E-Notes

The French Election: Earthquake, Fascism, or Wake-up Call?

by Michael Radu

May 3, 2002

Michael Radu is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and director of its Center on Terrorism and Political Violence.

A specter haunts the European Union and the multinational elites behind it: the return of the right among voters in more and more countries. Just three years ago Ireland, Spain, and tiny Luxembourg were the odd men out in a 15-member club dominated by the Left; all the other members were socialist. Socialism was tinged with totalitarian Marxism-Leninism in some of these countries (France, Italy, and Portugal, where communist support or membership in government was decisive) or moderate in the UK and Germany. Today the balance has been reversed: Italy, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, and Portugal all have center-right governments, and conservatives have excellent chances to win this year in the Netherlands, Germany, and even France. Socialist Sweden and Finland, Belgium, and Greece are the last redoubts of socialism— except, of course, for the unelected Eurobureaucrats in Brussels.

Which brings us to the results of the first round of presidential elections in France on April 21, where nationalist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen overtook socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to win a place in the run-off election on May 5 against President Jacques Chirac. Major European newspaper banners proclaimed this an “earthquake,” but then most of those newspapers are on the Left. And as far as the European Left is concerned, it was indeed cataclysmic. But for most of the European and even the French public, the “earthquake” was foreseeable and less than historic.

What occurred is relatively simple: within a complicated electoral system, with a larger-than-usual abstention rate and 16 (compared to the prior record 12) candidates, President Chirac, the frontrunner, obtained a mere 19 percent, followed by Le Pen with 17 percent and then Prime Minister Jospin. This was only partly surprising, since pre-election polls had suggested the possibility of Le Pen gaining over Jospin or even Chirac. The May 5 run-off election will be the first second-round elections since the 1960s in which the Left has no candidate. This represents not a significantly larger draw for Le Pen— he polled 5.7 percent in the last elections for the European Parliament— but the deconstruction of the French Left, which produced no fewer than six candidates: some democratic but most antidemocratic. This is what worries the European elites, most of them culturally part of the very Left now being rejected in country after country.

Most commentators have been preoccupied with their “shock” at Le Pen’s overtaking Jospin, missing some even more interesting facts to glean from the election results:

The French Communist Party (PCF), whose boss, Robert Hue received 3.5 percent of the vote, the lowest percent of the vote cast for this party’s candidate in 82 years. The PCF has most likely receded to history, which is delayed gratification for those who always thought that the fall of the Soviet Union would also lead to the end of its historic puppets, such as the PCF or its Portuguese brother. Better late than never. Ironically, Le Pen received some 30 percent of the “proletarian vote” in France— an order of magnitude higher than the self-appointed representatives of it, the Communists.
The Trotskyite candidates, who advocated the end of both “bourgeois” democracy and “capitalism” received 10 percent of the vote. Their voters were overwhelmingly young, which suggests that totalitarianism is alive and well in France. The Left-Trotskyites claim the communists are “traitors” to the cause of revolution.
The main issues of the campaign were crime and Muslim immigration. Both Chirac and Jospin were forced by popular pressure into talking about these issues, which have been Le Pen staples for years. However, after his defeat, Jospin accused Chirac of overstressing the crime problem and making it a key issue. It gives one a sense of his party’s disconnection to the voters that he evidently truly saw this as an electoral gimmick rather than an issue about which voters were very concerned. The problem was not the reality of crime or uncontrolled immigration, but talking about them.

There is little question that Chirac will win the presidency in the May 5 run-off: Le Pen has clearly tapped the 20 percent at most of the voters who would support him. There is some, but not much, debate whether Chirac and his conservative allies could win a majority in the June parliamentary elections. What is important is simply how Le Pen was able to do so well.

Bad campaigning by Jospin and the splintering of his “governmental Left” coalition (whose four members presented four presidential candidates) are both factors, but what about the total collapse of the Communist Party vote in working-class Parisian suburbs like Saint-Denis in favor of Le Pen? Why are the proletarians deserting “their party” in droves in favor of Le Pen?

