Shrouded in the news flowing from Ukraine and Russia, the French presidential campaign was a muted affair this year. Now as we head into the final runoff this weekend, the stakes for France, for Europe and for the global security order are higher than they have been in a long time.
Yet whether Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen is victorious, the election already offers more evidence of the challenges facing mainstream politics, with the collapse of the traditionally dominant parties and populist forces still rising across the West.
Take the strength of anti-status quo votes in France and Brexit’s rallying cry of “take back control.” Or Viktor Orbán and Hungary’s refusal to play by the European rules and Italy’s thinly veiled chaos despite Mario Draghi’s best efforts — not to mention Donald Trump’s reign in the United States. There is clearly growing voter revulsion toward the idea that they are condemned to one size fits all institutions, and to a single political and policy path. The idea that There Is No Alternative, as Margaret Thatcher once said, has become unbearable even when what is on offer is more comfortable and predictable.
Whether this broad rejection of the status quo means we are headed toward a world dominated by illiberal politics or merely one of extreme and permanent volatility isn’t yet clear. And new crises, notably the consequences of climate change, may well fashion some hybrid version of our politics.
But ultimately, populism is probably a transition, not an end-state. The politics of the center are far from irrelevant, but our institutions — overwhelmed by the politics of accusation and resentment — no longer know how to provide voters with reasonable and legitimate means to address their grievances from a centrist vantage point. So populism, however destructive, may yet force Western politicians to craft new institutional paths to representation and to compromise — more in sync with what people experience in their everyday lives, and with what they value. More reactive, more local, and more flexible. But a painful and treacherous transition it is, something made quite clear in the French election.
How Do You Say Groundhog Day in French?
There is a perspective from which the results of the first round of the French election earlier this month are a quintessentially French story and nothing larger. In fact, France looks as though it is copying itself by staging a rematch of 2017: A Macron-Le Pen runoff, and an outcome that isn’t quite yet in the bag — down, even, to roughly similar first round results for the top three candidates. Macron slightly higher with 28 percent (rather than 2017’s 24 percent); Le Pen also slightly higher (with 23 percent rather than 21 percent). And finally, third man Jean-Luc Mélenchon (with 22 percent rather than 20 percent), once again locked out of the second-round contest.
But look closely and there are some fundamental differences.
First off, the candidates may look the same, but this is a bit of an optical illusion. Macron is no longer the exciting young maverick who stormed the Elysée, having siphoned support from a frustrated center-left and scandal-plagued center-right. He’s struggled to govern through crises like the Yellow Vests protests and pension reform strikes, while his “Jupiterian” approach and occasional sarcasm have all led to a deep resentment of his persona and some outright loathing in many quarters.
Post-pandemic, most French voters might have grudgingly agreed that Macron’s government has “done OK,” and as a result, Macron entered this election well ahead of other candidates in the polls, and slightly boosted by the Ukraine crisis. But a majority of voters are at best disillusioned and most often angry.
Meanwhile, in five short years, Le Pen has furthered her mission to appear more mainstream. Gone are the days when 80 percent of French voters thought she and her far-right party were a menace to democracy. Today, the number is barely 50 percent.
Le Pen’s strategy (since she took over the party from her Holocaust-denying father in 2011) has been to focus on lower income voters. Rather than simply woo those susceptible to a traditional populist right agenda on immigration and integration as her father had done, she made a play for working class voters who increasingly felt that the traditional left had deserted them and their interests. This story is a familiar one in advanced democracies where progressive or social democratic parties have struggled to reconcile representing the economically vulnerable while supporting inclusive visions of societies that lower income voters feel disproportionately benefit an (urban, cultural) elite. We saw this play out in the Brexit vote, but also in the Trump vote.
Le Pen’s mainstreaming is deceptive: She sports a softer haircut, and the pictures are more Carol Brady waving brownies than far-right warrior expelling immigrants — yet the program remains chillingly nationalist, particularly on issues to related to immigration, integration and citizenship. But Le Pen has left these issues on the back burner (on page 16 of her pamphlet, where her traditional voters know where to find them), while she campaigns on the high cost of living and rising energy prices, which she blames on renewable energy development, Macron’s failed diplomacy with Russia, and on western sanctions. (After Russia invaded Ukraine, Le Pen quickly pulped her campaign fliers and produced a version purged of the chummy photos of her and Vladimir Putin. She has — weakly — condemned Russia’s aggression but suggested to voters who are anxious about the war that, were she to get into power, she would seek peace with Russia and a closer alignment between NATO and Russia.)
Macron spent a good part of his campaign engineering the faceoff with Le Pen, convinced he would easily beat her again. But now he is faced with a candidate who cannot be as swiftly dispatched because she stands as the only alternative to him and the status quo liberalism he stands for — in a landscape where most voters seem to want alternatives.
And this is perhaps the major point of difference with 2017 and the most alarming one from a broader European political perspective: In 2017, Macron was elected by reducing the Socialists to rubble and putting the center-right on life support. This year, that trend accelerated, as the Socialists’ candidate came in below 2 percent (after holding the presidency a mere five years ago) and the leading candidate of the center-right came in under 5 percent. The result is that Macron aside, the candidates from the main institutional parties have been wiped out in this election.
Of the three candidates who came in over 20 percent, one is of the populist right (Le Pen) and one is of the populist left (Mélenchon); both advocate a distanced relationship with the EU and with the U.S., governance by popular referendum and pulling out of NATO or NATO’s integrated command. Add to this the 7 percent for extreme right Éric Zemmour and the 26 percent of voters who stayed home, and it shows the vast majority of French voters are refusing to engage with mainstream politics.
