by Bernard Dreano*

In France, the unexpected and seemingly decisive victory of Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche! (The Republic on the Move!) and its allies, first in the presidential race, and then in the June parliamentary elections (winning 350 seats out of 577), means that the government is settled. But the political situation remains fluid and unsettled.

In our electoral system, the president exercises decisive power when his party has the majority in the Parliament. On three occasions since 1958, when this was not the case, real power has been in the hands of the Prime Minister. To be elected one needs to obtain more than 50% of the votes in the first round of voting; otherwise there is a second round in which the candidate with the most votes is elected.

Such a system favors a two-party system. For 50 years, political power has alternated between relatively stable coalitions, each being led by a major party: On the left, the Socialist Party (PS) in alliance with the declining Parti Communiste Français (PCF; 20% of the votes in the late 1960s, 2% today) and the small Green Party; on the right, Les Républicains in alliance with the small center-right party UDI.

Despite its growth since the 1990s, the extreme-right xenophobic party Front National (FN) has not been able to shake this system. Given how the electoral system works, the FN’s ability to do well in elections (with between 10% and 20% of the vote) did not translate into parliamentary representation. From 2012 to 2015, it had only two members in the Assembly. Similarly, in 2012, a leftist coalition (Front de Gauche) led by Jean Luc Melanchon received 11% of the votes, but only had ten members in the Assembly.

For two decades, France, like other countries, has been experiencing a crisis of representative democracy. Electoral participation in all elections has decreased (except in the presidential elections), especially for the working classes in the impoverished rural and deindustrialized areas where the cultural influence of the left is declining and that of the extreme right is growing.

Following the mandate of Les Républicains’ rightist/nationalist Sarkozy (2007–2012) and “socialist” Hollande (2012–2017), the political crisis has deepened. Hollande was so unpopular that he did not even try to run for reelection in 2017. The established parties feared that FN’s Marine Le Pen would be a formidable candidate in the presidential race. It didn’t turn out this way.

Faced with an increasingly alienated electorate, the major parties decided to involve citizens in the designation of their presidential champion by organizing “primaries.” The result was a success for left and right “radicals”: Les Républicains chose as their leader François Fillon, who was supported by the local Tea Party–like movement Sens Commun (Common Sense); and for the socialists, the leftist Benoit Hamon prevailed over Hollande’s Prime Minister Manuel Vals. Meanwhile, Jean Luc Mélanchon decided to go alone and created his own movement, La France Insoumise (FI, Rebellious France), while François Hollande’s Minister of Economy, Emmanuel Macron, decided to leave the Government and create En Marche!

Macron is a product of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the elite of the French civil-service, a former consultant at Rothschild Bank, then a member of President Hollande’s team and later a member of his cabinet. His politics resemble a mixture of young Bill Clinton and Justin Trudeau, with a touch of Tony Blair.

Macron was shrewd and lucky. He attracted part of the rightist electorate that feared the reactionary program of Fillon and part of the leftist electorate that feared a choice between “right extremism and extreme right” (Fillon vs Le Pen). In the first round of voting, Macron came in first place with 24 % of the votes (8.6 million voters). It wasn’t a tremendous victory, but in the second round he increased his support to 12 million, the choice of an electorate that voted either for a lesser evil or for a defense of the European Union.

Macron’s government includes politicians from Les Républicains (Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and economic ministries) and the socialists (Ministry of Interior and Foreign Affairs), the small centrist MODEM party, and technocrats (often young and often women).

Macron’s political program is quite clear:

• It will be pro-business and free trade–oriented, and it will continue to attack labor unions and the welfare state.
• It proposes to make permanent restrictions on freedoms previously introduced under the umbrella of an anti-terrorist “state of emergency,” including limitation on the right to demonstrate, less controls on the judiciary, and an extension of police powers.
• Although Macron reacted immediately to Trump’s withdrawal from the COP21 Paris treaty (“Let’s make the Planet great again”) and nominated to his cabinet the very popular Nicolas Hulot, icon of the ecologists, there is no evidence that there will be a strong environmental policy, and the nuclear and agro-industrial lobbies are well represented in the government.
• It reaffirms a commitment to increasing military and defense budgets.
• It will promote a Franco-German alliance to lead and defend the European Union.

