29/04/2022

Not Out of the Woods

Author

Professor at Princeton University

On Sunday, April 24, French voters returned President Emmanuel Macron to office by a decisive margin. Macron’s rival, the populist Marine Le Pen, acknowledged defeat. There were protests in the streets but no assault on the Palais Bourbon or the Élysée Palace. This is what a peaceful transition of power looks like, and Americans, with raw memories of January 6, 2021, might feel a pang of envy.

But democracy has not yet made it home safe, not in France and not elsewhere. The populist surge of recent decades, no doubt, has experienced a setback - more than one, in fact. Le Pen’s defeat was preceded earlier this month by that of Janez Janša, a Trump wannabee, in Slovenia. On the other side of the ledger, however, Viktor Orbán, a self-styled partisan of "illiberal democracy," has just won a new mandate. Russia’s military has encountered unanticipated reversals in the Ukraine War, but Vladimir Putin himself remains in firm control at the Kremlin. And in the US, Republicans, like Representative Liz Cheney, who do not toe the Trump line have found themselves cast into the outer darkness. For democracy, the political sky remains threatening.

The same can be said for France. In the first round of this year’s presidential elections, anti-system candidates won a majority of the votes cast. On the Right, Le Pen garnered 23% of the overall tally, and Éric Zemmour 7%. On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon did better than expected, coming in at 22% just a skosh behind Le Pen. It is true that in the second round Macron won hands down. But from a long-term perspective, it is Le Pen’s result that is most striking. In 2002, Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, squared off against Jacques Chirac in that year’s presidential contest. He managed to earn a mere 18% of the vote. In 2017, as again last April, Marine Le Pen was beaten by Macron. Then, she managed to win a mere one third of the ballots cast. Now, however, she has boosted her results to almost 42%. The upward curve of the populist vote is ominous. All the more so given that votes for Macron were not always enthusiastic ones. Add in an abstention rate that has edged up to 28% (not bad by American standards but not encouraging by French ones either), and the general picture looks yet gloomier. A swath of the French electorate would rather sit on its hands than stand up for the Republic. For the time being then, the electoral prospects of the populist Right remain undimmed. Le Pen is not going away because her voters, so numerous along the Mediterranean coast and its hinterlands, as well as in the rust-belt departments of the Nord, are not going away either.

The upward curve of the populist vote is ominous. All the more so given that votes for Macron were not always enthusiastic ones.

In days gone by, when a resurgent Right threatened the Republic, regime loyalists rallied. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Government of Republican Defense was formed to tamp down the explosion of xenophobic nationalism sparked by the Dreyfus Affair. It was led by a centrist, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, but included ministers from all pro-regime forces, including one socialist, a first in France’s history.

On February 6, 1934, in the wake of a corruption scandal implicating well-connected political insiders, a far right crowd besieged the Palais Bourbon, leading to several deaths. Parties of the Center and Left-Radicals, Socialists, and Communists-linked arms in response, forming a coalition, the Popular Front, which contested the elections of 1936 and won. But what parties will rally to the Republic’s side today?

Macron’s, La République en marche, is a simulacrum of a party, built more around an individual than a set of principles. The Parti socialiste and Les Républicains are the real thing by mainstream party standards, but currently have a weakened presence at the national level. Together, in the first round of the presidential elections, they polled a dismal 7% of the vote. What a comedown from 1995, when mainstream parties garnered more than 60% of the first-round tally. France’s party system is in disarray, and there is reason to worry about its capacity to sustain a regime under pressure.

At the moment, it is not parties that sit astride public life but strong personalities: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, and Macron. Mélenchon advocates convening a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution. Le Pen and Zemmour harbor dreams of a Trumpified nation, purified of undesirable elements and so made great again. Macron alone stands with the Fifth Republic and the Rights of Man, and even he has wavered, pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment during the presidential campaign in order to woo right-wing voters. Not that such efforts made him any better liked. For the Left, he remains the "president of the rich," for the Right, in Le Pen’s words, a man of "unbounded arrogance." There is no doubt of Macron’s intelligence and determination, but he does not have a strong party apparatus nor an electoral coalition to back him up, let alone a well of popular affection to draw on.

