Fear Wins in France

Last Sunday, Marine Le Pen came in third in a two-way race for the French Presidency. With the lowest turnout since 1969, Emanuel Macron won 44% among registered voters, abstentions plus over one million spoiled or blank ballots added up to 34%, and Le Pen won 22%. While most newspapers have trumpeted Macron’s 65% of expressed ballots, the real story of the election is one of dissatisfaction, strategic ambivalence and discontent. Even the status quo had to show up wearing anti-establishment garb. Macron, the great savior of the republic, is someone who stood apart from its major parties, while they collapsed around him. His En Marche! is not even a party but rather a political trick borrowed from Latin American politics or the likes of Silvio Berlusconi – a personal vehicle whose only purpose is to get him elected. The crisis of representation is the central fact of this election.

During the election, and its immediate aftermath, the dominant interpretation has been different: the moral imperative was to vote against the right-wing nationalist and then leave the rest to those who govern. We have argued before that there is no obligation to cast strategic votes against lesser evil candidates and that campaigns dominated by Lesser Evilism are undemocratic. During the campaign one isn’t supposed to bring up any of the lesser evil’s faults, for fear of undermining his or her chances, and there is nothing to hold him or her to afterwards. As such, Lesser Evil voting amounts to carte blanche for the victor. Merely by winning, the winner fulfills his mandate.

The results suggest most French people, like almost everyone else, can hold two thoughts in their head simultaneously: they disliked the FN more than Macron, but thought little of him and the status quo he represents. During the second round, one was not allowed to express much discontent with the present, nor the many good reasons for it, without looking like or being called a Le Pen supporter. With the bête noire of the FN out of the way, it will have to be continuously revived over the next five years to rebut perfectly valid criticism of Macron, his policies, the EU, the euro, the major parties, and the rest of it. If anything, the result underestimates the degree to which the sands are shifting beneath those who rule, since much of the vote for Macron was strategic. This graphic shows that the highest single reason given for voting Macron was opposition to Le Pen (h/t Jacobin)

That is all the more reason why the ruling coalition will want fear of the right to overshadow serious political debate about central issues – like how deeply undemocratic the EU is, what a recipe for stagnation and inequality the Eurozone is, and how few answers the mainstream European parties have for these problems because they prefer to wander the halls of Brussels than represent their own constituents.

Those who govern need to be forced back into representing their own people and they won’t do it voluntarily. As the French election reminds us, the EU is not the only way they wish to avoid accountability. Establishment politicians are no less willing to employ the politics of fear than is the populist right – an inflated fear of fascism to match the right’s inflated fear of immigrants. Anything to avoid the harder task of convincing voters on the merits.

Alex Gourevitch