Cross-national ideology in local elections: the case of Azione Sociale and the British National Party

Abstract

First paragraph: Extreme-right parties in Europe have gone beyond their former status as a marginal, or even exotic, phenomenon in electoral politics. For the last twenty years, in virtually all countries of the European Union (EU), such parties have shown themselves capable of electoral success, gaining policy concessions from governing parties or even determining the actual process of policy making and influencing the public debate on key issues. Even in Britain, traditionally seen as one of the few outlying cases where the extreme right could not penetrate, the situation has evolved. Since the British National Party (BNP) has been led by Nick Griffin, it has experienced a continual, though hardly spectacular, growth at the local level, leading to the election of a number of local councillors, a member of the London Assembly and two MEPs. It started to receive support from parts of the electorate that one would not normally associate with such a party and the strategy of the BNP in recent years has been to move beyond the classical enclaves of extreme-right support. In Italy, Azione Sociale (AS, Social Action) led by Alessandra Mussolini, similarly had representatives in local government across Italy and had also been represented in the European parliament. Since the parliamentary elections of 2008, it has been a constitutive part of Silvio Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà (PDL, People of Freedom) coalition. In March 2009 AS became completely merged within the PDL along with other parties on the Italian right such as Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale (AN, National Alliance), although its members still maintain a certain level of independent activism.[i] Despite being forced to camouflage somewhat its neo-fascist identity within this new party, it has received notable benefits in terms of media coverage which go well beyond the election of Mussolini to the Italian parliament. [i] This chapter was written before the official creation of the PDL but has since been modified to reflect this situation.