TIMESONLINE: The death of Jörg Haider has cast a light on the resurgence of facsist politics in Austria and Italy
The death of the Austrian far-right politician Jörg Haider has again focused world attention on his country's ambivalent attitude to its Nazi past. The son of an SS officer, Haider won notoriety by praising Hitler's welfare policies and describing concentration camps as work camps. None of this seemed to bother Austrian voters, who gave him and his fellow-travellers a third of the vote in the last elections.
In Italy, too, right-wing politicians have recently showed signs of a positive attitude to the fascist regime run by Mussolini from 1922 to 1945. The election of Gianni Alemanno as Mayor of Rome was greeted by supporters shouting “Duce! Duce!” - the name taken by Mussolini and Hitler, while the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has declared that his movement is “the new Falange”, in a reference to the Spanish fascists of Franco's day.
What drives the radical politicians of the new Right is, in the first place, hostility to immigrants, a feeling that is likely to get worse as the European economy slides into recession. Added to this are fears of the collapse of law and order. The rhetoric of fascism provides a handy symbol for the far Right's determination to deal firmly with immigrants and criminals. It contrasts with the complacency of conventional politicians in Italy and Austria who for decades after the Second World War cosily arranged everything for their own benefit in coalition governments built on political compromise.
This collapsed in Italy a few years ago, and seems to be collapsing in Austria today. In both countries, support for the far Right offers voters the most obvious means of giving voice to their protest and disillusion.
Such rhetoric arouses little public hostility because Austrians and Italians have never felt guilty about their fascist past, as the Germans have. In Germany today you will see former concentration camps turned into sombre monuments to the murderous cruelty of Nazism; small brass plates in the pavement outside houses and shops whose Jewish owners were driven out in the 1930s, with the names of those owners inscribed on them; a monument to Jewish victims of Nazism installed at the centre of the capital city, Berlin. The Nazi past is everywhere, and people's rejection of it is universal and comprehensive.
True, in parts of the former East Germany, the far Right has made some headway, building on popular resentment, especially among the young and unemployed, of the economic shock therapy administered after its absorption into the West in 1990. But it has always remained on the fringes of politics, completely ostracised by the mainstream.
Not so in Italy and Austria, where the far Right is an acceptable coalition partner for leading parties, and few seem troubled by its positive references to the national past. As Europe Slumps, Is the Far Right Rising? >>> Richard J. Evans | October 14, 2008
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