The last time Nigel Farage stood for parliament was in 2015. He wasn’t elected, and it was his seventh failure to win a seat, as his many enemies love to point out.
What has inspired Farage, the new leader of the Reform party, to have an eighth shot? The state of the domestic opposition, perhaps, and also maybe the rise in the last decade of European politicians who, like him, were once considered freaks, failures and fascists.
A decade ago, even Farage considered Marine Le Pen too extreme to form any form of alliance in the European parliament. It was specifically her party’s history of ‘anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA’ that repelled him.
His remarks infuriated Le Pen, who had replaced her father, Jean-Marie, as leader of the National Front in 2011 and was in the process of trying to detoxify the party. Calling his comments ‘extremely disagreeable’, Le Pen said of the then-Ukip leader: ‘Slandering your neighbour to try to make yourself look whiter than white, it’s not correct. He’s doing it simply for electoral purposes.’
Farage’s stance disappointed Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom party, who told the Daily Telegraph in May 2014: ‘I respect Mr Farage a lot. I think he is a very charismatic and excellent politician I understand he has a lot of support. But I also respect Marine Le Pen a lot. She is a very charismatic leader as well as doing well in the polls with almost the same message when it comes to Europe.’
Farage was correct in describing anti-Semitism as part of the National Front’s DNA. Jean-Marie Le Pen was convicted several times in French courts of the charge, and a year later, in April 2015 he repeated his claim – first made in 1987 – that the Nazi gas chambers were just a ‘detail’ of history. It was too much for his daughter, who expelled him from the party and subsequently changed its name to the National Rally.
Marine Le Pen threw out her father in August 2015, the same month that another female European politician took a significant decision. On the last day of August, German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Europe’s borders with a cry of ‘we can do this’.
Well over a million refugees and migrants entered Europe in a matter of months.
A rattled Merkel conceded to her Christian Democratic Union party at their annual conference the following December that the numbers arriving were a ‘historic test’ for Europe, but one she was confident the continent would pass.
Her optimism was misplaced. As Katja Hoyer wrote yesterday in Coffee House of her recent visits to Germany, ‘it’s hard not to gain the impression that its society is falling apart at the seams’. She cited the rise of far-right and Islamic extremism. An Afghan national is in custody following an attack at a political rally last week in Mannheim that cost the life of a policeman.
Social cohesion is also fraying in France. On Monday evening a man was shot dead when a gunman opened fire indiscriminately on diners at a kebab restaurant in the Loire, just the latest act of violent crime. The same is true of Sweden, Holland, Belgium and, of course, Britain, where last week a young girl was one of several people wounded in a drive-by shooting in East London. Police are investigating whether the shooting was linked to a feud between Turkish and Kurdish gangs.
Reacting to the incident, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Ward said Londoners would ‘be shocked’ by the violence. Would they? London has become accustomed to such mayhem. In April a 14-year-boy walking to school was killed by a man who had gone on a rampage with a sword. A foreign national has been charged with murder and two counts of attempted murder.
It is because so many European feel their societies are falling apart that parties that identify as right-wing, national conservatives or sovereigntists are on course to win the European elections this weekend.
When Wilders was attempting to broker peace between Farage and Le Pen in 2014 they were all considered fringe players. Wilders is now the most powerful politician in Holland and Le Pen leads the second biggest individual party in the French Assembly with 88 seats.
In 2014 the trio would have been only vaguely aware of a young Italian politician whose nascent Brothers of Italy party had polled just 2 per cent in the 2013 general election. The party did little better in the 2014 European elections, obtaining just 3.7 per cent of the vote, not enough for any seats in the Brussels parliament.
Eight years later Giorgia Meloni was elected prime minister of Italy having made immigration the centrepiece of her campaign. Arguably no one did more to help in her meteoric rise than Angela Merkel. Her decision to open Europe’s borders in 2015 is still being felt politically and socially.
The Tories and Labour continue to regard immigration and insecurity as beyond the pale of polite society. These are the issues on which Farage may well focus his energy between now and 4 July because they trouble millions of voters. Then perhaps it will be eighth time lucky.
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