Italy's March 27/28 elections swept a far right-wing government, led by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, into power. Of the 366 parliamentary seats won by the right-wing coalition, 105 went to the National Alliance, an openly fascist party, strong in the south of the country.
For the first time since 1945, a fascist party will become part of a government in Western Europe. This breakthrough topped off five years of sustained growth for fascist and extreme-right wing parties in Europe, which are stronger now than at any time since the 1930s. Commentators reckon the extreme-right German Republicans will pass the 5% mark in October's elections, thus gaining a minimum of 20 deputies. Support for the French far right, about 10% of the electorate, shows no sign of declining. What lies behind this resurgence? Are the big electoral parties of the far right really fascist? How can they be fought? PHIL HEARSE investigates.
The fascist National Alliance has ridden into power on the back of an electoral tie-up with two other parties, Berlusconi's Forza Italia (Go Italy!) and the Northern League, neither of which are fascist. Nor will the new Italian government itself be fascist.
With the exception of Italy's National Alliance, the major far-right parties in Europe have important differences with the classical fascist parties of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. Those were paramilitary organisations based on organised violence against the trade unions and left-wing parties; their job was to physically crush the mass movement of the working class.
Today the most successful big far-right parties, such as the Republicans in Germany, the National Front in France and the Freedom Party in Austria, avoid association with violence and street disorder. They present a respectable face. They are far-right, authoritarian, anti-democratic parties. But their victory, although threatening living standards, democratic rights and the immigrant communities, would in all probability not institute the fascist military dictatorships and the concentration camps of the 1930s and '40s.
Many of the individuals who lead the new far-right parties have a fascist background. The Republicans' leader, Franz Schoenhuber, is a former Waffen-SS officer, with a long history in fascist politics. National Front supremo Jean-Marie Le Pen has led several fascist organisations over the past 35 years.
But people like Schoenhuber and Le Pen have understood that the ruling classes of Europe had a very bad experience of dictators in the 1930s, which they are unlikely to want to repeat. Because of the memory of the second world war and the destruction it wrought, it is very difficult for open nazis to get a hearing.
While forces like the National Front, the Republicans and the Northern League are not fascist, they have on their periphery smaller organisations like the German People's Party (DVP) and the British National Party (BNP) that do organise racist violence and who are real fascists.
Making the distinction between fascists and authoritarian parties of the far right should not lead the left to underestimate the task of organising self-defence to defeat fascist and fascist-inspired violence of the kind which has resulted in the deaths of 15 Turkish immigrants in Germany.
The key ideological weapon of the fascists and far right is anti-immigrant racism. This is stoked up by and interacts with the growth of state racism, especially new racist immigration and asylum laws. These are part of the "Fortress Europe" policy of the European Union.
Underlying this policy is a decline in the need for immigrant labour from Third World countries in a period of recession, and the fear of Europe being "flooded" by asylum seekers and economic migrants from collapsing economies in eastern Europe and the Third World.
Germany changed its liberal asylum law in 1993, Britain instituted a harsh Asylum Act in November 1992, and France is using existing laws to "root out illegal immigrants". Harsh new anti-immigrant laws will be imposed later this year in Holland, once the most liberal country in Europe on immigration. A similar switch has already occurred in Austria, as a result of campaigning by the Freedom Party.
The "Fortress Europe" policy also reflects the extent to which mainstream right-wing political parties are being pressured by the extreme right, and compelled to adopt racist policies for fear of being outflanked. This is most apparent in France, where the Gaullist RPR (Rally for the Republic) campaigned in the March 1993 elections in a fashion calculated to outdo the National Front in racist hysteria.
Commenting on the situation in Holland, National Bureau Against Racism leader Olaf Stamp said, "Once the Dutch extreme racist party Centrum Democraten was the only one calling for the expulsion of illegal immigrants. Now the mainstream parties are saying practically the same thing."
