Europe's Right Turn

A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of the extreme right. George W. Bush’s long war has dramatically accelerated the brown-shirted emotions of xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant hysteria all across the Continent. Undermined by corruption and programatically bankrupt, European social democracy is on the run, and, where still in power, its political leadership is taking the blame for the deepening economic crisis. The “Rose Europe” of the ’90s -- in which social-democratic governments of the left, or left-center coalitions, held power nearly everywhere in Western Europe -- is coming to an end.

The “Third Way” dear to Germany’s Gerhard Schröder (and Britain’s Tony Blair) represents the “Clintonization” of traditional social democratic politics, and French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s compromises are pretty weak tea, indeed. But those vying to replace the temporizers of the watered-down European left are much, much worse. The Franco-German entente has traditionally dominated Euro-community politics and economics, motoring the drive toward an increasingly federalized Europe. But this year’s elections on either side of the Rhine threaten to shift the balance of power sharply to the right.

France’s lurch rightward is driven by the fact that it has a larger North African population than any other European country. It imported hundreds of thousands of manual laborers from its former colonies in the postwar growth years of the ’50s and ’60s. The second- and third-generation youths from these traditionally large immigrant families are trapped in an identity crisis: French-speaking and rarely knowing the language and culture of their parents’ origins, they have never been accepted into French society. Penned in the desolate, stifling, low-income high-rises of the isolated suburban cités that ring urban France (and victims of unemployment rates as high as 50 percent) many idle ghetto youths find their only real identity in gangs of petty criminals -- and are seen as the cause of rising crime.

All this helps explain why the French left lost control of 40 cities in last year’s municipal elections, in a harbinger of things to come. The Socialist Party’s Jospin is slightly behind or even with conservative incumbent Jacques Chirac in the polls for April’s presidential elections. But Jospin’s strongest challenge may be from his former minister of the interior, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a hard-liner on immigrants. Chevènement, a fervent nationalist and Eurosceptic, had quit as minister of defense for a previous Socialist government in 1991 to protest France’s support of the Gulf War. He then founded his own party, the Citizen’s Movement (or MDC, its French acronym), which until his latest resignation had been a part of Jospin’s governing coalition. Posing as a guarantor of order, the man the French press ironically has nicknamed “le Chè,” in moving sharply to his right, has stitched together a crazy-quilt coalition of supporters that includes former Communist ministers, leaders of the Radicals of the Left (a small, middle-class party which is neither) and Viscount Phillipe DeVilliers, an ultraright Catholic politician.

Chevènement’s anti-Americanism and pandering to security hysteria is attracting more of Chirac’s voters than Jospin’s in the polls, making him le troisième homme (the third man) in the first round of the two-stage presidential election process. He’s doing so well that many perspicacious French political analysts believe that the runoff could well be between Jospin and le Chè rather than a Jospin-Chirac duel.