An uneasy Europe swings right

Unsettled by rising immigration, unsure of their personal safety, and uncertain about their future, European voters are turning in election after election to conservative parties promising reassurance.

At the next milestone on the Continent's march to the right, French voters seem set to give President Jacques Chirac a convincing parliamentary majority on Sunday. The president's supporters won 44 percent of the vote in first-round polling last weekend, well ahead of the Socialists' 36 percent.

They did so by playing the law-and-order card strongly – a tactic that has worked well for conservative parties elsewhere in Europe recently – to win back voters who had drifted into the camp of extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen.

"If people feel insecure, they believe that more-conservative parties will be more severe in fighting that insecurity," says Dominique Moisi, a French political analyst. "That is a key theme across Europe."

The French elections confirm a year-long Continental trend that has seen left-of-center governments chased out of office in Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Norway and Holland. In Germany, Social Democratic leader Gerhard Schröder is trailing his right wing rival, Edmund Stoiber, as September elections approach.

Some analysts see the shift as merely a predictable swing in the democratic cycle. Two years ago almost all of the 15 countries in the European Union were ruled by Social Democratic governments, but voters dissatisfied with their leaders' performance have turned elsewhere for new guidance.

"In the mid-1990s we saw a synchronization, which was a reflection of the process of European integration, that produced a concerted swing to the center left," says John Palmer, head of the European Policy Center in Brussels. "The economic and political climate in many of these countries is the same, so it isn't surprising that now we are seeing the normal swing of the pendulum ... to the center right."

But the recovery of traditional conservative parties has been shadowed by the rise of more extreme, anti-immigrant and nationalist right-wing parties in several countries, expressing deeper fears in the electorate.

European integration "means modernization, which means you have to accept the risks and dangers that entails," argues Sergio Romano, a prominent Italian commentator. "Parts of society will suffer from this. Immigration has somehow become the focus on which all worries can be concentrated."

Those worries stem from the changes European nations are going through as they hand over more powers to central authorities in Brussels, and attempt painful economic reforms to streamline the continent and make it competitive in an era of globalization.

These changes and reforms go to the root of questions of national identity, and of national autonomy in a European Union that is pooling more and more authority even as it prepares to admit up to 10 new nations from Central and Eastern Europe.

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