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Few who have seen the French soccer team fight for another European Cup (France beat Belgium and await Spain) can forget the contradiction lodged in the country’s fanatical affection for its team. Les Bleus, as they have been since the beginning of their era of dominance in the 1990s (two World Cups!), are a magnificently multicultural and multi-ethnic team, which over the years has brought together Congolese, Algerian players , Spanish and many other origins in an elegant and cosmopolitan package. Many have dual nationalities, making them the kind of people the far-right National Rally (RN) political party, which looked set to win a parliamentary majority and form a government last Sunday, has promised to withdraw from at least some roles. in the civil service. He there, on the football field: the worldly and multiracial face of France as it is, betting on the country, while the insular and xenophobic face of another France seemed prepared to rule it. (Kylian Mbappé, the French captain, of Algerian and Cameroonian origin, suggested others vote “against the extremes”, to the disapproval of Marine Le Pen, effective leader of the R. N. )
Surprisingly (to some, strangely), the elections produced final results more wonderful than one could have expected. Sunday’s result puts the RN in a poor third place, ahead of the leftist New Popular Front (NFP) coalition and President Emmanuel Macron’s strangely disjointed centrist party. Macron’s bet in the fight against the R. N. through the dissolution of the National Assembly, after the triumph of the extreme right in an insignificant but very visual European elections, will have to be declared, if not a success, at least not an absolute failure. (The Popular Front was called “New” after the O. G. Popular Front, that of Léon Blum, the wonderful socialist – and Jewish – leader of the 1930s, and it united the left until the Nazi invasion drove the parties of extreme right to power. It was, not insignificantly, the last time they were).
The axis of the elections was, according to all indications, the pact made through the “republican” parties of the left and right to withdraw to electoral districts in which, although they had a legal position at the polls, they chose to organize around an anti-electoral movement party. -Candidate R. N. . It’s a bit like if Liz Cheney joined forces with Bernie Sanders, the pact provided for “the left-wing electorate voting for the right and the right-wing electorate voting for the left”, as Raphael said Glucksmann, the leader of the Social Democratic Party party, said. The public requested a short campaign. It seemed unlikely, but it is.
Monday morning’s quarterbacks (or rather centre-backs, in honor of their game) are still struggling to perceive Macron’s probably mysterious motivations for dissolving Parliament, which was almost guaranteed to leave him, as it turns out, very little power. reduced. Parliamentary presence. But maybe he’s not so mysterious after all. Macron possibly feels that he should be on his guard. The three former French presidents – Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande – were mistakes to varying degrees, often quite absurd and unworthy. (Just a few weeks ago, Hollande’s famous scooter, on which he had made nightly expeditions from the presidential palace to stops at the home of actress Julie Gayet, now his wife, was sold at auction for more than twenty thousand euros. ) Chirac necessarily lost his mandate. Six months after taking office, Sarkozy was beaten in the public eye by the complexities of his own domestic existence, leading him to divorce and then remarry the singer Carla Bruni. Whatever one’s assessment of the brazen normality of the love lives of French politicians, this was not the kind of “Jupiter”-style royal loft extravaganza envisioned by President Charles de Gaulle at the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Macron’s weakness in pursuing politically unpopular projects is an expression – perceptible in itself, although rarely impetuous and sometimes misplaced – of the real imperative to never be passive, never appear weak.
During the weeks leading up to the election, Glucksmann was a particularly poignant figure, pleading with his followers, in television and radio appearances, to embrace the idea of voting for other people they don’t like to protect themselves from real danger. of power. Array Those, including myself, who knew and enjoyed his father, the philosopher André Glucksmann (and his passionate political mother, Fanfan), identified that their son sought to translate a vital detail of his father’s philosophy into practical politics: the concept of We will never know, nor will we be able to define, what “good” is – even asking the question is an epistemological error – however, that we can know what “evil” is and fight against it is a task sufficient for us. any philosopher or politician. However, this perception is not exactly attractive; “Vote for someone you don’t like to be left out” will never be as nice as “Vote for me to be left out of the most productive. ” The PFN was burdened by its dependence on the far-left France Insoumise party, led by the demagogic Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose crusade had been peppered with credible accusations of anti-Semitism. (Le Monde spoke of a “slow poison, distilled drop by drop. ”) He was even more disfigured by his illiberal and narcissistic behavior, to the point that his popular deputy, François Ruffin, had split from the party, singling out Mélenchon as obstacle. to progress and a burden for the left before Sunday’s elections.
The final result, without an absolute majority to govern and with a set of extremely confusing pacts and commitments to pursue, leaves formidable challenges. The PFN insisted that its victory on election night was a final endorsement of its program, a rather insulting idea to those who were convinced that voting for the N. F. P. It was above all a vote opposed to the R. N. Many French television commentators, accustomed to more authoritarian and clearer agreements, deplored the new truth of multipartyism, calling it “impossible. ” But, as Glucksmann pointed out, nothing could simply be more normal: fishing for votes for specific projects and forming unlikely coalitions among other types is how parliamentary politics works in Spain, in Germany and in the European Parliament itself. According to Glucksmann, in a rare agreement, perhaps France had entered an era of “normal” politics, without Jupiter (i. e. Macron) nor, as he added with a wink, without Robespierre (i. e. Mélenchon). Possibly, just as all art aspires to the condition of music, as Walter Pater once said, all politics now aspires to the condition of Italy, which in the postwar period resisted authoritarian magnates and far-right leaders without, of course, moment, wasting their way or their trust, finding even at the last moment fantastic coalitions and no little common sense.
No one in France – left, right or center – currently has an intelligent word to say about Macron. But no one in France ever has an intelligent word to say about the current president, with the sole exception of François Mitterrand a few weeks after his victory in 1981, and more out of amazement that he has succeeded than out of admiration for an already well-known character. be questionable. Yet there is a perverse sense, perhaps too visual to an outsider, that Macron – taking too much risk, perhaps, and with inadequate certainty that he would work – won his bet. If he had remained in office and not dissolved Parliament, all the talk, all the concerns and all the noise for the next three years would have revolved around the far right: ascendant, threatening and close to power. A fatalistic note, already present, would have defeated any other. For so long, the R. N. It was, as in one of the favorite performances of the Grand Guignol of the Luxembourg Gardens, the big bad wolf who terrified the three little pigs. But suddenly, for the first time in a long time, the far right seems weak and demoralized. (One can see, in the anguished face and muttered contempt of Jordan Bardella, the twenty-eight-year-old Le Pen protégé who currently leads the R. N. , how unprepared the Party is for defeat. ) He had a hard time breaking away. -he demonizes himself and now, on the contrary, he is discredited. As is the case with wolves, they may return (as Le Pen’s presidential election approaches), but the big bad wolf is, for the moment, defeated. This one is, anyway. ♦
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