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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Column: Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryFrench vote sends shock waves through Europe
"Today I'm Ashamed to Be
French," read the hand-lettered sign carried by a young woman demonstrator
in Paris on April 22, one day after the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen placed
second in the initial round of the presidential election. How could France, the
country that in 1789 gave birth to the modern conception of human rights, sink
so low and what did this portend elsewhere? Such questions have impacted
European and even global public opinion. Poland's liberal newspaper Gazeta
Wyborcza editorialized that this "catastrophe" would give a green
light to those who up to now have been "embarrassed to express their
demagogic, nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic ideas." Over the past two decades, Le
Pen has frequently had to pay fines for violating French laws against
disseminating racial and ethnic hatred. He has called for the deportation of
North African immigrants and referred to the Holocaust as a mere
"detail" of the history of World War II. In 1998, he was deprived of
the right to hold office for two years after his bodyguards assaulted a leftist
politician. However, his racist appeals, combined with attacks on crime and
unemployment, both of which he links to immigration, have won him support among
some sectors, including parts of the white working class. His National Front is
a tightly disciplined organization, complete with "security" squads,
many of them former police or military officers. Le Pen himself was a
paratrooper during the Algerian War, where he tortured liberation fighters. The young woman demonstrator's
sense of shame was a common feeling among the over 100,000 French youth who came
out in dozens of cities to protest Le Pen's showing. Many of them were too young
to vote, but nonetheless determined to make sure that Le Pen's type of politics
are not the future that they will inherit from their elders. Describing how they
organized the largely spontaneous demonstrations, one Black youth, clearly
reassured by the outpouring, told French television: "It spread by word of
mouth because we're all in this together." The actual election results
were as follows: Gaullist conservative Jacques Chirac received 20% of the vote,
Le Pen 17%, social democrat Lionel Jospin 16%, the Greens 5%, and the Communists
a humiliating 3%, the latter three parties making up the current government.
Thus, Le Pen narrowly edged out Jospin, until now the Prime Minister, who lost
ground largely due to leftist discontent with his government's pro-capitalist
policies. There was also an important
realignment within those parts of the Left espousing versions of Marxism, with
Trotskyist parties reaching an unprecedented total of 11%, buoyed to a great
extent by the anti-globalization movement and by workers disillusionment with
both Jospin and the Communists. It is no small thing that revolutionary
anti-Stalinist parties now dominate French Marxist politics, but the Marxist
Left also faces a severe challenge, since the runoff election on May 5 offers
only two candidates, Chirac and Le Pen. Will they be able to distinguish between
a conservative bourgeois democrat and a neo-fascist, or will they fall into the
politics of "a plague on both of your houses"? The French youth and the
leftist public are determined to see to it that Le Pen is not only defeated, but
resoundingly so. How can one accomplish that without giving up one's
anti-capitalist politics in a situation where abstention will only help Le Pen?
This is a major test that will have implications not only for the French Left,
but also for the worldwide anti-globalization movement, which will be watching
these events closely. —April 24, 2002 |
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