I’m upper class, so what? I live in the Arab/Turkish quarters in Munich with a heavy mixture of German and Islamic Mediterranean population. I used to live near Pigalle in Paris - again the Arab quarters.
I have produced films and television programs about gang violence all over the world, about urban ethnic strife, about you guys and on a variety of similar topics that has required me to spend much time and make many acquaintances well beyond my own social and ethnical background.
Get back to me when you have slept on the mud floor of an African hut, or spent a few nights out on town with well adjusted black youth in Paris witnessing that no matter how non-violent and non-criminal they are they get harassed by the police, you guys and society in general just for being of a different skin color.
Open your mouth again when you have spent three peaceful years in a multicultural neighborhood where the only racial incident was right after September 11th when the Arab and Turkish population didn’t dare go out for fear that everybody else had started hating them for something they neither did nor supported.
What on earth are you talking about? Your grasp of European politics is not poor - it is laughable. Pro primo the immigration trend in Europe is declining, which is unfortunate since we desperately need new arrivals in order to balance our growing non-productive pensioner population beyond our zero population growth. We also need to replace a few spineless louts who live like leeches off the welfare system and spend more time running around waving red black and white flags and screaming about imaginary threats to ‘their culture’ than doing something productive for themselves and society.
As for support for the populist extreme right-wing parties in the EU… support was growing, but is not anymore. The French presidential elections gave Le Pen and FN 17% in France. Austria had Haider and his cohorts, Denmark have a minority of loons as well, Holland have the whack-jobs of the departed Pim. There are two or three dumbasses running around in several of the parliaments elsewhere, but generally speaking the rest of the EU hasn’t followed. Support is local and pretty much concentrated to areas of high unemployment and social unrest (as usual). For instance; Saxony Anhalt in Germany had local elections that gave a Nationalist party some minor success, it made alot of headlines but has no real effect on politics (Saxony Anhalt is one of the German states). None of the extremist right-wing parties can even make the percentage barrier to get one single representative into the German Bundestag (the Parliament). In the elections a few weeks ago they also more or less threw out the dwindilng communist party - less and less loons.
There is a group in the European Parliament that collects the rare few far right-wing kooks that manage to get themselves elected to the EU. They are an anti-EU, pro-Nationalism and anti-Immigration bunch. Masters of irony as they must be they call themselves the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities. They number 16 (2.6%) seats out 625. Nobody takes them very seriously. There is also the slightly more moderate, but still anti-immigration and pro-Nationalism, Union for a Europe of Nations holding 22 seats (3.5%). While the EDD manage to hold their seats in the election of 99 the UEN went from 30 seats to 22 loosing almost a third.
In Austria Haider’s Nationalist party has completely disintegrated and their exit from government is imminent.
After Le Pen unexpectedly beet the Socialist candidate in the preliminaries for the Presidential in France the whole population came out in force for the finals and Chirac - the conservative candidate - beet him with a vengeance.
In Denmark the populists of the Danish People’s Party got 11.3% of the votes in the last elections, a significant increase. Denmark represents about 1.1% of the EU population.
Almost ten years ago Sweden was plagued by infestation from a right extremist populist party that managed to hog some 10% of the vote in the parliamentary elections. They survived one term before imploding due to the deluded agenda they supported.
That leaves you with Holland where the late Pim Fortuyn’s party took 26 (17.3%) out of the 150 seats in the recent elections.
You could also bring up Italy and Forza Italia led by Berlusconi, but he isn’t really extreme right-wing, he’s just pro-Berlusconi, against all laws that would possibly effect his capacity to do tax planning and generally whacky. He is for instance not really anti-immigration – although he isn’t exactly pro either.
So we had a momentary upswing for the Nationalists and Racists (only Le Pen can justly be qualified as neo-Nazi of those), but as you can see it doesn’t seem to be going very well for the whack-jobs on the far right.
As usual Sionnach has not a single clue of what she speaketh of!
Sparc