Let’s leave the fascinating debate on retirement at 60, 62 or 65 to the French. This election presented two political visions so radically opposed that they concerned “the rest of the world” as much.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
It is no exaggeration to say that liberalism and the future of democracy in Europe were at stake.
Marine Le Pen’s speech is less brutal, but the former National Front, now National Rally (RN), is still fundamentally anti-European and anti-NATO. Not to mention the fact that in the “homeland of human rights”, she envisaged an unprecedented attack on the civil liberties of religious minorities by prohibiting the wearing of any religious sign in public space.
Guess who Vladimir Putin wanted to see at the Élysée?
The operations of destabilization of constitutional democracies by Russia are numerous and well documented. Since the FBI investigation and the Mueller investigation, we have proof of the Kremlin’s maneuvers to help Donald Trump’s campaign. We see how Trump was, and still is, at the head of a colony of carpenter ants of the American democratic system.
In Britain, Russian Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko – quoted in the Mueller report – backed Brexit leaders.
In France, one only has to reread Marine Le Pen’s positions on Russia, NATO and Europe in recent years to see the influence of Russian propaganda. No need to have been aware of this loan of around 15 million from a Russian bank to his party to suspect it. But this loan, dubious in 2014, takes on a whole new dimension when Putin’s bloody aims come even more clearly.
Europe has its heaviness, its bureaucracy, its rigidities. It forces compromises between sovereign states. NATO has its problems, its contradictions and its impotence.
But since the invasion of Ukraine, all of a sudden, these two institutions find a new meaning, or rather, we see more clearly than ever what they stand for.
I am not analyzing the French vote here. I examine its international impact. A disunited, more turbulent Europe is a victory for Putin. For China too. This is why this election was so important for liberalism.
The fact remains that this somewhat diluted extreme right never stops progressing in France. At 42% in the end, it’s major.
PHOTO DARRIN ZAMMIT LUPI, REUTERS
Marine Le Pen addresses her supporters after her defeat on Sunday evening.
It will be necessary to ask why and how Le Pen continues to progress, to reach more than the threshold of electoral respectability.
Because the same currents exist here as everywhere, and they draw from the same sources.
Did I write “extreme right”? Oh, sorry, it seems that we have no right to say that.
Conservative commentators in France and Quebec tell us that Le Pen’s RN cannot be assimilated to the extreme right, because in many respects it proposes social policies, not to say socialist ones. The classic far right, on the contrary, would be for the deconstruction of the state and all-out deregulation. We could surely hold a political science symposium on this subject, but the ultranationalist far right in Europe before the Second World War advocated an all-powerful state.
What is extreme in the policies of the RN is its illiberalism. During the debate last week, Macron told Le Pen that his proposals would provoke a “civil war”. Do you really want to send the cops to arrest veiled women in the streets?
All she could find to say was that he had indeed sent the cops to arrest people who did not respect sanitary measures.
I heard a commentator say that this Macron charge was meant to boost the “Muslim communitarian” vote. Because if this political proposal is indeed in Le Pen’s program, she did not talk about it in the campaign.
Yet just because she hides her most heinous ideas doesn’t mean they’re any less extreme.
On the merits, how can we accept that a presidential candidate proposes such a huge violation of public freedoms? A proposal manifestly contrary not only to the values of freedom, but also to the French Constitution.
Because if she is especially against the Muslim veil, a law prohibiting it in the streets of the Republic should also exclude Jewish kippas, Sikh turbans, not to mention of course the few remaining cassocks…
No democratic regime has ever done such a thing. And indeed, it is communist regimes that have banished religions claiming to liberate the citizen from the opium of the people, therefore the extreme left.
It is perhaps necessary to put aside the definitions and the old lists, in this era when the classic parties are bursting everywhere and recomposing themselves à la carte.
This is no reason to drown the fish, to dilute the social poison of this extremism by refusing to name intolerance and xenophobia, camouflaged in the fight against Islamist fanaticism.
It can be given all sorts of meanings. But in the end, Emmanuel Macron’s victory is that of fundamental democratic values. At this moment in history, it seems to me that it is particularly necessary and pleasing.