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rise of the new rightA range of scholars, politicians and thinkers reflect on the disturbing rise of the far right across Europe in 2002. From campaigns to resist Berlusconi to commitments to multiculturalism and dissections of the allure of the sharp suited demagogue, our debate maps the co-ordinates of the landscape of European politics.
The real story of Austria's general election is that the country's democracy has been taken hostage by the extreme right. Anton Pelinka, Austria's leading political analyst, explains. Read the rest of this post...
The success of Italy's football team in the world cup could inspire a renaissance in the country's public life, says Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
The centre-left revival in Italy has not extended to Sicily's regional election, but Rita Borsellino's campaign has highlighted a larger campaign for ethics and justice in Italian politics, reports Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
An election without a decisive result leaves Italian politics in limbo, report Sarah Pozzoli & Mario Rossi. Read the rest of this post...
Italy's knife-edge election result leaves its political future, and Silvio Berlusconi’s legacy, unresolved. Geoff Andrews reports. Read the rest of this post...
The worst of old Sicily – corruption, patronage, entropy – has become endemic in Italy itself under Silvio Berlusconi, veteran anti-mafia campaigner and centre-left candidate Leoluca Orlando tells Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
Italy's showman-leader has lost his touch, but have his centre-left opponents found the way to defeat him? Geoff Andrews reports on an unpredictable Italian election. Read the rest of this post...
The United States president is preparing to welcome Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to address a joint meeting of Congress. A bad move, says George W Bush's fellow Harvard Business School alumnus, Pierleone Ottolenghi. Read the rest of this post...
Silvio Berlusconi hopes that an intense media blitz will help sustain him in power, but Geoff Andrews finds that Italy's comedians and artists have other ideas. Read the rest of this post...
The career and achievement of the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is being celebrated thirty years after his brutal murder, but the political controversy surrounding his death haunts Italy still, says Geoff Andrews. Read the rest of this post...
Silvio Berlusconi began April an election loser but ends it as head of a reformed centre-right coalition. Sarah Pozzoli & Mario Rossi on the great survivor of Italian politics. Read the rest of this post...
The search for equality and respect by Roma people in Romania has produced a new generation of activists using creative, confident methods of expressing their identity. The leader of a Bucharest-based NGO, Florin Botonogu, talks to Julian Kramer of openDemocracy about the impact of social activism on Roma’s sense of their direction in modern Romania. Read the rest of this post...
Roma in the Czech Republic have been hit hard by post-communist industrial decline and social prejudice. In the eastern city of Ostrava, they display a survivalist spirit amidst grinding poverty. But how can Roma children succeed in an educational system based on institutional exclusion and contempt? Read the rest of this post...
The arrival of Roma on the political stage is often heralded as a mark of enlightenment and social progress. But the search for Roma nationalism and political representation is better understood as part of the regressive empowerment of ethnic and nationalist cleavages as an organising principle in European politics. Rather than top-down leadership, the Roma need grassroots campaigning for equality with their fellow-citizens. Read the rest of this post...
The condition of Roma people is a vital issue in negotiations over the accession of Romania to the European Union. Roma who leave in great numbers (claiming human rights violations) and those who stay (enduring multiple sources of social injustice) alike challenge democratic and social ideals in a context of far-right revival. An academic of Roma origin reflects on the tortured history of Roma in Romania, and affirms the need for a new discourse and practice of equality for Roma at the European level. Read the rest of this post...
As Silvio Berlusconi took on Italy’s presidency of the EU, his “kapo” gaffe in the European Parliament gave warning of fireworks to come. It was preceded by his coalition partner Umberto Bossi’s demand for cannon fire on illegal immigrants. Here a long-time observer of the new right in Italy tells the story of the rise of the Northern League, talks to Bossi, and reads the portents for the collapse of Berlusconi’s “House of Liberties”… Read the rest of this post...
The far-right Vlaams Blok gained ground in Belgium’s May 2003 elections on an anti-immigrant, nationalist platform. The journalist Nick Ryan spent time there with suits and skinheads. This extract from his book ‘Homeland’ tells the gripping story of their attempts to “save their identity” from “globalisation and mongrelisation” – a battle fought on the streets, in pubs and in the parliament. Read the rest of this post...
The public embrace between the prime ministers of Italy and Britain fills this Italian free market conservative with despair. For, he writes to the editor of openDemocracy, Silvio Berlusconi is leading Italy down a dangerous path, and one that has closed a historic opportunity - for the country to become normal. Read the rest of this post...
The old is dying, and the new cannot be born. The catastrophic defeat of Lionel Jospin and his socialist party in the recent French elections was more than just another swing of the political cycle; it reflects the Left’s lack of understanding of the society it aspires to represent. Only an honest engagement with its own society, with a globalised world, with a changed Europe, and with its own illusions, can free the French Left from the immense weight of its own past. Read the rest of this post...
Paul Gilroy’s work, “Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race”, challenges the way that categories of ‘race’ are routinely used and proposes an audacious new binding concept of ‘planetary humanism’. He elaborates the argument in an interview with Anthony Barnett, Bola Gibson and Caspar Melville of openDemocracy. Read the rest of this post...
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