Posted on 04/27/2002 8:28:33 PM PDT by LarryLied
After Le Pen's shock triumph, it's like 1968 again, but this time the Left is in tatters
From the pavements in Paris, the anti-fascist New Revolution looks set for victory as it reawakens the national conscience. The slogans are sharper than May 1968 and the young multi-ethnic marchers, sometimes accompanied by the parents who took part in the long-ago student revolt, are more politically and historically aware than their elders.
Plotting behind the walls of his mansion in the leafy Paris suburb of St Cloud, Jean-Marie Le Pen should be trembling at the muffled sound of thousands of trainers gathering around the Bastille.
Everybody says 1 May will be the great showdown, when fresh-faced, democratically aware youngsters, some as young as 13, will confront a rival march by the National Front, dominated by 'vieux schnocks' - old codgers still fighting the Second World War - and show that France is ready to rebuild equality and fraternity out of the rubble of the first-round presidential shockwave.
Or so it would seem near the militant Place de la République. A week after Le Pen ousted the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, from next week's presidential run-off against the Gaullist, Jacques Chirac, a deluge of positive news insisting on popular reaction has disguised the real repercussions - a spread of National Front poison and the acceleration of left-wing political decay. The political earthquake of 21 April has created two nations out of a broken France.
Great swathes of the provinces are strongholds of intolerance and fear where, in many cases, one out of three voters will, next Sunday, underwrite Le Pen's message more forcibly than they did a week ago. They do not like immigrants and think Arabs and blacks are the primary cause of street crime and unemployment. They want a President who will follow Le Pen's promise to round them up and ship them out of the country.
The realisation has been slow to sink in because this has been the most badly reported and misinterpreted presidential poll in the 44 years of the Fifth Republic. Before 21 April, Le Pen, 73, was almost reduced to an amiable old trooper making his last, doomed bid for power on a creaking platform of dead doctrines inspired by Mussolini, Hitler and Philippe Pétain, the collaborationist wartime leader who also thought France's problems could be solved by getting rid of unwanted minorities.
Maybe it is going too far to agree with Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, Le Pen's former press officer who left the movement in 1994 because he considered it too dangerous, and forecast that the racist leader will be elected head of state next Sunday. But it is hard to deny his claim that 'outside Paris many people are extremely happy at Le Pen's score and are picking up a message that he is on a winning ride'.
It is not Le Pen who is using the French, but the French who are using him to signify their feelings over the failings of the political system in place and their readiness to smash it to pieces. Their case is fed by slogans saying is it better to vote for a crook (Chirac) than a fascist, a logic that feeds Le Pen's crusade against a supposedly rotten elite.
In Lille, a Socialist fiefdom an hour's TGV ride from Paris, students at the country's most independent journalist college can hardly contain their anger at the failure of France's intellectual press, including Libération (created by Jean-Paul Sartre), Le Monde , and the weekly Nouvel Observateur, at failing to pick up fascist signals or refusing to think the unthinkable before 21 April.
'The national press is Paris-based and did not get out in the country and listen to the people,' Elsa Fayner, 24, said during a student café discussion. 'We had a journalist from Libération 's political desk here telling us why it was important to report Jospin wore Armani suits.'
Ludovic Gonty, 24, was even more scathing when talking about the 'superficial, simplistic and sensationalist' TV networks which concentrated on reporting violent crime, stoking up Le Pen's message, lamely pursued by both Chirac and Jospin as the national priority.
'The problem is that, if Chirac wins, politics will revert to business-as-usual and the deep disconnection between the ruling political classes and the rest of the country will remain. Abstention [nearly 28 per cent in the first round] is not the problem - it reveals the problem.'
The North, once a guaranteed reserve of Socialist and Communist votes, followed the nation in turning against the traditional Left, with the Communist vote dropping to 7 per cent against 12 per cent seven years ago. At St-Paul-sur-Mer, Le Pen won an unprecedented 30 per cent. It was not only the media that failed to identify the trend. Opinion polls were so wildly wrong that some critics believe the election result should be annulled because the people were misled into thinking that the Socialists were home and dry.
Neither is there much use in blaming a single sector of discontent. Post-poll analyses revealed there was no typical National Front voter and that Le Pen did better among the 18-35 electorate than Chirac or Jospin. Lille and its surrounding rundown industrial areas, such as Roubaix and Tourcoing, produced an across-class reactionary vote from white-collar workers in the big mail- order firms, embittered former workers from the abandoned steel and coal industries, young unemployed and the farming community.
