France has an electoral run-off system. The top two candidates in the general poll go on to a face-to-face election. This year, that is Macron and Le Pen. Melenchon, the left-wing candidate came up just short.
What is happening was inevitable, and predicted. Europe had been sclerotic before 2008, but enough people were doing well. After 2008, Europe, more than perhaps any other areas in the world, doubled down on austerity and neoliberal policies like “labor flexibility” (code for “fire for any reason, reduced (ideally no) protection from bosses.)
And so we now have the neo-fascist (in a much more real way) vs. the neoliberal who ran Hollande’s vastly unpopular economic policy.
The French establishment has reacted predictably.
Elites simply can’t pivot. They don’t know how to do anything but keep doubling down on neoliberal austerity. It is their entire playbook, and this default strategy may wind up costing them everything.
Polls currently have Macron winning, and Le Pen has been softening her rhetoric on leaving the EU, though it’s primarily, “We can wait a bit and have a referendum.”
I consider that a mistake, not because of electoral considerations this time, but because of the electoral considerations next time. As sometime-poster Mandos has pointed out, the EU has set up both membership in the EU and the Euro so that leaving them frontloads the pain onto whoever leaves. If you’re leaving, you need to get it over with right at the start of your term so you have time to recover from the pain.
(Leaving the Euro is clearly correct on policy terms, though whether Le Pen and her team have the chops to manage it properly is another matter.)
The other consideration is that if Le Pen doesn’t win this time (and the polls are unreliable, given past performance around similar candidates and issues), she’ll be on the final ballot in the next round, because the policies Macron will pursue will make the French worse off–just as they did when he ran them from Hollande. They aren’t going to miraculously work now that Le Pen is even more of a threat, or because Mercury goes retrograde or something.
But then there’s a very real chance Melenchon will be on the last round ballot next time, too, and he’s been pulling no punches. He refused to endorse Macron (he did not play Bernie Sanders Nice) and unlike Sanders followers, who overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, about two-thirds of Melenchon supporters refuse to vote Macron.
A Melenchon deputy explained:
We don’t want to help Marine Le Pen, but we don’t want to endorse Mr. Macron,” he said.
“He’s the candidate of free trade,” Mr. Coquerel said. “He’s going to assist in the Uberization of society. Everything we are going to fight against in the coming months. There’s no possible rapprochement.”
This is correct behaviour, as far as I am concerned. Melenchon is not a colleague, he did not run under the same party, and he disagrees with almost all of Macron’s economic policies.
If Macron can’t win against Le Pen without the left’s support, he doesn’t deserve to win, because he isn’t a left-winger on non-social issues. And while social issues are important, so is whether or not you have a good job. Freedom in poverty, as those of us who have been poor know, isn’t really freedom.
Besides, Melenchon is in the same position as Le Pen. He’ll almost certainly be in the next “last round” if Macron wins, because, again, Macron is going to hurt a lot of French. It is inevitable, he cannot avoid doing so because he genuinely believes in neo-liberal austerity as the road forward.
There are a large contingent of people who are “just hanging on.” The status quo sort of works for them, but they can see the abyss, and they don’t want change, yet, even though they aren’t happy.
They will only want change if the game of economic Russian roulette that is austerity happens to take them out, and dump them into a slum. Their numbers decline every election, as some eat that austerity bullet and others die (since they tend to be older) and a very few can no longer stomach buying their present with their children’s future. (This is rare, most don’t care, and I base that on the cold hard numbers. If they cared, things would have changed long ago. Their children are expendable to them.)
So we play the game out. Time’s wheel must grind on, bodies caught in the gears, till the last neoliberal has failed, and we get either the populist right or the populist left.
Those are your choices: populist right, populist left, or continued decline into what will become an increasingly obvious dystopian surveillance state; something out of an 80s cyberpunk novel, but without the actual cool tech (as yet).
But there is no other choice that moves away from current trends except populist right or left. Those are the choices. Choose.
Update (how LePen will win, if she does):
A false story of “I will help fix your awful life” wins against a true story of “I’m going to hurt you, but the other person is lying about helping you and will hurt you even worse.”
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