Racist immigration policies are reflected in systematic state harassment of, and violence against, black and immigrant communities throughout western Europe. Last August British immigration police killed West Indian Joy Gardner in the Tottenham area of north London during an attempt to deport her. She suffocated after being manacled and having her mouth taped up. Such casual violence against black people is typical of police throughout Britain.
The Gaullist interior minister, Charles Pasquat, has since March 1993 instituted a regime of harassment against immigrants in France. Every day dozens of young north Africans are searched by riot police on the Paris Metro, and hundreds have been deported.
Of the social conditions which give rise to the growth of these new mass right-wing parties, the most important is mass unemployment. For example, the growth of the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany cannot be separated from the fact of 25% unemployment, a result of the destruction of east German industries during the reunification process.
There are 30 million unemployed people in Europe today. Mass unemployment gives rise to an underclass, especially of youth. With the destruction of state welfare services, becoming unemployed is often a personal catastrophe. Where new employment is created, as the old "smokestack" industries close down, it is usually low-paid, low-skilled, insecure and part-time work in service industries. In this situation people abandon the old "moderate" political currents and look for more radical solutions.
The second major factor fuelling the growth of the far right is disillusionment with the old political leaders, and indeed the entire parliamentary democratic system. Mass corruption in Italy, for example, has resulted in 50% of the parliamentary deputies being under investigation. Nobody believes that such people put ordinary citizens first, or indeed care about their fate. The regionalist Northern League in Italy is one product of this anger with all the old political parties.
There has been a 20-year economic recession in the main industrial countries. The old mixed economy and social welfare consensus has showed itself incapable of overcoming this, and millions of people are losing faith in the established political system.
Disillusionment with the old parties includes disillusionment with the established mass parties traditionally supported by the working class — the social democratic and Communist parties. Social democratic parties like the French Socialist Party and Spanish PSOE (Socialist Workers Party), in government during the 1980s, administered austerity and attacked welfare services. Confidence that social democracy represents a viable alternative to capitalist austerity and economic restructuring has therefore been severely eroded.
The Communist parties, strong in southern Europe at the end of the 1970s — the high tide of "Eurocommunism" — were devastated during the 1980s both by their support for austerity policies and by growing realisation among their supporters that they had been duped about the reality of Soviet-style "socialism".
The crisis of the social democratic and Stalinist parties has continuously generated critical and left-wing currents both within them and on their periphery. The most significant of these currents was the "Bennite" current in the British Labour Party, although it declined and was in retreat by the end of the 1980s. In the Spanish state, the "Redondo" left trade union current split with the PSOE in 1986; in France successive waves of "refounders" and "reconstructors" broke with the Communist Party, but most of these have since gone to the right.
But nowhere, except with the British Labour left in the early 1980s and the Party of Communist Refoundation in Italy today, have these developments led to stabilised left-wing alternatives with mass support.
The European working-class movement has suffered substantial defeats at the hands of the right-wing austerity offensive over the last decade. The defeat of the 1984-5 British miners' strike was a crucial symbol of how even the best organised and most militant sectors of the working class could be picked off, isolated and dealt crushing blows, in the absence of systematic solidarity action organised by the trade union leaders. It is when the working class movement is on the retreat that the extreme right gets its chance.
The issue being debated now throughout Europe is whether the Italian elections were an aberration or whether they show the future — a general trend towards imposing extreme right-wing governments. It is impossible to make absolute predictions. Whether substantial sections of the capitalist class will turn to the extreme right depends on the struggle over the welfare state.
After 20 years of economic recession, European capitalists are confronted with a grave difficulty. Their main economic competitors, in Japan and the US as well as in the newly industrialising countries, do not have the burden of a substantial welfare state, tying down huge amounts of state expenditure. Europe-wide there is a trend to dismantling free health services, social security and unemployment benefits — even in the "social democratic paradise" of Sweden.
This is a frontal attack on the so-called "postwar settlement" between capital and labour, leading to huge class battles — as foreshadowed by general strikes in Belgium in November and in Spain in January.
