Harsh Kapoor on Fri, 2 Jun 2017 14:43:07 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> French Presidential Election of 2017 France Has Dodg |
French Presidential Election of 2017 France Has Dodged a Bullet in its Head: Macron’s Victory Offers a Much Needed Reprieve Against Narrow Nationalism by Harsh Kapoor commentary addressed to progressives and democrats in India On April 23, the first round of the French elections eliminated the established parties, leaving two final contenders for the final round of May 7; Emmanuel Macron, a former economy minister and cosmopolitan political novice representing his newly created movement called ‘en marche’ [on the move] and Marine Le Pen leader of the forty year old Front National (FN) [an anti immigrant and anti European party of the far Right]. Two opposing conceptions of France were in the race. Macron won in a landslide with 66% of the vote, yet many voted for him simply to keep Le Pen out of power. Macron’s victory over Le Pen is certainly good news for France and a post-Brexit Europe, but it is naïve to see this electoral defeat of FN as the beginning of the end for hateful identity politics in France. Let us say a storm has passed for now, but the dark clouds loom large. Manifestation anti-FN, place de la République, le 1er mai 2002. Photo Joël Robine. AFP Fifteen years ago there was a similar situation: Jean Marie Le Pen the founding leader of the National Front, had reached the Presidential run-off. At that time one and a half million people had marched on the streets in a resounding no to the FN. A republican front of all parties, left and right was formed and the FN defeated by a record 82% votes in 2002. Today there is comparably little political mobilisation against the FN - which has been normalised. Macron the Maverick’s Big Gamble Macron hails emotionally from the Left. He is a liberal democrat who stands for enlightenment ideals, opposes racism and xenophobia, and offers hope in a common European future by attacking economic isolation as a reactionary idea. His alliance is made up of free-market elites, centrists and social democrats. Macron is bitterly hated by unions for the labour reform law he brought in under the socialist party govt he was once part of but has humanist convictions and has had the moral courage to publically say that: ‘Colonisation is a part of French history. It is a crime, a crime against humanity … it belongs to a past that we must face up to, while offering an apology to the people who were on the receiving end.’ Macron, the finance man is a fine example of the intellectual rigour of people who constitute French political elites. Unlike the RSS sanchaalak in India who proclaims there was plastic surgery in ancient times, or the real estate salesman and TV showman in the US who sees climate change as a conspiracy, Macron wrote a philosophy thesis on Hegel (supervised by Etienne Balibar); was Paul Ricoeur’s editorial assistant when Ricoeur was writing his book La mémoire, l’histoire et l’oubli. Macron’s ideas are influenced by the work of John Rawls and Amartya Sen on justice and equality of opportunity. The Far Right, its banalisation and national presence: France’s two main established political parties have been losing credibility with the people and facing opposition to their policies. In consequence they have ceded ground to anti-establishment, anti-immigrant, anti-European, and anti-globalisation sentiment. French parties failed to draw the lessons from the shock of 2002. Instead of trying to combat the FN’s ideas, politicians focused on shutting them out of power. In 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy kept Le Pen out of the run-off, but only by peddling identity politics to court FN voters. The FN’s achievement was the ‘Le Pen-isation’ of other parties. For its part, the Left resorted to scare-mongering. But what France needed was to confront identity politics, actively educate and cultivate a secular, pro-European society that faced terrorist violence and a xenophobic backlash. The Front National (FN) has been the key beneficiary of this backlash, becoming the main party of the working class over the past years. More than half (56%) the working-class votes in the 2017 presidential election went to Le Pen, and over 40 percent of them belonged to lower socio-economic categories and less educated. [. . .] FULL TEXT AT: http://www.sacw.net/article13266.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: