{"id":1178500,"date":"2026-08-31T05:52:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T05:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1178500\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T05:52:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T05:52:17","slug":"de-demonisation-of-europes-far-right-clears-ground-for-resurgence-of-fascist-ideas-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1178500\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018De-demonisation\u2019 of Europe\u2019s far right clears ground for resurgence of fascist ideas \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The likely election of Ulrich Siegmund of far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD<\/a>) next weekend in the Saxony-Anhalt l\u00e4nder or state has much of democratic Germany<\/a> deeply fearful. Currently polling at around 43 per cent, like the AfD in neighbouring former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony, his victory will be the first time a far-right premier rules one of the country\u2019s l\u00e4nder since the Federal Republic\u2019s 1949 founding. But not, many fear, the last.<\/p>\n

The party\u2019s rise, German chancellor Friederich Merz warned recently, marks \u201cfive minutes to midnight\u201d, a reawakening of fascism, \u201cthe last warning to the parties of the democratic centre\u201d of the need, he argues, to build consensus on key issues such as immigration, economic reform and European defence. <\/p>\n

The AfD success and that of France<\/a>\u2019s National Rally or Rassemblement National (RN) among others, makes the publication of two studies into political continuity on the far right and the lasting legacy of its historic leaders in France and Italy particularly timely. Enda O\u2019Doherty\u2019s historical account of the French far right since the trial of Dreyfus (The dark side of France), and Stephen Gundle\u2019s cultural and psychological examination of Italy\u2019s whitewashing of Benito Mussolini\u2019s legacy (Mussolini\u2019s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Dictator), complement each other well, particularly in their different insights into the unconvincing parallel processes of what RN leader Marine Le Pen<\/a> calls the \u201cd\u00e9diabolisation\u201d \u2013 de-demonisation \u2013 of their respective parties.<\/p>\n

That whitewashing process, clearing fertile ground for the re-emergence of fascist ideas, has been under way for some time in France, and strikingly included her expulsion of her father, RN\u2019s founder and former presidential candidate Jean Marie Le Pen, for Holocaust denial. And in Italy with prime minister Giorgia Meloni\u2019s more recent distancing of herself from Mussolini\u2019s brutal rule and from her past in the neo-fascist MSI party. Though not its repudiation. Both have moderated their anti-EU rhetoric and opposition to assisting Ukraine though not their anti-immigrant campaigning. <\/p>\n

Whether purely tactical for electoral reasons, not least Le Pen\u2019s increasingly plausible presidential ambitions, or genuine, the depth of such rebrandings are a matter of dispute. Neither O\u2019Doherty nor Gundle are convinced by the deliberate forgetfulness about the past, or that leopards have changed their spots. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Ulrich Siegmund: AfD\u2019s scent specialist smells victoryOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The RN\u2019s cynicism in this regard is reflected in a speech by Marine Le Pen\u2019s former partner, Louis Aliott, a vice-president of the party. \u201cWe need to be clear about de-demonisation,\u201d he told activists, \u201cit is solely to do with the suspicion that we are anti-Semitic. Not Islam, not immigration. In respect of these things it is not necessarily bad to be demonised.\u201d A nod and a wink to the old guard.<\/p>\n

De-demonisation of Mussolini started early. As Gundle records, by the end of the cold war, rose-tinted memories of fascism had been fuelled by histories, popular culture and exhibitions that \u201cgave a cheerful, even nostalgic view of the Mussolini era, one that left Italians feeling they had nothing to be ashamed about.\u201d It was really the Germans, the public was assured. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was able to assert, largely unchallenged, that the murderous Mussolini, butcher of Ethiopia, \u201cnever killed anyone\u201d, while others cheerily recalled that the dictator got the trains to run on time.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Giorgia Meloni masquerades as the \u2018acceptable\u2019 face of the far right, but nobody should be fooledOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The re-emergence, Gundle argues, of leaders like Meloni with their roots in fascism \u201cindicates those experiences have been normalised within commonly held ideas of national history and that the fascist regime is no longer seen as wholly or predominantly negative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Germans in the postwar period preferred silence or simple denial, he argues, \u201cturning the past into a dim and ghost-like memory \u2026 the bond with Hitler remained unaddressed and unresolved as a concealed undercurrent in national life\u201d. Largely, that is, until the tiny numbers of Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists began to find a comfortable home in an amenable AfD whose members bridle at what they claim is the stultifying collective guilt required of all Germans. The party\u2019s de-demonisation efforts have been at most token \u2013 many party members are avowedly Nazi-sympathetic.<\/p>\n

France now faces into a presidential election next year in which either Marine Le Pen, or if she has not cleared up her legal problems, her young, charismatic deputy Jordan Bardella, have a real chance of surfing the populist tide sweeping Europe and taking the presidency for the first time for the far right.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0A banned song in Germany has become a rallying cry against a far-right surgeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Le Pen insists that hers is not the party of her anti-Semitic father, of unreconstructed racists who promote \u201cremigration\u201d, or of apologists for the collaborationists who propped up Petain and Laval to enable Nazi occupation, of the generals who tortured Algeria and sought to overthrow De Gaulle. Her party, she says, is democratic and \u201cneither left, nor right, but French\u201d, borrowing a meaningless but apparently appealing slogan from its fascist past. But in mass rallies she shows her true colours, shouting to the crowd \u201cStand up if you want France to remain French.\u201d<\/p>\n

The danger is that voters, fed up with austerity and drift, bewildered by divisions on the left and centre of politics and by gridlock in parliament, may well believe her lies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The likely election of Ulrich Siegmund of far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD) next weekend in the Saxony-Anhalt l\u00e4nder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1178501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[90813,2000,299,5187,36,1945,1824,2440,2199,44],"class_list":["post-1178500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-afd-alternative-for-germany","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-france","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-germany","tag-giorgia-meloni","tag-italy","tag-marine-le-pen"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117188568688051362","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1178500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1178501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1178500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1178500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1178500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}