Last week, that breeze gusting through the newsrooms of the Washington Post and the New York Times was a sigh of relief, not a stray zephyr from Hurricane Beryl.
Moderation had prevailed in the European elections.
Or so it seemed.
On the 4th of July, the Labour Party won a large majority in the UK parliament.
Then, on July 7, in drama worthy of Les Miz, the French Left took to the barricades — they called it a barrage, or dam, as in what beavers make — to fend of the ‘far right’ Rassemblement National (RN).
RN had been widely predicted to win big in the elections for the French National Assembly, possibly even a majority, which would have allowed it to form the next government.
To nearly everyone’s surprise, the barrage kept the barbarians back from the gates.
The BBC woke up the next morning and asked: “What just happened in France's shock election?”
RN candidates won the largest share of the popular vote, 37.3%, but finished third in number of seats in the National Assembly.
American National Public Radio (NPR) — never strong on STEM skills, and in any event unwilling to deny its woke listeners a feel-good headline — happily pronounced: ‘French Voters Reject Far-Right’.
As I will try to explain, neither the UK nor the French election was exactly what it seemed.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister of the UK, is a boring fellow.
One headline greeting the Starmer era was: “A new yawn has broken.”
Boring was just fine with the New York Times.
The Times did try to give Starmer a sprinkle of glitter, by comparing his victory with Tony Blair’s in 1997.
Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair, if I may channel Ronald Reagan’s 1988 quip about Lloyd Bentsen.
But Labour’s victory came as little surprise. The Conservatives had been in power 14 years.
Sophisticated polling had revealed the British electorate had a profound desire to throw the bums out.
Which they did. More later.
But France… ah. C'est une histoire.
Which I will try to summarize, making sure I get in the best bits.
The Rassemblement National (literally a ‘gathering’, but in the political context translated ‘rally’, as in sounding an alarm with a bugle) is the current name of a political party originally founded as the National Front in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Jean-Marie is a man, just to make that clear. His daughters, who come into the story, are also Maries, or close enough. It gets confusing.
Le Pen — still going at age 97 — became infamous back in the day for his outrageous, Trump-like pronouncements about Muslims and immigrants.
In France, immigrants don’t come across the Mexican border, but across the Mediterranean, usually starting out in France’s former colonies in North Africa.
To the ongoing dismay of the French pundit class, Le Pen’s outrageous, Trump-like pronouncements about immigrants and Muslims appealed to some voters.
The commentariat was dismayed for the first time in 1988, when Le Pen managed to get 14% of the vote in the French presidential race.
They were dismayed still more in 2002, when Le Pen got 18%. That time he made the final round.
I need to note, because it comes up later in this story, that the National Front’s platform had some economic planks that were highly unfashionable back in the heyday of triumphant globalization.
It proposed using import duties to protect French jobs; getting France out of the European Union (‘Frexit’); and doing something to allow France to take back control of its currency, such as ditching the Euro and going back to the Franc.
Although what got most of French commentariat’s attention was Le Pen’s law-and-order stuff, which seemed suspiciously like yet another American import, possibly picked up by Le Pen from watching too many Dirty Harry movies.
For the next bit of the Le Pen saga, American readers need to understand that while France says it values ‘freedom of expression’, the French neglected to copy-and-paste the First Amendment, at least as we know it.
The French have no problem policing fashion statements that might be mistaken for political statements.
They famously have banned the burqa.
You never know what those Muslim women have got going on under those robes.
The jury is still out on the burqa variant worn as swimwear. French legal scholars have devoted many hours to examining burkinis.
The headscarf is also an ongoing source of headache.
French women are famous for knowing how to toss on scarves, loop them around and have them come out looking just so.
But if one is tied under the chin, so it looks too much like a foularde islamique, that’s trouble.
France’s free speech laws are best seen as political cudgels, which get picked up by one side or the other as exigency dictates.
If the U.S. had the same laws, Donald Trump would definitely be in jail.
As would most of Twitter.
For a few fun examples:
In 2020, French police interrogated a group of 10-year-old children on the suspicion something their teacher said in their classroom qualified as an ‘apology for terrorism’.
Those kids got off with a warning. In 2019, two guys who burnt an effigy of Emmanuel Macron at an otherwise boring political rally were convicted.
