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Rogozin calls on Russian nationalists to assume rightful role

EU Times — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:18:00 +0000

The head of the Russian defense industry, Dmitry Rogozin, has praised Vladimir Putin’s ethnic policy and called upon Russian nationalists to work hand in hand with the country’s authorities.

The outgoing NATO envoy, who was appointed deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry this year, published his own article in the popular daily Izvestia, which seeks to expand on afeature by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the same newspaper outlining his election manifesto on national and ethnic issues.

In today’s paper, Rogozin praises Putin’s article as an “unprecedented event” that will have long-term benefits for Russian statehood.

The deputy premier writes that the current trend of focusing on various smaller ethnic groups within the Russian Federation is constructive, but the authorities should not neglect the needs and problems of ethnic Russians. He also writes that society must understand that focusing on the problems of ethnic majority is not always extremist or supremacist.

Rogozin gives several examples from history to support his thesis that the leaders of the Russian state have turned to Russian nationalist ideas in times of trouble.This helped them to survive at a time when “the push of ethno-nationalism of the provinces the Soviet power perished and the USSR collapsed like an ice floe along national administrative borders.”

He concludes that in times of crisis, the authorities must turn to ethnic Russians as the main foundation of Russia’s statehood. He adds that that moment has arrived.

The outgoing NATO envoy predicts that the new century, which started with wars and shocks, will be really cruel. He goes on to reveal that four years of work at NATO headquarters filled him with an anxiety about the fate of the world which he has been unable to get over. Dmitry Rogozin believes that we have arrived at a period when resources need to be redistributed.He also states that the United States is no longer ashamed of its “hegemonic plans”. He says that international migration is overwhelming “European Christian civilization” which, according to the Russian vice premier, is in the steepest decline in its history.

Rogozin warns his readers that a weak Russia will fall victim to a world that only respects “brute armed physical force.” He says Russians must concentrate all their efforts on strengthening national unity and on the revival of Russia’s economic and military might, reanimate fundamental scienceand “get smarter spiritually and stronger physically to oppose the internal and external threats to our country.”

The deputy prime minister then blasted the Russian political opposition for targeting Putin in their criticism, saying that “Putin is the only leader left in Europe who has not been run over by a steamroller of American hegemonism.” The official claims that Putin’s defeat will only give succour to American politicians who dream of getting hold of the mineral riches of Siberian mineral resources with the aid of traitors inside Russia.

Dmitry Rogozin says Putin’s article only opened the discussion on the national problem and pledged that from now on, the issue of Russian nationalism will not be hushed up.He said that the Prime Minister’s article was the fruit of cooperation between the government and some Russian nationalist organizations. Rogozin then called upon the “patriotic movement” to bravely integrate itself into official structures of the Russian Federation.

Also outlined were such issues as the defense of ethnic Russians’ rights in foreign countries and highlighting the value of Russian culture and history. He also objects against using the word nationalism when referring to certain Russian organizations, and suggests the word patriotism instead.

At the same time, Rogozin writes that the ongoing crisis requires the consolidation of all “indigenous peoples of Russia” and all active and caring citizens.

Dmitry Rogozin ends his piece by reminding the public about his initiative to create the Volunteer Movement in Support of the Popular Front – the movement in support of the Army, Navy and defense industry. He announced the founding congress of the organization will take place in Moscow on February 26.

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France’s Marine Le Pen Would Leave Euro and Slash Immigration

EU Times — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:40:44 +0000

The charismatic Marine Le Pen has campaigned hard against free trade and the European Union, and has pushed the party’s traditional tough line on crime and immigration.

Marine Le Pen said she would balance France’s books if elected president by leaving the euro, slashing immigration, taxing imports and tapping the central bank for cheap loans instead of the debt markets.

The National Front leader, who ranks third in opinion polls, spelt out the financial planning behind her campaign promises just over three months before the first round of the presidential contest on April 22.

Exploiting discontent over globalization and the debt crisis in Europe, Le Pen has sought to lure voters by detailing her plan to knock the country’s bloated public deficit to zero by the end of 2017.

She said she would raise 200 billion euros ($260 billion) over five-years, in large part by restoring the autonomy of the French central bank and getting it to lend to the government at cheap rates in order to slash debt costs.

Her economic nationalism has seen her continue to closing the gap with incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. The Ifop poll for Paris Match showed that in the first round, to be held April 22, Socialist candidate Francois Hollande would finish first with 27 percent, followed by Sarkozy with 23.5 percent and National Front candidate Le Pen on 21.5 percent, the poll published today showed today. Another poll however found that Marine Le Pen is more popular than Nicolas Sarkozy which ranks Le Pen as second instead of third.

Mr Hollande is staking out his position as a more reliable, more caring reincarnation of the late President François Mitterrand – without the eloquence or, so far, any clear program.

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Thousands of Hungarians Hold Anti-EU Demonstration

EU Times — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:40:21 +0000

Protesters trample a burnt European Union flag during a demonstration in front of the EU Parliament and Committee headquarters in downtown Budapest, January 14, 2012.

Thousands of Hungarians have protested against the European Union, urging their country to pull out from the bloc while Budapest seeks EU’s backing to evade insolvency.

People gathered in front of the European Commission offices in Budapest on Saturday in a street protest called by the rightist Jobbik Party — the second biggest opposition party in Hungary’s parliament.

“This week the EU declared war on Hungary in a very harsh and open way,” said Csanad Szegedi, a Jobbik member of European Parliament, addressing the protesters.

Szegedi was referring to the bloc’s threats of legal action against Hungary over a series of new laws passed by the two-thirds majority of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party.

The EU says the law curtails the independence of the country’s central bank, its judiciary and its national data protection authority.

The most disputed point of the legislation, which went into effect on January 1, is a plan to merge the central bank and the financial regulator, a de facto demotion for the country’s central bank president.