The answer, and ultimately the most significant lesson of the election, is that at least for the workers and lower-income French, immigrants— which is to say Third World immigrants in France as in the rest of the West, usually of a different religion (Islam) and language— are seen as a threat. It also means that the French (and one may say European) establishment — whether the Socialists/Left (Jospin, the communists, and the Greens), who claim that immigration control is “racist,” or the conservatives (Chirac et al.), who prefer not to talk about it at all so as not to invite accusations of racism— all ignored real fears by most voters that their jobs, security, culture, and values are under threat. This is the ultimate, if not the only, explanation of Le Pen’s success.

The elites (“Chiraquiens” or socialistes), paralyzed by their culture’s basic tenet that Third World people should unquestionably be given victim status, were unable to deal with the issue relevant to French voters who have lost jobs through affirmative action or were victims of criminal acts by aliens. Crime control was seen by French elites as a tool of oppression, implicitly in the service of the U.S.-led war on terrorism. The French-based Muslims engaged in terrorism were explained away by politicians who preferred criticizing the United States to dealing with the activities of Islamists in Paris, Lille, and Marseille, and the problem of an unassimilated mass of Algerian youth hostile to the basics of French beliefs and the rule of law. Why? Because to do so would be “racist” and go against the leftist dominant culture of France.

That is where Le Pen comes in. Often accused of being racist and anti-Semitic — in 1987 he described the Holocaust as a “detail” of European history — he is a former Foreign Legion paratrooper with a big chip on his shoulder. From an American and rational point of view, Le Pen’s history is more complicated. A self-proclaimed French nationalist, self-proclaimed leftist on social issues and conservative on economic matters, he is a dedicated enthusiast squaring the circle by some inscrutable (and certainly not Cartesian) logic.

Le Pen believes that immigrants, especially from Muslim North Africa, threaten France’s cultural identity and explain the high criminality in France (an exaggerated, but not mistaken notion), but he also sees the Anglo-Saxon and American cultures as equal threats, along with the EU (which he feels threatens French sovereignty). In fact, Le Pen perceives attacks on French culture from the Left, Washington, and everyone else.

Back to the EU and Its Future

Ultimately, what the Brussels elites and their supporters among the ivory-tower inhabitants in Paris, Berlin, and London should be worried about is the “democracy gap” between their nations and an EU interested in ever more regulation, establishing a common currency with no regard to popular opinion (in Denmark, where the voters had the opportunity to vote on this, they rejected it), and generally disregarding popular feelings.

As usual, emotion is the last line of retreat; hence the slogan that opposition to unrestricted immigration is racist. Of course, since all the illegal aliens are from the Third World, this makes attempts at border control “racist” by definition. It is this anti-immigration-control sentiment that explains, at least in part, the appeal of Le Pen and his anti-immigration counterparts elsewhere.

Beyond immigration and sovereignty, however, France (and also Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, not to mention Sweden) clings to a truly archaic economic system— “socialism” or the “welfare state— from which the rest of the world is retreating. Globalization, the one object of hatred that Le Pen shares with his leftist enemies, is ultimately anti-capitalism, anti-democracy, and (as usual in France) anti-American. In that sense, France post-April 21 is still the old France: claiming intellectual leadership in support of reactionary and passe ideas. This is no “earthquake.” Nor is it a great surprise that Trotskyite totalitarians and “lepeniste” rightwingers have met on the same primitive, emotional, and antidemocratic field.

Le Pen’s lasting legacy will be the shock he gave the European Left in general and the EU bureaucracy in particular. His success is a repudiation of the concept of giving non-elected bureaucrats and politicians the right to decide issues of national concern for Frenchmen, Swedes, Greeks, or Spaniards. Paradoxically, a politician who despises democracy may well have brought attention to its importance and the need to safeguard it.

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