Member Newsletter
You’ve likely seen the news of the new European Union elections in which the far-right — particularly in France and Germany — have made big gains. Those gains in turn spurred French President Macron to call snap elections for the national parliament, an extremely high stakes gamble. European politics are complicated and different from those of the U.S. in numerous ways. Each country, notwithstanding the centralizing force of europeanization, remains its own microcosm. But it’s worth taking a moment to focus on their essential similarity.
Take the example of France.
The National Rally party, until 2018 the National Front, has been the far-right outsider party in French politics for half a century. When Marine Le Pen took over the party in 2011 she pursued a policy of “de-demonization” of the party, which essentially entailed jettisoning key elements of the party under the long leadership of her father, the party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen: the explicit anti-semitism and Holocaust denial, hold over pro-Vichyism and more. These shifts were largely cosmetic, a general softening of the party’s image. But Marine Le Pen surely realized that these features prevented it from ever actually holding power in France. She actually expelled her father, the party’s founder, from the party. The party has also made peace with big business, which has allowed it to make nice with the oligarchy while still being the electoral party of the left-behinds outside France’s cities. Now there’s a good chance her party will be running the country (under France’s system of “cohabitation”) by the end of the summer.
(I assume Macron believes that a mix of a higher turnout national election plus the two-stage French electoral process will help him, or that a National Rally victory, which would bring it to power, will compromise it with power in time for the next presidential election. Macron himself is termed out.)
This is essentially the Trumpist GOP. I mean, almost literally — national identity, being pals with Russia, cutting taxes, keeping immigrants out. What’s notable is that to the degree the similarity is obscured it is simply because the U.S. is a structural two-party democracy. The nature of the constitutional framework essentially dictates two national parties, though this wasn’t clear or intended by the architects of the federal constitution. We have the identical progression, only in the U.S. it was pushed through the structural two party reality of the U.S. constitution. In France, National Rally has now almost completely supplanted the center-right Conservatives, who barely even placed in the EU returns. The old Conservatives have now either shifted to National Rally or become electoral flotsam who resettle in centrist or center-left parties, which is essentially the fate of Never Trumpers in the U.S.
I don’t suggest this is a huge revelation. It’s conventional wisdom that Trump is allied with, part of a global movement (most readily identifiable in Europe) which is revanchist, far-right, anti-immigrant. Let me say proactively that I’m sure many of you will find errors in my intentionally broad-brush overview of French politics. I’m certainly no expert on French politics. This post is really about U.S. politics. And my point is that the differences and the oddnesses looking at the two continents mostly fall away when we step back and try to understand them as the same trajectory playing out, in one case in a multi-party context and another in a structural two party context in which different factions vie for control of each party and remake it in turn.