Disenchanted Europeans flee to the fringes

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It's hard to imagine Frank Verhoef as the new face of European political extremism. The polite and articulate 20-year-old university student lives happily among the cafés and brothels of multicultural downtown Amsterdam and has views that don't generally clash with the middle-of-the-road liberalism of his parents and girlfriend.

Yet last week, worried about his job prospects and the future of his country in a sagging European economy, Mr. Verhoef joined hundreds of thousands of Dutch voters in casting a ballot for Geert Wilders, a fringe politician who believes the Koran should be banned, immigration ended and Muslim believers treated as neo-Nazis. By most standards, his party is on the ultra-right-wing fringe; he was banned this year from entering Britain on hate-speech laws.

This weekend, Europe's mainstream parties are struggling to deal with the nightmare that is Mr. Verhoef's vote. Like millions of other new far-right voters, he is not an extremist. But his disenchantment with mainstream European politics, observers say, is part of a continent-wide trend that could push conventional politics in a more insular, angry direction in order to prevent people like him from escaping to the fringes - and it could provide a big pool of taxpayer financing for single-issue campaigns around isolationist or xenophobic issues.

Mr. Verhoef was far from alone with his unorthodox vote: When ballots were counted this week, Europe's 490 million citizens had elected to the European Parliament a record number of ultra-right-wing, extremist and anti-Europe parties.

About 60 of Europe's 736 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) now come from such parties - including, for the first time, two from Britain's overtly racist British National Party, four from Mr. Wilders's Freedom Party (PVV), which got 18 per cent of the vote in the Netherlands, and three from Hungary's explicitly anti-Semitic Jobbik Party.

To some observers, this week's results bore a chilling resemblance to elections during the economic downturn of the 1930s, when people in many countries were drawn to extremist parties, including fascists in Germany, Austria and Italy, pulling the continent into genocide and war.

But it's worth a closer examination of what really happened this week. To begin with, take a look at Frank Verhoef, and his motives for voting.

Mr. Verhoef, like a great many people who cast their ballots on the extreme fringe, does not support any of the anti-Muslim ideas of the PVV. In fact, he finds Mr. Wilders and most of his candidates crude and alarming - but he wanted to send a message to a national government he believes has failed to talk about his country's excessively open borders and high taxes.

"I see this more as a failure of our mainstream parties," he said as he returned from classes on the train Friday. "I don't think I'd vote for PVV on a national level, they are bashing Muslims by saying the Koran should be banned. Plus, they are anti-elitists. That's something I absolutely do not support. So next time, I might vote for a totally different party."

This kind of voting - as an expression of anger or frustration with the established parties of the moderate left and right - has sent the mainstream parties of many countries into paroxysms of fear. Across Europe, the big moderate-conservative and social-democratic parties are holding crisis meetings to find out how their voters escaped to the extremes and to consider what policies might pull them back in.

Some members of governing parties were willing to admit that their handling of the economic crisis has pushed voters away.

"When citizens are scared for their jobs, salaries, future of their children, they vote defensively," said Denis MacShane, a British Labour MP and former Europe minister, who blames the BNP's rise on his own party's loss of touch with ordinary consumers and its humiliation in the expense-account scandal. "The European right, both mainstream and extreme, are the winners in this election as voters become defensive and see no clear options from the democratic left."

The new extremist voters often appear to be frustrated, economically battered citizens disgruntled with the failures of governing parties to deal with the economy, rather than people who have embraced a new ideology of intolerance.

In fact, the BNP actually received several thousand fewer votes in this election than it did in the previous European vote, in 2004. It won its seats, analysts say, because so many Labour Party supporters stayed home, apparently out of disgust with their party's economic floundering and expense-account scandals, that its voters made up a larger slice of a smaller electoral pie in Europe's proportional-representation system.

The fringe parties themselves are well aware of this, and are happy to admit that they are interested in manipulating the policies of the centrist parties.

Mr. Wilders, in an interview at his parliamentary office in The Hague, said that he made protest against the government's failure to stave off the economic crisis a core part of his message.

