European Muslim Initiative

European Parliament Elections 2014 have resulted in big gains for extreme far right and anti-EU parties. Many anti-minorities and anti-Islam MEPs are voted in through a democratic process, that clearly shows how racism has infiltrated so deeply in so many minds.

One MEP has a leader with a swastika tattoo, one wants to rid his entire country of Muslims, another has a founder who suggested releasing the Ebola virus on migrants. This is the kind of parties, which have now entered the European Parliament as part of the Union’s most euro-sceptic, far right, anti-immigrant intake of all time. This is also the first time openly neo-Nazi parties will sit in Brussels as representatives of their nations. Many new MEPs are elected on the platform giving the message of hate while in these difficult times when Europeans need a message of hope and peace.

The amount of public support for such parties is staggering. In most EU countries, from Finland to Greece and UK to Hungary, far right parties have won more than 25% of the popular votes. For example, in UK, UKIP got 30%, in Denmark, DPP got 27%, and in France, Front National received 26% votes.

Since the late nineties, ethnic minorities were hopeful that the struggle for human rights, anti-racism, and anti-discrimination would go from strength to strength in the future. For a while it did go in the right direction but slowly and steadily, anti-migrants rhetoric, anti-asylum propaganda and open religious discrimination started taking hold. More and more political movements and parties started using demonizing tools against ethnic and religious minorities and the atmosphere became very poisonous.

Progressive people and NGOs warned the European and national decision makers that something was going wrong. Unfortunately, nothing concrete was done because the mainstream parties were afraid to be seen by public as pro- anti-racist movements. The 2014 EU Parliament election has proven us right.

We are afraid that this tilt to the far right will effect the coming national elections in many EU countries and would not only hugely influence the mainstream parties but would also force these to make compromises on human rights, anti-racism and fight against Islamophobia. It is a sad day for democracy in Europe, because it is now firmly marching in the wrong direction.

The worst part of this sad development in Europe is that media and the mainstream political parties fell over each other to congratulate with a broad smile to racist and far right extremist parties on their election victory. No one in the progressive camp has the guts to admit that their passivity and non-visionary attitudes have contributed to these horrible results.

EMISCO really fears that the worst has still to come because far right racist parties now have an emboldened agenda as well as that the majority is silent or condoning tacitly this development. What the future holds is anyone’s guess?