Europe: Schengen Under Threat – Pages 8-9
JANUARY 2016 N o 1601
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France’s FN election success
BY SERGE HALIMI
France’s far right benefits from almost everything in the country: a broken economy; a still-rising unemployment rate; job insecurity and a fear of loss of social status; an endangered welfare system and public services; a repellent “European project”; a wave of migration, heightened by chaos in some Arab countries; coordinated attacks planned by those who claim to act in the name of Islam. And a Socialist Party that for almost 30 years has shared with the right the responsibility for neoliberal policies now locked in through European treaties, and a project of remaining in power indefinitely by presenting itself every election as the last defence against the Front National (FN).
The result: no other political force displays as much momentum and cohesion as the far right, and none communicates as effectively the feeling that it knows the way and owns the future. No party has any convincing strategy for challenging the far right (1). Prime minister Lionel Jospin, ousted from the second round of the 2002 presidential election by Jean-Marie Le Pen, talked of a “thunderbolt” and, as he withdrew from public life, invited his Socialist comrades to “prepare the reconstruction of the future.” The task fell to François Hollande…
It is pointless to ascribe such a political phenomenon to a single cause when it has developed over decades. In the UK and Denmark, xenophobic movements have prospered without a ruling socialist party to make that possible, and in Poland and Switzerland, with better economic situations than France has. The far right has not done so well where unemployment rates are higher than in France (10.8%) – in Spain (21.6% in 2015), Greece (24.6%) and Cyprus (15%). Moreover, the FN was already doing very well before the Paris attacks in January and November 2015, and before the recent influx of migrants, even if these events have boosted it. As most things have done.
The important fact is not just that FN candidates came first in six out of 13 regions and in 46 out of 96 départements in the first round of regional elections on 6 December 2015. It is that the FN improved its results almost everywhere in the second round, including regions where it had no chance of winning a majority. For an FN sympathiser, an FN vote now seems a worthwhile vote and the party, far from being an auxiliary force that can be absorbed by the right, is beginning to successfully encroach on its terrain: 18-20% of those who voted for Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 seem to have switched to the FN last December (2).
The resolution of voters on the far right is all the more significant as the electoral system and current party alliances heavily penalise the FN. It came first in votes cast in December’s regional elections (as it had done in May 2014 European elections and March 2015 departmental ones), but it does not control a
Serge Halimi is president of Le Monde diplomatique single regional or departmental council. And in parliament it has only two deputies (out of 577) and two senators (out of 348) (3). This democratic anomaly enables it to continue to portray itself as the victim of a widely despised political class, which it criticises with the sincerity of the excluded.
But in the battle of ideas, the FN is dominant, and its intellectual enemies – overcome with gloom and defeat, riven with schisms and divisions – too often seek comfort and reassurance in the merely theoretical radicalism of universities (4). The mainstream media do not make life for the FN any harder when they alternate reports of “brazen Islam” and reactionary thinkers.
Traditionally, the victory of a leftwing majority coincided with a radicalisation of the right, which felt dispossessed of the power it thought it owned. The hostility François Hollande provokes in conservative circles is more troubling, because it is hard to see how his policies differ from theirs, except over same-sex marriage: the right did indeed mobilise against that three years ago, but if it were to return to power no one believes there would be any revision of the law (5).
Like the far right, the mainstream right likes to lambast the politically correct. This is not an exclusively French phenomenon (6). In the US, Republican contender Donald Trump’s assaults on Mexican “rapists” or Muslim “terrorists” enable him to emphasise his courage in departing from the flabby consensus of the left, intellectuals, the middle class and snobs. His attacks have a guaranteed effect: the media feign outrage, then allow him to explain himself so much that it is difficult to hear anyone but him. Should 11 million illegal immigrants be expelled? Should a border wall be built with Mexico? Should records be kept on all US Muslim citizens and all others prohibited from entering the country? Such “debates” arise time and again. Opposition to these ideas is taken as evidence of cowardice, permissiveness, and contempt for the aspirations of the silent majority, even of willingness to expose the US to new attacks.
Nicolas Sarkozy is familiar with the American right’s tricks (7). On 9 December he
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Inside this issue Venezuela takes a right turn gregory wilpert Page 3 US primaries: socialism gets a voice bhaskar sunkara Page 4 Tunisia: five years after its revolution thierry brésillon Page 5 France: the erosion of liberty jean-jacques gandini Pages 6-7
yosman botero gÓmez – ‘common things’ (2010) y o smanb o ter o .
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After the Latin revolution For over a decade, the apparent success of Latin America and its laboratory of leftwing government has offered hope to the left elsewhere in the world.
But those successes are faltering
BY RENAUD LAMBERT
Ahuge graffiti inscription – “Why should we bail out the bankers?” – confronts motorists on the expressway into central Rio de Janeiro. It’s been a common slogan in most European capitals for years now but is more surprising in Rio, where the financial party was still in full swing just two years ago – in 2013, the road ran through a forest of cranes. In 2009, at the height of the international crisis, Brazil’s optimism had inspired an Economist front cover of Rio’s statue of Christ the Redeemer blasting off from top of the Corcovado with the headline “Brazil takes off”, and 14 pages on “Latin America’s big success story”.
Renaud Lambert is deputy editor of Le Monde diplomatique
Korean reunification: a waiting game martine bulard Pages 10-11 Africa: presidents who just stay put tierno monenembo Pages 12-13 US justice: a law unto itself? raphaël kempf Pages 14-15 Reconciling cross and crescent akram belkaïd Page 16
Unable to draw advantage from the neoliberal debacle, Europe’s left was looking across the Atlantic for hope. The successes of the Latin American laboratory, celebrated to the music of the samba in Brazil, morenada in Bolivia, pasillo in Ecuador and joropo in Venezuela, allowed it to dream of victory too.
But after an international economic slowdown that has badly affected Latin American economies, the picture is less bright. In 2013 Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa attacked neoliberalism in a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris. A year later he signed a free trade agreement with the European Union.
Despite its problems, Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution was known for its determination to improve living conditions. In January 2015 the neutral UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reported that the poverty rate in Venezuela had risen from 25.4% in 2012 to 32.1% in 2013 (1).
Dilma Rousseff, campaigning for re-election as Brazil’s president in October 2014, told her
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