Motley crew of hate-mongers who lead the rightist fringe

ITALY: Alessandra Mussolini is the granddaughter of Italy's wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini, the man credited with making…

ITALY:Alessandra Mussolini is the granddaughter of Italy's wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini, the man credited with making fascism a force to be reckoned with in Italy. Alessandra reveres Benito. In 1992, she was elected to Italy's parliament as a member of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano.

After falling out with colleagues in 2003 she founded a new party of the extreme right, Libertà di Azione (Freedom of Action, now called Social Action), which united with other neo-fascist movements and gave rise to the electoral cartel Alternativa Sociale (Social Alternative). At the European elections of 2004, this coalition obtained 1.2 per cent of the vote, permitting Alessandra to be elected to the European parliament.

Apart from appearing in the Italian edition of Playboy magazine. Allesandra is notorious for her homophobic views. In 2006 she responded to criticism by a trans-gender Italian with the quip: "Meglio fascista che frocio," meaning: "It is better to be a fascist than a faggot."

Bruno Gollnisch is a French academic and politician and general delegate (second-ranking executive) of the National Front far-right party. He met National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen while studying at Nanterre university.

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On October 11th, 2004 he declared: "I do not question the existence of concentration camps, but historians could discuss the number of deaths. As to the existence of gas chambers, it is up to historians to say their mind . . ." His comments provoked an instantaneous scandal.

The president of the university asked the minister of national education to suspend Gollnisch, and announced the opening of a disciplinary procedure against him.

However, when asked in court last November whether "the organised extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime . . . constitutes an undeniable crime against humanity, and that it has been carried out notably by using gas chamber in extermination camps," he replied "absolutely".

Andreas Mölzer is an Austrian politician who was expelled in 2005 from the far right Austrian Freedom Party because of continued criticism of its leader, Jörg Haider. After a split in the party, he was readmitted in the same year.

In Austria, Mölzer is known as a right-wing publicist of the old pan-German school. He wrote a column for the Neue Kronen Zeitung, the leading Austrian tabloid, for several years.

He has repeatedly highlighted immigration issues. In February 1992 he took part in a meeting of the Freiheitlicher Akademikerverband (an association of academics in the perimeter of the Freedom Party) on the topic National Identity and Multicultural Society.

The newspaper Der Standard reported: "Mölzer is afraid rather that the German nation as a whole in Germany and Austria is confronted by an ethnic exchange of population 'for the first time in its thousands of years of history'. Until now the 'biological power of the Germans' would have been strong enough 'in order to remain an assimilating factor'. But now Mölzer . . . notices an 'overaged and weak national body facing dynamic immigrants'.

"Hence there could not be taken [ into Austria] an 'amorphous mass'; the people should 'already be screened abroad'. Otherwise an 'ethnic exchange of population' could take place."

Corneliu Vadim Tudor is leader of the Greater Romania Party (Partidul România Mare), and is a writer and journalist. An essentially populist political figure, he is known for his strongly nationalist and xenophobic views, the theatrics which often accompany his rhetoric, and his reliance on the denunciations of political opponents (so far, a tactic which several civil lawsuits have ruled slanderous).

He is a disciple of the writer Eugen Barbu (who was an unofficial trusted adviser of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu). Tudor was also energetic in his praise (in both prose and poetry) of the dictator, executed on Christmas Day 1989 along with his wife, Elena.

In 1991, Tudor and Barbu founded the Greater Romania Party, the platform of which Time magazine described as "a crude mixture of anti-Semitism, racism and nostalgia for the good old days of communism".

To this, one ought to add ultra-nationalism, anti-Magyarism (anti-all things Hungarian), anti-Roma sentiment, and homophobia.