On the Footsteps of Stalin's 'Class' and Hitler's 'Race,' the Extreme Right in Europe Adopts 'Immigration' as Core Ideology

The extreme right populist rhetoric in Europe has been fueling the fears about "the danger of immigration” for European society. Its radical trend made “Immigration” a core basis for its ideology. In the footsteps of Hitler, who premeditated racial discrimination between members of society; and Stalin, who entrenched class discrimination in the communist system. The far-right came to divide the European community by adopting a discourse that divides society into “immigrants” from one side and the “people” from another.

A comparative study of populism in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, showed that movements based on anti-immigration rhetoric find little resonance in the cities where the targeted immigrants reside.

In an interview with AFP, the French demographer and historian Hervé Le Bras who conducted the comparative study considered that migration plays a key role in framing the ideology of the far-right in Europe.

He believes that immigration is presented as a source of inconvenience in daily life, but those who consider it as such live in areas where there is no immigration.

Dr. Mirona Gheorghiu, a lecturer at the Edinburgh Napier University in the UK, published a study entitled: Status, Relative Deprivation, and Moral Devaluation of Immigrants. The study emphasized that “immigration has been a prominent political issue for decades, but particularly so with rising national populism.”

It added that the moral devaluation (dehumanization and distrust) have become a novel mechanism (over and above prejudice) underlying the formal (anti-immigration policies) and informal (hate crime) means of immigrant exclusion.”

 

Populist Parties’ Rise

According to the BBC website, “Nationalism has always been a feature across Europe's political spectrum but there has been a recent boom in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.”

Khalid Idrissi, an IT engineer and member of the Intellectual Movement in France, explained to Al-Estiklal that the rise of the extreme right in France and eventually Europe could be analyzed from two perspectives, economic and security ones.

First of all, “from an economic perspective, the far-right was able to formulate a straightforward approach to overcome the economic difficulties facing the European countries. An approach based on closure instead of globalization and openness.”

He pointed out, “For instance, Le Pen claimed to protect the French from the ‘scary’ labor force coming from various countries.”

Idrissi stressed, “Unfortunately, the focus on confronting the real economic threats resonates well in times of crisis. With the economic rise of China, Europe, and the western bloc, in general, is declining. Thus, prosperity and luxurious life are threatened. Indeed the lack of opportunities directly activates the competitor-mindset and the tendency to adhere with initiatives that may calm fears.”

Idrissi explained that “the second perspective is related to the security measures proposed by the far right to enforce the law and protect the European citizens from the ‘imminent’ dangers that threaten their safety. In fact, the media plays a prominent role in nurturing the ‘uncertainty and danger’ atmosphere approving the far-right claims, by its coverage and focus on violence, crimes, and terrorism, typically committed by Immigrants.”

 

Spread Mostly In Countryside

Contrary to what might be expected, France's election results revealed that far-right supporters are more prevalent in rural areas, although the proportion of immigrants is greater in major cities than in the countryside.

In France, only 4% of immigrants in 2017 lived in the Ain region in the northeast of the country, where far-right leader Marine Le Pen received 30.7% of the vote in the last presidential election while receiving 13% of the votes of the Seine-Saint region Denis, near Paris, where 30% of foreigners live.

This paradox applies to the far-right voting results of the Austrian Freedom Party, the Spanish Vox Party, the Swiss People’s Party, the Italian Northern League, the Alternative for Germany and the German PEGIDA Movement, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the populist British politician Nigel Farage.

Without invoking the issue of immigration, the measures proposed by the populist parties will not be coherent.

The French demographer expert said: “The issue of immigration became the emphasis of the populist parties’ discourse. It started as an opportunist orientation to slowly become a central element of the far-right identity.”

Hervé Le Bras cited the example of the far-right Eric Zemmour, the presidential candidate, wondering about "how to balance all his economic promises."

Zemmour for instance says that he will recover the billions of euros that migrants cost trying to link the migration crisis to various other types of crises, especially economic ones.

 

On Stalin and Hitler’s Footsteps

Le Bras’s study drew attention to the fact that populism is achieved when there is a “homogeneous people,” which is rare. It stressed: "The far-right movements describe the people as creating a contradiction, meaning that the people for them are all who are not immigrants."

However, it seems that the right can overtake the radical far-right discourse, as what happened in Italy with the radical leader of the anti-immigration league, Matteo Salvini, in the face of the Five Star Movement.

Also, in Germany with the Alternative for Germany party competing with the PEGIDA movement, and in France, where the strategy of demonizing Marine Le Pen creates an identity space for Eric Zemmour.

The comparative study considers that “immigration constitutes to populism what race is to Nazism and class to Communism,” an ideological base that crystallizes in the controversial concept of “Great Replacement,” that is, the concept of a non-European immigrant people replacing the European people, and this may herald the development of populism into totalitarianism.

The regimes of Stalin and Hitler were the hope for their supporters. Hitler was the man who was creating camps with blonde children and blue eyes in order to re-create the Aryan race. On the same track, immigration is the “cornerstone” of populism and the hope or the illusion of their supporters to put an end to all European crises by ending immigration.