While urban streets resound to the shuffling of Nikes and Reeboks, there is no hope of an immediate comeback by traditional left-wing movements which led the voter up dead-end alleys. The Communist Party, with only 3.3 per cent nationwide, is on the verge of bankruptcy 50 years after being the country's biggest party. The leaderless Socialists, torn by internal divisions, are following, not leading, the street protests, stirred up by Trotskyist movements which have told their voters not to vote on Sunday.
As an omen of Socialist desolation, L'Atelier, Jospin's campaign headquarters in central Paris, always had a shabby look compared with Chirac's sparkling offices at the Tapis Rouge, a newly renovated banqueting hall 300 yards away. Yesterday, emptied of its second-hand furniture and littered with the remnants of millions of unwanted second-round prospectuses and posters, Jospin's workshop looked as if the tenant had quit its dusty red interior without paying the rent.
What seemed a dignified departure, when Jospin announced in a couple of sentences that he was giving up politics altogether, has turned out to be a headlong flight into obscurity, leaving his leaderless troops with nothing to look forward to but electoral massacre.
François Hollande, the good-humoured, sharp-brained but hardly charismatic party secretary, now back at the Socialist Party's eighteenth-century mansion near the National Assembly, had to beg the Prime Minister to give his lost flock some guidance. After a week's silence, they received a four-line fax telling them to vote for democracy while refusing to mention that the only democratic movement in the second round was run by Chirac, the man the Prime Minister blamed for paving the way to extremism.
So Socialist voters will go to the polls without a hoped-for dispensation from the white-haired leader for what will amount to an immoral act: backing a right-wing candidate carrying a sackful of corruption allegations. The slogan Votez escroc, pas facho (Vote for a crook, rather than a fascist) contains the twisted logic of the Cold War get-out, 'Better dead than red'. Everyone except the extreme Left, who creamed off much of Jospin's vote, have said much the same, led by the Greens' Noël Mamère, who called on his backers to say 'Yes' to Chirac 'with your back turned, your nose blocked and your eyes blindfolded'.
Photos of Jospin, with a smile like a rictus, being escorted from his last Cabinet meeting by his Ministers hid a deeply felt resentment for a misguided campaign based on the arrogant assumption, confirmed by the media, that the Socialists were safe, having been in every presidential run-off except 1969 when Gaston Defferre sunk to 5 per cent against the Gaullist Georges Pompidou. Solidarity around Jospin in public was essential, because the party was still traumatised by the suicide of a defeated Prime Minister, Pierre Bérégovoy. He shot himself in 1993 after being shunned by his colleagues when he lost a general election that cost the Socialists more than 200 seats.
If Jospin's orphans lose 'only' 200 seats in the June, Socialists should consider themselves lucky. The party's old guard, who have worked with the academic Jospin since he was party first secretary in 1981, are still tearing their hair out at the failure by their stiff-backed Prime Minister to stoop low enough to make friendly gestures to the working class. Although first rounds are supposed to be rallying cries to partisan electorates, Jospin, former diplomat and polytechnic lecturer, called his platform 'non-Socialist'. He would not even listen when Pierre Mauroy, Prime Minister in the Marxist-inspired coalition of 1981, told him he was not to act as if ouvrier - worker - was a dirty word, a piece of advice that was not necessary for the Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller with her catchphrase 'Travailleuses, travailleurs'.
Jospin's lacklustre meetings (frankly, he was dead boring, a colleague said) could not make up for the plodding image of a man trying to catch up with Chirac and Le Pen on the law-and-order issue while ignoring advisers who told him Socialists were far more worried about low pay and unemployment. The Left will pay a long time for appointing the wrong man for the wrong job and the only bright memory of his campaign will be the presence of his second wife, Sylviane Agacinski, a philosopher who shuns the political arena but would have made an excellent left-wing Joan of Arc.
As in 1958, when the Left was dynamited by De Gaulle's return, and in 1969 before Mitterrand moved in to re-invent socialism, even the technicalities of the two-round general election next month forebode a lengthy voyage in the wilderness. In 1997 Jospin's surprise election win was largely due to National Front spite, when Le Pen ordered well-placed candidates to stay in place in the second round to wreck the moderate Right even when they had no chance of winning.
