Good essay. I'm glad Traverso mentions Pym Fortuyn whose openly gay identity appeared to attract rather than repel supporters of his xenophobic platform. And towards the end of his career, Austria's Jörg Haider seemed to be rather coyly playing with a publicly gay persona as well. Traverso mentions the significance of the French far right entrusting its leadership to a woman. And Marine Le Pen, in the RT interview I linked to earlier, makes a great deal of her earlier job as a defender of immigrants and gives her supporters permission to join the battle against immigration "without hating immigrants". Le Pen also aligns her struggle to that of the uprisings in Egypt; of the people against the oligarchical elites. Also in the RT interview, Le Pen is asked about Sarkozy appropriating her anti-immigrant positions. And Traverso mentions Berlusconi's campaign against the Rom people as an example of the xenophobic platform of marginalized groups like the National Front being appropriated by allegedly centrist governments. The only thing I think the article is weak on is the way it skirts the phenomenon of how diverse the borrowings of the political past are in these new xenophobic political configurations... they appear to be borrowed from both the left and right.
fm