{"id":449,"date":"2014-10-20T19:46:34","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T19:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2014\/10\/20\/strange-bedfellows-putin-and-europes-far-right-alina-polyakova-2014\/"},"modified":"2014-10-20T19:46:34","modified_gmt":"2014-10-20T19:46:34","slug":"strange-bedfellows-putin-and-europes-far-right-alina-polyakova-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2014\/10\/20\/strange-bedfellows-putin-and-europes-far-right-alina-polyakova-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Bedfellows: Putin and Europe\u2019s Far Right – Alina Polyakova (2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nStrange Bedfellows: Putin and Europe\u2019s Far Right<\/strong><\/em>
\nAlina Polyakova <\/strong><\/em>
\nThere\u2019s love in the air between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Western Europe\u2019s far-right political parties.
\nThe courtship between Eastern European far-right parties and Russia has been going on for years, of course. In 2008, Eastern Europe\u2019s far right supported the Russian war against Georgia. In May 2013, leaders of Jobbik, the Hungarian far-right party with dubious fascist origins, met with Russian Duma leaders and academics at Moscow State University. The neo-Nazi Bulgarian Ataka party has vocally supported Putin and Russian foreign policy. In 2012, Ataka\u2019s leader, Volen Siderov, traveled to Moscow, reportedly at his own expense, to celebrate Putin\u2019s sixtieth birthday and express admiration for the Russian president\u2019s strong leadership. After Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea, Siderov threatened to withdraw his party\u2019s support from the coalition government if it supported further sanctions against Russia.
\nSince the Ukrainian crisis began, the romance has moved westward. In Austria, the Freedom Party (FP\u00d6) holds forty (out of one hundred and eighty-three) seats in Parliament, having won a fifth of the vote in last year\u2019s elections. The Danish People\u2019s Party has maintained its position as the third-strongest party in Parliament since 2001. And in 2012, the Greek extremist neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party shocked observers when it won eighteen parliamentary seats. The oldest and best-known party of the Western far right, the French National Front (FN), had its strongest showing in the past fifteen years when the party took fourteen percent of the vote in 2012. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) has struggled in national elections, but came in first in the May elections for the European Parliament.
\nIf the yeas have it on September 18th, David Cameron will be remembered as the prime minister who lost Scotland. He also faces the prospect of being the man who led Britain out of the EU. Until very recently, Marine Le Pen, de facto spokesman for the European far right, was unknown in Russia, even after she hailed Russia\u2019s president as a true patriot and defender of European values. But after Le Pen praised Russia\u2019s actions in Ukraine, while Angela Merkel and other centrist European leaders were condemning it, Putin invited her to Moscow along with other representatives of the FN and other European far-right parties to observe the March referendum on Crimea\u2019s accession to Russia. When she endorsed the Crimean referendum as legitimate, others on the European far right, including Austria\u2019s FP\u00d6 and Britain\u2019s UKIP, followed suit. Russian media and bloggers, meanwhile, embraced Le Pen\u2019s endorsement. One blogger started a \u201cMerci Marine!\u201d Twitter campaign. After the European parliamentary elections on May 25th, in which Le Pen\u2019s party took the largest share of votes in France, Russia\u2019s president returned the compliment by publicly praising the right-wing leader\u2019s success.
\nThe relationship between Russia and Western Europe\u2019s far right may be a marriage of convenience, but it also shows signs of genuine affection. Closer ties with rising political parties in the EU will give Putin more leverage against NATO. For its part, the European right sees the Russian leader as a staunch defender of national sovereignty and conservative values who has challenged US influence and the idea of \u201cEurope\u201d in a way that mirrors their own convictions.
\nThe far right\u2019s major gripe with the European Union is the euro, which strips eurozone countries of control over their monetary policy. The hostility has grown during the economic crisis of the last few years, which has forced all of Western Europe to bend to unpopular austerity measures set by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. In hindsight, the common currency looks like a terrible blunder to centrist political leaders and voters. Even the Germans, still the most pro-European members of the eurozone, are showing signs of buyer\u2019s remorse.
\nFor the Euroskeptic far right, endorsing the Crimean referendum was a carom shot that allowed them to reframe their defiance of the European Union and its growing influence over national politics, but it was also an endorsement of Putin\u2019s nationalism and social conservatism. Le Pen derided the EU as an \u201canti-democratic monster\u201d while in the same breath exalting Putin for doing \u201cwhat is good for Russia and the Russians.\u201d Meanwhile, the leader of Britain\u2019s UKIP, Nigel Farage, sees Putin as a \u201cbrilliant\u201d strategist who can outwit the West. When asked which world leader he admired the most, Farage\u2019s answer was unhesitating: Putin.
\nBehind Russia\u2019s affection for Le Pen and her fellow travelers may lie something more than appreciation for her endorsement of Crimea: a shared anti-Americanism. According to a recent survey by the Levada Center, in Moscow, seventy-one percent of Russians have a \u201cbad or very bad\u201d opinion of the United States. In fact, Russians\u2019 opinion of the United States is the lowest since the fall of the Soviet Union.
