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Yes, The French Election was a Good Thing
I didn’t initially post this piece I wrote for National Review about the outcome of the French election here because I figured you’d probably had it with reading my views about this election. I’ve been writing about it non-stop for weeks, and I do know it’s not the only story in the world.
But yesterday, when I saw JcTPatriot’s post, and the discussion it prompted, I felt compelled to weigh in one more time, because the issues involved here are, I think, genuinely important. I understand full well that there are many articles and news stories out there competing for your attention today, and that it’s a lot to ask to say, “Please give me another hour to make my case.” I wouldn’t ask it if I didn’t think what happened here has a significance that goes beyond France.
The piece I wrote for National Review is short, and will literally take only two minutes to read. Here’s the key paragraph:
For those of us who feared Le Pen would do well enough to claim a moral victory, the relief was immense, and any American with his head screwed on straight should share in it. Le Pen’s most memorable line in last Wednesday’s debate may have been, “France will be led by a woman. It will be me or Mrs. Merkel,” but in truth, France under Le Pen would have been led by a man, and that man would have been Vladimir Putin. As has been widely reported, Le Pen is in hock to the Kremlin, which funded her campaign. During one of her visits to Moscow, Le Pen explained her views to Kommersant: “The economic crisis gives us the opportunity to turn our back on the United States and turn to Russia.” That many Americans found this fact irrelevant when asking themselves whether Le Pen’s victory would be in their interests reflects a new and strange species of geopolitical masochism.
I discussed the last-minute attack on Macron’s campaign in that piece, and the effect it may have had on the total vote outcome. When I filed the piece, it was too soon to say for sure who was behind it. It’s not too soon to say anymore. It was Russia:
The head of America’s National Security Agency said Tuesday that Russia was behind the 11th-hour hack of French President-elect Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team, and that US officials had informed France a cyber-attack was underway.
Irrespective of any other question about the candidates and what they stand for, this part is simple. Russia is our adversary. We all wish this were not so: At the end of the Cold War, there wasn’t an American alive who hoped for a return to a hostile relationship with Russia or its people. We can argue about whether the US bears part of the responsibility for the deterioration of US-Russian relations. We can argue about whether the greatest threat to our security comes from Russia, China, North Korea, a disparate collection of Islamic terrorist organizations and states, or from ourselves. These are legitimate debates. I argue that we bear very little of the responsibility for the deterioration of our relationship with Russia, and that indeed, it is the greatest threat to our security, and my views are anything but unorthodox. They’re shared throughout our defense establishment. Secretary of Defense Mattis, for example, when asked about the greatest threats confronting the United States, responded thus:
I would consider the principal threats to start with Russia. And it would certainly include any nations that are looking to intimidate nations around their periphery, regional nations nearby them, whether it be with weapons of mass destruction or I would call it unusual, unorthodox means of intimidating them.
In 2016, Deborah James, who was at the time Secretary of the Air Force, put it this way:
Russia is the No. 1 threat to the United States. We have a number of threats that we’re dealing with, but Russia could be, because of the nuclear aspect, an existential threat to the United States.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford shares this view:
[He] told the conference that Russia’s goal was to counter NATO, undermine its credibility, and limit the ability of the US military to project power around the world.
“They are operating with a frequency and in places that we haven’t seen for decades,” he said, adding that the buildup should be viewed in the context of its actions in Ukraine, Crimea, and Syria, where Russia has already stepped up air attacks on eastern Aleppo.
I’m noting this not because I want to make a cheap argumentum ad verecundiam, but to stress that if you hold otherwise, you’d best have some strong arguments on your side. These are not frivolous men and women who’ve never given this problem a moment’s thought.
That said, I accept that reasonable people may and do disagree about the extent of the threat. Let’s leave those debates to one side for now, because one thing isn’t disputable among reasonable people: Russia is a major adversary. The Putin regime poses a danger to the United States and its allies. It wishes us ill, holds our values in contempt, and pursues policies designed to cause us harm.
