A softer kinder pan European fascism (European Alliance for Freedom)

[Magda Hassan]

There is movement amongst the European far right to join forces to present as the alternative. They are 'officially' leaving behind parties such as Greece's Golden Dawn and Hungary's Jobbik but they are all anti-immigrant and nationalist. There was the recent resignation of founder Lennon from the EDL on the dubious grounds that 'extremists' had taken over. Once again this is also a maneuver to co-opt more women (like the NATO humanitarian bombing campaigns) who have not been traditionally associated with the far right in any numbers because of the lumpen male and military structure of much of the far right. Marine Le pen is the current face of this movement but she is far from alone. No tacky gas chambers this time. The clean up will come via welfare cuts.

France's FN to team up with other far Right parties for European elections

Marine Le Pen announces plan to create pan-European far-Right front, teaming up with Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and Austrian anti-immigration partiesPhoto: AP Photo/Jacques Brinon




By Bruno Waterfield, Brussels

7:59PM BST 23 Oct 2013



Populist and anti-immigrant far-right parties will fight together on a common manifesto in next year's European Union elections but will not form an alliance with neo-fascist parties, Marine Le Pen has said.

The French Front National (FN) leader is planning to team up with Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and Austrian anti-immigration parties but has asked her father Jean-Marie Le Pen to break with groups such as the British National Party (BNP).

During a Strasbourg press conference to launch her softer focus "European Alliance for Freedom", Miss Le Pen, who is already an MEP, poured scorn on Nigel Farage for being immature, scared of joining forces with her and worried that she would overshadow him and Ukip as Europe's most important populist leader.

"We do have contact with them. Ukip is a young movement without the maturity of established nationalist parties. Ukip is already so much a victim of demonisation that it is afraid to undergo the demonisation other parties have faced. It is afraid of its image," she said.

"I would like them to join the alliance but if they don't want to that is too bad. I think Nigel Farage is worried because I would be the leader."

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Miss Le Pen's Front National is already allied to the Austrian Freedom Party, Belgium's Vlaams Belang and Sweden Democrats for next May's elections to the European Parliament and on November 13 she is holding talks in Holland with Geert Wilders, the popular Dutch anti-Muslim leader.
She predicted that following next year's pan-European vote that the far-right parties would be able to form a political group in the EU assembly allowing them to cash in millions of euros of public funding.
"I am very optimistic that we will have the capacity to form a group, that is to say, with at least seven nationalities and twenty-five MEPs," she said.
Last night, Mr Farage told The Telegraph that he "couldn't care less" about Miss Le Pen's comments.
"There are significant political differences between Front National and Ukip," he said.
After successfully breaking her party from its associations with fascist and extremist groups, Miss Le Pen said she had requested the FN's founders, her father, Jean Marie and Bruno Gollnisch, another MEP to break their links with a grouping that includes Hungary's Jobbik and the BNP.
"I asked Gollnisch and Jean-Marie Le Pen to quit the Alliance of European National Movements so the Front National's path is perfectly clear. This is being done," she said.
"We will not have Jobbik in our group, we not have Golden Dawn."
Hungary's Jobbik, the "Movement for a Better Hungary" which has links to a banned paramilitary militia and is the country's third largest party, has been firm ally of the FN since 2009 and the break with it shows Miss Le Pen's determination to clean up her party's image.
Earlier this month, a survey by pollsters Ifop for French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, put Le Pen's National Front party on 24 per cent, higher than the centre-right UMP and the governing socialist party.
The European Alliance for Freedom was set up in 2010, involving a senior Ukip MEP who has since left. It received over £639,000 (€750,000) in funding from the European Parliament in 2011 and 2012.
Previous far-right European political groups have collapsed amid acrimony and squabbling between nationalists who sometimes share little in common.

The last attempt, the Independence, Tradition and Sovereignty group fell apart in 2007 after MEPs representing the Greater Romania party walked out because Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the Italian dictator, had made comments about Romanian immigrants.