There is a deadline today in France. It was set by Marine Le Pen last week for Michel Barnier. Show me you’re serious about respecting me and my party, she told the prime minister, or I will bring down your government.
The ultimatum, ostensibly at least, concerns Barnier’s budget for 2025, and the ‘red lines’ that Le Pen demands must not be crossed if she’s to desist from supporting the left’s vote of no confidence.
The sanctimonious hypocrisy of the French elite never ceases to amaze
There have already been concessions of Barnier’s part, notably his withdrawal last week of a tax on electricity and a promise to reduce state medical aid. Le Pen wants a drastic reduction in this aid, an essential cause for the left, but which her party says is a major pull for migrants.
In fact, Le Pen has been pushed into this confrontation with Barnier by the majority of her 11 million voters, and also a growing number of her 125 MPs. They are worried that the party is being sucked into the centrists’ vortex having strayed to close in their pursuit of ‘respectability’.
A few months ago Le Pen and her MPs were ‘fascists’ and a threat to democracy, the method used by the left and the centre to scare the undecided from casting their vote for the National Rally in July’s legislative election.
Now these same centrists are demanding that Le Pen do the decent thing, for the good of the Republic, and continue to support the government, come what may. To do otherwise would be disloyal and run the risk of seeing a far-left government in power, one controlled by Jean-Luc Melenchon. The mainstream media are also piling in, accusing Le Pen of ‘blackmail’ and ‘irresponsibility’ in her threat to topple the government.
The sanctimonious hypocrisy of the French elite never ceases to amaze. One minister was quoted as saying if Le Pen did join the left in a vote of no confidence ‘it’s going to be very, very complicated for her afterwards and she’ll have to bear the responsibility for what happens.’
Le Pen’s responsibility is to her voters, not to an elite that are desperate to cling onto power at all costs. And the polls show that two-thirds of Le Pen voters want this government to fall.
As for the fear-mongering about the financial chaos that would follow a vote of no confidence, most Le Pen voters look around and ask: ‘Can things get any worse? Nearly every sector, from agriculture to manufacturing to retail, is in crisis and an avalanche of redundancies are forecast for next year. Furthermore, the extraordinary mismanagement of the country’s economy under Macron has shocked the financial world. ‘The governability of France is being called into question more than I have ever seen in my lifetime,’ Moritz Kraemer, ex-head of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor’s, told the Telegraph last week.
Meanwhile the drug cartels still ply their trade with immunity and judges hand out derisory sentences, like the €600 fine to the man who threatened to ‘burn alive’ a headteacher who had asked a pupil to remove her headscarf.
Ultimately, the ambition of Le Pen and her voters is to get rid of Emmanuel Macron, the man who described them as ‘slackers’, ‘resistant Gauls’ and sneered that there is no such thing as French culture. More and more politicians and commentators have declared in recent days that the only way out of the imbroglio is the president’s resignation.
It is Macron who bears responsibility for the disintegration of France. The day after he called his snap election he was heard boasting to a senior member of the country’s business community: ‘I’ve been preparing this for weeks, and I’m delighted. I’ve thrown my hand grenade at them. Now we’ll see how they get on.’
With remarks like that, who can argue with professor Jean-François Bayart, one of France’s leading political scientists, who described Macron last year as ‘an immature, narcissistic, arrogant child, deaf to others, and somewhat incompetent.’
Macron’s ‘hand grenade’ blew the country apart, and the 11 million men and women who voted for Le Pen’s party see no reason why they should help in the healing process.
As for Le Pen, it is a strategic mistake to believe she will win over the metropolitan bourgeoisie by acting ‘responsibly’ for the sake of the Republic. This demographic will never vote for her party; not of out ideological opposition but because hers is the party of the working-class. Instead, she should focus on appealing to the one third of the electorate who didn’t vote in the legislative election, many of whom have been alienated by the consensual politics this century.
As the historian Philippe Fabry said in the summer, the demonisation of the National Rally ‘is no longer ideological, it’s sociological: for the nobility of the Republic, it’s a question of refusing to allow the people to enter their place of life and power.’
A recent study disclosed that those most opposed to the National Rally are those who been through higher education and live in a city. The author of the report said that in contrast, people voted for Le Pen’s party because of a ‘broader rejection of all the intellectual classes, of the “elites”, and it goes far beyond the political class. It concerns the people who actually live in metropolitan France…it’s a cultural rejection.’
Metropolitan France is in general progressive whereas the provinces are far more traditional.
Having recently moved from Paris to rural Burgundy, I can testify to this: I might as well be living in another country such are the cultural differences.
The disaffection of the people in the provinces of France mirrors that of Americans in the Rust Belt, and that is why Le Pen made a mistake in not celebrating Donald Trump’s recent victory more enthusiastically.
Her voters, like Trump’s, believe that the only way to make the country great again is to drain the swamp.
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