the
event, part of an energetic push for votes by France’s surging far
right ahead of elections this week for the European Parliament, also
promoted an agenda distant from the customary concerns of conservative
voters: why Europe needs to break its “submission” to the United States
and look to Russia as a force for peace and a bulwark against moral
decay.
While
the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia’s
annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in
eastern Ukraine, Europe’s right-wing populists have been gripped by a
contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V.
Putin.
“Russian
influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over
Europe,” said a study by Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian
research group. It predicted that far right parties, “spearheaded by the
French National Front,” could form a pro-Russian bloc in the European
Parliament or, at the very least, amplify previously marginal
pro-Russian voices.
… among
far right groups, the sympathy for Russia and suspicion of Washington
are in part tactical: Focused on clawing back power from the European
Union’s bureaucracy, they seize any cause that puts them at odds with
policy makers in Brussels and the conventional wisdom of European
elites.
But
they also reflect a general crumbling of public trust in the beliefs
and institutions that have dominated Europe since the end of World War
II, including the Continent’s relationship with the United States.
“Europe
is a big sick body,” said Alain de Benoist, a French philosopher and a
leading figure in a French school of political thought known as the “new
right.” Mr. de Benoist said Russia “is now obviously the principal
alternative to American hegemony.” Mr. Putin, he added, is perhaps “not
the savior of humanity,” but “there are many good reasons to be
pro-Russian.”
Some
of Russia’s European fans, particularly those with a religious bent,
are attracted by Mr. Putin’s image as a muscular foe of homosexuality
and decadent Western ways. Others, like Aymeric Chauprade, a foreign
policy adviser to the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, are
motivated more by geopolitical calculations that emphasize Russia’s role
as a counterweight to American power.
Russia
has added to its allure through the financing, mostly with corporate
money, of media, research groups and other European organizations that
promote Moscow’s take on the world. The United States also supports
foreign groups that agree with it, but Russia’s boosters in Europe,
unlike its leftist fans during the Cold War, now mostly veer to the far
right and sometimes even fascism, the cause Moscow claims to be fighting
in Ukraine.
Hungary’s
Jobbik, one of Europe’s most extreme nationalist parties and a noisy
cheerleader for Moscow, is now under investigation by the Hungarian
authorities amid allegations that it has received funding from Russia
and, in a case involving one of its leading candidates for the European
Parliament, that it has worked for Russian intelligence.
No
longer dismissed, as they were for decades, as fringe cranks steeped in
anti-Semitism and other noxious beliefs from Europe’s fascist past, the
National Front and like-minded counterparts elsewhere on the Continent
are expected to post strong gains in this week’s election, which begins
on Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands and then rolls across Europe
through Sunday.
But they are unlikely to form a cohesive bloc: Nationalists from different countries tend to squabble, not cooperate.
Nigel
Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, a group
zealously opposed to the European Union, and a critic of American
foreign policy, is already engaged in a bitter feud with Ms. Le Pen.
But
Mr. Farage and Ms. Le Pen have at least found some common ground on
Russia. The British politician recently named Mr. Putin as the world
leader he most admired “as an operator but not as a human being,” he
told a British magazine.
Ms.
Le Pen has also expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and called for a
strategic alliance with the Kremlin, proposing a “Pan-European union”
that would include Russia.
In
general, said Doru Frantescu, policy director of VoteWatch Europe, a
Brussels research group, the affections of far right Europeans for Mr.
Putin are simply opportunistic rather than ideological, “a convergence
of interests toward weakening the E.U.”
[At the recent election rally, Mr. Chaprade lambasted Washington for trying, unsuccessfully, to pressure France to cancel a contract with Russia for the sale of two amphibious assault ships. "We have the right to be partners with whomever we want without referring to the State Department of the United States," he said.]
The
European Union, said Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a member of the French
Parliament and the niece of Marine Le Pen, “is the poodle of the United
States.”
Russia
offers the prospect of a new European order free of what Mr. Chauprade,
in his own speech, described as its servitude to a “technocratic elite
serving the American and European financial oligarchy” and its
“enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”
The
view that Europe has been cut adrift from its traditional moral
moorings gained new traction this month when Conchita Wurst, a bearded
Austrian drag queen, won the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Russian
officials and the Russian Orthodox Church bemoaned the victory — over,
among others, singing Russian twins — as evidence of Europe’s moral
disarray.
At
the National Front’s pre-election rally, Mr. Chauprade mocked the
“bearded lady” and won loud applause with a passionate plaint that
Europeans had become a rootless mass of “consumers disconnected from
their natural attachments — the family, the nation and the divine.”
