The Rise of the Far Right in Europe and France

John Palmer: The rise of far right parties across Europe is a chilling echo of the 1930's

Marine Le Pen (left)- Leader of the National Front Part in France who are gaining popularity

Le Pen is at the forefront of a European-wide nationalist resurgence — one that wants to evict from their homelands people they view as Muslim subversives. She and other far-right nationalists are seizing on some legitimate worries about Islamic militancy — 10,000 soldiers are now deployed in France as a safety measure — in order to label all Muslims as hostile to traditional European cultural and religious values. Le Pen herself has likened their presence to the Nazi occupation of France.

Le Pen herself espouses an authoritarian program that calls for a moratorium on immigration, a restoration of the death penalty and a “French first” policy on welfare benefits and employment.

Long after World War Two, fascism is a specter that still haunts the continent. But whether Le Pen’s stances — and those of other nationalist leaders in Europe — qualify as fascist is questionable. The borderline between the kind of populism they espouse and the outright fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, when Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini espoused doctrines of racial superiority, is a slippery one.
Charlie Hebdo fallout: Specter of fascist past haunts European nationalism

New York Times: Vote Result in Greece Challenges More Than Austerity

Inside the Troubling Rise of Fascist Parties Across Europe

As Europe's depression continues six years after the financial collapse of 2007-2008, watch for far-right parties to make big gains in this week's elections to the EU's European Parliament. And why not? The establishment parties of Europe's center-right and center-left have put austerity policies and the interests of banks ahead of a real economic recovery for regular people.

More than 20 years ago, when the European Union created its constitution in the form of the Treaty of Maastricht, the hope was that Europe stood for a social compact that put citizens first. Europe, especially northern Europe, was a model of decent earnings, universal social benefits and regulation that prevented wealth from swamping citizenship.

Today, however, centrist or center-right governments, which either sponsor austerity or approve of it, govern in every major European capital but France, and France is too weak to go its own way. The economic crisis with its high unemployment only stimulates more migration, which puts pressure on local labor markets and pushes the local working class further into the arms of the nationalist far-right.

London's Holy Turf War

The over-aching rhetoric we see continue through all of these far right parties is the threat to the values and morals of the nation they represent. Most prominently, the threat of Muslim values and those of migrants who don't assimilate to the so called dominant culture. This then frames racism that is palatable to the wider public. These radicals have become popular due to their strong nationalist propaganda, building upon the worsening economy throughout the European Union, many feeling that the Union is not delivering what it had originally promised. They feel they are losing their national pride to other countries, bureaucrats, the banks and the rich elite who have caused them to lose faith, due to finding themselves amidst another economic depression. Their values have been compromised, as they had no hand in their countries economic status and the huge rise in unemployment. This causes people to seek populist parties, as their confidence in the parties closer to the middle have continued to fail them. This though sounds all too familiar from the rise of Mussolini and the Nazi party in the 1920's and 30's. If we're not careful, these party's can take us all by surprise.