How To Stop Fascism

The first round of the French Presidential election witnessed a close shave for Emmanuel Macron when Jean-Luc Mélenchon came within 1.2% of beating Marine Le Pen to second place. Though he increased his vote to 28%, from the 24% he scored in the first round in 2017, Macron has clearly not endeared himself to the French public after five years in the Élysée, though he has consolidated his support among centre-right voters, thereby contributing to the decline of Les Republicains and Valérie Pécresse's abysmal 5%. He is unquestionably the President of the rich now. The French political terrain has been fragmented on both flanks for the last decade. Macron's calculation was that a centrist offering both modernisation and a reassuring nationalism would always make the Presidential runoff. His hope, so far fulfilled, was that the second slot would be taken by the far-right, allowing the second round to centre on the defence of republican values and a weak progressivism that would herd leftwing voters into his camp, much as it has done since Jacques Chirac first managed the trick in 2002 (that many on the left remain bitter about the consequences of this is a factor now). 

The danger, narrowly averted this time, was that a fragmented right might let the radical left in, obliging Macron to appeal beyond the centre-right to Le Pen's voters in a runoff against Mélenchon. That Zemmour proved a damp squib was very much to Macron's advantage, even if it has meant the further normalisation of Le Pen as a viable contender on the right. The counterfactual of a left versus centre runoff would have relocated the political discourse, but it would also have legitimised the left, and while Macron has been happy to make gestures towards the far right on Islam and policing, he has been obdurate in refusing to make any concessions to the left on his core neoliberal programme, allowing Le Pen to expand her offer to issues of social protection, such as the cost-of-living crisis. While the far right is presented as a danger to the republic, the left is simply dismissed as illegitimate and its voters, at best, as deluded fools. The corollary of this is the barely concealed contempt in the demand that leftwing voters now rally to the republic and support the incumbent.

While Macron is still odds-on to win the second round vote, the result will likely see Le Pen score over 40%, perhaps even over 45%, certainly well over the 35% she got in 2017. Macron's belief, presumably, is that he can hang on to the centre-right voters he has won from Les Republicains while simultaneously expecting the broad left, from the Parti Socialiste through La France Insoumise to the PCF, to dutifully turn out in his favour. But this is not a coherent political bloc, which emphasises once more that the political centre in France is less than a third of an electorate otherwise divided between left and right. During his tenure in office, Macron has failed to build an effective coalition, partly because of his own "Jupiterian" arrogance and personalism, but largely because the electorate remains divided across a broad spectrum. The continuing fragmentation on both the left and right is evidence of real variety and dissensus, not just the egotism of small party leaders in an electoral system that encourages small parties. But that said, there was undoubtedly an opportunity to create a new political formation five years ago.

The unpopularity of Hollande in 2017 and the centre-right's move to a more conservative line under Francois Fillon created the space for an emergent centrist bloc that combined both left and right. While essentially pushing a neoliberal programme of institutional reforms and a commitment to Europe, Macron was able to appeal to a general progressivism centred on modernisation and individual rights. But that was then. As Stefano Palombarini puts it, "The situation is very different today, even if the hard core of Macron’s programme, i.e. neoliberal reform, has not changed. Now Macron is openly addressing himself to a right-wing bloc: the progressive side of his programme has been buried beneath the police violence he has systematically supported and the liberticidal laws he has pushed through. The project of a bourgeois bloc was thus an illusion, which vanished very rapidly." 

In its place, we see a now-dominant right that is fragmented into three blocs. First, you have Macron's absorption of the traditional conservative centre-right (his strong support among older voters being a clear indication of this). Second, in place of the illusion of social advance that he promoted in 2017 you now have a fear of downward mobility (always fuel for Fascism) among the middle class and "respectable" working class, who are attracted by Le Pen's focus on social justice and economic security. Third, her shift away from vocal Islamophobia has been enabled by the coalescing of a more extreme right under Zemmour. Macron's achievement has been to integrate the Rassemblement National into the mainstream of the conservative right and to legitimise a more moderate Islamophobia as a dimension of "Republican values". The result, as Palombarini notes, is that "If there is still a pseudo-republican barrage in France, it is now against the anti-neoliberal left", hence the strong focus of the media in the first round on blackballing Mélenchon as much as Zemmour.

