Re: Le Pen - Europe's highest austerity price so far

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

European socialists have for a long time abandoned their populists roots.  This has created
an opening for rightwing populism.   Le Pen may well win the run-off,

Geoffrey Gardiner puts it very well over a Gang8:

020422 Right and left in France

I was in France at the time of the last presidential election, and noted  the power of the
populist campaigns. Populist support was split between  several candidates, some supposedly
right wing and some left, but in
fact little to choose between their policies. Altogether the populists got 35% of the votes,
and I pointed out at the time that if they could have backed one candidate they would have
been just 2.5% short of the
37.5% voting level achieved in January 1933 by A. Hitler with similar policies.

The other parties did not learn, and continued to ignore the feelings of the people on
interest rates, unemployment, farm incomes, distribution of wealth, corruption, public
services, crime, Muslim immigration, and national culture. The result is that in the present
election a populist candidate has got through to the final round, and those who support
populist causes will have the chance to back one candidate, Le Pen. The
socialists will campaign for Chirac, but which way will the voters go?
The left and right meet round the back and it would not surprise me in the slightest if
those who voted for the three Trots, the communist, and for socialists, will all switch
their support to Le Pen. Will he be defeated as a result of 5,000,000 Muslims voting for
Chirac? Le Pen has put his position very cleverly. "Socially," he says, "I am on the left,
economically on the right, and wholly nationalist." Those who voted for Jospin may find that
more to their liking than voting for Chirac. What does Chirac stand for? Many voters will
not know. I am not sure I do.

Le Pen is a superb political performer. Fortunately that cannot be said of the leaders of
Britain's nationalist parties whose slobbishness repels the educated. Nevertheless the local
elections in May will probably see a strong performance by the BNP in the Labour fiefdoms of
the north of England were voters feel that the champagne socialists of the Blair camp are
not their friends. The Labour councillors in the North have silently connived at the
segregation of Muslims in the schools and ghettoised Muslims as a result have been easy prey
for the Islamic fundamentalists who have oodles of Arab oil money behind them.  Assimilation
has gone backwards with the third generation of Asians, not forwards. The determination of
the mainstream parties not to be racist has backfired for it has not made the Asians less
disaffected. Rather it has weakened the attraction to immigrants of the vernacular culture
of the British Isles as it seems to lack principles. "We do not want to be
associated with those weak ninnies," they may be thinking.

The ghettoisation of Britain, by religion, race and class, proceeds apace, fuelled by
egalitarian education policies which were supposed to achieve the opposite. One buys good
education when one buys one's house.
Research shows a house near a good state school can now command a premium of ?00,000 over an
identical house only 500 metres away yet in a different school catchment area. The
difference would finance a
private education at Eton College or Winchester.

Geoffrey

We have lived through that all before.  The collapse of the left leaves capitalism facing
fascism.  The capitalists will soon find that the disappearance of the left forces them
(capitalists) to fight their own dirty little battles which they will not win.  What
defeated German fascism was a US made leftist through the New Deal. If the US had been under
the control of the right wing, as it is now, the Nazis would not have lost.  France is the
head of the European political snake.  The War on Terrorism will turn out to be the wrong
war, at the wrong time and in the wrong places.

Henry C.K. Liu

Sven R Larson wrote:

> I must say I woke up with a bit of shock this morning, learning about Le Pen's
> formidable success in the first round of the French presidential election process.
> (Chirac got 20% of the votes, Le Pen 17% and incumbent prime minister, the socialist
> Jospin gathered only 16%.) Irrespective of whether he wins the second round or not (it
> is a two-step process, the second of which is a final between the two frontrunners of
> the first) the political consequences will go far beyond the borders of France.
>
> Le Pen has now qualified himself for the second, final round of the election. Until now
> every French presidential election since 1969 under the fifth republic's constitution
> has contained at least one socialist candidate. This time the incumbent neo-Gaullist
> president, Chirac, will have to run for the final against Europe's - cynically speaking
> - most enduring right-wing extremist, J M Le Pen. Le Pen is more aggressive than
> Austria's Haider, he's politically more established and skilled than Berlusconi, and
> because he's French he is also the biggest single threat against the European
> unification process. He concluded his victorious first-round election night with the
> following message to Brussels: "Au revoir".
>
> Right-wingers are on the march all over Europe. The pattern is the same everywhere: the
> socialists or social democrats who said they were the strongest defenders of the poor,
> the workers whose daily lives were to be made easier by a generous public sector, have
> pursued harsh government cutbacks all across the continent in order to squeeze their
> economies through the Maastricht needle's eye. I've warned before that this process was
> under way, in particular after Haider's party emerged as a strong player in Austria.
> France has shown that this process will continue, and it should be clear to everyone by
> now that the left - even mid-stream liberals - cannot play any significant role in
> European politics until they credibly can explain to Europeans how they are going to
> restore the welfare systems they so carefully worked to dismantle. Le Pen and his
> extreme right-wingers do not have to defend their agenda on this matter: the the mere
> fact that the socialists and social democrats have let crime rise, the public sector
> deteriorate AND taxes go up is enough for voters to trust new promise makers.
>
> Le Pen's success is more alarming than that of Berlusconi and Haider even if he will not
> beat Chirac in the final round. A likely outcome of the current election process is that
> Le Pen ends as prime minister instead, which does not deprive him of the chance to stir
> things up. He has vowed to hold referenda on a variety of issues already this summer -
> one of which is whether France should leave the currency union. It may very well be that
> the French wake up from the shock of having voted Le Pen in as either president or prime
> minister, and therefore will do their best to preserve the fragile EU institutions that
> have emerged over the past decade. But other, "core" issues of the far right will most
> probably be fully accepted by the French. And that is a high, incomprehensibly high
> price for a democracy to pay for the kind of perpetual fiscal austerity that has plagued
> Europe for years and years.
>
> It is certainly true that other factors contribute to the far-right swing among European
> voters. One is undoubtedly the not very democratic superstructure that the EU has become
> (and continues to develop). But we must not forget that one of the key components of
> this integration process is a currency union the very foundation of which is the world's
> first constitution that effectively mandates fiscal austerity. Although the individual
> voter in Europe does not understand the theoretical fine print of this, he sure knows
> that he suffers once the demands of that constitution make themselves heard in his own
> life as unemployment, lost economic opportunities, higher taxes, eroded public sector
> services and less predictable public insurance systems.
>
> Until Keynesianism is restored in Europe's political process, until the fiscal
> straitjacket of the Maastricht treaty is removed - until then rightwingers will keep
> marching and gain influence.
>
> The next scene is the group of new EU member states, waiting on the Union's doorstep.
> Poland, the Checz republic and Hungary may very well revert to right-wing extremism once
> the promised membership benefits translate into fiscal hardships.
>
> God help Europe,
> /srl
>
> --
> Sven R Larson
> Ph.D.; Assistant professor of economics
> Department of Social Sciences, 22.2
> Roskilde University
> PB 260
> DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
> http://www.ruc.dk/english/