The French vote

After the hate-fuelled votes in favour of Brexit and Donald Trump, the world’s attention anxiously turned to the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday (April 23). Disaster has been averted for now as the centrist independent candidate Emmanuel Macron received just under 24 percent of the vote, with the openly fascist Marie Le Pen gathering 21.5 percent. The right-wing Francois Fillon and leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon both got under 20 percent. Macron and Le Pen will now face off in a second round on May 7 and since all the other candidates other than Melenchon have endorsed him over Le Pen he will most likely be sworn in as president of France. Le Pen herself has stepped down as leader of the National Front, claiming to want to concentrate on the second round of the election. But this is no occasion for the world to heave a sigh of relief. The entire rationale for Le Pen’s candidacy was to seal France’s borders to immigrants, pass laws specifically targeting Muslims and leave the European Union. Like her father – Jean-Marie Le Pen – she traffics in the worst kind of hate. That more than one-fifth of the population voted for her points to the growing radicalisation of the French people. Her voters see Muslims as the cause of all their problems and even support revoking the citizenship of those from former French colonies. Le Pen’s campaign did not try to sugar coat its racism and yet she is now going to be competing in a run-off for the presidency.

The French election shows that everything we thought we knew about democratic norms in the West had changed. Normally, one would expect right- and left-of-centre candidates to face off. All of that has now changed, and we have largely the growing corporatism of politics to blame. As income inequality has soared and the safety net destroyed, right-wing demagogues have pounced on minorities as a scapegoat for the economic problems of the white working class. The centre-left, meanwhile, keeps moving in an even more corporate direction. This is how a former investment banker like Macron – who was the choice of the financial elite – ended up being the only credible opposition to Le Pen and why Donald Trump was able to face a candidate as flawed as Hillary Clinton. For now, keeping Le Pen out of the presidency is important enough that everyone needs to rally around Macron. But in the long run, the only way to counter the rise of fascism is by developing a grassroots alternative that rejects both neoliberalism and xenophobia.