"I actively encouraged this kind of voting. I went before all the television cameras and I said, please, Dutchmen, please, if you are hesitant going to vote, it's officially about Europe, but just think that you can also use this vote to show how you feel about your government. Because it will have an influence on the strength of the national parties."

He fully expects that his victory, which makes him the most popular far-right leader in Europe with the support of almost one out of five Dutch voters, will force the governing coalition of centre-right and centre-left parties to start talking about limiting immigration and reducing the European Union's influence.

"I believe that we will be able to redefine the meaning of what is mainstream in this country," he said.

There are clearly elements of xenophobia, racism and intolerance among these votes: It is hard to imagine anyone voting for the BNP without being aware that the party forbids non-whites from joining or that its officials sometimes engage in Hitler salutes; for Hungary's Jobbik without knowing that its leaders make crude and outspoken verbal attack on Jews; or for Italy's Northern League without being aware of its plans to imprison immigrants caught without papers.

But experts say this new far-right bloc does not represent a new European zeitgeist and is unlikely to evolve beyond its current, fragmented state - in part because the parties seem unable to form any kind of a movement, or even a parliamentary bloc.

That became apparent Friday, as the parties began to try to form an alliance. The BNP is refusing to talk to Mr. Wilders because his party is narrowly devoted to opposing religious Islam but embraces Jews and homosexuals. He won't get involved with any parties, such as those in Britain, Austria or Italy, that are associated with classic fascism. None of them, including France's National Front, want to talk to the successful Greater Romania party, in part because they tend to characterize Romanians as menacing foreigners.

"This is the weakness of these parties - they are strictly nationalistic in character, and they are also very paranoid, so they don't want to have anything to do with each other," said Kees Aarts, who analyzes Dutch voting behaviour with the University of Twente. "This is as organized as they get."

But their success in the continent-wide elections - for a parliament that is politically not terribly influential - could give these parties a powerful new influence within their own countries.

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, which has beaten Labour to become the second most successful party in Britain, has said that for each MEP he sends to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, his party receives almost $4-million in EU financing.

With 13 MEPs elected this week, this creates the vast irony of a party able to run a massive anti-Europe campaign in the next British national election, financed to the tune of $50-million by European Union funds. Mr. Wilders also acknowledged that the taxpayer funds, and the increased media visibility that comes with parliamentary seats, will help send his ideas into the mainstream.

And that is what the major parties are facing now: The prospect of major, well-funded campaigns backed by newly popular fringe parties, calling for policies on immigration, multiculturalism and Europe that contradict their traditional views.

As the economy weakens - analysts expect European unemployment to rise by several more percentage points even if a recovery is under way - they will be tempted to appease voters with far tougher immigration and international-relations policies, which are easier to control than the economy.

"It's already happening. The mainstream parties, both the Conservatives and Labour, have moved their migration and asylum policies to the right in order to fend off the BNP's message and prevent a shift of voters to the fringes," says Simon Usherwood, an expert in anti-Europe parties at Britain's University of Surrey.

So, too, in the Netherlands, Mr. Aarts says. "After our voters rejected the EU constitution in a referendum in 2005, that was the last we ever heard of this issue. And now that Geert Wilders has been so successful with it, all the big parties are going to be looking at ways to address public fears of Europe; nobody will dare be talking of more Europe."

The most dramatic case here may be Britain's opposition Conservative Party, which has dropped out of the European Parliament's dominant centre-right bloc and is trying to align itself with anti-Europe parties, in large part out of fears that its core supporters will escape to parties like UKIP.

This has led to a frustrating search for coalition partners: Tory officials have been in Brussels all week, trying to build a coalition, and rejecting one suitor after another for racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic sentiment, outright fascism, ethnic nationalism or flakiness.

The Conservative Party's elders may find themselves in a position not unlike that of Mr. Verhoef with his Geert Wilders vote: Having made their protest, they now find themselves part of a club they would really rather not see accepting them as members.