EN24: Yellow vests: only 10% of French people still say they support them

 “The movement remains a pole of protest which continues to be regenerated by new frustrations, however, underlines Jerôme Fourquet, director at Ifop. To the historical ones who rebelled against the increase in taxes on fuel and denounced the gap between the people and the elites, were added the directors of nightclubs affected by the economic impact of the health crisis or the anti-masks . The yellow vests crystallize all the anger which itself is constantly renewed. What does not change, however, is that the Vests are recruited mainly from the extreme parties (15% vote for Jean-Luc Melenchon, 19% for Marine Le Pen).

The yellow vests also suffer from their inability to agree on a common political platform. “It is true that the Yellow Vests have not succeeded in becoming a French“ Five Star ”, Fourquet analysis. In Italy, this movement had gained momentum thanks to Bepe Grillo, in whom he had found incarnation. Jean-Marie Bigard, who for a while believed to bring the movement to France, was exfiltrated from a parade this Saturday. The Ifop poll also points out that only 32% of those who say they are close to the yellow vests could consider voting for the comedian. We are far from the plebiscite. And now, it is Professor Didier Raoult who, according to Jerôme Fourquet, would be popular with them.

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The New Yorker: The Gilets Jaunes and a Surprise Crisis in France

The gilets jaunes take their name from the yellow safety vests that French drivers are required to keep in their cars. The group is a complicated phenomenon, first of all because it has no defined leader. The movement began in protest of Macron’s economic policies, particularly the increase in fuel taxes (four euro cents on the litre for unleaded gas, seven euro cents for diesel) that was introduced, in January, to help curb carbon emissions. Along with the hike in taxes, the price of gas has risen dramatically, meaning that French drivers, this fall, found themselves paying as much as 1.59 euros per litre (six dollars per gallon), an increase of seventeen per cent since this time last year for users of unleaded gas, and twenty-three per cent for diesel. For many households, particularly in rural and suburban areas that are ill-served by public transportation, the added expense has been brutal. It has also inflamed social resentment, the sense that the ruling classes and their wealthy urban supporters take the rest of the country for fools, “milking cows” for the rich to grow ever fatter off of. In a homemade Facebook video that has been viewed more than six million times, Jacline Mouraud, an accordionist from Brittany who has become a de facto spokesperson for the movement, vented her frustration with an exasperated, folksy refrain: “Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites avec le pognon des français?” (“But what are you doing with French people’s money”). In addition to the gas tax, she objected to new rules for car inspections and the transformation of the countryside into a “forest of radars.” Many of the group’s early actions consisted simply of blocking traffic on roads and at roundabouts. [...]

According to some polls, around eighty per cent of French people are sympathetic to the gilets jaunes. When the questions are worded more precisely, the number drops to around forty-five per cent, roughly the same proportion of the electorate that supported the extreme-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19.5%) and the extreme-right leader Marine Le Pen (21.3%) in the first round of the 2017 Presidential race. Interestingly, the gilets jaunes have been able to amass support without putting particularly impressive numbers of people on the streets. Even as physical participation in the movement has declined—from almost three hundred thousand people to a hundred a sixty-six thousand in the course of three weekends—its power has increased. (Can there ever be fewer of a thing online?) A fourth Saturday of disruption is planned for this weekend. [...]

The European Parliamentary elections are coming up in May. Macron knows that they are referendum not only on him but also on the values of globalism, centrism, and environmentalism, of which he has positioned himself as an international defender. One of the garbled but loud messages of the gilets-jaunes movement may be that it isn’t the street that Macron has to master, it’s the information highway. Macron successfully fended off hackers’ attempts to discredit his campaign on the eve of the Presidential election, but it’s hard not to wonder whether Facebook populism is finally coming for France.

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Jacobin Magazine: We’re With the Rebels

The people who are mobilizing in the gilets jaunes movement are the people of peripheral France: those who come not from large urban centers but from smaller towns and rural areas. A part of the country that is not usually seen is today rising up. To make itself visible it wears the flourescent yellow vest, a reflective garment every driver has to keep in their car. They came together, and organized, on social media — a few weeks ago groups started being created for each département (small administrative units of France) — and sometimes they held a few preparatory meetings before they took to the streets on dawn of Saturday 17. [...]

