Macron – Saviour of Europe?

With the recent victory of Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen in the recent French election, following the failure of Geert Wilders to win in the Dutch election in March, and the narrow loss of the conservative Freedom Party in Austria in December of 2016, there is a sense of relief emanating from a strata of the European establishment that now finally politics is back to normal. There is even gushing euphoria from a smaller section of the most extreme Left-wing who think that the failure of the ‘extreme Right-wing’ to take power is tantamount to the defeat of nascent fascism. For those who think that, they have failed to observe the seismic shifts in European political currents and are continuing to be blind to important realities facing Europe.

A vexed Charles de Gaulle once famously remarked: “how can you govern a country with 246 different varieties of cheese?” The current political atmosphere is certainly filled with discord. The French election was a dismal affair suffused not with espièglerie but ennui. It is a vote of political existentialist crisis - at a time of such political discord, more than 25% of eligible voters abstained and 8.6% of votes cast were blank or null, many undoubtedly being protest votes. That’s 16 million voters who did not choose either candidate. While Macron won 66.1% of the votes, what it means is that barely 40% of eligible French voters voted for him in a two horse race.

On the other hand, the media proclaims how soundly Le Pen was beaten. The real story should be that Le Pen, despite the noxious trademark of the National Front and her father’s ever-present shadow branded into the party and her very name, and the uphill battle she faced with a hostile media and political establishment (who never heralded her as possibly the first female French President, contrasting with the way they incessantly did with Clinton), beat the major parties into the second round and garnered more than 10 million votes, doing particularly well with the under 30’s. Her poor result from older voters doubtless due to the memory of her genuinely bigoted father (many of her policies on the other hand are actually Left wing, such as taxing the rich, worker control of companies, limited working hours etc. The term ‘far-right’ is increasingly used by Left-leaning media to mean ‘the baddie’). The name National Front, instead of being spat upon as would happen not that many years ago, is now the main opposition force in France. The political map of France is redrawn.

It should be remembered that Monsieur Macron is also something of an outsider, who self describes as a centrist with no party apparatus and is perilously untested. The Left-wing Hamon of the Socialist Party and the Right-wing Fillon of the Republican party, the two major parties that have provided France with their last two presidents, have failed to make it to round two. Given the slender 2% difference in votes gained by the two main candidates in the first round, there is no doubt therefore that many who voted for Macron was simply voting against Le Pen.

What all this represents en masse is a rejection by the people of France of the establishment of both wings of politics for failure to address many pressing and tangible problems facing France and Europe, chief among which are a stalling economy and mass immigration. 

The establishment, instead of patting themselves on the back, should realise they just barely dodged a bullet and should be wondering why the public whom they profess to serve dislikes them so much so that 26 million out of 47 million voters would abstain or turn to Le Pen. I would want to know what the public’s views are on the EU and immigration policy and why they think so. I would certainly not have the temerity or ego to think that more than half of France who disagree with me are doing so because they are bigoted or xenophobic, as certain sections of the establishment seem to conclude. There has  already been a mass rally against Macron, the day after his victory, from the Front Social group, organized by powerful unionists in Paris. Make no mistake, he is not loved.

Whether Macron will take into account seriously the concerns of those who did not vote for him remains to be seen. L’habit ne fait pas le moine as the French say – the habit does not make a monk. It doesn’t fill one with great confidence that all the EU elites and the European political establishment cheered at Macron’s victory. The fear, which many in France have already voiced, is that Macron, with his vaguely named party, En Marche!, made more so by the overcompensating exclamation mark, will be more of the same kind of aloof, idealistic-driven politics, which has led France, over the last decade, to suffer from snail-paced growth and high unemployment, particularly for the young, which is well above 20%. 

Macron already faces the monumental task of forming a party – his newly released list of 428 election candidate for June’s general election show that an astounding 52% of those candidates have never held election office before. You can hear Le Pen sharpening her fangs and warming up for the 2022 election. The people, who voted him into office tepidly to reject the establishment, would certainly not forgive him if he proves to be, despite his rhetoric, more of the same medicine that sickens the patient.

A similar story in the Netherlands. Who would you think said this during the Dutch election, telling migrants to “be normal or be gone”? Surely the anti-immigration Wilders? No, it’s the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte, leader of the Liberal Party, who made a rather sharp veer to the Right, no doubt aiming to steal some of Wilders’s sizeable voters who think unchecked immigration is a big problem. While Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV) lost the election, they picked up an additional 3% of votes and 5 seats in the House of Representatives since the last election, which makes them the second largest party. Rutte’s party on the other hand lost more than 5% of voters and 8 seats. If you have taken the trouble to look at the PVV policies, aside from its stance on particularly Muslim immigration and membership of the EU, its policies are quite Left wing, including harsher punishment for violence against LGTB and Jewish minorities, refusal to raise the pension age above 65, support of same-sex marriage, universal health care and both pro-choice and pro euthanasia. But of course the media and the establishment insist on labelling PVV and Wilders with the ominous label ‘far-Right’ and refuse to see any merit to the issues such as immigration that only the PVV seem to be addressing. Until the elections of course, with the realisation that many of the citizens the politicians profess to represent actually agree with the PVV. While Wilders didn’t win the race, he has reshaped Dutch politics by forcing the establishment to pay attention.

