Flemish Bloc Seeks Repeat of Far-Right Feat in Austria

ANTWERP, Belgium —  Flaming torches in their hands and outrage in their hearts, the protesters from the far-right Vlaams Blok were on the move. Their government had plans to open a center for foreign asylum-seekers in their city--and weren’t there far too many foreigners already?

“Enough is enough! Antwerp is not a garbage can!” the march leader, Filip Dewinter, blared through a megaphone as 120 riot police backed by Belgian shepherd dogs blocked demonstrators from going any farther.

In this inland port and world diamond center, a center of Renaissance trade and art but now depressed with 12% unemployment, events at the other end of Europe--in Austria--have been warmly welcomed by extremists on the right as a harbinger of great things to come. In Italy, dictator Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter interprets the inclusion of a far-right party in Austria’s new coalition government as a sign that Europeans, troubled by immigration and crime, are yearning for tougher policies.

“People have had enough,” Alessandra Mussolini, a member of Italy’s Parliament from the National Alliance, said in an interview. “In my opinion, there is a desire for a real right. That’s what people want: security. They’re not interested in political tactics; ideologies don’t exist anymore within the parties, especially in Italy.”

Has a new day dawned for Europe’s extreme, or “national,” right--for parties that, from Denmark to Italy, excoriate immigration, link the presence of foreigners to crime and a rising feeling of insecurity, and may have historic ties to Nazism, fascism or local strains of intolerance, separatism or xenophobia?

Austria’s 14 partners in the European Union evidently think so; they have thrown a cordon sanitaire around the new government in Vienna and refuse to have normal contacts with it.

But in Antwerp, where the Vlaams Blok, or Flemish Bloc, has been kept out of power for the last six years by an unnatural, bickering coalition of the traditional left and right, new municipal elections are scheduled Oct. 8. And the Flemish separatists--who received almost 30% of the vote in 1994 and whose ultimate goal is the breakup of Belgium and independence for the Flanders region--think that their hour is at hand.

“What happened in Austria could happen here,” predicted Dewinter, 37, the son of a railroad stationmaster who is the polite but unbending tribune of Flemish separatism. He hopes to duplicate the feat of Joerg Haider, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, and form a governing coalition with mainstream conservatives.

“I admire Haider,” said Dewinter, sipping a beer with a reporter after the nighttime march, “because he has managed to come to power.”

France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, probably the best-known of Europe’s extreme right-wing politicians until Haider’s arrival on the scene, has lauded the success of the Austrian, despite their mutual antipathy, as a continentwide “premiere.”

The Freedom Party’s presence in power in Austria, Le Pen predicted recently, “will serve the cause of the national rights in Europe, in each of their countries, to defend the citizens against immigration, against insecurity, unemployment, corruption, etc.”

Fallout Seen From Rise of Far Right in Austria

More neutral analysts agree that the fallout from recent events in Austria could be considerable because of the multiple challenges Europe now faces. Though the continent’s economy is expanding again after years in the doldrums, most EU members still suffer from double-digit unemployment--prime recruiting terrain for political extremism.

There are also large, visible communities of Moroccans, Turks and other immigrants--they make up 14% of Antwerp’s population of 450,000--whose non-Western lifestyles unsettle and irritate some Europeans. Fresh waves of newcomers, including some criminal bands from Eastern Europe, arrived after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the wars in the Balkans.

There could be yet another influx if the EU admits the dozen countries, from Malta to Estonia, that are now formally negotiating entry.

In Spain, where the far right has been an insignificant political force, anti-immigrant protesters rioted in the town of El Ejido last week after the fatal stabbing of a 26-year-old Spanish woman in a market, allegedly by a mentally disturbed Moroccan immigrant. Mobs of residents chased Moroccans and other African immigrants through the streets of the southern town, damaging the immigrants’ cars, shops and other property.

Riot police arrested 46 Spaniards. Many of the town’s 10,000 Moroccan immigrants, who harvest greenhouse vegetables during the winter, have refused to work until they are compensated for the damage and assured of their safety.

In Italy, the elevation of Haider’s party was welcomed by the Northern League, the most anti-immigrant party in Parliament, with some of its elected officials inviting him to visit their region. The National Alliance, a party with its roots in Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement, had jettisoned its extremist ideas to try to capture the political center and took part in a short-lived government in 1994. Now some party members, including Alessandra Mussolini, want a harder line.

“A couple of days ago, we had Albanian immigrants who were racing their cars and killed three poor young girls; among them was an illegal immigrant who had already been expelled,” Mussolini said. “We have serial killers who go free.”

