­er house of par­lia­ment — one of whom is Hofer.

...

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Nation­al Front, an ally of the Free­dom Par­ty, was less restrained.

“After the hap­py vic­to­ry of Brex­it in the Unit­ed King­dom and the rise of euroskep­ti­cism in Italy, Aus­tria too has the oppor­tu­ni­ty to return to the path of free­dom and nation­al pride,” she said in a state­ment.

“Hofer­’s near-vic­to­ry was wide­ly seen as part of a ris­ing tide of pop­ulism that has since reached Britain. The Brex­it vote could buoy sup­port for Hofer — or the eco­nom­ic fall­out, includ­ing a sharp drop in ster­ling, could under­mine him.”

That’s going to be a pret­ty big ques­tion: does the Brex­it vote help or hurt the far-right in places like Aus­tria? It will prob­a­bly depend quite a bit on whether or not EU lead­ers are capa­ble of con­ceiv­ing of a post-Brex­it response that could shore up pub­lic sup­port for the project and how rapid­ly they can make the plans pub­lic.

But anoth­er more imme­di­ate big ques­tion raised by Aus­tri­a’s re-vote is whether or not there real­ly was any sig­nif­i­cant vote rig­ging. And as the arti­cle below points out, that’s not as easy a task as it might be in less polit­i­cal­ly charged peri­ods. Why? Because when you have a runoff between the far-right and the Green par­ty, two groups that are tra­di­tion­al­ly rel­a­tive­ly minor play­ers, that means that vot­ers are basi­cal­ly forced to engage in very atyp­i­cal vot­ing behav­ior and it’s atyp­i­cal vot­ing behav­ior that would nor­mal­ly be looked for as evi­dence of vote rig­ging. In oth­er words, the more atyp­i­cal the politic scene gets, the hard­er it might be to iden­ti­fy signs of vote rig­ging:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Elec­tion foren­sics analy­sis finds no evi­dence sup­port­ing alleged fraud in the Aus­tri­an Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion

By Wal­ter R. Mebane, Jr., Allen Hick­en, Kir­ill Kalin­in and Ken Koll­man
July 1 at 3:30 AM

In Aus­tria, did the right-wing, pop­ulist Free­dom Par­ty get cheat­ed out of the pres­i­den­cy when it lost by a razor-thin mar­gin to the left-wing Green Par­ty?

That’s what it alleges. On May 22, the Free­dom Party’s Nor­bert Hofer lost the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to the Greens’ Alexan­der Van Der Bellen by 30,863 votes, accord­ing to offi­cial Aus­tri­an gov­ern­ment reports. That comes to 0.69 per­cent of the valid votes count­ed. The loss came in the sec­ond, and final, round of vot­ing, which pit­ted the top-two vote-get­ters from the first round in April.

Hofer led the first round with 35.1 per­cent ver­sus 21.3 per­cent for Van Der Bellen. In that first round, four oth­er can­di­dates divid­ed the rest of the votes: 18.9 per­cent for Irm­gard Griss (Inde­pen­dent); 11.3 per­cent for Rudolf Hund­stor­fer (Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty); 11.1 per­cent for Andreas Khol (Aus­tri­an People’s Par­ty); and 2.3 per­cent for Richard Lugn­er (Inde­pen­dent). The Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, on the cen­ter-left, and the Aus­tri­an People’s Par­ty, on the cen­ter-right, had been the dom­i­nant par­ties.

The Free­dom Par­ty lodged a legal chal­lenge to the final elec­tion results, alleg­ing “fail­ures and irreg­u­lar­i­ties” and claim­ing a “sys­temic fail­ure” in the count­ing of mail-in bal­lots espe­cial­ly. The Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court of Aus­tria appar­ent­ly agreed, and ordered today a rerun of the elec­tion.

We use these meth­ods to check on elec­tion fraud

Our meth­ods are avail­able for oth­ers to use at our Elec­tion Foren­sics Toolk­it. Elec­tion foren­sics uses sta­tis­ti­cal tests on report­ed elec­tion data. Report­ed vote totals and turnout counts for polling sta­tions, con­stituen­cies or dis­tricts should exhib­it par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics where irreg­u­lar­i­ties or frauds are present com­pared to locales with­out such irreg­u­lar­i­ties.

Our Toolk­it applies three kinds of sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods using com­pu­ta­tion­al tech­niques spe­cial­ly designed by Wal­ter Mebane and Kir­ill Kalin­in, two mem­bers of our team. No one sta­tis­tic is defin­i­tive in demon­strat­ing fraud. How­ev­er, when sev­er­al sta­tis­tics dif­fer sig­nif­i­cant­ly from what we would expect to see in a nor­mal elec­tion process, fraud­u­lent behav­ior is like­ly the cause.

Here’s the back­ground. The Green and Free­dom par­ties have been his­tor­i­cal­ly minor par­ties. But 265,221 more votes were cast in the election’s sec­ond round than in the first round. In oth­er words, most vot­ers in the sec­ond round typ­i­cal­ly vote for one of the major par­ties, not the Free­dom Par­ty or the Greens – and so cast their bal­lots for par­ties to which they do not have long-term alle­giances.

What prob­a­bly hap­pened is this. Many cit­i­zens, on both left and right, were wor­ried about the fact that one of two minor par­ties on oppos­ing ide­o­log­i­cal edges was going to win the pres­i­den­cy. And so more peo­ple vot­ed than might have if the con­tenders were the usu­al cen­trist can­di­dates.

Fur­ther, many peo­ple were prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed to vote because they expect­ed that many oth­ers would vote, and most vot­ers were vot­ing for a par­ty that wasn’t their most pre­ferred par­ty. Such strate­gic behav­ior — behav­ior in which rea­son­able expec­ta­tions about what oth­ers will do affect vot­ers’ actions — can pro­duce turnout num­bers and results that resem­ble the pat­terns pro­duced by such fraud­u­lent acts as bal­lot-box stuff­ing, vot­er intim­i­da­tion and vote-buy­ing.

In Aus­tria, var­i­ous lev­els of gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies report pres­i­den­tial elec­tion data. Through­out the coun­try, there are com­mu­ni­ty (Gemeinde) lev­el report results. In Vien­na, where the “com­mu­ni­ty” lev­el is very large, there’s a lev­el below that one — the elec­tion dis­trict lev­el — that also reports results. Final­ly, mail-in bal­lots are report­ed at a lev­el above the Gemeinde, at a larg­er dis­trict lev­el that’s akin to coun­ties in the Unit­ed States; this lev­el typ­i­cal­ly includes sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties.

Our elec­tion foren­sics found no fraud in the Aus­tri­an elec­tion

We found no signs of anom­alies, when check­ing most of the sta­tis­ti­cal indi­ca­tors using Gemeinde (and, where appro­pri­ate, dis­trict) counts of eli­gi­ble vot­ers and cast votes, in either the first or sec­ond round of the elec­tion.

There was one excep­tion: One tech­nique detect­ed the pres­ence of a small anom­aly in round two. But the pat­terns that mod­el detects are also con­sis­tent with strate­gic behav­ior, as Mebane shows in his research.

Even if we assume that these anom­alies do indi­cate fraud, our best esti­mate is that only 3,870 poten­tial­ly fraud­u­lent votes occurred, or .087 per­cent of the vote total. That’s not enough to change the out­come. But let us empha­size that these anom­alies are con­sis­tent with what hap­pens dur­ing peri­ods of intense mobi­liza­tion: sup­port­ers ral­ly­ing in favor of Van der Bellen. Fur­ther, only Vien­na showed that small num­ber of anom­alous turnout results. It stands to rea­son that Vien­na, a heav­i­ly anti-Hofer city with many immi­grants and a diverse pop­u­la­tion, saw inten­sive and unusu­al turnout activ­i­ty.

The oth­er sta­tis­ti­cal tests show no evi­dence of unusu­al pat­terns in the elec­tion data.

We find no foren­sic evi­dence to sup­port the Free­dom Party’s claims of fraud.

...

“What prob­a­bly hap­pened is this. Many cit­i­zens, on both left and right, were wor­ried about the fact that one of two minor par­ties on oppos­ing ide­o­log­i­cal edges was going to win the pres­i­den­cy. And so more peo­ple vot­ed than might have if the con­tenders were the usu­al cen­trist can­di­dates.

Fur­ther, many peo­ple were prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed to vote because they expect­ed that many oth­ers would vote, and most vot­ers were vot­ing for a par­ty that wasn’t their most pre­ferred par­ty. Such strate­gic behav­ior — behav­ior in which rea­son­able expec­ta­tions about what oth­ers will do affect vot­ers’ actions — can pro­duce turnout num­bers and results that resem­ble the pat­terns pro­duced by such fraud­u­lent acts as bal­lot-box stuff­ing, vot­er intim­i­da­tion and vote-buy­ing.”

So the more the strate­gic atyp­i­cal vot­ing behav­ior, the more like­ly vot­ers’ strate­gic actions will pro­duce turnout num­bers and results that vote integri­ty ana­lysts would be watch­ing out for. And when we have a tight­ly con­test­ed elec­tion between tra­di­tion­al­ly-minor par­ties, strate­gic vot­ing is going to be par­tic­u­lar­ly preva­lent. That does­n’t bode well.

If the France ends up with Pres­i­dent Marine Le Pen next year, or even a ‘Frex­it’, there will no doubt be a num­ber of fac­tors that all con­tributed to that result. Here’s one of those puta­tive fac­tors in a future fas­cist Frex­it­ed France:

France 24

French PM Valls bypass­es par­lia­ment to force through labour reforms

Lat­est update : 2016-07-05

France’s gov­ern­ment has used a spe­cial mea­sure to force through a divi­sive labour bill in the low­er house of Par­lia­ment with­out a vote — for a sec­ond time.

French Prime Min­is­ter Manuel Valls invoked a spe­cial con­sti­tu­tion­al arti­cle to approve the con­tro­ver­sial bill Tues­day, prompt­ing law­mak­ers to storm out of the Nation­al Assem­bly in anger.

This is the sec­ond time he has bypassed the leg­is­la­ture on this issue amid stiff oppo­si­tion from mem­bers of his own par­ty.

The Social­ist prime min­is­ter argued that the reforms are need­ed to tack­le France’s stub­born­ly high unem­ploy­ment, which stood at 10.2 per­cent in the first quar­ter. Sev­er­al mem­bers of par­lia­ment loud­ly booed and whis­tled as Valls announced that he would enact Arti­cle 49.3 of the con­sti­tu­tion, which allows a gov­ern­ment to pass laws with­out a par­lia­men­tary vote.

FRANCE 24’s Marc Perel­man explained that Arti­cle 49.3 is referred to as “the ‘nuclear weapon’ of French pol­i­tics” and that its use demon­strat­ed that there was clear­ly no com­pro­mise to be found in the Social­ist Par­ty on this issue.

Polit­i­cal bat­tle of wills

Oppo­nents, includ­ing some mem­bers of the Social­ist Par­ty, say the reforms will threat­en hard-won work­er rights because it will sim­ply make it eas­i­er for com­pa­nies to lay- off work­ers and extend work­ing hours.

FRANCE 24’s Perel­man said that some with­in the par­ty think, “Valls is real­ly going too far to the right and that this real­ly will be a major blow against the French wel­fare state as we know it.”

The leg­is­la­tion has become a key issue for the rul­ing Social­ist Par­ty, with Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hol­lande say­ing in June that his gov­ern­ment will “go all the way” to enact the reforms.

Hol­lande, the least pop­u­lar French pres­i­dent in recent times, has vowed not to stand for a sec­ond term in 2017 if he fails to reduce unem­ploy­ment.

But less than a year away from the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the deci­sion to force through the con­test­ed reform with­out par­lia­men­tary sup­port is a polit­i­cal gam­ble for the unpop­u­lar Hol­lande and a Social­ist gov­ern­ment already the focus of reg­u­lar street protests.

Thou­sands on the march

The bill has prompt­ed sharp divi­sions in the gov­ern­ing par­ty and sparked large-scale protests across the coun­try.

Thou­sands marched through Paris and oth­er cities on Tues­day, along­side the oblig­a­tory heavy police pres­ence, in what labour unions say will be the last of a dozen such demon­stra­tions before a sum­mer hia­tus.

