The shorthand on June parliamentary elections in Europe looks like this: newly-elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, 350 seats; British prime minister, Theresa May, minus 12 seats.
Pictures: https://www.istockphoto.com/de/fotos/french-elections?mediatype=photography&phrase=french%20elections&sort=best
Does the French presidential election, after the American one, confirm Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that “every profound spirit needs a mask”? The shallow spirit, by contrast, is usually plain to see and can be found on American reality television.
The dominant sentiment is one of relief that centrist Emmanuel Macron has won through to the second round of the French presidential election. Barring some sort of political accident, it’s now highly likely he will be the next president of France.
A far-left candidate’s meteoric rise has given a surrealist hue to the already remarkable French presidential campaign. Heading toward the Sunday election, firebrand radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon is among four top candidates polling within a margin of just 4 percentage points.
The outcome is too close to call. But it’s possible that at least one extremist will reach the May 7 runoff. That both finalists will be populists — one from the radical left and one from the radical right — cannot be ruled out.
Avuncular, loquacious, with a touch of the litterateur about him, Mélenchon, 65, is in fact a soak-the-rich revolutionary who champions Russian President Vladimir Putin and whose political hero is Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan leader who ruined his oil-rich South American country — inflation is running at more than 1000% in Venezuela today).
That in a field of 11 candidates, Mélenchon — who wants a top marginal tax rate of 100% — has a following at all, together with far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, shows the farcically low level — the surrealism — of current French political debate.
France’s weak economy, squeezed wages and
high debt and deficits may solidify its voters’
embrace of populists.
This is the first time in half a century that one of the two major French parties is not certain to make the second round of a presidential election. It’s also unprecedented that a first-term president has decided not to run for reelection — a clear admission of failure by President François Hollande.
Of the top four candidates, centrist independent Emmanuel Macron is at 22%, according to an Ipsos poll (down 3 percentage points in the last three weeks); Le Pen is also at 22% (and trending slightly downward), while Mélenchon, barely into double figures a month ago, is now at 20%, having just overtaken the scandal-riven establishment conservative, François Fillon, at 19%.
Another opinion poll, by Elabe, may explain the sorry spectacle. After a television debate, viewers were asked which candidate best reflected their preoccupations: Mélenchon came in at the top, with 26% of the respondents connecting with him; Le Pen, 14%, and Philippe Poutou, a Trotskyist outlier, third at 12%.
That 52% of the French said they felt closest to one or another of these anti-establishment candidates shows the extent of what one analyst called the French electorate’s “monumental anger.”
For more than 30 years neither the French left nor the right has managed to reverse the nation’s economic decline, marked by de-industrialization, a rigid labor market, unemployment stuck at around 10% and exploding public spending. The last time the national budget was balanced it was 1974.
Britain and the U.S., countries with close to full employment, chose Brexit and Donald Trump; highgrowth Netherlands blocked the ambitions of far-right populist Geert Wilders. Now France’s weak economy, squeezed wages and high debt and deficits may solidify its voters’ embrace of populists who variously reject the European Union, banks, big business, the European Central Bank, a market economy, profits, liberalized trade and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Further complicating the mix is the possibility that Fillon may yet rise — precisely because he is at least well-placed to block the populists. France has generally been moving to the right and Fillon, a former prime minister, is viewed as strong on law and order, which resonates given that France remains in a Parliament-declared state of emergency, after 230 deaths and more than 800 injured since 2015 in
terrorist attacks.
The big trouble with Fillon, however, is that he presented himself as the presidential-probity candidate and then trashed his own moral example. After media allegations that he paid family members a million euros for work as no-show assistants, he pledged to stand aside if charged over the affair — until he was, in fact, charged over the affair. That his candidacy is at all viable seems incredible, but the threat of the populists is doubtless one reason. Another is probably that, as corruption watchdog Transparency International has pointed out, 1 in 6 French parliamentarians employ family members.
