Briefing | The reaction across Europe

Solidarity, for now

A backlash against European Muslims would play into the hands of the killers.

Mrs Merkel shows solidarity
|AMSTERDAM, BERLIN AND COPENHAGEN

“ISLAM is part of Germany.” When Christian Wulff, then president of Germany, voiced that sentiment in 2010 it was controversial. The fact that the Pegida movement has brought people on to the streets every Monday for the past three months to protest against the “Islamisation” of Germany shows that it is far from universally accepted. But when Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, repeated the claim at a rally on January 11th, it felt as though she was expressing the spirit of the nation in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris. “I am the chancellor of all Germans,” Mrs Merkel went on, clearly including her 4m Muslim compatriots.

The responses of most European leaders to the Paris attacks resembled that of Mrs Merkel. Yet anxiety over terrorism has risen across the continent. As the glow of righteousness dissipates, right-wing populists and others will have a chance to exploit both that specific worry and a more general unease about Muslims which fears of terror serve to strengthen. Any success they have will fit perfectly into the agenda of the sort of people who plan murders like those in Paris. Nothing serves the jihadist cause as well as stoking up distrust of their co-religionists.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the increasingly popular UK Independence Party, channelled such concerns when he talked of a “fifth column” in the wake of the Paris attacks. Unlike some European parties of the far- and populist-right, UKIP has not been noted for its stance on Islam. The targets of its nativist ire have tended to be immigrants from eastern Europe, along with the idea of Britain being part of the European Union. But the vision of Britain it likes to promulgate harks back to a time when the country was home to far fewer Muslims. That taps into the concerns of a growing number of voters; the proportion of Britons who said that the country would lose its identity if more Muslims moved in rose from 48% in 2003 to 62% in 2013.

By way of contrast, the Dutch populist, Geert Wilders, and his Party for Freedom (PVV) are overtly anti-Islamic, having brought anti-Muslim xenophobia into mainstream politics a decade ago. The response to the Paris attacks in the Netherlands, though, has not been quite what the party’s lead in the opinion polls might suggest. In 2004, when Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker and provocateur, was murdered in an attack that the massacre at Charlie Hebdo brings to mind, the reaction was a divisive backlash against Islam that helped launch Mr Wilders’s career. This time was different: Muslims and non-Muslims alike turned out for demonstrations of solidarity. Even Mr Wilders was comparatively conciliatory; he warned people against attacking mosques, saying they should be “safe places”.

The quiet on the Dutch right, however, is unlikely to last, says Chris Aalberts, an expert on the PVV. In the longer term Mr Wilders is well placed to exploit renewed popular anxiety about Muslim radicalism. Provincial elections are due in March, and the PVV could raise its share of the vote as high as 20%.

Cartoons and conspiracies

In Denmark, too, the Charlie Hebdo attack had a precedent in the fierce conflict over caricatures of Muhammad published by Jyllands-Posten, a newspaper, in 2005. Interestingly, this time the Danish political establishment uniformly affirmed the need to protect free expression, but Jyllands-Posten itself declined to reprint Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, citing security risks. Denmark has one of Europe’s strongest anti-Muslim parties, the Danish People’s Party, which won the European Parliament elections last May with 26% of the vote. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks one of its MPs called for closing a mosque he accused of radicalism.

Even in countries with less history of organised anti-Islamic political action the fault lines are showing. Italy’s 1.5m Muslims are more diverse and often better integrated than those elsewhere, with many hailing from Albania rather than north Africa, and the country’s political culture has more room for religiosity. Yet the new leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, Matteo Salvini, used the attacks to denounce Islam in general as “dangerous” and “not a religion like the others” at a protest against the building of a mosque outside Milan.

And then there is Germany. January 12th saw Pegida get its biggest turnout yet, and a majority of Germans perceive Islam as a “threat”, according to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a think-tank. Some leaders of the new populist Alternative for Germany party have flirted with Pegida’s agenda, which appeals most to the old and in regions where hardly any Muslims live. But others prefer to stick to the party’s original anti-euro message, leaving Germany without a political voice for anti-Islamic feelings. And this week was not the first when marchers backing an open society outnumbered Pegida’s—merely the most notable.

One European country, meanwhile, may have discovered a way to avoid painful debates over Islam and integration. In Russia the state-controlled tabloid press is telling its readers the Charlie Hebdo attack was a false-flag operation by the CIA.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Solidarity, for now"

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