Martin Rhodes, professor of political science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, believes that Haider’s achievement in getting his Freedom Party into power could “legitimize those who believe the response is to throw all immigrants out and to make policy toward immigrant groups much tougher.”

“Austria is a special case at the moment,” Rhodes said. “But there are longer-term repercussions because there are other places in Europe where the discontent that can lead to racism and far-right parties is not far below the surface.”

Among such places, Rhodes says, are districts of the former East Germany where unemployment now hovers at 30%.

In June’s elections to the European Parliament, the most recent Europewide litmus test of political strength, far-right parties generally achieved only modest success. But cross-border generalizing obscures important local differences.

France’s National Front, which once received more than 15% of the vote in nationwide elections, has been badly weakened, and voter support for the far right eroded by a third since one of Le Pen’s lieutenants rebelled to found his own party last year.

In non-EU Switzerland, the People’s Party of multimillionaire Christoph Blocher received 23% of the ballots in October’s legislative elections and now holds 44 of the 200 seats in the lower house of parliament. But other parties refused to revamp a long-standing formula in order to let Blocher participate in government.

For Shimon T. Samuels, Paris-based international liaison director of Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center, studying election returns may be missing the point. Samuels is especially concerned about Haider’s appeal in former Eastern Bloc countries, where there are often indigenous ethnic minorities and where Austria, the onetime imperial power, is still looked upon as a “beacon.”

In EU member states, where left-of-center parties generally hold the reins of government, traditional right-wing parties may also be tempted to embrace some of Haider’s line to entice more voters.

“There is a danger of verbal slippage on the part of those responsible, in an attempt to steal the thunder,” Samuels said. “What Haider is saying is going to be in the media, going to enter into mainstream political discourse.”

Europe’s far right has drawn much of its support over the years from disgruntlement over “politics as usual” and from many voters’ belief that the parties in power have a tacit deal that often ignores the day-to-day concerns of the people.

In Austria, the Social Democrats and the center right developed a power- and patronage-sharing duopoly that stifled real political choice for three decades. In Antwerp, Socialists and Christian Democrats enjoyed a chummy, corruption-marred lock on City Hall for half a century after World War II.

“He [Haider] is a symbol, and many of the causes of his popularity are present in most of the states of the union,” commentator Quentin Peel wrote last week in London’s Financial Times. “Austria is not alone in demonstrating resentment of a tired and corrupt political establishment, a fear of excessive immigration and growing uncertainty about what enlargement of the EU will mean for the cozy lifestyle of the present member states.”

In the Antwerp neighborhood of Ekeren, Leo Moeskops, 49, speaks like a puzzled man who could ultimately end up in the Vlaams Blok. It’s his tidy, mostly middle-class neighborhood that the government has chosen as a site for the new refugee center. When Dewinter and about 100 Vlaams Blok members marched into Ekeren one night last week to protest the decision, Moeskops wasn’t with them--but he understands their viewpoint.

“There’s a storm now in Europe, a hurricane coming at 120 miles an hour,” said Moeskops, a member of Belgium’s Liberal Party who served as local mayor for 15 years. “We had our beer, our good cooking. And now someone is taking it away. That’s what people think.”

Far Right May Next Triumph in Belgium

The European far right’s next triumph may well come in Antwerp. With but a few hundred more votes than it received in the 1994 election, the Vlaams Blok would capture a third of the seats on the City Council. It would then have the power to call the council into session whenever it liked and to exercise effective control over the agenda.

“Mr. Dewinter thinks like a lot of Antwerp people,” said Guy Fransen, editor of the local newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. “He says, ‘I’m not a racist, but . . .’ And then comes the real story.”

Vlaams Blok publications charge that “ethnic cleansing” is going on in Antwerp, as African and East European immigrants cause more and more members of the native Flemish population to move out. Though foreign-born residents built a good deal of modern Antwerp and work in its businesses and hospitals, the word “immigrant” in party literature invariably is linked to rising crime or other social ills.

For the moment, other Belgian parties say they remain firm in their resolve not to have anything to do with the Vlaams Blok. But journalists say unofficial contacts take place all the time in the cloakrooms at City Hall.

“Look what happened in Austria,” Dewinter said. “Just two or three days before the election, [conservative People’s Party leader Wolfgang] Schuessel said he would never make an alliance with the Freedom Party.”

Schuessel is now Austria’s chancellor and his party a coalition partner with Haider’s.

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Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux and Maria De Cristofaro of The Times’ Rome Bureau contributed to this report.