In France, the excuse-making is in full swing. Political grandees past and present express their shock at voters’ “anger”.
None accepts blame for causing it. It’s as if they think some irrational impulse this weekend led almost one third of the electorate to vote for the National Front (FN) in regional polls. Yet you only had to listen to Marine Le Pen’s victory speech to know there is nothing irrational about it: she has all the best lines.
The FN leader, a talented chancer in stone-washed jeans, has extended a “broad tent” to a huge range of disgruntled voters. But it remains the case that the greatest ally she and her supporting cast of nasty, little proto-Fascists have is the mediocrity, entitlement and cowardice of French politicians both Left and Right. We shouldn’t really be surprised. Nothing defines French politics of the past quarter century better than the old saw about madness.
For decades established political parties have been doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results: the Le Pens are tarred (not without good reason) as undemocratic extremists inadmissible in public debate. Meanwhile, embarrassing political problems — from the radicalisation of the suburbs and the rise of fundamentalist Islam among young French Muslims, to the creeping loss of sovereignty under the “ever closer” European Union — are swept under the carpet.
As a result the FN’s ritually shamed voters share a rebellious feeling that the country’s media and political class are too po-faced and politically correct to connect with them. And their party’s share of the vote climbs. On Sunday afternoon, during the purdah for political comment before polling stations closed, Le Monde’s chief political correspondent tweeted a facsimile of his paper’s front page from 17 years ago.
The Socialists, then as now in power, had lost five per cent of the vote in the 1998 regional elections, and were down to a “miserable” 35 per cent (they’re at 26 per cent today); Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN was polling an unprecedented 15 per cent. This was incomprehensible, wailed France’s foremost, Left-leaning newspaper of record. The accompanying cartoon quoted Brecht on the rise of the Nazis.
That was three presidents ago. Since then, French politics has seen the Le Pens and the rest remain locked in a dance of death. Today the FN has its first major victories in sight.
Ahead of the second round of voting on Sunday, its candidates are clearly ahead in six of the country’s 13 mainland regions. For President Francois Hollande, this is not all bad. He is hoping that the FN will split the vote on the Right. That way he might find himself in a run-off against Le Pen in the presidential election of 2017. He might stand a chance against her — he wouldn’t against anyone else, notably from the Republican party of his old enemy, Nicolas Sarkozy. Others are more concerned about the political battles of today.
Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls has forced candidates from his own party to stand down in order to aid better placed Republicans. This desperate act of unity may help to ward off the Le Pen threat one more time. If it does, however, there will be no disguising the fact that, for millions of French voters, it will seem more like rank injustice than happy reprieve.
— Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
