You’ve never thought about it, so much does democracy seem obvious to you. Perhaps you are too uneducated to elect your own representatives? Perhaps we should introduce a “permit to vote” as there is a driver’s license? This would only allow the voting booth to those who passed the good voter test. Do not laugh ! This is the absurd idea proposed in 2017 by the former French columnist Aymeric Caron in one of his books (Utopia XXI, Flammarion). An idea that he had defended at the time on television sets. After all, to practice law, you have to do the Bar, he said. Why shouldn’t democracy have its professional order? A form of property-based vote inherited from the Old Regime, but revised and corrected by university leftism.
All of this would only be a gigantic farce if its author, known in Quebec for his vegan activism, were not preparing to stand in the French legislative elections under the banner of the radical left led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Arrived third in the presidential election, the tribune is about to complete an alliance with other formations which should devote his hegemony on the French left. A first since those years when the Communist Party, under orders from Moscow, ruled the left and in the intellectual world.
Would we go back to that time? One might wonder, at a time when social democracy is imploding, in France as in Quebec, for that matter. However, what is striking is the impunity enjoyed by this radical left. While the denunciation of the “extreme right” seems to be becoming more and more imperative, what was still called the “extreme left” yesterday, on the contrary, enjoys an undeniable benevolence in the media. As if only the right could sink into extremism.
Coming from the revolutionary left and still imbued with this culture, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is proof to the contrary. The candidate may take on the proposal to explode public spending by 250 billion euros, but journalists generally give him an indulgent look. Perhaps in memory of their own youth.
It must be said that like a conjurer, the man showed great skill. A fine tactician, he was among the first on the left to take inspiration from the famous note by the think tank Terra Nova, which advocated in 2011 the abandonment of the traditional workers’ vote in favor of that of immigrants and these new urban classes and educated in search of “societal” revolution.
Who remembers the former secularist for whom those who wore the Islamic veil “stigmatized” themselves? “You can’t call yourself a feminist by displaying a sign of patriarchal submission,” he said in 2010. The new Mélenchon, for his part, is no longer afraid to appear alongside supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and to oppose the law on Islamist separatism. Its deputy Danièle Obono even dreams of abolishing the 2004 law prohibiting religious symbols at school.
Bet won: during the first round of the presidential election, Mélenchon won 69% of the Muslim vote, according to an IFOP poll carried out for The cross. His electoral progress is largely due to his ability to flirt with this new, yet ultra-conservative electorate. Against everything he had defended before, the former Trotskyist militant rallied to the new racialist and decolonial theses coming from the American university left. He also wants to include in the French constitution the “right to choose one’s gender”.
Like Québec solidaire, Mélenchon largely rallies the student youth of the big cities and the immigrant populations of the suburbs thanks to a mixture of cultural leftism and communitarianism called “Islamo-leftism”. This ideology offers the immense privilege of sparing yesterday’s Marxists from painful questioning. For the “bourgeoisie” that they denounced on all platforms, it suffices to substitute the “white bourgeoisie”. For the rest, it is the same Manichaeism and the same rhetoric, the class struggle henceforth being coupled with the struggle of races, when it is not the struggle of the sexes.
It will be said that in these times when political landmarks are blurred, it is the whole era that exudes radicality – this is not false.
However, on the left, all the excuses are good to absolve the most extreme speeches, and even the violence which accompanies them more and more in France, in particular during demonstrations. In the university middle class, this leftism seems to have become a kind of rite of passage for a youth in search of challenges, a rite that everyone looks at with tenderness and perhaps even a touch of nostalgia.
It is partly because they have not distinguished themselves from this new radicalism, a thousand leagues from what the ordinary world thinks, that the great social-democratic parties, such as the French Socialist Party and the Parti Québécois, are today in the agony. Also failing to understand how much this resurgence of the radical left is linked to the belief that only the right can be totalitarian. A belief contradicted by the whole history of the XXand century.