This feeling of exasperation is the result of years of fiscal and social policies that have gradually strangled the low and middle classes, including in terms of the tax take. Immediately upon reaching office, Macron abolished the Solidarity Wealth Tax (ISF), giving €4 billion to the richest; and has strengthened the Tax Credit for Solidarity and Employment (CICE), a tax cut and exemption program transferring €41 billion a year to French companies, including multinationals. Shortly afterwards, with the 2018 budget bill, Macron established a flat tax that allowed a lowering of taxation on capital, handing another €10 billion to the richest. [...]

The movement is not limited to mainland France, but has also reached France’s “ex”-colonies in the overseas territories and in particular the island of Réunion. In a territory where unemployment is sky-high and 42 percent of people live under the poverty line, the prices of petrol, gas, and electricity have also continued to increase. As in rural and peripheral France, such territories have particularly suffered the degradation of public services over the last decade or more, as governments close the hospitals, courts, and train stations taxes are meant to pay for. The social contract crumbles, and gives way to anger. [...]

Some doubts are legitimate. Ecologists and the defenders of nature have been, to say the least, disconcerted by the hubbub around a movement that basically asks to be able to burn more fuel at a lower price and that seemed initially uninterested in the government’s at least explicit intention to use this “carbon tax” to fund the ecological transition.

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Jacobin Magazine: Emmanuel Macron Goes to Church

This past April, however, Macron made the controversial move of accepting an invitation to speak at the annual conference of the bishops of France. In a country with a long tradition of militant anticlerical struggle, the fact that the president would even get in a room with the Catholic Church’s top clergymen was enough to rouse some secularists’ worries that Macron’s commitment to laïcité was less than solid. Minutes into his speech, the young president seemed to confirm these worries, announcing to the bishops that “the link between the church and the state has become strained, and it is up to us to repair it.” [...]

Addressing the bishops only days after workers went on strike to contest his government’s liberalization of the national rail service, Macron took the opportunity to describe what he believed was the real challenge facing French society. “It is not only an economic crisis,” he insisted, “it is a relativism, even a nihilism, the idea that nothing is worth it: not worth learning, not worth working, and especially not worth lending a hand in service.” In our “postmodern era,” Macron continued, “our system traps people in a spirit of ‘What’s the point?’” by discouraging hard work and entrepreneurial initiative.

The message was clear to anyone familiar with Macron’s tendency to moralize economic activity. Throughout his short political career, he has cast himself as a champion of entrepreneurs and risk-takers against the “lazy.” For Macron, France is divided between those who want to set the country in motion — or as he named his campaign movement, En Marche! — and those who want to keep it stuck in place. In his speech to the bishops, Macron unsurprisingly insinuated that striking workers across the country are on the side of immobilism and laziness; choosing his words carefully, he referred to this moral crisis as “burdening our country,” the verb grever, “to burden,” being a homonym for the word for “strike.” More original was his suggestion that the church is on the side of dynamism and initiative. Throughout his speech, he praised the Catholic “energy” that he believed was the authentic source of French politics and culture, and called on Catholics to continue to “act politically” in this struggle. [...]

Sensing the growing respectability and popularity of anti-immigrant rhetoric, many prominent figures of France’s mainstream right has been determined not to let the Front National reap all the benefit. As a result, its strategy in recent years has increasingly been to exacerbate the far right’s obfuscations by associating laïcité, paradoxically, with Catholic religious identity. The massive protests against the legalization of gay marriage in 2013 revealed the political engagement of Christian conservatives to be a much greater political force than many had previously acknowledged. Under the leadership of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the Right began staking its future on concocting a mixture of anti-immigrant rhetoric and ethnicized Catholic identity politics that could compete with that of the Front National.

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Jacobin Magazine: The French Left’s Long March to the Right

Today, the situation is different. In 2012, François Hollande was elected with exactly the same majority as François Mitterrand in 1981 (51.7 percent), and had an absolute majority of socialists in the National Assembly, a socialist majority in the Senate, control of every regional government in France but one (Alsace), a majority of departmental governments, big cities. Never in France’s history has a head of government of the Left held so many of the levers of national power. And what did he do with it? One of his ministers, Arnaud Montebourg, summarized it well: “When they voted for the socialists, the French people didn’t know they were voting for the program of the German right.” [...]

