by Tomislav Kardum
“Aspecter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter,” is the first sentence of perhaps the most important political pamphlet in history — the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. That famous sentence would still be relevant today only if we change one word, that is, if we remove the word communism and replace it with the “far right.”
“The far right is growing/surging!” is one of the most common talking points of mainstream media and political elites, regardless of whether it is a fact or not in a given moment. We will often see that term, as a sort of rallying cry, in the titles of numerous articles and on the covers of the most widely circulated newspapers. The very use of the term “far right” as an abomination and defamatory tool in the political arena indicates that it is a negative signifier that serves to discredit certain political options, policies, or persons.
From the point of view of the particular political interest group, it is of course an ancient political strategy whose purpose is to declare the opponent illegitimate and place him outside the framework of what is regarded permissible and normal. In the interwar period, the forces of order (mostly conservatives) used a similar strategy toward the extreme left, i.e. towards the communists, who were outlawed in many countries due to their violent revolutionary activity and agenda of overthrowing the capitalist order with the help (instructions and money) of the Soviet Union. However, circumstances are now reversed. The cordon sanitaire is not used against the extreme left but against the perceived extreme (far) right. For this reason, we will have difficulty naming leftist parties in the Western world that are considered to be a threat to the established order.
This points to the fact that left-wing extremism is discursively completely accepted in the mainstream. “We would be offended if you called us a Nazi, a neo-fascist, a terrorist. But, as a communist, as a socialist, never. It doesn’t offend us. This makes us proud many times. And, many times, we know that we deserve it,” recently said president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was more or less openly supported by the United States in the elections against “far right” candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
Unlike Lula, “disreputable” Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni (pictured above), whose party can trace its origins to the post-fascist movement, clearly distanced herself from fascism. Meloni has said she “had never sympathized with anti-democratic regimes, including fascism” and that she would fight “every kind of racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination.”
This comparison can serve as a prelude to the claim of asymmetry that exists today in regard to the perception of the radical left and the radical right. This asymmetry has a strong political effect in virtually every European country. It probably traces its genesis to the Second World War. As British diplomat Rex Leeper prophetically foresaw after the German invasion of the USSR:
The hopes of many millions of people rest on the success of the Russian armies. Since a fortnight ago [22 June] there has been something of a revolution in men’s minds…. It is not too much to suggest that the relief and consequent enthusiasm felt for a Russian victory will make many people forget the excesses and brutalities of Communism.
The practical outcome is the following: Lula’s rhetoric will certainly be condemned by the entire right, but the moderate left is not even expected to distance itself from Lula. While Meloni raises suspicions because of the post-fascist past, the media has never labeled the largest left-wing Italian Democratic Party as post-communist, even though it was created precisely from the remnants of the Communist Party of Italy, which was an outpost of the Soviet regime for decades. This applies to literally all social democratic parties in Eastern Europe. Namely, they are heirs to the communist parties that until 1990 ruled respected countries with an iron fist. In fact, these parties often have pro-communist statements or look upon the communist era with nostalgia. For example, the new Slovenian left-wing government abolished Victims of Communism Day immediately after coming to power. Furthermore, the current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, also does not have to apologize for his troubled youth and the fact that he “was not only a convinced Marxist but also an ardent follower of the so-called ‘peace movement.’” The radical leftist past of the individual is usually presented as something worthy of sympathy — a reflection of youthful idealism.
The described asymmetry applies not only in relation to the past (the Right condemns both communism and fascism, and the Left only condemns fascism), but also to the practical political arena.
We can take as an example the recent case of Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s largest right-wing party, the Christian Democratic Union, which is the leading party according to the polls. Merz recently suggested that, due to the growth of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany, he cannot rule out a coalition at the local level. A few days later he renounced his words after intense pressure. The Christian Democratic Union program categorically rules out a coalition with both the Alternative for Germany and the Left (Die Linke) party, which is a successor to the infamous East German communist party the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
Other parties do not have a sanitary cordon towards them. Is Die Linke at least verbally renouncing its heritage? “The founding of the German Democratic Republic was the legitimate attempt to prevent the social driving forces of National Socialism,” says Die Linke on its official party websites, “from regaining strength after the Allied victory over Nazi Germany — keywords for this are land reform and the smashing of big business — and to build a socialist state on German soil.” Die Linke is in power as a coalition partner in several German states, and it also has the leader of one state (Thuringia) with the support of Greens and Social Democrats.
In principle, there can be two situations that are not asymmetric:
- mainstream center-right and center-left parties refuse to cooperate with radical options or;
- both accept cooperation with their respective radical relatives.
The first option implies that, in the words of the American historian Eugen Weber, “we might understand certain political phenomena better by identifying them as radical or moderate, theoretical or spontaneous, than by trying to fit them into categories experience is rendering out of date.” The second would imply a closer ideological alignment, which happened, for example, during the last elections in Sweden. In any case, an inconsistent solution always favors one option and represents an uneven playing field.
For example, in Germany, the tabooing of the AfD may have made tactical sense while that party was a negligible force. But in a situation where the CDU/CSU coalition has 26 percent and the AfD 22 percent of the votes, there is practically no space for maneuver.
However, the right in many European countries agrees to such a game to its own detriment. According to many analysts, despite the expected victory, the conservative People’s Party (PP) in Spain lost precisely because the current socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez managed to connect PP with the “extreme right” Vox (he succeeded in making elections a referendum on Vox), even though Sanchez was in a coalition with the radical left Podemos. Despite the constant distancing from Vox the strategy did not pay off for the PP’s leader Albert Feijoo.
The strategy of the center-right is proving to be a losing one in the long term — in France, the populist right is already stronger than the Gaullists, same applies to Italy and Austria, while AfD is on track to become more popular than CDU. It is quite an expectable outcome that if, as advised by the current British Prime Minister, the culture wars should not be “escalated,” with each election cycle the positions of the left in the ideological sphere become stronger. The constellation in which leftist radicals are on the one hand more or less tacitly allowed in the mainstream, and others are not, necessarily pulls the pendulum in that direction.
The existing tabooing of right-wing populists (“extreme right”) only benefits left-of-center options. By agreeing to such rules of the game, the center-right is a necessary loser because it creates an uneven playing field.
