Europe: Surge to The Right

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

They range from jackbooted skinhead youths assaulting foreigners in Germany to sedately dressed middle-aged couples dining off lace tablecloths at a banquet outside Amiens -- under a poster urging the eviction of immigrants from France. Their leaders include old nobility, yuppie types, an ex- paratrooper who boasts of being born in a house with a dirt floor, and former communists. But whatever their appearance or origin, the far-right- wingers who are emerging across the European continent share an alarming attitude, if not exactly an ideology: a virulent nationalism expressed mainly as raw hatred of foreigners, particularly immigrants. They also share momentum: West and East, their influence is on the rise.

That might seem paradoxical. In western Europe the headlined trend is toward unprecedented economic and even political unity. The fear of Bolshevism that played so great a role in prompting the growth of European fascism between the two world wars has virtually disappeared with the disintegration of the Soviet empire in the East.

But in the former communist satellite nations, the red downfall has lifted the lid off long-suppressed ethnic nationalism, while prompting some people with no tradition of democracy to look for an alternative form of "strong" government. In the West, right-wing movements have inherited some of the generalized protest vote that used to go communist. Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front does well these days in the industrial suburbs of Paris that were long known as the Red Belt.

East and West, economic distress is also spurring the rightist revival. In the East, the breakdown of command economies has led to chaos and suffering that the painful birth of free markets has not yet relieved. Western Europe, though far more prosperous, nonetheless has been experiencing some of its highest unemployment rates since World War II. It has been easy for demagogues to blame immigrants who snatch away the jobs of the native-born -- though that happens far more often in right-wing mythology than in reality. The movement toward west European integration has also provoked a nationalist backlash in some countries. France's Le Pen lately has been drawing cheers by sneering at unity-advocating "federasts."

The power of the far right should not be exaggerated. In no European country is an extremist party close to taking power. Only in Austria, and possibly France, does it even have an outside chance of muscling its way into a government coalition. On the other hand, the rightists in some countries are exercising more influence on mainstream politicians and parties than their vote counts might indicate.

And rightist sentiment is popping up in some unexpected places. In Belgium the anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok party increased its representation from two to 12 seats in November's parliamentary elections. Sweden, long considered the & socialist's dream of the earthly paradise, gave its Social Democrats their worst electoral defeat in 60 years in 1991. The European Community warned at its Maastricht summit in December "that manifestations of racism and xenophobia are steadily growing in Europe."

A rundown on that growth, from the Atlantic to the Urals:

FRANCE. The right-wing National Front, according to a mid-December poll, would win about 15% of the vote if parliamentary elections were held today. That is only slightly above what Le Pen personally polled in the 1988 presidential election. But the mainstream parties have kept him from making further inroads only by echoing some of his hostility to immigrants, especially dark-skinned Muslim Arabs and Africans. Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac has called for a moratorium on allowing immigrants' families to join them and suggested denying welfare payments to residents of non-French ancestry; former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has hinted at refusing automatic citizenship to French-born children of immigrants. All three ideas came straight out of Le Pen's platform. Even Socialist President Francois Mitterrand once declared that France had passed "the threshold of tolerance" in absorbing African and Arab immigrants.

Still, nobody can match Le Pen in playing on the resentment of petits blancs (poor whites) toward the immigrants. Now he is appealing to other kinds of discontent. He is making a strong pitch to farmers worried that European integration will strip away their accustomed subsidies, and is even putting out feelers to ecological and animal-rights activists, who also have been gaining among voters bored with the mainstream parties. It is just conceivable that if the vote in the 1993 legislative elections splinters widely, a coalition strong enough to form a government could be put together only by including Le Pen.

ITALY. Senator Umberto Bossi, a onetime leftist, hit the big time in the spring of 1990 when his ultra-conservative Lombard League won enough votes in industrial northern Italy to become the second biggest party in the region. As leftist views have gone out of style, discontented voters are turning to the right to express their bitter disaffection with the government in Rome. In a November election in the city of Brescia, the league polled 24.4% to edge out the Christian Democrats for No. 1. In the next general elections, which could come as early as this spring, the league plans to run candidates for $ Parliament throughout Italy; some polls indicate that the league and like- minded groups could collect 21% of the vote.

That might seem surprising, since Bossi's league originated as a separatist group urging the north to secede from a central government that was bleeding it for the sake of the poorer south. But voters up and down the peninsula are attracted by the league's message of opposition to corruption and confusion in high places, to government taxation and red tape, and to every social ill from joblessness and drug peddling to immigration. Bossi and some of his allies have voiced views toward dark-skinned immigrants that are as racist as any in Europe.

GERMANY. Alienated youths known as skinheads have shown terrifying power to unleash violence against foreigners, especially in what was formerly East Germany. There the populace went from Nazi to communist totalitarianism without any democratic interval. So far, unification has brought economic instability rather than prosperity and has wiped out the state-subsidized clubs that used to keep the young off the streets.