Although Hungary made a set of changes to the central bank law to more closely comply with the criteria of the European Central Bank, some of the most controversial points, including new nomination procedures for senior central bank officials, were passed without change.

However, Hungarian protesters on Saturday urged the government not to bow to international pressure, insisting that Hungary should go its own way and keep its national sovereignty.

The EU is pressing Budapest to change controversial legislations on its central bank and judiciary, and even threatened to suspend vital EU funds to Hungary if Orban does not make budget deficit cuts sustainable.

Hungary will have to make significant changes to win the European Commission’s green light for aid talks, as the EU’s executive prepared to announce its verdict on some key Hungarian laws next week.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi said the government would examine the EU’s concerns and pledged that Budapest will do its best to secure an agreement with the European Commission and International Monetary Fund.

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Thousands protest in Russia against Immigration

EU Times — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 11:15:42 +0000

Held back: A police barrier stops the chanting 5,000-strong mob of mostly young men from going any further

Thousands of far-right nationalists marched in Moscow today in a ‘Take Back Russia’ protest at Muslim migrants.

Resentment is growing over the migrants from Russia’s Caucasus and the money the Kremlin sends to those troubled regions.

Chanting ‘Russia for Russians’ and ‘Migrants today, occupiers tomorrow,’ about 5,000 demonstrators, mostly young men, marched through a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of the capital.

Police stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the street, which was blocked to traffic.

Violently xenophobic groups have flourished in Russia over the past two decades, killing and beating non-Slavs and anti-racism activists, and crudely denouncing the influx of immigrants from the Caucasus and from central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

They have drawn moral support from nationalism that has been encouraged by Vladimir Putin’s rule as part of the Kremlin’s attempts to rebuild a strong Russian state.

After a clash last December between police and thousands of football fans and other extremists just outside the Kremlin walls, and an unprecedented outbreak of hate crimes, the government has taken a tougher line against the groups.

But their virulent hatred is proving hard to combat for many Russians share the anti-migrant sentiments and even those who would not describe themselves as racist are increasingly resentful of the hefty subsidies sent to the Caucasus, particularly to Chechnya.

The money is intended to bring stability after years of war, but the region remains deeply impoverished while Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov flaunts his wealth.

Among the banners carried today was one reading, ‘Stop feeding the Caucasus.’

‘All Russian people are on the march — football fans, skinheads, national socialists,’ Dmitry Demushkin, who leads a banned group called Russkiye, or Russians, shouted to the crowd: ‘We have to show what our nation is demanding.’

The so-called Russian March has been held annually since 2005 on a new national holiday created to replace celebrations of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

The new holiday was usurped by far-right nationalists, whose first rally in 2005 led to the shocking sight of thousands of skinheads marching through central Moscow with their hands raised in a Nazi salute and shouting obscene racist slogans.

The following year the march was banned, but nationalists marched anyway and clashed violently with police. Since 2007, the Russian March has been relegated to areas outside of the capital’s centre

Meanwhile, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended a National Unity Day ceremony 400 miles from the capital.

They laid flowers at the monument of Minin and Pozharsky, the leaders of a liberation struggle against foreign invaders in 1612 in the historic city of Nizhny Novgorod.

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Switzerland against immigration and EU membership

EU Times — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:39:54 +0000

On October 23, Switzerland elected the lower chamber of the parliament – the National Council. The favorite of the election was considered the ultra-right People’s Party. It stands for the drastic restriction of immigration and is against joining the EU.

Its program is best characterized by the pre-election poster: three white sheep standing on the Swiss flag are kicking a black one. The three white sheep symbolize the German, French and Italian- speaking indigenous people. The black one represents the people from Asia, Africa and south-east Europe. Or another poster: a Muslim woman wrapped in a veil from head to toe against minarets made in the form of launched rockets.

The far-right can be given credit for the result of the referendum in 2009 that resonated nearly in the entire world. Then most people in Switzerland were in favor of a ban on minarets. Subsequently, through the efforts of the People’s Party a law on expulsion from the country of migrant workers who have committed crimes on Swiss territory was adopted. In addition, the lower house of the parliament passed a law banning wearing of the burqa, but the upper (Council of States) rejected it.

Once, the People’s Party has caused a rustle. Four years ago, it won a landslide victory, gaining just over 29 percent of the vote. This time the result was more modest – 25.9 percent, and for the first time in 20 years, the support for the “populists” has diminished. Accordingly, they would get 55 out of 200 seats in the National Council (it used to be seven more). At the same time, the next candidates were significantly behind, therefore the victory is still quite convincing.

The runner-up, the Social Democratic Party, gained the support of 18.1 percent of voters, the liberal Free Democratic Party – 15.3 percent, the conservative Christian Democrats – 13.1 percent. The Green Party, the Liberal Green Party and Bourgeois-democratic party also made it to the Parliament. The last three parties secured from five to eight percent.

It would be wrong to consider the results of the current right-wing voting a failure also because many other parties in recent years too abruptly turned “right”. The conservatives supported the People’s Party when voting to ban the burqa. The need to tighten immigration policies was discussed by many other parties, and the question of joining the European Union is no longer on the agenda. There was a partial overlap of the slogans of the far right, which led to a drop in their rankings.

In no other country in Europe the far-right could win elections, while in Switzerland it has happened twice already. This is largely explained by the specificity of the country. It is difficult today in the Old World to find another country where such a high percentage of the population lives in rural areas. Residents of the Alpine mountain villages are completely integrated in the modern life and keep up with the times, but they cherish the tradition stronger than in other places.

All major political forces in the country have to take into account the desire of its people to hold on to traditional ways and resist newcomers trying to break it. (Switzerland is the country of direct democracy, where every year several referenda on a variety of issues take place). Accordingly, the rules for obtaining citizenship in the Alpine Confederation are perhaps the toughest in Europe. First you have to obtain citizenship in the community, then – in the canton and only then – on the country level.

