Más allá de las codenas a los atentados noruegos. Se acentúa un viejo debate: qué hacer con la creciente inmigración musulmana a Europa. Al parecer, tanto el multiculturalismo de manga ancha como la xenofobia no tienen la solución al problema.
Shift in Europe Seen in Debate on Immigrants
By NICHOLAS KULISH
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| Armas capturadas en Alemania a un grupo anti-inmigración. |
BERLIN — Less than a week after the mass killings in Norway, evidence of a shift in the debate over Islam and the radical right in Europe already appeared to be taking hold on a traumatized Continent.
As the police in Norway and abroad continued to search for potential accomplices, expressions of outrage over the deaths crossed the political spectrum. Members of far-right parties in Sweden and Italy were condemned from within their own ranks for blaming multiculturalism for the attack. A member of France’s far-right National Front was suspended for praising the attacker.
Lurking in the background is the calculation on all sides that such tragedies can drive shifts in public opinion. Nonviolent political parties can hardly be blamed for the violent actions of a terrorist or a homicidal person. But politicians have begun to question inflammatory speech in the debate over immigrants, which has helped fuel the rise of right-leaning politicians across Europe in recent years.
The head of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, told the German news service dpa on Wednesday that a trend toward xenophobia and nationalism in the region had fostered the attacks in Norway. In a society where anti-Islamic sentiment and isolation were tolerated “naturally on the margins of society, there will be crazy people who feel legitimized in taking harder measures,” he said.
“The center of society has to make clear that there is no room for this with us, even for sanitized versions,” Mr. Gabriel said. “There is a deep feeling in society that the pendulum has swung too far toward individualism.”
It is too soon to tell what the political fallout from the attacks will be. The left in Europe is out of power in major countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Italy — and has struggled to find a cause to revitalize it, or at least to reframe the passionate debate over immigration. The mainstream right, on the other hand, could find it more difficult to accept support from the far-right parties after the deadly events in Oslo and on Utoya Island.
“The biggest challenge is the opportunism of the center, and I think this will change now,” said Joschka Fischer, Germany’s former foreign minister and a leading European voice on the left, pointing to the Danish government’s cooperation with the far-right Danish People’s Party, which has pushed through a partial reinstitution of border controls.
The political fallout will be unpredictable in part because Europe is still so varied in its political landscape, with each country’s different history and culture. Norway, for instance, is not a member of the European Union.
That may make it harder for a left-leaning politician to seize the initiative against conservatives the way that President Bill Clinton did after the Oklahoma City bombing, which was carried out by a right-wing extremist. Trying to link mainstream politicians to the beliefs of Anders Behring Breivik, who the authorities in Norway say has taken responsibility for the killings and whose lawyer says is insane, is also risky.
Pascal Perrineau, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, where he directs the Center for Political Research, said that French parties were being “extremely cautious” in their approach to the tragedy out of fear of looking as if they were exploiting it. According to Mr. Perrineau, it was unlikely to shift the larger balance of power between right and left in France, but would make it more difficult for the far-right National Front and its leader, Marine Le Pen, in elections.
Mr. Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, while full of calls for violence, also includes some passages that echo the concerns of mainstream political leaders about preserving national identity and values.
“So much of what he wrote could have been said by any right-wing politician,” said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Green bloc in the European Parliament. “A lot of arguments about immigrants and Islamic fundamentalism will now be much easier to question and to push back.”
The clearest evidence of a change in tone at this early stage may be the way anti-immigrant parties try to rein in their members. A member of the National Front, Jacques Coutela, was suspended for calling Mr. Breivik “an icon” on his blog. He replaced it with a note saying that he denounced Mr. Breivik’s actions.
Erik Hellsborn, a local politician for the nationalist Sweden Democrats in the southern town of Varberg, wrote on his blog that “in a Norwegian Norway this tragedy would never have happened,” according to the local daily Hallands Nyheter. Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, distanced himself from Mr. Hellsborn’s sentiments in comments to the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet on Wednesday, saying, “You can’t blame the actions of individuals on social structures like this.”
And Mario Borghezio, a member of the European Parliament from Italy with the anti-immigration Northern League, said on a radio talk show on Monday that some of Mr. Breivik’s positions regarding the Islamic threat to Europe “could certainly be agreed with.” He called the Oslo killings “the fault of a multiracial society,” the kind of society he called “disgusting.”
Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Liberty Party, which is in a coalition with the league, said Mr. Borghezio should offer “a personal apology” to Norway, which he did on Wednesday.
Other far-right groups have sought to distance themselves from Mr. Breivik and his actions, and violent acts in general. After reports that Mr. Breivik was in touch with Britain’s far-right English Defence League, the group issued a statement this week saying it could “categorically state that there has never been any official contact between him and the E.D.L.”
Europol, the European Union’s police agency, created a task force to investigate threats in Scandinavia and links to extremist groups across Europe. Some officials worry that Mr. Breivik might be part of a fledgling though loosely organized network of like-minded extremists.
In the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg on Wednesday, police officers raided 21 homes as part of an investigation of a right-wing extremist group. The police said the action was not connected to the events in Oslo, but pressure to keep watch over extremists is now a constant theme.
At the same time, debates have begun over how to crack down on radical extremists, including stepped-up monitoring of online chat groups. Andrea Nahles, a leading member of Germany’s Social Democrats, renewed the party’s call for banning the far-right National Democratic Party.
But experts say banning political parties can have the opposite of the intended effect, driving individuals further from mainstream dialogue and encouraging the kind of rejectionist philosophy that leads to violence.
And shutting down communications by extremists online seems nearly impossible, according to Peter Molnar, an expert on free-speech law and one of the founders of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University in Budapest. “It is like jumping on a shadow,” he said.
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