In 2005, Jean-Marie Le Pen said in an interview with Le Monde — the major French newspaper, comparable to the New York Times — that the day will come that there were be “no longer 5 million but 25 million Muslims in France, [and] they will be in charge.”
For that prognostication, Le Pen got convicted of ‘inciting hate’. He was fined €10,000.
Le Pen went on to a career as a repeat — you could say serial — offender.
In this, he joined several French stand-up comedians and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper that gets hauled into court on a regular basis.
If legal services could be delivered to France by Amazon, Charlie Hebdo would have them on Subscribe-and-Save.
In 1995 Charlie Hebdo was, in fact, convicted and fined for insulting one of the Le Pen daughters, Marie-Caroline, calling her a “Buchenwald bitch.”
In 2015 the Le Pens — père and daughter Marine, this time — featured in a publicly aired soap worthy of Succession, or maybe French Family Feud.
In the final episode, Marine kicked her father out of his own political party.
When we left Marine’s storyline in 2015, she was busy rebranding and trying out air fresheners.
Her new Rassemblement National was no longer your grandfather’s right-wing party.
Or her father’s. Some of its older members, which Marine purged, carried a lingering whiff of World War II collaborationism, very objectionable to the sensitive French political nose.
Doubt and suspicion linger long in the Gallic mind.
Was Marine’s softer, gentler Rassemblement 2.0 the real deal?
Or was Marine just faking it?
In June, panic set in among the French Left when the Rassemblement won big in the elections for the European Parliament.
Panic got worse when the Rassemblement won big — again — in the first round of voting for the National Assembly.
In France, when you say someone is ‘still fighting the war’, you have to specify which war: Napoleonic, Franco-Prussian, whichever.
In June 2024, it was the Spanish Civil War. The small French left parties, like history re-enactors, got together and formed the Nouveau Front populaire (NFP).
In the mid-1930s, the French Communists and French Socialists reluctantly resolved to stop fighting each other and formed the ‘Popular Front’ to focus on fighting fascism, both German and domestic.
In an act of supreme forbearance, the left parties took a similar pledge and swore off internecine squabbling.
For a few weeks, anyway.
Pulling this off was about as likely as a three-way merger between the People's Front of Judea, the Judean People's Front, and the Judean Popular People's Front, familiar from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
The largest of the NFP parties is La France Insoumise (LFI, “France Unbowed”), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
In a rare lapse of British understatement, the Manchester Guardian refers to Mélenchon as ‘a radical-left firebrand’.
Others in the NFP include: what remains of the French Parti socialiste (PS), whose famous alum include the two François, Mitterrand and Hollande; the rump of the French Communist party (PCF), the very same of the 1930s Popular Front; and a Greenish party (LE-EELV), which now apparently calls itself the Ecologists.
The NFP begin beavering away on its barrage.
In practice, that meant culling weak candidates out of races RN might win and urging party members to hold their sensitive noses and vote — tactically — for the other guy.
It worked better than anyone, NFP included, expected.
You’ve got to love the power of hate to bring us all together.
In terms of winning seats, the NFP got the most, Macron's centrist Ensemble alliance came in second, and RN was knocked down to a third-place finish.
The result leaves the Assembly with three blocs, none a majority, all of whom basically hate each other.
If you look at a map, the French vote also divides into three zones. I’m grateful to Louis-Vincent Gave of UnHerd for this off-the-cuff analysis, which is of the sort I find good enough for me.
Call the urban centers Zone A. The largest one, of course, is Paris. That’s where metropolitan technocrat types work in government, finance, media, and so on.
They are doing well economically. That’s Macron’s heartland.
Around the urban centers, in the banlieue, you have Zone B people, who are immigrants or youth who might be children of immigrants.
The Zone B people work for the Zone A people as nannies, Uber drivers, what have you. They are not doing well economically. They’d like more social services.
They voted en masse for the NFP.
The Zone C people are everybody else, especially those out in the countryside.
That’s France’s version of flyover country. Zone C people are generally ignored by Zone A people.
Zone C’s social services keep getting cut. Zone C people feel they are getting less love than Zone B people.
Zone C voted RN.
For visual thinkers, French philosopher Michel Onfray made the following observation about flags.
