Austria, Italy – a breathing space for the left

Left Unity reports on the election  in Austria and Italy’s referendum.

Sunday’s Austrian presidential election represented a significant defeat for the onward march of the far right in Europe. Although the Austrian presidency is mainly ceremonial, a victory for Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer over former Green leader Alexander van der Bellen would have put more wind in the sails of the far right Europe-wide. Coming after the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the US, the election of the first far right president in Europe since 1945 would have meant that the far right appeared unstoppable in Europe. Now this is not the case.

In fact Hofer lost by a larger margin, 47% against 53%, than he did in the first contested round in May 2016. What’s remarkable about this is that the issue of immigration was put front and centre by Hofer, but he still lost by 6%. The contradiction in Austria is that while their anti-immigration stance gets the Freedom Party massive support, in Austria the European Union is hugely popular and fears of a Brexit-type referendum if Hofer won may have lost him support.

While Hofer’s defeat is good news, it has to be put in context. Austria came close to having as its head of state a leading figure from a fascist party that has its roots in Nazism.

Next year there are parliamentary elections in Austria in which the Freedom Party will try to come back hard. Relief may be short lived. Hofer’s defeat does not remove the threat that Marine Le Pen, leader of the far right Front National in France, could win the presidency in 2017. Neither is it likely to stop substantial gains for hard right parties like Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany: in both countries there are elections next year.

In 2013 the Alternative for Germany won only 4.7% of the vote, and thus failed to cross the 5% threshold for Bundestag membership. In 2017 it is certain that they will cross that threshold and that far right deputies will be elected,  the first time in Germany since1945. In Holland the Freedom Party currently has just 12 deputies out of 150 and is therefore unlikely to get into government, although it is likely to significantly improve its result, in 2017.

The outcome of the Italian referendum called by premier Matteo Renzi is much more ambiguous than the outcome in Austria. Renzi as leader of the Democratic Party (PD), originally coming out of the Italian Communist Party but now a totally neoliberalised outfit which takes its name from the US Democrats, has forced through a series of anti-working class reforms, notably changes to labour laws and employment rights. The December 4 proposed a series of constitutional changes that strengthened the power of central government and weakened the Senate and regional and local government.

The left in Italy – for example the Party of Communist Refoundation, the CGIL trade union federation and the left’s premier newspaper Il Manifesto – all opposed the proposed changes as undemocratic and strengthening the executive arm of government. But also opposed to the changes were the xenophobic regionalists of the Northern League, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (a declining force) and the alleged ‘anti-corruption’ Five Star movement led by comedian/demagogue Beppe Grillo.

In the event the defeat of Renzi’s referendum was huge – 59% against 41% – and a significant blow for democracy. The problem is that the forces likely to gain from this are not those of the left, which has become much weaker over the last decade, but the Northern League and above all the Five Star movement.

As Italian academic Nicola Melloni pointed out:

“Occupy exposed the class nature of contemporary capitalism, and Podemos (in Spain) proposes a democratization of society that would attack the vested interests of the capitalist class. The Five Star Movement, on the contrary, reduces Italy’s historical and prolonged crisis to a matter of corruption and lack of civic virtue, ignoring the economic and class dynamic of Italian capitalism. Far from progressive, its political agenda is an incongruous mix of common-sense, populist appeals and right-wing and left-wing slogans. While campaigning for an overturn of the whole establishment, it fails to address the circumstances that allowed for the development of such a corrupted political system to begin with.”

The fact that Renzi’s support collapsed so rapidly in such a short space of time means that all bets are off in the coming French presidential election. The second round is widely expected to be contested between Marine Le Pen and Francois Fillon from the right-wing Republicans party.  Fillon is promoting the same anti-immigrant line as Le Pen but he represents the political establishment threatening mass unemployment and cuts to wages and benefits with a super-charged Thatcherite programme. Despite current opinion polls Le Pen with the same xenophobic programme but with a promise of state intervention and protectionism could win.

The outcomes in Austria and Italy on December 4 represent an important breathing space for the left. There is much work to be done to re-build a credible anti-capitalist left and a powerful anti-racist movement across the continent that can begin to turn back the wave of reaction.



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