Do you know Sahra Wagenknecht? Coming from the former East Germany, her background has always been associated with the left. In January, she founded a new party, The Alliance for Reason and Justice. Non-existent barely four months ago, it miraculously managed to surpass 5% on Sunday and gain access to the European Parliament. A real feat!
The reason ? Sahra Wagenknecht is the only one on the left to oppose mass immigration. As a good Marxist (because it is a subject on which Marx was not mistaken), she believes that it is the working classes who pay the price of uncontrolled immigration which pushes wages down and accentuates the crisis of the welfare state.
You probably know the famous line from James Carville, Bill Clinton’s advisor who, in the midst of a recession, dethroned George HW Bush who had not been a bad president: “It’s the economy, stupid! »
At the end of these European elections, we could parody Carville by saying: “It’s the immigration, stupid! “. Because, everywhere, the parties that have done well are those that have taken the full measure of the social, political and identity crisis caused by mass immigration in Europe.
Beyond the labels, the common thread of this election was this uncontrolled immigration which has become the symbol of the dispossession of the working classes, as the essayist Christophe Guilluy has amply demonstrated. In Germany, regardless of their political color, all anti-immigration parties have been rewarded at the ballot box. Starting with the traditional right (CDU-CSU), today led by the “potential chancellor” Friedrich Merz, a historic opponent of Angela Merkel who has radically hardened the party’s program in this area. Same thing in Italy, in Austria and the Netherlands, founding countries of the European Union. In Ireland, the party that collapsed was Sinn Féin, which never saw immigration as an important issue, even when migrant reception centers were burgeoning across the country.
In France, the tidal wave of the National Rally (RN), the so-called “extreme right” party which affects all social classes, is the expression of this same groundswell. Jordan Bardella was able to convince previously very reluctant categories of voters, such as senior executives and women. The RN even comes first in Brittany, which had always been impervious to it. As for Emmanuel Macron’s personal defeat, it is so scathing that, to everyone’s surprise, he saw fit to call early legislative elections. A persistent rumor goes so far as to say that he could resign in the event of cohabitation.
On Wednesday, in two hours of a lunar press conference, he nevertheless did not devote 30 seconds to immigration and barely a little more to purchasing power, which polls indicate are at the top of the concerns the French. It was easier to raise the old, yellowed standard of the threat of extremes.
The tactic dates back to François Mitterrand. It consists of brandishing the scarecrow of fascism. It took 40 years to unmask this “cordon santé” scam that the greatest French political scientist of his time, Raymond Aron, had identified in 1983. The only fascism of the 1980s, he wrote, “is red and not brown “.
Seven years ago, by absorbing the center right and the center left and declaring himself the only party of reason, Macron put an end to the democratic game of alternation, throwing extremes into the hellfire right any claim to succeed him. A speech repeated word for word on Wednesday, in which he equated any opposition to a banal “expression of anger”.
By calling elections three weeks’ notice and 15 days before the Olympic Games – after having affirmed that the Europeans had nothing to do with domestic politics – the president gives the impression of playing with matches. For former political advisor Alain Minc, he even invented a new Russian roulette… with five bullets in the barrel! According to the latest polls, barely 15% of French people believe in his victory on July 7. He could even come third.
His whim has already caused the left to rally around its most radical wing (La France insoumise) which revels in a form of revolutionary romanticism flirting with anti-Semitism and calls for violence. On the right, he accelerated the breakup of the Republicans, whose days were numbered, for the benefit of an RN certainly carrying demands shared by the majority of French people, but without experience or seasoned executives and whose economic program is, to say the least, lame.
Behind the appearance of the fight between the extremes, are we not discovering the new face of what the left and the right have quite simply become, after a period of erasure? To put it simply, the new left today is rather multicultural, wokist and decolonial. The new right, rather nationalist, sovereignist and conservative.
In the fury and chaos, we are witnessing not only the return of the opposition between right and left, but perhaps also of the alternation without which no democracy could survive.