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APRIL 12, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

The French Left's Conundrum

Macron's been a disaster, but far worse disasters await should he
lose.

Transatlantic transpositions are inherently tricky, but one way to
understand France's upcoming presidential election runoff (on April
24) between center-right incumbent Emmanuel Macron and right-wing racist
Marine Le Pen is to imagine if the two choices presented to American
voters were George H.W. Bush and Pat Buchanan-and moving their actual
1992 Republican primary rivalry to a hypothetical general election in
2022. How liberals and leftists would respond to such a choice is
anybody's guess.

Just as it's anybody's guess how French leftists will respond to the
choice of Macron and Le Pen in just under two weeks. What the first
round of French presidential voting last Sunday made clear is that
France is roughly evenly divided between left, right, and center, with
the combined votes of each bloc coming in at about a third of the
electorate. Had the Socialist, Communist, and Green Party votes been
consolidated with that of leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he would have
bested Le Pen and now be running off against Macron. Instead, the French
left faces a rather dismal choice.

What it should do is swallow hard and vote for Macron, on the principle
that a centrist elitist poses less of a threat to the nation's Muslims
and its democratic civic culture than a neofascist whose party has
received significant financial support from Vladimir Putin. It's by no
means clear, however, that that will happen. An Ipsos poll

taken last Sunday showed that just 34 percent of those who voted for
Mélenchon said they'd vote for Macron in the runoff, with 30 percent
saying they'd vote for Le Pen and the rest saying they'd simply not
vote or hadn't yet decided what they'd do. (On election night,
Mélenchon told his supporters that they simply couldn't vote for Le
Pen, but declined to endorse Macron.)

There's no question that Macron deserves the left's reservations.
When he first campaigned for the presidency five years ago, he ran as
someone who vowed to replace and transcend the rule of the center-left
Socialists and the center-right neo-Gaullists with a fresh face that
would add the best of both parties' programs to his own innovations.
Instead, he governed as a center-rightist continually looking over his
shoulder at the rising nationalist right and embracing some of their
anti-Muslim agenda. Casting aside any of the vaguely left appeals he'd
made in his campaign, he governed as a right-wing post-Gaullist
conservative, eliminating the nation's wealth tax, reducing social
benefits, and sporadically going to war against the nation's unions.
Even now, he is campaigning on raising the retirement age (that is,
eligibility for senior pensions) from 62 to 65. As the invaluable Thomas
Piketty points out, working to 65 means one thing to working-class
French men and women, who start work around age 18, and another to
French college graduates, who don't start work until they're in
their early twenties. (For those who think that Macron is displaying a
unique level of political idiocy in sticking to his from-62-to-65
position while running off against Le Pen, remember that Barack Obama
insisted on championing the Trans-Pacific Partnership even as Hillary
Clinton was in the process of losing the once-industrial Midwest to
Donald Trump.)

For her part, Le Pen, like the European populist right, defends the
welfare state that Macron has sought to diminish. But, also like the
European right, she wants it reserved for those who are historically
French-that is, white folks.

But if Macron deserves the left's reservations, France does not. When
the greater evil is neofascism, the case for the lesser evil doesn't
have to affirm any of the merits of that lesser evil, save one: It
doesn't plunge France into the level of state-enforced bigotry (and
worse) that France experienced when its government ruled from Vichy and
lent the Nazis a helping hand.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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