prague, czech republic | Gains by anti-Semitic, xenophobic and racist far-right parties in last week’s elections for the European Parliament were a reminder of how voters across Europe gravitate toward fringe parties and extremists during tough economic times.
Financial misery throughout Europe has given rise to increased nationalism, skewing an election of representatives whose job is mostly to pass Europe-wide regulations on food and safety standards, the environment and internal market competition.
“As far as Jews are concerned, the election results are a warning that in a period of crisis people vote with extremists,” Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary general of the European Jewish Congress, said from Paris. “It doesn’t matter if it is left or right to angry voters, as long as it is extreme.”
For the first time since the 1930s, a neo-fascist group in Britain, the British National Party, received enough votes to enter a legislative body. Of the two representatives the party will send to the E.U. Parliament in Brussels, one is Nick Griffin, a convicted Holocaust denier accused of chanting “Death to Jews!” at a 1981 political rally in Leeds.
Krisztina Morvai, the newly elected Hungarian parliamentarian from the far-right Jobbik party, blogged earlier this month in response to accusations of xenophobia, “I would be glad if the so-called proud Hungarian Jews would go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised d—s rather than vilifying me.”
Marvai’s party, Jobbik, sent shock waves through Hungary’s Jewish community, Europe’s fourth-largest, by grabbing three seats and nearly 15 percent of Hungary’s vote in elections.
Even when compared to other gains made by the far right, Jobbik’s success was extraordinary. It was the first time the party had run for the E.U. Parliament and it showed that Jobbik, which had run in local elections mostly on joint tickets with Hungary’s main rightist opposition party, Fidesz, is a potent political force on its own.
Jobbik, a Hungarian word that means both “better” and “further to the right,” is led by Gabor Vona, 30, a former high school history teacher. Though he denies being a racist, Vona says the party keeps an “open mind” about the veracity of the Holocaust.
In Austria, far-right parties won 18 percent of the vote, a greater percentage than anywhere else in Europe. One of the parties, the Freedom Party, or FPO, campaigned with posters reading “FPO veto for Turkey and Israel in the EU” and won 13 percent of Austrian vote.
Amid record-low turnout for the June 4 to 7 elections — 43 percent of 388 million eligible voters — the ascent of the far right was a message to European institutions that worries over immigration and anger over failed domestic policies take precedence over any pan-European agenda, analysts said.
About 30 of the 736 new European Parliament members come from extreme-right parties in countries such as Hungary, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Romania and Bulgaria — up from 23 in 2004. The strongest showing in the elections was for center-right parties, which took victories across Europe and trounced their Socialist rivals. The centrist conservatives have the largest voting bloc in the Parliament.
But apathy — national voter turnouts in Europe frequently are above 60 percent — and the perception that the vote was for a distant, insignificant legislature might mean that extremists will not do as well in upcoming national elections in individual European countries.
Clara Marina O’Donnell, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform in London, cautioned against interpreting the far-right gains as a major political upheaval.
“We have a growth in certain countries of extreme parties, but they only got a few seats and the growth is very much marginal,” O’Donnell said. “People feel the European Parliament does not count, so they feel more tempted to vote extreme, often electing candidates they would never think of choosing for their national parliaments.”
European institutions in Brussels comprised of country representatives have no unified foreign policy or jurisdiction over crucial national issues, such as immigration, education or health care.
But they occasionally make policy — such as when the European Parliament froze a planned upgrade of E.U. relations with Israel during a war against Hamas in Gaza in January. They also might have a hand in setting European rules on shechita, Jewish ritual slaughter, which is banned in some European countries.
More worrisome to Jews and other minorities is that extremist parties who gained ground in the recent Euro-pean vote show no sign of going away.
“The greatest surprise is that two decades after the collapse of Soviet power, a bright young generation of East Europeans should now put its faith in the tired anti-Semitic stereotypes that were current here a century ago,” said historian Rafael Vago of Tel Aviv University. “I see the gravest danger in the consequent infiltration of racist perceptions and hate speech into political and civil discourse.”
Vago noted that in a 300-yard stretch along a central Budapest avenue, he found several infamous and long-discredited anti-Semitic pamphlets on sale by at least three newspaper venders.
“If on the E.U. level they do not stop this kind of extremism, it will get worse,” Cwajgenbaum said. “There is something wrong with how people are being educated, or not educated, in these countries.”
There are some positive signs, with the far right failing to garner almost any support in Germany, France, the Czech Republic and Poland.
“Within the European Parliament, there are people who need to be quarantined,” said the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations in Paris, Shimon Samuels, “and there are enough centrists who will make sure that happens.”