French president Emmanuel Macronwill has now beaten Marine Le Pen in successive elections. That might mean Le Pen’s retirement — there are younger challengers for the nationalist vote, her niece Marion Marechal among them — and the collapse of the party she founded, National Rally.
None of this, though, will mean that moderation has vanquished the “far-right,” “nationalism,” and “populism” in France or that the system is working as it should. Charles de Gaulle created the Fifth Republic’s two-stage system to filter out extremists and create presidents who could operate free of parties and coalitions. Instead, the system has malfunctioned in three of the last four presidential elections, exposing the collapse of party politics.
The second vote is meant to be an ideological centrifuge, spinning the extremists of left and right toward the parties of the moderate left and right and the moderates toward each other. In 2002, the racist Jean-Marie Le Pen broke through into the second round. The center-right rallied to the Socialist candidate Jacques Chirac and sent Le Pen pere back to his cave with only 5% of the vote. This front republicain, the “republican front,” is France’s informal equivalent to the Electoral College. It is a firewall against the voters, and it is crumbling.
After 1945, European social democracy leaned right on economics and left on social policy: How else to rebuild economies while funding a generous welfare state? The sweet spot between the poles of left and right was “third-way” technocracy. This fitted the postwar tradition of not trusting the voters, and it dovetailed national politics smoothly into the emerging framework of the European Union. But the EU forgot to consult the voters and failed to secure its borders against massive immigration from the Middle East and Africa.
Today, increasing numbers of Europeans want to reverse the technocrats’ recipe: lean left on economics to protect jobs and pensions against globalization and lean right on social policy. That means a tough line on immigration, Islam, and skepticism about the EU. These have always been Marine Le Pen’s policies. They have also always been the policies of Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the socialist LA France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), not to be confused with the Socialists, who are the Fifth Republic’s institutional left, or the Communists, who really are communists.
In policy terms, Le Pen is as “far-left” as Melenchon is, and Melenchon is as “far-right” as she is. As the French say, “Les extremes se touchent”: the extremes meet. The question is, where are they meeting? It used to be said that communists were socialists in a hurry. Is Marine Le Pen a fascist who can take her time in unpicking the Fifth Republic or a democrat in a hurry to save the social compact?
Macron insists that the extremes are meeting beyond the pale of respectability, but it’s evident that yesterday’s extremists are falling into the center ground. In the first round of voting on April 10, Le Pen won 23%, Melenchon 22%, and Macron 28%. The moderate parties simply disappeared. The Socialists, heirs to the mighty Francois Mitterrand, collapsed to 1.9% — less than the Communists. Les Republicains, the inheritors of Chirac’s center-right mantle, had a promising candidate in Valerie Pecresse, but she scored only 4.8%. Combine Le Pen’s and Melenchon’s votes with those of the other anti-establishment candidates, and “populists” of various stripes won a massive majority in the first round.
It wasn’t only relative moderation that transformed Jean-Marie’s 5% in 2005 into Marine’s 34% in 2017. France’s populists represent a new consensus. Macron will win again as the candidate of the Fifth Republic. Still, it is only a matter of time before a populist without Marine Le Pen’s family baggage and Russian bank loans storms the Elysee Palace. In this sense, Macron is right to claim that this election is a referendum on the Fifth Republic.
Compared to this, the U.S. isn’t doing too badly. The two-party centrifuge is working as it should. Though some on the Right see a French-style “uniparty” in the grip of the D.C. bureaucracy, America’s parties are rapidly absorbing the post-2008 shift in voters’ priorities. The 2024 Republican presidential nominee will be more protectionist than the Democrat. The Democrat will be the candidate of Silicon Valley, institutional spec codes, and sex changes for children. The Republican will be the candidate of Wall Street, red-hat free speech, and family values. It won’t be pretty, but it will be a choice.
Two cheers for the American way.