Despite all the obstacles, the number of migrant workers in Switzerland is over 20 percent of the population, but in absolute terms there is half million people. Immigrants work in construction, hotels, and all kinds of menial work. However, highly skilled engineers and programmers are also welcomed. The level of education among the indigenous Swiss is relatively low (due to the large number of people living in rural areas), but it still is higher than that of the newcomers.

Until certain time Switzerland drove people rather close in terms of culture. After the war, people of southern Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece came here to work. Since the 1960s the former Yugoslavia residents – Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians began to emerge. Gradually the Turks began to move to the German part of Switzerland (there are many of them in Germany), and the Arabs and immigrants from Africa – to the French. Colonies of the Kosovo Albanians since the early 1960s were in German and Italian regions. To date, Muslim immigrants make up about a quarter of all visitors (400,000). The most numerous of them are Albanians, Turks, Arabs, and the Bosnian Muslims. Practicing Muslims account for not more than 50 thousand, but Switzerland has some 170 mosques – even if only four have a minaret. Women wearing the hijab and burqa have long been an integral part of the urban landscape in Geneva and Zurich.

Many indigenous Swiss simply shudder at their national soccer team. Among its leaders are Turk Gokhan Inler, Eren Derdiyok, Hakan Yakin, Albanian Valon Behrami and Dzherdana Shakira, Black Johan Djourou and Gelson Fernandes. The image is complete with the Spaniards and the Croats. It may seem that already half of the Swiss population is newcomers. Yet, it is still not the case.

It should also be borne in mind that the Swiss had suffered for their present peace and prosperity after going through many wars and conflicts. They came up with such a government in which members of one linguistic group have their own mono-ethnic area (Canton), but ultimately different cantons form a government with three state languages (German, French, Italian), and one official (Romansh).

The emergence of new ethnic groups will certainly upset the balance. Hence the success enjoyed by the People’s Party. Incidentally, the Swiss far-right differ from their colleagues in Europe because they represent different linguistic and religious groups. They defend the Swiss idea, and the German, French- and Italian Swiss, Catholics and Protestants vote for them. All of them (albeit in somewhat different degrees) would like to keep the way of life that led to the prosperity of Switzerland.

In addition to the issue of immigration, the Swiss see that things in the neighboring European Union are not that great. The Euro (in contrast to the Swiss franc) fluctuates significantly. And if we talk about business immigrant, now EU leaders one by one accept that the policy of integration into the society (especially of the Muslims, but not only them) has failed. The desire for relative isolation in Switzerland is strong. It is reflected in the outcome of the elections.

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Russian Nationalist Urges Support for Putin

EU Times — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:20:21 +0000

An influential nationalist leader urged his followers on Wednesday to throw their support behind Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, telling them that they will no longer have to shiver at street demonstrations because the Kremlin will grant them access to executive and legislative power.

The leader of the Rodina party (Motherland), Dmitry Rogozin, who is Russia’s envoy to NATO, was speaking about coming parliamentary elections in which Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, aims to preserve its lock on power. But his remarks had resonance amid growing tensions over whether Mr. Putin or his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, will run as the Kremlin’s presidential candidate.

Both the president and the prime minister will speak on Saturday at United Russia’s congress, and many are looking for signs of a decision. In the meantime, virtually no prominent political figure has risked expressing a preference for one man over the other.

“I want to say that I’ve made my choice,” Mr. Rogozin said. “I’m not a delegate, I’m a guest at the convention. But my choice is Vladimir Putin. I believe that in the political situation that is developing with the upcoming elections, we should support him.”

Ethnic nationalism makes up a powerful strain in Russian politics, and there have been signs that the parliamentary campaign will tap into grievances against migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. This month, Mr. Medvedev delivered a speech in which he warned against the spread of xenophobia and intolerance, as well as “reactionary and conservative ideas.”

In his remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Rogozin told his followers that they would be rewarded with influence if they joined forces with United Russia, something he called “a pragmatic approach.” This represents a substantial shift, since his previous party posed a pugnacious challenge to United Russia when it was banned in Moscow in 2006, on the grounds that it incited ethnic hatred. “Our main goal should be to integrate with power,” Mr. Rogozin told the Congress of Russian Communities, a political organization created to support ethnic Russians living outside Russia’s borders. Mr. Rogozin says the organization has 100,000 members.

“Maybe not into Parliament, but into executive authority,” he said. “We should go boldly to the authorities and say we have had enough of freezing at Russian marches. It’s time to move into the offices where the main strategic decisions about Russia’s future are made.”

Ninety-one of the 107 delegates at the congress then voted to support Mr. Putin’s party, rather than form an independent one or boycott the elections, according to the Interfax news service. Mr. Rogozin ended speculation that he might run for Parliament or the presidency, saying he planned to return to his post in Brussels.

Meanwhile, Valentina I. Matviyenko, a Putin loyalist approved to head the upper house of Russia’s Parliament, suggested that incremental political reforms may be introduced after the elections. Ms. Matviyenko told Russian state television that she supported restoring direct popular election to the upper house, called the Federation Council, rolling back a decision made by Mr. Putin after he took power 11 years ago. Mr. Medvedev expressed support for the change this month.

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Dmitry Rogozin: Within the Russian Mainstream

EU Times — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:06:11 +0000

An article in the Financial Times adds some interesting details about Rogozin and the situation in Russia (“Medvedev appeals for ethnic tolerance“). First, things are definitely heating up:

Opinion polls show that 55-60 per cent of Russians support the slogan “Russia for the Russians”, and nationalism threatens to become the new centre of gravity in domestic politics ahead of the December 4 elections.

