NEWS ANALYSIS : Rise of Far Right Continues in Italy, Germany

Significant scores by German and Italian extremist parties in elections this weekend continued a Europe-wide trend of electoral gains by anti-immigrant, populist and ultra-right parties that began last fall.

Strong showings by the far-right Republican and German People’s Union parties in two German state elections and by the populist-regionalist Northern League in Italy’s national election came on the heels of the best-ever score by the far-right National Front in French regional elections last month.

As occurred in France, the German and Italian extremists built support by exploiting widespread public dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties, conditions of economic recession and especially strong anti-immigrant sentiments.

In Germany, the strongest far-right showing since the 1950s was concentrated on the immigrant issue and the country’s liberal political-asylum laws.

As Werner Kaltesleiter, an election researcher at Kiel University, expressed it, “Unresolved foreigner and foreign asylum-seeker problems bear the brunt of the blame for this swing to the right.” A record 35,059 asylum-seeking immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe and Turkey, entered Germany in March, 4,000 more than in February.

In 1987, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 57,379 foreigners sought asylum in Germany, which has Western Europe’s most liberal asylum policies. But by 1991, that number had risen more than fourfold to 256,112, and anti-immigrant, right-wing movements began to pick up steam.

An analysis of the vote in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, where the virulently anti-immigrant Republican Party polled a record 11%, revealed that 20% of the wealthy state’s young male voters opted for that party, which is headed by Franz Schoenhuber, once a member of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS (elite) troops.

This mirrored the voting pattern for the National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. The anti-immigrant front, with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism, captured 13.9% of the vote in nationwide regional elections March 22.

Studies showed that the National Front scored highest among young males and also that it attracted strong support from blue-collar workers in Paris’ industrial suburbs, where it won 16% of the ballots, eclipsing the vote for President Francois Mitterrand’s governing Socialist Party.

An analysis by the respected Institute for Applied Social Sciences in Bonn compared Sunday’s results in Germany to France’s regional elections, saying “similar tendencies were recognizable,” which show that “it is not just about a German, home-grown problem.”

Among main contributing factors listed by the institute were “widespread uncertainty, indeed fear for the future in the face of threatening economic doldrums, and social burdens that lead to fiercer competition over scarcer goods, jobs and housing.”

Reaction to the extremist gains was especially strong in Germany. “Dear Lord, The Browns Are Coming Again,” shrieked a headline in the sensationalist eastern German tabloid Super, referring to the brownshirts, the storm troopers of Nazi Germany.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose Christian Democratic Union lost its parliamentary majority in its last western German stronghold in Baden-Wurttemberg, immediately ruled out any coalition with the parties of the far right. Like others, Kohl dismissed the vote as a “protest warning against us.”

But Christopher Husbands, a specialist at the London School of Economics on European extreme-right political movements, said the roots of the far-right voting trend also reflect increasing attitudes of racism and ultra-nationalism on the Continent, five decades after the rise of Hitler.

Similar far-right gains were recorded last fall in elections across Western Europe, ranging from Sweden, where the right-wing New Democratic Party won 25 seats in Parliament, to Italy, where the Lombard League, precursor to the Northern League, claimed its first election victory by winning a plurality in an election for the city government of Brescia, a northern industrial city.

Jones reported from Bonn and Tempest from Paris. Times staff writer William D. Montalbano in Rome contributed to this report.