At Rassemblement rallies, there were French red, white and blue tricolors.
At Macron rallies, you could see European Union flags, the circle of 12 gold stars on blue.
At Front Populaire rallies, you saw a lot of Palestinian flags.
In the near term, France will muddle forward with a dysfunctional and bitterly divided National Assembly.
As it has at other times in its not-always-glorious past.
Teachers at lycées are no doubt looking for the notes they took in college on the Fourth Republic, which had 21 governments between 1946 and 1958.
Unless — or until — crowd-sourcing rides to the rescue.
On the puzzle page of its website, Le Monde has a game inviting its readers to build their own National Assembly majority, with their personal coalition simulator:
The winning coalition will be awarded a poisoned chalice.
But fortunately not until the Summer Olympics are over.
The poisoned chalice is also known as the French budget, up in September.
France is already in hot water over it with the European Union, being in what in EU-speak is called the ‘Excessive Deficit Procedure’.
The Left coalition wants to do a lot of new spending. A food fight in September seems a sure thing.
If the EU backs down and says it was just kidding about the Excessive Deficit thing, it risks not only losing face but being trampled by a stampede of other countries that want an Excessive Deficit just like France has.
If the EU doesn’t back down and makes France toe the line, the French will back on the streets throwing cobblestones in the direction of Brussels.
The French electoral follies had things in common with the boring British ones.
In both, the ‘first-past-the-post’ convention produced parliamentary seat-count numbers that had only a tangential relation to the popular vote.
In the UK, for example, Labour won 64% of the seats on 34% of the votes.
Frazer Nelson, writing for The Spectator, had the best headline: “Labour's Potemkin landslide”.
The UK Conservative Party didn’t just lose, it dematerialized. Labour swept up the pieces.
France, ironically, offers an history lesson on what happens when half of a two-party duopoly disappears.
That allowed Emmanuel Macron’s newly-minted Renaissance party to win the presidency in 2017.
The more waggish and risqué political pundits call rot of the center of the body politic the ‘French disease’. It remains to be seen if the UK has caught it.
Both elections had candidates who won on Gaza — in the UK, four independents.
What the long-term salience of that is, I don’t know. But the factoid is noted.
‘First-past-the-post’ is a feature or a bug of elections, take your pick. Most European countries have some kind of proportional voting scheme, as do the European Parliament elections.
France actually had it until 1958 during the above-mentioned Fourth Republic. There’s some talk of bringing it back.
While I hate to disappoint NPR, neither election result spells an end for 'far-right populism'.
Whatever that particular hobgoblin actually is.
The use of the words 'left' and 'right' to describe a political spectrum originated from the seating arrangements of the very same National Assembly in 1789.
Supporters of Ancien Régime, then the King, sat on the right, and the more revolutionary types sat on the left.
This bit of history does not bode well for the future of the French National Assembly circa 2024.
In 1793, those sitting on the right got guillotined.
In 1794, it was the turn of the ones on the left.
So, did the Rassemblement National suffer only a tactical defeat in July’s electoral battle, or is the war over?
A reasonable case can be made that RN actually emerged the winner.
Aside from winning the largest percent of the popular vote, RN increased the number of seats it controls in the Assembly, as it has been doing steadily for the past few years.
And not being in power for the upcoming budget crisis could easily prove a blessing in disguise.
Still, it’s the earnest desire of many that 'right-wing populism' just go away.
Not going to happen.
The long-term trends are all in its favor.
Some background.
What Gary Gerstle calls the ‘Neoliberal Order’ reached its high-water mark in the 1990s.
It’s been unraveling in one way or another since the financial crisis of 2008.
The Neoliberal era came after the previous era, which ended in the 1970s.
In France, the post-war decades 1945-1975 are called Les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious years.
Les Trente Glorieuses produced a ‘compression’ in inequality.
Neoliberalism threw that into reverse. The share of income going to the top skyrocketed.
A chart from Thomas Piketty for wealth in France shows the inflection point. One for income would be even more dramatic.
Neoliberalism was a reaction to the economic stagnation of the 1970s, which we can date to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher around 1980.
Their idea was to roll back the excessive government involvement in the economy.
Left over, Gerstle says, from the New Deal Order.
