As Europe faces up to its old demons of financial breakdown and job
losses, a wind from the past is blowing through the continent. The
politics of moderate center-right and left-liberal democracy that took
power after 1945 are giving way to a new old populism. The extravagant
rhetoric of the demagogic left and right is gaining ground, and the
most obvious manifestation is the return of anti-Semitism as an
organizing ideology.

Consider the numbers: according to a recent Pew survey, the percentage
of Germans who hold unfavorable views of Jews has climbed from 20
percent in 2004 to 25 percent today. In France, which has the largest
number of Jews of any European nation, 20 percent of people view Jews
unfavorably—up from 11 percent four years ago. In Spain, the figures
are even more striking: negative views of Jews climbed from 21 percent
in 2005 to nearly one in two this year. In Britain, where the numbers
have remained around 9 percent for some time, anecdotal evidence of
increased animosity abounds: youngsters returning from the Jewish Free
School in middle-class North London are now frightened to go home on
public buses on account of anti-Jewish attacks. Their parents hire
private buses, as the London police seem unable to staunch
anti-Semitic assaults on their children. In Manchester, a Jewish
cemetery had to have a Nazi swastika hurriedly cleaned off its walls
before a VIP party arrived.

Anti-Semitism also lies at the heart of the ideology of the British
National Party, the fastest-growing political party in Britain.
Already, the extreme rightist party has won a seat on the London
Assembly, and in local elections this year the BNP doubled its number
of local councilors. The party now avoids public statements about Jews
and even tries to keep its Islamophobia under control. Yet the only
serious publications by BNP leader Nick Griffin are in the mainstream
of traditional anti-Semitic tropes. In his short book "Who are the
Mindbenders?" Griffin listed British Jews who he said were the secret
controllers of the British media, accused Jewish immigrants of
changing their names to disguise their origins and called the facts of
the Holocaust gas chambers "unscientific nonsense."

Alongside the Jew-hating BNP are Britain's anti-Semitic Islamist
ideologues. Gordon Brown—Europe's strongest supporter of Israel—and
his Labour government have done more than any other to promote British
Muslims as government ministers, as M.P.s and peers, and Downing
Street celebrates Muslim festivals and achievements in a manner that
would amaze previous occupants of the building. Meantime, Britain, as
much under Labour as under Conservative governments, has tolerated the
growth of fundamentalist Islamism rooted in classic texts denouncing
Jews. It took the London tube bombings of July 2005 to lift the veil
off the eyes of a political establishment that had turned away from
the growth of ideological extremism with its anti-Semitic focus.

The Pew survey on public opinion shows a particularly troubling trend
in Spain—a country where all Jews were expelled in 1492 and synagogues
are historic monuments. The massive influx of immigrant workers from
North Africa, combined with the anti-Israel language of Spain's
liberal-left intellectual and media elites, may explain the puzzle of
anti-Semitism in a nation with few Jews. Poland under communist rule
sanctioned anti-Semitic politics even after most Polish Jews had been
exterminated. Spain's indulgence of Islamism may be creating the same
phenomenon of anti-Jewish feelings in a country without Jews.

Looking east, it was staggering—but perhaps should not have been
surprising—to see the faces of this new populism earlier this year,
when thousands of Austrians turned out for the funeral of Jörg Haider,
the right-wing extremist who presented himself as an Austrian patriot
but hardly bothered to hide his anti-Jewish views. "There is no
greater insult to a Germanic politician than to be accused of having
Jewish blood," Haider proclaimed. Similarly, anti-Jewish politics
resonate in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. All three countries sent
politicians to the European Parliament to set up a far-right grouping
alongside anti-Jewish rightists from France and Italy. In Poland, the
percentage of those with unfavorable opinions about Jews is up from 27
percent in 2004 to 36 percent today, and throughout this part of
Europe the target is now Israel and its support in America, and the
preferred vocabulary is of "Zionists" and the "lobby" rather than
"Jews" or "conspiracy." It blends with a wider xenophobia.

As jobs are lost and welfare becomes meaner and leaner, the politics
of blaming the outsider can only grow. The hard-won European politics
of breaking down frontiers and trying to legislate for tolerance will
get harder to defend, still less to promote. European populism and the
anti-EU nationalism of both the right and the left is now the politics
to watch. As America celebrates its first nonwhite president and the
hope of a new politics, Europe may be beginning to revisit its past.

MacShane is a Labour M.P. and was Britain's Europe minister. His book
"Globalising Hatred: the New Antisemitism" has just been published.