by MAHIR ALI
On the night of the Swedish election on Sept 11, a 26-year-old politician from the Sweden Democrats hailed its triumph in becoming the nation’s second-biggest parliamentary party by raising one arm and proclaiming “Helg … seger”. It means ‘weekend victory’, but to many local ears it sounded a lot like ‘Hell seger’, the Swedish version of ‘Sieg Heil’. The resonance probably wasn’t unintentional, given the party’s Nazi antecedents.
The Sweden Democrats won’t form the next government in Stockholm, and probably won’t even formally be a part of it, but their support will be instrumental in keeping the next right-wing coalition in power, given its slim parliamentary majority.
A rather different scenario is unfolding in Italy, where Giorgia Meloni is expected to become prime minister in due course, possibly close to the centenary of Benito Mussolini’s accession to power on Oct 31, 1922.
She’ll be her country’s first female PM, which is a trifle ironic given her party is called Brothers of Italy. It sprang up earlier this century as a more or less direct descendant of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano that emerged in 1946, a year after Mussolini’s execution by Italian partisans. In the event, it’s hardly surprising that the globally embraced partisan ballad Bella Ciao became a bone of contention during this year’s election campaign, with the ‘anti-woke’ forces seeking to cancel it.
But the neo-fascist backlash to European neoliberalism isn’t new, of course. The Freedom Party in Austria got there first this century, only to be followed by Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Danish People’s Party, Norway’s Progress Party, the True Finns, and the French National Rally. That excludes the former East European nations that drifted to the right amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequently embraced the authoritarian aspects of their ‘communist’ past, rejecting its progressive impulses.
Viktor Orbán’s Hungary may be the most obvious instance of this phenomenon, with its misogyny, homophobia and affinity with Putin setting an example for other retrograde forces across the continent. But Poland and the Czech Republic haven’t been far behind.
The resurgence of the far right in Europe cannot be attributed to the intrinsic appeal of neo-fascist forces. It’s a consequence of the multiple failures of what was once known as the left. Since at least the 1980s, the so-called progressives have bought into the neoliberal economic myths of the Reagan-Thatcher era, and colluded in ripping the heart out of the welfare states that emerged from the wreckage of World War II, partly as a means of diminishing the appeal of the Soviet alternative.
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