Opinion | France’s Neither-Nor Election (original) (raw)
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Op-Ed Contributor
- April 12, 2017
Credit...Jasper Rietman
PARIS — For the first time in the history of the last three French republics, the two front-runners in the presidential election deny belonging to the right or the left, or even the center, of the political spectrum.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, widely known as a far-right party, has tried to rid it of its founder — her own father, Jean-Marie Le Pen — for being too extreme. Ms. Le Pen, who according to current polls will win the first round of the election on April 23, faults the outgoing Socialist president, François Hollande, for turning his back on the weak and the underprivileged — in other words, for abandoning the left’s ideals of social solidarity. In his time Mr. Le Pen instead faulted François Mitterrand, the first Socialist to be elected under the Fifth Republic in 1981, for his vile and “harmful” leftism.
During the last candidates’ debate on April 4, the words Ms. Le Pen used the most would never have passed her father’s lips: “the unemployed,” “the downtrodden,” “poverty,” “the have-nots”; all the product of “capitalism” and “_libéralisme_” (meaning, in the French sense, the pro-market economic theory rather than the political doctrine promoting individual rights). One curious result was that candidates from the left, even the far left, wound up sounding like they were on the same wavelength as she was when they castigated bankers and multinational companies.
Ms. Le Pen’s main opponent, Emmanuel Macron — who is forecast to make it past the first round of voting with her and then win the second — has tirelessly repeated that even though he has a social bent, he is principally a progressive and a pragmatist, and favors globalization and finance. A young graduate of the prestigious national school of administration known as l’ENA — as well as a former investment banker and an adviser to Mr. Hollande, who made him economics minister — Mr. Macron says he doesn’t belong to the traditional political spectrum either. He refuses to be called left-wing, much less socialist, but balks just as much at being labeled right-wing. Campaign posters for his party, En Marche! (Onward!), tout the slogan “France must be a chance for all.”
Some, like the former education minister François Bayrou, take this rhetoric to signal the center’s return to the political scene, but Mr. Macron rejects this notion as well. He prefers to cast himself as advocating the renewal of the political class — which also happens to be one of the Front National’s favorite leitmotifs. But unlike Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron is a convinced Europeanist. He believes in the euro. He doesn’t consider immigration to be a calamity. He doesn’t think French identity is in danger, that Islamization threatens French culture or that technology can’t be trusted.
Instead of embodying the traditional left-right polarity, the two leading candidates of this election embody a polarity between populism and liberalism, broadly understood.
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