...

An opin­ion poll in April found that 58 per­cent of the French pub­lic remain opposed to the Social­ist gov­ern­men­t’s labour reforms.

“But less than a year away from the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the deci­sion to force through the con­test­ed reform with­out par­lia­men­tary sup­port is a polit­i­cal gam­ble for the unpop­u­lar Hol­lande and a Social­ist gov­ern­ment already the focus of reg­u­lar street protests.”

That’s right, with less than year before the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Hol­lan­de’s admin­is­tra­tion is over­rid­ing France’s par­lia­ment to forc­ing through an aus­ter­i­ty bill and this is viewed as part of polit­i­cal gam­ble. Or, more pre­cise­ly, a polit­i­cal gam­ble that will only work if aus­ter­i­ty mag­i­cal­ly starts work­ing and mak­ing it dra­mat­i­cal­ly eas­i­er to fire work­ers ends up reduc­ing unem­ploy­ment. That seems like an incred­i­bly fool­ish gam­ble.

So giv­en the deep unpop­u­lar­i­ty of both the law and how its being pushed through par­lia­ment, you have to won­der if it would be a polit­i­cal­ly worth­while gam­ble for the Hol­lande admin­is­tra­tion to point out to the pub­lic that EU rules would basi­cal­ly force any French gov­ern­ment to imple­ment this lat­est batch of aus­ter­i­ty unless France wants to court an EU-Com­mis­sion show­down and pos­si­ble sanc­tions. Sure, admit­ting that France does­n’t have a choice in this mat­ter might play right into hands of the Nation­al Front. But watch­ing a Social­ist gov­ern­ment use a par­lia­men­tary ‘nuclear option’ to force through EU-man­dat­ed aus­ter­i­ty is also a pret­ty good way to play right into the hands of the Nation­al Front.

Just a heads up: The next Aus­tri­an head up state is on track to be the EU’s first far-right head of state:

Reuters

Far-right can­di­date ahead in polls to win Aus­tri­an pres­i­den­cy

Mon Aug 29, 2016 7:05am EDT

The far right is ahead in Aus­tri­a’s pres­i­den­tial race, accord­ing to opin­ion polls which pre­dict a win for the anti-immi­gra­tion can­di­date that would be a water­shed for pop­ulists across Europe who have cap­i­tal­ized on the migra­tion cri­sis.

Ahead of the Oct. 2 elec­tion, the Free­dom Par­ty’s (FPO) Nor­bert Hofer is just ahead of his inde­pen­dent rival, Alexan­der Van der Bellen, who nar­row­ly beat Hofer in a pre­vi­ous run-off vote in May that was annulled.

...

A poll of 600 peo­ple pub­lished by the Oester­re­ich tabloid showed the aver­age sup­port for Hofer at 53 per­cent, one point high­er than a poll in late July, ver­sus 47 per­cent for for­mer Greens head Alexan­der Van der Bellen.

Anoth­er poll, of 778 peo­ple with a mar­gin of error of 3.6 per­cent, pub­lished by news­pa­per Kuri­er, found 38 per­cent thought Hofer would win while 34 per­cent expect­ed Van der Bellen to.

In polls for par­lia­men­tary elec­tions set for 2018, the FPO reg­u­lar­ly attracts more than 33 per­cent, ahead of both rul­ing cen­trist par­ties.

Hofer, whose par­ty argued against join­ing the Euro­pean Union in a ref­er­en­dum on mem­ber­ship in 1994, has said Aus­tri­ans should hold a vote on leav­ing the bloc if Turkey were to join or if sig­nif­i­cant­ly more polit­i­cal pow­er were trans­ferred to Brus­sels.

The Free­dom Par­ty chal­lenged the pre­vi­ous run-off result, which showed Van der Bellen win­ning by 31,000 votes. A court decid­ed the elec­tion had to be re-run due to slop­pi­ness in the count, although no evi­dence of manip­u­la­tion was found.

Although Aus­tri­a’s pres­i­dent plays a large­ly cer­e­mo­ni­al role, he can dis­miss the cab­i­net.

“In polls for par­lia­men­tary elec­tions set for 2018, the FPO reg­u­lar­ly attracts more than 33 per­cent, ahead of both rul­ing cen­trist par­ties.”

Yep, it’s not just the Aus­tri­an pres­i­den­cy that’s poised to fall into far-right hands. The Free­dom Par­ty is polling ahead of both the cen­trist par­ties in polls for the 2018 par­lia­men­tary elec­tions. Now, 2018 is quite a ways off in polit­i­cal terms and quite a bit could change. But that’s still pret­ty omi­nous.

Of course, if Hofer becomes pres­i­dent and ends up alien­at­ing a large chunk of the FPO’s new sup­port­ers that could cer­tain­ly change the FPO’s 2018 par­lia­men­tary prospects. It’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty we can’t rule out since alien­at­ing peo­ple is sort of what the far-right is all about. It’s sort of their strength and weak­ness. But since the pres­i­den­cy is large­ly a cer­e­mo­ni­al role it’s unclear that Hofer will even have the pow­er to alien­ate. Unless he goes around dis­miss­ing every cab­i­net if he gets his way...something Hofer is cer­tain­ly hint­ing at doing:

EurActiv.com

Aus­tri­an nation­al­ist can­di­date to flaunt his ‘tough­ness’

By EurActiv.com with Reuters

Aug 24, 2016 (updat­ed: Aug 24, 2016)

Austria’s far-right Free­dom Par­ty (FPO) kicked off its cam­paign for pres­i­dent on Wednes­day (24 August) with the slo­gan “Pow­er needs con­trol”, seek­ing to get its can­di­date Nor­bert Hofer elect­ed on a promise of tough­ness after con­cerns over Europe’s migrant cri­sis.

The FPO suc­cess­ful­ly chal­lenged the result of a runoff vote in May that Hofer nar­row­ly lost against for­mer Green Par­ty leader Alexan­der Van der Bellen. The Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court ordered a re-run, which will take place on 2 Octo­ber.

Hofer’s slo­gan is the same as that which in 1992 ensured vic­to­ry for the cur­rent president’s pre­de­ces­sor, Thomas Klestil from the con­ser­v­a­tive People’s Par­ty (OVP).

Back then the OVP and the Social Democ­rats were mass par­ties, but Aus­tri­ans’ anger about their shared pol­i­tics built up. Since then the Aus­tri­ans have become so upset with the two par­ties that both par­ties’ pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates failed to make it the pres­i­den­tial run-off.

Like the late Klestil, who was head of state until 2004, Hofer says he wants to be an active pres­i­dent, rather than a pure­ly cer­e­mo­ni­al one.

“(He wants to become a) nec­es­sary counter weight to a pow­er car­tel that has estab­lished itself at every nook and cor­ner in the state,” said his cam­paign man­ag­er and the Free­dom Party’s sec­re­tary Her­bert Kickl

Hofer is a euroscep­tic and has said that in some cas­es Aus­tria should con­sid­er leav­ing the EU.

The FPO, which also hopes to pro­vide the next head of gov­ern­ment, shares its anti-immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy with right­ist move­ments in sev­er­al Euro­pean coun­tries, such as the Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD).

Very few of Europe’s top politi­cians would be expect­ed to wel­come Hofer as the first far-right head of state in the Euro­pean Union.

...

““(He wants to become a) nec­es­sary counter weight to a pow­er car­tel that has estab­lished itself at every nook and cor­ner in the state,” said his cam­paign man­ag­er and the Free­dom Party’s sec­re­tary Her­bert Kickl”

Ok, so Nor­bert Hofer wants to show every­one that he’s a “tough” pres­i­dent. And yet the only real pow­er he has is dis­miss­ing the cab­i­net for any rea­son at all, a pow­er that has nev­er been used before. So, uh, so long folks!

Folks liv­ing in Ger­many might be hear­ing the word “Volk” a lot more going for­ward. Specif­i­cal­ly, they might be hear­ing the word “Volk” spo­ken by folks who want to reha­bil­i­tate the word after it became taint­ed by the Nazis with ideas of Ger­man suprema­cy and took on a very dif­fer­ent mean­ing from “Folks”. And, yes, the folks who want to reha­bil­i­tate “Volks” hap­pen to be the neo-Nazis in the AfD:

Asso­ci­at­ed Press

Ger­many’s far-right par­ty wants to bring back Nazi-era phrase

Sep­tem­ber 12, 2016, 4:19 PM

BERLIN A lead­ing mem­ber of Alter­na­tive for Ger­many, the nation­al­ist par­ty whose recent elec­tions suc­cess­es have shak­en the country’s polit­i­cal sys­tem, faced fierce crit­i­cism Mon­day after call­ing for a racial­ly charged term favored dur­ing the Third Reich to be reha­bil­i­tat­ed.

Par­ty co-chair­woman Frauke Petry said in an inter­view pub­lished Sun­day that words such as “voelkisch” shouldn’t be taboo any longer. The term refers to peo­ple who belong to a par­tic­u­lar race and was fre­quent­ly used by the Nazis — their par­ty paper was called Voelkisch­er Beobachter.

“We should final­ly regain a relaxed, not uncrit­i­cal but nor­mal way of deal­ing with our nation and terms such as ‘Volk’ and words that are derived from it,” she told week­ly Welt am Son­ntag. Asked whether she would include the word “voelkisch,” Petry respond­ed that she doesn’t use the term her­self but dis­likes the fact that it is only used neg­a­tive­ly.

“Let’s work on giv­ing the term a pos­i­tive con­no­ta­tion,” she said.

Her remarks prompt­ed a swift back­lash from politi­cians, com­men­ta­tors and his­to­ri­ans who warned that Petry’s par­ty — known by its acronym AfD — was try­ing to legit­imize ideas that were once at the core of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi ide­ol­o­gy.

“Her state­ment that one should work on giv­ing the term ‘voelkisch’ a pos­i­tive mean­ing is dis­gust­ing,” dai­ly Neue West­faelis­che wrote in an edi­to­r­i­al. The paper accused Petry of try­ing to blur the lines between con­ser­v­a­tive and extreme-right opin­ions.

Volk­er Beck, a Green Par­ty law­mak­er who heads the Ger­man-Israeli par­lia­men­tary group, called Petry’s com­ments “dan­ger­ous arson.”

“The voelkisch ide­ol­o­gy of the 20th cen­tu­ry result­ed in Nation­al Social­ist race hatred and the mass mur­der of Auschwitz,” Beck said.

AfD has become a potent elec­toral force in Ger­many since it was found­ed three years ago, sweep­ing into four state Par­lia­ments on a wave of anti-migrant sen­ti­ment this year, most recent­ly in Meck­len­burg West­ern-Pomera­nia. The par­ty is polling dou­ble-dig­it fig­ures in advance of a vote in the city-state of Berlin on Sun­day.

Along the way, AfD has tried to por­tray itself as the only true defend­er of the Ger­man “Volk.”

Although it has a com­mon root with the Eng­lish word “folk,” the term Volk gained an eth­nic con­no­ta­tion in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry to sig­ni­fy the uni­ty of Ger­man peo­ple who lived in dozens of mini-states across Cen­tral Europe. Nation­al­ist sen­ti­ment didn’t evap­o­rate with Germany’s uni­fi­ca­tion in 1871 but rather grew into a myth of Ger­man unique­ness in the world.

The Nazis latched on to that, and encap­su­lat­ed it in their slo­gan, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer” — “One Peo­ple, One Nation, One Leader”

“There’s a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence with the word as it’s used in the French or Eng­lish-speak­ing world,” his­to­ri­an Pas­cal Begrich said.

While some of its uses are ambigu­ous — such as AfD’s reg­u­lar call for pop­u­lar ref­er­en­dums, or Volksab­stim­mungen — oth­er phras­es have raised eye­brows.

When one of the party’s local chap­ters post­ed a Christ­mas mes­sage to Face­book fol­low­ers urg­ing them to think about their respon­si­bil­i­ty toward the “Volks­ge­mein­schaft” — the com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple belong­ing to the same Volk — experts point­ed out that this was a phrase straight out of the Nazi dic­tio­nary.

AfD ral­lies com­mon­ly include plac­ards accus­ing Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel and her gov­ern­ment of being “Volksver­raeter” — trai­tors to the Volk — for allow­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of migrants into Ger­many last year.

