Ah, the glories of crisis. After a deadening
presidential campaign that moved French voters to derision rather
than participation, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's stunning
passage to the runoff round next Sunday has belatedly set France's
political blood pumping — and maybe flowing. Hundreds of thousands
were on the streets last week, and a million could be marching against
Le Pen on May Day this week, when clashes are likely with his National
Front (FN) militants honoring Joan of Arc. "I've got my hammer out
already, made of hard African wood," says Gilles Rohaut, 50, owner
of a snackbar near Paris' Gare de l'Est, who demonstrated against
Le Pen with his 17-year-old daughter last week at the Bastille. "We're
going to smack him where it hurts."
Along with a keening cry of "Had we only known!" that reaction seems
to be the best French democracy can offer in the immediate wake of
Le Pen's leering half-victory. As some urgently conjure up the "brown
pest" of Nazism, and others even savor the prospect of street battles
la Berlin in the 1930s, France has finally found a political mission
in making sure Le Pen is demonized. The second round of the presidential
elections on Sunday has been transformed into a "referendum on Le
Pen," and the hope is to make it a resounding non.
As noble as that mission is, it misses the larger point. For Le Pen
is a symptom of France's malaise, not the cause. Rejecting him is
a necessary and bracing tonic, but "antifascism" is the easy part.
As they scramble to improve their fortunes in the campaign for crucial
legislative elections on June 9 and 16, France's traditional political
parties have been saved from articulating a coherent message of change
by the specter of Le Pen's success. Unless they go deeper and look
at their own gaping distance from voters' concerns, they are going
to live with a societal migraine for years to come.
The no pasaran stance sidesteps the reality that the far right
didn't win nearly as much in the first round of the presidential elections
as the traditional parties lost. The National Front and its 1999 offshoot,
the National Republican Movement of Bruno Mégret, a former
Le Pen lieutenant, together got 900,000 more votes than Le Pen did
last time. But the Socialists of Premier Lionel Jospin lost 2.5 million.
The Communist Party, bigger than the Socialists 30 years ago, essentially
self-destructed, losing more than 1.6 million voters since 1995 to
collect a pitiful 3.37% of the vote. The Greens' gain of almost 500,000
couldn't begin to offset the debacle of Jospin's "pluralist left."
Chirac can't crow victory either. Totaling up his score with those
of conservative candidates François Bayrou and Alain Madelin
still yields a catastrophic drop of 4.5 million voters for the parliamentary
right. "These elections mark a movement of rejection," says Pascal
Perrineau, director of the Center for the Study of French Political
Life. The biggest sole gainer in the elections were abstainers. Only
a third of those who bothered to show up cast their ballots for the
parties of Chirac and Jospin, which Perrineau says are perceived as
"technocratic and out of touch with the people." And the rest? "One-third
of the electorate voted for people with no political project: they
were advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, withdrawal from
Europe or, in the case of [Gilles Saint-Josse's pro-hunting party,
nothing at all," he says. "It's a vote of hatred and resentment, and
it shows that French society is in very bad shape indeed."
