Right gains in Europe

Londoners penalised the ruling Labour party by electing the Conservative party candidate Boris Johnson as the Mayor of London. With the defeat of Labour's Ken Livingstone, the ruling party suffered its worst defeat in local elections in England and Wales in four decades.

It was not only the problems that mired the year- long premiership of Gordon Brown, as the British people are getting tired of a party in authority for more than a decade now.

Though some in the media like to draw analogies between Brown after Tony Blair, and John Major after Margaret Thatcher, the fact that Brown was a co-architect of "New Labour" refutes the analogy.

The problem with Labour seems to be a drift away from the centre-left to a wobbly ground that is neither centre nor right. With the right moving to the centre, the new Conservative leadership of David Cameroon is gaining ground among the populace.

Politics of the centre in Europe are giving the right more credit than they did three decades ago. What is feared now is the shift to the extreme right in Europe and further away from the centre as some indicators makes such a trend a viable possibility.

Anti-immigrants

May Day local election in UK resulted in a breakthrough for the far-right, anti-immigrants British National Party (BNP) which gained a seat in London Assembly for the first time. The new mayor was the second choice of BNP voters in the mayoral elections, for his previous remarks were considered ultra-nationalistic and Islamophobic.

Though Johnson tried in his campaign to distance himself from his previous gaffes, he is clearly the opposite of the outgoing mayor when it comes to issues like multiculturalism. The heart of the matter is that the new Mayor of London is representative of the right more than centre-right claimed by his party.

It may not be a coincidence in electing a figure of the right as the Mayor of London, if one looks at the trends in other parts of Europe. Just a week ago, the voters in Rome chose a neo-fascist as mayor of the Italian capital - the first right-wing mayor since the Second World War.

Gianni Alemanno's election was celebrated by hundreds of supporters chanting "Duce! Duce!" and raising their arms in Mussolini's fascist salute. Alemanno's choice conforms with the trend in Italian politics that brought Silvio Berlusconi to power again, this time not on centre-right ground but in coalition with the far-right, anti-immigrants Northern League.

After Alemanno's election Berlusconi said: "We are the new Phalange," referring to the Spanish fascist party founded in the 1930s that was the original Phalange.

The first pledge of the new mayor of Rome was to purge the Italian capital of 20,000 illegal immigrants. That came just weeks after the French President Nicolas Sarkozy's government pledged to deport 25,000 illegal immigrants each year.

And one of the main achievements of Sarkozy's reign, within a year in power, was the change of laws to tighten immigration. That trend is not confined to Italy and France, but it is spreading across Western Europe.

During a short visit to Sweden, a few weeks ago, I heard various complaints from immigrant communities feeling the punch of a shift in power from centre-left to centre-right.

Probably, it is the same story in Holland, Belgium and other European countries. It is true that the immigration problem is exacerbated by the recent influx from new members of the European Union, but the core of it is the immigrant communities from Asia, Africa and Latin America - among them about 20 million Muslims.

Previously tolerant attitudes acknowledging the economic benefits of skilled immigrants and virtues of cultural diversity are now changing. A more nationalist approach is developing, whether close to racist like that of the far-right Phalangists or eccentric like that of the right and centre-right.

Europe is turning right, and even though this might be for a variety of reasons, immigrants are going to be the most negatively affected.

Not necessarily is this going to be good for other native citizens of Western European countries, as the economic consequences are still disputed among proponents and opponents of globalisation.

Yet, such "cultural protectionism" is consistent with economic backlash to the rise of globalisation manifested in protectionist measures from North American and Western European countries.

Dr Ahmad Mustafa is a London-based Arab writer.