None of this might matter that much, so long as public disaffection confined itself to protest voting or abstentionism. But what if it did turn violent? In 2005, Paris’ northeast suburbs were the scene of riots and car burnings, triggered by the deaths of two teens, electrocuted while fleeing a police chase. A proposed gas-tax hike in 2018 set off months of protests, the so-called Yellow Vest movement. Some protests took the form of sociable gatherings at provincial roundabouts, but others spilled into window-smashing and vandalism.

Today, elements of the French public, young people above all, are in a combustible mood.

Today, elements of the French public, young people above all, are in a combustible mood. Macron’s re-election stirred the embers, but the outbursts it provoked were sporadic. Still, so long as inflation continues to eat away at people’s ability to make ends meet and so long as the Covid epidemic continues to rattle everyone’s peace of mind, the public climate will remain unsettled, with a potential to turn stormy in the event of some unforeseen trigger event.

There are many reasons, however, to push back against such gloom-and-doom prognostications. For starters, France’s party system is not as enfeebled as all that. PS and LR candidates did not fare well in the presidential elections, but the parties remain a meaningful presence at the municipal, communal, and regional levels. This is consequential in two respects. Forceful national leaders are in short supply for the time being, but local party organizations may yet breed a future crop able to contend with the likes of a Le Pen or Mélenchon. In the short term, moreover, while the mainstream parties of old did not perform well in the presidential campaign, they will surely do better in the legislative elections scheduled for this June.

Forceful national leaders are in short supply for the time being, but local party organizations may yet breed a future crop able to contend with the likes of a Le Pen or Mélenchon.

On the matter of leadership, for all Macron’s shortcomings, he has pulled off back-to-back presidential victories, a feat unprecedented since Jacques Chirac was re-elected president twenty years ago. Le Pen, by contrast, has gone down to defeat three times in a row, doing better on each outing, but still losing. Zemmour has proven himself a niche candidate at best. Mélenchon is a far more formidable figure, but at 70, he no longer has the freshness of youth. His party, La France insoumise, is not any more structured than Macron’s. And anyhow, Mélenchon has announced he will not run again (not that such declarations are to be taken at face value). Yet the point still remains: however unloved Macron may be, he stands head and shoulders above the rest of the political pack.

As for political violence, France seems a good deal less vulnerable than the United States. On January 6, 2021, elements of the Trump administration, working in tandem with far-right paramilitary groups, mounted a pressure campaign on Congress that turned murderous, whether by design or not. France, for its part, has its share of casseurs, but they are nowhere near as organized as the militia groups that have proliferated in the US. Nor is there anyone in France’s governing class, even on the fringes, who is trying to stoke up the street-brawling element in pursuit of political advantage. To this extent, cold comfort as it may be, the situation in France is more stable than it is in America.

And it may stabilize further, depending on how events, both near and short-term, play out. In the near term, legislative elections are upcoming. It is not likely that a hostile majority will emerge, but it is also not clear what kind of governing coalition Macron will be able to patch together, one that will allow him to pursue a constructive agenda or one that will slow him down. "Constructive agenda" is, of course, an ambiguous phrase. Even if Macron is not constrained by an uncooperative parliament, he has to decide which way to tack, whether toward the anti-immigrant Right or toward an ecologically-minded Left still attached to welfare-state institutions and the benefits they afford a hurting public. Clamping down on immigrants will not require digging deep into the public coffers, but forward-looking environmental policies and welfare-state preservation will. To pursue the latter course, Macron will need a more favorable economic conjuncture with scaled-down inflation, and it would make a positive difference if the benefits of growth were distributed to favor not just the well-to-do but people in general. Wise policy can make a difference on this score but just up to a point. In the long term, France, like the United States, is not yet out of the woods.

Copyright: Francois Mori / POOL / AFP

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Not Out of the Woods