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**JUNE 26, 2023**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** The Path to Soft Fascism

France could be the next country to elect a far-right president.

PARIS - Paris in late June appears reassuringly normal. The country is
well governed. Systems work. The Métro runs on time. The cafés are
full. There is a spirit of celebration in the streets. June 21 was the
annual daylong Fête de la Musique, celebrating the first day of summer
with bands and impromptu singing and dancing on nearly every street
corner. June 23 brought a massive gay pride march. On June 24, much of
the city was blocked to car traffic for a huge bike race. All of this is
not tourists but locals.

But the joyous mood of private pleasures coexists with a sour politics.
In April, the technocratic President Emmanuel Macron used emergency
powers to ram through a law raising the normal retirement age with full
pensions from 62 to 64.

Compared to other nations, even the revised French system seems
generous. But in the context of unreliable jobs, stagnant earnings, and
unaffordable housing, the state pension commitment was one economic rock
French people could count on. Macron's revision seemed a personal
betrayal.

Macron's approval ratings have sunk to around 30 percent. The biggest
beneficiary has been Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National
Front, now renamed the National Rally, who is the odds-on favorite to be
elected the next president of France in the 2027 election.

You might think that the left, which opposed the pension change even
more strenuously than Le Pen did, would be the bigger gainer. But the
French left is in a state of terminal collapse.

The French Socialist Party, a major power from the era of President
François Mitterrand beginning in 1981 to that of François Hollande
ending in 2017, is a spent force. In the 2022 parliamentary election,
the Socialists took just 27 seats in the 577-member National Assembly.

The leader of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, nearly made it into the
presidential runoff in 2022. But Mélenchon is a divisive and extreme
figure. If he is the alternative to Le Pen in 2027, nearly all observers
here believe that Le Pen will win in a walk. Mélenchon, now 71, has
hinted that he might not run. But whether he runs or not, there is no
figure on the scene or in the wings who could unite left and center.

The comparison with the U.S. is instructive. Marine Le Pen is a
cleaned-up version of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, longtime leader of
the National Front. Her positions are not very different from her
father's on such issues as French identity and resistance to
immigrants and Muslims. But she deftly speaks in a softer voice with
less stridency and more dog whistle. She is less frightening to the
middle class. In each succeeding election, she takes more votes from
fed-up young voters and working-class voters who might support a
credible left.

In the U.S., there is no cleaned-up version of Trump. He is more
outrageous than ever. And on the other side of the spectrum, France has
no counterpart to Biden-an effective moderate leftist. So the U.S.
could be spared Trump in 2024, while France could well get Le Pen in
2027.

Of course, predictions are risky and a lot could happen between now and
2027.

But this brings me back to my impressions of Paris celebrating early
summer. If Le Pen is elected as a soft fascist, pleasant daily life will
go on-the cafés, the bike races, the efficient Métro-though maybe
not for immigrants and Muslims and Jews. The local working class will
get the satisfactions of identity, though not of secure jobs. Politics
is failing. And as politics ceases being credible to ordinary people,
this is how fascism insidiously fills the vacuum.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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