Bon débarras, Le Pen!
Michael C. Moynihan | June 13, 2007, 2:43pm
The French far-right party Front National, led by the Archie Bunker of Brittany, Jean-Marie Le Pen, suffered a humiliating electoral defeat during the Sunday's of legislative elections.
From the (UK) Telegraph :
The days of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a force in French politics appeared to be over yesterday after his far-Right party received its worst drubbing in 25 years in the first round of legislative elections on Sunday.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been a major political figure in France, has seen his support eroded by Nicolas Sarkozy. The National Front won just 4.3 per cent of the vote, down from 10.44 per cent in 2002.
In France, political parties are (naturally) funded by the state, provided they maintain a measure of popular support. So Sunday's elections were especially bad news for extremists on both ends of the political spectrum:
The party is also facing financial ruin, as its poor parliamentary score means the annual £3.1 million state funding it has received over the past five years will be cut by two thirds. The Communist Party is also facing financial difficulties, and is expected to drop from 21 parliamentary seats to between six and 12.
But as is often the case in Europe, these extremes are not, in fact, too far apart. As the
Telegraph mentions, an internal struggle is taking place for the soul of the party, with Le Pen's daughter Marine attempting to reestablish Front National as a promoter of "'Left-wing' national popularism." This is an increasingly common position amongst Europe's radical-right parties. The "post-fascist" (read: neo-Nazi) NPD in Germany routinely rails against globalization, American imperialism and supports a robust welfare state (with racist exceptions, naturally). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the party has attracted former
Baader-Meinhof adherents Klaus Rainer Röhl (ex-husband of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof) and
Horst Mahler. Germany's far-right newspaper
Junge Freiheit hawks books by Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and t-shirts bearing the slogan "revolutionary, socialist, activist."
The same is true for Sweden's extremist parties, who agressively support the "Swedish model." The current top story on the website of the far-right Sweden Democrats
website demands, bizarrely, "less multiculturalism, more care for the elderly and less crime!" And so on.
In 2005, Michael Young discussed Le Pen's persistent
legal troubles and "France's misguided effort to legislate values."
postgetsclipped | June 13, 2007, 7:00pm | #
"...rejection of anti-semitism among some far-right European parties, now they they've seized on Muslims as the 21st century "enemy within."
"Arabs are Semites too, joe."
">the term "antisemitism" refers to prejudice against Jews, and does not refer to prejudice against Arabs."
semantics, semitics, whatever.
but all Islam is not semitic, not all Arab, etc.
As for anti-semantics...I'm against all the abuse of the meaning of words. ;)
Anti-semitism has been claimed by Jews. While the arabs are semites, if you are against against them, then you are anti-???. I mean, are all Arabs Islamic? No. Then, again, are all Jews, Jews? Practicioners of Judism...
I'm with the guy who suggested anti-jewish, but then, are you talking about the people or the religion.
It's becoming a tower of babel around here.
Back to the French economy.
One of five people in France are born in another country. Why not bring to bear their ingrained economic models? ...by economics models I'm not talking about small cars, or...
Ashish George | June 14, 2007, 12:37am | #
Jerry--
From the NPD Wikipedia page:
"Since its establishment in 1964, the party has never won the minimum 5% of votes in German federal elections that allow a party to send delegates to the German Parliament. However, it was represented in several state parliaments in the 1960s and has repeated this feat recently, winning 9.2% of the vote in the 2004 state election in Saxony. The NPD currently sends 12 representatives to the Saxony state parliament, the Landtag."
And later:
"After the recent 2006 September State Parliamentary election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania where the NPD received 7.3% of the vote, the NPD gained representation there as well."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_Germany
I know it's ever so much fun to score cheap points against the damn dirty hippies, but next time it might be better if you were a bit more informed. Apparently a lot of people take the NPD seriously. The government takes them so seriously that they've tried to ban the party (which I would oppose on free speech grounds). And as for the German public: "According to an ARD poll, a large majority of the population considers the NPD to be undemocratic and damaging to the image of Germany."
http://www.infratest-dimap.de/?id=229&aid=40
dhex--
What's problematic is classifying people as extremist simply according to where their ideas are situated relative to mainstream political discourse without considering how popular or sensible those ideas are. A lot of very distasteful ideas may be very popular and a lot of very good ideas may be very unpopular. People use the tactic of calling libertarian proposals to legalize all drugs "extremist" all the time to marginalize libertarians without addressing what libertarians have to say. And so long as they are allowed to get away with that, libertarians will be kept from a lot of mainstream political discourse, thereby keeping them at the "extreme." There is no need to do that to address the strengths and weaknesses of someone's positions, even if what you basically want to say is that some political group has no idea what they're talking about.
It's troubling to see the word "extremist" used so lazily, and I was simply trying to point out that perhaps Moynihan should think about how he is deploying the term more carefully.
