French presidential candidates Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron
(Picture: AFP/Getty Images)With Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron through to the final round of the French presidential election, might we be on the verge of a seismic political shock sufficient to eclipse Brexit and Trump? Le Pen, after all, comes from the French far-Right. She may have worked hard to detoxify her brand — her National Rally party was originally the French National Front – but, in the corridors of European power, there will be plenty of politicians and bureaucrats biting their nails. They, after all, believe in a version of the world that Le Pen and her ilk totally reject.
We used to think politics could be divided neatly into “left” and “right”, with the main disagreements focused on the role of the state, the liberty of the individual, the importance of markets, the limits of capitalism and so on. That division no longer works.
The new schism is between what might loosely be described as globalists (Macron) and, depending on your point of view, nationalists or isolationists (Le Pen). Both camps span left and right. Donald Trump with his “America First” is no fan of globalisation but neither is the left-leaning Democrat Bernie Sanders. Brexiteers exist within both the Tories and Labour, united under the mantra of “take back control”. Hungary’s right wing Viktor Orbán is a thorn in the EU’s side but so, too, was Syriza, the far left party in Greece that took on Brussels and lost in the midst of the Greek financial crisis. And Marine Le Pen will likely gain votes in the second round of the French Presidential contest from supporters of the Corbyn-esque Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Le Pen’s campaign has primarily focused on the rising cost of living. Putting to one side the fact that higher energy prices partly reflect the activities of Vladimir Putin, until very recently a man she was proud to do business with, Le Pen has offered populist answers to a worsening economic reality: income tax scrapped for the under-30s and cuts in VAT to offset the impact on inflation of higher energy bills and rising prices at the supermarket. How she will fund these giveaways is a mystery. She also, however, has her eyes on both the EU and immigration. She’d rather the EU be “a Europe of nations” with national sovereignty trumping EU-wide rules and laws. And “it’s for us, the French, to decide who can stay and who must leave”, a view that rather begs the question of who, precisely, counts as French.
Le Pen is the anti-Macron. The President’s enthusiasm for globalisation has only highlighted the ways in which French society has become increasingly polarised. Those who disagree with Macron’s belief in open borders, international market forces and green taxation are no longer so willing to vote for “conventional” candidates. They’re prepared, instead, to gamble.
In some ways, French society has become even more fragmented than Britain’s. On average, French living standards are higher than the EU average, as you might expect. That average, however, masks huge, and disturbing, variations. Living standards in the Île de France – in effect, “greater Paris” – are 76 per cent higher than across the EU as a whole. Only one other region – Rhones-Alpes, with gourmet-friendly Lyon at its heart – enjoys living standards (marginally) above the EU average. Every other region is poorer. Deindustrialisation has occurred in countless areas, even as other parts of the EU – including enclaves within relative newcomers such as Poland and Slovakia – have flourished.
Supporters of globalisation – and I include myself in this group – have always struggled to answer the political challenge associated with the creation of regional winners and losers. While, in theory, the losers could always be compensated, in practice they typically have not been. And they’ve become increasingly angry, all too aware that what has worked economically for a nation in aggregate has not worked for them either individually or regionally. Trump used to tap into the so-called “left behind”. Le Pen has followed a similar tactic.
What this all ultimately points to is a world in danger of becoming more protectionist, isolationist and disjointed than it has been in many a decade. When the Berlin Wall came down, the eminent American political thinker Francis Fukuyama argued that we had reached the end of history: free markets and liberal democracy had finally triumphed over the perils of Soviet Communism. Yet in the rush to imagine a borderless world of common values and markets, many millions of people found themselves in an increasingly precarious economic position. Their unease has ensured that history is coming back.