It’s true that the Russian economy is no powerhouse, and true as well Russia has a host of internal problems that make its aspiration to dominate Europe seem preposterous. I assume we all agree that Russia should be getting its own house in order, not threatening its neighbors. But no matter how logical that seems to us and no matter what we’d prefer, the world’s the way it is, not the way we want it to be, and this is the way it is: Russia aspires to dominate Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. We can’t pretend this isn’t so, even if we’re talking about a country with a GDP the size of Italy’s.* Russia isn’t Italy; it’s a deadly, hostile, dysfunctional empire with firepower sufficient to obliterate the United States. Its land-based cruise missiles are deployed in direct violation of the INF Treaty, and they’re targeting Europe. The very real threat it constitutes is why US troops have been pouring into Poland. It was reasonable, not hyperbolic, for commander Meelis Kiili, the leader of Estonia’s paramilitary forces, to call Russia “a threat to Western civilisation.”
(*Parenthetically: It’s become commonplace to the point of cliché to point out that Russia’s GDP is the size of Italy’s. I’m not sure why this impresses people. Italy isn’t a poor country. In nominal GDP, Italy’s economy is the eighth-largest in the world. Given its small population — 60 million — it’s a fantastically wealthy country. Russia’s economy ties Italy’s for the eighth-largest spot — or it did, I think it dropped a notch or two this year on the nominal GDP list — so it’s not too bankrupt to cause trouble. What’s more, its long-term business strategy, so to speak, relies on invading its neighbors. So this shouldn’t console anyone.)
I don’t need to rehearse the rest of the case. You’ve heard it. Russia systematically intimidates its neighbors, annexed Crimea by force, invaded Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. It poured into the void in the Middle East created by Obama’s retreat, moving into the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, Turkey, Iran, and the Persian Gulf. It now so profoundly constricts American freedom of action that in places where once the United States enjoyed near-total domination of the skies, we’re unable to operate. Southern Turkey, Cyprus, most of Israel, and northern Jordan are now in range of Russian S-400s. We face area denial. Our traditional allies, including Israel, have been forced to suck up to Moscow –and so have we.
No matter who you think our greatest adversary is, you can’t view this as a salutary development. It’s a massive obstacle to the pursuit of any foreign policy save, “Russia calls the shots, everywhere.” Now, if that’s the foreign policy you endorse, I’ll grant you that hoping for Marine Le Pen’s victory is consistent with it, but “internal consistency” is the only merit of that view.
Russia wanted control over France, which has been an American ally since 1778. France is significant: It’s the world’s sixth-largest economy, a nuclear power, the heart of Europe. Marine Le Pen vowed to pull France out of NATO, that is, to cease being our ally. She openly promised instead to pursue an alliance with Russia. No secret about this, it’s not a rumor, it was part of her party platform.
Her campaign was financed by Russia. (That’s in French, but Google Translate will do a good job.) Her response, when confronted with accusations that Russia had purchased influence over her party, was remarkable: The insinuations, she said, were “outrageous and injurious,” but not for the reasons you’d think. She was injured and outraged by the suggestion the National Front could be bought and sold. Not so, she insisted. The National Front was pro-Russia in principle.
As far as I’m concerned, this is open-and-shut. I just can’t understand the view of any American who thinks otherwise. If it’s a truism of romantic life that you shouldn’t hang out where you’re not wanted, it’s just as much a truism of geopolitics. Even if I believed Marine Le Pen would in some way be good for France, I could not, as an American, view her election with anything but horror. When I look at my passport, I see it clearly says American. That tells me where my loyalties lie, as it should.
It seems some Americans believe we’re so powerful, so untouchable, so divorced from the rest of the world that we can afford to shrug whimsically at the prospect of flushing the Franco-American alliance down the toilet. “No big deal. Why do we need allies?” Some go a step further: They think we’re so powerful, so untouchable, so divorced from the rest of the world that we can afford to shrug whimsically at the prospect of France entering an alliance with our enemy. “No big deal, we can handle that, too.” Well, perhaps we can: It’s true that we’re a big and powerful country. But why would we want to make our lives so much harder? And to put so many more of them at risk?
Why, especially, when her opponent promised to strengthen our alliance and formally committed, in his platform, to raising France’s defense budget to meet its NATO spending commitments? (In French, but here’s the key passage.) Why, when her opponent not only took a strong, principled stance against Russia’s aggression toward our allies, but did so at the risk of inviting a full-on Russian attack on his campaign? Why, when clearly we could use allies who are shrewd enough (unlike some politicians I could mention) to fight off an attack like that and win?
Even if Le Pen had been committed to the Franco-American Alliance — and she was not — why would we support a politician whose economic program would have destroyed the French economy, leaving it unable, even if it were willing, to meet its NATO spending commitments?
If you don’t believe she would have destroyed the economy, how exactly do you think economies work?
