He was quite a croquignolet the other morning to hear the writer Jacques Attali on the radio talk about the dangers that the election of Marine Le Pen on April 24 would pose to France. According to him, this election would lead, simultaneously and “in less than a month”, to the “ruin of the French economy”, to the “exit from the European Union” and to an alliance of France “with the Kremlin against NATO.
Hearing these words, it was difficult not to think of the nightmare that had inspired many, in 1981, the prospect of the election of François Mitterrand – of which Jacques Attali was then the chief of staff. In Le Figaro of April 11 of that year, the writer Jean d’Ormesson predicted “collapsed companies” and a “collapsed franc”. Without forgetting the former minister Michel Poniatowski, according to whom “Russian tanks” would soon be parked “place de la Concorde”!
This is what happens to those who try to apply yesterday’s concepts to today’s reality. The difficulty with this second round of the French presidential election, which opposes Marine Le Pen to Emmanuel Macron, consists precisely in getting out of these prefabricated diagrams.
We do not understand anything if we do not recognize that this election is only the last episode of the political recomposition started in France a few decades ago. This has seen the right-left opposition slowly disappear in favor of new divisions that could be traced back to the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. By signing the disappearance of the Socialist Party, the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 only confirmed this erasure. Last week’s ballot took a further step by reserving the same fate for the traditional right (Les Républicains).
But what are these new divisions? It is first of all that which opposes the globalists to the sovereignists – others will say, the Europeanists to the nationalists. We could also see there what Emmanuel Macron himself designates as the antagonism between “progressives” and “conservatives”. These oppositions are coupled with a third fracture between what the political scientist Jérôme Sainte-Marie calls the “elite bloc” and the “popular bloc”. This is confirmed by the sociology of Macronist and Lepenist electorates.
In a world where the opposition between the right and the left no longer punctuates political life, we will have understood the futility of the qualifier “extreme right” that many attach to Marine Le Pen. Qualifier that no one else can define precisely. Especially since the candidate has a left-wing economic program, that she no longer wishes to leave the euro and that she intends to submit her proposals on immigration to a referendum. In short, the democratic choice of the majority.
The keenest observers, such as political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff (On the Devil in Politics: Reflections on Ordinary Antilepenism, CNRS), have shown for a long time that this epithet had essentially become a polemical process designating vindictiveness to those who wear it. However, with each election, we see the rebirth of what former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin himself described as anti-fascist “theatre”.
As the philosopher Marcel Gauchet said recently on Europe 1, Marine Le Pen rather represents “an authoritarian, national, popular right, which furiously evokes the beginnings of the Vand Republic” and Gaullism. “In reality, she embodies something very different from what the extreme right has been like in the past. We would gain, from the point of view of political clarity, by recognizing this. »
The best analysts have understood this. Political scientist Pascal Perrineau speaks of a “populist right”, while the president of Fondapol, Dominique Reynié, evokes a “national sovereignist right”. It “is all the same problematic”, he specifies, to consider as far-right the simple fact “of wanting to leave the European treaties and reform the constitution by referendum”… as General de Gaulle!
Instead of criticizing its program, particularly in terms of public debt, it will always be easier to decree that it is outside the “circle of reason” or the “republican circle”. Two partisan ways of appropriating the Good side. We can disagree with Marine Le Pen’s political project without declaring that with her “the poor will perhaps die”, as the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, did on Tuesday. In another era, communists also ate little children, joked comedian Pierre Desproges.
This way of sending almost one out of two voters to the camp of Evil is the recipe for civil war. In his memoirs, the great essayist Jean-François Revel recounts this anecdote. The tutelary figure of the left, Pierre Mendès France, once told him that General de Gaulle would never leave power on his own, according to him. In short, that it was the seed of a dictator, as the Americans also believed. However, not only did de Gaulle leave power of his own free will, but he did so when constitutionally nothing obliged him to do so, on the occasion of a simple referendum lost with a score of 48 %. All did not have this abnegation.
We are never immune to intellectual laziness.