ABSTRACT
Introduction The rise of the parliamentary right has become an important political phenomenon in Europe since the last decades of the twentieth century. Special attention has been given to the right-wing national populist parties and their new forms of mobilising antagonism against the ‘Others’– be it immigrants, the political or economic elite or the European Union (see Chapter 4 for further details). Rightwing national populist parties and organisations share political strategies, which are grounded in politicising common concerns of ‘the people’. The ideology, position and role of right-wing national populists can be better understood by clarifying their relations with neo-fascism and neo-Nazism. The issue is not new: in France, since the 1980s, during the unstoppable electoral progression of the Front National, a lot of debates took place about the way to best characterise this phenomenon. Is it fascism coming back to the forefront with a modernised manner of presentation, or is it something else that needs to be defined? The question of the nature of Front National provoked passionate debates, because it echoed another crucial historical debate about the existence (or not) of a French fascism.1 The links between right-wing populism and fascism/neo-fascism have been largely discussed also in Italy by Gino Germani in the 1970s and Pietro Ignazi and Marco Tarchi in the 1990s. In order to identify right-wing nationalist populism, the Italian political scientist Piero Ignazi (1994) proposed to focus on the party’s ideology, rather than study the organisational structures, style of leadership or characteristics of the electorate. Hence, Ignazi (1994, 2000) argues that the extreme right might be defined as organisations, which adopt fascist (or Nazi) ideology. Differently from Ignazi, Tarchi (2002, 2003) argues that there is no simple continuity or reference to fascism and National Socialism, but national populism is characterised by both: ‘Populism is often considered synonymous with the extreme right, or its variant actualized, more presentable than the classic one’ (Tarchi 2002). The issue of continuities and discontinuities can be found in the work of many European scholars. As the British historian Roger Griffin (1991: xii) argues, the extreme right’s ideology is a ‘palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’, which occupies ‘the space where political-ideological fascism
is the basic reference’, opposing the democratic system through frames of antiparliamentarism and anti-pluralism. Yves Mény and Yves Surel (2001) insist on the discontinuities with respect to programmes, style, organisation, leadership characteristics and the electorate of neo-fascist and neo-populist parties. From this perspective, the extreme right and national populist parties across Europe are reshaping their ideologies and tend to distance themselves from neo-fascism and neo-Nazism: they seem to search for a new model of political antagonism. Moreover, some national populist parties have a direct filiation from neo-fascism and neo-Nazism, such as the Austrian FPÖ, while others do not. In recent years, the links between ‘populism’ and neo-fascism have been explored by various scholars, such as Wiarda (2005), who theorises the existence of two intersecting trends, neo-fascism and ‘new populism’. Mammone considers, on the contrary, that ‘by failing to consider fascism as a wider and transnational phenomenon, the terms populism and national populism replace fascism/neo-fascism as the used terminology’ (Mammone 2015: 7). The work of Andrea Mammone consists of assuming a pattern of ‘continuity’ within the history of right-wing extremism in some European countries (2015: 9). This chapter explores the links and relations between right-wing populism and neo-fascism and neo-Nazism in today’s Europe, taking the examples of Italy and Austria, both countries having a fascist and Nazi history. Our analysis is based on the argument that neo-fascism, neo-Nazism and right-wing national populism not only have multiple historical roots, but are also multi-faceted and polymorphous and by no means identical across Europe. To the contrary, country-specific forms of cooperation, division of political spheres and antagonisms exist. Taking Italy and Austria as examples, this chapter pays attention to country differences and places the rise of right-wing populism in the shift of these two European states towards post-democracy; it focuses on issues of democracy and historical legacies (Germani 1975; Canovan 1981). As Germani (1975) argues, right-wing populism, neo-fascism and neo-Nazism have to be explained in the context of the countries from which they emerged. These countries are characterised by different social and economic structures, as well as by different typologies of class conflicts and different forms of neo-liberal strategies of negating and de-politicising class conflicts. Right-wing populism, neo-fascism and neo-Nazism can, however, illuminate each other, while respecting the irreducible semantic autonomy and differences of the different organisations and ideologies.2 The question we aim to address is how right-wing populist parties and movements in countries with a fascist or Nazi past differ, how they overlap and how the parties developed since the end of World War II. Did fascist or Nazi organisations go through a sort of metamorphosis towards neo-fascist and neo-Nazi parties or did they develop into new formations, accepting democracy and democratic institutions like elections in general, while at the same time questioning some values and structures of liberal democracies, such as universal human rights? How do far right parties and organisations refer to the fascist or Nazi
past? Does such reference contradict their aim to win votes? How do national populist parties refer to far right organisations? We contend that neo-populist antagonisms in some of the organisations are accompanied by a neo-fascist and neo-Nazi ideology. But moreover, we argue that today’s references to fascist and Nazi ideologies and symbols are political modifications and reconfigurations of fascist and Nazi inheritance; they are adaptations developed after the fall of fascism and National Socialism, located in the context of Italy’s and Austria’s post-war democratic societies. Paradoxically, in the country where neo-fascism was stronger in the post-war years – Italy – neo-fascism has not given birth to large national populist parties. Neo-fascism in Italy is scattered across different small parties and groups, while national populism is represented by the Northern League, which has no fascist connections. Links have been established by some individual personalities (such as European MP Mario Borghezio) and only recently there has been an attempt to establish a more organic relationship in a trend of ‘lePenisation’ of the Northern League. Nevertheless, the Northern League still rejects the historical experience of fascism. In contrast is the Austrian FPÖ, which was founded as a follow-up Nazi party and developed into a neo-populist right-wing party, nurturing a sort of division of labour with far right and Nazi organisations. The Austrian political landscape on the right is characterised by one strong party, some minor populist parties (e.g. Team Stronach) and a vivid neo-Nazi community. Comparing Austria and Italy offers an interesting overview of how fascist and Nazi ideology is still alive in the post-war years of the two countries and how it has nourished different political expressions. The aim of this chapter is to show how, in Italy, neo-fascists either have explicitly condemned fascism in order to become a ‘mainstream party’ or have ended up as part of a scattered nebula of extremist groups; while in Austria, a clear continuity exists between Nazism and the FPÖ. We argue that these differences are due to the different national narratives and specific histories. The anti-fascist foundation of the Italian Republic forces all the political parties to take a position in respect to the fascist heritage, while Austria still lacks an in-depth debate of its Nazi past.