The murder of an ethnic Russian by a gangsters from the Caucasus last December has resulted in mainstream politicians “flirting with nationalist messages.” Rogozin is said to in talks to join a group led by Vladimir Putin that would provide candidates for United Russia, the main political party in Russia. At a high level conference of Russia’s political elite “Rogozin [predicted] the death of multi-culturalism in Europe and Russia in the wake of the London riots and the rise of far-right parties. ‘Immigration of huge numbers of unqualified workers has created immense pressures on our cities. … Multi-culturalism has not led to integration of minorities but to a creation of a fifth column from the south.’” (Medvedev, on the other hand, seemed to be doing his best David Cameron or Angela Merkel imitation, warning about the rise of “semi-fascist parties” in Europe.)

Rogozin’s views are now mainstream: “Rogozin does not lie outside the [Russian] political mainstream,” Sergei Markov, a parliamentary deputy, told Izvestia newspaper on Thursday. “His formulations may be tougher, but in general he reflects the concerns of many people.” And Rogozin himself noted that after 5 years away from Russia as a diplomat, he feels that he is “more moderate than most of the people I’m talking to here.”

I have the feeling that Russians have not internalized the sense of shame so common among Western political elites. They don’t seem to have the pathetic sense of guilt and moral righteousness that so paralyzes elites in the West on any topic related to race or immigration. The culture of the Holocaust has not permeated the society, at least not anywhere near the extent it has in the West. Indeed, a major aspect of Putin’s revolution in Russia was to break the grip of Jewish control over the media. As I noted elsewhere, “The neocons much preferred a democracy in which the Jewish oligarchs completely controlled the media and could buy large blocs of the Duma — in other words, a democracy that much more resembles our own.”

It’s not just the elites. The protests by thousands of young Russians against the killing of an ethnic Russian also show much more ethnic solidarity than we see in the West where killing of Whites by non-Whites is routinely suppressed by the media and the vast majority of Whites are completely mesmerized by the anti-White narrative on any topic related to race.

The fact that these ideas could so quickly go mainstream is heartening indeed. I have said several times that the revolution would start in Europe. In particular, it’s a good bet that it will start in Russia. Exciting times.

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Arrests in Moscow as nationalists protest the Mirzayev case

EU Times — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:45:07 +0000

More than 30 people have been arrested in Moscow and St. Petersburg as ultra-nationalists staged rallies over the death of Ivan Agafonov.

Agafonov, 19, died after a scuffle outside a Moscow nightclub on Aug. 13 and Dagestan-born martial arts champion Rasul Mirzayev is accused of throwing the fatal punch.

That has angered right-wing groups, who are planning a wave of protests against “Caucasian lawlessness”.

And even the reversal of a decision to release Mirzayev on bail was not enough to prevent unauthorized rallies taking place in Russia’s two biggest cities.

‘It could be you’

Nationalist groups gathered outside Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky Court, with representatives of “Russky obraz”, “Russky grazhdansky soyuz” and “Russkoye obshchestvennoye dvizheniye” claiming more than 300 people joined the protest.

Organizers claimed that the protest could not be cancelled because Mirzayev had been remanded in custody: “We know he is being held once more, we do not know that he will be punished and thrown in jail. In place of the murdered boy could be you or your loved ones,” read a message which spread on internet forums.

Police were pelted with stones and paving slabs as they tried to arrest young women who had joined the demonstration, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

Officers later said about 50 people took part in the rally, most of them football fans. Twelve people were detained, the police press service told Life News, adding that they were believed to be the organizers.

A similar demonstration in St. Petersburg saw about 15 people detained, mostly for being drunk in public and using abusive language.

Tensions remain high, with police on alert for further trouble in Moscow at the weekend – perhaps coinciding with the Spartak vs CSKA football match on Sunday evening.

Mirzayev’s defense

Speaking in court prior to being remanded in custody, Mirzayev himself admitted throwing the punch which caused Agafonov to fall, hitting his head and sustaining the injuries which ultimately killed him.

But he said that Agafonov was no mere “boy”. “He is almost two meters tall and weighs just under 100 kg. Should I stand there and wait for him to hit me?” he said in court, Itar-Tass reported.

And Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that the student was also under investigation for alleged involvement in two aggravated robberies of couriers.

His mother and his girlfriend both denied that Agafonov had committed any crime.

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Far-right raises fears amid Greek crisis

EU Times — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 17:57:02 +0000

They descended by the hundreds – black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down darkskinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a rightwing rise – and the July 22 Norway massacre drove authorities to beef up security.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) warns that some Athens neighborhoods have becomezones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.”

Greek police on August 1 said they have increased security checks at Muslim prayer houses and other immigrant sites in response to the Norway shooting rampage that claimed 77 lives.

“There has been an increase in monitoring at these sites since the events occurred in Norway,” said police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis.

Greece’s fears are shared across Europe. Last week, EU counterterror officials held an emergency meeting in Brussels on ways to combat right-wing violence and rising Islamophobia, warning of a “major risk” of Norway copycats. The massacre by Anders Behring Breivik prompted continent-wide soul-searching about whether authorities have neglected the

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threat of right-wing extremists as they focus on jihadist terror.

Greece, however, may be particularly worrisome because of the intersection of extreme economic distress and rampant illegal immigration, which can create fertile ground for the rise of rightist movements. Immigrant scapegoating has been rife here as unemployment balloons amid economic catastrophe.

Even as Greece founders under mountains of debt, illegal immigrants have been streaming into the country across the Turkish border – turning Greece into the migrant world’s gateway to Europe. Last year, Greece accounted for 90 percent of the bloc’s detected illegal border crossings, compared to 75 percent in 2009.

The UNHCR and Muslim groups say hate crimes have risen sharply, although police do not have hard numbers.

