France’s new two-party system: Center vs. Extreme
Former mainstays of French politics struggle to stay
relevant ahead of European election.
By JOHN
LICHFIELD 3/27/19, 4:01 AM
CET
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen are the new
standard-bearers of French politics | Philippe Wojazer/AFP via Getty Images
PARIS — Something dangerous is happening in French politics.
Forget French President Emmanuel Macron’s difficulties.
Forget the Yellow Jackets. Forget the various flavors of far right and far
left.
The center left and center right that dominated French
politics for more than 70 years after the end of World War II were humiliated
in the 2017 presidential election. Two years later, despite Macron’s
unpopularity, despite the longest and most violent social movement in French
post-war history, the two establishment parties remain moribund, scattered and
leaderless.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the two-party pattern has
been banished from French politics. On the contrary, it has been hijacked by
Macron’s La République En Marche and far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National
Rally. The new two-party dynamic is the center vs. the extreme. In a country
that has seen frequent alternations of power since 1981, this is alarming.
With the two former French mainstays struggling to stay
relevant, the European election has become a two-horse race between the parties
of Macron and Le Pen.
On the center left, the Socialist Party — the party of
François Mitterrand, Jacques Delors, Lionel Jospin and François Hollande — is
polling between 5 and 6 percent in the most recent European election opinion
polls, including in POLITICO's own polling. On the center right, Les
Républicains — the party founded by Jacques Chirac and renamed by Nicolas
Sarkozy, containing the DNA of various parties going back to Charles De Gaulle
and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing — are at 13 percent.
Neither is dominant in their reduced share of the market, as
they try to fend off competition from splinter groups.
For the Socialists, competition comes from the breakaway
party Générations, started by former Socialist presidential candidate Benoît
Hamon, which is polling at just 3 percent. But neither Hamon nor the current
Socialist leader, Olivier Faure, show any sign of making a concerted effort to
rebuild the Socialist base — social workers, teachers, the left-leaning urban
bourgeoisie — created by Mitterrand and, briefly, by Hollande.
On the right, moderate, pro-European elements of the
Républicains have rebelled against the mildly Euroskeptic and aggressively
social-conservative line adopted by the party’s new leader, Laurent Wauquiez.
Some have splintered off to create a new party, Agir, which will campaign
alongside Macron’s party in the European election.
Laurent Wauquiez, leader of France's conservative Les
Républicains | Bertrand Langlois/AFP via Getty Images
The young man who is leading the Républicains' list in the
European election, François-Xavier Bellamy, 33, is a pro-life, anti-gay
marriage philosophy teacher with no political experience. He appeals to the
party’s new, narrower Catholic-conservative base — an admission that the
Républicains is now a pressure group rather than a potential party of
government.
Neither Bellamy nor Wauquiez have anything to say to the
hard-scrabble outer suburbs and rural towns that spawned the Yellow Jacket
movement but once voted for Chirac and Sarkozy.
Way out in front
With the two former French mainstays struggling to stay
relevant, the European election has become a two-horse race between the parties
of Macron and Le Pen.
POLITICO's polling shows a narrow lead for Macron — just
over 23 percent to Le Pen’s 21.5 percent. In what would have been an impossible
scenario just a few years ago, the only credible electoral alternative to the
unpopular Macron in the presidential election in 2022 is now Le Pen — even
though she is also floundering personally.
The Yellow Jacket movement, which is well into its fourth
month of protests, is a physical manifestation of a shift in the tectonic
plates of French politics — a lava flow of anger.
The discrediting of traditional parties of government is not
just a French phenomenon. It has gone even further in Italy, where managerial
centrism gave way to nationalist populism, a dangerous precedent for its sister
to the north.
The more thoughtful members of the movement — at least more
thoughtful than those who smashed up Paris last Saturday — will tell you they
are not just rejecting Macron. They are rebelling against a system under which,
for decades, the right governed like the left and the left governed like the
right. Their issue is with the man, Macron, who promised to break the mold but
ended up perpetuating the top-down approach to government that defined previous
administrations.
The real division in French politics in 2019 is between a
reformist status quo and a hearty “screw you all.” If you total up the support
of all the French parties and micro-parties that represent the “screw you”
extremes, it comes to over 45 percent. Twenty years ago, when Jean-Marie Le Pen
was in his pomp, it was around 25 percent.
In theory, Le Pen fille should be the great beneficiary of
this new duopoly of center vs. extreme. It should be Marine’s “turn” to win the
European election and then to govern in 2022. But she has failed, so far, to
gain electorally from France’s black mood.
She started off praising the Yellow Jackets and then blamed
the government for their excesses. Rather than offer a coherent alternative to
Macron, she stooped to amateurish false claims, such as suggesting that asylum
seekers receive more from the French state than pensioners.
The second half of Macron's mandate, partly thanks to the
Yellow Jackets protests, may be more imaginative and balanced than the first
half.
All the same, it’s difficult to imagine the second round of
the 2022 presidential election being anything other than a rerun of Macron vs.
Le Pen. That has always been Macron’s insurance policy. However unpopular he
might be, the alternative was worse. “Après moi, le déluge” is now “Après moi,
Le Pen.”
He may still get away with it. The second half of his
mandate, partly thanks to the Yellow Jacket protests, may be more imaginative
and balanced than the first half. The French economy may yet recover.
But beyond 2022, the prospects are worrying. The desire for
something different is a strong impulse in democracy. It’s what democracy is
supposed to be about.
If the center left and center right never recover, the only
long-term alternative to Macronian managerial centrism will be the
anti-democratic extreme left or extreme right — with a cleverer leader.
France may yet get its own Matteo Salvini.
John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent
and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.
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