France has gone a bit bonkers. In the European elections barely a week ago, the anti-immigration Rassemblement National won so hugely that President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the national assembly and called a snap election. It was widely seen as a wild gamble. Well, not that wild in that, win or lose, the intrepid Emmanuel will keep his job, since it is not a presidential election.
Macron is betting that either the left and centre will unite and prevent the far right from winning, or that the far right wins the election and faces an uncomfortable two years in office cohabiting with Macron. The hope would be that a brief brush with executive power would expose the incompetence of the extremists.
This is a pretty decent punt. Generic nationalists thrust into the legislative limelight often show they have no idea who empties the bins or how to make water come out of the tap. But as the case of Donald Trump proves, sometimes voters don’t care – they’ll vote for them again anyway.
Few of us know much about gambling now. In a world of scratch cards and lottery tickets, no one has a poker face any more. Gambling has become as mechanical as everything else. Few know how to ride the risk, how to conjugate the instinctual pull and drag of all that probability they can feel in the seat of their pants. Thus bewilderment ensues. And half of France rages against their president’s Dostoyevskian imprudence.
But then, barely 48 hours after Macron’s announcement, the political leaders of other parties started to commit an extraordinary form of televised and comic hara-kiri. In less than a week, the right and far right have exploded into inter- and intra-party war. Everyone is calling everyone else a liar and a traitor.
These wars aren’t even slightly ideological. They’re more about office size and window views. Everything is curtain-twitchingly personal. The sudden golden opportunity of Macron’s snap election has exposed the French far right for what they are – people of such frivolity and incompetence they make BoJo and Trump look like Churchill and Roosevelt.
I should give some background. But you don’t care about the names of the parties and you won’t remember them anyway (I know I can’t). Plus you’ve got your own infuriating election to deal with. In any case, the French right has been so consistently dallying with the hard right for a decade, it’s better if I do my slightly liberty-taking shorthand version. Basically the French right divides into three main parties - Éric Zemmour’s Arabs Are Awful party, Jordan Bardella’s Jews Have Weird Elbows party and Éric Ciotti’s more moderate What’s a Little Deportation Between Friends party.
That last one might seem harsh (Ciotti’s Républicains used to be the French version of the Tories), but the idea of any moral distance between them and the extremists finally fell off the mantelpiece last week and, like fine china, it made a lovely tinkling sound when it shattered.
On Wednesday, seeking an electoral pact with the hard right and fearful of being marginalised or sacked, Ciotti (small, bald, looks a bit like Phil Collins without the sexual charisma – big Roderick Spode vibes), well, the bold Éric locked himself inside the party HQ of Les Républicains and wouldn’t let anyone in. Yes, seriously. Party workers had to call around looking for someone with spare keys. And it was all deliciously filmed by delighted TV crews. By Thursday, he ended up getting sacked anyway.
That is, until Friday, when there was a court hearing about the dismissal where Ciotti’s lawyer argued, among other things, that he should be allowed the freedom of the offices because he was only 5ft 2in and didn’t want to get thumped. I’m not making this up. End result? His sacking was cancelled and he was party leader again. It was as though, near the end of the long run of the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey, the writers had gone on a two-day meth-bender and said, bugger it, let’s just have some fun.
Comedy and politics can make for an unpredictable blend. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump seemed notably impervious to their own ridiculousness. Trump, in particular, was so uniquely stupid and horrible that lampooning him risked making him more likable, just as Spitting Image’s Ronald Reagan puppet had famously rendered Ronnie almost cute in the 1980s. We tend to like people or things who make us laugh.
Yet, despite all the giggles, the French know perfectly well this election is serious – perhaps their most serious in a century. The left have their fair share of room-clearing bozos – my personal favourite is Adrien Quatennens, the convicted domestic abuser who made a wonderfully airy appeal to feminist voters last week. But, faced with a surging far right, the left and centrist parties are rapidly uniting in the Nouveau Front Populaire movement. While the right can’t agree who gets the nice curtains, the left are setting aside serious ideological schisms. It’s not perfect, and some left-leaning Jewish voters may have to hold their nose at the ballot box, but it’s showing signs of success.
As one of their posters puts it: Look, We’ll Fight About it Later.
The risk remains great. Simply put, France is big and important. A far-right victory would bring serious aid and comfort to the international hard right and to Vladimir Putin. It could play havoc with stock markets and might even reignite the deeply silly hobby horse of Frexit. The stakes are enormous.
But the comedy factor remains important. If the far right’s cartoonish absurdity doesn’t cost it the election, it might cripple their administration. The French like a laugh as much as any of us, but are constitutionally allergic to being the butt of the joke. They don’t much want the international image of France to be overlaid by The Benny Hill Show theme tune.
As I watch all these rightwing Alan Partridges lock themselves in cupboards, backstab each other on TV or wave haplessly from balconies, I can’t help feeling an unfamiliar but distinct sensation of hope.
Robert McLiam Wilson is an award-winning Paris-based novelist
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