The xenophobic rage exploded in May, when youths rampaged through a heavilyimmigrant neighborhood in broad daylight, knifing and beating foreigners. The attacks left at least 25 people hospitalized with stab wounds or severe beatings. Athens has since suffered a spate of hate attacks by far-rightists. Last November, the leader of a neo-Nazi group won a seat on Athens’ city council, with an unprecedented 5.3 percent of the vote.

The UNHCR warns of daily attacks by fascist groups in central Athens.

“There has been a dangerous escalation in phenomena of racist violence targeting indiscriminately aliens, based solely on their skin color or country of origin,” the UNHCR wrote in a June report.

“In certain areas of Athens, cruel and criminal attacks are nearly a daily phenomenon staged by fascist groups that have established an odd lawless regime.”

Immigrants testify to the growing atmosphere of hostility.

“I receive threats all the time,” Naim Elgandour, the Egyptian-born head of the Muslim Association of Greece, said in an interview.

“Things have gotten much worse lately. It’s an alarm bell from the rest for Europe,” he said. “There may be 5,000 hardcore extremistsin Athens, by they are gaining sympathy and tolerance by the day.”

Elgandour said at least 10 makeshift mosques – basements and coffee shops converted by immigrants to use as prayer sites – have been damaged in firebomb and vandalism attacks in the past year.

Under the strain of fast-growing unemployment and new immigrant arrivals, once middle- class neighborhoods north of the center are turning into a rightist-ridden slums.

Police with machine guns guard intersections, white brothel lights line narrow back streets, and young men from violent far-right groups sit casually in squares, sipping cans of beer and hoping to intimidate immigrants.

Police spokesman Kokkalakis said violence by far-right groups has seen “periodical increases” but lacked numbers to point to a trend. But he said most cases of violence that appeared to have a “racial component” in Athens turned out to be the result of rivalry between criminal gangs.

Analysts argue that once-marginalized extremist groups are gaining a foothold in mainstream society for the first time, filling a perceived gap in law enforcement in crime-ridden neighborhoods, and benefiting from a surge in popular anger against the political establishment.

Since winning a seat on Athens City Council, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, head of the violent far-right group Golden Dawn, has tailored his recent rhetoric to the financial crisis.

“We are living in an enslaved country, financially and nationally,” Michaloliakos, a 54year-old mathematician, told supporters last month, giving a speech under a statue of Alexander the Great.

“We have a bankrupt economy and the thieving politicians responsible go unpunished,” he said. “How long do they think they can keep lying and fooling the Greek people? Whether they like it or not, the hour of Golden Dawn and nationalist revolution is coming.”

Aristotle Kallis, a professor of modern history at Lancaster University in Britain, studies European fascism. He argued that Greek extremists are losing the stigma of being associated with the 1967-1974 far-right dictatorship and becoming more similar to other European groups – sharing ideas and methods on the Internet.

“Since the 1990s, Greek nationalism has mutated quite substantially,” Kallis wrote in an email to the AP, warning of a broader European rise in bigotry.

“We are … becoming complacent about a wider, deep and dangerous prejudice against immigrants that is spreading well beyond the constituency of the conventional far-right.”

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Marine Le Pen leads rise in populism

EU Times — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:14:11 +0000

Front National leader Marine Le Pen is unlikely to win power but she is shaping France’s political debate, writes Charles Grant.

Since becoming leader of France’s Front National in January, Marine Le Pen has started to shift her party away from the far right. She has not only dropped the overt racism and Islamophobia of her father, but also adopted hard-left economic policies. “Left and right don’t mean anything anymore – both left and right are for the European Union, the euro, free trade and immigration,” she said when opposing me in a recent dinner debate on the future of Europe in Paris. “For 30 years, left and right have been the same. The real fracture is now between those who support globalisation and nationalists.”

The debate, organised by The KitSon, a Paris think-tank, was off-the-record. But I can repeat some of her comments, since they echoed what she had already said on-the-record elsewhere. She is a tall, strong-looking woman and an effective debater. She speaks pithily and sometimes with humour. She presents her party as a nationalist force – in British terms, the United Kingdom Independence Party rather than the British National Party. In its hostility to the EU and to immigration, the Front National has much in common with Austria’s Freedom Party, the Danish Peoples’ Party, the True Finns, the Sweden Democrats and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Populist, illiberal parties are flourishing in the most sophisticated, liberal societies of northern Europe.

Although Le Pen is changing her party’s brand, she is no Gianfranco Fini: he led his party away from neo-fascism towards the pro-European centre of Italian politics. Le Pen’s European policies remain extreme: she urges France to leave not only the euro but also the EU. Her economic platform is one of national economic autarky. She wants to protect France from globalisation by erecting high tariff barriers. Her economic platform is in fact quite close to that of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the veteran anti-European and former Socialist minister. Earlier this month she appealed to Chevènement to work with her, but he rebuffed her advances.

Le Pen’s line on the euro and the EU may be extreme, but given the mess that Europe is in, her views may not cost her votes among those who want to kick the Paris and Brussels elites for their apparent complacency, smugness and incompetence. She wants France to leave the euro so that it can devalue and become more competitive. While China and the United States benefit from being able to devalue, she said, the eurozone suffers from low economic growth. “To save the euro we are asking the Greeks to make huge sacrifices through austerity, and soon we will ask the same of people elsewhere, even in France. The euro will lead to war.”

When I responded that devaluation would destroy the French people’s purchasing power, she said that only BCBGs – short for bon chic bon genre, that is to say the fashionable middle class – would complain about devaluation; they buy the foreign goods and holidays that would cost more, whereas most poor people buy things made in France, a point that is highly debatable. She complained about sovereignty draining away to Brussels and said that we live in a Union Soviétique Européenne. The EU represents the interests of big financial groups, she said, and encourages immigration in order to put downward pressure on salaries. She said that her country needs a French agricultural policy, rather than a Common Agricultural Policy, since the CAP was giving too much aid to central Europeans.

