Vive La France? Macron’s Victory is a Temporary Reprieve

Cheering for a banker to win the French Presidency is like cheering for tuberculosis to beat malaria: yes, the lesser evil defeats the greater, but at what cost to your soul?

The even-tempered French, in a result which can only be called “le incredible!” decided to vote for the suit over the nightstick, and we are all happier for it. The centrist Macron beat the far-right Le Pen. Change comes in a thousand forms, and sometimes it shows up as a terrifying right-wing populist who wants to feed immigrants into a meat grinder as food for the amphibious mutants of the Seine. There are some who would criticize my explanation of Le Pen as sensationalist, but they have never considered France seriously. What sober person has?

But a successful assault on the French Presidency would have shattered Mother Europa. It would have meant the downfall of her Union. You go bankrupt, Hemingway wrote, “Gradually and then suddenly.” And that’s how the near the French Republic came: had the wind blown a little differently, we would now be dealing with the National Front in power.

And so France is about to swear in its youngest President. That ought to give us pause. Like Obama, Macron is a symptom of the crumbling of the old order, not its salvation. Macron became a possibility because of the loss of faith in the mainstream parties; Obama was a contender due to the Dems’ complicity in Iraq and the predatory economy. Young kings usually come to power when a plague has killed off everybody else. Le Pen actually finished in third place Sunday, behind abstention votes. Sixteen million people didn’t vote for either candidate. Think about that.

The Times gifted the public with a bland, gray feature which could have been written in 1950. There was a bizarre reference to how Macron demonstrated qualities which appealed to “French voters, unlike many Anglo-Saxon ones”—Samuel “Clash of Civilizations” Huntington would have been proud. That story also used the prefabricated sentence “balancing protection of the French welfare state with mild encouragement for business”…whatever in the good graces of gigantic St. Christopher that means. But there was an insightful moment in the otherwise “Yes, but” coverage:

The National Front could win as many as 100 seats in the new Parliament, according to some analyses, making it a formidable opposition party. Indeed, even as Ms. Le Pen was soundly defeated on Sunday, she still managed a showing that not too long ago would have been unthinkable. And in her concession, she made it clear that she was already looking toward the parliamentary elections, and the future.

There are two dangers in assessing the aftermath of the French election. First, normalizing this result: we cannot forget what almost happened. Second, misreading the popular will: the people in charge should not think Business as Usual can resume. That would be a huge error of unspeakable bigness.

What do we mean when we speak of the problems of normalization in politics? This: When we normalize Le Pen or Trump, we lose all sense of proportion, of what is acceptable. The Local, a English-speaking French news organ, noted that: “The interior ministry reports that 20.7 million voters chose Macron, while Le Pen got 10.6 million in total.” The future of half-a-billion EU citizens hinged on ten million voters in the Republic of France.

France and Germany are the pillars of the whole United Europe enterprise. The British can leave, and the Union will stand. The U.K. has their club music and bitterness to retreat into—like the English in every sea conflict ever, they can retreat and re-enter at their pleasure. But the two central powers must not fold. Otherwise, the lights go out in Brussels. In the final analysis, Le Pen was an absurd proposition. But so was Donald Trump in the Republican primary, or Britain voting for Brexit, or the House of Representatives voting to repeal Obamacare. And all came to pass.

Marine Le Pen being in the final heat is not an ordinary wibble-wobble in the political order. Le Pen, and Trump, and Brexit, are obvious signs of an unraveling. They tell us the swaggering post-Cold War system will not hold.

There needs to be a full re-investiture of the social contract. We need a roll-back of neoliberal capitalism, or Le Pen will return again. And next time she will win.

The clearest and most presentest of all Tom Clancy-style dangers is this: that the neoliberal austerity-mongers do not learn their lesson. The victory of Macron does not mean the end of the assault on international institutions. These institutions are under siege because large numbers of people feel, correctly, that they are tools used by global capital to oppress the people. The EU as a political union is an excellent idea. The EU as Germany’s enforcer for austerity measures is a dreadful revenant. If Macron, his supporters, and his sympathizers misread his election as a vote of confidence for the current world order, they are deluded. From The Local:

According to official results, the abstention rate stood at 25.38 percent – the highest since the presidential election in 1969. That means some 12 million voters did not vote in the election, three million more abstainers than in 2012, when the turnout was 80 percent. Among the abstainers it was the young (34%) and the unemployed (35%) who had the highest abstention figures. … The interior ministry reported a record number of blank and invalid ballots, accounting for 8.49 percent of all registered voters, compared to two percent in the first round. So that means four million French voters went to the polls to cast a blank vote. That’s two million more than in 2012.

Europe may indeed recognize what has happened … but even so, they might consider it as a one-off, like spitting near a child. That would also be a mistake. If the globerati take the Le Pen candidacy as a wacky detour on the march to a world of borderless banking—if they treat it as a near-gruesome yachting accident—then they have missed the point altogether. There must be a fundamental change in the international economic order.

Nothing is going back to the way it was. The world and France must change. We cannot have the Nineties forever and ever. Thirty-five percent of the vote is still too high a percentage for a Le Pen to score. Simply because a tide has ebbed does not imply it has gone out to sea, never to return.

Macron’s victory must not be Obama 2.0: a win that makes us feel good but fails to deliver. That will not banish the far-right, any more than celebrity endorsements for Clinton disappeared away Donald Trump. There were millions of people in France, millions, in a cultured, well-educated country who voted for a raspy-voiced crypto-fascist ingénue. Even more people decided not to vote for Macron, even at the cost of electing Le Pen. Surviving a hospital visit with one lung is not being returned to full health. To his credit, and despite his banking background, Macron seems to recognize reality:

Mr. Macron seems aware that his large victory isn’t a large mandate, that the pressure is now on to ensure that France’s reprieve from the National Front is not just a temporary one. “If I fail to solve” France’s problems “or fail to offer a solid start to solving them, in five years it will be even worse,” he told the left-wing news website Mediapart on Friday night. “What nourishes the National Front will be even more virulent,” he added.

Reading the accounts of French voters is like reading transcripts of voters who knew they didn’t have a choice. According to the Times’ Nossiter:

“He’s not someone I feel a lot of conviction for,” said Thomas Goldschmidt, a 26-year-old architectural firm employee in Paris who voted for Mr. Macron after supporting the Socialist Benoît Hamon in the first round. “He’s someone who raises a lot of questions. It’s a vision of society that is too business-friendly,” Mr. Goldschmidt said. “It’s this whole idea of making working life more uncertain. We just can’t bet on it, that everyone out there can be an entrepreneur. Society isn’t built like that.”

Per Chiarello and White for Reuters, a poll of seven thousand voters found 59 percent of Macron supporters voted primarily to stop Le Pen.

Macron is the Hardee’s of France: it’s what you consume when there’s nothing left. You eat there because a gun was stuck in your face—a gun called hunger. Neoliberalism was famous for using the phrase “There Is No Alternative.” In himself, Macron, a businessman of the most reliably dull and resume-polishing kind, was neoliberalism made flesh. This time, there actually was no alternative. The point of Macron—the French neoliberal nobody wanted, but everyone had to have—is hopefully to disprove the premise of his own philosophy. There must be alternatives the next time around, or the only electoral road left for the Fifth Republic will lead through the National Front. And France will fall again, this time occupied from within rather than without.