Rise of the Right

The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities,immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence,some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.

“I’m not surprised when things like the bombing in Norway happen,because you will always find people who feel more radical means are necessary,” said Joerg Forbrig,an analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who has studied far-right issues in Europe. “It literally is something that can happen in a number of places and there are broader problems behind it.”

Last November,a Swedish man was arrested in the southern city of Malmö in connection with more than a dozen unsolved shootings of immigrants,including one fatality. The shootings,nine of which took place between June and October 2010,appeared to be the work of an isolated individual. More broadly in Sweden,though,the far-right Sweden Democrats experienced new success at the polls. The party entered Parliament for the first time after winning 5.7 per cent of the vote in the general election last September.

The bombing and shootings in Oslo also have served as a wake-up call for security services in Europe and the United States that in recent years have become so focused on Islamic terrorists that they may have underestimated the threat of domestic radicals,including those upset by what they see as the influence of Islam.

According to Forbrig,isolated right-wing groups in Europe would rise up and then quickly disappear from the ‘60s into the ‘90s. But in recent years,far-right statements have appeared to lose much of their post-World War II taboo even among some prominent political parties.

A combination of increased migration from abroad and largely unrestricted movement of people within an enlarged European Union,such as the persecuted Roma minority,helped lay the groundwork for a nationalist,at times starkly chauvinist,revival.

Groups are gaining traction from Hungary to Italy,but it is particularly apparent in northern European countries that long have had liberal immigration policies. The rapid arrival of refugees,asylum seekers and economic migrants,many of them Muslims,led to a significant backlash in places like Denmark,where the Danish People’s Party has 25 out of 179 seats in Parliament,and the Netherlands,where Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom won 15.5 per cent of the vote in the 2010 general election.

Some of the primary motivations cited by the suspect in Norway,Anders Behring Breivik,are now mainstream issues. German Chancellor Angela Merkel,President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain all recently declared an end to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism “has failed,utterly failed,” Merkel told fellow Christian Democrats last October,though stressing that immigrants were welcome in Germany.

Perhaps the most surprising about-turn came in Britain,a country that has long considered itself among the most immigrant-friendly in Europe until a series of coordinated bomb attacks in London six years ago. Cameron told the Munich security conference in February that the country’s decades-old policy of multiculturalism had encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.

France,a fiercely secularist state where all religion is banned from the public sphere,was long isolated and berated for its staunch opposition to the laissez-faire of multiculturalism. Girls who show up in public schools there with the Muslim headscarf are suspended,as are teachers or any other employees in the public sector. That hasn’t stopped the far-right National Front,now led by Marine Le Pen,the daughter of its founder,to surge in opinion polls.

In Finland,the True Finns,a populist nationalist party founded in 1995,became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19 per cent of the vote in April. And Norway’s Progress Party,a right-wing populist party,is the second largest in the country,winning 23 per cent of the vote in the last parliamentary election in September 2009.

“The Norwegian right-wing groups have always been disorganised,haven’t had charismatic leaders or the kind of well-organised groups with financial support that you see in Sweden,” said Kari Helene Partapuoli,director of the Norwegian Center against Racism. “But in the last two or three years,our organisation and other antifascist networks have warned of an increased temperature of debate and that violent groups had been established.”

But neither does Norway exist in a vacuum. Its right-wing scene is connected to the rest of Europe through the Internet forums where hate speech proliferates and through right-wing demonstrations that draw an international mix of participants.