The Fondation Concorde is a right-leaning, pro-business think tank, devoted (in my translation), to advancing “economic decentralization, focussing on small and medium-sized enterprises and industry, economic competitiveness, and job creation, while demanding a lean state.” (All things we used to agree about, once, on Ricochet.) In a report titled, The Economic Plans of the National Front, or how to Accelerate the Collapse of the French Economy, they wrote (my translation, again):
The National Front proposes to pursue the worst aspects of the past thirty years [of France’s] economic policy: excessive spending in the public sphere, increased taxation for private actors, and denying the reality of global economic competition. Its policies would result in higher taxation on the jewels of French industry and the strangling of SMEs with fees and charges. … Large companies will relocate their businesses abroad [to avoid confiscatory taxation] … [and their policies would] further strengthen the rigidity of the labor market and accelerate our economy’s loss of competitiveness … causing French companies to lose international market share and unemployment to soar.
The idea that France can protect its industries by raising tariffs, they wrote, “is an illusion.”
These would be rejected by the WTO and the European Union and would lead to retaliatory measures that would reduce our exports … There would then be a double problem: companies would confront the dismantlement of their supply chains and the loss of their export markets, leading to the dramatic impoverishment seen in other autarkic economic models: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, or Argentina.
They brought up the “crushing failure” of the Argentine experience, and they were drawing the right analogy, because this is exactly what she proposed to replicate. France would see “sharp devaluation combined with economic protectionism, currency collapse, an explosion of consumer prices, rising commodity prices, rising deficit and debt, rising unemployment and ultimately the decline in French GDP.” That’s exactly right. That’s what France was just spared.
There has never in history been a successful example of a country doing what she proposed to do. There have been many examples of countries destroyed by just the policies she proposed. Even if you believed it mattered not one whit whether a France under Le Pen would be an ally or an adversary, embracing a politician whose plans would result in the economic immiseration of millions is immoral. The enthusiasm for Le Pen is a right-wing version of radical chic. The clueless celebrities who slobber over Hugo Chávez as the man who freed Venezuela from Yankee imperialism and speaks truth to neoliberal power met their opposite number in the Americans who slobbered over Le Pen as the woman who, I guess, would have freed France from Yankee imperialism and spoken truth to neoliberal power, but frankly, where this is concerned, I can no longer tell the difference between the so-called right and the so-called left.
The article to which JcTPatriot linked in Gatestone was so mendacious and intellectually dishonest that I have no idea where even to start. I feel embarrassed that such a thing was published in an outlet for which I once wrote. All I can advise you to do is follow the links. They will, at least, take you to the articles in which Macron purportedly says what the author took out of context, distorted, mistranslated, or invented. Thanks to Google Translate, you can see what he really said — or didn’t.
This post will turn into a book of its own if I go through every claim in the article in question, but I’ll choose one to show you what I mean. “French art? I never met it!”
Here’s the speech he really gave. Watch it for yourself. I’ll translate for you in a second. This is what he said, in French.
Je voyais les tracts que certains camarades distribuaient à l’entrée du building, très gentiment, pour vous expliquer toutes les raisons pour lesquelles j’étais un odieux personnage, ils disaient “Emmanuel Macron, il ne croit pas à la culture française”. Bon, c’est défendu, généralement, par des gens qui ont oublié de lire, qui pensent que la culture française relève, je cite le programme d’un de mes opposants, de l’art français. J’ai dit : “Il n’y a pas une culture française.” Mais c’est la vérité, ou alors que ceux qui disent cela aillent me dire si Picasso, Chagall et quelques autres sont dans la culture française, dans leur définition. Parce que moi, l’art français je ne l’ai jamais vu. Il y a des cultures, et il y a bien une culture qui est en France. Nous avons notre culture, notre littérature, notre peinture, nos valeurs qui vont avec, notre langue! — qui est ce qui nous tient. Et c’est la fierté de ce pays! Mais cette culture s’est toujours vécue avec des racines profondes mais comme éminemment ouverte, généreuse, accueillant les talents de l’étranger. Et qu’est-ce qui a fait la littérature française, la peinture française, la musique française, la danse française ? La capacité à faire émerger des génies de notre pays mais à, chaque fois, d’agréger des talents de l’étranger.
