No journalist really understood the forces that over the past year made Donald Trump president, with the possible exception of the former newspaper publisher Conrad Black. In early 2016, with the primary season barely underway, Black wrote a column in Canada’s National Post entitled “Don’t underestimate Donald. He will win.” Against those who claimed Trump could not possibly break the barrier of 20, 30, or 40 percent of the vote, or that his “infelicities” doomed his candidacy, Black admitted that it certainly did appear that way. “But he seems to have become the man,” Black wrote, “whom the great office of president of the United States now seeks.”
Black’s idea of an office “seeking” a person would sound nutty had it not been so thoroughly vindicated. The events of the past week lead one to wonder whether something similar isn’t happening in France as the presidential elections scheduled for April 23 and May 7 approach. Ever since 2011, when Marine Le Pen took over the populist National Front (FN) from her aging father, pundits have speculated that it might be possible for France to make an ideological lurch of the sort that has now taken Britain out of the European Union and brought Donald Trump to the White House.
This has always been unlikely. To simplify a bit, the FN is a coalition of two conservative out-groups: reactionary nationalists and ultramontane Catholics. Le Pen took over the party by rallying the former faction against the latter. The Catholics and their allies, though, have turned out, to the surprise of many, to be the larger force. When the unpopular Socialist government of François Hollande introduced gay marriage in 2013, millions rallied against it. Last November, the mainstream conservative party, the Républicains, nominated the Catholic ex-prime minister François Fillon (sounds like “peon” or “neon”) as their candidate for the presidency. Le Pen’s chances seemed to vanish. Fillon could start measuring the Elysée Palace for drapes.
At the end of January, that changed. The satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné alleged that Fillon had paid his Welsh-born wife hundreds of thousands of euros for a no-show job in parliament. Hiring relatives is commonplace in French politics. Fillon admitted his wife had worked for him as a legislative aide for years, and that his children, who are lawyers, had also done legal work for him. What is anathema in French politics is a no-show job. As the Voix du Nord newspaper snidely put it, Mrs. Fillon was a co-worker “so discreet that she never acquired an entry badge for the Palais Bourbon, or even an email address.” She also seemed, rather mysteriously, to be collecting a large salary from the literary Revue des deux Mondes for similarly light duties, and Fillon’s children had done their so-called legal work when they were too young to be lawyers. Barely 10 weeks from the elections, the Républicains were looking for a Plan B.
“Not content to throw the bums out,” someone wrote in the daily Le Télégramme, “the French are now punishing candidates before they even get into office.” Marine Le Pen herself was battling a similar scandal, having been assessed a fine of over $300,000 for listing phantom employees for her party’s delegation to the European parliament. But French voters apparently do not punish politicians for stealing from the German, Polish, and Spanish taxpayers with quite the zeal they do for stealing from French ones.
In ordinary times, the great beneficiary of Fillon’s struggles would be France’s Socialist party. But Hollande has proved, by some measures, the single least popular national leader in the Western world since World War II, with popularity ratings that have dipped into the single digits. Hollande alienated much of the country in 2012 by promising a radical anti-capitalist program that would include 75 percent taxes on top earners, and describing himself as an “enemy” of the rich. When the promised tax and other classical socialist measures turned out to be illegal, his party’s true believers turned on him. By 2015 Hollande and his prime minister Manuel Valls, probably the most conservative figure in the Socialist party, had to pass unprecedented free-market reforms in order to keep the economy from sputtering out.
Among French Socialists there is something called “the left of the left.” That is where the votes turned out to be this primary season. For a long time, Valls appeared to be the strongest candidate to appeal to the median Frenchman, but you know the times we live in. Benoît Hamon, Hollande’s most ideological detractor among the Socialists, pulverized Valls. Hamon believes in euthanasia, green energy, and legalized marijuana, but at the heart of his platform is a set of unconventional economic ideas. We are undergoing a raréfaction du travail, he thinks—a permanent shortage of good-paying jobs. As such, he wants to abrogate Hollande’s 2015 reforms. He also favors offering each citizen a guaranteed minimum income.
Hamon has been accused of “Corbynizing” the Socialist party, as Britain’s Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn did in returning his own party to real ideological socialism. We would call this Sandersization. And if you are among those who think there is such a thing as the “change vote,” and that, by winning it, Bernie Sanders could have beaten Donald Trump, then there would be nothing silly or futile about a Hamon candidacy. Except that Hamon is not a Sanders-style nostalgic—he is a utopian. And in French politics, it’s okay to be a utopian only when it comes to experiments in sexuality—not when it comes to the portfolios of the “caviar left,” as they are called in Paris.
The well-heeled part (and that is a big part) of the Socialist party is rushing to the exits. These voters have been smitten by Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former investment banker whom Hollande appointed economy minister when bond traders were starting to worry that France was turning into a banana republic. Macron may be the most capitalistic candidate for president France has ever seen—and the present zeitgeist would seem unpropitious for introducing French Socialist voters to Clintonomics. Macron, who likes the Socialist party’s gender and ecological programs, believes a preference for clean air over dirty is enough to qualify one as a man of the left nowadays. Maybe he is right. Macron did not participate in the Socialist primary, starting instead a new political organization called En Marche, which humbly borrows the initials of the candidate himself. According to the weekly magazine L’Express, so many Socialists want to register as En Marche candidates that the party’s leaders fear being seen as a new label for an old politics. Pollsters have been quoted as saying that if Macron could achieve a critical mass of popularity (20 percent or so), that would suffice to convince Socialists he is their man, and En Marche their party.
The French “left” is laboring under a common difficulty. Like the American one, it binds together a coalition of urban elites and the disproportionately minority populations that labor for them. It is a coalition that works well as a governing majority, when it can distribute privileges, and each part of the coalition has something to gain from swallowing its misgivings and saying “yes” to all the other partners’ agendas. But once in opposition, the interests of the rich part of the party and the poor part become harder to reconcile. Look at the present disarray of American Democrats.
That is why a victory for Le Pen, while still unlikely, is now among the possible outcomes. It may not even be the strangest among them.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