“The EU has been built on Anglo-Saxon principles of everything being available to be bought or sold.” Ultra-liberals run the EU, she said, and will not let the French protect their industries. “Without protection we cannot be competitive against China, since we don’t want to work 20 hours a day.” When I said that rather than trying to compete directly with China, France should go up market and produce goods and services that the Chinese cannot, she argued that they could now beat France in any industry – as they were doing by building high-speed trains. I responded by praising the prowess of France’s world-beating companies in areas such as luxury goods, agribusiness, energy and aerospace, so she joked that the best proponents of Sarkozyism came from Britain.

The obvious critique of her line on the EU is that France, on its own, is rather small compared to China and other emerging powers, and that it therefore needs the EU to amplify its voice in the world. But she had no truck with that argument, saying that France on its own had a big voice. “I am a gaullienne, and the general would be horrified to see the EU today. I want an association of sovereign nation-states; that would allow us to influence Russia and the wider world.” And when I suggested that the EU had the merit of constraining German power, she said Germany already dominated the EU. “When Germany has a constitutional problem, we change the EU treaty; but if France has a problem, we have to change our constitution.”

Le Pen wants France to leave NATO. When I pointed out that France would then have to raise defence spending enormously, in order to enjoy a comparable level of security to that provided by NATO today, she was unfazed. “We are not Botswana, if we want to play a big role in defence we can, and in any case defence spending is good for the economy.” During two hours of debate she said nothing that sounded racist. The closest she came was this: “I am not against immigration, France has always accepted foreigners. But it should not lead to lower salaries. And in employment we should prioritise jobs for français de souche.” That could be translated as people of French stock.

I think Le Pen is right when she says that the main political divide in Europe is between nationalists and globalisers. But the solutions that she offers to complex problems are far too simple. Her language resonates with the common man: she is on the side of the little people against foreigners, international bureaucrats and big capitalists. And her economic nationalism goes down particularly well in France, a country that is probably more hostile to globalisation than any other European country.

But there are obvious gaps in Le Pen’s thinking. She has nothing to say about global governance, or what to do about transnational threats such as organised crime, climate change, proliferation or international terrorism. And she would be a more effective critic of globalisation if she acknowledged that in certain respects France does nicely from it. When I told her that France benefited hugely from foreign direct investment – it gets more FDI than any other country in Europe – and that French companies did very well from investing in other member states, like Britain, she had very little to say.

Opinion polls suggest that Marine Le Pen has a good chance of getting into the second round of the May 2012 presidential election – as Jean-Marie Le Pen did when he won more votes than the Socialists’ Lionel Jospin in 2002. According to some polls, the second round would pit the Socialist candidate – almost certain to be either François Hollande or Martine Aubry – against Le Pen. Of course, she would not win the second round. As in 2002, the centre-left and the centre-right would combine to keep out a Le Pen, only reinforcing her view that Sarkozy and the Socialists are the same. But in any case, I do not think she is serious about exercising power, at least for now. If she were serious, she would have to start compromising on some of her economic and international policies, and she shows no signs of doing so.

But even without formally winning office, she – like her equivalents in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden – is shaping the political debate in her country. Politicians on the centre-right have toughened their line on immigration, lest the Front National steal too many of their votes. And very few French politicians on the centre-right or the centre-left have a good word to say about the EU.

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Austria’s Freedom Party Goes from Strength to Strength

EU Times — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 09:14:52 +0000

Under its leader Heinz-Christian Strache, the right-wing populist Freedom Party has become a force to be reckoned with in Austrian politics. It is currently neck and neck with the country’s two largest mainstream parties in the polls. Meanwhile the governing Social Democrats are struggling to reconnect with ordinary voters.

They aren’t actually that far apart, the chancellor and his adversary — at least in geographical terms. While Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann runs the country from the Federal Chancellery on Vienna’s Ballhausplatz square, Heinz-Christian Strache meets with visitors five minutes away at his office in a palace, which has a view of the city’s rooftops.

The leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Strache has steel-blue eyes and looks dashing in a dark suit. He is not someone who shies away from selling pipe dreams as prophecies. “As chancellor,” he promised in June, he plans “not to do everything differently” but to “improve many things.”

In his choice of words, Strache sounds out of touch with reality. Given that he is the nightmare of Austria’s major parties, the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), who does he intend to govern the country with? “That’ll work itself out,” he says. “After the next elections, different people will be in charge” in the SPÖ and the ÖVP.

Polls now place Strache’s FPÖ consistently neck and neck with the two “old parties,” and in May it was even the top choice among voters. Strache is already telling people that if he comes into power, the country will no longer pay a cent for “bankrupt EU countries like Greece” because, for someone like him, “the red, white and red shirt” — a reference to the colors of the Austrian flag — “is tighter than the Brussels straitjacket.”

A Statesman in Waiting

The next election is in 2013. Is it pure Angstlust if, in the city of Sigmund Freud, newspaper editors are already fretting about the possibility of Strache becoming chancellor? Or do people want to nip the development in the bud, as some kind of democratic early warning system?

Strache was tied to the neo-Nazi community in the past and was forced to admit that he took part in militia training. Today he paints himself as a statesman in waiting and only rarely sends out signals to like-minded individuals — such as when, during a visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in December, he wore a cap that identified him as a lifelong member of the right-wing student fraternity “Vandalia” instead of a Jewish skullcap.

At its convention in June, the FPÖ renewed its commitment to the German ethnic community, boosting Strache’s right-wing credentials even beyond those of his mentor, Jörg Haider. The former FPÖ leader, who died in a car crash in 2008, had committed himself to Austrian patriotism before he died. Strache says that it was Haider’s historic achievement to have destroyed the system of cronyism promoted by the SPÖ and the ÖVP. But Haider, according to Strache, was also responsible for the FPÖ’s original sin: its entry into a coalition government under former ÖVP Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel in 2000.

