[A-List] Le Pen victory: Hugo Young verdict

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Analysis from an impeccably establishment perspective in the UK...


French alarm rings bells for Europe's body politic

Democratic politicians must share the blame for Le Pen's triumph

Hugo Young
Tuesday April 23, 2002
The Guardian

If the first British republic were modelled on the fifth French
republic, the electoral picture might look like this. The voting system
would encourage the same fragmentation of politics. As well as Lab, Con
and LD, we'd list the Greens, the BNP, the SWP, doubtless Real Labour,
very possibly the old CP and, for sure, several regional parties. Five
hundred official signatures would be enough to get a party on the
ballot, and less than 20% of the vote would probably suffice to
guarantee a place in the run-off. The political structure that has kept
extremism at bay would be smashed. So the French election is a caution
to both republicans and electoral reformers. Two lost causes anyway, but
now blown over the horizon by a result that, as Liberation wrote
yesterday, reduces France to a fight between the Superliar and the
Superfascist.

The system does offer the beginnings of an alibi for what happened.
Taken together the votes of the left can be made to add up to 44%. In a
two-man contest the socialist, Lionel Jospin, might even have won. You
can put the fiasco down to the congenital inability of the left to unify
in dangerous circumstances. On this analysis, there's no great political
crisis, just the political system of the fifth republic that needs to be
fixed. Moreover, isn't Jacques Chirac now certain to win anyway? Won't
the forces of democracy bury their mutual hatreds to dig a deeper grave
for the super-enemy of democracy, Jean-Marie Le Pen? So all is surely
well?

This would be a grand illusion, and hardly any French democrat now
believes it. Le Pen is the first man of the far right to get within
spitting distance of power in a major EU country. Two can play at adding
up the votes, and Le Pen's along with those of his fellow fascist Bruno
Mégreatly exceeded what Chirac got. Though Jospin's defeat produces a
crisis for the left, Le Pen's victory registers an even bigger crisis
for democratic politics in the round. A deep pattern of alienation from
democracy is visible, of which France now offers the most shattering
example, but from which not even calm, secure, Blairite Britain is
exempt.

Certainly there's a crisis on the left. Towards the end of the 1990s,
most EU countries were run by social democrats, and now most of them are
not. Italy, Spain, Austria, Denmark and Portugal have swung to the
right. It remains to be seen what happens to Gerhard Schröder in the
autumn. Meanwhile, continental socialists confront the sometimes painful
irony that the British Labour government, only now reverting to a
recognisably social democratic programme, stands almost alone as a
leftist party of unchallengeable power.

What matters about this rightward shift, however, is not its direction
but its dependence in several cases on the far right. Centrist rightism
is not much different from centrist leftism, as we see from the kinship
between Blair and the Aznar government in Madrid. But the fascist
tendency is eating its way into corners of real power, and the French
experience suggests two main reasons for this frightening development,
one particular and one general.

The particular is perceived defects in "security", which is alternately
a euphemism for crime and immigration, and often both. This was what Le
Pen relentlessly played to, with the aid of Chirac who made it a main
line of attack on Jospin, which Jospin in the end had to try to match.
In this degeneration, it was the man with the simplest answers who
scored the best, in a shameful display for which the democrats were
almost as much to blame as the anti-democrat. But one cannot deny the
potency of the attack on foreigners, and the quest thereby for some
protection of "identity", especially given the presence of the second,
more general factor: wholesale disaffection from the political system.

In France this can be measured. As many as 40% of those who voted, about
60% of the electorate, rejected the only two parties that could form a
government, Chirac's and Jospin's. This was double the figure at the
1988 and 1995 elections, a pretty staggering decline, but perhaps little
more so than the fall in turnout at last year's British election from 71
to 59%. Protest was delivered in one case by impossibilist extremism, in
the other by withdrawal, but each was a way of registering disgust at
what mainline politics now apparently offers.

The roots of this lie deeper than a government's performance. Jospin had
a decent record as prime minister, running a not unsuccessful economy,
bringing in the 35-hour week, presiding, Brown-like, over more quiet
anti-socialist reform than he liked to admit. But governments these days
face anomie, impatience, generalised discontent, which are less amenable
than they once were to the recompense of doctrinal zeal, for the simple
reason that it does not exist. Governments, easily charged with failure,
lack any vision to make up for it. Most elections, like this one, are
full of languor and anxious imitation, where any semblance of vision is
replaced by meretricious showboating, of the kind for which Jospin had
no talent.

It's easier to see the wrong answer to this than the right one. Le Pen's
answer is intolerable, and should not be graced for even a second with
the knowing, if regretful, observation that he strikes a chord. He
offers the pretence that there's an easy answer to the security problem,
and a commanding alternative to the complexities in which ordinary
leaders seem to be trapped. On both counts his programme is as vicious
as it is misleading. There are no simple solutions to anything in these
globalised days. The lure of the quasi-fascist answer, whether in France
or Italy, deserves to be met with only one response: the re-energising
of democratic politics, especially on the only wing that can be relied
on to reject quasi-fascist solutions, which is to say the left.

The body politic laid bare by Le Pen's success is Europe-wide. European,
not just French, values are put in question; Europe as well as France
faces the challenge of reaffirming progressive democratic answers to the
problems of the age, including migration and social integration.
Europe's credibility in the eyes of the world is on the line. Europe as
well as France stands in desperate need of reconnecting political vigour
with economic power, which I happen to believe can only be done properly
on a Europe-wide scale - but that's another column.

Britain, meanwhile, is protected from some of these manifestations by
her electoral system. There will be no first republic, nor any PR at the
heart of power. Even in Oldham and Bradford the forces of evil do not
match those that brought Le Pen to the gates of the Elysée. But the
problem of disengagement exists here as well as elsewhere in Europe.
Extremism is kept at bay by the system, but the seeds of alienation are
buried deep. The wake-up call for the French left is an alarm bell that
rings round the continent and its archipelago.

Full article at:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/farright/comment/0,11375,689138,00.html

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx