Marine Le Pen succeeded by “breaching into the Left”

On Sunday, Emmanuel Macron won the first round of the French presidential elections and is the odds-on favorite to become le president de la République. However, under French law, a candidate takes up residence in Élysée Palace only after winning an absolute majority of popular votes; if no candidate reaches that threshold in the first round, the two most popular candidates go on to a second ballot in two weeks.

Macron has been able to beat the candidate-to-be-beaten, Marine Le Pen, by two percent of the vote. But the Le Pen is the real political winner of the competition, even if she fails to get the majority of votes on May 7. She took a party of the “far-Right” and successfully appealed to the Left.

Le Pen has been the leader of National Front (FN) since 2011, after she succeeded in wrestling its leadership out of the hands of her own father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded it in 1972 as a neo-fascist party of sorts. He had previously anointed her as his successor, but Marine saw that her father’s reputation limited her ambitions, so she joined in the chorus of those calling him an extremist and anti-Semite. (Such allegations have been levelled against her, as well.) After years of vote totals that hardly budged, Marine’s key political undertaking has been rebranding the party in order to broaden FN’s electoral base.

Marine’s new strategy bears the old name of “breaching into the Left,” a classical feature of the European nationalist (so-called) Right – and a highly revealing one. In the second half of the twentieth century, European neo-fascist movements and groups have grown steadily dissatisfied with being labelled “rightist” by media and political opponents because of the association of the term “Right” with capitalism, Atlanticism, and a generally warm embrace of the United States and even Israel. (In Italy, the term also indicates monarchism.) Over the years, these groups branded themselves a “third force.” During the Cold War, they assured voters they were “neither with the Soviets, nor with America.” Such “far-Right” economic nationalist and populist movements ‒ which were by no means less statist than their fascist forebears – struggled to gain credibility as “differently leftist.”

Of the many attempts to transform quasi-fascist parties into a brand of nationalism that spans the entire political spectrum, the French FN is the most successful. Winning its bet, it has enlarged its electoral base and appeal. It has gained national momentum. It has made immigration its defining political theme. And it has successfully breached into the Left.

As matter of fact, the new man of the FN behind Marine Le Pen is Florian Philippot, one of the party’s five vice presidents in charge of strategy and communication. Philippot comes from the ranks of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a former Socialist leader who founded the “Mouvement des citoyens” (later renamed the “Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen,” or the Republican and Citizen Movement). In French, this is part of what is known as la Gauche souvraniste, or the “Sovereignist Left.” In France “souvranisme” is the self-selected label by which all varieties of nationalists have banded together for years. It started as an opposition to the European Union’s internationalism and developed into a philosophy of “neither Left, nor Right.” It proposes both nationalist and socialist policies that would further ensnare France’s democratic institutions in its long political tradition of nationalization and statism. Those proposals are necessary, as there is no other way to possibly keep together such different political pedigrees and ideological sentiments as one can find in the National Front of France, or the separatist Lega Nord of Italy, or Italy’s Five Star Movement (“Movimento 5 Stelle”). “Souvranisme” lures the masses by promising “change,” and its only strength is the critique of the status quo. As long as people like Marine Le Pen can blame all societal problems on the euro, immigration, and, yes, the free market, votes will come.

The funny ‒ or frightening ‒ thing is that the free market evil that the French Sovereignists want to combat and correct is hardly the free market. Such a thing does not exist in France. It is instead the lack of a genuine free market at both the national and European levels. The problems of society come from a form of cronyism, corruption, and the degradation of property rights that Sovereignists would further dismantle. The tragedy is that, being unable to articulate an adequate language or program for reform, they keep using the old, dull, anti-market phraseology of the leftists.

While Le Pen has popularized her statist revolution, Macron truly embodies the establishment. That seems odd to say about a man who was a stranger just two years ago, who doesn’t even have a party (his “En Marche!” or “On the Move” movement is just an electoral cartel with no history and no territoriality), and who is running as an independent. He, too, claims to be “nor Left, nor Right,” but he in fact is a center-leftist defining promoting a mixed economy and a socially liberal agenda. His public rhetoric mingles an appreciations of market reforms with support for welfare that could be found only from one who worked with both the Rothschild banking interests and the Socialist Party.

An American reader could get the impression that France is now on the ballot to choose between a sort of Donald Trump populist (Marine Le Pen) and a variety of Bill Clinton pragmatist (Emmanuel Macron). But this is misleading. Trump has shown a flexibility in his political and economic views that would be impossible for an ideologically blinkered statist like Le Pen.

What, then, is missing in the French general election? A champion of both true economic freedom and a respect for religious liberty that would undergird a free and virtuous society. That mantle belonged to François Fillon of “Les Républicains” (the Republican Party), a deeply religious man and a sincere Thatcherite in economics. He launched the only genuine challenge to the establishment of entrenched statism and two-centuries old secularism of the French res publica in this election. But his campaign has floundered after an fiscal scandal involving corruption and nepotism; thus he ended third behind Macron and Le Pen. He is now out of the race ‒as out are Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-Left “La France Insoumise” (“Untamed France”) and Benoît Hamon of the Socialist Party.

The election results remind all international observers that freedom is not free and, for the time being, it is not on the march in France.