Gideon Botsch, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pots­dam who has watched AfD’s rise, said the par­ty has absorbed ideas from far-right thinkers who claim that Germany’s white pop­u­la­tion is being inten­tion­al­ly dilut­ed.

The notion that a con­spir­a­cy is behind the recent influx of migrants to Ger­many has echoes of the country’s dark past, Botsch warned.

“They try to avoid open­ly anti-Semit­ic images but it’s clear that there are close par­al­lels to anti-Semit­ic and anti-Jew­ish ideas,” he said.

Hei­drun Kaem­per, a lin­guist at the Insti­tute of Ger­man Lan­guage, not­ed that AfD’s rhetoric is imbued with notions of “us” and “them.” The party’s pro­gram por­trays migrants as une­d­u­cat­ed and their women as exces­sive­ly fer­tile com­pared with “women of Ger­man ori­gin.”

AfD’s focus on nation­al self-inter­est has already trans­lat­ed into con­crete pro­pos­als to strength­en Germany’s armed forces, weak­en inter­na­tion­al insti­tu­tions such as the EU that were designed to keep Germany’s pow­er in check after World War II, and return to the prin­ci­ple of grant­i­ng cit­i­zen­ship only to those who can prove they have Ger­man blood.

AfD also wants more “pos­i­tive, iden­ti­ty-inspir­ing aspects of Ger­man his­to­ry” to break up what it calls the “cur­rent focus of Germany’s cul­ture of remem­brance on the peri­od of Nation­al Social­ism.” It’s the only time the par­ty men­tions the country’s Nazi past in its pro­gram.

...

“Par­ty co-chair­woman Frauke Petry said in an inter­view pub­lished Sun­day that words such as “voelkisch” shouldn’t be taboo any longer. The term refers to peo­ple who belong to a par­tic­u­lar race and was fre­quent­ly used by the Nazis — their par­ty paper was called Voelkisch­er Beobachter.”

Yeah, some­one might need to point out to Frauke Petry that when a hor­ri­ble group taints a word via asso­ci­a­tion, the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of that a word prob­a­bly isn’t going to go so well when it’s the next gen­er­a­tion of that same hor­ri­ble group doing the reha­bil­i­tat­ing. Oh well. She’ll still no doubt find a recep­tive audi­ence with­in her par­ty, so get ready to hear a lot more about the “Volk”, folks!

Check out the AfD’s new “bill­board for the AfD’s abil­i­ty to gov­ern and per­form”: Berlin:

The Local.de

How the AfD could wield real pow­er in Berlin

Pub­lished: 19 Sep 2016 16:02 GMT+02:00
Updat­ed: 19 Sep 2016 16:03 GMT+02:00

Germany’s main­stream par­ties had ruled out gov­ern­ing with the AfD in Berlin, but the far-right party’s suc­cess in state elec­tions gives it the right to sev­en dis­trict coun­cil posts — and poten­tial access to bud­gets affect­ing refugees.

The Alter­na­tive for Ger­many scored 14.2 per­cent of the vote in Sunday’s elec­tions in the cap­i­tal, putting the par­ty just three point behind Angela Merkel’s CDU.

Now, for the first time, the par­ty looks set to exert polit­i­cal influ­ence in the Ger­man cap­i­tal. The party’s share of the vote means it is enti­tled, in the­o­ry at least, to have coun­cil­lors in sev­en of Berlin’s 12 bor­oughs.

In prac­tice, the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment could try to lock the upstart par­ty out, since coun­cil­lors are for­mal­ly elect­ed by the 12 dis­trict coun­cils.

Before the elec­tion, coun­cils had con­sid­ered block­ing AfD can­di­dates from vot­ing, but this looked a less like­ly prospect on Mon­day after the anti-immi­gra­tion par­ty had scored high­er than more estab­lished par­ties in some bor­oughs.

In Neukölln, the Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (SPD) may­or Franziska Gif­fey sug­gest­ed the AfD would get its chance.

“Now they have to show if they can do the job,” she told broad­cast­er RBB.

Until now the par­ty has had a gov­ern­ing man­date in just one town hall nation­wide: the small town of Reuth in Sax­ony, where the may­or is an AfD politi­cian — and that only after the may­or joined the par­ty after the elec­tion.

In some of Berlin’s poor­er bor­oughs the AfD’s suc­cess fell in line with pre­dic­tions, notably in the east­ern dis­tricts of Licht­en­berg, Marzahn-Hellers­dorf and Trep­tow-Köpenick, while the par­ty also per­formed well in Pankow.

But the par­ty also exceed­ed expec­ta­tions in the west­ern bor­oughs of Span­dau, Reinick­endorf and the mul­ti-cul­tur­al Neukölln.

“Berlin will be a bill­board for the AfD’s abil­i­ty to gov­ern and per­form,” said the par­ty’s Berlin leader Georg Pazder­s­ki before the elec­tion.

But it was uncer­tain which can­di­dates the par­ty would pick to fill any vacan­cies, since so few had any polit­i­cal or admin­is­tra­tive expe­ri­ence.

Pazder­s­ki said the AfD would address this by cast­ing its net out­side the city to find the right peo­ple if nec­es­sary.

“Because the pol­i­cy-mak­ers need to mas­ter their area of exper­tise,” he explained.

With this in mind he was unlike­ly to opt for the par­ty col­league in Neukölln who told the Berlin­er Zeitung before the elec­tion: “I have absolute­ly no idea what a coun­cil­lor does”.

Each dis­trict may­or in Berlin works with four coun­cil­lors, who are respon­si­ble for things like plan­ning per­mis­sion, school build­ings and local parks — but they also con­trol bud­gets for grants giv­en to clubs and polit­i­cal groups, which could see the par­ty stran­gle some of the resources cur­rent­ly used to help refugees.

...

“Until now the par­ty has had a gov­ern­ing man­date in just one town hall nation­wide: the small town of Reuth in Sax­ony, where the may­or is an AfD politi­cian — and that only after the may­or joined the par­ty after the elec­tion.”

It looks like Ger­many’s bare­ly-cryp­to-Nazi par­ty won quite a prize for itself. At least assum­ing it can find some­one that knows enough about how the gov­ern­ment actu­al­ly oper­ates to do the job:

...

But it was uncer­tain which can­di­dates the par­ty would pick to fill any vacan­cies, since so few had any polit­i­cal or admin­is­tra­tive expe­ri­ence.

Pazder­s­ki said the AfD would address this by cast­ing its net out­side the city to find the right peo­ple if nec­es­sary.

“Because the pol­i­cy-mak­ers need to mas­ter their area of exper­tise,” he explained.

With this in mind he was unlike­ly to opt for the par­ty col­league in Neukölln who told the Berlin­er Zeitung before the elec­tion: “I have absolute­ly no idea what a coun­cil­lor does”.
...

It appears a nation­al AfD gov­ern­ing tal­ent search might be required for the AfD to demon­strate that it’s capa­ble of gov­ern­ing. That does­n’t bode well.

Or course, since this is the AfD we’re talk­ing about, even if they did have plen­ty of peo­ple on hand with ade­quate knowl­edge of how the gov­ern­ment func­tions it still would­n’t bode well.

With Ger­many’s 2017 elec­tion sea­son just around the cor­ner and the migrant/refugee cri­sis con­tin­u­ing to fuel the surge in Ger­many’s far-right par­ties, it’s unfor­tu­nate­ly worth keep­ing in mind that the nor­mal­iza­tion and main­stream­ing of lan­guage asso­ci­at­ed with the Nazis is set to surge in 2017 too:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

In Ger­many, the lan­guage of Nazism is no longer buried in the past

By Antho­ny Faio­la and Stephanie Kirch­n­er
Decem­ber 9, 2016

BERLIN — In a recent tweet, a Ger­man law­mak­er used a high­ly spe­cif­ic term to describe her anti-migrant angst. Sug­gest­ing that her country’s nation­al iden­ti­ty was under threat, she cried ­“Umvolkung” — a word rough­ly trans­lat­ed as “eth­nic con­ver­sion.”

It is also a word that was last in vogue when Adolf Hitler ruled the land, and its appro­pri­a­tion by a politi­cian from Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s rul­ing par­ty sparked a rau­cous uproar. Yet the tweet high­light­ed the term’s resur­gence in Ger­many — where a half-dozen words long asso­ci­at­ed with the Nazis are mak­ing a come­back.

Hitler and his pro­pa­gan­dists wield­ed a tox­ic lex­i­con in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, deploy­ing vocab­u­lary meant to exalt eth­nic puri­ty and own Germany’s only real “truth.” And the reemer­gence in social media, lit­er­a­ture and polit­i­cal protests of words that were weaponized by the Nazis is gen­er­at­ing a fierce debate here over the pow­er of lan­guage in pol­i­tics, espe­cial­ly as nation­al­ists surge on both sides of the Atlantic.

“While we’re at it, why don’t we just give a pos­i­tive mean­ing to the word ‘con­cen­tra­tion camp?’” quipped tele­vi­sion satirist Hans-Joachim Heist after a dif­fer­ent Ger­man politi­cian recent­ly defend­ed anoth­er word — völkisch — used by the Nazis to con­jure images of a racial­ly pure state.

Forces on the polit­i­cal right are hail­ing the exhuma­tion of such words as a tri­umph over polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and war guilt — as well as a nod to free speech in Europe, which came under the spot­light after the guilty ver­dict Fri­day against Dutch nation­al­ist Geert Wilders for incit­ing hate against Moroc­cans. Call­ing it time to reclaim Ger­man words taint­ed by the Nazis, pro­po­nents see a new tell-it-like-it-is dis­course tak­ing shape over an influx of near­ly 1 mil­lion most­ly Mus­lim migrants from Syr­ia, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.

In a post-fac­tu­al world, some reclaimed words are meant to stake own­er­ship over truth. At least one — Lügen­presse or “lying press,” a slur aimed at the main­stream media — popped up among Don­ald Trump sup­port­ers on the U.S. cam­paign trail. In Ger­many, it’s become a fix­ture at anti-migrant protests and a word lobbed like a bomb on Twit­ter and Face­book against the media.

Crit­ics, how­ev­er, see height­ened usage of eth­ni­cal­ly charged terms as an attempt to detox­i­fy them — as well as the racist notions they once rep­re­sent­ed.

As lin­guis­tic polit­i­cal tools, experts rank them along­side “alt-right” — coined in the Unit­ed States to recast the white suprema­cy move­ment. Rather than mint new words, how­ev­er, the Ger­mans need only look to his­to­ry for a nation­al­ist the­saurus. Crit­ics say those embrac­ing such vocab­u­lary are play­ing a coy game, wink­ing at Ger­man nation­al­ism with­out open­ly salut­ing Hitler.

“If some­one said ‘Sieg Heil’ today, it would be clear this is about Nation­al Social­ism,” said Georg Schup­pen­er, a not­ed Ger­man lin­guist and lan­guage his­to­ri­an. But the words pop­ping up now “at first don’t sound like Nation­al Social­ism, but nev­er­the­less sug­gest it.”

All the words in ques­tion pre­date the Nazis but became taint­ed in the pub­lic mind after their deploy­ment in Nazi pro­pa­gan­da. After World War II, some terms lin­gered in beer-hall talk and neo-Nazi cir­cles. Dur­ing the Cold War, a few found a perch in com­mu­nist East Ger­many.

But Ger­man lin­guists point to a resus­ci­ta­tion of nation­al­ist terms in 2014, when the anti-migrant group Pegi­da began stag­ing mas­sive demon­stra­tions nation­wide. Two years lat­er, the rapid rise of the pop­ulist, anti-migrant Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) — ­cou­pled with mas­sive pub­lic ­skep­ti­cism of Merkel’s refu­gee pol­i­cy — has these terms rolling off the tongues of politi­cians and fly­ing around social media in a man­ner that has shocked many Ger­mans.

In a Sep­tem­ber inter­view with Die Welt, the AfD’s chief, Frauke Petry, declared it an “undue sim­pli­fi­ca­tion” to call the Ger­man word “völkisch” fun­da­men­tal­ly racist. Though used by Hitler and his lieu­tenants to describe a racial­ly pure pop­u­la­tion, she argued that mod­ern Ger­mans should give the term “a pos­i­tive con­no­ta­tion again.”