Corbyn and Sanders, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, are breaking with these ideas, reviving a social language that foregrounds the inegalitarian and environmentally destructive logic of the market. Their programs vary; sometimes, especially on foreign policy issues, Sanders concedes too much to his political allies, the Democrats, who’ve always been the loyal managers (and even the architects) of America’s imperial policies. But for now, Corbyn, Sanders, and Mélenchon are sticking to a line that rejects both Third Way liberalism and the lefty academic and postcolonial verbiage churned out in elite American institutions. Here I’m thinking of the obsession with “diversity” that, in celebrating all identities, often hardens and essentializes them — as long as the identities in question aren’t class identity defined by one’s relationship to capitalist production. [...]

So the bourgeoisie owning “a little bit of money and an apartment” became the favored constituency of a socialist movement born in the nineteenth century thanks to working-class trade unionism intended to unite the proletariat of all nations. DSK, charitably, doesn’t entirely forget the poor: he suggests “caring about them, helping them, training them to try to bring them into the middle layers.” But he suggests no longer “relying on them, because most of the time they don’t want to participate in political life, since they feel excluded.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Politics of France Insoumise

Perry Anderson described France Insoumise’s April 2017 presidential campaign as “an impressive feat.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rallies gathered huge crowds, and he was widely recognized as the winner of the televised debates. In the final weeks of the campaign he achieved a spectacular increase in his support. Despite this major advance, Mélenchon came in fourth place, after Emmanuel Macron, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen, and François Fillon, the candidate of the conservative Les Républicains. In the parliamentary elections that took place in June, France Insoumise (FI) obtained seventeen seats, an insufficient number to have any real influence in parliamentary negotiations. Macron’s party La République En Marche secured a majority in the National Assembly, while Les Républicans came in second place. [...]

In this context, France Insoumise has at least three major resources that it can rely on while building itself as the main opposition to Macron and his neoliberal policies: Mélenchon’s charisma; the enthusiasm aroused by his presidential campaign; and the party’s parliamentary presence, which grants it a certain media visibility. FI intends to oppose Macron both in parliament and the streets, which also means using its platform to call for protests. The first test for this strategy arrived last September, when the party called a demonstration against Macron’s labor reform, which deepens the liberalization of labor relations and slashing of labor rights promoted by former president François Hollande. The protest was a success (around 100,000 people took part in the march) but it was not enough to stop the so-called XL labor reform, which was eventually approved in November. This raised the question of where the formation would go next. [...]

At the same time, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his collaborators have created a new kind of political organization, which they refuse to call a party. Indeed, France Insoumise’s membership is flexible and there are no elected decision-making structures. This organizational model raises questions. Who, then, makes the decisions? How legitimate are France Insoumise’s present leaders? How much power do militants have? These questions recall the insights in American activist Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman argued that the absence of formal decision-making structures in political organizations is “a way of masking power,” and put forward a set of principles for promoting democracy which are applicable both to social movements and parties, such as the circulation of tasks, the distribution of authority among a wide array of individuals, and the accountability of leaders to the people who have elected them.

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The Atlantic: What Foreigners Don't Get About Emmanuel Macron

In other words, Emmanuel Macron is the Donald Trump of the elite class. He’s not just their representative—he’s their avatar. Trump’s die-hard followers love him with such devotion not just because they like what he says, but because his image is that of the guy they wish they were or could be. It’s the same thing with Macron and his own elite base. And this is the stuff out of which Messianic movements are made. [...]

As Christophe Guilluy, a sociologist and leading analyst of contemporary society, pointed out, Macron’s supporters can be boiled down to one word: They are the “haves.” They are the people who rode the waves of change that have inundated the West over the past few decades—globalization, technological transformation—to great success. Education is the best predictor of voting for Macron, which makes sense, since it correlates not just with financial capital but also with cultural capital. Another predictor is age, although in a perhaps-unexpected way: Macron is highly popular with the elderly, whose pensions protect them from the liberalizing reforms Macron campaigned on, and very unpopular with the young, who disproportionately come out the losers in France’s contemporary economy. [...]

