BRUSSELS -- The press in England has had a field day over the past 20 years chronicling the rise of the Continent's far right. The first chance came in the early 1980s with the emergence of France's National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man who believes the Americans built the gas chambers in the Buchenwald concentration camp after the war. Next came the re-emergence of the Italian neofascist Moviemento Sociale Italiano, or MSI, and the birth of the German Republikaner.
More recently the rash has spread like wildfire as new parties that dance in the limbo between Fascist-lite and the far right proceed by saltation from candidacy to council chamber, and from coalition to Cabinet. Such parties have been established components of government in Austria and Italy, while their merely xenophobic stepbrothers serve in Holland and set the asylum and immigration agenda in Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland.
In Italy, Gianfranco Fini, leader of Alleanza Nazionale, the successor to the MSI, serves as deputy prime minister. And in this year's presidential elections in France Le Pen finished -- albeit distantly -- second to President Jacques Chirac.