Welcome to the post-liberal world
The extreme-right stomps in the Franch elections, with the extreme-left not too far behind.
I can’t believe this happened. I feel like the earth is spinning off its axis. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
Your gracious host, Damian Penny, actually predicted something.
Flashback to the 2022 French Presidential election, when Emanuel Macron handily defeated far-right challenger Marine Le Pen:
I find myself thinking back to the 2002 French Presidential election, when Marine’s infamous (and even more hardline) father Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked everyone by making it to the second round. Aside from the Front National base, French people of all political persuasions held their noses and united behind Jacques Chirac, and Le Pen pere won a smaller share of the vote in the runoff than he’d received in the first round.
Marine improved on that standing in 2017, winning about a third of the vote. This time around, she broke the 40% barrier.
Macron still benefitted from voters who didn’t like him but feared an extreme-right President even more. But the urgency and shock of 2002, and the old stigma about publicly supporting a candidate with that infamous last name, is long gone.
[…]
The right guy won, thankfully, but over half of the French electorate backed far-right or far-left candidates in the first round. Marine Le Pen has a dedicated following, name recognition and - as I was surprised to find out - she’s only 53 years old. If she runs for President of France in 2042 she’ll still be younger than Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign.
Indeed, Biden had already run for President twice and lost - once getting caught in an extremely embarrassing plagiarism scandal - and Republicans and Democrats wrote him off as a perennial loser who was too old to successfully make a go of it in 2020. Biden’s been having a rocky few months, but at the end of the day he still gets to live in that big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The challenge for Macron and other relatively centrist and mainstream politicians is to give people a reason to vote for them instead of just against their extremist opponents. After a while, if they don’t think they’re being listened to, people just stop being scared.
This past weekend, France held the first round of legislative elections Macron called after the far-right Rassemblement National performed well in voting for the European Parliament. If he was in a gambling mood, he would have been better off betting on Fisker stock or on the Slovak national football team.
Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party led France's snap parliamentary elections on Sunday with 33% of the vote, according to the interior ministry, with the leftist alliance New Popular Front following in second place at almost 28%. President Macron's ruling coalition trailed in third place with 20%.
[…]
The far-right National Rally party is estimated to win between 230 and 280 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly. The second-biggest group is projected to be the leftist New Popular Front with between 125 and 165 seats and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition at between 70 and 100 seats.
Even here in Canada, where political parties usually win majority governments with only a plurality of the vote, it seems kind of weird how the RN can win a majority or near-majority with just a third of the electorate on its side.
But this was just the first round of voting. In constituencies where no candidate won over 50% of the vote, it goes to a second-round runoff between all of the candidates with at least a puncher’s chance of winning.
And in many ridings, it will come down to Rassemblement National, with its Vichyite roots, and le Nouveau Front populaire, which is dedicated to building a new country free of inequality, poverty, racism and those uppity Juifs telling real French people what to do.
Melenchon, a former communist who won 19% of the vote in the previous presidential elections, has increasingly adopted pro-immigration stances and a tolerant approach to public expressions of the Muslim faith as he replaced the Socialist Party as the main political force in heavily Muslim suburbs. He’s also made multiple statements that critics said were antisemitic. In a 2017 speech, Melenchon said about French Jews that “France is the opposite of aggressive communities that lecture to the rest of country.”
In 2014, weeks after nine synagogues were torched in France, he said he wanted to “congratulate the youth of my country who mobilized in defense of the miserable victims of war crimes in Gaza,” adding: “If we have anything to condemn, then it is the actions of citizens who decided to rally in front of the embassy of a foreign country or serve its flag, weapon in hand,” he said, referencing French pro-Israel Jews. Earlier this month he said that antisemitism in France was merely “residual.”
Melenchon, who has long sought (in French) a union on the left, recently appointed to his party’s European Parliament faction Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian activist who is under a police investigation for justifying the October 7 onslaught. She has visited multiple anti-Israel demonstrations at French campuses and danced and sang with the protesters. Melenchon has called Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza a “genocide,” and has said that “peace-loving Frenchmen” cannot express solidarity with the victims of the Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, in which the terrorist group’s gunmen murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251.
“As the National Rally moved away from antisemitism, LFI rushed toward it and embraced it,” said Philippe Karsenty, a center-right French-Jewish former politician.
You know we’re in a new topsy-turvy world when France’s most famous Nazi hunter, a lifetime foe of the extreme right, says he’d vote for Le Pen’s party as the lesser of two evils:
“I never imagined voting for the National Rally [of Le Pen] to curb antisemitism,” said Alain Finkielkraut, a liberal Jew who is one of France’s best-known philosophers. A consistent and fierce critic of the far right, Finkielkraut will nonetheless vote for Le Pen’s party, he told Le Point, “if there’s no other choice and if LFI had a real chance of reaching power.”
More stunning still was the announcement by Serge Klarsfeld, a prominent historian of the Holocaust and hunter of Nazis. “I would have no hesitation, I would vote for the National Rally,” Klarsfeld told the LCI radio station on June 15. His life, he explained, “revolves around defending Jewish memory, persecuted Jews, Israel. Now I’m faced with a far left that’s in the grip of LFI, which reeks of antisemitism and violent anti-Zionism, or the National Rally, which has evolved.”
The RN deserves credit for shaking off its antisemitic roots, but it’s not like they’ve become a paragon of liberal tolerance. Instead, the party has found a new target:
Under Marine Le Pen, the National Rally continues to support hardline positions on immigration and Islam. The party wants to ban street prayers and public wearing of some religious symbols, including the niqab for Muslim women and the kippah for Jews, which Le Pen has described as a sacrifice that Jews needed to make to defend themselves and the country against radical Islam.
Someone said that patriotism is love of your own country while nationalism is hatred of someone else’s country.
And that is pretty much what European populism, whether on the far left or far right, is all about, isn’t it? One side targets Muslims instead of Jews, while the other targets “Zionists” (wink, wink) instead of Muslims.
Liberal democracy loses either way.
New York Times: publishes editorial saying we should find a cure for cancer.
Margaret Sullivan: “Where are all the New York Times editorials demanding that we solve global warming?”
#Resistance Twitter: “The New York Times actively wants to kill all life on the planet through global warming!”
Morning Joe: runs 15-minute segment about how curing cancer is a distraction from the fight against global warming. (And quietly hopes you don’t remember all these times in 2015 and 2016 when they allowed global warming to call into the show a bunch of times.)