If there is sustained resistance to this attack, the temptation will exist to turn to the extreme right to impose "order". In such a crisis situation, ruling-class attitudes can change very quickly. Today's staunch opponents of the new fascism can become tomorrow's converts.
This creates an extremely dangerous situation for the working class, the trade unions and the left. In Italy, an important taboo — the exclusion of fascists from government — has been broken. Unlike the 1920s and 1930s, there is no mass revolutionary or radical socialist challenge to the existing order. Such a mass-based socialist alternative will be built only over a long period. In the immediate period, what steps can be taken to confront and defeat the far right? This is a highly controversial question in the European left.
There are four central issues to be addressed: the fight against state racism; organising self-defence against racist attacks; mobilising the labour movement and the community against fascist public activity; building a mass socialist alternative.
State racism creates the social climate which allows the extreme right wing to grow, by legitimising its central campaigning issue — anti-immigrant racism. State racism and fascism feed off one another; as state racism legitimises fascist propaganda, the fascists get stronger and further pressure the mainstream parties and the government. The left therefore can't separate the fight against fascism from the struggle against all forms of institutionalised racism, especially racist immigration and asylum laws.
Black and immigrant communities must be defended from the kind of racist attacks which have claimed lives in Germany and Britain. This must be led primarily by the communities themselves. Socialists and the labour movement can help build self-defence, but small socialist organisations cannot patrol the streets. Organisations like Youth Connections, which developed among Bangladeshis in London in 1993, are the best form of self-defence network. The best defence is always the self-organised and self-mobilised community.
The issue of confronting fascist public activity is highly controversial on the left. This should not be constrained by concerns about defending the so-called democratic rights of fascists. Fascists are organised to carry out street violence; they are anti-democratic by definition.
On the other hand, calling on the police and the state to pass laws to suppress fascists and the extreme right is very dangerous. Bitter experience shows that all such laws, whatever their excuse, end up being used against the left and the labour movement. Nearly every advanced country has some form of public order act designed to curb "extremists", but in practice always used against the left and labour movement, curbing democratic rights. The key to challenging the fascists is mass mobilisation, not calls for state bans.
In Europe some sections of the left argue that physical confrontation with fascists is a matter of principle. It is not. The only principles are self-defence against fascist violence and the most effective action to politically defeat and isolate the fascists and other extreme-rightists. In some cases, this will involve physical retaliation against fascist hooligans, but this is always a matter of assessing its chances of success and political impact.
How not to do it was shown by the October 16, 1993, anti-fascist demonstration in south-east London. Forty thousand demonstrators attempted to march to the Nazi BNP headquarters, amid chants of "burn down the BNP!". Demonstrators were confronted by 7000 well-armed riot police; only a few hundred demonstrators were prepared to engage in isolated physical clashes with them, and the BNP headquarters was not even reached.
The result was tens of thousands of demoralised anti-fascists and a triumphant police force, with the fascists unscathed. Attempts by socialists to physically "crush fascism in the egg", unless there is a truly massive movement to do so, will not work so long as the state is determined to prevent it.
In his famous writings on fascism in Germany, Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky sharply criticised the "minority violence" approach to the Nazis adopted by Communist Party street fighters — which resulted in dozens of deaths in 1930-31. These tactics, said Trotsky, were a substitute for building a mass united front with social democratic workers and others, for common self-defence against the fascists.
Finally, in the period of mass unemployment and social crisis that exists today in Europe, the outcome will not be decided in a contest between fascists and anti-fascists, but between alternative, society-wide political solutions. Much depends on the evolution of the world economy. A new economic boom could ease unemployment and reduce social tensions. But there is no sign that European capitalism is on the verge of escaping its 20-year cycle of crisis.
Unless a democratic socialist alternative is built which can engage the energies and enthusiasm of millions, the door to fascism and the extreme right will be left permanently ajar.