The mainstreaming of Europe's 'stealth far-right'

The results from yesterday’s general election in Sweden are in – and continuing the narrative of European elections over the past five years, the results are bad news for the left. The centre-left Social Democrats lost 17 seats in the parliament – just the latest blow for a party that until recently had dominated Swedish politics.

But the ruling centre-right coalition, who will hold on to power, weren’t exactly jumping out of their seats last night in celebration. Only Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's party managed to gain seats, while his three coalition partners all lost seats. This left the coalition just short of a majority, and they will have to ally with the Swedish Greens in order to put them over the threshold. So if everyone seemed to lose seats, where did the votes go? They went to the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), who will now enter the parliament for the first time after winning 20 seats in yesterday’s election. It's a stunning development for a historically left-of-centre country like Sweden.

Austria's Far-Right Gay Secret: History Repeating?

The death of far-right Austrian politician Jörg Haider took an interesting twist today. The huge outpouring of mourning and sympathy which Haider's death inspired has received much press coverage in Europe over the past two weeks, but the biggest open secret about Haider has not - the fact that he was gay. That is until yesterday, when his lover of five years Stefan Petzner publicly acknowledged their relationship in a tearful confession.

What has followed has been some hesitation from European media about whether it is appropriate to cover the sexuality of Haider, who is married with two children, as a news story. The issue has been further complicated by the fact that his sexuality was hardly inconsequential in the details of his death. He died in a car crash driving home drunk from a gay bar he had been at with his lover. But before Petzner's televised admission, that detail was left out of all press reports in Austria. It's not hard to see why, when the reality of Haider's personal life are so inconsistent with the public image of the party he led - the far-right Alliance for Austria's Future (BZÖ). After his admission, Petzner was fired from his position as leader of the BZÖ. He had already attracted attention at Haider's funeral after television cameras caught him loudly weeping more than Haider's wife and two daughters combined. Petzner said in his interview that Haider's family was aware of their relationship.

The revelation has put the party into full damage-control mode, fearing that the news will scare off the core conservative voters in Southern Austria that make up the group's voters. The hugely popular Haider had recently led the party to great success, ushering in a victory scoring 8 percent in last month's general election. Now that this news might throw the party into disarray, there has been speculation it may merge with the populist Freedom Party (FPÖ). That merger would create the second-strongest political party in Austria.

So, the revelation about Haider's sexuality is hardly inconsequential. But still, Austrian media outlets have remained extremely hesitant to cover it. In fact, it was Germany's Bild newspaper that forced the details surrounding the circumstances of Haider's death into some of the Austrian press. Austria is one of the most conservative countries in Western Europe (many would say the most conservative) and has a particularly bad reputation for gay rights (though it does not have a form of civil partnership). The rest of the European media is full of criticism today for Austria's press, questioning why the country's media seemed to show such deference to the far-right leader in not reporting his homosexuality, which seemed to blatantly contradict the policy goals of his party. However the Austrian media has defended itself by pointing out that though the party's official platform demonized gays, Haider himself was never heard to utter any criticism of homosexuality amidst his attacks on foreigners and his praise for Nazis.

I can't help but wonder what effect all of this will have on the public perception of Austria in the rest of Europe, already badly damaged by the recent string of bizarre imprisonment cases, most notably the horrific tale of Josef Fritzel. That last case was also notable for the shocking way in which people 'looked the other way.'

Fascist leaders who lived secret gay lives while publicly condemning gay people to death is a familiar theme in Europe's history. As Austria slides further and further to the right, revelations such as these are bound to make people pretty uncomfortable, especially due to its almost creepy historical parallels.

Welcome to the religion century

Tony Blair made some interesting comments at a fundraising dinner in Toronto last night. Coming on the eve of the launch of his new Faith Foundation, which was unveiled to the world today in New York, it offered a stark and blunt assessment of the century we are entering. While probably true, his comments will no doubt be quite troubling to secular Europe.

Speaking at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, Blair described the impetus behind his new faith foundation as an effort to “get faith in action,” saying that the goal of his new foundation is to help various religions work together to make the process of globalisation more humane. Sounds innocuous enough. But it was his blunt assessment of the power religion will have over the world over the next century that got my attention. Spoke Blair:

“Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century.”

Fascism creeps back in Italy

The local elections held throughout England on Thursday saw an absolute trouncing of the Labour Party, with the most notable casualty being London mayor Ken Livingstone, who has been replaced as of Sunday by Conservative candidate Boris Johnson. Johnson is going to be a real wild card because not much is known about what he will do. In fact his whole campaign seemed to be centered around making buses shorter, as far as I can tell. One thing that’s clear is that Johnson benefited from good timing, cashing in on widespread dissatisfaction with Ken Livingstone as well as Gordon Brown’s plummeting polls.

But as Labour frets over the implications of having a conservative mayor for the first time since the office was created, on the continent the left is far more concerned about a different mayor recently put into office. It seemed to slip under the radar for the English-language press, but last week Rome elected a Neo-Fascist leader, Gianni Alemanno, as its new mayor. It is the first time since the fall of Mussolini that a Fascist party has attained such a high position of power.

In the early 1980’s Alemanno became well-known for leading violent fascist youth demonstrations in Rome. The young, square-jawed and handsome firebrand became a protégé of Gianfranco Fini, the rightist leader who later founded the neo-Fascist National Alliance party in 1993. Since then Alemanno has worked hard to become the legitimized voice of Fascism in modern Italy, appearing often on Silvio Berlusconi-owned television stations. Berlusconi later appointed Alemanno as agriculture minister in his 2001-2006 government.