Last month, AfD law­mak­er Ste­fan Räp­ple described peers from Ger­man par­ties as “Volksver­räter” — or “trai­tor of the peo­ple.” Used in the Nazi era as an offi­cial charge against ene­mies, the term has addi­tion­al­ly burst forth from the mouths of pro­test­ers at anti-migrant polit­i­cal ral­lies and protests. In August, for instance, right-wing demon­stra­tors taunt­ed Merkel’s deputy chan­cel­lor by call­ing him “Volksver­räter.”

In a 1933 speech, Hitler’s pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joe­sph Goebbels used the word “Über­frem­dung” to denounce what the Nazis saw as the infec­tion of Ger­man intel­lec­tu­al life by Jews. Fol­low­ing loss­es in local elec­tions this year, con­ser­v­a­tive dis­senters in Merkel’s Chris­t­ian Demo­c­ra­t­ic Union (CDU) and its sis­ter par­ty, the Chris­t­ian Social Union (CSU), used it to define cit­i­zens’ fears toward the migrant wave.

“The con­cern about a loss of iden­ti­ty and Über­frem­dung of the coun­try has seized many cit­i­zens,” they wrote in a man­i­festo.

...

Ronald Gläs­er, a Berlin-based politi­cian for the AfD, called it unfair to draw any par­al­lels between those rede­ploy­ing such words now and their use in Nazi pro­pa­gan­da.

“None of us delib­er­ate­ly use Nation­al Social­ist vocab­u­lary,” he said. Attempt­ing to explain the increas­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of such words, he added that many Ger­mans sim­ply “fear that by 2040, Ger­many will be like a Third World coun­try which doesn’t con­sist most­ly of white peo­ple.”

Yet in a nation high­ly sen­si­tive to any echoes of the Nazis — and where the nation­al­ists have had a hard­er time gain­ing a foothold than in many oth­er Euro­pean nations — the use of such terms still risks a pow­er­ful back­lash. In Sep­tem­ber, for instance, when Bet­ti­na Kud­la, a law­mak­er for Merkel’s CDU, used “Umvolkung” in her anti-migrant tweet, the ret­ri­bu­tion was swift.

Michael Grosse-Brömer, chief whip of the CDU and its sis­ter par­ty, the CSU, decried her tweet as “unspeak­able.” The CDU’s sec­re­tary gen­er­al, Peter Tauber, denounced it as “com­plete­ly unac­cept­able in tone and con­tent.” By Octo­ber, Kudla’s office in her home con­stituen­cy had been van­dal­ized. Ulti­mate­ly, the CDU did not nom­i­nate her for reelec­tion next year.

But her lin­guis­tic bomb won high acco­lades, too.

“Mak­ing a Nazi com­par­i­son because of the word ‘Umvolkung’ is remark­ably stu­pid,” one sup­port­er — Peter Mar­tin — wrote on her Face­book page. “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, no one gives a damn about the Nazi era. ... The future belongs to patri­ots.”

“Forces on the polit­i­cal right are hail­ing the exhuma­tion of such words as a tri­umph over polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and war guilt — as well as a nod to free speech in Europe, which came under the spot­light after the guilty ver­dict Fri­day against Dutch nation­al­ist Geert Wilders for incit­ing hate against Moroc­cans. Call­ing it time to reclaim Ger­man words taint­ed by the Nazis, pro­po­nents see a new tell-it-like-it-is dis­course tak­ing shape over an influx of near­ly 1 mil­lion most­ly Mus­lim migrants from Syr­ia, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.”

So the resus­ci­ta­tion of Nazi-taint­ed ter­mi­nol­o­gy isn’t just seen as a vic­to­ry of “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness”. It’s also a tri­umph over war guilt. Gee, how is this going to end?

And note that it’s not just the AfD ad Pegi­da main­stream­ing these terms any­more:

...

In a 1933 speech, Hitler’s pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joe­sph Goebbels used the word “Über­frem­dung” to denounce what the Nazis saw as the infec­tion of Ger­man intel­lec­tu­al life by Jews. Fol­low­ing loss­es in local elec­tions this year, con­ser­v­a­tive dis­senters in Merkel’s Chris­t­ian Demo­c­ra­t­ic Union (CDU) and its sis­ter par­ty, the Chris­t­ian Social Union (CSU), used it to define cit­i­zens’ fears toward the migrant wave.

...

Yep, using Nazi terms is now seen as a catchy way of show­ing dis­sent for CDU offi­cials too.

Talk­ing like a Nazi and dis­miss­ing a sense of his­toric shame over the Nazi atroc­i­ties is the new trend in Ger­many. So if you thought 2016 was a deplorable year, get ready for 2017!

This should sound pret­ty famil­iar to any­one who hap­pened to the fol­low the US 2016 Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion: The can­di­date wide­ly expect­ed to win an even­tu­al runoff against Marine Le Pen — in this case it’s the cen­ter-right can­di­date Fran­coise Fil­lon — has a fun new scan­dal and a pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al probe just months before the elec­tion:

Bloomberg Pol­i­tics

French Race Blown Wide Open as Le Pen, Macron Wait in Wings

* News­pa­per reports Fil­lon employed two chil­dren as sen­ate aides
* Canard report also rais­es amount wife earned to 900,000 euros

Helene Fou­quet and Gre­go­ry Vis­cusi
Jan­u­ary 31, 2017, 10:24 AM CST Jan­u­ary 31, 2017, 12:40 PM CST

Fran­cois Fillon’s French pres­i­den­tial cam­paign plunged deep­er into trou­ble on Tues­day after fur­ther rev­e­la­tions about his use of pub­lic funds to employ mem­bers of his fam­i­ly.

The Repub­li­can candidate’s daugh­ter and son alleged­ly earned 84,000 euros ($91,000) from 2005 to 2007 while work­ing for him when he was a Sen­a­tor, Le Canard Enchaine said. His wife, Pene­lope Fil­lon, earned more than 900,000 euros dur­ing over a decade as a par­lia­men­tary assis­tant and a con­trib­u­tor to a mag­a­zine, accord­ing to Le Canard.

The newspaper’s ini­tial report on Penelope’s job last week trig­gered a pros­e­cu­tor to open a pre­lim­i­nary probe into the family’s affairs. The can­di­date says he’s inno­cent.

“I am con­fi­dent, I am calm and I’m wait­ing for the end of the inves­ti­ga­tion,” Fil­lon said in Paris. “Nev­er has a sit­u­a­tion like this one occurred. Nev­er, three months before an elec­tion, was such an big and pro­fes­sion­al oper­a­tion set up to elim­i­nate a can­di­date oth­er than through a demo­c­ra­t­ic vote. Every­one will reap the con­se­quences.”

The scan­dal has gripped France over the last week and offers the prospect of anoth­er twist in a race that has the nation­al­ist Marine Le Pen lead­ing the polls and has already seen house­hold names like Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hol­lande and his pre­de­ces­sor, Nico­las Sarkozy, fall by the way­side. That said, polls show that Le Pen is still a long shot for vic­to­ry in the sec­ond round of vot­ing, with Emmanuel Macron also poised to ben­e­fit — at least in the short term — from Fillon’s woes.

“His image has been seri­ous­ly dam­aged, and what’s wor­ry­ing for him is that even among his sup­port­ers many are not con­vinced,” said Yves-Marie Cann, direc­tor of polit­i­cal stud­ies at poll­ster Elabe in Paris. “The fire is not con­tained.”

For an explain­er on the Fil­lon scan­dal, click here

Cann said it’s almost cer­tain the next round of polling will show Fil­lon has lost sup­port, though it’s too ear­ly to judge whether the main ben­e­fi­cia­ry will be inde­pen­dent cen­trist Macron or the anti-Euro­pean Union Le Pen. Fillon’s ini­tial attempts to explain his way out of the grow­ing scan­dal were deemed uncon­vinc­ing by three-quar­ters of the French, a poll said.

“Fran­cois Fil­lon is inno­cent, but the media pres­sure is such that the French have con­demned him,” Fillon’s spokesman Benoist Apparu said LCP tele­vi­sion. “It’s total­ly unjust.” Fillon’s cam­paign team and the Repub­li­can par­ty declined requests for com­ment.

Tack­ling Le Pen

Fil­lon has promised to with­draw from the race if the pre­lim­i­nary inquiry becomes a for­mal one — some­thing that has nev­er hap­pened to a major French can­di­date this late in a pres­i­den­tial con­test.

The for­mer prime min­is­ter has been the establishment’s lead­ing can­di­date in the bat­tle to stop Le Pen’s pop­ulist cam­paign to seize the pres­i­den­cy and lead France out of the euro. He won the Repub­li­cans’ pri­ma­ry boast­ing that he had the irre­proach­able integri­ty required to lead the coun­try.

While polls show Le Pen lead­ing in the first round of vot­ing, they’ve recent­ly shown Macron close on Fillon’s heels for the April 23 first round of vot­ing. Sur­veys also sug­gest that Le Pen would lose heav­i­ly to either Macron or Fil­lon in the May 7 run-off.

Police Inter­ro­ga­tion

A Kan­tar Sofres poll released Mon­day in Le Figaro showed about 22 per­cent of vot­ers now back Fil­lon for the first round of vot­ing, leav­ing him just one point ahead of Macron and three behind Le Pen. Before the inquiry, Fil­lon was con­sid­ered the favorite to be France’s next pres­i­dent.

Inves­ti­ga­tors on Tues­day searched for doc­u­ments at the Nation­al Assem­bly, a day after Fil­lon and his wife were sep­a­rate­ly ques­tioned for about five hours by the police as part of the probe. The pres­i­den­tial can­di­date was “hap­py to defend his hon­or,” Antonin Levy, Fillon’s lawyer, said on BFM tele­vi­sion. A par­lia­men­tary job’s assis­tant is often “less tan­gi­ble” than oth­er types of work, Levy added.

...

“The scan­dal has gripped France over the last week and offers the prospect of anoth­er twist in a race that has the nation­al­ist Marine Le Pen lead­ing the polls and has already seen house­hold names like Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hol­lande and his pre­de­ces­sor, Nico­las Sarkozy, fall by the way­side. That said, polls show that Le Pen is still a long shot for vic­to­ry in the sec­ond round of vot­ing, with Emmanuel Macron also poised to ben­e­fit — at least in the short term — from Fillon’s woes.”

Well, at least it sounds like Fil­lon’s pos­si­ble implo­sion won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly trans­late into increased odds of Le Pen win­ning. And even if Le Pen does win the first round vote she’s expect­ed to lose hand­i­ly to either the con­ser­v­a­tives or Social­ists in the sec­ond round, depend­ing on which par­ty takes sec­ond place in the first vote. But that’s assum­ing the cen­ter-left­/right “repub­li­can front” pact holds, and let’s not for­get that when Marine Le Pen led in the polls for the first time ever back in 2014, main­tain­ing an anti-far-right “repub­li­can front” was a rather con­tro­ver­sial posi­tion for Fil­lon’s con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty. So while his­to­ry sug­gests that the “repub­li­can front” will hold, more recent his­to­ry isn’t so sug­ges­tive of that out­come.

And then there’s the recent his­to­ry of the euro­zone cri­sis and all the con­se­quences that emerged from it. Con­se­quences that could make pre­dict­ing the uphold­ing of the “repub­li­can front” a lot trick­i­er in the past. Con­se­quences like the embrace of right-wing neolib­er­al eco­nom­ics by the Europe’s cen­ter left that leaves the far-left and far-right the only anti-aus­ter­i­ty/an­ti-neolib­er­al options left to choose from:

The New York Times Mag­a­zine

Will France Sound the Death
Knell for Social Democ­ra­cy?

As a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion approach­es this spring, even work­ers
in the country’s rust belt are embrac­ing right-wing pop­ulism.