The Goldilocks Illusion
On the eve of the second round of voting, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is to argue, as many have, that France is split into two blocs — an “elite bloc” (roughly one-third) that tends to be optimistic and more confident in the future, and a “popular bloc” (the other two-thirds) that is angry, worried and wants out of “the system.” The fact that in France these two blocs are nowhere near of equal size should worry us in a majoritarian system — can the nonpopulist bloc ever win again given the numbers? It’s worth noting that when the blocs are of more comparable size, as in the U.S., the outcome is instability, and no less worrying.
Perhaps as a way of posing the question in a less desperate way, some French analysts are choosing to frame the result as “tripolarization,” the emergence of three blocs — a populist right bloc, a populist left bloc and a centrist liberal bloc.
The appeal of dividing France — or any other European democracy — into three poles is obvious; it avoids lending credence to the populist view of two enemy blocs fighting to the death, and it gives current politics a certain comfortable readability that maintains a version of left, right and center. What one might call Goldilocks politics — with a center that’s “just right.” But it’s not clear this center really exists at the moment: It is more likely a trick of the light. The political center is not an illusion, but it’s always been a constructed compromise. Under our current politics, it feels fabricated to many voters, with their preferences not so much aggregated as disregarded. The result is invective and polarization.
Sunday’s round may deliver the last gasps of Goldilocks politics à la Française: Most recent polls suggest that Macron will win next week — and perhaps even that the parliamentary elections in June might deliver a just-about-workable, centrist majority or set of alliances to govern France across the political spectrum. But ultimately this outcome gives new meaning to the idea of zombie institutions: ghostly emanations of the past divorced from voter preferences, ideological reality or historical developments.
Two things seem clear though. First, it’s foolish to ascribe any permanence to this kind of bi-polar, or “tri-polar” politics; we are not yet recomposing or realigning — we are still decomposing and de-aligning.
In this respect, the French election ultimately offers a glimpse at the future of Western politics: Whether populist politicians take power or not, they are certain to continue to upend our politics for years to come. Either because they will continue to create knife-edge situations such as the ones in France or the U.S. Or because, more positively, they will prompt those who can read the writing on the wall to seek institutional change that can deliver on compromise and representation.
Which brings us to the second point: Part of the attraction of illiberal ideologies (sometimes imported from places such as Russia and China that have gone through more recent political and economic upheavals) is their rejection of the status quo. What is coming into focus is the fact that voters have a bone to pick not just with the choices they are being offered, but with the way they are being asked to choose.
Responding to the Populist Moment
However we decide to interpret political developments in European democracies, their institutions show signs of fraying. Be it the voting systems, the electoral calendars, the political parties and even the broad political and cultural references that account for their emergence (social democracy or Gaullism, for instance). It is telling that the first-round results in France prompted politicians across the board to immediately question the timing of electoral cycles, the length of the presidential term and the nature of institutional representation.
A couple of things are worth highlighting here. The first is that voters in France and elsewhere have made it clear over the past few decades that they trust representative institutions — indeed they care about institutional representation — less and less. The fact that a sizable minority, or a small majority, of voters keep choosing populist politicians who are wedded to the idea of governing via referendum is no accident; that’s not only because the populists may not have the necessary majorities in parliament, but because populism is in great part about the bypassing of representative institutions to give a direct voice to the people. The experience of the speed, immediacy and endless variety of the internet, and the illusion of personal efficacy and relevance created by the echo chambers of social media do nothing to attenuate the demand for directness and speed of policy. Yet interestingly, no one has yet really used digital tools to improve democratic representation and make them more reactive and more adaptive. It’s notable that France’s younger voters, who are likely the most digitally savvy, largely flocked to the populists Mélenchon and Le Pen.
Recent events — notably the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — have conspired further to make the EU the source of all salvation, through recovery packages, vaccines and defense. But what many of us take as Europe’s achievements, and a high point of cohesion and effectiveness, are nevertheless seen by some as proof of an absence of any alternative, and of the downgrading of their national cultures and personal and group preferences and references. Nationalist critics see the EU’s quite necessary “Fit for 55” climate package, with its offer to member states of cash for climate investment, as the latest instance of a non-negotiable politics from a monolithic and technocratic institution. Even as institutions “deliver” on crucial goods, the way they are decided upon and the channels through which they are delivered are called into question. Many view this as the sign of spoiled or uninformed electorates. Maybe, but it is also the sign of electorates that are fundamentally alienated from the individuals and institutions that deliver these goods.
In a world where digital channels create a permanent aspiration to intimacy, closeness and reactivity, we shouldn’t underestimate the resentment toward a political world that offers none of that. This is what populist politicians — left and right — have understood: the fundamental need for personal involvement and efficacy in a world where they have become a form of currency. The once emotional charge of casting a vote, of contributing to political decisions, of making history by crafting compromises that benefit entire communities — all this needs to be reinvented and replenished. We need more voting, more often, more campaigns, more opportunities to discuss what normally comes around only every few years, lest we let populism deliver all the wrong excitement of the occasional, binary and oppressive referendum.
If Macron and his centrist counterparts across the West want to chart a viable alternative, they must find a way to meet voters where they are and provide them with a political adventure that meets their aspirations. And paradoxically, on climate change, on energy, on defense, a majority of European citizens want the EU to take more responsibility. Can Europe be the adventure? It might be our best shot.
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By: Catherine Fieschi
Title: Opinion | Mainstream Politics Is Withering. Just Ask the French.
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/19/mainstream-politics-is-withering-just-ask-the-french-00026425
Published Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2022 18:40:56 EST
