On 20 March provincial leaders of the UDF (Union pour la démocratie française) accepted votes from neo-Fascist MPs of the FN (Front national) in order to get themselves elected to assembly presidencies in five of France’s regions. In doing so, they provided a spectacular demonstration of the way in which the whole of the French right —including the RPR (Rassemblement pour la République)— is currently falling apart.

In October 1995, five months after his election, Jacques Chirac had staged a U-turn by turning his back on the programme on which he had been elected (based on recognition of a two-tier society) and embarking on a programme of ultra-liberalism. By then it was clear that the right was in trouble - with no clear policies and no identity.

The right’s setback in the parliamentary elections of May 1997 compounded this with a loss of confidence in the right’s leadership and the collapse of party structures.

With no leaders, no programme and no organisation, the right launched into a pathetic attempt at restructuring and reiterating basic principles.

Could such disarray have been predicted ?

Perhaps not. For much has been written about the crisis of the left following the three landmark crises of the late 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf war and the implosion of the USSR) which marked the end of the cold war (1948-89) and the end of the post-war period (1945-91). However, too little has been said about the way in which the ending of this historical cycle paradoxically left all sectors of the right disempowered and disoriented.

Was it any accident that Christian Democracy came to grief after 1991 ?

Or that the British Conservative Party suffered the most resounding defeat in its history in 1997 ?

Apart from Germany and Spain, there are no countries in the European Union where the right governs alone.

Add to these circumstances major contemporary changes in technology (computers and digitalisation), economics (the global economy and the growing power of finance capital) and society (identity crises, marginalisation and transformation of the power structure). It then becomes clear that the right, while singing the praises of the global economy, is as much at a loss as the left, and incapable of offering new perspectives.

When all these changes occur at a time of economic crisis and while liberal economic policies are being promoted in Europe, we end up with a rash of social inequalities and the re-appearance of social ills such as unemployment and mass poverty.

Within Europe, there are an estimated 18 million unemployed and 50 million poor...

A natural consequence of all this has been an increase in violence. People feel that they have been abandoned by governments which they see as corrupt and in the hands of big business. Feelings of insecurity grow by the day.

The economic circumstances and the social context of fear and disarray they have engendered have encouraged the growth of political parties with openly fascist roots.

In Austria, the Liberal Party of Jörg Haider has 22% of the vote, and 41 members of parliament ; in Norway, Carl Igar Hagen’s Progress Party has become the second major political force in the country, with 15% of the vote and 25 representatives in the national Assembly ; in Italy, Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance (AN) has 15.7% of the vote and 53 members of parliament ; in Flanders (Belgium), Filip Dewinter’s Vlaams Blok has 12.3% of the vote and 11 members in the federal parliament.

In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front is promoting a cult of racial purity and nationalism, the restoration of the "nation" (in the ethnic sense of the term), the setting up of an authoritarian regime on the pretext of combating crime, drastic cuts in income tax, a return to economic protectionism, sending women back into the home, and the expulsion of three million foreigners to make more jobs available for French people.

According to a 1996 survey, "more than one in four French people would agree with the ideas of the National Front".

As the heirs of Pétainism and wartime collaboration, fed by nostalgia for the days when the Algeria was part of France, this party (the only major party not to have its roots in the Resistance) has, despite a facade of respectability, made no secret of its racism, xenophobia and anti-semitism.

It is the living negation of the values of the Republic.

But, unlike most of the other political groupings, it is an inter-class party, in the sense that it has room for bourgeois and proletarians, small businessmen and the unemployed alike ; it is active in a number of problem local neighbourhoods, offering warmth and solidarity to people in difficulties ; and its militants display the kind of social devotion and self-sacrifice that once characterised activists of the Communist Party.

This explains why its candidates have been pulling in about 15% of the vote in various elections, and why its influence has grown consistently in particular regions (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Alsace, for example).

As a result, it now has left-wingers voting for it and increasing numbers of right-wing activists are perfectly happy to join it.

Studies have shown that only 1% of FN activists come from the extreme right : while 40% come from the "Gaullist movements".

Leading public figures have been openly seeking support from the National Front.

Michel Poniatowski (in line with the logic of François Furet and Stéphane Courtois’s Black Book of Communism, which contends that the Socialist Party was actually allied to the Communist Party) says that "it is more immoral to accept votes from the Communists, who murdered millions of people in Europe, than those of the National Front".

In Germany in the early 1930s, it was this line of reasoning that led the parties of the traditional right to extend a welcoming hand to the National Socialist Party, which at that time looked a very attractive proposition.

We know what then happened to the parties of the right.

And to democracy.