We now have a result in the French presidential election which until a week or so ago looked to be the expected, most probable outcome. The independent Emmanuel Macron (technically the candidate of the made-for-purpose Forward party) will face National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in a run-off on May 7th. It seems very likely that Macron will be the eventual winner, though nothing these days can be treated as certain. The defeated candidates of the two dominant mainstream parties, the Socialists (Hamon) and the Gaullist Republicans (Fillon), have both already said they will vote for Macron since Le Pen stands outside the bounds of acceptable national leaders.
I am no expert on French domestic politics and make no pretense of being one. But I am a close and concerned observer of the rightist-populist trend which has been roiling Europe and North America. So I have some thoughts on that dimension of the story.
Part of Marine Le Pen’s ‘brand’ is her attempt to sand some of the rough edges off the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen led from 1972 until 2011. Still, the National Front is a hyper-nationalist, rightist, anti-Semitic political party. (In the spirit of the Dem/Labour early 90s rebrands which brought us New Democrats and New Labour, Marine’s might be termed ‘New Fascists’.) While Marine Le Pen has pushed her fondness for animals, dialed down the anti-Semitism (dialed down from open Holocaust jokes level stuff) and tried to counter-program the latter with a stronger focus on Muslim-bashing, this is still what the National Front is. Remember too that President Trump has openly supported her quest for the presidency.
Every election turns on its own domestic national political dynamics. But they are inevitably seen as and in fact are parts of larger trends affecting associated states. Such a trend has been unfolding over the last few years. We have a rising tide of far rightist-revisionist parties and political movements across Europe. Then we had Brexit, which while distinct in its politics was clearly part of this populist, rightist and certainly anti-EU trend. Then you had Donald Trump become President in the dominant state in the global liberal internationalist order.
What comes next? Rightist xenophobes came up short in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. Now it seems likely that the next President of France will be a post-party, center-left technocrat (he was a minister in Hollande’s government) among whose dominant campaign themes were anti-extremism and keeping France in Europe. In other words, he is not just not Trump/Brexit/European rightist wave, he is a candidate running a campaign explicitly opposed to the larger movement of which they are all constituent parts.
There are other ways to see this result. One is that neither of the two establishment parties even made it into the run-off – you can scarcely get more ‘anti-establishment’ than that. Another is that two of the four most vote getting candidates were, from diametrically opposed sides of the political spectrum, anti-EU. Still, at the end of the day, the next President of France looks likely to be not only someone who is the antithesis of the rightist-populist wave in Europe but ran precisely as the antithesis of that movement.