By JAMES ANGELOS
JAN. 24, 2017

One after­noon in Sep­tem­ber, Franck Sail­liot marched through the north­ern French city of Lille along­side a cou­ple of thou­sand left­ist trade union­ists and stu­dents. The marchers waved union flags, blew whis­tles, bel­lowed slo­gans. “Enough, enough, enough of this soci­ety, where there’s only unem­ploy­ment and inse­cu­ri­ty!” they yelled. “We don’t want the law of the boss­es! The only solu­tion is to revoke it!” Sail­liot, a 48-year-old trade union­ist who had worked much of his adult life in a paper mill in a town about an hour’s dri­ve to the east, shuf­fled along, most­ly silent, his hands in his pock­ets. As the demon­stra­tors made their way through Lille’s town cen­ter, pass­ing the ornate 17th-cen­tu­ry stock exchange, they shout­ed, “Fire the stock­hold­ers!” and “Every­thing they have, they stole it!” One man wield­ed a blood­ied, sev­ered man­nequin head and waved a French flag embla­zoned with the sil­hou­ette of Robe­spierre, who presided over the Reign of Ter­ror. It was a rev­o­lu­tion of sorts, but Sail­liot seemed a bit bored. The French left has long protest­ed the encroach­ment of an unbri­dled free mar­ket, and despite some vic­to­ries in halt­ing its progress, the over­all trend was one of demor­al­iz­ing defeat. Sail­liot debat­ed peel­ing off from the crowd ear­ly and grab­bing a beer.

He might have been for­giv­en for betray­ing a degree of protest fatigue. For sev­en months, he had par­tic­i­pat­ed, off and on, in a wave of large and angry antigov­ern­ment demon­stra­tions that trans­fixed the coun­try and at times par­a­lyzed it. Chief among the objects of the pro­test­ers’ ire was a labor law, con­ceived by Pres­i­dent François Hollande’s Social­ist gov­ern­ment, designed to loosen the country’s impos­si­bly dense net­work of job pro­tec­tions. The law lacked sup­port in the French Leg­is­la­ture, so in July, Hollande’s prime min­is­ter invoked spe­cial con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­ers to push it through with­out a vote. From the point of view of French left­ists like Sail­liot, this was the lat­est in a series of betray­als by an osten­si­bly left-wing gov­ern­ment that backed one non­left­ist mea­sure after anoth­er. Hol­lande and his min­is­ters were act­ing under immense pres­sure to improve the country’s slug­gish growth and chron­i­cal­ly high unem­ploy­ment, which now hov­ers at 9.5 per­cent (25.9 per­cent for peo­ple under 25). Every­one from the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund to the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion was urg­ing Hol­lande to under­take a pro­gram of eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­iza­tion in order to rem­e­dy the prob­lem. The argu­ment for the labor law was the essence of free-mar­ket ortho­doxy: If com­pa­nies could more eas­i­ly lay off work­ers in bad times, they would be more will­ing to hire them in good times.

The argu­ment was uncon­vinc­ing to many in Pas-de-Calais, the rur­al and indus­tri­al area in the north­ern­most tip of France, where Sail­liot lives. In the 1970s, France, like oth­er indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries, began a shift away from man­u­fac­tur­ing to a ser­vices-based econ­o­my, and with­in a few decades, Pas-de-Calais came to epit­o­mize indus­tri­al decline. It is now France’s rust belt and coal coun­try all in one. The work­ing-class vot­ers of Pas-de-Calais have long sup­port­ed France’s Social­ists along with the French Com­mu­nist Par­ty. But as in the Unit­ed States, where Rust Belt vot­ers no longer embrace the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, these work­ers have increas­ing­ly lost faith in the par­ties of the left.

Sailliot’s union, the Gen­er­al Con­fed­er­a­tion of Labor, or the C.G.T., was among the most stri­dent oppo­nents of the new labor law. The C.G.T., for­mer­ly linked to the Com­mu­nist Par­ty, is one of the old­est and largest trade unions in France. Though its mem­ber­ship and stature, like those of oth­er French unions, have declined con­sid­er­ably from their post-World War II height, the C.G.T. remains unmatched in its abil­i­ty to mobi­lize work­ers. And many of its mem­bers retain a far-left ide­ol­o­gy and pref­er­ence for mil­i­tant tac­tics. After a draft of the labor law leaked last Feb­ru­ary, the C.G.T. demand­ed that it be scrapped and rec­om­mend­ed alter­na­tive poli­cies: Reduce the French work­week to 32 hours (from the cur­rent 35) and give work­ers rais­es.

The Social­ist gov­ern­ment tried to appease the C.G.T. and oth­er unions by water­ing down the orig­i­nal draft of the law, but oppo­si­tion to it remained fierce. The face-off ignit­ed one of the most sus­tained and impas­sioned protest move­ments in France since the May 1968 demon­stra­tions that near­ly brought down the Fifth Repub­lic a decade into its exis­tence. March­es in Paris and cities across the coun­try drew hun­dreds of thou­sands of pro­test­ers and often cul­mi­nat­ed in tear-gas-laden street bat­tles between trun­cheon-swing­ing riot offi­cers and anar­chist groups. Nuit Debout, a French ver­sion of Occu­py Wall Street, drew large gath­er­ings of young peo­ple to night­time meet­ings in the Place de la République in Paris. C.G.T. activists blocked high­way lanes and oil refiner­ies, cre­at­ing fuel short­ages. Labor strikes halt­ed train trav­el and cut out­put at nuclear-pow­er plants.

Sail­liot had anoth­er rea­son to protest. The paper mill in Pas-de-Calais where he worked for three decades shut down in 2015, because of what the com­pa­ny called an “accel­er­at­ing dete­ri­o­ra­tion in mar­ket con­di­tions for print­ing and writ­ing papers.” Sail­liot was still tech­ni­cal­ly employed there — he was a C.G.T. del­e­gate, he explained, so legal­ly it was hard­er to lay him off — but it was an unset­tling feel­ing, he said, to think he’d have to find a new indus­try to work in. He blamed the Social­ist gov­ern­ment. His resent­ment was aggra­vat­ed by the fact that he vot­ed for Hol­lande in the French pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 2012, enticed by his left­ist pre-elec­tion rhetoric. These new Social­ist laws, Sail­liot said, were even worse than what the right was propos­ing; as for Hol­lande per­son­al­ly, Sail­liot raised his hand in a ges­ture, not uncom­mon among French­men, to indi­cate his tes­ti­cles’ spring­ing up to his neck in anger. “He’s a trai­tor.”

All around his home and work­place in Pas-de-Calais, Sail­liot told me, the far-right, anti-immi­gra­tion Nation­al Front was fill­ing the polit­i­cal void that work­ing-class dis­con­tent had cre­at­ed. With nation­al elec­tions loom­ing, the par­ty depict­ed itself as the new defend­er of the French work­er; as part of that effort, its leader, Marine Le Pen, joined France’s hard left­ists in con­demn­ing the labor law as “social regres­sion” — the same term of dis­par­age­ment used by trade-union lead­ers and the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. Le Pen’s eco­nom­ic rhetoric, in fact, is often hard to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from posi­tions nor­mal­ly held by the far left. She rails against free-trade agree­ments and “social dump­ing” — the prac­tice of domes­ti­cal­ly hir­ing for­eign­ers for low­er wages than cit­i­zens earn — and her par­ty has vowed to rein­dus­tri­al­ize France and pro­tect social ben­e­fits. The French news­magazine Le Point report­ed that Hol­lande, when asked to explain the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Nation­al Front, often relays a sto­ry a for­mer head of the C.G.T. told him: When the union leader read a Nation­al Front leaflet to his fel­low union mem­bers with­out telling them what par­ty it was from, the union mem­bers all approved of the mes­sage.

Sail­liot, a com­mit­ted Com­mu­nist, referred to the Nation­al Front’s lead­ers as “impos­tors” — a word that C.G.T. lead­ers use when describ­ing the party’s effort to appeal to their rank and file — and dis­missed the notion that the far-right par­ty, if ele­vat­ed to pow­er, would keep its left­ist-sound­ing promis­es. But he could not deny the polit­i­cal effec­tive­ness of the mes­sage. Among his dis­af­fect­ed col­leagues, neigh­bors, even with­in his own fam­i­ly, the Nation­al Front was increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar, he told me. Laid-off work­ers saw that main­stream par­ties hadn’t done any­thing for them, he said, “so they vote for Le Pen.”

In two rounds of vot­ing this April and May, France will elect a new pres­i­dent to suc­ceed Hol­lande. Accord­ing to polls, as of this writ­ing, Le Pen remains a viable con­tender. Her suc­cess — in the com­ing elec­tion and beyond — hinges in no small part on her party’s effort to sup­plant the left in places like Pas-de-Calais, and to make the Nation­al Front the new voice of France’s work­ing class.

The 2008 finan­cial cri­sis, which began in the Unit­ed States but quick­ly spread to Europe with more endur­ing, destruc­tive con­se­quences, should in the­o­ry have been a boon to the glob­al left. The vast scope of the col­lapse, after all, illus­trat­ed that free mar­kets are far from unfail­ing­ly effi­cient. Gov­ern­ments across Europe stepped in to res­cue banks, to save cap­i­tal­ism from itself. Both the ori­gins of the cri­sis and the activism of the state in address­ing it seemed to jus­ti­fy the social-demo­c­ra­t­ic mod­el that Euro­pean nations tra­di­tion­al­ly cham­pi­oned: gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion to tame the excess­es of cap­i­tal­ism and har­ness its pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty for the greater good.

Recent­ly, though, Euro­pean social democ­rats have wit­nessed an extra­or­di­nary drop in sup­port. In 2009, the Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty of Ger­many suf­fered its worst elec­tion defeat in post-World War II his­to­ry. In the British gen­er­al elec­tion one year lat­er, the Labour Par­ty received its sec­ond-low­est share of the vote since 1918, the year that vot­ing restric­tions on women and non-prop­er­ty-own­ing men were relaxed. Even in Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries — often cit­ed as the apoth­e­o­sis of social democ­ra­cy — cen­ter-left par­ties are strug­gling. A recent analy­sis in The Econ­o­mist showed that across West­ern Europe, sup­port for social-demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties is at its low­est point in 70 years.

France appeared to be some­thing of a hold­out. Hollande’s ascen­sion to the pres­i­den­cy in 2012 was seen as a rare bit of good news. Before his elec­tion, Hol­lande tapped into the sense of griev­ance on the left, declar­ing his “true ene­my” to be the “world of finance,” call­ing him­self the “can­di­date of jus­tice” and vow­ing to impose a 75 per­cent tax on earn­ings over one mil­lion euros (a mea­sure lat­er enact­ed but allowed to expire in 2014). Hol­lande also declared his oppo­si­tion to Ger­man-backed aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies applied in response to the euro­zone debt cri­sis. But only months into his pres­i­den­cy, he began to anger the far left, sup­port­ing a Ger­man-led Euro­pean Union fis­cal com­pact that estab­lished stricter con­trols over nation­al spend­ing. By 2014, Hol­lande was empha­siz­ing the need to reduce cor­po­rate tax­es and trim pub­lic spend­ing in order to increase growth and con­trol deficits, and he replaced left­ist cab­i­net mem­bers with more cen­trist min­is­ters. Hollande’s prime min­is­ter, Manuel Valls, had pre­vi­ous­ly sug­gest­ed that the par­ty drop the word “social­ist” from its name; it was Valls who lat­er mus­cled the labor law through Par­lia­ment. In part because of the dis­af­fec­tion of the left­ists who once sup­port­ed him, Hol­lande became per­haps the least pop­u­lar pres­i­dent in recent French his­to­ry; in one poll last Octo­ber, only 4 per­cent of respon­dents said they were sat­is­fied with him. In Decem­ber, Hol­lande took the extra­or­di­nary step of announc­ing that he would not run for re-elec­tion, mak­ing him the first sit­ting pres­i­dent in recent French his­to­ry not to seek a sec­ond term.