The Macron tsunami has hit, and the traditional parties of the French left and right are deeply wounded and struggling to survive. But two people are doing fine: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s leading far-left firebrand, and the infamous Marine Le Pen, France’s hard-right populist leader. In fact, it’s in Macron’s political interest for them to do well, to squeeze the last pangs of breath out of the traditional parties that might supplant his new centrist party. The better Mélenchon and Le Pen do, the worse the traditional parties do, and the more Macron looks like the only alternative to candidates the majority of French people still reject.

This might work to get him re-elected. But here’s what many don’t understand about Macron’s attempt to steer French politics away from the left-right divide we invented: If it is successful, it will mean that the opposition party (whatever it looks like, whoever its leader is) will be the anti-elite party par excellence. Put Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Marine Le Pen in a bottle, shake vigorously—and, in a Macronified politics, whatever comes out is almost guaranteed to run the country. Not today. Not tomorrow. But, if Macron’s bet is successful, at some point.

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Social Europe: Parti Socialiste: Squeezed Between Macron And Mélenchon

The unions and parties of the left, were never historically, if you like, working together. There was always a clear separation. There’s even a charter, the Charter of Amiens, signed in 1906, an old text which really sets up this dramatic separation between the two sides, because simply, the unions did not trust the Socialist Party, which they considered far too parliamentarian, bourgeois, etc. [...]

Well, the strengths of the Socialist Party, and that’s not very original because that’s something you will find across the board in Europe with all social democratic parties is that, if you like, the Socialist Party, at least when it was electorally winning elections, was a party which was able to appeal to different constituencies, in terms of class, in terms of gender, in terms of age and generations, in terms of ethnicity. [...]

Any scholar, any student, of populism should look at France very carefully, because it’s really become the new battleground for all forms of populism, left-wing, right-wing, far right-wing, and you might argue to some extent, a centrist type of populism with Macron. In the end, all the ingredients, all the characteristics of populism are met by Macron.

One leader, fairly charismatic, trying to establish a direct relationship with people, with the nation, talk about recapturing sovereignty, or national, or popular democracy in some cases. All that is part of the usual populist narrative. It’s very strong, very buoyant in French politics. [...]

Now, it seems that the debate on Europe, it’s not a straightforward one. You have people still supporting Europe, but you also have, and I’m not talking here about extremes, left and right, you have a fairly mainstream opposition to Europe, not the idea or the concept of Europe. I think still the majority of the French people are attached to it, but to the institutions and the policies implemented on behalf of the EU. There’s a rising opposition to that. It’s becoming mainstream.

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Quartz: A Nobel laureate explains why we get the bad economic policies we deserve

The timing of the book—published in English this month after its original release in French last year—is pertinent. The relationship between economics and politics is starting to unravel. Over the past year, many have sought to explain Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of far-right and far-left politics in Europe using economic arguments. But it’s becoming clear that economics alone does not explain the situation. If the questions at the root of public life are no longer answered by the famous political dictum, “It’s the economy, stupid,” where does that leave economists? [...]

He also isn’t afraid to turn the tables. “We get the economic policies we deserve,” he writes. “And as long as a lack of economic understanding prevails among the general public, making good policy choices will take a lot of political courage.” This concern shared by the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, who recently said the UK suffers from “twin deficits” in public understanding and trust in economics (paywall). [...]

It also applies to the National Front in France [a far-right party], which has a similar economic program. People see the market as this anonymous entity that is running their life. Governments have a role to play, but not what they think. They want someone to rescue them and they think the government is going to protect their job. I am for a welfare state but, for example, not the way it works now in France. You want to protect workers; you don’t want to protect jobs. [...]

I’m pessimistic. If you look at the populist movement—but not just populists— they always offer more sovereignty. If you look at the broader scale, it’s ridiculous. The French are going to defend against Germans and vice versa. But as a narrative it works, and the trend is towards more sovereignty and less federalism.

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The New York Review of Books: Is Democracy in Europe Doomed?

Those who believe millennials are immune to authoritarian ideas are mistaken. Using data from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have painted a worrying picture. As the French election demonstrated, belief in core tenets of liberal democracy is in decline, especially among those born after 1980. Their findings challenge the idea that after achieving a certain level of prosperity and political liberty, countries that have become democratic do not turn back.  

