France

Though a Marine Le Pen victory in the second round of the French Presidential elections is not out of the question, it seems at the moment improbable. https://t.co/LVKeONTIFJ

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 12, 2022

Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker‘s American in Paris:

A long sigh of at least partial relief was audible to anyone with an ear open to the wind blowing across the ocean from France last night. It might have been particularly audible in the New York Harbor, around the Statue of Liberty, that great gift of one republic to another, and where the smaller, original model of republican virtue was displayed just this past year.

The good news was that, in the first round of the French Presidential election, on Sunday, while Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extremist, anti-republican National Rally, once again advanced to the forthcoming second round, it was with a minimal increase to her tally from five years ago, and significantly if narrowly behind that of the incumbent President, the liberal republican Emmanuel Macron. Nothing is settled, but, though a Le Pen victory in the second round, on April 24th, is not out of the question, it seems at the moment improbable. Adding the votes that went to center and left candidates in this round to Macron’s tally, and adding the votes that went to the even more extreme-right candidates to Le Pen’s, it seems unlikely—not out of the question, but unlikely—that she will be able to cross the fifty-per-cent threshold. Macron should have a small but decisive edge, especially because the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who could never bring himself to actually support Macron, repeatedly asked his voters during his concession speech never to vote for Le Pen. Certainly, not all of his followers will go to Macron, but abhorrence of the extreme right is still a stronger motive for the French left than is abhorrence of the liberal center, strong though that motive is, as well. Non-French pundits see Mélenchon as a “kingmaker,” but this misreads French tradition, by which candidates are expected to declare their second-round allegiance immediately after the first round, and minimal bargaining for support goes on after that.

We tend to overestimate the immediate, imaginary causal connections in elections, and to underestimate the structural and traditional ones. But tradition matters in analysis; systems produce peculiar results. If the French had an electoral system as heavily weighted in favor of rural districts as the American system is, Le Pen would have won in this first round, as Donald Trump did in his. (Trump won, let us recall, while losing the popular vote—which is all that matters in France—by an enormous margin. In France, both of his elections would have been called against him as soon as the polls had closed.) A Presidential system like that of the Fifth Republic, which is intended to centralize power in a single figure, after what was perceived, perhaps wrongly, as undue government changing and chopping during the Fourth Republic, ends by making every difference more absolutist than the electorate really is. Although the two candidates will offer radically different programs in the second round—Macron is strongly pro-European and pro-NATO; Le Pen is just as strongly not—there is in reality a broad consensus among the French on what they actually want. There is general support for France’s continued leadership in the European Union; a solution to the “security” problems that, since the Bataclan theatre massacre of 2015, have been felt to traumatize French life; probably a revised policy on immigration; and, certainly, support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. But the sane consensus has had a hard time being heard…

Make no mistake: the election of Le Pen is still entirely possible—if indeed some significant part of the left either abstains or makes a burn-it-down move toward her. That would be a threat to the existence of the Republic in France, as Trump’s election was here. Yet it is not implausible to make the case that there is more stasis than shock in the election results. In good times and bad, wartime and peacetime, extremist parties thrive in France, along with more liberal ones, less out of a response to some crisis than because, in a philosophically minded, highly centralized country, with a polarizing Presidential system and long traditions of political extremism, ideological parties tend to flourish in a way that they don’t in, say, Canada or the United Kingdom. Common sense and a mania for systematization, logical thinking and ideological totalism, are constantly at war in the French character, as a belief in instant happiness and a paranoia about imaginary enemies are in the American. For the moment, at least, it seems that once again France may luck out.

Excellent Read: <em>‘France Is Still Standing After the First Round of Presidential Elections’</em>Post + Comments (18)