Capitalism’s power had to be unleashed, even if that meant upending institutions that were in the way. Time for a little creative destruction.
That happened and much of it was good, but it was not without consequences, some intended, some not.
Industry was offshored to low-wage countries in the name of globalization.
Manufacturing jobs went away. Along with unions and worker bargaining power.
At the Neoliberal apogee, Clinton deregulated the financial sector.
In Peter Turchin’s memorable phrase, a reverse ‘wealth pump’ got turned on and started sucking money from the poor to the rich.
The resulting levels inequality hadn’t been seen in the U.S. since the Gilded Age of the 1890s.
Which was, not coincidentally, the decade when the first populist party appeared, growing out of the Farmer's Alliance of Kansas and Nebraska.
Political scientists have sliced and diced the populist vote in Europe and the UK ad nauseam looking for causal factors.
It’s not just economics.
But the economics part of political shift can be summarized thus:
The days when some political party represented the working class are over.
The new class divide in politics is between the well-educated urban elite, and everybody else.
Populism, being mainly anti-elite, is not intrinsically 'left' or 'right'.
It exists on a different dimension.
I’ll resist the temptation to quote a Rod Serling opening monolog for The Twilight Zone.
An engineer looking at the design of representative democracy would quickly spot a number of ‘normal’ possible failure modes.
Dēmokratia -- dēmos + kratia, let the people rule -- was acknowledged by the Greeks to be a risky prospect.
Plato hated the idea. Aristotle fretted about the dēmos electing some demagogue.
The Romans invented representative democracy. It became a popular blood sport for its elites.
The winners enjoyed it, anyway.
The engineering problem arises when the engine of state is unable or unwilling to respond and the dēmos works up a head of steam about something.
The regulating mechanisms get bypassed.
Political theorist Margaret Canovan says populism won’t go away because it’s always there as a possibility. It follows democratic systems around ‘like a shadow’.
Populism likes to go ‘direct’.
Sometimes, it uses the politically correct tools of direct democracy, such as the referendum. One of those, of course, decided Brexit. The Swiss like referenda a lot.
The Populist Leader, however, can be an invasive species of bugbear. The Leader claims to have a special direct connection with the people.
The Populist Leader can, potentially, claim the people have given him a green light to dismantle the regulating mechanisms. Especially the ones that were in his way.
For show, illiberal democracies still have elections, and they play on the ‘direct connection’ bit. Putin’s Russia can be called a plebiscitary dictatorship.
On the populist dimension, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are relatively meaningless. It’s the established elite, often in the center, against the populists circling around the fringes.
If the center has no answer for populist issues, the fringe grows.
For Europe in the 2010s, I’d list the issues for which the center had no answer as: national sovereignty, immigration, and the impact of greenism on the economy.
Understand that the center’s range of motion is circumscribed.
In the grand bargain originally struck by Europe back in 1948 for U.S. Marshall Plan aid, ex-Nazis could be tolerated, but only if confined to the political fringe.
In the interests of free expression, far-right parties could allowed to make all the noise they liked, but needed to be walled off from the real political action by a cordon sanitaire.
Fast forward to 1992, where big economic idea of the European Union was enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty: open borders and the free movement of capital, goods, and people.
In culture, a new cosmopolitanism would have to replace the old ethno-traditionalist nationalisms.
The French and the Germans would just have to get over it. Citizens of Europe first.
Cosmopolitanism was an ethos perfectly tailored for the new global and transnational Neoliberal order.
Flare-ups of ethno-nationalism were an aberration, to be waited out. Those people would eventually get with the program.
Only they didn’t.
Especially after Muslim immigrants started showing up in Europe in 2014:
The demographics of immigration are complicated.
You’ve got the rate of immigration, but also the differential birth rates of two different populations, the ages of those populations, plus the rate of assimilation, if any.
Take Germany. Women in Germany have 1.5 children on average, well below the replacement level of 2.1. Half of them are over 45.
From that, Germany's population would have shrunk by 5 million between 2000 and 2020.
If not for immigration. Germany’s population actually grew by 1.7 million people in those years.
Germany get immigrants from Poland and Romania, not just Syria.
But in Pew Research’s demographic model, under its ‘high immigration’ scenario — admittedly not the most likely one — Germany’s population could be 20% Muslim in 2050, and Sweden’s 31%.
