Two far-right parties, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Movement for Austria’s Future, won 29 percent of the vote in the latest Austrian general election, double their total in the 2006 election. Both parties share the same attitudes toward immigrants, especially Muslims, and the European Union: a mixture of fear and loathing. Since the two parties’ leaders, Heinz-Christian Strache and Jörg Haider, despise each other, there is little chance of a far-right coalition taking power. Nonetheless, this is Adolf Hitler’s native land, where Jews were once forced to scrub Vienna’s streets with toothbrushes before being deported and killed, so the result is disturbing. But how disturbing?
That 29 percent is about 15 percent more than populist right-wing parties get in very good years (for them) in other European countries. Strache, the leader of the Freedom Party, wants the government to create a new ministry to manage the deportation of immigrants. Muslims are openly disparaged.
Haider once praised the employment practices of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Inevitably, the new rightists bring back memories of storm troopers and race laws.
Yet, to see the rise of the Austrian right as a revival of Nazism is a mistake.
Neither party advocates violence, even if some of their rhetoric might inspire it. Voters for the far right may be motivated less by ideology than by anxieties and resentments that are felt in many European countries, including ones with no Nazi tradition, such as The Netherlands and Denmark.
In Denmark, the hard-right Danish People’s Party, with 25 parliamentary seats, is the country’s third largest party. Dutch populists, such as Rita Verdonk or Geert Wilders, who is driven by a paranoid fear of “Islamization, are putting the traditional political elites – a combination of liberals, social democrats, and Christian democrats – under severe pressure.
This is precisely the point. The biggest resentment among right-wing voters in European countries is reserved for political elites, who, in the opinion of many, have been governing for too long in cozy coalitions, which appear to exist chiefly to protect vested interests.
In Austria, even liberals admit that an endless succession of social democratic and Christian democratic governments has clogged the political system’s arteries, making it difficult for smaller parties to penetrate what is seen as a bastion of political privilege. The same is true in The Netherlands, which has been governed for decades by the same middle-of-the-road parties, led by benevolent but rather paternalistic figures, whose views about “multiculturalism, “tolerance, and “Europe, were, until recently, rarely challenged.
Expressions of nationalism in postwar European democracies were always tolerated in soccer stadiums, not in public life. Skepticism about European unity was routinely denounced as bigotry, or even a form of racism.
Attachment to national feeling was further undermined by governments’ habit of blaming unpopular policies on European Union bureaucrats, who are increasingly seen as yet another bunch of self-satisfied, privileged, and unaccountable elitists.
This is linked to resentment of immigrants. When the offspring of manual workers imported from countries such as Turkey and Morocco in the 1960s’ began to form large Muslim minorities in European cities, tensions rose in working-class neighborhoods. Complaints about crime and unfamiliar customs were often dismissed by liberal elites as “racism. People simply had to learn to be tolerant.
None of this was necessarily wrong. Tolerance, European unity, distrust of nationalism, and vigilance against racism are laudable goals. But promoting these aims without discussion, let alone criticism, resulted in a backlash.
When the Dutch, the French, and the Irish voted against the European constitution, they were expressing distrust of their political elites. And populists who promise to restore national sovereignty by rejecting “Europe, fighting “Islamization, and kicking out immigrants are exploiting this distrust. The rhetoric of xenophobia and chauvinism is unpleasant, and, in a country with Austria’s past, even alarming. But the new populism is not yet undemocratic, or even anti-democratic. The phrase most often heard in Austria among voters of the right-wing parties is “fresh air. People say they voted for Haider and Strache to break the stranglehold of the ruling parties.
This is not an illegitimate motivation. If people are anxious about their national identities, the sovereignty of their governments, the demographic and social complexion of their societies, such fears are best voiced in the political arena. As long as people express their concerns, however distasteful to liberal ears, by votes, not violence, democracy will not be seriously harmed.
Running against the political elite is, of course, the essence of populism everywhere. American presidential candidates pretend to run against “Washington even when they are the sons of former presidents. Real damage is done when people lose confidence, not only in the elites, but in the system itself.
This has not yet happened in Europe, not even in Austria. There is no need for liberal, traditional parties, in a fit of panic, to battle the right by pandering to the same resentments. But those resentments should be taken seriously in political debates. That way, the dangers of popular antipathies will be contained. Instead of damaging democracy, the rise of the right, by challenging the corruption of vested interests, might actually turn out to strengthen it.
Ian Buruma is Professor of human rights at Bard College. His most recent book is “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