\nIn the Russian popular imagination, the US is still seen as setting the foreign policy agenda in Russia\u2019s immediate neighborhood. Throughout the Ukrainian crisis, Russian media framed the US as the instigator and sponsor of the Maidan revolution that toppled Russia\u2019s ally\u2014Ukraine\u2019s then president, Viktor Yanukovych\u2014a view that pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine\u2019s eastern regions subscribe to as well.
\nIn early May, when I was in eastern Ukraine\u2019s largest city, Kharkiv, pro-Russian protesters holding anti-American and anti-EU posters blamed a US-led \u201cjunta\u201d for fomenting unrest. In this version of the story, the EU plays the role of the lackey sidekick: representing American interests because it is too spineless to adopt an independent stance.
\nFor their part, Western Europe\u2019s far-right parties have also been increasingly critical of the Obama administration\u2019s campaign to impose economic sanctions on Russia. Leading the charge, Le Pen sees the sanctions as American meddling in European affairs. Echoing the Russians\u2019 view of Europe, Marine Le Pen\u2019s niece, French parliamentarian Marion Mar\u00e9chal-Le Pen, called the EU \u201cthe poodle of the United States.\u201d
\nBut the infatuation of the Western European far right with Putin is about what it calls \u201cvalues\u201d as well as the constellation of nationalist issues that coalesce in opposition to the idea, as well as the fact, of \u201cEurope.\u201d Le Pen has gone so far as to call the Russian president a defender of \u201cthe Christian heritage of European civilization.\u201d
\nThe Putinist cultural conservatism that the far right admires has been enforced with an iron hand across Russian society. Most notorious is the anti-gay propaganda law passed in June 2013, which allows the government to infringe on LGBT individuals\u2019 rights by banning peaceful demonstrations or imposing hefty fines on same-sex couples who are affectionate in public. The law was widely criticized by Western media, but in Russia, where population decline has reached a critical point, reinvigorating \u201cfamily values\u201d is high on the government\u2019s agenda. Along with nationalism and law-and-order themes, traditional family values are key to Putin\u2019s broader political ideology of \u201cpost-communist neo-conservatism.\u201d To Putin and many Russians who support him, European cultural liberalism that grants equal rights to same-sex couples is not only degenerate, but also a threat to Russia\u2019s survival as a nation.
\nFor Russians, the Austrian bearded lady Conchita Wurst, nom de drag of Tom Neuwirth, whose song won the 2014 Eurovision contest, confirmed what many in the country already suspected: Europe is on a slippery slope toward cultural depravity. Vitaly Milonov, a conservative St. Petersburg politician who sponsored local legislation that laid the groundwork for the federal anti-gay law, urged Russian media to boycott the European song contest, which he called a \u201cSodom show.\u201d Wurst\u2019s win sparked anger in Russia. Even high-ranking Russian officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, denounced the drag queen for embodying the loose morals that European integration entails.
\nIn the renewed culture war between Western social liberalism and Eastern traditional conservatism for which Conchita Wurst has become a symbol, Europe\u2019s far-right parties have stood with the Russians. In its party program, Austria\u2019s FP\u00d6 defines family as \u201ca partnership between a man and woman with common children.\u201d UKIP\u2019s Nigel Farage has said that gay marriage in France was unnecessary. (But even among the far right, there are exceptions: Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, styles himself as a promoter of gay rights, which he sees as in line with traditional Dutch values.)
\nWhile the romance between Putin and the European far right is passionate right now, a question for both parties to face is how long this relationship can endure\u2014and to what end. The importance of the far right\u2019s gains in May\u2019s European parliamentary elections is easy to overstate: voter turnout was low, the European Parliament is a weak governing body, and even in victory the far right is fractionalized across competing alliances. But the European elections could presage more important shifts in national politics. As Europeans grow more disillusioned with the EU, the far-right parties that have so far been marginal in national elections, like UKIP, could start to gain an audience.
\nEven if the alliance with Europe\u2019s far right turns out to be transient, it has given the Kremlin a boost during a difficult time. If it turns out to have legs, it may give Putin a more powerful lever for influencing European foreign policy in the long term. With far-right parties on the rise in their own countries, centrist European politicians may eventually be forced to concede ground to anti-European, and now pro-Russian, sentiments if they want to win reelection. Fearing the power of voters aligned with UKIP, FN, and other parties, European leaders may become reluctant to take a strong stance against Russia. And an EU so crippled by inward-looking national politics that it cannot be a counterweight to Russian aggression is exactly what the Kremlin wants. If anti-EU, pro-Russian voices gain a foothold in national governments, a Europe united on foreign policy becomes difficult to imagine.
\nAlina Polyakova is a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington. This article first appeared in World Affairs <\/a>of September 10, 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}