Fascism

By James O. Jackson/Bonn

Throughout Europe, the past is staging a comeback, and its presence is not comforting. Last week in Rome, its shadows intruded again. A band of what Italians call "Nazi-skins" invaded Casa del popolo, a social center for immigrants. Shouting "Bastards, we're going to kill you," they threatened to throw Molotov cocktails into the building on the Via di Valle Aurelia. A 17- year-old immigrant suffered serious head injuries after being bludgeoned with an iron bar.

Two weeks earlier, a gang of 200 Nazi-skins marched through the northern Italian city of Vicenza shouting racist slogans and waving banners with swastika-like emblems. Mainstream political leaders expressed outrage, but not Teodoro Buontempo, 48, a self-proclaimed fascist elected to Parliament in March on the ticket of the National Alliance, the successor to the party founded by followers of Benito Mussolini. In an interview with the Turin daily La Stampa, Buontempo said, "I would send them into the midst of society" to proclaim their values. And they have. Speaking on the Italian television network RAI-1, Maurizio Boccacci, leader of the Vicenza marchers, said, "We follow a policy that we hope will regain lost values in our community. Fascism is the family, respect for older people and for the fatherland."

In this year of Normandy's remembrance, the extreme right -- always lurking in the wings of European politics -- is inching toward the spotlight. Parties of the far right collected upwards of 10% of the vote in some elections in France, Italy and Germany. Five members of the far right National Alliance hold seats in the new Italian government. Skinheads decked with swastikas continue to terrorize foreigners in Germany, Italy, Britain and Spain. While the number of neo-Nazis and neofascists in Western Europe remains minuscule, ugly pictures of straight-arm salutes, street hooligans and racial hatred are haunting reminders that the old ideologies are not dead.

The example of Italy is the one that troubles Europeans most. In the midst of a soul-destroying political crisis, Italian voters reached not just to the right but to the spiritual descendants of Mussolini to rescue their nation. These new politicians reject any direct fascist connection. Today's National Alliance says it is not interested in the authoritarian leadership and bombastic nationalism of the old Fascists but in tougher jail sentences, job creation and limits on immigration.

The most polished of the new breed is Gianfranco Fini, 42, who deftly transformed the once frankly neofascist Italian Social Movement, founded in 1946, and unabashed guardian of Mussolini's legacy into the right-wing National Alliance. The party, which won 13.5% of the vote in parliamentary elections in March, shares power in the right-of-center coalition government of millionaire-businessman Silvio Berlusconi. A politician of intentionally moderate language, Fini has labored to rid his party of its World War II ties -- but not always with success. Last April La Stampa roused a furor when it quoted him as calling Mussolini the "greatest statesman of the century." He complained that the interviewer put words in his mouth but still considers joining forces with Hitler to have been Mussolini's main mistake. That, he says, "ruined fascism."

Fini says the word fascism is misapplied to his party. "If we were in the U.S., we'd be called Republicans," he declares. "In France we'd be Gaullists." He believes the Italians who support him are voting issues -- jobs, health care, crime -- not ideology. "There isn't one Italian in a hundred who would ask me about fascism, racial laws and Nazis," he says. The neofascist label, he insists, was unfairly tagged to his party by the press and his political opponents.

Fini joined politicians in condemning skinhead violence. He said the - marchers in Vicenza should be "put in coal mines so they can break rocks with their heads." When told that his National Alliance colleague Buontempo thought highly of the demonstrators, Fini simply said, "Buontempo is mistaken."

If such controversies were happening only in Rome, they might be dismissed as stray spikes on an otherwise healthy European heartline. But other nations are experiencing their own unhealthy twitches. France has its National Front, led by the anti-immigration populist Jean-Marie Le Pen. He has led the party to a solid 10% vote in a series of elections dating back to 1988, despite a penchant for crude crematorium quips, a reportedly secret admiration for Hitler and a not-so-secret racism. The extreme-right neofascist British National Party, which advocates anti-immigration policies, last year startled the political establishment by winning a seat in the local government of a poor London district. In May's municipal elections, they lost it again but, encouraged, the B.N.P. together with a handful of other small rightist movements fielded 68 candidates, winning up to 7% of the vote -- but no seats -- in some districts.

Britain's soccer terraces are fertile soil for the neofascist recruiters. In Spain, ultrarightist youths have combined a fondness for Nazi paraphernalia and street violence with a rabid attachment to their home teams, venting their anger on football-field rivals. In Madrid, local matchups resemble a military exercise, as armed police patrol the grounds to separate hooligan bands. Recently, three members of one Barcelona fan club, who frequently boasted of neofascist opinions, were sentenced to 15-year prison terms for killing a young supporter of a rival club.

Nowhere are neo-Nazi outbursts more unsettling than in Germany. In one week in May, German authorities recorded the beating of a Zairian asylum seeker in Halle, the torching of a Turkish kindergarten near Bonn, the vandalizing of a Jewish cemetery near Wurzburg, five arson fires at a refugee shelter in Hauzenberg and the arrests of 26 neo-Nazis for chanting "Sieg Heil!" during a party in a Berlin suburb. Such occurrences have become so commonplace they rarely make the front pages and are simply considered a routine part of the German political landscape.

As elsewhere in Europe, the skinheads in Germany have an impact on fringe politics. While far-right parties, such as the Republikaners, eschew violence and discourage stiff-arm salutes, they profit politically from the < undercurrent of anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment stirred up by the neo-Nazis. The Republikaners have scored as high as 15% in local elections, and charismatic party leader Franz Schonhuber, who served in Hitler's SS, is a member of the European Parliament.

In fact, representatives of neofascist or far-right parties currently holding as many as 20 seats have scored their most surprising successes in elections for the European Parliament -- even though they abhor the concept of a European Union.

But viewing current events through the prism of the Nazi and fascist past can be distorting. With the exception of Italy, neofascists wield no real power in any national parliament, and the Italian case is too much of a political quirk to be considered a harbinger of Europe's future. "The situation today is not at all the same as it was in 1933," says Karsten Voigt, a spokesman for Germany's opposition Social Democrats. "The problem in 1933 was not that there were too many Nazis but that there were too few democrats. Today we have enough democrats." So do France, Britain, Spain and Italy. That, ultimately, is the gift the soldiers brought to Europe on D-day.

With reporting by Michael Brunton/London, Bruce Crumley/Paris, John Moody/Rome and Nomi Morris/Berlin