Fillon is another admirer of Putin, so if he rather than Macron should make it to the final vote against one of the populists, one wonders who Putin’s hackers will be looking to help. If two populists win, though, there will be a political earthquake in France, with major ramifications for Europe and beyond.
Face à l’enjeu électoral français, le journaliste australien, un temps expatrié en France, se souvient du jour de sa première arrivée à Paris qui correspondait à la mort de Miles Davis. Il décrit la capacité qu’a la France de faire rêver un non-Européen.
A Shakespearian twist is required, perhaps, to comprehend the astonishing scenario of moral laxity and personal enrichment, playing out currently in the Old World kingly court of French electoral politics.
Unfazed by the weight of history, Donald Trump says he will save America — from ISIS, drugs, the relentless march of technology and the demon ills of globalisation — without reaching out across the oceans to other Western democracies.
Munich: One of the lessons to be drawn from the ugly Berlin truck attack is that if words are to have a sense in the screaming white noise of modern debate – around terrorism, demagoguery and the rise of the populist right – things must be called by their name, even when half-masked and crouching in corners.
Within an hour of the Berlin massacre, in which 12 people died and around 50 were wounded after a terrorist drove a truck into a Christmas market, a tweeting senior representative of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) labelled those who died “Merkel’s dead”.
After the stupefying Brexit-Trump sequence, and the Italian referendum result, could far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen win next year’s presidential elections in France?
The second album from the Hungarian-born Vienna-based guitarist finds her embracing a broad scope of music, broader even than on her outstanding debut En otra parte.
Where EU leaders have got it wrong is that Brexit is less a crisis for Britain (though it is that), than the latest manifestation of a deep-seated European malady. A sense of the risk of the EU unravelling is alive in the air in Germany and France because the fear is that Brexit has launched a dangerous dynamic of EU disintegration that, if uncontrolled, may, like Brexit itself, prove unstoppable. Perhaps this is something of which David Cameron, but also Boris “Opt-Out” Johnson, are painfully aware.
Debate surrounding terrorist attacks in Europe this northern summer has morphed into rhetorical overkill, as opportunistic politicians in France in particular focus on “situational dissuasion”, which usually just means regulating access to guns and knives.
Munich: Amid a sense of rising panic, events seemed to happen with exceptional speed in Munich on Friday night. Rain in the air, I was returning home from the central city pool with my 7-year-old, when a blaze of police cars mounted tram-lines as we prepared to cross the street. Moments later came the buzz of choppers overhead. Switching on the mobile flashed the horror of multiple killings.
Might Brexit be a good thing for Europe? There’s a comic wrinkle in watching the British Remain campaign translate the argument that Brexit would be devastating for Europe, when Europe itself is not so sure.
With a federal election in the offing, the visit to Australia by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls to mark the $50 billion submarine contract earlier this month, apparently couldn’t be made to last more than three hours.
Alba is the premiere recording of trumpeter Markus Stockhausen’s duo with pianist Florian Weber, a formation in existence for some six years now.
The ECM debut of Ferenc Snétberger features the widely-acclaimed Hungarian guitarist in solo performance before a rapt audience at the Liszt Academy in Budapest.
Angela Merkel is on the political rack, blamed from all sides for exacerbating the refugee crisis that she alone among Europe’s senior political leaders was prepared to meet. As if the world’s war-ravaged and desperate arrived on Europe’s southern beaches because the German Chancellor appeared in a selfie at a refugee shelter in Berlin.
In the febrile arena of current German public debate, prudence should be the byword. But it isn’t. No one would want to appear an apologist for the molestation de masse in Cologne on New Year’s Eve – when a group of men descended on unsuspecting women in the half-light of the city’s central square. But some of those condemning it are also seeking to profit from it.
The French hair-trigger? Just another lurching crisis from the nation that gave us the modern revolution? The media frenzy that greeted the far-right National Front (NF) winning the first round of French regional elections on 6 December, will now as with previous surges, more-or-less quickly subside.