Macron has presented himself brilliantly on the international stage, using all opportunities immediately after the election to display his presidential stature at the NATO and G7 summits.

After the elections, the rightist Les Républicains is in deep crisis, with its seats in the Assembly reduced by more than one-third. It is divided between hard-line conservatives and soft liberal-democrats. The Front National is similarly divided between social-nationalists and conservatives-nationalists. But the situation is far worse for the Socialist Party, which has gone from 290 representatives in the Assembly in 2012 to only 44 in 2017. The survival of the PS is in question.

The decline of the PS might have been an opportunity for the “left of the left,” but Jean Luc Mélanchon and FI candidates engaged in a bitter fight with other leftist candidates, communists, greens, and left-socialists. The result was catastrophic for the left. The situation was aggravated by a significant increase in abstentionism from the parliamentary elections, primarily voiced by young people and the working classes. More than 50% of the electorate refused to vote, something never previously seen in France. There were seven million votes for Melanchon in the presidential race, but only three million for FI and the Communist Party in the parliamentary elections. On the right, the FN suffered a similar fate, receiving only three million votes.

In the coming years, we can expect a profound political restructuring in France. Social and cultural conditions cry out for new kinds of leftist parties. Hamon’s and Melanchon’s presidential platforms, supported by 27% of voters, took strong positions on social policy, civil liberties, and ecological issues. But La France Insoumise, as it is constituted today, cannot unleash this political potential because it shares with Macron’s En Marche a hierarchical structure through which candidates for elections are selected.

For the time being, Macron and his government will have full power, despite lacking support from a majority of the electorate. It will take a new kind of politics and organizational forms to challenge the new status quo.

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* Bernard Dreano is Chair of the International Solidarity Studies and Initiatives Center CEDETIM, Paris.

by David Edgar*

Whisper it softly, but Britain may have turned the global political tide. To understand the extraordinary political events of the last few days, it’s necessary to grasp a little history.

Seven years ago, in the immediate wake of the financial crisis, the electorate rejected the mildly left Labour government  (led by Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown) which had been in power since 1997, in favour of a coalition between the Conservatives (who won most seats but not a majority) and the small, socially-progressive Liberal Democratic party, which together implemented a policy of austerity (cutting back public expenditure, particularly welfare) in order to reduce the country’s fiscal deficit.

Two years ago, it was expected that another general election would lead to another hung parliament (no party with an overall majority). Running on a moderately left program, Labour performed disappointingly and the Conservatives surprised pundits and pollsters by squeaking in with an absolute majority of 12 seats over all other parties. Able to govern alone, they had no excuse not to deliver on their election promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union.

That referendum was held last summer, and was a seismic shock. Despite being supported by the four traditional major parties (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationals), though opposed by the right-populist UK Independence Party (UKIP), the remain side narrowly lost. People voted to leave the EU for a number of reasons, but the dominant motivation was hostility to unrestricted immigration from other European countries. The older, whiter and poorer you were, the more likely you were to vote to exit. One of the most reliable indicators of a leave voter was support for the restoration of the death penalty.

An unexpected victory by old, white, left-behind social conservatives in Britain was, of course, followed by something very similar in the United States. From Poland via central and western Europe to Britain and the United States, it seemed that the populist right was riding a wave of disillusion with liberal globalist values and enthusiasm for socially conservative if not overtly racist policies. Less noticed was the fact that right populists from the Polish Law and Justice Party via the French National Front to Britain’s UKIP and – of course – Donald Trump’s Republicans had shifted their parties to the left on some aspects of economic policy. Despite his tax and welfare policies, Trump was elected on a promise to revive manufacturing industry, and undertake a program of public works unmatched since the New Deal.

This year has been different. The far-right candidate for the Austrian presidency lost (albeit by a whisker) to a Green. The Dutch right populist Geert Wilders and then the French Marine Le Pen failed more substantially. In French parliamentary elections last weekend, Le Pen’s party failed again. The British general election has to be seen in the context of this cheerful development.