In America, 72 percent of respondents born before World War II deemed it absolutely essential to live in a democracy; only 30 percent of millennials agreed. The figures were similar in Holland. The number of Americans favoring a strong leader unrestrained by elections or parliaments has increased from 24 to 32 percent since 1995. More alarmingly, the number of Americans who believe that military rule would be good or very good has risen from 6 to 17 percent over the same period. The young and wealthy were most hostile to democratic norms, with fully 35 percent of young people with a high income regarding army rule as a good thing. Mainstream political science, confident in decades of received wisdom about democratic “consolidation” and stability, seemed to be ignoring a disturbing shift in public opinion. [...]

Too many people on the European left scoff at nationalism, mistaking their own distaste for evidence that the phenomenon no longer exists or is somehow illegitimate. If 2016 and 2017 have proven anything, it is that this sort of visceral nationalism, or loyalty to one’s in-group, still exists and is not going away. Those who dismiss this sort of national sentiment as backward and immature do so at their own peril. [...]

The first step in any coherent political project to counter right-wing populists is to reject the fear that fuels their popularity and resist the temptation to adopt their policies. Very few leaders have done this. In Holland and Denmark, the center right and the social-democratic left have largely caved and adopted planks from the populists’ platform. The left has lost much of its old base by appearing to care only about free trade, technological progress, and limitless diversity. This scares many people who used to vote for the Democratic Party, British Labour, or European Social Democrats.

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The Atlantic: The Education of Emmanuel Macron

While the initial enthusiasm that drove Macron to victory—and that encouraged me to work as a U.S. representative for his campaign—has faded, there’s little to justify the widespread anger against him. Something deeper is at work. As a Frenchman living in Washington witnessing the rise of Donald Trump first hand, I came to see that, at heart, Macron’s fall reveals the profound challenges that moderate liberals face in a polarized political climate. As he pursues his reforms, he is also trying to reshape French politics, bringing together a coalition of reformists from both sides of the political aisle, elected with center-left votes but governing with a mostly center-right cabinet. But he will have trouble building a lasting base if he is seen only as a moderate technocrat—a fate he escaped during the campaign. His success or failure to hold the center in the face of populists may well shape the fate of liberals across Europe.

Macron’s political gamble succeeded, in part, because of the unpopularity of his chief opponents, the scandal-marred Francois Fillon of the right-wing Republicans party and the divisive Marine Le Pen of the National Front. More importantly, beyond his policy platform, he captured much of the anti-establishment anger sweeping France (and indeed, the world). In January, a vast majority of French voters felt their political leaders were “corrupt”; 49 percent wanted a “strongman that wouldn’t have to worry about parliament or elections.” He pledged to run against the failures of both traditional parties, and was well-positioned to do so: At the age of 39, he had never run for office, and built a party from scratch. Only five percent of the candidates he endorsed were incumbents—most had never run for office.

But Macron is no failure. In addition to getting new candidates elected, he and his allies in parliament successfully passed a bill that sought to make France’s politics more transparent, and roll back the conflicts of interest that have poisoned the country’s institutions for decades, by imposing stricter controls on parliamentary spending. Furthermore, the inexperienced president’s first steps in the international arena, especially his handling of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, were largely hailed as successes. Now with his labor-market reforms, Macron continues to execute on his campaign promises.  [...]

But it’s unclear whether voters will follow him down this path. After all, he captured only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, and benefited from the collapse of the Socialist party after Hollande’s unsuccessful term. As the Socialist share in parliament fell from 295 to 31 seats, orphaned center-left voters turned to him. And yet, Macron’s cabinet tilts to the right, with a prime minister, economics minister, and budget minister, poached from the right-wing Republicans party. His first economic measures, from tax cuts to reduction in housing subsidies and labor market reforms, are drawn from the center-right. Macron may see all this as a way of building a new liberal pole that unites center-left and center-right. But disgruntled voters might see his triangulation as a betrayal. 

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Jacobin Magazine: France Is Transformed

The second round marked a moderation of the results of the first round. Many surveys recorded that a majority of those interviewed did not want the newly elected president to be able to rely on a compliant majority in the future National Assembly. The En Marche! tactic that might have proven devastating — seeking to mobilize right-wing voters to wipe out the Left, and then to mobilize the Left to wipe out the Right — was in fact only a moderate success. [...]