This time his men, riding a populist wave, are more likely to upset a divided Left, already further diminished by a pathetic Communist score. Socialist Party analysts have warned that conditions are set for a whopping Chirac majority in the National Assembly and that the Left will be lucky to take 100 seats out of 557 compared to 318 for today's shattered 'gauche plurielle'.
A fair guess is that Le Pen, drawing on the vacuum left by the routed Socialists, will attract at least a third of the second-round vote next Sunday, as much because of a bandwagon effect as by his brilliant manipulation of his self-made image as victim of an eternal parliamentary gerrymander designed to keep him out of the National Assembly. The debate, violent or otherwise, will switch back to Paris, while the fissures opened in two-nation France will widen further in the provinces if the National Front's parliamentary vote produces no seats.
There have been years of complacency among moderate parties on the Left and Right over the steady conquest of the South by the National Front and the rival Mouvement National Républicain of the dissident Bruno Mégret, who has called for a Le Pen vote on Sunday.
But the lack of response to provincial fears, justified or not, has also alienated much of eastern France, notably Alsace, which despite suffering so much under German occupation has voted up to 40 per cent for a racist leader with an iron-fisted law-and-order programme encompassing internment camps for unwanted immigrants and huge investments in new prisons.
Opposition to Le Pen among the hills and rural backwaters of the Vosges has been reduced to silence. There is another sort of fear than the supposed national obsession with urban crime. In Rothau, where Le Pen received a quarter of the vote, the atmosphere recalls memories of denunciation that split collaborationists and résistants 60 years ago.
'It is not that we are afraid,' said Sylvie, a 19-year-old who did not want to give her name. 'There are just not enough of us [anti-Le Penists] here and the mood is not right to speak out. It is easy to be brave when you are at university with thousands of others.'
Hardly one out of ten of Rothau's electorate voted for Jospin, but you don't go round shouting out your political opinions. In the sullen, resentful atmosphere of a town near the Stutthof-Natzweiler concentration camp, where a road sign points to la chambre à gaz, it may be easier to forget the lessons of history, skip the polling booths and just keep your mouth shut.
In Paris, among 30,000 or 40,000 like-minded youngsters recreating the joyous atmosphere of SOS-Racisme's fraternal campaign of the Eighties, there is no such restraint. You can be as impertinent as you like and inscribe rude home-made slogans such as 'Let's piss on the National Front's flame' on your cardboard placard. Or you can show your awareness of history with the reference to the Vichy years with the written cry: 'Jean Moulin [a Resistance hero], you did not resist in vain'.
Here, it is National Front voters who hide behind the secrecy of the polling booth or insist they were only carrying out their democratic duty in choosing the most effective voice from the trio of leading candidates in the first round who were dubbed 'the good, the bad and the ugly' by Socialists.
Now that the 'good' has been electorally gunned down after mishandling his own revolver, the bad and the ugly have the graveyard of French politics to themselves for the shoot-out. Bystanders might get hurt.
The whining in the streets is but the tip of the iceberg. If the leftists ever get absolute power, blood runs in the streets or so history shows.
Regards
Yes. All of my euro-weenie friends insist Chrac will get 80%, but are unwilling to bet on it. I have been proposing $50 dollar bets that LePen breaks 30%, but I have no takers.
On another note, my French friends (all around 30, young professionals) all voted for Chirac because they thought that in essence that it was Chirac vs. Jospin. Now, they are all voting LePen. They are starting to have kids, and Immigration and Crime are their main concerns.
Good one!
???? A little late out of the blocks, that train left the station in 1940, mes amis. Don't worry, we gotcha covered.
The realisation has been slow to sink in because this has been the most badly reported and misinterpreted presidential poll in the 44 years of the Fifth Republic. Before 21 April, Le Pen, 73, was almost reduced to an amiable old trooper making his last, doomed bid for power on a creaking platform of dead doctrines inspired by Mussolini, Hitler and Philippe Pétain, the collaborationist wartime leader who also thought France's problems could be solved by getting rid of unwanted minorities.
Lets read this as: Great swathes of the provinces have seen through the lies of political correctness.
Basing their beliefs on the irrational notion that street crime is caused by criminals and unemployment by people who refuse to work, rather than recognizing that the true malfactors are the Anglo-Saxons, acting on behalf of an international Jewish conspiracy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.