Watch the speech, and the body language. Now, this is what he’s saying, in English. “There are many debates on the subject of French culture, and I see that some comrades are distributing leaflets outside the building, very kindly, to explain all the reasons I’m an odious personality. They say, ‘Emmanuel Macron, he doesn’t believe in French culture.’ So I’ll take advantage of the moment to put this in parentheses.”
He was speaking in London, to French expatriates, about how he hoped to create a climate in France that valued success: one such that the French would no longer have to go to London to flourish. He was saying he wanted to create a France to which they could return to be “entrepreneurs, researchers, teachers, in France.” His comment really was parenthetical, and this is the whole of it:
They say, “Emmanuel Macron, he doesn’t believe in French culture” … Okay, this is said, generally, by people who have forgotten how to read. Who think French culture consists — I’m citing the platform of one of my opponents — of “French art.” I said, “There is not one French culture.” But it’s the truth, isn’t it? Or, the people who say this are going to tell me whether Picasso, Chagall, and there are a few others, are part of French culture, according to their definition. Because for me, “French art,” I’ve never seen it, there are cultures [he said “des” cultures, i.e., “more than one single thing”] that are in France, there is certainly a culture that’s in France. We have our culture, our literature, our painting, our values, which go with our language! — and which keep us together. And which are the pride of our country! But this culture has always lived with deep roots of being eminently open, generous, welcoming of talent from abroad. And what made French literature, French painting, French music, French dance? The capacity to make the genius of our country emerge, and in every case, to aggregate talent from abroad.
He goes on to say (it’s not in that video), “J’aime plus que tout notre langue, notre culture, ce qui fait ce trésor, mais en même temps, elle a toujours été ouverte. Elle s’est toujours construite dans la capacité à en agréger d’autres, à faire venir les talents d’ailleurs. A faire que des jeunes ou moins jeunes qui venaient de partout ailleurs en Europe, ou dans le reste du monde, devenaient constitutifs de la culture française.” In other words, “I above all love our language, our culture, that which we must treasure and at the same time, always be open. It’s always been built out of our ability to gather in others, to attract talent from everywhere. To make young people — or less young — who come from all over Europe, or the rest of the world, become constituent parts of French culture.”
I won’t go through every word of the rest of that article, but I hope that example suffices to suggest how dishonest it is to write that Macron said, “French art? I never met it!” — and leave it at that. It should make you wonder, deeply, about the author’s motivation. What Macron said was true, and should not have been especially controversial; you’d have to know nothing about French culture to deny that many of its most luminous specimens were not born in France. He didn’t choose Picasso and Chagall as random examples. Picasso was born in Spain. (As was former Prime Minister Manuel Valls — of whom Jean-Marie Le Pen infamously said, “Valls has been French for 30 years. I’ve been French for 1,000 years. Has this immigrant really changed?”) Chagall, of course, was a Belarusian Jew — and the relevance of this, in the context of the National Front, is obvious.
I’ve written quite a bit, and I know I’ve taken up more of your time than you planned to assign to thinking about an election that’s already over. I didn’t mean to write so much, but I got angry when I read that lamentable piece by Yves Mamou, and felt it called for a response. And I’m still angry, but my case is not finished. So if you’d give me just a bit more time, here are two more articles, both of which I wrote prior to the election. They may help you understand why this makes me angry.
The first, which I published at The American Interest, is really a long piece. If you’re in a hurry, skip to the section called “You Madame, are No Margaret Thatcher,” and focus on this:
The National Front is not a normal political party in any way. Ranking members of normal French parties in the 21st century do not say things like this: “I consider that from a technical standpoint it is impossible—and I stress, impossible—to use it [Zyklon B] in mass exterminations.” Thus said Jean-François Jalkh, who was appointed interim party president only weeks ago, and almost as quickly forced to stand down when a journalist at La Croix republished these and related remarks. He’d offered them, apparently totally unprompted, to a doctoral student who kept both the notes and the audio recording of the interview.
The party is rotten with this kind of sentiment. As the election nears, multiple stories like this confirm that Le Pen’s campaign to soften the party’s image has been just that: an effort to soften its image. Consider Frédéric Chatillon and Axel Loustau, for example, “ubiquitous” members of her inner circle; they have been among her closest friends since she was a student. The “de-demonization” of the party didn’t go so far as to boot them (notable, because it did go so far as to boot Marine Le Pen’s own father). As Marine Le Pen’s former advisor, Aymeric Chauprade—who has fallen out with the party for “moral and political” reasons—put it to the New York Times: “They are anti-Semites, nostalgic for the Third Reich, violently anticapitalist, with a hatred for democracy…. People think they’re marginal. But in fact, I discovered, she protects them. She supports them. They are at the heart of everything.”