At the time, the European Union responded to this step by ostracizing Austria diplomatically. Now, 11 years later, the FPÖ has reached the same voter-approval rating it had during Haider’s heyday — 27 percent. This comes as no surprise, says Strache. “A culture war is raging in our country, and we are leading the debate.”

‘Always Smile’

In his office on nearby Ballhausplatz, the current chancellor takes a relaxed view of all this. The photogenic Chancellor Faymann embodies contemporary Austria as the land of smiles, invoking the spirit of composer Franz Lehar, who wrote an operetta of the same name. “Always smile and always be cheerful,” is a line in one song. It could be Faymann’s motto.

How does he do it? Faymann’s campaign coach, the mime Samy Molcho, once wrote in the weekly magazine Falter: “You have to smile and exhale at the same time, or else your smile will turn into a mask.” Perhaps this explains Faymann’s impassive approach to the malice that is currently being showered on a government that now seems to be focusing on governing itself rather than the country.

“Our politicians are too idiotic and cowardly, and too ignorant,” Andreas Treichl, head of Austria’s largest bank, Erste Group, said in May, referring to what he perceived as a lack of economic competence. Gerd Bacher, the former director of Austrian broadcaster ORF, complained about a “despotism of little minds” and a “massive blockage when it comes to major reforms.”

Strache and his friends like to hear this sort of thing. They are now riding a wave of popularity, with their approval ratings rising almost without the party even having to do anything. All they have to do is stand still and be carried along in the wake of the current trend. The successes of right-wing populists in countries like Finland and France play into the hands of the euroskeptic FPÖ.

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Denmark’s far right gains influence

EU Times — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:48:29 +0000

Pia Kjaersgaard, leader of Denmark's right-wing Danish People's Party.

Border controls set to return amid concerns over link between foreigners and crime.

European Union ministers are discussing new measures which could restrict people’s movement across the continent. Much of the debate has been prompted by an influx of migrants from North Africa.

The far right has been using this to its advantage. Denmark is only one of many European countries where the far right appears to be influencing government immigration policy.

Despite a low crime rate, the government says it is so concerned about the link between foreigners and crime that it is going to bring back border controls. Perhaps they are trying to prevent Denmark from becoming like the UK for example where the crime rate has skyrocketed during the last decade.

Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee reports from the Danish capital, Copenhagen.

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European Nationalist Parties Top Opinion Polls

EU Times — Sat, 28 May 2011 13:49:42 +0000

Several nationalist and anti-immigration parties have become the most popular in their countries, topping recent opinion polls in France, Austria and Finland.

France’s Front National, Austria’s Freedom Party and Finland’s True Finns have all headed voters’ surveys in recent weeks.

In March, Marine Le Pen’s party received 23 per cent in a poll of voting intentions for 2012’s presidential election. The survey, carried out by the Harris Institute and published in the newspaper Le Parisien, put Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP and the Socialist party at 21 per cent each.

The Front National received a 15.06 per cent vote share in the first round of France’s regional elections in March; however, that total would have been higher had the party contested more seats.

This week the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) also proved the most popular in its country.

The FPÖ would secure 29 per cent of the vote if there were a general election held today, according to a poll by the OGM institute on behalf of the Kurier newspaper. For the first time, the FPÖ overtook the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), who polled 28 per cent, and the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), who earned 23 per cent.

The FPÖ stands opposed to EU membership, Turkey’s joining the EU, the Islamificiation of Austria, and immigration.

Previous Austrian polls this year have shown support for the FPÖ at around 24–29 per cent, on par with the SPÖ and ÖVP. Among people under 30 years of age, the FPÖ has the support of 42 per cent.

The BZÖ, a breakaway party from the FPÖ that also advocates stronger immigration controls and opposes Turkish accession, scored highly too, at 13 per cent. The FPÖ already holds 38 seats in the Austrian national parliament, and the BZÖ holds 17.

Meanwhile, in Finland, the anti-immigration and anti-EU True Finns party also surged into the lead.

A poll commissioned by a group of regional newspapers found that 22.4 per cent of those questioned said they would vote for the True Finns, compared with 20.6 per cent for the centre-right National Coalition party and 19.1 per cent for the Social Democrats.

The result reflects another rise in support for the True Finns, whose opposition to EU bailouts and the erosion of Finnish culture saw them become the country’s third-largest party in last month’s national election. The party earned 19.1 per cent of the vote in April, just 1483 votes behind the Social Democrats, who also gained 19.1 per cent, and 1.3 per cent behind the winning National Coalition Party.

The rise of nationalist sentiment is also felt in the Netherlands, where support for Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) increased this week.

A Maurice de Hond poll gives Wilders’ PVV 26 seats if there were a general election tomorrow, three up on the previous poll. The ruling centre-right VVD fell by two seats to 32.

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Bulgarian Nationalist Leader: US Ambassador Threatened to Destroy Me!

EU Times — Sat, 14 May 2011 09:33:04 +0000

Volen Siderov, leader of the far-right Ataka formation.

Volen Siderov, leader of the far-right Bulgarian Ataka (Atack) party claimed US Ambassador to the country James Warlick threatened to “destroy him”.

In Siderov’s words, he encountered Warlick by chance the other day and presented him a “bill”, which was actually the total cost the nationalist believes the US has to pay for using military bases on Bulgarian soil in the period 2006 – 2011 – USD 2 B.

Upon receiving the “bill”, Warlick threw it and threatened he will “destroy” Siderov, the Ataka leader said from the Parliamentary tribune Friday, adding the encounter was “documented.”

Siderov declared he will ask the Bulgarian National Security Service to protect him.

“When the Ambassador of the world’s most powerful state threatens you, it is normal to feel afraid,” he admitted.

