The likely election of Ulrich Siegmund of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) next weekend in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament has much of democratic Germany deeply fearful. Currently polling at around 43 per cent, like the AfD in the neighbouring former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony, his victory would be the first time a far-right premier rules one of the country’s states since the Federal Republic’s founding in 1949. But many fear it will not be the last.

The party’s rise, German chancellor Friederich Merz warned recently, marks “five minutes to midnight”, a reawakening of fascism, and “the last warning to the parties of the democratic centre” of the need to build consensus on key issues such as immigration, economic reform and European defence. Merz’s language echoes the historical alarm that has accompanied previous moments of far-right ascendancy in Germany, but this time the threat is not just on the margins. The AfD is polling strongly across the east and has already become the second-largest party nationally, while its youth wing is openly flirting with Nazi-era rhetoric and revisionist interpretations of history.

The AfD’s success, and that of France’s National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN), 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’Doherty’s historical account of the French far right since the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in the 1890s, The Dark Side of France, and Stephen Gundle’s cultural and psychological examination of Italy’s whitewashing of Benito Mussolini’s legacy, Mussolini’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Dictator, complement each other well. Both offer different but equally unsettling insights into the parallel processes of what RN leader Marine Le Pen calls “dédiabolisation” – de-demonisation – of their respective parties.

A strategy of forgetfulness

In France, de-demonisation has been under way for nearly two decades. Marine Le Pen took over the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011 and has systematically sought to scrub the party’s image of the overt racism, anti-Semitism and violence that marked the old Front National. The most striking gesture came in 2015 when she expelled her father for Holocaust denial, a calculated act that she presented as a rupture with the past. Yet the party’s platform remains steeped in the same nativist and exclusionary ideas that have always defined the French far right, now repackaged in more polished language. The expulsion of the patriarch was a symbolic move, but it did not change the party’s DNA, according to O’Doherty, who traces that lineage back through the Vichy collaborationists, the anti-Dreyfusards and the street movements of the 1930s.

In Italy, the process has taken a different form. Prime minister Giorgia Meloni has distanced herself from Mussolini’s brutal rule and from her past in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), but she has not repudiated that past. Instead, she has sought to rebrand her Brothers of Italy party as a mainstream conservative movement while preserving its roots in the MSI and its successor, the National Alliance. This ambiguity is deliberate, as Gundle demonstrates. Meloni often speaks of national pride, motherhood and Christianity, but she rarely discusses the colonial crimes, the concentration camps and the wartime alliance with Hitler. Her ascent to power, Gundle argues, would have been unthinkable without decades of cultural whitewashing that gradually refashioned Mussolini from a brutal dictator into a benign, even comic, figure.

Whether these rebrandings are purely tactical – Le Pen’s presidential ambitions are increasingly plausible – or genuine, the depth of them is a matter of dispute. Neither O’Doherty nor Gundle is convinced by this deliberate forgetfulness about the past. As O’Doherty points out, the leopard has not changed its spots; it has merely learned to hide them more effectively. Le Pen still speaks about “national preference” and the need to stop immigration, ideas that have their roots in the collaborationist ideology of Vichy France. Meloni still invokes the language of the “primacy of the Italian nation” and has never fully shed the post-fascist iconography that appears at her party’s rallies.

A nod and a wink

The RN’s cynicism in this regard is reflected in a speech by Marine Le Pen’s former partner, Louis Aliot, a vice-president of the party. “We need to be clear about de-demonisation,” he told activists. “It 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.” This was a nod and a wink to the old guard, a signal that the rebranding was never meant to be a real conversion but a strategic veneer. Aliot’s remarks, which were widely reported at the time, reveal the extent to which the party’s leadership is willing to compartmentalise its rhetoric: one language for the public, another for the faithful.

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 gave a cheerful, even nostalgic view of the Mussolini era, one that left Italians feeling they had nothing to be ashamed about. The narrative was that fascism was not all bad: the trains ran on time, the economy was stable, and the dictator was more comic than tragic. This was reinforced by television dramas, films and even school textbooks that treated Mussolini as a tragic figure rather than a criminal. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was able to assert, largely unchallenged, that Mussolini, the butcher of Ethiopia and Libya, “never killed anyone”, while others cheerily recalled the supposed efficiency of the regime. This cultural amnesia, Gundle argues, created the fertile ground in which contemporary far-right leaders could rise to power without being tarred with the brush of fascism.

The re-emergence of leaders like Meloni, with their roots in fascism, Gundle argues, indicates that 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. The process is reinforced by the political mainstream’s willingness to accept these leaders as legitimate partners, to treat them as ordinary conservatives rather than as the heirs of a murderous ideology. This normalisation does not happen overnight; it is the product of decades of incremental cultural shifts, of jokes about Mussolini and revisionist histories that downplay the violence of the regime.

Germany’s own reckoning

Germans in the postwar period preferred silence or simple denial, Gundle argues, turning the past into a dim and ghost-like memory. The bond with Hitler remained unaddressed and unresolved as a concealed undercurrent in national life. 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 AfD’s de-demonisation efforts have been at most token: many party members are avowedly Nazi-sympathetic. The party’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “disgrace” and has repeatedly criticised the country’s culture of remembrance. In Saxony-Anhalt, Siegmund has similarly tried to distance himself from the most extreme elements while still accepting the support of party figures who have been convicted of using Nazi slogans.

Unlike France and Italy, where the far right has attempted to polish its image, the AfD has, in many ways, embraced its notoriety. Its strategy has been to normalise nationalist and anti-migrant rhetoric while attacking the democratic establishment and the media. The party has benefited from widespread discontent with the government, particularly in eastern Germany, where economic stagnation and resentment of the post-unification settlement still run deep. Chancellor Merz’s warning about “five minutes to midnight” reflects a genuine concern that the democratic parties have failed to address the root causes of this discontent and that the AfD is now profiting from that failure.

France at a crossroads

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. Le Pen has increasingly presented herself as a stateswoman, focusing on cost-of-living issues and sovereignty, and has courted voters beyond her traditional base. She has insisted that hers is not the party of her anti-Semitic father, of unreconstructed racists who promote “remigration”, or of apologists for the collaborationists who propped up Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval to enable Nazi occupation, or of the generals who tortured Algeria and sought to overthrow Charles de Gaulle. Her party, she says, is democratic and “neither left, nor right, but French”, borrowing a meaningless but apparently appealing slogan from its fascist past.

Yet in mass rallies she shows her true colours, shouting to the crowd “Stand up if you want France to remain French.” This invocation of a threatened French identity is classic far-right rhetoric, and it is not new. It echoes the language of the 1930s, when the far right warned of national decline and the need for a strong leader. Le Pen’s de-demonisation strategy has succeeded in making her appear more acceptable to the French electorate, but it has not changed the underlying ideology. Her party is still committed to a radical reduction in immigration, an exit from the European Union’s legal framework, and a foreign policy that is hostile to the United States and NATO. If she were to win the presidency, the consequences for France and for Europe would be profound, not just in terms of policy but in the signal it would send that fascism is once again a legitimate force in politics.

The danger, as O’Doherty and Gundle both observe, 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 the lies. The de-demonisation of the far right has proceeded in parallel with the eroding of democratic norms and the rise of a political class that has too often treated the far right as a normal partner. The historical amnesia in France and Italy is not an accident; it has been cultivated by politicians, intellectuals and media figures who have found it convenient to forget the past. And as the memory of fascism fades, the possibility of a new tyranny grows.

Source:The Irish Times News