COLUMN ONE : Europe Turns to the Right : Extremist parties’ successes in elections sound alarms on a continent where the rise of fascism before WWII is still a vivid memory.

Propelled by post-Cold War insecurities, economic recession and building anti-immigrant sentiments, right-wing extremist political parties have made important electoral inroads recently across Western Europe, from Sweden in the north to Italy in the south.

The most recent example in a national election occurred this weekend in Belgium, where the Vlaams Blok--a Flemish nationalist, virulently anti-immigrant party--registered its best showing ever. It gained a plurality in the important northern city of Antwerp and increased its representation from two to 12 seats in the 212-member Parliament.

Flemish Socialist Party leader Willy Claes called the vote “a black day, literally and figuratively, comparable to the elections of 1936”--a reference to the dawn of fascist political strength in Europe.

In Italy, the Lombard League, a right-wing regional party, claimed its first important election victory Monday, winning a plurality of votes in the election for the government of Brescia, a major northern industrial city. The Rome daily newspaper L’Indipendente described the Brescia vote as “a solemn judgment on the failure of the traditional parties, indeed of the whole political class.”

Extreme right-wing parties also have had strong showings in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and even in the social-welfare bastion of Sweden, where in September elections the anti-immigrant New Democratic Party won seats in Parliament for the first time.

Although most far-right political parties remain relatively small, seldom surpassing 20% of the vote in local elections and less in national elections, their recent success at the polls has sounded alarms on a continent where the rise of fascism before World War II is still a bitter, vivid memory.

After the Belgian vote, European newspapers rose in a chorus to condemn the rightward trend.

“In election after election,” wrote Pierre Haski in Tuesday’s editions of the Paris daily newspaper Liberation, “from Belgium to Austria, in Sweden and, of course, in France, the extreme right scores its points and installs itself solidly in the European political landscape.”

The Guardian, the left-leaning British newspaper, editorialized: “Belgium is the latest European country to wake up to a morning of shame with the news that a far-right party, peddling racism and anti-Semitism and with undeniable connections to the Nazi era, has broken through at the polls.”

Although there is no Europe-wide movement linking the emerging right-wing parties, they share a common hatred of immigrants and a feeling of lost national identity in their respective homelands. The prospect of the border-less, united Europe of 1993--proposed by the 12-nation European Community--has added to the insecurities leading to the growth of the extreme right.

“The idea of the common European home, the Great Market,” commented French historian Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol in an interview, “was at first welcomed with open arms. But now it has given rise to an uneasiness, a fear of competition and a concern about the free movement of people across borders, particularly from the East.”

Duranton-Crabol, a professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, is the author of a recent book on post-World War II extreme-right political movements. In the anti-immigrant, nationalist cause, usually tied to unemployment and other economic concerns, the extremist parties may have found a more potent issue than the old right-wing fight against communism.

“Deprived of its favorite bete noire, communism,” the French newspaper Le Monde editorialized Monday after the Belgian vote, “the extreme right now exploits unemployment, recession and the fears raised by the construction of a unified Europe.”

A Varied Far Right

The nature of the far right varies from country to country and even within countries.

In Switzerland, the populist right-wing Parti des Automobilistes (Motorists’ Party) won six out of 200 legislative seats in October national elections after a campaign centered on opposition to increased gasoline taxes, speed limits and speed bumps.

In the same Oct. 20 elections, the Ticino League--a right-wing, ethnic Italian political party, modeled on the Lombard League in Italy--won 25% of the vote in the Italian region of Switzerland by campaigning against domination by German and French speakers in Switzerland.

In the Netherlands, the extreme right, represented by two parties, the Centrum Democratum and the Centrum Partij, is essentially an urban phenomenon. In regional council elections last March, the two parties together gained about 7% of the vote in Amsterdam and Rotterdam but almost none in the countryside.

In Belgium and Italy, the right-wing parties began as regional, ethnically oriented movements and have expanded to take on broader national issues.

The main issue for the Vlaams Blok political party in Belgium, for example, was Dutch-speaking Flemish resentment of what members felt was political domination by the minority French-speaking Walloon population that controls the Belgian--and European Community--capital in Brussels. Similarly, Italy’s Lombard League was mainly a regional protest movement based on perceived inequities between the economically dynamic north, centered in Milan, and the economically depressed south.

Immigration Issue

But when the parties take on the broader issue of immigration--attacking the already existing flow of immigrants from North Africa and the anticipated wave of immigrants from collapsing Eastern Europe--they produce bigger vote counts.

In blatantly racist cartoons distributed during the recent campaign, the Vlaams Blok portrayed black African and Muslim immigrants as responsible for most of the country’s problems, ranging from drug addiction to unemployment. The symbol of the party is a pair of boxing gloves. Its motto: “Our Own Folks First.”

Similarly, in September, the German ultraright-wing Deutsche Volksunion party used a simple anti-immigrant slogan, “The Boat Is Full,” to double its previous best results in the small state of Bremen and to gain six of 100 seats in the state Parliament.

In Germany, right-wing parties have shown only small gains in elections. But resurrected extremist sentiments have surfaced in outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence in several cities. The German anti-immigrant rage is also fueled by the unusually high number of refugees, mainly from Eastern Europe, who have migrated to Germany to take advantage of the country’s liberal asylum laws.

