Pause and engage; Europe's far right The Economist March 19, 2011
FROM the tip of Scandinavia to the shores of the Mediterranean, far-right leaders and parties are doing well in opinion polls. Given Europe's history, this has set nerves jangling.
The biggest shock is the rise of Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front. Polls put her ahead of both President Nicolas Sarkozy and any likely Socialist challenger in 2012. She will not win the presidency, but she has shed the jackbooted imagery of her father, Jean-Marie, who shamed France by getting into the run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002.
The right is on the rise for old reasons and new. Hostility to immigration is sharpened by Islamist terrorism; alienation from the political system is exacerbated by both globalisation and the bail-outs of failing euro-zone countries. Ms Le Pen and her kind trade on anti-Islamist sentiment to resist not just more immigration from north Africa but also Islamification at home. In northern Europe far-right parties play more on hostility to Brussels and the euro. The German government is worried about the possible emergence of a nationalist party pushing to restore the D-mark.
Europe's political establishment has tried many different tactics to defang the far right, none of which has wholly succeeded. The first was to ignore it in the hope that it might go away. Next came a policy of ostracising extremists, throwing a cordon sanitaire around parties that won municipal or parliamentary seats. Then came its opposite: embracing the far right and even bringing it into government, in the hope that contact with reality would both moderate it and reduce its appeal.
Mr Sarkozy tried another approach in the run-up to the 2007 election: he occupied the National Front's ground by ranting about immigrants and using coded anti-Islam discourse. A charitable interpretation (善解) is that by broadening the respectable right, he left less space for the extremists. Whatever the intent, this strategy had some success in winning back voters. But it is a dangerous path to follow. By espousing the arguments of the far right, the centre may legitimise them; and voters may opt not for the ersatz party but the real thing, especially in a more respectable guise—Ms Le Pen, for instance.
Mainstream parties would do better to address the extremists head on. Instead of stoking anti-Muslim sentiment by claiming, as Germany's interior minister has, that Islam has no place in a country, explain the importance of integrating minorities. Instead of demonising the Greeks, spell out the arguments for keeping the euro together. Instead of hinting that governments can hold globalisation at bay, explain its benefits and the costs of resisting it. That may sound Panglossian, but it is better than raising voters' expectations only to dash them later. That's what Mr Sarkozy did in 2008 when he pledged to keep a steel plant from shifting production abroad. The jobs went anyway. Little wonder if voters flock to parties that seem to offer a more robust bulwark against painful change.
Dealing with extremists is never easy for moderates, but addressing voters' concerns honestly, and making the argument against the far right stoutly, is the best approach. Those who steal extremists' clothes end up looking too much like them.
