A Dyke A Broad #78 French Election Edition
In which 27% of French voters, go for the incumbent centrist Macron, but 23% favor the Putin-financed, anti-European, anti-NATO Le Pen. Stay tuned for round 2.
Hello from Paris!
I guess I should have written about it before—how we’re holding presidential elections. While part of me agrees with jokers who think you’d have to be nuts to even want to run the place, this election is essential not just for France, but Europe and beyond. In fact, the stakes feel very 2016. Like when Hillary Clinton squared off against Trump and the disastrous consequences were right in front of your face.
It’s democracy versus autocracy. Moderation versus extremism. Nationalism versus international community.
Yesterday was the first round, where the two top finishers out of 12 candidates were incumbent centrist president Emmanuel Macron, who did slightly better than expected pulling in 27.84%, and a surging, extreme-right Marine Le Pen who earned 23.15% of the vote.
Because neither won 50%, they’ll face off in a second round in two weeks.
The perennial far-left populist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who never met a dictator he didn’t like) narrowly fell short of the final with 21.95%, a significant 2.37% better than his last showing in 2017. He will still have an impact, though. Some of his voters have already said that if he wasn’t on the ballot they’ll vote Le Pen. And while he told supporters that, "You must not give a single vote to Marine Le Pen," it rang a little hollow because, unlike most other candidates, he didn’t actually ask them to vote for Macron.
While the two are different in a few key areas like immigration, in which Le Pen would close borders and Mélenchon open them, the two candidates are interchangeable in others. Both are Putin pals, heck, Putin openly endorsed Le Pen during the last election. And both want to pull France out of NATO and the European Union. At which point the hated EU would unravel, along with their support for Ukraine. And autocrats and populist demagogues everywhere will be popping their champagne corks.
A Le Pen presidency is a real possibility. She has momentum—she was polled at third place just a few weeks ago. And besides some Mélenchon voters, she’ll definitely pick up hardline nationalist Éric Zemmour’s 7.1%, as well as Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s 2.1%. That’s a lot of votes.
That leaves Macron in a perilous position. If he wants to win he’ll have to let Ukraine take a back seat for two weeks, and do some serious campaigning, ideally picking up at least some Mélenchon voters, and pray like crazy that the others stay home.
I was trying to find some good analysis for you, since I’ve had my head ostrich-like in the sand. But a lot of what I read in English is either pretty thin or simple-minded. Like the BBC article, France election: This time it won’t be a walkover for Macron. It started pretty well, talking about strategic voting, but then talks about how
Macron has so engineered it that the divide in French politics is now definitively the one that he sought: between his own "realistic centrism" and "openness to the world" and the "extremism" of his opponents. The "nationalist extremism" of Le Pen and the "utopian extremism" of Mélenchon.
This divide has served him very well so far. It allows him to aggregate the so-called "responsible" forces of left and right, gutting the mainstream opposition and leaving him master of the terrain…
“As veteran political commentator Alain Duhamel put it on Sunday night "the anti-system parties now have the loyalty of a majority of the French”.”
While Macron clearly wanted to peel off votes from the right and left to construct a center, it seems like quite a leap to blame him alone for the growth of both extremes, which has being going on for decades and has multiple causes, from globalization and its discontents to the rot and collapse of traditional parties.
In fact, only an idiot would write about an election in 2022 and ignore the increasing wild card of social media, which includes not only the political bubble you get trapped in along with your “friends” but a range of corporations and political forces which may or may not be identifiable. A couple years ago, the daily newspaper Libération tried to figure out who was behind seemingly official websites promoting the “spontaneous” gilets jaunes, “yellow vests” and discovered that… they couldn’t. Not really.
Then of course there’s Putin. Russian hackers played a role not only in the Trump-Clinton election “OMG her emails!”, but in the last French one, going after the Macron campaign.
Last week the Atlantic published a conversation with Barack Obama in which he said,
if you ask me what I’m most concerned about when I think back to towards the end of my presidency, it probably has more to do with the topic here today—it’s something I grappled with a lot during my presidency; I saw it sort of unfold—and that is the degree to which information, disinformation, misinformation was being weaponized. And we saw it. But I think I underestimated the degree to which democracies were as vulnerable to it as they were, including ours.
More and more it seems like we’re all in an airplane, trying to figure how to navigate, when the pilots are all dead and the electronics are controlled by an evil robot.
Thank god my subconscious is there for me. I had the most unexpectedly lovely dream last night in which I spent several minutes cuddling a fat, warm little puppy with its soft oversized pelt and squirmy affection. I woke up feeling almost hopeful.
That’s it for this time.
Wish us luck.
Disgruntledly yours,