The Left’s answer to the immigration question was to cut off all discussion.
Anyone who wanted to talk about it was a racist or a Nazi.
if cosmopolitanism didn’t work, there was ‘multiculturalism’. In was in vogue for a time.
Multiculturalism is the proposition that minorities should continue to identify with their ethnic groups. No melting pot. Rather, a salad bowl.
In France, multiculturalism showed up in serious consideration of a legal concept called le droit à la différence, ‘the right to difference’. Special legal statuses would be conferred and groups and individuals based on ethnic identity.
That idea ran too much against the grain of republican égalité, and fell out of intellectual fashion.
Which did not stop a fringe on the left, apparently overcome with guilt for being white, from pushing a particularly pernicious variant, ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’. That recommends that minorities continue to identify with their ethnic groups, while the majority dissolves its own identity, morphing into tolerant cosmopolitans.
The immigration issue in Europe shows that there is one way populist parties do go away.
Mainstream parties can detox their ideas, then co-opt them.
The Farmer’s Alliance of 1896 wanted ‘free coinage of silver’ because they though that might end the oppressive deflation they blames on the gold standard.
They didn’t get free sliver, but they did get the Federal Reserve, in 1913, which explains some of the weird language in the Fed’s charter about maintaining an ‘elastic currency’.
In Europe, the center-right parties in Denmark and Austria were among the first to take onboard Muslim immigration issue.
This, at least, brought it into sphere of normal political debate, rather than leave outside it as a taboo or third-rail issue no politician could touch.
The bad news is that it’s a thorny and emotional issue.
Consider assimilation: should that be the goal?
If assimilation is the goal, will it happen over time on its own, or should government try to move it along?
When it does, the measures can seem harsh. In Denmark, all preschool children now receive mandatory training in ‘Danish values’.
Danish urban planners have a ‘No Parallel Societies: No Ghettos in 2030’ plan which has led to instances of heavy-handed, involuntary resettlement of immigrants out of low-income ‘ethnic’ neighborhoods.
Religion, like race, is one of those ‘counter-entropic’ traits that works against assimilation. Religion is a touchy subject for governments to get involved with.
Catholics and Jews are now ordinary citizens in the US and UK, but it wasn’t always so. The aptly-named Know Nothings in the US in the 1850s were virulently anti-Catholic. As late as Kennedy’s election in 1960 there was nonsense talk that he would be taking orders from the Pope.
Secularization has been going on at a steady pace in the West, but it’s another complication for the demographic model.
Intermarriage rates are an excellent hard metric for assimilation. In France, Franco-Algerians and Franco-Moroccans do take French ethnic spouses, but generally after them become more ‘secular’ Muslims.
If the cultural issues contributing to ‘right-wing’ populism appear intractable, the economic ones are even more so.
Politicians tend to view populist dissatisfaction through their usual glasses: they’re just people agitating for more benefits and public services. If you want to shut them up, throw some money their way.
This confuses welfare with meaningful jobs that pay a decent wage.
But getting lots of those ‘back’, if even possible, would require abandoning large swaths of the Neoliberal paradigm.
And, short of some kind of multi-year wartime mobilization, it wouldn’t happen very fast. The Rust Belt has been sitting there for forty years. The Undo key is not going to work.
Some things are starting to happen, at least in the talk.
Its’s possible in polite company to suggest that bringing China into the World Trade Organization in 1997 may not have been the greatest idea. Or at least point out it had some downside.
Industrial policy, a formerly taboo subject, is newly respectable. So even are tariffs, formerly an anathema dismissed by believers in free trade.
In the UK, the new Labour government is busy enjoying its electoral honeymoon by passing various Green Agenda items.
The UK’s Net Zero policies since 2009 have made a big contribution to that country’s depressing wage and productivity trends, two classic yeast-like fermenting ingredients of populist discontent. I wrote about that not long ago, here.
At the moment, only Reform UK’s platform is explicitly anti-Net Zero.
At present, Reform and the Conservatives are presently jostling with each other to be opposition party of the right. The Liberal Democrats are also hoping to be there if things go south for Labour.
If they do go, the UK may end up with a plethora of parties.
And we may see the French follies go on the road, opening with a London cast.