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    France’s Electoral Abyss

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    Across the globe, democracy appears to be in a curious state. One of the main indicators of the health or pathology of democracy is the turnout in elections. Some might claim that the high turnout for the Biden-Trump face-off last year was a sign of health for US democracy.

    But the aftermath — marked by the “stop the steal” movement, a riotous occupation of the Capitol building and a continued spirit of revolt by a significant proportion of the citizenry as well as some prominent politicians — reveals that the spectacular numbers achieved by both candidates in the presidential election were a sign of high fever in the body politic rather than healthy democratic engagement. Many commentators noticed that voting against a particular candidate — Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020 — rather than voting for a preferred candidate may have been the determining factor in those two elections.

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    Iran’s presidential election on June 18 was notable for its low turnout. But that is what everyone expected. Iran’s centrally controlled electoral system, emanating from a strictly hierarchical governmental structure in which the power of the president is extremely restricted, produces elections that are more accurately referred to as “selections.”

    Though the two-party system in the US, sometimes referred to as a “duopoly,” leaves itself open to a similar critique, Western democracies still hold onto the idea that elections are expressions of vox populi, reflecting the will of the people. The general trend noted in recent years and in many democratic nations toward levels of abstention that often dip below 50% indicates that belief in democracy as a viable representative form of government may be far less solid than politicians and educators like to affirm.

    France set a record on June 20 for its combined departmental and regional elections, two distinct opportunities to vote on the same day in the same place. With nearly 33.3% showing up to vote, two-thirds of the electorate simply didn’t bother. The only worse showing was in a referendum in 2000, where only 30% of the electorate bothered to vote on shortening the length of a presidential term. On Sunday, the abstention figure was dramatic enough, in any case, for President Emmanuel Macron’s press secretary to term it “abyssale” (abysmal).

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Abyssale:

    A French adjective, usually translated in English as “abysmal,” but with a more literal meaning that serves to compare what is being described to a literal abyss, something most French people also consider to be an appropriate characterization of the level of competence and efficacy of the current French government and more generally of the political class

    Contextual Note

    Macron’s government has every reason to deem the result of this first round abysmal. Occurring less than a year before the 2022 presidential election in which Macron hopes to break the recent trend of one-term presidents (Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande), the media and the pollsters regarded these local elections primarily as an indicator of what to expect in next May’s contest. The majority party — itself a “bricolage,” an assemblage cobbled together after Macron’s freak parting of the Red Sea in 2017 — performed particularly badly, not even attaining the 10% required to remain in the running for the second round in five of the 13 regions. 

    Embed from Getty Images

    For most of his term, Macron has had low approval ratings. He has never earned the admiration of the masses that presidents of the Fifth Republic once managed to achieve, though there have been moments when the French were willing to respect his apparent competence. This was especially true after his initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are other moments, far more frequent, in which his popularity has not only faded, but Macron himself has become an object of public scorn. The yellow vest movement that raged in 2018 and 2019 is the closest thing in modern times to the kind of popular revolt immortalized during the French Revolution that more than two centuries ago, at least provisionally, abolished the monarchy.

    The commentators were even more surprised by the unexpectedly low score of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front. The media have been building up the idea that the second round of next year’s presidential election will inevitably be a remake of 2017, with a rising Le Pen challenging a fading Macron, a recipe for anguished suspense among those less tempted by fascism. Over the next week, and immediately following the second-round results, the pundits will begin drawing conclusions about what this tells us about who will actually be present in the second round next year and how they may fare. 

    The same pundits may even decide that it means nothing at all, given the rate of abstention. Prognostication has suddenly become a more difficult exercise. The manifest indifference of the electorate to everything that politicians believe is important does, however, tell us something about the state of democracy in France in what may be the waning years of the Fifth Republic. L’Obs, a left-center weekly, cites what it calls “fatigue démocratique,” a weariness with the very rituals of democracy.

    Historical Note

    The one dramatic indicator early commentators have highlighted is the apparent victory of the traditional right that had formerly been humiliated, finding itself in a no-man’s-land between Emmanuel Macron’s increasingly right-wing neoliberal center and Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic right-wing nationalism. Some see it as a sign of rejuvenation for the Gaullist tradition. The leader of Les Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, has been trying to resist Macron’s sedulous attempt to laminate the traditional right by adopting not only its policy themes, but also the demagogic Islamophobia of Le Pen’s party.

