Posted on 05/07/2002 2:39:36 AM PDT by xsysmgr
EUROPEAN politics are turning ugly. For the second time in recent months, a high-profile politician has been assassinated. At the time of writing, we do not know why Pim Fortuyn, the smooth-pated Dutch populist, was murdered, but there can be no doubt about the strength of feeling against Mr Fortuyn among his opponents.
Many Continental countries are experiencing rare levels of voter disenchantment and political extremism. Add political assassination to the brew and, suddenly, there is a whiff of Weimar in the air. This is not to say that the contemporary political scene is comparable to the disorders of the 1930s. But there is a new anger in political discourse, a nastiness not felt during the post-war period.
The proximate cause is probably the atrocity of September 11. From that moment, the debate over immigration and multiculturalism took on a new immediacy. Feelings ran high on both sides. Right-wing politicians sometimes crossed the line between being anti-immigration and being anti-immigrant. Left-wingers took to demonising their opponents, accusing them of being not merely wrong, but malevolent.
Although neither side will admit it, both have contributed to an inflammatory atmosphere. In a number of European countries, notably France and Belgium, opponents of immigration have stirred up resentment against legally settled ethnic minorities.
By the same token, the readiness of some on the Left to daub their opponents - sometimes literally - with the swastika, has fed the kind of hatred that led to the recent assassination of Silvio Berlusconi's adviser on employment law, and that may have killed Mr Fortuyn.
To lump Mr Fortuyn in with Jean-Marie Le Pen, as Left-wing newspapers constantly did, was ludicrous. The National Front leader was the political heir to Vichy. Mr Fortuyn, by contrast, was more maverick than fascist. True, he opposed further primary immigration into the Netherlands - but this, in theory if not in practice, puts him no further to the Right than the British Labour Party.
The truth is that Mr Fortuyn, like other politicians around Europe, was chiefly protesting against the governing cartel. The political systems of most EU states - based as they are on proportional representation, state-funded political parties and consensus - tend to create a "club" of establishment parties.
The Netherlands was typical in that most of its politicians could expect to be in power most of the time. The governing coalitions set out to create a consensus on all the big issues: immigration, European integration, corporatist economics. Those outside the tent found themselves isolated and stigmatised.
The 20 per cent of Dutch voters who had planned to back Mr Fortuyn were protesting against all this. Ten years ago, as Maastricht was rammed through, we predicted that voters would turn, in frustration, against their political systems. We take no pleasure in being proved right.
Remember this editorial.
Earth to the Telegraph, the Left has been doing this for decades, not since 9/11. They smeared Barry Goldwater in 1964. They smear Reagan in 1980. They smeared evangelical Christians since 1979. They were a problem in 1976, when they voted for Jimmy Carter, only when they were going to vote for Reagan. John Tower, Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan and most recently Judge Pickering has been smeared and demonized. That's just the US. I know in Germany, Franz Josef Strauss had been a target of demonization, when I was in Germany in 1975.
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