The media focus on the risk of Mélenchon's supporters abstaining in the second round reveals anxiety, and yet it hasn't led to any softening towards the left. Interestingly, it is this aspect of the campaign - that the centre might be defeated by the far-right due to the indifference of the left - that has been most remarked upon in the UK, more so than Le Pen's absorption into the mainstream and her shift to social and economic issues. Of course, there is no great mystery as to why this has such resonance here. Starmer's treatment of the left has been even more brutal than Macron's while his supporters' insistence than any electoral failure will be the left's fault has been even more strident. According to Ian Dunt, a Le Pen victory would be entirely the fault of the left: "Through a form of sustained political infantilism, it has left the battlefield." The charge of immaturity is a longstanding liberal trope, and Dunt isn't imaginative enough to move beyond it: "Sometimes you have to pick between options which you do not like on the basis that one is worse than the other. That’s a calculation even a child could make. But we live in an age of emotional tribal political divides in which black-and-white thought processes replace compromise and reason .. Infantilism and puritanism have turned whole sections of the French left into de-facto collaborators with fascism." 

There's obviously a lot of projection going on behind the hyperbole, both in the sense that Dunt's track record is littered with infantile judgements and tantrums and in the sense that the collaborators with Fascism are invariably from the centre-right of the political spectrum. Dunt's pragmatic argument, insofar as he's actually making one, is lesser-evilism: "There used to be an alliance against the far-right. Not so long ago, people of integrity and decency understood that you put aside your differences when it came to fighting fascism. No matter how much you disliked the centrist or centre-right candidate, you would proudly support them if the alternative was someone who posed a threat to freedom and equality." The problem, as his assumption that the lesser evil is always the centre indicates, is that this never benefits the left. Dunt was notably loud in his denuciations of the choice on offer in December 2019 and certainly didn't advocate that the political centre should hold its nose and vote for a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn in order to avoid the hard Brexit promised by Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. His vision of "compromise and reason" was a hung parliament in which the Liberal Democrats would hold the balance of power and immediately call a second referendum. Nothing infantile there.

This scolding of the left is also prominent in the US. In a long piece for The New York Review of Books, decrying the decline of the centre-left in France and its lack of imagination in the face of threats from the far-right, James McAuley dismisses Mélenchon because "he has advocated Russophile positions in the past and, most recently, a withdrawal from NATO, which he has called a “useless organization.”" What he ignores is the French context. First, how the tradition of cultural anti-Americanism produces both the superficial Russophilia of a Metro station named Stalingrad as well as protests against McDonalds. Second, that scepticism about NATO has long been mainstream in France, shared by Charles De Gaulle as much as Georges Marchais. As ever, the lessons being drawn from the French left are really about domestic politics, in this case the lack of focus and plain wrongheadedness of the socialist left, a point that Noah Smith makes explicit. The left will never be respectable enough for the neoliberal centre, and every concession that they might have a point about inequality or public investment will be relentlessly undermined by an insistence that their worldview is warped and they are naive and irresponsible. This is an argument increasingly being made by the centre-left as well, witness the likes of Paul Mason berating the left for its geopolitical naivety and insisting that it must ally with the centre to stop Fascism.

The chief lesson of the first round of the French Presidential election is that while Macron has made inroads on the right, he has signally failed to absorb the left, even in its currently fragmented state, meaning that his political project remains no closer to true hegemony than it was in 2017 when La République En Marche scored only 28% in the first round of the Legislative Assembly elections on the back of his Presidential victory. The runoff nature of the French electoral system benefits the centrist candidate, but it doesn't actually create a sustainable political bloc that commands a popular majority, only a temporary alliance at the ballot box. His hope is that this alliance will persist through to the second round vote, after which he will no doubt continue to cultivate conservative support while turning his back on the political left, on organised labour, and on any social activism that fails to respect his interpretation of republican virtue. If he fails in his objective, it will be the left that will be blamed, not Macron himself or the many conservatives who voted for Le Pen. In the UK and US, this will be held up as evidence that defeating the left is the objectively necessary first step towards defeating Fascism.