France and the future

Editorial

Nicolas Sarkozy is not in good shape heading into the runoff for the French presidency on May 6. Last weekend, he came second on the first ballot, behind his socialist opponent François Hollande. While the two were close together on the first ballot – separated by only a couple of percentage points, each with about a quarter of the votes – the socialist appears to have more room for growth as the lesser candidates disappear and their voters come up for grabs.

Among the startling results of Sunday’s voting was the showing of Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front. She exceeded expectations, taking slightly more than one in five votes. Le Pen’s campaign featured her railing against the “Islamicization of France” and calling for France’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Le Pen did better in proportion of the vote than Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father and predecessor as Front leader, did in 2002, when he bested the socialist candidate and went into a runoff with the conservative candidate. To their credit, however, a massive majority of French voters were horrified and coalesced around the incumbent Jacques Chirac and, despite her showing, Marine Le Pen came third and will not be in the runoff. Though she is out of the presidential race, her party is strengthened and emboldened.

While Le Pen appears a softer version of her hard-edged father, critics say her policies are the same neo-fascist wine in more attractive bottles. Her rhetorical flourishes suggest she is her father’s daughter: recently she equated Muslims praying in French streets with the Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

There are, of course, numerous factors accounting for Sarkozy’s unpopularity, but his poor showing must be attributed partly to his own pandering to extremism. In recent months, he has called for a halving of immigration levels and adopted some of the hard-line anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric typical of Le Pen.

That sort of posturing by a mainstream elected official has the potential to cut two ways. His hope, of course, was to undermine the potential of Le Pen by stealing her issues and making them his own. But the reverse is also possible. When ordinary voters see their president taking up the issues erstwhile condemned as the purview of the extreme far right, it legitimizes them. After all, how far out of the mainstream can Le Pen be when Sarkozy is spouting her ideas? Now, with Sarkozy’s future hanging on the second choices of the almost 20 percent of French who cast ballots for Le Pen, the next week may bring even more pandering.

The rhetoric of the French far right now, like that of the far right across Europe, focuses more on fear of Muslims than on the far right’s historic obsession with Jews. This is a perverse twist of history and fate. While European leftists have come to define themselves as antagonistic toward Israel and often blatantly insensitive to Jewish history and concerns, it has been the mainstream right that has become the voice of support for Israel. Meanwhile, as the left has routinely downplayed the seriousness of “homegrown” and imported Islamism in Europe, the right has gone equally the other direction. Extremist ideologies tend to thrive on fears of “the other” – for the European far right, this once meant Jews and Judaism, today it’s Muslims and Islam.

The issue is muddied for European Jews. Having been victimized before, there should be a natural tendency to sympathize with the contemporary victims of fear-exploiting ideology. However, Jewish victimology in Europe today is largely emanating not from the far right, but from extremists within Muslim communities. Jews are being driven from France, the Netherlands, Norway and other places not because of government policies, but because of the rogue acts of a tiny minority of Islamist extremists who are acting out on prejudices instilled either in foreign countries or through “homegrown” radical groups. Either way, these acts are condemned by all voices of reason. The anti-Muslim politics, however, despite the legitimate concerns over a tiny minority of radicals, is being exploited by those in power – or seeking power – in ways that do little to address the actual problems and much to create unnecessary – and harmful – hysteria.

While Sarkozy may have hoped to stem the tide of the National Front by adopting its rhetoric, he may instead end up hoisted on his own petard, having legitimized the far right’s approach and thereby weakening his own chances. Sarkozy may lose the election next month, but gain a very old lesson learned by those who play with fire.

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