The Swiss People's Party and the Danish People's Party have also taken initiatives around referendums pushing reactionary and nationalist campaigns against immigrants and in opposition to adopting the European currency, the euro. Spain has been the scene of stepped-up attacks on immigrants from north Africa who, in increasing numbers, toil in the fields and factories across the country. In Italy, the rightist Northern League is seeking to increase its electoral gains with the slogan, "One more vote for the League, one Albanian fewer in Milan."

The German government has seized on a growing number of racist and right-wing assaults and murders to push for a ban on the fascist National Democratic Party, founded by Udo Voigt, a former West German army officer, and Michael Nier, a longtime member of the former communist party in East Germany. "Our course of action now is to represent the frustrated German worker," Voigt said in a recent interview. "The Social Democrats have deserted the worker for foreign capitalist interests. Yet poverty is growing. Ours will be a new German Socialism."  
 
Immigrants 'must live like Belgians'
In the Belgium vote, the dramatic advances by the ultranationalist Vlaams Blok, or Flemish Bloc, in the port city of Antwerp and the northern Dutch-speaking half of the country were based on the Bloc's campaign blaming "'fat cat' Eurocrats for soaring house prices in Brussels" and accusing immigrants of "imposing a financial burden," according to the Financial Times. Its leaders say immigrants are welcome to stay in Belgium "provided they learn to speak Dutch and live like Belgians," the International Herald Tribune reported October 10.

The Bloc calls for the independence of Dutch-speaking Flanders, while stoking middle-class economic insecurities and exaggerated fears about crime. Besides the Vlaams Bloc's success in Antwerp, it also won more than a fifth of the ballots in Ghent and Mechelen, and doubled its share of the vote in Brussels to about 9 percent in several districts.

At the end of September the right-wing Danish People's Party spearheaded the defeat of a referendum on whether Denmark should adopt the euro. The "no" vote won by a 53.1 percent margin. Under the guise of protecting a small country against the big European powers, People's Party leader Pia Kjaersgaard said, "The EU wants to close Denmark down as a nation," adding that the "no" vote on the euro was "a great victory for democracy in Denmark." The Danish People's Party won 7 percent of the vote in the last general election and is now at 12 percent in opinion polls, according to the September 23 Economist.

Austrian Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, a member of the fascist Freedom Party, said the Danish vote came in part as a reaction to the EU's imposition of sanctions on Austria for inclusion of the Freedom Party in the governing coalition. The rejection of the euro was "an expression of the worries and concerns of the people over the role of smaller countries in making decisions," he claimed.

In order to compete with U.S. imperialism, European capitalists and their respective governments have carried out belt-tightening measures and are demanding that working people accept less in wage increases and social benefits. Despite the drive to establish the euro as a common currency, economic and political conflicts between nation-states are on the rise as each rival capitalist class competes for a better spot in the pecking order.

Rightists have sought to play on these conflicts, and anxieties about "crime" and economic uncertainties among middle class people and sections of the working class, which still faces persistently high unemployment. Pushing a reactionary campaign of nationalism, these forces especially target the growing population of immigrant workers as scapegoats for these problems, and portray themselves as champions of the "common man" against a European bureaucracy.

The euro's rejection in Denmark was a slap in the face for Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who had campaigned for joining the currency union as a way for Copenhagen to assert its political influence in Europe. He and other supporters insisted this would also enable Denmark to have a seat at the European Central Bank, which sets monetary policy for the common currency.

While the government has pegged its currency to the euro, the Danish krone's decline against the U.S. dollar matches the euro's descent. The euro has plummeted in value by some 25 percent relative to the U.S. dollar since the 11 countries in the European Union adopted it as their currency in January 1999. The decline of the euro "has generated widespread unease in Germany and some of the other euro countries," bolstering sentiments against it in Denmark, the International Herald Tribune reported.

The ruling Social Democrats and other capitalist politicians in Denmark have attempted to use their campaign for adopting the euro as a probe to press for cuts in social spending, prompting opposition to the common currency among working people there.

"What happened in Austria was a scandal and that is why I voted 'no,' " said Louisa Jacobsen, an attorney, who said she supported Denmark joining the currency union but was outraged by the EU's punishment of a small country like Austria. Denmark's population of 5.3 million is similar to that of Austria, which has some 8 million people.  
 
Rightists gain in Switzerland
A recent anti-immigrant campaign in Switzerland was defeated when more than 63 percent of voters rejected a measure to limit the number of immigrants to 18 percent of the country's 7.2 million people. Members of the conservative Radical Party, which organized the anti-immigrant proposal, claimed much of its support came from working people who feared losing their jobs. The September 24 balloting was the seventh time since 1964 that a referendum was conducted to restrict the number foreigners there. The Swiss government has already proposed new laws that would limit the number of workers from countries outside the European Union.

The referendum came on the heels of elections last October in which the Swiss People's Party consolidated support from smaller rightist parties as it led a campaign against immigrant workers, accusing them of causing an increase in crime, drug dealing, and of stealing jobs from native-born Swiss workers.

Some 25 percent of the workforce in the country is immigrant. About 50,000 Albanian refugees fled from Kosova into Switzerland last year as the U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign devastated Yugoslavia. This was the largest influx of refugees into the country since World War II.  
 
 
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