When almost 60 percent of eligible voters abstain from casting their ballot — that is to say, when they are given the opportunity to vote in what is meant to be a decisive contest — this means that politics is in crisis and that democracy is ill. All the indices — structural abstention, the discredit that the parties have fallen into, distrust of elected officials — indicate that we have reached the point where in most people’s minds the political institutions have lost their meaning. [...]

If we do not free ourselves of this crisis, the very basis of any democracy will be under threat. Discontent and anxiety will not lead to concerted collective action, but to resentment, bitterness, and hatred. Combativeness will give way to the stigmatization of scapegoats, to flare-ups of violence followed by resignation. There is nothing to be won for emancipation in this game, where in the last instance it is always the dominant who will remain the strongest. [...]

By virtue of its majoritarian principles, the Fifth Republic reinvigorated the binary of left and right. But the centrist temptation persisted, insofar as both the Right and Left in power gave an appearance of fragility. In the mid-1960s the rise in opposition to Gaullism revived political centrism as a possible alternative to historical Gaullism. At that time, it took the “American form” of Jean Lecanuet’s Democratic Center and then the Union for French Democracy (UDF) under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, which sought to replace Gaullism by setting itself the ambition of rallying “two in three French people.”

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Quartz: Macron is draining the swamp in France—or trying to

Sex and money are hot topics for which my two countries exhibit inverted cultural hangups. Here in the US, we freely discuss our money, but experience a countrywide conniption when a singer shows a tiny bit of nipple. In Paris, we happily discuss carnal mischief but would never think of asking someone how much they paid for their apartment—it’s tantamount to grabbing someone’s pudendum. The French demonize money just like we Americans demonize sex. Money is a very private affair. [...]

During France’s recent presidential election campaign, we were treated to revelations of corruption that led to the indictments of two candidates and a few close associates. Angry shouts of “tous pourris” (they’re all rotten!) were heard at both ends of the political spectrum, from the extreme leftist Jean- Luc Mélenchon and the no-less-extreme Marine Le Pen on the right (who herself was embroiled in the kind of financial shenanigans she accused the “rotten” political class of condoning). [...]

Next up: There’s a parliamentary election mid-June, with 577 seats in play. If Macron is to implement the reforms he articulated during his presidential campaign, he needs an indisputable legislative majority at the Assemblée Nationale, colloquially referred to as a majorité de gouvernement (governing majority). These reforms—modernizing France’s paleo-marxist labor code, cleaning up unemployment compensation, making retirement regulations and payments more equitable for present and future generations—will arouse opposition from a wide range of stakeholders, and Macron’s parliamentary support will inevitably suffer defections as afflicted voters put pressure on their representatives.

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Vox: 6 things to watch as Macron takes office in France

Macron, who formed a new political party called En Marche in 2016, has promised to strengthen France’s ties to Europe, simplify the tax system, overhaul the labor market, and scale back needless regulations. But without a clear governing coalition, he will face a number of obstacles. If he’s unable to lift France out of its economic malaise, all those festering anxieties will come bubbling up five years from now when the next presidential election is held. [...]

We don't know what will happen or what the mode of failure will be if Macron fails. Who knows, it could empower the far left. Mélenchon [the far-left candidate who quit the Socialist Party in 2008] did better than expected in the first round, so people might turn in that direction. If you were to ask me today, I would say that's the most probable direction in which things would turn if Macron became as unpopular as Hollande.

It's still a deeply divided country, and Macron's vote is by no means an endorsement of Macron's program. Estimates are that as many as 40 or 45 percent of the people who voted for him voted to block Le Pen and not for Macron positively. And he's probably going to alienate quite a number of those people because he said that his first move will be to reform the labor code, which even the mild reforms attempted under Hollande elicited quite a strong reaction and there were demonstrations in the streets, lots of union protests. So the divisiveness is going to come to the fore immediately, and we'll see how he responds to that.

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Jacobin Magazine: Lessons From the French Election

The result is apparent from the numbers: at least 25% abstention and 8.8% blank votes. In total, one-third of the electorate said that they were being forced to take an impossible choice. This was a little less than 1969 (when the total abstentions and blank votes reached 35.6%). This time we can note the particular indication represented by the record level of blank votes, almost doubling the previous highest levels in 1995, 2012, 1969, and 2002. While abstention is both a social phenomenon (the marginalization of popular layers) and an index of political dissatisfaction, the blank vote is a conscious political act, proper to an often educated and politicized population. For some time, the idea that the blank vote should be fully counted as a separate choice has been gaining strength: the 2017 presidential contest incontestably reinforces this demand yet further. [...]