Marco Respinti

Articolo pubblicato con il medesimo titolo
in Religion & Liberty Transatlantic
(Acton Institute for the Study of Religon and Liberty),
Gran Rapids (Michigan) 25-04-2017

Article published under the same title
in Religion & Liberty Transatlantic
(Acton Institute for the Study of Religon and Liberty),
Gran Rapids (Michigan) April 24, 2017

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Temporary jobs put young Europeans’ dreams permanently on hold

Temporary employment is permanent in Europe, especially for the young.

A recent article by Liz Alderman for the New York Times rips the veil on an increasingly worrisome trend that, given the general economic landscape, seems to be here to stay.

Her article paints a picture of deep pain and uncertainty: Alessandra Sisco, an Italian, is a medical doctor who treats patients for cancer – but only on separate contracts that last three months each. Charles Terraz from Lyon, France, has a master’s degree in human resources and is just one of that 80 percent of new hires that in his country can’t get a permanent job. Joost Minaar, a Dutch scientist, has survived on an endless stream of one-year-long renewable contracts abroad.

The main reason young people cannot find full-time, gainful employment has been known nearly as long as the problem has been ingrained in the European economic culture: artificially high wages and benefits for workers, inflexible labor regulations, steep taxes on profits and productivity, and an outlook that generally discourages entrepreneurship. Employing someone for a temporary job is less onerous for an employer, even if this means doing without the most skilled labor for a given position.

What’s wrong with Europe? Seemingly everything. Some will object that the problem is restricted to the labor market. I agree; as I said, everything is wrong with Europe. The labor market is the salt of a society. If citizens cannot find regular jobs, or young people can’t find employment for more than a few months, how can a people endure?

The impact on young people is not just economic but prevents them from engaging in the kinds of activities that allow them to launch into adult independence. With only short-term job prospects, the young aren’t able to make long-term commitments, like signing a mortgage to buy a house or having a stable source of income to raise a family. As The Telegraph of London documented, the young are also poorer in absolute terms. By the time they turn 30, Millennial men earn £12,500 (€14,750, or $15,500 U.S.) less than the previous generation. This compels the young to depend on their parents for longer and longer periods of time. In Europe, “young” is becoming a label less tied to an age than a social condition: The young are those who still live with their parents, even if they are in their mid- to late-thirties.

The pain caused by this situation fuels a desire for the state to do more. Lamenting the temporary job market leaves many youth yearning for a pool of permanent, public sector jobs. The case study is Italy and its social myth of “posto fisso” (a “fixed place” of politically guaranteed stability). For decades, parents dreamed of getting their children some public employment as soon as possible after school: the post office, any level of bureaucratic public administration, or even the police department or a teaching assignment in a public school. In Italy, the alternative is a job in the bank sector. Legions of graduate Italians in a full range of subjects have for years ended up as bank clerks (with not even one single T.S. Eliot among them). The complex labor laws of the country and the irresistible power of labor unions as a result of the informal but strong power that the Communist Left has always exerted on the country made it virtually impossible to fire workers. And the easy availability of arms crystallized the Italian labor market for ages as a contest between public employees and bank tellers.

In time, it became clear that this paralysis had to go. But just when government officials finally started thinking in terms of deep labor reform, the global economic crisis hit. Thus, people were almost catapulted overnight from life-long jobs to the treacherous jungle of insecurity. As a result, a growing number of people, especially the young, started to feel nostalgia for the old days in which all was quiet – but only because it was idle, secure because it was motionless, and painless since it was frozen in a state of suspended animation. One heard the Italian saying, “It was better when it was worse” – a sentiment traceable to the idea that, when Benito Mussolini was in power, at least the trains ran on time. A similar longing for the awful past is sometimes seen in political rallies in the former Communist Europe and Soviet Russia – a desire for a mythical past that endures among those who never lived through either the fascist or the Marxist era.

The real dilemma is how to bridge the gap between “posto fisso” and stable, private-sector jobs. Thus far, Europe has been incapable of building stability.

As usual, people in this confused time blame it on capitalism, but what we have here is not capitalism at all. It’s a giant bubble of crushing labor regulations and welfare state policies incapable of reforming itself. The global financial crisis has made already risk-averse firms decide to seek their fortunes off government contracts, rather than serving the private sector. Greater investment is needed, but it will not be forthcoming as long as government policy discourages hiring full-time workers.

Those who blame this situation on capitalism suggest that without that massive labor and safety net interventions, life would become a “race to the bottom,” but the reality is that their policies have already resulted in an impoverished generation: young people, shorn of the ability to use their talents to their fullest extent, are obliged to take less – and less secure – jobs just to survive.

The human toll is large and cross-generational. In 1977, punk rock-inspired youngsters camped out in the streets of London while embracing the slogan, “No future” – but that time is now. Young people know no serious commitment in life. With rising rates of divorce and cohabitation, increasingly no adult has shown them what a real commitment is. The demographic winter and the rapidly growing number of elderly people dependent on their taxes for support contribute to their troubles.

A liberation movement for the labor market is what we need. But the sad news is that, surveying the next wave of European elections slated for the forthcoming months, there seems to be no one applying for the job.

Marco Respinti

Articolo pubblicato con il medesimo titolo
in Religion & Liberty Transatlantic
(Acton Institute for the Study of Religon and Liberty),
Gran Rapids (Michigan) 22-02-2017

Article publishe under the same title
in Religion & Liberty Transatlantic
(Acton Institute for the Study of Religon and Liberty),
Gran Rapids (Michigan) February 22, 2017