Ataka is the ruling centrist-right GERB’s only ally.

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Far-right threat exaggerated despite hysteria of some media

EU Times — Sat, 07 May 2011 22:22:05 +0000

Is the far-right making a comeback? You might think so reading some of the headlines this week. “Behind the migrant row, Europe keeps shifting to the far-right,” warns Time magazine. “Finland leads rise of the far-right in Europe,” according to The Daily Telegraph.

The Irish Times went with the same theme, editorialising, “As similar nationalist parties have done recently in Sweden, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Belgium, and Hungary, the True Finns have also, although even more dramatically, become a lightning rod for popular alienation from politics and immigration.”

Is Europe slipping into the abyss? Are we really heading for a new Dark Age, with Europe’s Nazi past coming back to haunt us? Are fascistic far-right parties really ‘on the march again’ everywhere from Greece to France, from Italy to Holland? In a word, no. The current obsession with the rise of the far right tells us far more about the European elites’ crisis of confidence and legitimacy than it does about any Nazi reality.

In the discussion of the far right, European commentators have attempted to squeeze very different parties into the same category. Consider the list of far-right parties that are supposed to be plaguing democracy in the countries listed by The Irish Times. The Swedish Democrats, who have a murky background but claim to have purged their extremists, have less than 6% of the vote. They have just 5,800 members — hardly the numbers of which Nuremberg rallies are made.

In Denmark, the People’s Party, a breakaway from a more pernicious group, is much stronger and can claim to have helped reverse Denmark’s extremely liberal asylum laws, but it cooperates with the Danish government and has no history of violence. It justifies its anti-immigration policies in the language of celebrating diversity and protecting identities. This hardly sounds like a return to fascism.

The Austrian Freedom Party is even larger. It may be obnoxious and is probably anti-Semitic but this is hardly a novel stance in Austrian politics — there has only ever been one Nazi Party.

The Netherlands has had a strong anti-immigrant camp for a decade now, originally centred on the late Pim Fortuyn who was openly gay and justified much of his anti-Muslim ranting by claiming that Muslims are homophobic and, therefore, enemies of diversity. His spiritual successor, Geert Wilders, is shockingly frank in his views about Islam, but calls himself a ‘right-wing liberal’ and makes a point of keeping his distance from the Holocaust-denying French National Front, Hungary’s vile Jobbik party and Belgium’s disturbing Flemish Interest, all of which certainly do deserve the far-right label.

As for the Italians, widely ridiculed, many of the politicians we are told are ‘the good guys’ were once fascists or communists. One of the few who were neither is Silvio Berlusconi. The party which still carries the torch for Mussolini, though, scores just 2% in elections.

And that’s the point. In some — mainly small — countries which feel their national identity is threatened by globalisation or the European Union, parties which include strong measures against immigration in their platforms are flourishing. But parties which are openly racist and fascist are, by and large, marginal.

Take Britain. The BNP has less than 2% of the vote. True, it has a couple of MEPs, but that perhaps tells us more about how seriously the Brits view the European Parliament than anything else. In Germany, again the neo-Nazis are stuck on 2% and have made no headway at the federal level. In Spain, the Falange, Franco’s successors, don’t even register in opinion polls.

In plenty of other countries it’s the same: immigration is becoming a significant political issue, but an issue for all the parties.

If tight immigration limits, queasiness about multiculturalism and opposition to the transfer of further national powers to the EU makes a party far-right or neo-Nazi, what was Enda Kenny doing in 10 Downing Street earlier this week? (In Ireland we cannot preach too much when 1-in-8 voters two months ago supported either the political wing of a still-banned but inactive terrorist organisation, or eejits who think Leon Trotsky had the answers.) The fact is that some of these derogatory political labels are being applied willy-nilly to right-wing parties, usually by people with strong (and often extreme) political views or by people who don’t know any better.

It is precisely because the vast, vast majority of Europeans are broadly tolerant and have learned the lessons of the 1930s and 1940s that even parties which do (or might) have unpleasant ulterior motives have had to tone down their rhetoric. The Swedish Democrats have a pretty blue flower as their party logo, for heaven’s sake. Can anyone really see battalions of Swedes marching back into Finland carrying bunches of daisies? Where extreme parties win electoral support, it is not that voters are ‘voting for fascism’, or even endorsing everything the party stands for. Rather, it is a sign of isolation from mainstream politics. Across Europe, votes for small hard-right parties look like a two-finger ‘fuck you’ to traditional politicians, rather than an endorsement of Nazism.

There is one thing that unites Europe’s ‘far right’ parties — they are all vehemently anti-immigration. Even here, however, there are differences. Some supposedly far-right parties like Norway’s Progress Party want caps on the numbers coming into their countries, just like the Australians and the British. Others are concerned that many immigrants are hostile to their countries’ progressive and civilised values. And a few extremists want to ‘send them back’ and make their nations white again.

Generally, though, contemporary debates about immigration express societies’ general fear of risk and the unknown, more than an old-time hatred of Johnny Foreigner. And, it has to be admitted, in many European countries the only sections of society still opposed to gay relationships or demanding the return of capital punishment are immigrant communities.

The idea that fascism is returning to Europe is nonsense. There are some large right-wing parties either in power or in coalition, which might have loathsome politics and policies, but they are hardly fascists. There are medium-sized right-wing parties, many of which promote their anti-immigration beliefs in modern PC-speak. And there are small hard-right parties, some of which talk like Nazis but in reality are small groups of sad men and women with very little support.

The obsession with this week’s result in Finland and the ‘far right threat’ tells us far more about insecure and uncertain elites, particularly the one in Brussels which is trying to ram a single economic policy on 27 different countries, than it does about political reality on the ground. They exaggerate the threat of the far right and at the same time underestimate the extent of their own isolation.

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