This is borne out in court documents; it has been captured on hidden cameras, and interview after interview substantiates it. They don’t even try all that hard to hide it. …
And when you’ve finished that, if you’re still unsure, please read this piece, which I published here. You’ll have to read the whole piece to understand why, exactly, this is specifically connected to the election that took place, and why I took another day to return to the subject, even though the election is over:
Some families were sent to internment camps near Paris, where the children, mostly aged between two and twelve, were separated from their families by the French police, drenched in water, and bludgeoned. Their parents were sent directly to Auschwitz.
Others were taken to the Vel d’Hiv. The few lavatories there were sealed, lest children escape through the windows. The children were left, alone, for five days in the unbearable heat, with only the scarce rations of food and water brought to them by the Quakers and the Red Cross.
From there, they were sent to the internment camps of Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. Then in August, the children were sent, alone — on French rail cars, by the French government — to Auschwitz. The youngest child sent to Auschwitz, under Laval’s orders, was only 18 months old. Laval, according to the historian Julian Jackson, told an American diplomat that he was “happy” to get rid of them.
Not one returned. All were exterminated.
Then perhaps you need one more piece of information to understand why, when I see Americans doubt that the defeat of Le Pen was a good thing, I want to vomit. That additional piece of information is my father’s birthday. You don’t need to know the specific date. But if you know he was born in 1942, you can put it together.
It was only by the grace of God — or luck, perhaps, because no one knows where the hell God was, back then — that he’s alive. Some other child became the footnote known to historians as “the youngest child.” But it was only because my grandparents, somehow, managed to get an exit visa. Most Jews didn’t.
And no, that will never be a “detail of history.”
Published in General
I’ve not had it with reading your reviews, just have to get to work! Sometimes your reviews require more than one cup of coffee, but I’ll be back later today – carry on the good work from the “front seat” of history! Viva la France!
Claire, I’ve found your writing on Le Pen persuasive, and I appreciate your efforts.
This quotation attributed to Le Pen is damning, and I’d like to repeat it elsewhere. However, I’m unable to locate any link to the original quotation, nor can I find it on the Kommersant site. Do you have a link to an article or video that would substantiate the quotation?
Many thanks,
Hank
Thank you @claire. Keep up the good work, despite the opposition from your own side.
It’s here, though I don’t read Russian and so I’m relying on Google Translate and this translation into French in Le Monde. (Russian-readers here can tell me if it’s correctly translated.) I’m not sure if it was reported in English at the time.
More from the Google-translated version of the interview:
I’d like to see the whole thing properly translated into English, but alas, I don’t read Russian. I’m amazed, though, as I keep saying, by this new version of Google Translate. It’s not flawless English, but you sure do get the jist, don’t you.
Thank you. It’s an older story than I expected — 2011 — and I probably didn’t tell Kommersant to search the proper date range.
Appreciated.
Claire, I don’t dispute anything you have said. The problem is (and has always been) that it’s only half the picture, the other half being France’s future under Macron.
You focus on France’s option of suicide by alliance with Russia, by economic fantasies, and by anti-Semitic hatemongers. Others have focused on France’s option of suicide by demography, by different economic fantasies, and by other anti-Semites.
Many Americans who preferred Le Pen made the same error, focusing exclusively on one candidate’s flaws while declaring a single preferable trait of the other. Rather than continue that debate, please now analyze Macron as a worthy or unworthy leader on his own, without reference to alternative candidates. The election is over. Now, where is France headed?
Many good points, yet you still end with trying to associate her with the holocaust. As I said last time you brought it up, the points about her economic policy and friendliness to Russia are valid concerns. You made a much better case on those points in this article, but laying the blame for Vichy France on her comes across as completely unfounded.
You keep making the case that what Vichy France did was wrong. I don’t know of anyone who disputes that. Blaming LePen for it seems to be based on her saying the nazis were at fault. That’s not an endorsement of their actions.
Very good recap of the real issues with Le Pen and the National Front. I always figured she would lose but, based on what little I have read, was not too impressed with Macron. Clearly, with the information you have provided, he, relatively, is a fabulous choice.
The main complaints I have heard about Macron is that he is likely too allow many more immigrants, specifically undesirable immigrants unlikely to assimilate (making the two France problem worse). I do not claim to be well informed. What are your thoughts on that front?