The core problem facing European politics is not resurgence of the ‘far-Right’. Neither Le Pen nor Wilders is even close to being far-Right by any proper use of the term. They represent the only political channel for a lot of people to voice real concerns within Europe of pressing problems that the major parties, the establishment, will not even acknowledge let along address. Instead of having a proper conversation with millions of people who have apprehensions with immigration numbers, which have been rising sharply over recent years, or tackle Islamic fundamentalism head on, especially the type incubated within European cities by Salafist Mosques or extreme preachers, or about the ever shrinking economy of the EU and its increasing centralising of legislative power, these citizens are brushed aside by the establishment as racists, bigots, fools and far-Right nationalists. 

This insufferable condescension is what drove so many voters to antiestablishment politicians; because people like Le Pen and Wilders, to the average person experiencing the negative consequences of a lot of these Utopian policies (in contrast to the political establishment), are like the child in that Andersen tale who was unfettered enough to point to the naked strutting Emperor and state the obvious, that he hath no clothes. So much so that their sometime caustic and even crude rhetoric and some of their terrible economic and social policies cease to matter. Similar to Trump, who is doing overall a predictably terrible job in the US, they at least talk about the enormous pink elephant in the room. When simply doing something so elementary is enough to elevate fringe parties to major powers, you know the core of politics is pretty rotten. The dogmatic refusal of the Left to concede that their opponents may have a point has contributed to the rise of many genuinely far-Right elements such as the Golden Dawn and the English Defense League. Every action, as Newton said, has an equal and opposite reaction. 

The chasm that has opened up between the establishment and the people on these big questions is reflected in many ways. A 2016 Pew poll found 61% of French people surveyed held unfavourable views on the EU and an Elabe survey found that 54% of French people favoured holding a referendum on EU membership, while virtually all political parties except Le Pen favour closer integration with the EU. 66% of French polled disapprove of the EU's handling of the economy. Almost 40% think that some powers should be returned from the EU to the national governments. In this atmosphere, Macron wants closer ties and integration with the EU to "heal divided France". One can only say "bon chance".

The above mentioned Pew poll also found that the vast majority (on average 74.7%) polled across 10 European countries are unhappy with the EU's handling of the refugee issue, with 70% of French surveyed disapproving. A recent poll of 10,000 people across 10 European countries conducted by Chatham House found that, to the surprise of the pollsters, when asked to given their opinion to the hard statement ‘All further immigration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped’, 61% in France replied with ‘agree’ and only 16% ‘disagree’. In fact, in all countries surveyed, including the UK, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Austria, the majority of people (54.6%) answered ‘agree’ while only 20.1% answered ‘disagree’. 

This is not necessarily because of negative views of Muslims, as a recent Pew poll show that only 29% in France viewed Muslims negatively. It is rather likely because the majority of the unprecedented influx of migrants into Europe are from Muslim majority countries. The understandable failure of integrating so many people and the negative social and economic consequences thereof, including many recent underreported riots in Paris, culminated in a negative view of mass immigration. This is backed by findings in the aforementioned Pew poll that even among those with a favourable view of Islam, more than 35% of people across 10 European countries see large amount of refugees as a threat, the average being almost exactly the response rate of the French. 

Accentuate this with the fresh and terrifying memories of 239 innocent people murdered in France since 2015 from Islamist terrorist attacks, and the country being under an official state of emergency since November 2015. The effect is more than psychological; the tension saw a 15% drop in tourist numbers to France since the beginning of 2016, meaning 1.5 million fewer people visited la belle France in 2016 compared to 2015. This comes with an estimated loss of revenue of more than a billion Euros in the Paris regions alone, meaning less jobs and less prosperity in a country already struggling with unemployment. Unsurprisingly, people might want at least a discussion on unchecked immigration.

Hence picture the confusion of the Europeans (shared by this blogger) when they cast their mind back to Merkel stating publicly in 2010 that “multiculturalism has utterly failed”. David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy echoed her words in 2011. They might wonder therefore why after making this belated and rather large concession, she of all people and the establishment in general would continue pushing for an increase in immigration. As the journalist and author Douglas Murray puts it, "if it has failed when the immigration rates are relatively low, why would they think integration would work better when the rates are increased?" Quite obvious logic, one would think, and fairly vexing to the voters, one would imagine. 

Their concerns are not unwarranted, as the result of enlarging this failed multicultural project tells – a 2017 survey of over 7,000 Muslim youths between the ages of 14 and 16 in France conducted by the National Centre for Scientific Research found that 32% of young Muslims adhere to ‘fundamentalist views’ with 33% believing that violence for ‘ideological’ goals is acceptable. As if that’s not concerning enough, 24% of young Muslims do not condemn the Charlie Hebdo murders and 21% do not condemn the Bataclan massacre. Clearly, there is a big social problem caused in part by mass immigration and in part by certain areas of incompatibility between Liberal France and fundamentalist Islamism that’s leading to the brain washing of these children to adhere to dogmatic ideologies. Again, one is not filled to the brim with confidence in Macron, who said that “no religion is a problem in France today.” 

The cancer in today’s political culture in the West is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy of the establishment, for political expediency, shallow ideology and with a nasty strain of callousness, to attempt to manufacture and enforce a sociopolitical uniformity on the people from high on top. They never consider or admit that they might be wrong, in the face of ever-mounting evidence. This is backfiring spectacularly and those who played with fire deserve to get a few scars.

“Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”                                                                                                                                            - Molière