It is a front, an arc, an alliance, a dam or a coalition, a gathering, a bloc, an understanding, a union. Unless it is a pact, an agreement or a contract. It does not matter as long as the word is followed by the adjective “republican”. A magical attribute that would seem to have the power to transform any electoral alliance, even the most shaky, into an irreproachable political project. For three weeks, French news has exhausted all the imaginable variations on this theme of the “republican front”, the creativity of the political elites being almost limitless in this area.
This “republican arc” was first applied to all parties represented in the National Assembly, as Prime Minister Gabriel Attal briefly stated when he took office. But it was too good to last. The National Rally (RN) having shown some inclinations to break out of its role as a protest party in order to try to govern, it was quickly excluded without further explanation.
As for La France Insoumise — whose verbal violence is often reminiscent of that of Donald Trump — it would be “republican” to fight the RN, but not to govern. What then of the New Popular Front of which it is the main component? A vast question to which the main interested parties, who came out on top in the legislative elections but are unable to agree on the name of a prime minister, still do not know how to answer, as this alliance is so variable in geometry.
In reality, this removal from the republican framework has nothing to do with the respect for the rules and laws of the Republic that characterizes, whether we like them or not, all the parties of the National Assembly. It has everything to do with a form of discredit and opprobrium thrown on the opposition according to the moods of the moment. One day, you are a republican, and therefore a simple adversary. The next day, you are no longer one: you are transformed into an irreducible enemy and rejected from the circle of good society.
This way of doing politics has not always prevailed. We remember a time when one could criticize one’s opponent’s program without consigning it to the flames of hell or thus transforming politics into a contest of moral respectability. For, as is well known, one does not debate with fascists, Nazis and other enemies of the human race. Eliminating them would even be an act of courage.
It is then surprising that a madman would want to settle his score with the man whose “authoritarian and dictatorial tendencies” Hillary Clinton had compared to Hitler. A comparison repeated word for word in an opinion published by the highly respected Washington Post : “Yes, we can compare Trump to Hitler.” Not to mention the incredible cover of the June issue of the equally respected magazine New Republic reproducing a photo of the Republican candidate with a small mustache under the title “American Fascism ». And we won’t mention some of the comments that seemed to regret that the shooter missed his target.
Of course, Trump himself has never been short of verbal excesses of the same nature. But this recent radicalization of political discourse has causes. One of the first is certainly the ambient political ignorance, particularly that of journalists. One must be of abysmal historical ignorance to find a single common point between the architect of the Shoah and any French or American political leader, even the most demagogic and authoritarian. One must also be completely ignorant of fascism, which was a totalitarian and revolutionary ideology, on a par with communism.
This radicalization of discourse is above all very convenient. Regardless of the proven demagogy or not of the leaders, it allows the elites to send millions of voters back to their kitchen as if they had not expressed the slightest dismay or the slightest suffering… while waiting for the next Yellow Vests! This is exactly what has been happening in France since abracadabra alliances have made it possible to push the RN bloc back to third place among the political forces in the National Assembly, as if, with its 10.1 million voters, it were not the first political bloc in France and the one whose nominal vote increased the most during the last legislative elections.
It will always be easier to send Marine Le Pen back to her province and Trump to the asylum rather than to ask what they represent and what popular and identity-based demands they are the exacerbated expression of.
How can we not sense in these political spasms, in France as in the United States, the last hiccups of a political class that emerged in the 1980s with “happy globalization”? An end of a cycle that is symbolized in a caricatured way, each in their own way, by the aging Joe Biden and the narcissistic Emmanuel Macron, both powerless in the face of the upheaval of the era. “This explains the violence and emphasis of the words,” wrote the historian Pierre Vermeren, “while ‘the people’, as a political actor, ‘the nation-state’ and ‘the homeland’ had been declared dead by the boomers.”
This return of peoples and nations to the stage of history has certainly not produced its last convulsions. Had we forgotten? History is not a four o’clock tea where people of good society discuss with their little finger in the air.
This column will return to you in September.