For many French left­ists, Hollande’s pres­i­den­cy did not rep­re­sent the first betray­al at the hands of the Social­ist Par­ty. The only oth­er Social­ist pres­i­dent of the Fifth Repub­lic, François Mit­ter­rand, was an even greater dis­ap­point­ment. When he was first elect­ed in 1981, Mit­ter­rand ran on an ant­i­cap­i­tal­ist plat­form, vow­ing to nation­al­ize indus­try, raise wages and reduce the retire­ment age. His vic­to­ry was met with jubi­la­tion on the left, and some sup­port­ers believed Mit­ter­rand would end French cap­i­tal­ism. But out­side France, polit­i­cal winds were blow­ing in the oth­er direc­tion. The 1980s were the era of dereg­u­la­tion and eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­iza­tion, the age of Mar­garet Thatch­er and Ronald Rea­gan. Europe was advanc­ing toward a sin­gle mar­ket. Mitterrand’s poli­cies couldn’t con­tain infla­tion, threat­en­ing the country’s place in the com­ing mon­e­tary union. He was forced to choose between his rev­o­lu­tion­ary agen­da and Euro­pean inte­gra­tion. By 1983, Mit­ter­rand chose Europe and imple­ment­ed spend­ing cuts, a move referred to in France as the tour­nant de la rigueur, or the aus­ter­i­ty turn. Today, French left­ists com­pare Hollande’s shift to Mitterrand’s U‑turn and ask now, as they asked then, Is social­ism dead?

The answer, at least in today’s Europe, is prob­a­bly yes. In the 1990s and ear­ly 2000s, lead­ers like Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clin­ton in the Unit­ed States and Ger­hard Schröder in Ger­many led a cen­ter-left resur­gence. Yet in their fight for the polit­i­cal mid­dle ground, they pulled their own par­ties away from shrink­ing labor con­stituen­cies and toward a fuller embrace of the free mar­ket. In Europe, the demise of the old left has been cement­ed by the stric­tures of E.U. mem­ber­ship, which sets in stone prac­tices that were once anath­e­ma to social­ists: free trade, lim­its on nation­al spend­ing and mon­e­tary poli­cies that sub­or­di­nate employ­ment to price sta­bil­i­ty. There is no more bla­tant exam­ple of the Euro­pean left’s inabil­i­ty to be left­ist than Greece, where in 2015 vot­ers elect­ed Syriza, a “rad­i­cal left” par­ty that promised to thwart E.U. aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies. Since its vic­to­ry, how­ev­er, Syriza has been com­pelled, under threat of expul­sion from the euro­zone, to adopt an agen­da that is any­thing but left­ist: pri­va­ti­za­tions, pen­sion cuts and strin­gent fis­cal tar­gets. In a recent inter­view in the French jour­nal Le Débat, Hol­lande was asked about his own right­ward drift: Will he be the pres­i­dent who pre­sides over “the end of the social­ist idea”? Hol­lande replied that it was impos­si­ble to be social­ist in iso­la­tion, before going on to frame the left’s chal­lenge. “What is at stake is whether the left, rather than social­ism, has a future in the world, or whether glob­al­iza­tion has reduced or even anni­hi­lat­ed this hope.”

As cen­ter-left par­ties become more indis­tin­guish­able from their cen­ter-right oppo­nents, the clas­si­cal lib­er­al vision — a well-informed poli­ty mak­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic choic­es along a left-right con­tin­u­um — has blurred. The left-right dichoto­my has its roots in the French Rev­o­lu­tion, when mem­bers of the Nation­al Assem­bly phys­i­cal­ly divid­ed them­selves accord­ing to their view on the king’s author­i­ty: Those mem­bers in favor of more roy­al pow­er stood on the right side of the cham­ber, and those opposed stood on the left. While the mean­ing of the left-right divide has since evolved and the con­cept has often failed to encap­su­late com­plex polit­i­cal move­ments, it has since come to define demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics. Increas­ing­ly, how­ev­er, vot­ers per­ceive their demo­c­ra­t­ic choic­es along a dif­fer­ent axis, not from left to right but from a fill-in-the-blank cen­trist par­ty to a pop­ulist, rad­i­cal one, as a choice between par­ties that wish to tweak the pre­vail­ing order and those that seek to over­throw it.

Far-right par­ties are not the only ones offer­ing rev­o­lu­tion. Far-left par­ties remain on bal­lots across Europe, and in France, the Left Front, an elec­toral coali­tion that includes the French Com­mu­nist Par­ty, has sought to take advan­tage of the Social­ists’ trou­bles. The Left Front was pop­u­lar among many of the trade union­ists I met, yet as of now, its sup­port has remained lim­it­ed. With notable excep­tions like Greece and Spain, where far-left par­ties have surged in the face of eco­nom­ic mis­ery, vot­ers in Europe often per­ceive these par­ties to be dis­cred­it­ed by his­to­ry, even irrel­e­vant. And now, in coun­tries like France, the far left faces grow­ing com­pe­ti­tion from the far right.

Many believe that the con­se­quences of this polit­i­cal scram­bling will be pro­found. Dominique Reynié, a polit­i­cal-sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Sci­ences Po in Paris, described “the end of the sto­ry of the demo­c­ra­t­ic-social­ist mod­el” as “very bad news,” even though he does not iden­ti­fy as a social­ist him­self. “If we con­sid­er the inven­tion of plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy in Europe at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, it was found­ed on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mak­ing a choice between the right and the left,” he told me. “If we have lost this dual­i­ty, we have prob­a­bly lost the mechan­i­cal prin­ci­ple of democ­ra­cy.”

...

The sus­pi­cion that immi­grants are tak­ing some­thing they don’t deserve, the con­vic­tion that native cit­i­zens are being sup­plant­ed by for­eign­ers, the grow­ing sense that main­stream polit­i­cal par­ties serve the inter­ests of priv­i­leged glob­al elites rather than work­ing peo­ple — all of this will be per­fect­ly famil­iar to Amer­i­cans who just lived through the last elec­tion. Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s cam­paign in many ways embod­ied the nativist, anti-estab­lish­ment rebel­lion sweep­ing much of the West. In doing so, it repli­cat­ed aspects of an old­er French mod­el, in which the far right adopt­ed the rhetoric of the far left to sur­pris­ing suc­cess.

In the mid-1990s, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Nation­al Front’s founder, began to push the party’s eco­nom­ic plat­form away from its orig­i­nal free-mar­ket ide­ol­o­gy and toward pro­tect­ing the work­ing class. (Observers coined the term gau­cho-lep­énisme to describe his grow­ing appeal to tra­di­tion­al left­ists.) In 2002, he stunned France by com­ing in sec­ond in the first round of the French pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, ahead of the weak Social­ist can­di­date. In France, the win­ner must obtain an absolute major­i­ty of votes, so the top two fin­ish­ers com­pete in a sec­ond round. In that runoff, Le Pen lost over­whelm­ing­ly to the cen­ter-right can­di­date, Jacques Chirac, as many left­ists joined cen­ter-right vot­ers to form a “repub­li­can front,” unit­ing forces to thwart the Nation­al Front.

When Jean-Marie’s youngest daugh­ter, Marine, took over the par­ty in 2011, she redou­bled the left­ist eco­nom­ic mes­sage and shunned her father’s bla­tant­ly anti-Semit­ic state­ments — a so-called dédi­a­boli­sa­tion of the par­ty intend­ed to make it more palat­able to the main­stream. Her eco­nom­ic rhetoric is now often indis­tin­guish­able from that of far-left Euro­pean lead­ers. In 2015, Hol­lande and Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel of Ger­many joint­ly addressed the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment in Stras­bourg, France. Le Pen, a mem­ber of that Par­lia­ment, stood to make a reproach to Merkel. The terms on which she did so — Ger­man eco­nom­ic dom­i­na­tion of Europe, the “vas­sal­iza­tion” of Euro­pean nations and the impo­si­tion of aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies that led to mass unem­ploy­ment — could just as well have come from Greece’s for­mer finance min­is­ter, Yanis Varo­ufakis, Le Pen’s ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­site in every oth­er way.

Le Pen has adopt­ed an old-left eco­nom­ic mes­sage at a time when the cen­ter-left has large­ly aban­doned it. Across much of Europe, in fact, far-right par­ties are increas­ing­ly pre­sent­ing them­selves as guardians of work­ers and of the wel­fare state for native cit­i­zens, promis­ing to pre­serve it from the threat of for­eign new­com­ers. The con­se­quences are prov­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly dras­tic for the Euro­pean Union. Britain’s vote to leave the E.U. was pro­pelled by an unusu­al alliance of con­ser­v­a­tives and work­ing-class vot­ers who have tra­di­tion­al­ly sup­port­ed the Labour Par­ty — many of them in England’s indus­tri­al north. Le Pen promis­es that if she wins the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, she, too, will call for a ref­er­en­dum on whether France should remain in the E.U., and she hopes a sim­i­lar alliance of vot­ers will yield the same result. France is a found­ing mem­ber of the E.U. and is far more eco­nom­i­cal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly entwined with the bloc than Britain, which was nev­er a ful­ly com­mit­ted mem­ber. While Brex­it was a blow to the E.U., France’s depar­ture could sig­ni­fy its end. An even­tu­al French exit, though unlike­ly, is not unimag­in­able. French vot­ers reject­ed a Euro­pean Con­sti­tu­tion in a 2005 ref­er­en­dum, and French atti­tudes toward the Euro­pean Union since then have only grown more skep­ti­cal. A pre-Brex­it Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey found that 61 per­cent of the French held an unfa­vor­able view of the E.U.; the same sur­vey found that 48 per­cent of Britons did.

Pres­i­den­tial-elec­tion polls in France, as of this writ­ing, show Le Pen like­ly to make it to the runoff, to be held in May. The press­ing ques­tion in France now is: Will the “repub­li­can front” once again hold? Giv­en the unpop­u­lar­i­ty of the Social­ists, Le Pen’s chief oppo­nents are now François Fil­lon — a cen­ter-right, mar­ket-ori­ent­ed social con­ser­v­a­tive who has promised to cut pub­lic-sec­tor jobs and was recent­ly depict­ed on the front page of the left-wing news­pa­per Libéra­tion with a Mar­garet Thatch­er hair­do — and Emmanuel Macron, a young for­mer invest­ment banker who served as the econ­o­my min­is­ter under Hol­lande but has now split to form his own nei­ther-of-the-left-nor-of-the-right polit­i­cal move­ment. This, bewil­der­ing­ly, makes the far-right Le Pen the only lead­ing can­di­date with a tra­di­tion­al­ly left­ist eco­nom­ic mes­sage, and it leaves many left­ists who remain opposed to her hard-pressed to vote for her oppo­nents.

Sail­liot told me that he would sup­port the Left Front can­di­date in the first round, but that if he was forced to choose between Le Pen and one of the oth­er prob­a­ble can­di­dates in the sec­ond round, he would not vote at all. Some of his left­ist col­leagues, many of whom vot­ed for Chirac in 2002 in order to foil Jean-Marie Le Pen, told me the same thing. Ulti­mate­ly, Marine Le Pen isn’t expect­ed to win; enough left-lean­ing vot­ers, it is believed, will join cen­ter-right vot­ers to defeat her. But this is an era in which polit­i­cal pre­dic­tion may seem like a fool’s game. The day after Trump’s elec­tion, Le Pen was clear­ly heart­ened by his unex­pect­ed vic­to­ry. “What hap­pened last night wasn’t the end of the world,” Le Pen said. “It’s the end of a world.”

...

“All around his home and work­place in Pas-de-Calais, Sail­liot told me, the far-right, anti-immi­gra­tion Nation­al Front was fill­ing the polit­i­cal void that work­ing-class dis­con­tent had cre­at­ed. With nation­al elec­tions loom­ing, the par­ty depict­ed itself as the new defend­er of the French work­er; as part of that effort, its leader, Marine Le Pen, joined France’s hard left­ists in con­demn­ing the labor law as “social regres­sion” — the same term of dis­par­age­ment used by trade-union lead­ers and the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. Le Pen’s eco­nom­ic rhetoric, in fact, is often hard to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from posi­tions nor­mal­ly held by the far left. She rails against free-trade agree­ments and “social dump­ing” — the prac­tice of domes­ti­cal­ly hir­ing for­eign­ers for low­er wages than cit­i­zens earn — and her par­ty has vowed to rein­dus­tri­al­ize France and pro­tect social ben­e­fits. The French news­magazine Le Point report­ed that Hol­lande, when asked to explain the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Nation­al Front, often relays a sto­ry a for­mer head of the C.G.T. told him: When the union leader read a Nation­al Front leaflet to his fel­low union mem­bers with­out telling them what par­ty it was from, the union mem­bers all approved of the mes­sage.”

