Spectre of fascism is looming over Europe. The UK must be wary

In Italy (where the far-right coalition government is led by Giorgia Meloni of the fascist Brothers of Italy party), and Hungary (where Viktor Orbán of the far-right party Fidesz has been prime minister since 2010), the heirs of Hitler and Mussolini are already in office.

Across the continent, the recent elections to the European Parliament showed a deeply disturbing shift towards fascist and far-right parties in many countries. In the EU’s biggest state, Germany, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) – which is a nasty coalition of far-right xenophobes and neo-Nazis – came second with 15.9% of the vote (beating the Social Democrats into third place).

In neighbouring Austria, the results were even more alarming, with the neo-Nazis of the Freedom Party topping the poll with a massive 25.4% of the national vote. Add to that the far-right votes in such countries as The Netherlands (17%) and Spain (9.6%).

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Lest we think the UK is, somehow, immune to the contagion of far-right politics, on Tuesday of this week the BBC’s General Election poll tracker was showing Reform UK (the party of the racist charlatan Nigel Farage) just three points behind the Conservatives on 17%.

The fact that so many Tories (including senior politicians) want either a pact with Reform UK or Farage as a Tory MP (or, even, leader) is not evidence of any “mainstream” credentials on Farage’s part.

Rather, it is indicative of the deplorable shift to the right of a Tory Party that is currently obsessed with beating up on refugees and forming alliances with the likes of Orbán (who was invited to 10 Downing Street by Boris Johnson) and Meloni (who was joined at a Brothers of Italy political festival in Rome by Rishi Sunak). Farage is part of an international far-right network, as evinced by his alliances with Donald Trump in the US and the AfD in Germany.

Nowhere is the rise of the far-right more worrying than in France, where the National Rally (RN) – the fascist party of the odious Marine Le Pen – came top of the European Parliament poll with more than 31% of the national vote. France’s neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron was so spooked by the result that he called snap national elections to the French Parliament, to be held on June 30 and July 7.

Macron is taking a massive gamble. His politics of the “extreme centre” has put him on a collision course with huge numbers of working-class people.

Macron’s politics – from attacks on the welfare state, to tax cuts for the rich and raising the pension age from 62 to 64 – have been aimed at “disciplining” the French working class. The French ruling class is still haunted by the mass movement that brought France to the brink of revolution in May 1968.

That, combined with France’s strong traditions of trade unionism, led to demands from big business to roll back workers’ gains. Macron’s “liberalising” of the economy – and the massive gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement against it – was the result.

Now – with his pro-business, pro-market agenda widely discredited – Macron is making the dangerous calculation that, by potentially allowing the RN, under its 28-year-old president Jordan Bardella, to come to power in parliament, he can pull the teeth of the fascist party’s presidential bid in 2027. Macron’s thinking goes like this: Bardella (whether running a minority government or leading a coalition with elements from the mainstream, Gaullist right) will make such a hash of a period in office that Le Pen’s next tilt at the presidency will be derailed.

French president Emmanuel Macron  (Image: PA)

This highly dubious thinking is frighteningly reminiscent of the position of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the early-1930s. More concerned with its sectarian rivalry with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) than with the rise of the Nazis, the KPD blithely predicted, “today Hitler, tomorrow our turn.”

Needless to say, Macron (and, indeed, much of the French left and centre-left) does not define the RN as a fascist party. This three monkeys approach – which has historically seen no fascism, heard no fascism and, consequently, spoken nothing about a fascist party with mass support in France – has been dangerous in the extreme.

The National Rally has changed its name (from National Front) and its leadership (preferring Marine Le Pen and Bardella to Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man whose antisemitic fascism extended to referring to the Nazi Holocaust as a mere “detail of history”). However, it has not changed its spots, and it is currently a greater danger to French democracy – and to refugees, migrants and France’s Muslim (mainly Arab and Black) population in particular – than it has ever been.

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Worryingly, Macron and, increasingly, sections of the French business class seem more concerned with stopping the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) – a broad coalition that includes supporters of the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the discredited centre-left Socialist Party – than with the threat of a fascist government. This, too, is reminiscent of Weimar Germany, in which many big capitalists – having previously dismissed Hitler as an unreliable, upstart extremist – began courting the Nazi Party as the “lesser evil” to the Communists.

French anti-fascists report that – buoyed by the rising vote for the RN – fascist gangs have recently attacked trade unionists, migrants and trans people in Paris, Lyon and Montpellier. However, activists against the neo-Nazis also point out that these fascist street forces remain small compared with the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets against the RN since Macron called the election.

If the huge French trade union movement joins with activists in France’s large pro-Palestine movement and other social movements, the tide can begin to be turned against the fascists. Strong votes for the NFP in the forthcoming elections, as a left bulwark against the RN, are important, of course.

However, the key in France, as across Europe, is building a mass movement on the streets, in workplaces and in communities that brings together anti-fascists regardless of their voting intentions or party affiliations.