Europe Letter: Any notion that Ireland has a special immunity to far-right politics for cultural or historical reasons a myth, according to one of the world's leading experts on radical right movement
In 2015, the German news programme Tagesschau reported on the role of right-wing extremists in fomenting local protests against refugee accommodation. They had a playbook of organising “citizens’ initiatives” in minor towns through Facebook groups. A neo-Nazi splinter group distributed a 20-page guidebook to preventing the opening of asylum-seeker accommodation, including a “blueprint” for mobilising protests.
These efforts largely failed at the ballot box. But at the time, I spoke to Cas Mudde, one of the world’s leading experts in radical right movements, to ask him what Ireland could learn from other countries that had already experienced similar trends. “I come originally from the Netherlands, and we felt very superior in the 1980s and 1990s about being so tolerant that we wouldn’t have a strong radical right,” he told me. “By and large, our politics has been dominated by far-right issues and parties and politicians since 2001.”
Whereas elsewhere the huge wave of migration caused by the Syrian civil war occasioned the sense of crisis, in Ireland the conditions seem to have finally been created by the challenge of accommodating Ukrainians and asylum seekers alongside the long-festering housing crisis.A major error made in other countries was to accept at face value the claim by the far-right that their views reflect a “silent majority” and that they speak on behalf of the population.
When EU national leaders meet in Brussels on Thursday, their discussion on migration will reflect how much migration policy has shifted since 2017
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