After the referendum, its architect, Prime Minister David Cameron, handed over leadership of his party to Home Secretary Theresa May, who quickly established a position that was essentially right-populist-lite: her firm commitment to Britain’s leaving the European Union and cutting immigration was tempered by vague but populist mood music on helping the working poor. By now, Labour was led by the veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, politically close to Bernie Saunders but generally thought to be less charismatic. The general consensus that the combination of Corbyn’s far-left politics, his personality and his alleged history of support for organisations like the IRA and Hamas rendered him unelectable. Last summer, the vast majority of Corbyn’s parliamentary party passed a vote of no confidence in his leadership.

Twenty points ahead of Corbyn in the polls, May decided to cash in her advantage and called a snap general election, announced in April. What she wanted – and the polls promised – was a Labour wipe-out and a dramatic increase in May’s majority, which would legitimize her leadership and enable her to be as aggressive as she liked in the negotiations to leave the EU. In addition to Labour’s polling woes, her strategists noted that the UK Independence Party’s vote had collapsed, with the expectation that almost all of it would break to the Conservatives. The hot money – and all but a handful of polls – predicted that Labour would lose between 20 to 30 of its disappointing 2015 tally of 232 seats. Even the bookies had the Conservatives odds on for a substantial overall majority.

It is a triumph of British understatement to say it didn’t quite work out that way. What was confidently expected to be a Conservative gain of upwards of 50 seats (some polls suggested over 100) ended up as a net loss of 13 seats, and the conversion of a small but workable majority into a minority position (albeit with a lead of 56 seats over Labour). Labour increased its seat tally by 32, and its vote went up from 9.3m (30.4% of the total, 6.5% behind the Conservatives) to 12.8m (40%, only 2.4% behind).

There were three reasons why Labour vastly exceeded expectations.

One was that the Conservatives ran a strikingly incompetent campaign. An edgy performer at best, May refused to participate in television leadership debates, and had to rewrite her manifesto commitments within days of its issue. By contrast, Corbyn proved a sure-footed television campaigner (in interviews and debates), and attracted huge numbers of young enthusiasts at nationwide rallies.

The second was that – again, against expectations – those young enthusiasts came out to vote. The earliest post-election poll estimated that 67% of 18-24 year olds voted Labour; a later poll assessed the youth turnout at 58% (both figures way above 2015). By contrast, 23% of 65+ voters backed Labour.

The third was that the right-wing populist vote – the people who’d previously voted for UKIP, many in northern and midlands working-class constituencies (the British post-industrial rustbelt) did not overwhelmingly defect to the Conservatives, but split roughly half-and-half between the Conservatives and Labour. As with the Democrats, Labour did best in metropolitan areas with large student and higher-educated populations (places which had voted to remain in the EU last year). But a predicted rustbelt meltdown failed to materialise in the Midlands and Northern cities: all the seats in Birmingham (formerly centre of the auto industry) saw swings from Conservative to Labour. It was in smaller towns and industrial villages that the Conservatives improved their vote – though rarely well enough to overcome built-in Labour majorities.

This third factor has the profoundest implications. Like other populist-right parties, UKIP has moved its economic platform to the left. Labour’s manifesto platform promised an end to student fees, but also free childcare, improvements in welfare and a program of state-led industrial investment. The fact that an unexpected proportion of UKIP’s voters moved to Labour implies not just that left economic programs are popular, but that UKIP’s left policies were a significant part of its appeal. In conjunction with the general retreat of the populist right in Europe, Labour’s success appears to be down to the economy, stupid.

The collapse of UKIP is a good of itself: at its height, the party was gaining over a quarter of the vote in local and European elections (last Thursday, it was 1.8%). But it has also changed the political balance. In 2015, the combined conservative vote (the Conservatives and UKIP) was a (fairly narrow) 658,756 votes ahead of that of the progressive parties (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Welsh and Scottish nationalists, and the Greens). Last week the progressive vote exceeded the conservative vote by over two million.

Now a confident Labour Party faces a Conservative minority government, forced to stitch up an alliance with the small Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party, a fundamentalist Protestant party, hostile to abortion and homosexuality, and suspicious of evolution and climate change. If that deal falls apart, another election will have to follow. Watch this space.

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*David Edgar is a playwright and commentator.