The Far Right Organizes in the Var

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
John W.P. Veugelers
Keyword(s):  
Party Politics ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Front ◽  
Municipal Elections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Client Relations ◽  
Electoral Performance

This chapter examines the history of the National Front in the Var from its origins during the 1970s until its electoral victory in the 1995 Toulon municipal elections. From the recruitment of leaders, cadres, activists, and voters to the style of language used, the influence of French Algeria pervaded the development of the National Front in this part of France. By the 1990s, the Var section of the National Front was the largest of any party in France. This laid the foundations for a strong electoral performance. While the left lost ground, the non-Gaullist moderate right resisted electorally: it upheld a system of patron-client relations, remained united in party politics, and exercised influence at multiple levels of government. The moderate right helped the far right in this part of France by validating its anti-immigrant rhetoric and treating the National Front as a tactical partner.

New Political Configurations

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
John W.P. Veugelers
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
National Front ◽  
Municipal Elections ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
Local Politicians ◽  
Client Relations

This chapter examines how the ex-colonials organized, what political influence they achieved, and why their efforts stalled. Anticipating elections, their leaders mounted social and cultural events with support from local politicians. These events maintained collective identity and social networks. They signaled a political potential and tightened bonds with local politicians. Similar models of patron-client arose in other Mediterranean cities (e.g., Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Nice, Montpellier, Perpignan, and Toulouse). In the 1965 municipal elections, all parties in Toulon wooed the ex-colonials, who backed the moderate right. For the 1965 presidential and 1967 parliamentary elections, they sought to maintain their influence, but lost unity. The patron-client relations and electoral support that joined them to the moderate right would persist until the rise of the National Front in the 1990s.

Holding Off the National Front

2019 ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
John W.P. Veugelers
Keyword(s):  
State Funding ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Front ◽  
Municipal Elections ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Departmental Level ◽  
Power Base ◽  
Local Results ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how the moderate right has held power in Toulon ever since the far-right experiment of 1995–2001. Eleven towns in France elected the National Front to power in the 2014 municipal elections and three of those towns are in the Var. Still, the moderate right enjoys a strong hold over Toulon, whose mayor has built up a power base that rivals that of the moderate right before it fell in the mid-1990s. While avoiding scandal, he and his allies have attracted significant state funding. They have mounted public works projects and buttress their power at the departmental level with influence over the regional conurbation. The moderate right is also disciplined. The city is not a loser of globalization. Still, it faces other economic challenges. Further, local results from national (presidential and parliamentary) elections suggest the city’s far-right potential remains significant.

Building a Base for the National Front

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-102
Author(s):  
John W.P. Veugelers
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Front ◽  
Fifth Republic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Political Battle ◽  
The Way

This chapter traces the origins and development of the far right under the Fifth Republic. Without discounting older roots in the interwar Ligues, the followers of Marshall Pétain, and the anti-tax movement of Pierre Poujade, it brings out the importance of the political battle for French Algeria. Uniting anti-communists and anti-Gaullists, it revitalized the French far right and paved the way for the creation of the National Front in 1972. After tracing the far right’s reaction to May ’68 and to the success of the neo-fascists in Italy in the early 1970s, the chapter reviews the early history of the National Front, and (against economic patterns) provides an alternative explanation for its electoral breakthrough in the 1980s.

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

The Toolkit of Nationalist Populism in Contemporary Hungary: Symbols, Objects, and Modalities of Circulation

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542095081
Author(s):  
Virág Molnár
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
The People ◽  
Consumer Markets ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Material Circulation

This article belongs to the special cluster, “National, European, Transnational: Far-right activism in the 20th and 21st centuries”, guest edited by Agnieszka Pasieka. Research on populism attributes great significance to mapping the distinctive discursive logic of populist reasoning (e.g., the trope of pitting corrupt elites against the people). This article aims to move beyond the primary focus on discursive structures to stress the role of symbols, objects, and different modalities of circulation in the political communication of populist ideas, using the case of Hungary. By tracing the history of one of the key symbols of nationalist populism—the image of “Greater Hungary”—from its emergence in the interwar period to its present-day use, the article shows how the meanings and material forms this symbol assumed in political communication that evolved under different political regimes. The analysis builds on extensive archival, ethnographic, and online data to highlight how the diversity of material forms and the conduits through which this image circulated have contributed to its endurance as a key political symbol. Symbols, like the Greater Hungary image, condense complex historical narratives into a powerful sign that can be easily objectified, reproduced, and diffused. Today’s differentiated consumer markets provide convenient conduits for this kind of material circulation. These symbols carry meaning in and of themselves as signs, and once they are turned into everyday objects, they facilitate the normalization of radical politics by increasing their salience and broad visibility.

Constituency Agents and British Party Politics

1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Frasure ◽  
Allan Kornberg
Keyword(s):  
Party Politics ◽  
Office Work ◽  
Job Descriptions ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Training

We began by reviewing the history of agency and by describing the two major parties' procedures for recruiting and training agents. Not surprisingly, the perceptions that agents have of their roles is not entirely congruent with official perceptions. Approximately 20 per cent of the agents of both parties felt that the performance of various representational functions was the most important part of their job although these tasks are not included in official job descriptions. Moreover, although a majority of the agents in each party believed that their most important job was to build and maintain constituency organizations capable of winning elections, the majority of their time was not spent on this task. Conservative agents seemingly spent a disproportionate amount of time doing routine office work, whereas over 40 per cent of the Labour agents spent much of their time trying to raise the funds that paid their salaries. Large numbers of agents in both parties agreed that raising money in their constituencies was a difficult and largely unrewarding task.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

On en sont les partis politiques, au lendemain du 8 octobre 2000?

Res Publica ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-587
Author(s):  
William Fraeys
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Municipal Elections ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Green Parties ◽  
Political Group ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Liberal Group ◽  
Regional Elections ◽  
Walloon Region

On October 8th 2000 municipal elections were held in Belgium to renew the local councils which had been elected in 1994. In the Walloon region and in Flanders in addition provincial elections were organised.  The aim of the article is to try and measure globally where the political forces stand after these elections and among others to assess whether significant swings have take place since june 13th, 1999, when the latest parliamentary and regional elections took place.  On the basis of an estimation of the global results in the municipal elections of the various parties in the Walloon region, in Flanders and in Brussels, backed up by the actual results of the provincial elections, one can say that the liberal group bas strengthened its first position.The Christian democrats, who make up the second most important political group and the Socialists, who rank third, have regained a large part of the losses they incurred onjune 13th, 1999.Although improving their results in comparison with 1994, the Green parties lost again part of their advance they registered in the parliamentary and regional elections and which had probably been boosted by the dioxin crisis.The frenchspeaking far right practically disappears, whereas the Vlaams Blok obtained an average of 15 % of the Flemish electorate in the municipal and provincial elections, a level which it had reached in the 1999 parliamentary elections.

The Withered ‘Greening’ of British Politics: A Study of the Ecology Party

1986 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Rüdig ◽  
Philip D. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
European Countries ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Green Party ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Green Parties ◽  
Group Integration ◽  
History Of

Britain appears to be largely removed from the new political tide of ‘green’ parties that is currently sweeping other West European countries. This article will put forward some explanations for this ‘stillborn’ character of ‘green’ party politics in Britain. A detailed scrutiny of the history of the Ecology Party will be provided. It will be argued that the relative weakness of the Party is mainly due to its'failure to attract the support of ‘new social movements’. Particular attention will be paid to the British political system's ability to deal with middle-class protest movements by a mixture of issue suppression and group integration.

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