HOW do we explain why 5.5m French voters in the first round of the presidential elections voted for far-right parties that are xenophobic, anti-semitic, racist and ultra-nationalist? Sounding off about the wrongness of the vote will not help understand the reasons underlying their choice. Everybody in politics needs to begin an urgent, thorough and much-needed self-criticism.
The vote may have been a valuable wake-up call for France if it opens the eyes of party leaders and revives the debate on how to build a nation based on justice and solidarity. What vanished in April was the comforting thought that although everything was changing in the world outside, in French politics everything could stay the same; that two ageing parties, the Gaullists and the Socialists, could share power as they had done for 30 years.
People have sensed for some time that these two political forces are worn out. Their historic mission seems to have ended. Each in its own way gives the impression of an organisation going nowhere, with crumbling infrastructures, no organisation or programme, no ideology, no identity and no compass for the journey ahead.
Previous elections had already shown that neither party was capable of addressing the needs of millions of people who are genuinely frightened by the new realities of the post-industrial world that has emerged after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. The disposable workers, the underclasses of the banlieues, the long-term unemployed, the excluded, the many people pushed into early retirement, the young people in precarious jobs, the families on the brink of poverty. For all these, the recent past has brought years of fear and anxiety, with many familiar landmarks apparently gone forever.
The Socialist party in particular, with almost no working-class people in its local organisations and several leaders in the supertax bracket, gives the impression that it lives on another planet, light years from the experiences of ordinary people. It has shown itself remarkably insensitive to what Daniel Mermet describes as “the sufferings of under-France”.
What about the right? Some conservative politicians see the far right as untouchable, but others have been happy to do electoral deals with it. The former liberal leader, Michel Poniatowski, recently wondered in public whether it was “any more immoral to accept the votes of communists, who murdered millions of people in Europe, than those of the National Front” (1). This perverse logic allowed Christian Democrat leaders of the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF) to accept National Front votes in 1998 to be elected to the presidency of five French regions.
While this plague infected the inner workings of France’s political institutions, was it reasonable to imagine that France would remain immune to the upsurge of far-right politics in its immediate neighbours (see Fascism isn’t what it used to be, by Jean-Yves Camus, in this issue)? Or likely that France would be the exception when, like other European countries, its social fabric has been violently rent in the name of modernity: by liberalism and globalisation, European unification, the decline in national sovereignty, the abandonment of the franc, the disappearance of national borders, the hegemony of the United States, multiculturalism, loss of identity and the crisis of the welfare state?
All this happened in the context of the end of the industrial era and technological transformations that led to widespread economic insecurity and terrible social malaise. In such a context, with competition raised to the status of a natural imperative, an increase in violence and criminality was inevitable. The abruptness and brutality of these changes meant that uncertainties are accumulating as horizons have been lost, the world seems less clear, and history appears to defy logic and understanding. Ordinary people have felt abandoned by governments of both right and left; unsurprisingly, since the press describes them as corrupt, as liars and cheats.
Many people feel lost and panicky; as Tocqueville put it,"since the past no longer illuminates the present, the human spirit walks in darkness". Old magicians have returned to conjure with this new obscurantism, this breeding-ground of fear, confusion and resentment. Their rhetoric is demagogic, authoritarian and racist; they talk of a return to the old values (work, family, motherland) and blame foreigners, Arabs and Jews for all the disorders, social problems and insecurities. Immigrants are an easy target, always available, because they symbolise social upheavals, and among the lowest-income earners they are seen as unwanted competition.
Although it is absurd, hateful and even criminal, the rhetoric of the National Front has long appealed to more than one in four French people according to the opinion polls (2). On 21 April it gained the electoral approval of millions (30% of the unemployed, 24% of workers, 20% of young people and 17% of employers).
The Republican awakening expressed in street demonstrations all over France translated into anti-Le Pen votes on 5 May. Neo-fascism will not be voted in during the parliamentary elections in June either. But once the moment of fear has passed, if the parties carry on as before, with privatisation, dismantling public services, creating pension funds and accepting sackings to keep shareholders happy, if they continue to deny people’s desires for a society that is fairer, more fraternal, more based on solidarity — then there is no guarantee that fascism, in alliance with the usual collaborators, will not win next time.
(1) Libération, 20 March 1998.
(2) Le Monde, 13 April 1996.