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May 6, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EDT

Europe’s Tea Party political parties on the rise
Commentary: True Finns electoral gains signal hard-right gains in Europe

By Jason O'Mahony
DUBLIN (MarketWatch) — It’s very easy for Europeans and Americans to have stereotypical views of each other.

Americans look over the pond and shake their heads at those crazy Europeans and their leftwing liberal ideas. Europeans look back at the Americans, aghast at their lack of universal healthcare (or sheer bloody terror of the concept when it finally arrives) and obsession with Muslims and terrorism.

Then along comes a man like Timo Soini from Finland, a country famous for mobile phones, killing Russian soldiers in creative ways (when they invade Finland. Not for kicks), the odd Formula One racing driver and having a fair claim at being the home of the greatest fictional giveaway socialist of all time, Santa Claus.

Suddenly, the stereotype is on its ear.

Last month, the people of Finland delivered an electoral trumpet blowing that was heard all over Europe. They gave Soini’s party, the True Finns, a huge injection of extra support, boosting the party from its previous fringe status of 4% to a handsome third place 19%. Under Finland’s proportional voting system the party received a generous bounty of seats in parliament. Soini himself won the largest number of personal votes in the entire country.

Soini’s party manifesto commits the True Finns to seeking cuts in both foreign aid and welfare payments to immigrants, and rejects any non-Finnish interference in the treatment of immigrants, a stance which will put the party in direct conflict with other EU states. He also provocatively questions support for the compulsory teaching of Swedish in Finland’s schools, which was instituted in recognition of the Swedish-speaking minority who make up 6% of the population.

Does it matter how the people of this tidy, well-run republic, which constantly appears in the top five nations in the world for standard of living, vote in their elections? Normally, the answer would be no. But Finland is a member of the euro zone, and in Europe, to paraphrase Lenin, everything is connected to everything else.

Weak tea
Although the policy platform above would seem mild by American Tea Party standards (indeed, a Democrat running in a rural district in the South would probably be slated as a liberal for running on such a platform) they are, by the standards of European politics, almost explosive. Soini’s agenda is to Finland, and indeed to the rest of the European Union, not that dissimilar to the rabble rousing populism of, say, a certain former Alaska governor. The only difference is that the EU main street is much closer to Castro Street, San Francisco than Main Street, Wasilla.

The True Finns also won support for wanting to defend Finland’s much lauded social welfare system from spending Finnish taxes on bailouts of profligate countries like Ireland, Greece, or more recently, Portugal. It’s a message which resonates in other EU countries, especially Germany, the EU’s perennial-but-getting-irritated paymaster.

Across Europe, a populist nationalist message tailored to the fears of individual electorates but marked with common themes is winning converts.

In France, centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy struggles in third place in polls behind the hard-line anti-immigrant nationalism of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen. In The Netherlands, Geert Wilders has already led his populist Party of Freedom to a striking result in last June’s national elections, winning 16% and third place on a similar platform to the True Finns and Le Pen.

In Austria, always a place watched with nervousness by Europeans given its last contribution to world-class homicidal maniacs, the hard-right anti-immigration Freedom Party won 26% of the vote in local elections in Vienna last year.

Interestingly, hard-right parties in Europe have recently started to espouse pro-Israel positions to allow them to subtly distance themselves from the anti-Semites of the past while sending a dog-whistle message on Islam.

In France, for example, Jean Marie Le Pen, former president of the far-right National Front (and convicted by a German court in 1999 for “minimizing the holocaust” and referring to the gas chambers as “a detail of history”) has been replaced by his daughter Marine, who has been quick to publicly defend Israel’s right to self defence.

The themes that link these disparate parties are not that dissimilar to those espoused by the Tea Party in the United States. A distrust of government, politicians, and imagined “elites” (replace Washington with Brussels, the capital of the European Union) coupled with a fear of outsiders, in particular Muslims and to a lesser extent other EU member states with different values. Then throw in a protectionist response to a global economic crisis that is putting huge pressure on employment and public services.

Divergence
It’s here where the U.S. and EU Tea parties diverge. In Europe, the populist right draws its support not only from the newly frightened middle classes but also from the low paid and unemployed who rely heavily on public spending.

Unlike the U.S. Tea Party, the angry anti-political establishment cry is not for less government but more, or at least the maintenance of existing government. Socialism is not feared anywhere near as much as the dangers of the untrammeled “neo-liberalism” of free markets and privatization. The baddy of the piece from Europe’s point of view is the International Monetary Fund or World Bank or the EU imposing Friedmanite solutions onto the European model of social solidarity. That is, high taxes on business and the middle and high earners to fund, well, everything.

Will Germany see a True Finns-style revolt? It’s unlikely, as Germany’s political system (for obvious historical reasons) does not look favorably upon xenophobic rabble-rousers. This hesitance can be seen in other European countries scarred by 20th century history. Even in Finland, for every True Finns voter, there were four voters who walked into polling stations and cast their ballots for other, less extreme parties.

Nevertheless, German politicians, like elected officials anywhere else, need to be elected, and need to recognize what the public are feeling, and respond accordingly. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party recently suffered a stunning defeat against the Green Party in regional elections. While that was probably more to do with nuclear policy in light of recent events in Japan, it still demonstrates an inherent weakness in the political strength of the Chancellor. With popular tabloid newspapers stirring up resentment of foreign bailouts, could Merkel be tempted boost her poll numbers by getting tough, or at least being seen to, with the rest of Europe?

In the Netherlands, Denmark, and Italy, hard-right parties are either in government or part of the parliamentary majorities that sustain those governments. And that means that their ideas are seeping ever closer to mainstream thinking.

One only has to look at President Sarkozy’s recent decision to temporarily close the Franco-Italian border to prevent North African refugees from crossing the border from Italy. Open borders and freedom of travel is one of the defining principles of the European Union, and it’s hard to imagine that Sarkozy did not take the action with at least one eye on the centre-right voters being tempted by the tough borders message of Marine Le Pen.

After all, he wouldn’t be the first conservative politician to recognize the voter potential of stopping poorer, darker-skinned people from the south trying to get across the border to the more prosperous north, would he?