In a frightening yet unsurprising turn of events, two neo-Nazi parties, Germany’s National Democratic Party and Greece’s Golden Dawn, gained enough votes in Europe’s parliamentary elections this week to take seats.  Recent changes in Germany’s election regulations, eliminating minimum thresholds, would allow the NPD to claim one of Germany’s 96 seats in the EU parliament, while Golden Dawn, with over 9 percent of the vote in Greece, would take 3.  There are 751 seats in the parliament, all told.

German Jews expressed immediate outrage over the results.  Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in a statement, “Right-wing MPs are now coming into the European Parliament from all over Europe in order to implement their anti-European and extremist course.”

“Democratic parties are now called on to curb this way of thinking and to defend and maintain European values,” he added.  He referred to the senseless shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, saying the “specter of anti-Semitism” had become a “brutal reality.”

“Such a thing can never be accepted and this message should be the very first which emanates from the new European Parliament,” Graumann said.

The European Jewish Congress blamed European “passivity” for the current climate of anti-Semitism and the rise of far-right parties across the continent.

“The alarming successes of extremist parties in these elections is the result of the passivity of European leaders and governments to deal with real issues facing European citizens,” EJC President Moshe Kantor, who heads the council of European Jewish leaders, said at a Monday meeting with senior Belgian politicians in the wake of the deadly Brussels shooting.

“What better example is there of the lack of security, the absence of tolerance and the climate of fear in our European cities than this attack on Jews in the capital of Europe?” Kantor said.

The NPD is self-described as “national socialist”, and efforts have been made in Germany to ban the party for its openly xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes.  Golden Dawn’s founder, Nikos Michaloliakos, is an admirer of Adolf Hitler who claimed in 2012 that the Nazis were not responsible for the Holocaust.  Six of its parliament members, including Michaloliakos, were detained that same year by police on charges of belonging to a criminal organisation after the killing of an anti-fascist musician.  One is still in prison.

In addition to these two parties, in France, the far-right National Front party scored 25 percent of the vote, and Austria’s Freedom Party achieved similar success.  Britain’s UK Independence Party, which promotes withdrawal from the European Union, won 27.5 percent of the national vote.  Hungary, too, was set to give seats to its far-right.

“To protect the values of our modern unified Europe we need European leaders to bolster existing legislation against hate, law enforcement agencies to strengthen enforcement and educators to teach against hate, intolerance and xenophobia to the next generation,” Kantor said.

“The European Union is supposed to be the bulwark against the rise of racism and intolerance but it has become the catalyst for the justification of its citizens to vote for extremists and racists,” he lamented.

“There is insecurity and there are real concerns over national identity. The Jewish community knows very well about immigration and we know about how minorities integrate into societies. These are real concerns, as much for minority communities as for indigenous citizens. If we want to combat anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance, we must address these issues,” Kantor concluded.

Europe has been experiencing a significant intensification in anti-Semitism.  Attacks on Jews are reported frequently, and an EU survey showed that one quarter of it Jewish population are afraid to wear identifying symbols.  Two recently-released studies on anti-Semitism worldwide, one by Tel Aviv University and the other by the Anti-Defamation League, have highlighted worrisome trends.  The TAU report showed an overall increase in the number of anti-Semitic attacks in recent years, while the ADL’s Global 100 survey indicated that over one quarter of the world’s population harbors anti-Semitic beliefs and attitudes.