    President Macron, the self-declared centrist, was counting on using his status as incumbent to position himself in a way that would make him attractive to a full range of voters on the right, while assuming that in his contest with Le Pen in the second round, he would also pick up most of the voters on the left who would be afraid to abstain. This could be compared on some points with Joe Biden’s successful strategy in the 2020 US presidential election.

    Les Républicains appear as the real winners for the moment, if only because they have thrown a wrench into Macron’s 2022 strategy. There now may be a stronger likelihood that Bertrand will reach the second round opposite Macron, or possibly even opposite Le Pen. This is a cause of deep embarrassment, if not consternation. The combination of Le Pen’s low score and the Républicains’ success means that the traditional right — whose continuity dates back to Jacques Chirac and, ultimately, Charles De Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic — may have recovered its mojo that so suddenly faded in 2017 following the scandals of its leading candidate, Francois Fillon, and its most recent president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The latter was recently convicted for electoral fraud and has been sentenced to six months in prison.

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    The media hasn’t begun asking the real historical question that underlies this curious drama. The parties are one thing, but what about the French people? What do they think, and what do they want at this historical “inflection point,” to quote Biden? The yellow vest spirit is still floating in the air, maybe even permeating the atmosphere.

    The only candidate to have dared to talk about the eventuality of a Sixth Republic is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing populist candidate who fared honorably in the first round of the 2017 election at a moment when the once conquering Socialist Party imploded. The French media refuse to take Melenchon seriously, except as a foil to the legitimate pretenders. He has been cast in the role of the French Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, with a stronger intelligence, a more marked strain of rebelliousness against the establishment, but less charisma. Though he could never win a presidential election, he is still the strongest political personality on the left.

    With other crises brewing — a pandemic still dragging on, hints of a possible new global financial crisis, a deepening climate crisis, exacerbated European instability, complemented by shaky leadership in the US — the French may simply be wondering how voting for anyone promises to accomplish anything worthwhile.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Emmanuel Macron, France’s Islamophobe-in-Chief

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      France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, may be unique on today’s world stage in an era marked by the rise of populism. He came to power in 2017 as a centrist maverick. He had no established party, ideology or tradition to guide him or fight for his future agenda. And yet, in the midst of that uncertainty, the rules of France’s Fifth Republic’s presidential regime gave him a stable position to govern from for a full five years. It was an enviable position. The media could not accuse the centrist Macron of the political sin of the age: populist extremism.

      In 2016, following Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in the US, populist extremism appeared to have overtaken the English-speaking world. It was rapidly spreading across Europe and elsewhere. The most obvious populists are branded right-wing. They demonstrate a taste for nationalism, authoritarianism and majoritarianism. They include Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi and Viktor Orban. The left-wing populists appear as reformers and even revolutionaries, ready to upset the status quo and alienate any number of vested interests. They include Bernie Sanders, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

      In 2017, Macron miraculously parted the waters of the French political Red Sea when he managed to split the political spectrum down the middle, neutralizing the traditional ruling parties on the right and left. As a centrist, he claimed to be capable of embracing the diversity of the nation. During his electoral campaign, he reached out to Barack Obama, who publicly supported him. This bolstered the image of Macron as an open-minded, globalizing liberal. The former Rothschild banker also had his neoliberal credentials, affirming his identification with the mainstream values of the existing economic superstructure, the traditional enemy of both right-wing and left-wing populists.

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      So why is Macron now embracing Islamophobia, the policy most clearly associated with right-wing populism? Can it be that the centrist Macron, who has built the strongest part of his reputation on the anti-nationalistic idea of strengthening the European Union, is at heart a populist? 

      Writing in The Conversation, Charles Barthold and Marin Fougère describe what may be called the populist method of French president: “Macron crafts his speeches to cater to the emotions and demands of the public, be it through ramping up the rhetoric on climate change or pushing for further European Union integration — whether or not he actually has the policies to match his words.” He shares with pure populists a deep sense of electoral opportunism. He simply lacks the fanatically loyal base that they cultivate and seek to excite.

      With the trial of the authors of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in the news, Macron has decided to use his pulpit to instruct the nation about the largely discredited thesis Samuel Huntington famously launched in 1993: the clash of civilizations. In what sounds like a call to arms, Macron says “we must attack radical Islamism.” He offers this deliberately vague but hugely provocative historical judgment: “Islam is a religion experiencing a crisis today, everywhere in the world.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Experiencing a crisis:

      The usual diagnosis made by those undergoing a crisis against those whom they seek to use as a scapegoat to explain their own crisis.