So there is no use in leveling accusations against those who thought they had nothing to choose between globalization and national exclusion. Rather, the blame is to be sought among those who have eroded the sense of conflict that historically separated the Left and the Right, and which revolved around the question of freedom and equality. So long as we prefer competitiveness, flexibility, budget balancing, the state of war, and the state of emergency, we end up feeding the idea that the Left and Right have joined together in accepting the norms of competition and governance. [...]

In getting close to 44% of registered voters’ backing, certainly he is not the numerically weakest in the annals of the presidential contest (see table below). He is well above Georges Pompidou in 1969 or Jacques Chirac in 1995. But he is far from the 60% Chirac got in 2002. Indeed, if we take into account the share of François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters that transferred to him against Marine Le Pen (around half, in each case) he did not get much beyond the electoral feat he pulled off the first round. He may well, then, be the president with the most fragile basis for the so-called “honeymoon” that used to be promised to the newly elected.

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Katoikos: Mélenchon could be the French Bernie Sanders, and that’s not a good thing

We recently saw a revival of this in the US with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Although Sanders ended up endorsing Clinton, the fact that his campaign and particularly his ‘supporters’ had concentrated their fire on her using ammunition provided by Trump and Putin (most of it buckets of undifferentiated rubbish) and refused to sully their consciences by voting for someone ideologically tainted by neoliberalism meant that ultimately Sanders helped Trump win. In the UK we saw the example of ‘Lexit’: people on the left who voted to leave the EU because they thought a campaign led by far-right demagogues and sponsored by Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail might somehow help bringing about socialism in our lifetime. [...]

Nonetheless, I have no sympathy with those who voted for Le Pen. They know what she and her father have always stood for. Even if FN voters are unemployed or overworked, I cannot sympathize with their tendency to become suicidal as a result. They could have expressed their anger at their plight by voting for a candidate who at least nominally represented an alternative rather than one who (aside from being openly corrupt) denies France’s role in the Holocaust, scapegoats all Muslims as terrorists and would even stop all legal immigration. [...]

Anti-fascism has to be the absolute basis of what people who see themselves as on the left stand and fight for. Encouraging the illusion that there is no difference between a banker and a fascist is utterly irresponsible, puerile, infantile, juvenile and obscene. It’s like Slavoj Žižek at his most obtuse. Any mature adult with a basic understanding of history and political realities would vote for a neoliberal rather than a lifelong national socialist. As the French themselves say , ‘c’est du gâteau‘ – it’s a no-brainer. Just as in 2002, when the slogan was ‘it’s better to vote for a crook than a fascist’, the French left must swallow its pride and vote to stop Le Pen. [...]

The CGT is calling the next stage a contest between the plague (Macron) and cholera (Le Pen). Criticism of Macron is already focussing on his past as a banker for Rothschild, i.e. evoking and appealing to a deep-seated anti-semitic canard particularly prevalent on the internet among Putin, Trump and, bien sûr, Le Pen supporters.

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Slate: Will Le Pen Lose in 2017—and Win in 2022?

So you are quite right to ask whether this kind of ganging up on the National Front can only be good for it in the long term. I’d be surprised if she weren’t stronger in 2022. This sense of marginalization and grievance and being ganged up on is really, really quite helpful from the National Front’s point of view because they can say that the will of the people has been thwarted. It’s a tradition that she, or whoever succeeds her, can invoke by saying, “We have always been discriminated against. There’s always been a kind of conspiracy of the institutions and the establishment against us. We’re going to get clear of it, and we’re going to embody the will of the people.” [...]

Yeah, this is a candidate for regulated capitalism. He’s not the candidate of change, in my view. It seemed to us in Europe that Obama, whatever his shortcomings in his two administrations, was a huge symbolic figure. I’m not sure Macron will make it to that extent. I don’t think the symbolism in Macron will have the resonance of Obama’s symbolism. I think they may be very similar candidates. They’ll navigate the ship, and they’ll try to keep things going for as long as they can, and in 2022 Macron and his team will face a bigger challenge from Le Pen, just as Obama after two administrations got hit hard by Trump. [...]

