After the far right’s strong showing in municipal elections in France, there are two reactions to choose from. One can join the ritual hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Or one can consult The Big Lebowski (1998), the crime comedy by the Coen Brothers, for insight from the film’s breezy philosopher-thug, Walter Sobchak.
The hand-wringing is a theatrical exercise. The condemnations, stern tones and defences of La Republique aren’t in themselves hypocritical. But the result has been foreseen and a long time coming. All there is to go through are the motions, without which the results threaten to seem banal.
There is nothing really new in the analysis. What’s new is the surface of French politics: the numbers, the personal anecdotes.
Ten years ago, most people would have kept a vote for the far-right National Front (FN) to themselves. It’s now discussed openly round dinner tables as a vote that cannot possibly be worse than voting for the big two: the ruling Socialists and the centre-right UMP. One poll has 60 per cent claiming they have no confidence in either the left or the right.
One newspaper described the poll as the consequence of people having had it “up to here” (citing the popular French expression, ras-de-bol). The numbers bear this out.
The turnout was only just over 60 per cent. The FN quintupled its vote from the last election five years ago – from under one per cent to 4.7 per cent.
That number is even more striking than it initially seems. The FN obtained it while contesting only a tiny fraction of the municipalities. Yet, in over a third of the municipalities it contested, it has managed to go through into the second round of polling due this weekend.
There are no surprises in the analysis. The FN had some of its best results in areas most affected by the economic crisis and where unemployment is high.
Dramatic as the numbers may seem, they pale beside the evidence literally signposting the roadsides in the run-up to the elections.
I’ve spoken to people who have themselves seen farmers put up signs on their property, big enough to be seen by passers-by, asking for their corporate creditors to pay them. Or a sign on a roundabout begging someone to buy an ailing company so that it wouldn’t have to declare bankruptcy.
No sooner were the results out that there also issued the first piece of economic good news in a long time: both French manufacturing and service firms reported a sudden burst of growth, even as a slowdown in Germany was suggested.
But it will take more than a bump to boost French morale. Salaries are down and low. Employment is increasingly intermittent. Welfare, generous in itself, is rigorously means-tested, which often means that taking up employment opportunities isn’t worth it.
A lot of the attention these days falls on President François Hollande, with his record unpopularity. But he beat an incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, who had become unpopular himself.
While his personal style was part of it, it was his ineffectiveness in enacting necessary institutional reforms that made many, who had voted for him in 2007, give up on him in 2012.
One could, if one wanted, trace the malaise back 30 years, all the way to the presidency of Francois Mitterand. But one doesn’t have to. All one has to notice is that disillusion with Hollande hasn’t led to a UMP resurgence.
Yes, the UMP scored 47 per cent to the Socialists’ 38 per cent but that is with an abstention rate of almost 40 per cent. The UMP is itself mired in corruption scandals, internal disagreements and fierce splits between leaders.
The emphatic far right result in May seems inevitable
With this scale of disillusionment, one might well ask whether people could possibly place their hopes in any political party, even the FN.
Perhaps now’s the time to turn for help to Walter Sobchak, memorably played by John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.
Sobchak is an endlessly ruminating thug, who holds the rules of bowling sacred (and is ready to pull out a gun when he thinks they’re being violated).
He has, he says, “dabbled in pacifism” and never misses a chance to rope his Vietnam experience into the conversation.
In one scene, he faces what he contemptuously dismisses as nihilists and turns to his companion, Jeff ‘The Dude’ Lebowski, with an apology for Nazism.
“Nihilists! Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
In other words, at least it stands for something.
It may be something like Sobchak’s attitude that explains the vote for the NF as well as the prospective high vote that far right groups look like they’ll get in the coming EP elections.
Not just in the debtor EU countries but also in the creditor member-states: from France to the Netherlands, from Greece to Austria, from Sweden and Denmark to Italy.
It’s not that European Walter Sobchaks necessarily buy into the far-right message. They won’t vote for MEPs because they’ve got any high expectations of them. Nor will they avoid the mainstream politicians simply because of misbehaviour.
They are put off by the natural defence mechanism of mainstream political parties to huddle together in unprincipled alliances of convenience. It’s a short-term strategy for addressing a far-right grouping in the European parliament or on the national stage.
In the longer run, however, the lack of important distinctions between the major parties, coupled with their inability to argue their case compellingly, will work out to the extremists’ advantage.
In fact, it is the far-right groups that are unprincipled. Marine Le Pen’s party is still full of anti-Semites but the public rhetoric no longer reflects this, so that the FN can appeal to voters beyond the core.
Nor is the EP alliance being planned by Le Pen and friends – to destroy the EU from within the EP – any more principled. It brings together the homophobic right with libertarians, together with an assortment of national chauvinisms that couldn’t possibly co-exist peacefully together for long (since they thrive on looking down on the other).
It’s all the more striking, therefore, that, at the moment, it’s this dissembling group of politicians who appear to be calling a spade a spade. There will be a time when we’ll wonder how it could ever have happened. But right now, as more Europeans find themselves turning into Walter Sobchaks, the emphatic far right result in May seems inevitable.
ranierfsadni@europe.com