By Sally Low and Peter Annear
Elections in France, Italy and Germany over the last two months have delivered sharp rebuffs to major parties in both government and opposition. While in all three cases increased support for far right parties received headline coverage, this was just one feature of outcomes that reveal the break-up of patterns that have endured since the end of the second world war.
Traditional Christian Democratic and Social Democratic policies — both solid bulwarks against Communism in post-fascist western Europe — no longer suit the needs of capitalism. The "social market" will be replaced by balanced budgets, low inflation, less government spending and unemployment at previously unacceptable levels.
Parties such as the French National Front are both a function of the need to push political debate to the right and an outlet for political discontent less dangerous to the powers that be than a strong united left. In many ways they have been encouraged and their success played up by the political establishment. Harsh economic policies and social and political upheaval caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc regimes will continue to provide fertile ground for their demagogy, making them a real danger that cannot be dismissed or ignored.
Swings in France
Despite the publicity given to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front's 13.9% in French regional elections in late March, the most outstanding result was the meagre 18% polled by the governing Socialist Party.
Prime Minister Edith Cresson's replacement by the monetarist Pierre Beregovoy is not likely to reverse the party's fortunes in time for next year's national election. After nearly a decade of austerity, the Socialist Party was unable to win back disillusioned voters with its claim to be the only safeguard against Le Pen.
Les Verts (the Greens) and Generation Ecologie — a right-wing split encouraged by Mitterrand in the hope of weakening the green political forces — profited most from the anti-Le Pen vote. They outpolled the NF, with close to 15% shared evenly between them.
An unusually high voter turnout of 70%, after many had predicted the contrary, has been attributed to a conscious anti-National Front mobilisation and is one reason why it failed to gain the
20% support it had boasted. A vigorous anti-racist movement which has brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets this year, helped swell the progressive vote which, when the Communist Party's 8% is counted, was well ahead of the far right's.
Nevertheless, the NF cannot be dismissed. It established itself as an important national political force. In five regions, including Ile-de France, which encompasses Paris, it beat the Socialists into second place. In Nice, the country's fifth biggest city, it gained 31.3%.
The two major right-wing parties, Union for France and Rally for the Republic also lost out, with a combined total of 33%, their worst result in the history of the Fifth Republic. While some may have been more willing to vote for minor parties because these were elections for regional rather than the national parliament, the fact that 49% did not vote for them must be of great concern to the political mainstream. However, they can take comfort from the fact that the disillusioned vote is fairly evenly divided between left and right.
Italy
In April 5 general elections, the powerful Italian Christian Democrats received 29.7%, compared with 34.3% in 1987. Betino Craxi's Socialist Party dropped 1%.to 13.6% . The outgoing coalition of these two plus the small Liberal and Social Democratic parties received just under 49% of the vote.
The swing is more significant when the sharp divergence between the North and the South of the country is taken into account. With 8.7% of the vote nationally, the right populist and regionalist Lombardy (Northern) League was the great victor in the North, while in the South the institutionalised parties generally retained their support.
With his granddaughter as one of their prominent candidates, the successor to Benito Mussolini's Fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, won around 6% and took the combined far right vote close to 15%.
While the Lombardy League is not really a fascist party, it is racist and xenophobic. During the election campaign, however, leader Umberto Bossi chose a more respectable angle and directed his rhetoric against the party system and centralised government.
Many small business people, entrepreneurs and white collar workers in the North supported the League. Frightened by the huge budget deficit — expected be to 9.9% of GDP this year — and the question of who will bear the brunt of its reduction, they were attracted by Bossi's rhetoric against bleeding the North to support the South and the excesses of the
big spending Rome government. He also drew a considerable youth vote.
Achille Occhetto's Party of the Democratic Left failed to reverse the decline of its predecessor, the Italian Communist Party. It received 16.1%, compared with 26.6% for the PCI in 1987, but is still the second largest party in parliament. Communist Refoundation (RC), a left breakaway from the PCI plus some other groups including Proletarian Democracy, scored 5.6% — a good result which ensures it parliamentary representation. However, the combined left vote was 5% less than in 1987.
According to RC member Franco Turigliatto, the Italian establishment had hoped that much of the expected protest vote could be channelled towards the centrist Republican Party which, despite a high profile campaign, received only 4.4%.
To form a new government from among the 16 groups represented in the new parliament will be difficult. It is possible the Party of the Democratic Left will enter a new coalition.
German right
On the same day Italians went to the polls, the two German Lõnder of Baden-Würtemberg and Schleswig-Holstein elected new governments. In Baden-Würtemberg the governing Christian Democratic Union's vote dropped from 49% to 41%. Prime Minister Bjorn Engholm presided over a 6.8% swing against the Social Democratic Party, of which he is also the national leader, in Schleswig-Holstein.
Around 13% of the electorate voted for the far right in Baden- Würtemberg. Of this the Republican Party received 10.9%. In Schleswig-Holstein, the neo-nazi Deutsche Volks Union won just under 6%. It is estimated that 16% of blue collar workers and 13% of people under 30 voted for the Republicans in Baden-Würtemberg.
These results were greeted with loud alarm by the leading parties and the media. And while far right groups have at various stages in the last 30 years received similar votes and then faded out of view, there is ample reason to believe that this is not just a passing phenomenon.
Both of these are wealthy west German states. There is speculation that the right would receive even stronger support among citizens in the crisis ridden east, where, over the last 18 months, the size of the work force has "shrunk" from 10 to 6 million and of those who remain, 2.4 million are either unemployed, on short time or in work creation schemes. The arrival of up to 35,000 asylum seekers every month provides a
target for xenophobic propaganda.
Left and greens
However, votes for green and left candidates show that there has not been a wholesale move to the right in political consciousness. France is the most striking example of the tendency for green parties to at least partially fill the vacuum created by the current crisis of much of the left. Similar though less marked trends have emerged in Austria and Belgium.
In Italy, where the left is still able to draw over 20% support, the Greens scored under 3%. In the two German Lõnder, they slightly increased their vote to 8.9% in Baden-Würtemberg and just over 5% in Schleswig-Holstein.
While major parties have appeared to give in to the rhetoric of the far right by shifting their own policies in that direction, it is not entirely a case of the tale wagging the dog. The large parties have their own racist program to create a fortress Europe against immigration from the Third World and the former Soviet bloc countries; they cannot but be gratified to have the likes of Le Pen denounce this as too mild.
The far right has become, in some respects, an instrument by which the political establishment can be seen to be pushed in the direction that it really wants to go.