Thank you for the detailed analysis.
Thank you, Claire, for your comprehensive treatment of this important topic. The National Front is beneath contempt and it is a sad commentary on the present state of the world that that party and its despicable leader were given a chance to govern France. We are all fortunate that the French electorate came to its senses and overwhelmingly rejected Le Pen and her loathsome party. I’m not sure that Macron is the answer, but at least there is hope; Le Pen’s election would have been a disaster – not just for France or Europe, but for the US also. Even if Macron turns out to be a standard-issue French socialist, we survived Mitterand and we will undoubtedly survive Macron.
I always found it curious that so many self professed American nationalist would seek to subvert American interests by supporting La Pen. I guess she hated the right people.
Thanks for this summary.
Something about binary choices….
La Pen does….
Economically, if France is forced to choose between the socialist nitwittery that they have been following up until now or launching a brand-new nitwittery, they are probably better off staying the course. If it hasn’t killed them yet, it probably won’t in one presidential term. Pulling an Argentina won’t make things better. It would probably make things worse.
Likewise, terrorism is bad and is going to get worse, but Russia is a threat right now.
Oddly enough, La Pen was more socialist than Macron.
I’m working on that article right now, actually. Always good for morale to know someone actually wants to read it!
Yes, thank you for continuing to weigh in and to jump into the comments with the rest of us.
But @claire has shown that some of Le Pen’s closest associates do endorse the actions of the Nazis and the Laval government, and Le Pen not only fails to repudiate them, she backs them:
So France has turned its back on an odious ideology. But has she returned to the embrace of another odious one?
Speaking of enemies, perhaps there is one problem that old cold warriors fell into due to concentrating on the immediate threat of a nuclear armed power with not only intercontinental ability to deliver those weapons, but intercontinental imperialist goals. That problem is to conflate the Communist and the Russian threats to international order.
Pre-Communist Russia (I) was also a threat, though its territorial ambitions were more modest than those of international Communism; Imperial Russia II is one as well. It has adapted some of the Soviet tools that were built to bury capitalism to the more modest ends of creating chaos beyond Russia’s near abroad to consolidate her territorial gains in the near abroad itself.
Europe’s bloody religious wars led to a diplomatic solution which, from its humble beginnings in Westphalia in 1648, developed into an international structure (created in part organically and in part through imperialisms) for national self-determination.
A number of threats to this system emerged in the 20th century: International socialism, imperialistic national socialism, and fascism; all of these have political ideologies to explain them. They also developed social technologies: international communication tools for the subversion and demoralization of their enemies.
Aspects of these social technologies have been adopted by Putin’s Russia, and by two other enemies of the Westphalia system: transnational corporations, and resurgent imperialist Islam.
Macron is a creature of the first; Le Pen purported to fight the second. France has spoken.
Well they are International Nationalists, who support other peoples nationalism more than their own, because they want to upset the system, and make “globalists” angry because they are such edgy outsiders and no one understands them but their woman (who is the sea). Okay I might have gone off the rails there. But, what I am seeing is that we are developing a very childish infatuation with revolution on the conservative side. I guess maybe that comes with feeling and being out of power. Just like commies and socialists of old too many on our side now are willing to cheer for anyone fighting “the system”. Which is how you got so many liberals in the US cheering for the Vietcong, Castro, and every socialist guerrilla group in jungles across the world.
We often site how the progressives and liberals have 60’s protest nostalgia, but I don’t think they are the only ones. Conservatives too now seem to romanticize the whole protest culture. Why all the talk about being at war with the left? Everyone wants to be a small band of rebels fighting the power. It has seeped into our bones and warped our very souls. All is now viewed through the lens of conflict and resistance. We resit them, they resist us, and everyone wants to be the more oppressed group rising up in rebellion.
This is the justification for many preferences for Le Pen. It’s reasonable to worry about empowerment of anti-Semitism under Le Pen as leader. But that was theoretical, whereas France already suffers under rising anti-Semitism due to the immigrants Macron welcomes. Many people prioritize the present threat over the likely threat.
I don’t expect that there will be a significant influx of immigration. It’s pretty clear no one in France wants that.
What’s really up in the air is whether he’ll be able to achieve any of the economic reforms he’s promised. So the main thing to watch now are the legislative elections, in June. Remember that Macron has no established party of his own. And unless he has his own parliamentary majority, he’ll be hamstrung from the gate: He won’t be able to reform the labor market, pensions, benefits, any of that.