Yep, thanks to the broad polit­i­cal embrace of aus­ter­i­ty and a gen­er­al ‘tax cuts, pay cuts, dereg­u­la­tion and more free-trade’-style of right-wing eco­nom­ics across Europe, Marine Le Pen and oth­er far-right par­ties basi­cal­ly get a mas­sive free polit­i­cal cud­gel. And it’s a cud­gel that gets stronger and stronger the more those right-wing poli­cies are embraced because they’re derived from a pro-oli­garch destruc­tive and unwork­able eco­nom­ic par­a­digm. And let’s not for­get that the Social­ist can­di­date, Emmu­nael Macron, is bare­ly a Social­ist and is run­ning on a neolib­er­al plat­form much like the one Hol­lande even­tu­al­ly embraced.

So while Marine Le Pen clear­ly does­n’t deserve to win France’s pres­i­dence giv­en the soci­ety-destroy­ing hate-based xeno­pho­bia and inhu­mane far-right ideals her cam­paign and par­ty are is based on, it’s not like the Social­ists or con­ser­v­a­tives real­ly deserve to win either giv­en the soci­ety-destroy­ing eco­nom­ic poli­cies they’re push­ing as the only option. And while it would be great of the far-left had a shot, they don’t. At least not at this point.

So we’ll see what hap­pens in France’s upcom­ing elec­tion and whether or not the “repub­li­can front” holds. But with a fresh scan­dal hit­ting the con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­date, putting his chances in doubt, and with the con­ser­v­a­tive’s tepid back­ing of the “repub­li­can front” in recent years com­bined with the Social­ist’s neolib­er­al plat­form, it seems a bit ear­ly to be breath­ing a sigh of relief. Espe­cial­ly when we read stuff like this:

...
Sail­liot told me that he would sup­port the Left Front can­di­date in the first round, but that if he was forced to choose between Le Pen and one of the oth­er prob­a­ble can­di­dates in the sec­ond round, he would not vote at all. Some of his left­ist col­leagues, many of whom vot­ed for Chirac in 2002 in order to foil Jean-Marie Le Pen, told me the same thing. Ulti­mate­ly, Marine Le Pen isn’t expect­ed to win; enough left-lean­ing vot­ers, it is believed, will join cen­ter-right vot­ers to defeat her. But this is an era in which polit­i­cal pre­dic­tion may seem like a fool’s game...

“Ulti­mate­ly, Marine Le Pen isn’t expect­ed to win; enough left-lean­ing vot­ers, it is believed, will join cen­ter-right vot­ers to defeat her. But this is an era in which polit­i­cal pre­dic­tion may seem like a fool’s game”

We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a hor­ri­ble movie.

Here’s a reminder that even if the EU makes it through 2017 with­out one of the nation­al elec­tions hand­ing the far-right a major vic­to­ry, there’s always 2018!

Reuters

Italy’s 5‑Star builds strong lead over Ren­z­i’s PD in polls

By Crispi­an Balmer | ROME
Tue Mar 21, 2017 | 7:21am EDT

Italy’s anti-estab­lish­ment 5‑Star Move­ment, ben­e­fit­ing from a split in the rul­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (PD) and divi­sions in the cen­ter-right, has built a strong lead over its rivals, an opin­ion poll showed on Tues­day.

The Ipsos poll in Cor­riere del­la Sera news­pa­per put the 5‑Star, which wants a ref­er­en­dum on Italy’s mem­ber­ship of the euro, on 32.3 per­cent — its high­est ever read­ing and 5.5 points ahead of the PD, which was on 26.8 per­cent.

The sur­vey sug­gests that the 5‑Star is like­ly to emerge as the largest group in nation­al elec­tions due by ear­ly 2018, although it might strug­gle to cre­ate a gov­ern­ment giv­en its stat­ed aver­sion to forg­ing coali­tions.

Such a sce­nario could spook finan­cial mar­kets wary of both the 5‑Star’s euroskep­ti­cism and the threat of pro­longed polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty in Italy, which has the heav­i­est pub­lic debt bur­den in Europe after Greece.

The PD appeared to be pay­ing the price for its inter­nal feuds, drop­ping more than three per­cent­age points in a month, as for­mer prime min­is­ter Mat­teo Ren­zi bat­tles to reassert his author­i­ty fol­low­ing a walk­out by a left-wing fac­tion.

...

“Polit­i­cal par­ties that pre­oc­cu­py them­selves with their inter­nal divi­sions are elec­toral­ly doomed,” said the British-based think tank Euroin­tel­li­gence in a note.

“We are now at the point where it becomes increas­ing­ly improb­a­ble for the PD to regain pow­er after the next elec­tions.”

The cen­ter-right is riv­en by its own divi­sions, with for­mer prime min­is­ter Sil­vio Berlus­coni look­ing to take charge of the bloc once more, but strug­gling to find com­mon ground with old ally the North­ern League, which has shunt­ed to the far right.

Tues­day’s poll of some 5,000 peo­ple put the anti-immi­grant North­ern League on 12.8 per­cent, with Berlus­coni’s Forza Italia (Go Italy!) on 12.7 per­cent.

A small cen­ter-right par­ty, which is in the gov­ern­ment coali­tion and is led by For­eign Min­is­ter Angeli­no Alfano, has seen its sup­port grad­u­al­ly erode and was put at 2.8 per­cent, mean­ing it risks fail­ing to even enter the next par­lia­ment.

Alfano’s group, which rebrand­ed itself at the week­end as the Pop­u­lar Alter­na­tive (AP), is the only main­stream par­ty besides the PD and MDP, which open­ly touts a pro-EU agen­da, rais­ing the prospect of a euroskep­tic gov­ern­ment tak­ing pow­er in Italy.

Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are still try­ing to draw up a new elec­toral law, with polit­i­cal ana­lysts expect­ing them to agree on some form of pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion that might reward a sta­ble major­i­ty to any par­ty or group that wins 40 per­cent of the vote.

The Ipsos poll sug­gest­ed that both the tra­di­tion­al cen­ter-left and cen­ter-right blocs would fall well short of the 40 per­cent thresh­old, leav­ing the 5‑Star in the dri­ving seat.

How­ev­er, the par­ty, found­ed by com­ic Beppe Gril­lo, has repeat­ed­ly ruled out form­ing an alliance with oth­er groups, sug­gest­ing Italy could face months of polit­i­cal uncer­tain­ty fol­low­ing the next elec­tion, as hap­pened last year in Spain.

“The sur­vey sug­gests that the 5‑Star is like­ly to emerge as the largest group in nation­al elec­tions due by ear­ly 2018, although it might strug­gle to cre­ate a gov­ern­ment giv­en its stat­ed aver­sion to forg­ing coali­tions.”

Is Italy in store for a 5‑Star revolt next year? Well, a lot can change between now and Italy’s ear­ly 2018 elec­tions but don’t for­get that one of the biggest changes over the next year could be some­thing like a far-right vic­to­ry else­where in Europe. But if cur­rent trends con­tin­ue it’s look­ing like the EU’s 2017 elec­toral scares aren’t going away any time soon. What that means for the EU as a whole if Italy decides to go down the ‘pop­ulist’ route remains to be seen. And, inter­est­ing­ly, what a 5‑Star vic­to­ry would mean for Ital­ians real­ly remains to be seen too in part because it’s unclear what exact­ly 5‑Star stands for although the dis­tinct Trumpian flare gives us an idea:

The Nation

Italy’s Five Star Move­ment May Be the Heir to Mussolini’s Fas­cists
The par­ty harps on the mes­sian­ic theme of redemp­tion for the betrayed, is allied with Britain’s far-right UKIP, and is con­trolled with an iron hand by leader Beppe Gril­lo.

By Fred­eri­ka Ran­dall
August 30, 2016

Rome—When 38-year-old Vir­ginia Rag­gi, a lawyer and rel­a­tive new­com­er to pol­i­tics, was elect­ed may­or of Rome in June, it was a stun­ning vic­to­ry for her par­ty, the Movi­men­to 5 Stelle (M5S), or Five Star Move­ment. Rag­gi beat her Par­ti­to Demo­c­ra­ti­co (PD) rival in the runoff vote by a crush­ing mar­gin of 67 per­cent to 33 per­cent, sym­bol­i­cal­ly slay­ing the gov­ern­ing PD, also the incum­bent in the city of Rome.

Though the M5S had pre­vi­ous­ly gained pow­er local­ly in a few places, Rome was much big­ger polit­i­cal prize, an inter­na­tion­al­ly vis­i­ble are­na where the three main post­war pow­er groups, the neo-Fas­cist far right, the Catholic cen­ter, and the Com­mu­nist left, had each fought for its piece of ground for decades. Now the M5S, dis­tin­guished main­ly for its fero­cious attacks on the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment, was to have its place in the sun. In Turin, too, the M5S tri­umphed, when Chiara Appendi­no, 32, with a back­ground in busi­ness man­age­ment, won a sur­prise vic­to­ry over the incum­bent may­or Piero Fassi­no, a PD vet­er­an whose polit­i­cal career goes back to the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

So the Movi­men­to 5 Stelle had final­ly stormed the Win­ter Palace… or should we say, car­ried out its March on Rome?

There­in lies the prob­lem. If only we knew what they stand for.

For the M5S is far more mys­te­ri­ous than it has appeared to some observers, to whom it seemed to resem­ble Spain’s Podemos or Syriza in Greece. The move­ment took off in 2007 with stand-up come­di­an Beppe Grillo’s suc­cess­ful Vaf­fa ral­lies, where crowds turned out to shout “Vaf­fan­cu­lo!” (“Get Screwed!”) at Italy’s cor­rupt politi­cians. Grillo’s huge­ly suc­cess­ful blog soon became a ral­ly­ing point for the dis­af­fect­ed. In 2009 he and the late Gian­rober­to Casa­leg­gio, an eccen­tric, sci-fi lov­ing web-mar­ket­ing guru in favor of both enlight­ened despo­tism and direct democ­ra­cy, found­ed the M5S­­. Today only a few acolytes seem to remem­ber what those five stars in the name and on the par­ty sym­bol sig­ni­fy.

The five stars were born, one jour­nal­ist mused recent­ly, because the pam­pered Gril­lo and Casa­leg­gio mea­sured well-being by hotel stan­dards. “We could have a five-star life!” the come­di­an used to scream at his ral­lies. That is, if those thiev­ing politi­cians didn’t steal all the mon­ey.

No, the five stars stand for “water, envi­ron­ment, trans­port, con­nec­tiv­i­ty, devel­op­ment” shot back one ardent Grilli­no in a tart com­ment. It’s true, those were the watch­words in the very ear­ly days, just after “vaf­fan­cu­lo” was dis­card­ed, although you do have to won­der what “five-star water” might be (mere­ly uncon­t­a­m­i­nat­ed, or pos­i­tive­ly deli­cious?), and why a rank­ing sys­tem for resource-guz­zling lux­u­ry hotels would make sense for the envi­ron­ment, which flour­ish­es where the hand of man is absent. A guar­an­teed “citizen’s income” for all whose earn­ings fall below a cer­tain lev­el is anoth­er long­time M5S pro­pos­al, warm­ly backed today by Turin’s Appendi­no.

Accord­ing to the most recent nation­al pro­gram, the M5S’s projects today are “state and cit­i­zen, ener­gy, infor­ma­tion, econ­o­my, trans­port, health, edu­ca­tion.” A look at the spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy promis­es turns up a hodge­podge of the pet­ty and the grand, a long wish list that seems to have been com­piled from the kind of web sur­vey dear to par­ty strate­gist Casa­leg­gio (he died in April this year, aged 61, of a brain tumor). Thus under “econ­o­my” the pro­gram calls both for “vig­or­ous debt reduc­tion” and “ceil­ings on exec­u­tive pay in pub­licly trad­ed and state-con­trolled com­pa­nies” and favors “local pro­duc­tion” and “non­prof­its” as well as guar­an­teed unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. Along­side all these good inten­tions, how­ev­er, there is no trace of the hard choic­es about how to stim­u­late a depressed econ­o­my that any gov­ern­ing par­ty would have to make. No men­tion of employ­ment, inequal­i­ty, or EU-imposed aus­ter­i­ty. Under “trans­port,” the pro­gram calls for more bike paths and an improved rail sys­tem to dis­cour­age auto­mo­bile use, but there is no men­tion of spend­ing on infra­struc­ture under “econ­o­my,” or of how to accom­plish all these good deeds and pay a min­i­mum income while slash­ing the debt. Nor does the pro­gram have any indi­ca­tions on for­eign pol­i­cy. The M5S is anti-Europe, and its Euro MPs are aligned with the far-right xeno­phobes of Britain’s UKIP in the EU par­lia­ment, at least until Britain final­ly leaves the union. It’s a pro­gram rich in mag­i­cal think­ing, in short.