In Swedish elections in September, the newly formed New Democratic Party--under a right-wing businessman, Count Ian Wachtmeister, and record promoter Bert Karlsson--won votes by calling for the deportation of immigrants convicted of crimes on Swedish soil. Along the same lines, Wachtmeister and Karlsson said that Swedish foreign aid should be directed to neighboring states with similar cultures, such as the Baltic states, rather than to faraway Third World countries.

Using these issues, the new party shook up the Swedish political establishment, gaining 6.6% of the vote and installing 25 of its members in the 310-member Parliament.

Austrian Rightists

Most European political analysts feel that the most potent extreme right-wing party is in Austria, where earlier this month the anti-immigrant Freedom Party won 22.5% of the vote in municipal elections in Vienna, the capital. The vote doubled the results won by the party in the previous Vienna election and vaulted charismatic Freedom Party leader Jorg Haider into national prominence.

Three years ago, Haider became one of the first extreme right-wing leaders to exercise territorial control when he was elected to the post of governor of the southern province of Carinthia. But he was forced to resign that post this year after creating a scandal by publicly praising Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich labor policies.

In national elections last year, Haider’s Freedom Party won 20% of the vote by campaigning against crimes attributed to illegal immigrants from Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The main campaign theme of the Vienna election earlier this month was “Vienna for the Viennese.”

All the extreme-right parties owe an ideological debt to France, where the National Front party, headed by the demagogic Jean-Marie Le Pen, has easily the most broad-based support among far-right parties.

There have been no recent electoral tests to measure the French party’s strength. But the National Front lately has recorded some of its highest approval ratings ever in national polls. According to one recent poll, 32% of the French said they were in agreement with many of the fiercely nationalist, anti-immigrant ideas of Le Pen, up from 18% the year before.

The popularity of the National Front’s anti-immigrant stand--particularly as directed against Muslim immigrants--has forced establishment parties to take similar positions.

Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, for example, caused a furor last summer when he described the influx of mostly North African Arab immigrants to France as an “invasion”--a clear attempt to woo right-wing votes for his center-right Union for French Democracy.

Former French Prime Minister and current Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, leader of the Gaullist Rally for the Republic party, gave a speech in which he complained about the noise and “odors” of immigrant families. Even current Socialist Prime Minister Edith Cresson joined the chorus by threatening to hire charter flights to deport illegal aliens.

Le Pen, a bull-necked, overweight figure whose face turns crimson with rage when he harangues his audiences about Arab immigrants, is widely considered unelectable in France. The same poll, commissioned in October by the newspaper Le Monde, showed that 32% of the French questioned supported his ideas; only 19%, though, felt he was fit to be a minister in the government.

But it is Le Pen, more than any other political figure, who has set the political agenda for France and other parts of Europe with his steady campaign against immigration.

Mainstream political leaders are anxiously awaiting a regional election next March in Nice in which Le Pen, who recently bought a house in the area, is felt to have his first good chance to establish a regional stronghold.

Although the right-wing political movements have mainly stuck to issues of immigration and crises in national identity, some observers feel that other issues lurk not far under the surface.

“One of the other things that links these people together is anti-Semitism,” said Antony Lerman, director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London. “I think if you scratch any one of these groups, you will find anti-Semitism at the heart of it.”

‘Sense of Vigilance’

Still, few analysts of the European extreme right feel that the conditions are nearly as threatening as they were in the dangerous years leading up to World War II.

“I think there are too many counterweights now,” said Duranton-Crabol. “The fact that so many journalists jumped on the Belgian election proves that there is a sense of vigilance that didn’t exist before.”

Europeans remember, however, that world-changing political movements can begin in such innocuous locales as a beer hall. As a result, every local election, every hint of a rise of the old European right, is taken seriously.

“Every country has extremists of various hues, fascists, anti-Semites and hooligans,” The Independent newspaper of London said in an editorial in its Tuesday editions. “They become seriously worrying only when they get wind in their sails, which is what seems to be happening now.”

Far-Right Parties Make Gains

Here is a list of recent European elections in which far-right parties have made significant showings:

ITALY, Nov. 25: Municipal election in Brescia, Italy. Right-wing, northern Italian regional party Lombard League wins plurality with 25% of the vote. Raises possibility of coalition government led by Lombard League in key northern industrial city.

BELGIUM, Nov. 24: Extreme right-wing Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Blok, running on anti-immigrant platform, scores strongly in Dutch-speaking north, increasing its representation from two to 12 seats in the 212-seat Belgian Chamber of Representatives. Vlaams Blok wins plurality in key northern city of Antwerp.

AUSTRIA, Nov. 10: Far-right Freedom Party under leader Jorg Haider wins 22.5% of the vote in Vienna city elections, surpassing tally of mainstream People’s Party. Capitalizing on xenophobic campaign of “Vienna for the Viennese,” Freedom Party doubles its score from previous election.

SWITZERLAND, Oct. 20: Right-wing Parti des Automobilistes (Motorists’ Party) wins six seats in national legislature on populist campaign against traffic restrictions. Italian nationalist Ticino League wins 25% of the vote in Italian region of Switzerland.

GERMANY, Sept. 29: Campaigning on platform of “Germany for the Germans,” extreme right-wing Deutsche Volksunion, founded by Munich millionaire Gerhard Frey, doubles its previous high score in state elections in Bremen, winning 6 seats.

SWEDEN, Sept. 15: Extreme right New Democratic Party wins first seats in Parliament (26) with a campaign against immigrants and political asylum-seekers. Party leaders Count Ian Wachtmeister and Bert Karlsson call for shift in foreign aid from the Third World to neighboring Baltic states. New party captures a surprising 6.6% of the vote.