With little else to do, many have turned to random -- and racially motivated -- violence. The national government counted 2,074 crimes motivated by hatred of foreigners in 1991, vs. only 246 in 1990. A Mozambican immigrant was thrown out of a trolley car to his death in Dresden; a Vietnamese was stabbed nearly to death in Leipzig; some Soviet children who survived the Chernobyl nuclear accident and were convalescing in a special children's home in Zittau, 150 miles south of Berlin, were assailed by a gang of stone-throwing drunks who shouted, "Jews, die!"

But the right's ability to make noise far exceeds its power to win votes. Unification has actually undercut the electoral appeal of right-wing parties. The biggest, Die Republikaner, won 7.5% of the vote in West Berlin in 1989 but polled only 2.1% in the nationwide Bundestag elections in 1990. Its adherents have no seats in parliament or in any state legislatures. That could change if the rightists can find a charismatic leader; so far, it has none.

AUSTRIA. Exactly the opposite is true here, where Jorg Haider, an articulate young (43) David Duke look-alike, is smooth enough to be described as a "yuppie fascist." Last summer he declared that the Nazis "had a proper employment policy in the Third Reich," then had to resign his provincial governorship in the protest that ensued. But he has led his Austrian Freedom Party to a higher share of the vote in 13 straight provincial and national elections, and in November the party won a startling 23% of the ballots in staunchly Socialist Vienna. It just might poll enough in the next national elections in 1994 to force Haider's inclusion in a government coalition.

The party pushes some respectable causes: deregulation of industry and an end to tenure for government bureaucrats. But as everywhere else in Europe its main appeal is to hostility against immigrants. Freedom Party posters in the capital, pandering to a fear that immigrants are prone to crime, exhorted, DON'T TURN VIENNA INTO CHICAGO. Such fears seem more than passing strange. Almost 510,000 registered foreigners represent 6.5% of the total Austrian population; 100,000 more are thought to have entered the country illegally. But Austria has prospered despite the influx. Through most of the 1980s, it boasted the lowest unemployment rate in Europe outside tiny Luxembourg. Since the immigrants come mostly from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, they "aren't greatly different in cultural and religious terms" from native Austrians, says political scientist Anton Pelinka. That they should nevertheless encounter such strong resentment, he says, "doesn't bode well for a united Europe."

EASTERN EUROPE. While Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia strive more or less successfully to replace communism with Western-style democracy, in other former Soviet satellites the alternative to red rule seems to be a mystic nationalism based on blood and soil. That holds particularly true for the main antagonists in the Yugoslav civil war. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, still nominally a socialist, has led his people to war in the name of a virulent ethnic nationalism that has nothing in common with the international brotherhood of workers to which he once professed allegiance. For his major opponent, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, democratic principles merely temper a style reminiscent of a Latin American caudillo, complete with ceremonial-sashed portrait displayed in all police stations and paternalistic rhetoric reminiscent of Peron or Pinochet. Yet his major internal opposition comes from an even more extreme group: the Croatian Party of Rights, which unabashedly honors the memory of the fascist, Hitler-backed state that flourished briefly during World War II.

In Romania several extreme nationalist parties blame ethnic minorities ( -- Hungarians, Jews and gypsies -- for the country's severe economic troubles. Though these parties do not yet exercise any real power, President Ion Iliescu has felt obliged to court their support.

RUSSIA. "Since 1917 we have been living under the occupation of Jewish fascists," says Valeri Yemelyanov, leader of one of several so-called patriotic groups. His view is totally false: though some leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were Jewish, Joseph Stalin and his successors practiced anti-Semitism almost as zealously as the czars. No matter: many Russians are looking for someone to blame for the shortages and hunger that have followed the collapse of communism, and some are finding that all-purpose, historic scapegoat, the Jew. Others focus on the Central Asians and residents of the Caucasus area who sell many of the scarce meats and vegetables that turn up in Moscow farm markets, sometimes at exorbitant prices.

These hatreds are harnessed by a variety of movements, many of them grouped under an umbrella organization called Pamyat, which preaches a sacred nationalism looking toward an authoritarian Russia purged of all foreign influences. The leader of one such group, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, though widely regarded as a clown, placed third in a field of seven in the Russian presidential election last June -- and that was before the political disintegration and economic collapse had reached anything like their present stage.

For all that, the continent-wide rise of the right is more a nagging worry than an imminent danger. Even in France or Austria, where right-wing attitudes have enflamed the public debate, heavy majorities of voters want no part of the right as ruler. But the right has shown enough strength in enough places so that it cannot be ignored. Democratic governments can put it down, but only if they demonstrate the strength to bring about renewed prosperity and the ability to offer a vision more compelling than the right's mean and narrow -- but unfortunately still attractive -- nationalism of blood and soil.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Vienna, Margot Hornblower/Paris and Ann M. Simmons/Moscow