      Contextual Note

      Macron attempts to clarify the nature of the crisis when he explains that it concerns “tensions between fundamentalisms.” What does he mean? Is he referring to the rivalry between Sunnis and Shia? Are the “religious and political projects” he mentions those of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran? He never clarifies this. His aim is less to elucidate historical trends than to exploit a sense of fear.

      The full text of Macron’s speech reveals his intentions. He introduces his remarks on the crisis of Islam by proudly pointing to his own “humility.” He admits he is not a specialist. In other words, what he is about to say has no scientific authority. Instead, he generously offers “to share his understanding of things as he sees them.” After all, who needs experts when everyone knows that what counts are the subjective feelings of a leader? The method resembles Donald Trump’s, who routinely excoriates experts as frauds. The gentler and subtler Macron uses the prestige of his office to simply leave the experts on the sidelines.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Macron follows this up with a laughably incoherent allusion to a nation he calls “our friend, Tunisia.” He explains that “Thirty years ago, the situation was radically different in the application of this religion, the way of living it, and the tensions that we live in our society are present in this one which is undoubtedly one of the most educated, developed in the region.” Is he more surprised by the fact that some things change over time or that some educated people may not think and act in the same way he does? Both can be attributed to a special form of French, and Macronian, hubris.

      Macron resorts to the method of sounding logical when he announces: “There is therefore a crisis of Islam.” “Therefore” implies that the evidence he has presented concerning Tunisia is conclusive. The debate is over. He has made his case. That enables him to lament a “reinvented jihad” which he oddly defines as “the destruction of the other.” He then describes the litany of horrors routinely cited by Islamophobes across the globe. He even obeys the command enjoined by hosts of Fox News or Bill Maher to “say the words” and identify the evil: “We must name it.” Naming is blaming, and clearly Islam is to blame, a message he expects the non-Muslim voting majority of France to appreciate.

      Macron clearly believes Islamophobia is a winning strategy. But France, unlike the United States, is a nation that also appreciates intellectual nuance. And so the president goes on to admit, in a way that Trump would never be tempted to do, that his nation bears some of the blame for today’s evils by allowing ghettoes to be created and failing to realize mixité, a French word for integration. He even refers to the failure of France to come to terms with the trauma of its colonial past, while at the same time demonstrating his own obvious failure to do so.  

      Historical Note

      Macron’s party, La République en Marche! (Republic on the Move, or EM!), is an example of what the French call bricolage, meaning basically cobbling things together and hoping they work. The fact that his party is still more or less intact says less about Macron’s political skills than it does about the sclerosis of the Fifth Republic’s political institutions and the dominant, if not regal role of the president.

      From the start, EM! was a dog’s dinner. Now it is at risk of spilling out of the bowl at any moment. That may explain why Macron occasionally feels the need for a populist fix, and Islamophobia is the only reliable fix for a centrist. For decades the Le Pens, both father and daughter, have deftly exploited the growing anti-immigrant sentiment of the working class. Thanks to that strategy, Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front) managed to capture what was once the Communist Party’s working-class constituency after it had fallen into irrelevance.

      The difference between Macron’s electorally convenient Islamophobia and Marine Le Pen’s becomes clear in his discourse. He wants Muslims to integrate, to become ordinary French people, whereas Le Pen — like Trump in reference to certain young, darker-skinned legislators — simply wants them to “go home.” Presumably, Macron and Le Pen would be satisfied if the Muslims simply stayed out of sight. But that would pose another problem. It would remove the convenient distraction of blaming another culture for the failures of one’s own.  

      France and other European nations share with the United States an underlying problem rooted in their history. Just as the US has never managed to come to grips with its slaveholding past, former European colonial empires have never worked out how to deal not just with their own colonial history. To some extent, this reflects and incapacity to deal with history itself, whose reality they prefer to deny. This is especially true of France, a nation that, like the US, believes its own political culture of human rights and the championing of freedom represents universal norms. Both the French and the Americans should ask themselves this question: Who is experiencing the deepest crisis today? The answer should be obvious.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Will 2020 Be Another Victory Year for Trump and Brexit?

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      In early 2017, Europe’s far-right parliamentary bloc met in Koblenz, Germany, to plot its political future. The meeting of the bloc’s leaders — which included Marine le Pen from France, Matteo Salvini from Italy and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands — took place shortly after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. The group was […] More