That was a moment. It was also one which he possibly regretted, although he’s OK now. This was the nearest, in terms of internationalism, that Macron ever came to the Mélenchon campaign. Mélenchon is a genuine internationalist in his support of migrants, asylum seekers. He’s very conscious of the global south. Macron is more a market liberal and a proper social liberal at the same time. He would say, “Look, this is a globalized world. We have to let the history slide away if it’s inhibiting our relationships with other countries, and I feel that this whole past with Algeria needs to be cleared away.” He’s modern in that way. He doesn’t carry the weight of history in the way that old Marxists do or people whose politics descend from that tradition do. I think he’s free. He was punished, dragged across the coals for saying it, but actually it’s subsided. I think it was a strange and radical and controversial thing to say, and I admire him for it.

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Bloomberg: Eight Maps That Explain France’s Macron-Le Pen Election

For the first time in modern-day France, neither of the two mainstream parties made the second round of a presidential election. In their place, Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist economy minister who left the party to run for the presidency, and Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front, will face off on May 7.

Here are eight maps to help make sense of all that’s scrambling the political landscape in France—from anti-establishment frustration to blue-collar angst and urban-rural divide.

In Sunday’s presidential first-round election, Macron won many departments—like counties—that went Socialist in 2012. Le Pen, by contrast, made most of her gains in the heartlands of the center-right. Both were aided by the poor performance of the candidates from those parties. Macron ultimately won 33 departments and territories that current President Francois Hollande had won in 2012, while Le Pen picked up 30 that had gone to UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. (France has 96 mainland departments plus several overseas departments and territories.)

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Political Critique: France’s Wild Card Elections

If 2016 was the year of Brexit and the surprise election of Donald Trump, 2017 is shaping up to deliver its own new and unpredictable results starting this Sunday. The French presidential elections have in fact in the past months delivered one of the most uncertain competitions in the history of the Republic. With two days to go until the first round, four candidates are competing within three percentage points of one another, all of them in plausible reach of the Palais de l’Élysée. Rocking the foundations of the French political system, which is historically based on a solid bipolarism, the electoral campaigns have seemed to synthesise in a single country all of the strengths and weaknesses of a changing Europe which is looking to Paris to see its future. [...]

Last December on live TV Hollande announced that he had no intention of renewing his candidacy on the basis that he wished to give space for the French left to reunite around a shared leader capable of opposing the advances of the right. Next month the chapter will close on the most unpopular President of the Republic in French history. More important still is the nature of the forces in play that are in a position to claim final victory. Excluding Fillon Les Républicans, who are anyway behind in the polls, all of the other parties or movements lie outside the traditional definition of a political party, a phenomenon that is characterising many other European countries. [...]

Whatever the outcome of the vote it is clear that the French parliamentary system is destined to change, and to do so very quickly given the forthcoming vote for the Legislative Assembly which will enable the future President to create his or her government, a decision which itself will have repercussions across borders. It will be an intense month in France then, with all eyes on Paris to understand the future of Europe.

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Jacobin Magazine: Center-Left in No Man’s Land

But there was also the success of Benoît Hamon. And I think that came about because left voters wanted to feel like they were voting for something rather than simply against things all the time. They accepted a utopian program because there has been so much despair over the last five years. They used the primary to support a “futur désirable” (“desirable future”), which is Hamon’s slogan. His program was quite ecological, much moreso for example than the program of Arnaud Montebourg, which was more classically leftist. [...]

Hamon was more popular with the media and eventually succeeded with a clear, ambitious, and strategic agenda. Campaigning on universal basic income, decriminalizing drug use, and so on won over leftist electors. Additionally, he performed quite well in televised debates, which contributed to a youthful image that was important in allowing him to dispel early notions that he was a career politician. This strange mixture of factors along with his focus on running a “positive campaign” — he did not attack Hollande directly, for example — contributed to his success in the primary. [...]

It has been quite striking. There has been a lot of discussion of the European Union in the campaign — and out of eleven candidates, only two are uncritical: François Fillon and Emmanuel Macron. There have been extreme-right criticisms and some left variants but overall a critical stance has become dominant among a majority of candidates. Specifically, the question is often framed in terms of Plan A and Plan B. Plan A means a reconstitution of the terms of France’s involvement, whereas Plan B would be an exit.

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