Commentary No. 88, May 1, 2002
"A French Earthquake?"
When Jean-Marie Le Pen edged Lionel Jospin out of second place in the first round of the French presidential elections, and thus qualified to run against Jacques Chirac in the second round, French (and world) newspapers described it as a political earthquake. What really happened, and how important was it? There are actually two separate questions. Why did Le Pen do as well as he did? And why did Jospin do as poorly? The short answer is that Le Pen did less well than it seems. It is Jospin's weak showing that is more significant.
Electoral results depend in part, as we know, on the electoral system. Le Pen got just under 17% (and his breakaway former associate Bruno Megret a bit over 2%), making 19% between them. This is not really a lot. Le Pen is a rightwing xenophobic populist nationalist who combines appeals to French insularity, diatribes against immigrants, a tough-on-crime language, a theme of Catholic integrism, and a dose of traditional anti-Semitism. He is anti-global, anti-European, and anti-American. His movement includes fascist elements, but doesn't use primarily the anti-parliamentary para-military mobilization of interwar fascist movements. But who knows how far he would go were he in power? He is a very unsavory character, and no one should want to see his movement gain strength, let alone win a presidential election.
That said, there are probably 20% of the voters in every Western country who basically support a program like that of Le Pen, and that almost all of the time. However, they don't vote for him or someone like him all the time. Why not? It depends on two things: first, the immediate situation of the country and particularly of the state of the so-called mainstream parties; and secondly, the electoral system. He got his 17% largely because both Chirac and Jospin seemed to offer voters (of the right but also of the left and even of the center) so little.
France has an unusual system: it is presidential, but it is a two-round system. The U.S. is presidential, but one round. And many other countries are parliamentary. Those in turn divide into the ones with single member districts (like Great Britain), and those with partial or total proportional representation. In the U.S. system, political factions are more or less obliged to work inside one of the two main parties, or be excluded. The Le Pen 20% in the U.S. are the Christian right plus the hawks. They work inside the Republican party, and at the moment have more or less taken it over. They did not vote for Pat Buchanan. The British system (parliamentary but single-member) gives results similar to those of the United States. In more "proportional" parliamentary systems, like Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Le Pen equivalents can draw large votes and make their deals afterwards. In Austria, it got them into the government. The Dutch equivalent, Piet Fortijn, is going to try that in the forthcoming elections.
France's system is quite different. Since there are two rounds, and in the second round only the top two candidates may stand, the system encourages factions to show their strength on the first round and to rally to the two top mainstream candidates on the second round. (All this is before the legislative elections, which are also two round.) This works on the assumption that the two top presidential candidates will poll a solid vote, and that the others will all poll small votes. Everyone thought that this would happen again this time, and that most Le Pen voters would vote Chirac on the second round.
For two months before, the pollsters kept showing that Chirac and Jospin would be in a safe lead, and that there were three main candidates vying for number 3 place, each of whom showed a good-sized vote in different weeks. At one point, it was supposed to be Chevènement. He represents the Jacobin left (nationalist, tough on crime and immigrants, but socialist) who thought he could woo disaffected Chirac voters. Then he faded, and Arlette Laguiller, the perennial Trotskyist candidate, came to the fore, speaking a wooden, tough traditional left line, and appealing to disaffected Communists and socialists. And then Le Pen, who stood in the polls at 7% a month or so ago surged forward, picking up no doubt many of those who were earlier going to vote for Chevènement or Laguiller (who both went down to under 6%). Le Pen drew a typical protest vote. Le Pen's hard core is probably little more than 5-7%.
So why did Jospin fall below Le Pen (only less than 1% below, be it noted)? There were a lot of immediate reasons. Jospin ran a lousy campaign. For a long time, he was campaigning for second round voters by sounding as close to Chirac as possible. This made many voters abstain on the first round or turn to some other minor candidate. And then there was the fact that, whereas in 1995 the parties in the present government - the so-called "plural left" that Le Monde now calls "la gauche gestionnaire" meaning the left in government that runs things - had only three candidates; this time they had five. The least well-known of them, Christiane Taubira, from the tiny Left Radical party, who ran only in order to establish the principle that someone from the overseas departments could run, got 2.32% of the vote. Had she not run, probably all of these would have voted for Jospin (since Left Radicals feel closer to the Socialist Party than to any other party in France). Taubira's votes would have allowed Jospin to squeak ahead of Le Pen. And then there would have been no "earthquake." Indeed, it is quite possible that Jospin would have gone on to win the second round.
The real story is not however in the idiocy of the Taubira candidacy. It is in the ideological decline of the social-democrats everywhere in the Western world. Jospin was probably the most traditionally "left" of social-democratic leaders anywhere. He ran his 1995 presidential and 1997 legislative elections on a left rhetoric (forcing the conservative parties leftward to the center), and this clearly appealed. No Tony Blair he! This time, he got cold feet, or rather he let the Tony Blairs of the French Socialist Party persuade him to move his rhetoric to the right. It did not work electorally.
The problem with the Social-Democrats everywhere in Europe (as with the Democrats in the U.S.) is that they have moved over 50 years so far to the center, and even the center-right, that they don't seem to stand for anything that will arouse voters. In 1981, people danced in the streets when Mitterand (much further right than Jospin) won the election. Mitterand had promised "another society." By 1983, the socialists had abandoned that language and that promise.
Socialists haven't been Marxists for a long time. They haven't been revolutionaries. These days they are scarcely socialist. (In this campaign, Jospin said his program wasn't socialist.) They are for the blessings of the free market, perhaps with some social leavening. They will defend for the most part the acquired rights of the trade-unions and governmental workers. And even there, they are beginning to weaken. Yes, they tend to be more "socially liberal" on questions like rights of women, of gays and lesbians, of people of color, and up to a point of immigrants. This means they can count on 20% of the votes, just as the Le Pens can count on 20%. The other 60% often go fishing, or vote for colorless centrist politicians, or get mobilized by national crises to support the like of George W. Bush.
Jospin's defeat was not the earthquake. The earthquake occurred some time ago, when the left ceased being left, or even recognizably left of center. France is not the worst story, by any means. It's time for the world's so-called left to reassess not only where the world is heading, but even electoral strategy, not to speak of political strategy overall.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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