The increased popularity of far-right parties in a number of European countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s has caused many observers to contemplate a return to real political influence of fascism on the continent. One reason that it is very difficult to define ‘neo-fascism’ is that fascism itself never had much intellectual coherence or ideological core. Furthermore, some of the policies that were originally central, notably racism and anti-Semitism, are now much harder to express legally than in the past, so much of the common identity of current movements with those of the 1930s has to be made oblique. However, there is a neo-fascist current in most European countries, and it does focus on the traditional fascist values of racial purity, national identity, social discipline, militarism and authoritarianism.
The defeats of Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War reduced fascism to a negligible political force across most of Europe, and the death of Franco in 1975 definitively removed it from power. However, by this time a number of small fascist parties had emerged.
The only overtly neo-fascist party which was of real importance in the 1970s and 1980s was the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI—which effectively became the Alleanza Nationale in 1995, and dropped virtually all of its actual fascist doctrine). Some parties in Germany, particularly Die Republikaner (REP) are, in fact, neo-fascist, but local political culture prevents them from saying so openly.
Neo-fascist movements like the British National Front exist in many countries, but in recent decades most have been of only peripheral significance. The electoral success of neo-fascist movements fluctuates, largely with economic conditions, because fascism is a political reaction of the disenchanted lower-middle and working classes, allied through a populist streak. The Front National (FN) in France, for example, experienced a modicum of electoral success in the 1990s, quite overtly playing on the racist attitudes of the unemployed and poor of the French working class against the North African immigrant population, and on the discontent of the business sector after a lengthy period of socialist economic policy. The FN’s previous modest successes were surpassed by its performance in the French presidential election held in April/May 2002, in which its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, received some 17% of the votes cast in the first round, advancing to oppose the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac, in the second ballot (amid opposition to Le Pen from nearly all the defeated first-round candidates, Chirac was re-elected with a comfortable majority). Le Pen focused his campaign on crime and immigration, suggesting a link between the two.
In Germany the strains of integrating the former East German state with the Federal Republic, combined with problems of immigration from Eastern Europe, have encouraged what was previously an insignificant neo-fascist movement. The successes of Le Pen, the Freedom Party of Jörg Haider in Austria and the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, together with strong electoral performances from far-right and anti-immigration groups in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and a number of other European countries, illustrated a trend towards increased sympathy for the far-right. While relatively few of these groups or their leaders could be properly described as neo-fascist—the label is much toowidely and easily used, and none possess the militarist focus of fascism itself—there is no doubt that a complex of attitudes that lay behind the success of parties such as the German National Socialist (Nazi) party and the Italian Fascist Party of Mussolini has been rejuvenated because of analogous social and economic conditions which arose in a period starting some time in the late 1980s and developing in the late 1990s.
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