Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 19 – Anti-Semitic
attitudes do not prevent post-Soviet politicians from making careers given that
such attitudes there can be said to be part of the cultural “code,” but they
seldom help those who have them to win elections and are unlikely to do so
except at times of extreme crisis, according to an expert at the Euro-Asian
Jewish Congress.
In a discussion of the electoral
practice of national-radicals in the former Soviet space, Vyacheslav Likhachev addresses
three questions: how successful have been those parties which have tried to use
anti-Semitism to win elections, how have they used it or not in order to win
votes, and to what extent have parties that are not openly anti-Semitic in
their programs tried to exploit prejudices (urokiistorii.ru/history/soc/51956).
Likhachev
begins by observing that “post-Soviet society is quite closed and still
sufficiently Soviet” that xenophobic attitudes remain widespread. But polls show that “anti-Semitism is not the
most important form of xenophobia.” Hatreds of immigrants and other minorities
are far more rampant.
But
nevertheless, he continues, anti-Semitism is to a certain degree more important
than newer, more obvious, and more widespread forms of xenophobia because it is
very deeply rooted in the culture in various social niches such as the milieu
around the church or, with regard the Russian situation, in certain Muslim
communities.”
In short, Likhachev continues,
anti-Semitism is “art of the common cultural code.” Consequently, it is not
surprising that ethnic or religious fundamentalist political forces “frequently
include [it] as a component of their ideology and this is reflected in their
propaganda including during elections.”
What is striking, the expert says,
is that “never and nowhere on the post-Soviet space (with rare exceptions each
of which is better explained by a combination of other factors) has
anti-Semitism been successful as an electoral strategy.” And those “more or less successful right
radicals have not exploited anti-Semitism as a major component of their
campaigns.”
Even parties whose leaders are
openly anti-Semitic themselves generally have sought to “carefully distance
themselves from anti-Semitism” during election campaigns rather than rely on it
to win them.
A clear example of this, Ligachev
says, is Oleg Tyagnibok, the leader of the Svoboda Party in Ukraine. Earlier he was excluded from Viktor
Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine fraction because of his anti-Semitic remarks. As a
result, Tyagnibok drew the following conclusion: “anti-Semitism does not block
a political career but one cannot build a political career on it.”
In the Russian Federation and
Ukraine, he adds, “those political leaders and groups who tried to build their
electoral strategy on anti-Semitic slogans suffered disasters.” One party in
Ukraine, for example, used money from the Arab world to promote an anti-Semitic
program but then won less than one percent of the vote in parliamentary
elections.
In contrast, parties which had
electoral success “either have laid stress on anti-Semitism or have even
attempted to downplay their anti-Semitism during the elections,” even if it is
manifested on other occasions. And, Ligachev says, “this serves as one of the factors
which has guaranteed them success.”
But there can be exceptions and
these are inevitably very troubling, he continues. In Kyrgyzstan, which provides an example of
the phenomenon of “’anti-Semitism without Jews,’” the revolution which
overthrew Bakiyev in 2010 featured anti-Semitic slogans, apparently because
Bakiyev’s son had actively cooperated with Israeli businesses.
In the elections that followed the
revolution, Ligachev notes, “many political forces, including those which
positioned themselves on the whole as liberal (for example, the fraction of
Rosa Otunbayeva, who attempted to form a pro-European image of Kyrgyzstan and
her own political force) used anti-Semitism” as a mobilizing force.
Because of the specific history in
that Central Asian republic -- a revolution followed quickly by elections – anti-Semitism
“did not become an obstacle for the successful conduct of electoral campaigns,”
a warning that however marginal anti-Semitism has been in elections in the
post-Soviet states up to now, it could become far more dangerous in the future.
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