Where to for the Radical Right in the European Parliament? The Rise and Fall of Transnational Political Cooperation

Abstract

Amidst all the academic and media discussion in recent years of the causes and consequences of the rise in support for Radical Right parties (RRPs) in Europe, a related, but equally significant development, has generated less debate; namely the rise and fall in the European Parliament in 2007 of the trans-national Radical Right political group, Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS). Drawing on interviews with and a qualitative survey of former ITS members, as well as EP archival evidence, the paper begins by discussing why the notion of trans-national cooperation for Radical-Right political parties has proved difficult, and thus far has been doomed to failure, before analyzing the internal and external dynamics behind the rise and fall of the ITS group. Finally, the paper focuses on current collaboration among Radical Right parties post the June 2009 European elections and on the chances of a new trans-national far-right group emerging in the current parliament.

Key Words:

• Radical Right
• far right
• European integration
• European Parliament
• identity
• tradition
• sovereignty

Notes

¹ For example Norris (2005, p. 44) states: ‘Standard reference works use alternative typologies and diverse labels categorising parties as “far” or “extreme” right, new-right, anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, or neo-fascist, “anti-establishment”, “national populist”, “protest”, “ethnic”, “authoritarian”, “antigovernment”, “antiparty”, “ultranationalist”, or “neo-liberal”, “libertarian” and so on.’

² Only in France where Jean-Marie Le Pen's support slipped from 16.86 per cent in the 2002 presidential elections to 10.44 per cent in 2007, and his Front National's (FN) dipped below 5 per cent of the popular vote in the subsequent legislative elections, has there been a noticeable decrease in support for such parties. Elsewhere the rise in support is noticeable. In Switzerland the Schweizerische Reichspartei (SVP) share of the vote rose from 26.6 per cent in 2003 to 29 per cent in October 2007, confirming it as the largest party in the Swiss party system. In Italy the percentage of votes cast for the Lega Nord (LN) rose from 4.1 per cent in 2006 to 8.3 per cent in the country's April 2008 general election. A few weeks later a former member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), Gianni Alemanno of the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), was elected as the mayor of Rome with 54 per cent of the vote. Elsewhere in Austria in the September 2008 legislative elections, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) popular vote increased by 6.5 per cent (compared to 2006) to 17.54 per cent, while the late Jorg Haider's Bündnis Zukunft Österreichs (BZÖ) party's share of the vote increased by 6.59 per cent to 10.7 per cent, giving the two Austrian radical right parties a combined share of the vote in excess of 28 per cent. In Belgium and Denmark the increase has been more gradual but nevertheless confirms the same trend. The Vlaams Belang's (VB) share of vote in the Chamber of Representatives increased from 11.6 per cent in 2003 to 12.0 per cent in the June 2007 elections and from 11.3 per cent to 11.9 per cent in the elections for the Belgian Senate. The Fremskridtspartiet (DFP) share of the vote in the general election increased slightly, from 13.2 per cent in 2005 to 13.8 per cent in 2007. Even in the UK, a country with little history of Radical Right electoral politics, the trend is upward with the British National Party (BNP) polling 5.3 per cent and winning a seat for the first time in the London Assembly at the May 2008 local elections. Similar trends with regard to the electoral rise of Radical Right parties are also evident in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) states (see Mudde, 2007).

³ This followed the arrest of a Romanian man on charges of raping and murdering the wife of an Italian naval officer in October 2007. As a result of this development Romano Prodi's centre-left government passed a controversial emergency decree in the Italian parliament that would give Italian police emergency powers to deport EU citizens if they were in breach of Italy's laws.