Like many a charis­mat­ic leader who rides the wave of pub­lic dis­gust with estab­lished pol­i­tics today (Don­ald Trump and Sil­vio Berlus­coni come to mind, and so does UKIP’s Nigel Farage, who claimed vic­to­ry with Brex­it), Casa­leg­gio was a kind of businessman/aspiring wheel­er-deal­er. Grillo’s suc­cess­ful blog was one of his ven­tures, and Casa­leg­gio expert­ly milked the adver­tis­ing on it. And Gril­lo, a wealthy show­man, shares much of his out­look. They are men who believe that pol­i­tics is intrin­si­cal­ly sil­ly and cor­rupt and that any entre­pre­neur can do it bet­ter. Their pro­found scorn for the polit­i­cal class springs from a per­son­al dis­like of gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions and tax­es they con­sid­er pun­ish­ing, and not sur­pris­ing­ly, they are firm­ly pro-cap­i­tal.

In recent years, prod­ded by Casa­leg­gio, the M5S has embraced anti-immi­grant and anti-reg­u­la­to­ry posi­tions dear to the small-busi­ness own­ers they hope to draw into the move­ment. When the gov­ern­ment of Mat­teo Ren­zi was final­ly poised to pass a law on civ­il unions, giv­ing gays long-need­ed rights (a mea­sure hot­ly con­test­ed in a coun­try occu­pied by the Vat­i­can), the M5S sud­den­ly with­drew sup­port and mem­bers were told to vote their con­sciences, thus doom­ing the most con­tro­ver­sial plank, the one allow­ing gay cou­ples to adopt. The promised “direct democ­ra­cy” of online voting—candidates and major M5S deci­sions are decid­ed by a vote on the Gril­lo blog site—has time and again brought accu­sa­tions of fraud­u­lent vote-count­ing. By many accounts, the par­ty is frag­ment­ed, held togeth­er by dra­con­ian mea­sures from the top, like the penal­ty of 150,000 euros that local rep­re­sen­ta­tives, includ­ing May­or Rag­gi, are con­trac­tu­al­ly oblig­ed to pay the par­ty should they stray from the agreed-upon pol­i­cy line. Nei­ther of the two young MPs spo­ken of as suc­ces­sors to Gril­lo is any­where near as pre­pos­sess­ing as the leader.

Accu­sa­tions of fas­cism are quick to fly here, in the coun­try that invent­ed the phe­nom­e­non; Prime Min­is­ter Ren­zi is rou­tine­ly called a fas­cist by the dis­si­dent left of his par­ty. But in truth, if any par­ty resem­bles the one Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni was build­ing with the sup­port of bit­ter World War I vet­er­ans in 1919–20, it is the M5S. There is the same mes­sian­ic theme of redemp­tion for the betrayed—in today’s case, cit­i­zens betrayed by their cor­rupt and spend­thrift gov­er­nors. The same mix­ture of ideas hasti­ly bor­rowed from right and left (lest we for­get, Mus­soli­ni was a Social­ist before he was a Fas­cist). The same dic­ta­to­r­i­al grip at the top, applied to keep a sprawl­ing move­ment togeth­er.

For the only issue that real­ly unites the M5S is scorn for pol­i­tics and politi­cians. That whole­sale “plague on all their hous­es” con­dem­na­tion of the polit­i­cal class is rather dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile with pub­lic office, as some M5S mem­bers elect­ed to local gov­ern­ment or to par­lia­ment in Rome have learned to their dis­may. Sev­er­al have been expelled from the par­ty for mak­ing alliances or not obey­ing orders. Anoth­er became embroiled in an orga­nized-crime scan­dal when a fel­low M5S city coun­cilor was inves­ti­gat­ed for con­nec­tions with the Camor­ra, Campania’s local mafia.

The first moves of both new­ly elect­ed may­ors Rag­gi of Rome and Appendi­no of Turin have met with intense scruti­ny and a bar­rage of crit­i­cism. Rag­gi, who is up against a hos­tile pub­lic bureau­cra­cy in a city where basic ser­vices like garbage col­lec­tion and bus and metro ser­vice are con­stant­ly on the verge of col­lapse, a city in which wide­spread cor­rup­tion was unveiled in 2014–15 in the Mafia Cap­i­tale scan­dal, does seem to lack the need­ed polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence. Mul­ti­ple urban brush­fires burned across Rome this hot, dry August, and she seemed unable to react. The city utter­ly defeat­ed her pre­de­ces­sor, Ignazio Mari­no, a sur­geon who was elect­ed with the PD but was even­tu­al­ly forced out by his own par­ty. Raggi’s can­di­dates to super­vise the envi­ron­ment and san­i­ta­tion have been hot­ly con­test­ed on the basis of their past expe­ri­ence, for if expe­ri­ence is nec­es­sary, it is also taint­ing in the mind of M5S purists. In Turin, oppo­nents of a much-con­test­ed high-speed rail line through the Val di Susa to the west lashed out at May­or Appendi­no for express­ing her sup­port for the police guard­ing the build­ing site; the M5S has strong­ly defend­ed the pro­test­ers.

Still, one doesn’t need to be a fan of the M5S to think two months in office is too lit­tle to eval­u­ate the per­for­mance of their new may­ors. In Raggi’s case, the attacks are con­stant. Beppe Gril­lo, who last year was report­ed to have drift­ed away from his cre­ation, fatigued and bored, has appar­ent­ly decid­ed to occu­py him­self with mak­ing Raggi’s gov­ern­ment a suc­cess as a show­case for the next elec­tions.

...

Just what the Movi­men­to 5 Stelle would do if elect­ed to nation­al gov­ern­ment remains a mys­tery. The mes­sian­ic “throw the bums out” ral­ly­ing cry wins votes but offers no pro­gram. It’s been called pop­ulism, but it’s not even clear that Gril­lo is speak­ing to the “lit­tle man”; his is a howl of pure rage. We need to ask our­selves why it is so attrac­tive today.

One rea­son is that the estab­lished par­ties are dis­cred­it­ed every­where. They are in Britain, which vot­ed for Brex­it despite Con­ser­v­a­tive and (weak) Labour sup­port for EU mem­ber­ship. And in Spain, where two elec­tions in a six-month peri­od still have not pro­duced a gov­ern­ing coali­tion. Not to men­tion France, where the Front Nation­al of Marine Le Pen threat­ens to over­whelm the Social­ists and the right. The estab­lished par­ties strug­gle to con­vince nation­al vot­ers they are look­ing after their inter­ests because the pow­ers they need to do so are sim­ply not avail­able at the nation­al lev­el. Neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism, tru­ly glob­al in scope, can no longer be reg­u­lat­ed by nation­al gov­ern­ments; it can only be con­trolled at a supra­na­tion­al lev­el. If Italy wants more jobs and growth, it can only get them through Euro­pean eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, although cer­tain­ly not the hege­mon­ic pol­i­cy of the moment, the aus­ter­i­ty imposed by Ger­man finan­cial author­i­ties. What­ev­er Mat­teo Renzi’s defects, he has cer­tain­ly tried to push Ger­many and France toward a more Key­ne­sian Euro­pean con­sen­sus.

Does the M5S under­stand these mat­ters? Does Beppe Gril­lo, who has made no polit­i­cal alliances in Italy and no inter­na­tion­al alliances except with Nigel Farage, even care? Like Mus­soli­ni, he seems to believe Italy can live in autarky, by impos­ing nation­al eco­nom­ic self-suf­fi­cien­cy. It’s not just a crazy idea (where will he get his new iPhone?) but reveals a pro­found naïveté about prob­lems that don’t real­ly inter­est him.

You would think that Italy, after almost twen­ty years of a soi-dis­ant anti-estab­lish­ment fig­ure like Sil­vio Berlus­coni, would have learned the les­son. In 1994 the rogue TV tycoon’s Forza Italia par­ty was that era’s equiv­a­lent: an upstart “anti-polit­i­cal” polit­i­cal move­ment that swept away the rul­ing par­ties after the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) cor­rup­tion inves­ti­ga­tions of 1992.

But per­haps cyn­i­cism breeds more of the same. It was the Berlus­coni government’s hun­gry, light-fin­gered approach to pub­lic office that opened a space for Gril­lo and his Vaf­fa ral­lies in 2007. Now Gril­lo hopes that same anger will bring down a cen­ter-left only mar­gin­al­ly impli­cat­ed in cor­rup­tion, but deeply divid­ed and defeat­ed.

...

“Accord­ing to the most recent nation­al pro­gram, the M5S’s projects today are “state and cit­i­zen, ener­gy, infor­ma­tion, econ­o­my, trans­port, health, edu­ca­tion.” A look at the spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy promis­es turns up a hodge­podge of the pet­ty and the grand, a long wish list that seems to have been com­piled from the kind of web sur­vey dear to par­ty strate­gist Casa­leg­gio (he died in April this year, aged 61, of a brain tumor). Thus under “econ­o­my” the pro­gram calls both for “vig­or­ous debt reduc­tion” and “ceil­ings on exec­u­tive pay in pub­licly trad­ed and state-con­trolled com­pa­nies” and favors “local pro­duc­tion” and “non­prof­its” as well as guar­an­teed unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. Along­side all these good inten­tions, how­ev­er, there is no trace of the hard choic­es about how to stim­u­late a depressed econ­o­my that any gov­ern­ing par­ty would have to make. No men­tion of employ­ment, inequal­i­ty, or EU-imposed aus­ter­i­ty. Under “trans­port,” the pro­gram calls for more bike paths and an improved rail sys­tem to dis­cour­age auto­mo­bile use, but there is no men­tion of spend­ing on infra­struc­ture under “econ­o­my,” or of how to accom­plish all these good deeds and pay a min­i­mum income while slash­ing the debt. Nor does the pro­gram have any indi­ca­tions on for­eign pol­i­cy. The M5S is anti-Europe, and its Euro MPs are aligned with the far-right xeno­phobes of Britain’s UKIP in the EU par­lia­ment, at least until Britain final­ly leaves the union. It’s a pro­gram rich in mag­i­cal think­ing, in short.”

So 5‑Star’s gen­er­al stance is kind of “populist”-ish...but it’s more of a “if we burn this all down we’ll get to have all these great things we’re promis­ing” kind of pop­ulism. Fused with far-right social “pop­ulism”:

...
In recent years, prod­ded by Casa­leg­gio, the M5S has embraced anti-immi­grant and anti-reg­u­la­to­ry posi­tions dear to the small-busi­ness own­ers they hope to draw into the move­ment. When the gov­ern­ment of Mat­teo Ren­zi was final­ly poised to pass a law on civ­il unions, giv­ing gays long-need­ed rights (a mea­sure hot­ly con­test­ed in a coun­try occu­pied by the Vat­i­can), the M5S sud­den­ly with­drew sup­port and mem­bers were told to vote their con­sciences, thus doom­ing the most con­tro­ver­sial plank, the one allow­ing gay cou­ples to adopt. The promised “direct democ­ra­cy” of online voting—candidates and major M5S deci­sions are decid­ed by a vote on the Gril­lo blog site—has time and again brought accu­sa­tions of fraud­u­lent vote-count­ing. By many accounts, the par­ty is frag­ment­ed, held togeth­er by dra­con­ian mea­sures from the top, like the penal­ty of 150,000 euros that local rep­re­sen­ta­tives, includ­ing May­or Rag­gi, are con­trac­tu­al­ly oblig­ed to pay the par­ty should they stray from the agreed-upon pol­i­cy line. Nei­ther of the two young MPs spo­ken of as suc­ces­sors to Gril­lo is any­where near as pre­pos­sess­ing as the leader.
...

It’s cer­tain­ly hard to avoid the Trumpian par­al­lels.