He’s put up names of 428 candidates for the election, including 200 who are completely new to politics. He’s selling this as, “I promised you a revolution, and you’re going to get it. Fresh blood, top to bottom.” I get what he’s thinking, but I’m thinking — “Inexperienced. Too many inexperienced people on that list. We need people who know how to run the government and where the bodies are buried, so to speak.” I would not be surprised if many voters agree with me, but even if they do, I can’t really predict what this is going to mean.
Polls show only 52 percent of voters want a pro-Macron government to emerge in the legislatives; 42 percent want a legislature that will be check on him. (I don’t know what the other six percent want. It’s kind of a mystery.)
The Socialist Party is so dead that former prime minister Manuel Valls actually declared it “dead” and said he wanted to run as a candidate in Macron’s party. (Macron turned him down — not clear if this was for ideological reasons, or because of personal bad blood, or because he thought voters had clearly said, “Enough of Hollande’s government,” and didn’t think it would be a popular move to accept him.)
But the Républicains (center-right) know that they only lost this one because they bet badly with Fillon — if he hadn’t been crooked, they’d have the presidency. So I’m guessing we’ll see a lot of Socialist defections to Macron’s camp, but LR fighting for every seat — and trying to pick up all of Le Pen’s voters along the way.
His list is going to be up against a lot of seasoned politicians who’ve had long careers and who have extensive local networks of supporters.
So … watch the legislatives to see what he’s actually going to be able to do, or not do, in the coming five years. My guess is that basically, he wants to govern from the center-right (and that’s what the left here suspects, too, which is why they’re already demonstrating against him). But he’s left the door wide open to cooperation with the center-left, so if that’s the legislature he gets, that’s probably what France will get.
It’s also worth considering the proposal of alliances with Russia from non-American perspectives. Yes, Putin is a threat for many countries in many ways. But he’s consistent and arguably a rising power. US leadership in contrast is unreliable as its goals swing wildly between elections and America’s future is full of doubts.
Between the incessant leaking of our intelligence agencies and the internal battle over America’s foreign policy, the US is unattractive as an ally in many ways. Consequently, some leaders might prefer to gamble that the bear won’t bite its companions.
That is a rather kind reading of Putin’s ambitions.
Just so you know what’s making the rounds about Macron, Claire:
I still think we need to do more work on the question – if the Left is so bad in general, and the Far-Far-Right is so bad … why can’t the Center-Right field a more competitive candidate?
The American election is one thing, but I wonder if France reinforces the trend. The voting public does not like center-right candidates who propose to work within the current system, neither here nor in Europe. I suspect that Brexit displayed another version of it.
People don’t like the existing system, neither here nor in Europe. They’re drawn to people who intend to work by different rules. That deserves consideration. Are they(we) wrong to not like it? Are they just being emotional? Are they secretly pointing to some hidden truth?
I don’t think we’re seeing concern about any specific candidates. I think we’re seeing a rejection of the whole political environment.
It’s all very well for Macron to say
Europe has lots of emptying villages and empty churches, and across the Mediterranean are a lot of people who would rather be poor in France than poor in wherever they are from. Europe is planning for eight million more in the next few years. Nice to address root causes, but what Macron does means by “strengthening European actions?” In the short term that appears to be open borders, so in the short term, how does Macron plan to keep France’s fair share of the eight million immigrants Europe is planning for out of France? Will he join Hungary and Poland in their legal action against the EU?
I implied nothing about his ambitions. Nor did I defend Putin in any way. Even brutal and aggressive dictators distinguish between victims/enemies and fair-weather friends. Some national leaders might prefer neutrality amid Russia’s aggressions to defiance.
Kindness or unkindness are irrelevant in this context. Russia is a rising power, and Putin, threat though he poses, looks to be a relatively predictable threat. That can mean stability. I can certainly see a country preferring to deal with the Godfather when the cops are capricious, often absent, and when there are sporadically corrupt in how they do their job.
It may not be wise, but it’s understandable.
Fair enough, it doesn’t explain why Americans would support such a union though.
Because they are more concerned about terrorism than about Russia. If the rise of Islam in Europe isn’t stopped, we will lose our European allies within a generation or two.
As Steyn recently said, most people seem to understand that demographic changes can have consequences. What they fail to understand is how quickly those demographic changes can occur.