⁴ The research for this paper was conducted between October 2008 and January 2009. Given the small cohort of 23 ITS MEPs any meaningful quantitative analysis was not feasible. Due to limited resources I was unable to conduct face-to-face interviews so I decided to e-mail a qualitative survey (see appendix 1) to all of the 23 MEPs who were former members of the group. In my e-mail I also offered the respondents the possibility of responding to the questions in a telephone interview and as a result I conducted two, 30 minute telephone interviews with two respondents from two different countries. I also received full written answers to the survey by post from two anonymous MEPs. Collectively these four responses ensured a response rate of 17.39 per cent, which building on evidence from existing secondary data ensured a decent snapshot of former ITS members from which to draw conclusions of a qualitative nature. It should be noted that there were no responses from the parties representing the two CEE states within the group (Bulgaria and Romania), which gives the findings something of a pro-Western European bias.

⁵ The Union for the Europe of Nations (UEN) group was formed in July 1999, replacing the previous Union for Europe Group which existed between 1995 and June 1999. UEN was a pro-sovereignty, conservative, ‘soft eurosceptic’ group consisting between 1999 and 2009 which at its peak in numerical terms in 2008 consisted of 44 MEPs from six countries – Poland, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Denmark.

⁶ Upon its formation in 2004 the Independence and Democracy Group comprised 32 (largely single-issue party) eurosceptic representatives from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) had the biggest representation within the group with eight MEPs. Prior to this between 1999 and 2004 the Europe of Democracies and Diversities group comprised MEPS from Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the UK.

⁷ The culmination of this was the accusation by the the Republikaner leader, accusing Le Pen of being a racist (see Fieschi, 2000, p. 523).

⁸ Euronat includes parties not represented in the EP between 1999 and 2004 such as the Swedish Nationaldemokraterna, the British National Party, Democracia Nacional in Spain, Nieuw Rechts / New Right in the Netherlands) as well as the French Front National and Fiamma Tricolore in Italy (see: http://www.euronat.org).

⁹ The one UK member, Ashley Mote, was expelled from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in December 2004, when faced with allegations of fraud. He was convicted in August 2007 of benefit fraud and given a prison sentence of nine months, of which he served three, before being released in November 2007 under the UK government's tagging scheme. He remained in the EP as an Independent until June 2009.

¹⁰ Thus, Romania's 35 representatives in the EP, including the five members of Vadim Tudor's Partidul România Mare (PRM) were nominated as observers by the Romanian assembly on a temporary basis, based on the 13 per cent of the votes cast for the party for the Chamber of Deputies and the 13.6 per cent for the Senate in the 2004 Romanian legislative elections. Likewise Bulgaria's 18 MEPs were in the initial instance observers, nominated by the Bulgarian government and included Dimitat Stoyanov of Natsionalen Sayuz Ataka (NSA), whose party had polled 9 per cent of the vote at the Bulgarian legislative elections in June 2005.

¹¹ (1) Recognition of national interests, sovereignties, identities and differences; (2) commitment to Christian values, heritage, culture and the traditions of European civilisation; (3) commitment to the traditional family as the natural unit within society; (4) commitment to the freedoms and rights inherited by all; (5) commitment to the rule of law; opposition to a unitary, bureaucratic, European super-state; (6) commitment to direct accountability of government to the people and transparent management of public funds.

¹² The two other established far-right parties, Gianfanco Fini's Alleanza Nationale and Alessandra Mussolini's, Forza Italia merged with Berlusconi's Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL) party at the beginning of 2009.

¹³ In Austria the late Jorg Haider's BZÖ polled 4.7 per cent of the vote, short of the 5 per cent threshold required to elect an MEP. In France the FN vote was dented by a split in the party in the build up to the election which resulted in the emergence of Carl Lang's breakaway Parti de la France in February 2009. The dispute revolved around who should head the FN's European list in the North-West constituency, with Marine Le Pen and Carl Lang vying to head the list. Although Lang's new party only polled 1.35 per cent of the vote nationally, on the back of a poor set of local election results in 2008, their presence nevertheless impacted on the result of the FN. In Belgium the VB's performance was affected by the emergence of the List Dedecker, a less radical, pro-Flanders sovereignty party founded by former liberal party (VLD) senator Jean-Marie Dedecker in January 2007. The List Dedecker polled 7.28 per cent of the vote with Derk Jan Eppink becoming the party's sole MEP.