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May
7, 2002
French Elections
2002
Pandora's Ballot:
Media Obsessions and Muting
the Progressive Vote
by Norman Madarasz
The fortnight between the first round of the presidential
elections to Sunday's runoff sparked an intense writing frenzy
among the French. The on-line site of LIBERATION featured dozens
of daily comments, reactions, analyses and debates. How Jean-Marie
Le Pen had ended up in the second-round of the elections, for
the first time and beyond all expectations, fostered explanations
that proliferated from two main sources. One centered on a pure
luck factor, the other on the rising tide of the European far-right.
Recall that in the French political system,
the president is elected through a direct vote. The Constitution
of the 5th Republic, implemented by De Gaulle in 1959, allows
for numerous candidates to appear in a first round, with the
two leading scorers being entitled to a second-round or runoff
election. The president is ensured with majority rule.
With the elections now over, France has
confirmed to its own satisfaction a refusal to flirt with the
far-right. Jacques Chirac, cumulating the votes of the former
'plural left' coalition, has been swept to a landslide victory
in his bid for re-election. Tallied at a historically high 82.22%,
he has crushed his rival the far-right contender, Le Pen. The
French political and media establishment played its card firmly
by proclaiming Chirac's re-election as a 'victory for democracy
and the Republic.'
The first round saw the total left vote
hover at 45%. Leaving aside any speculation as to how much of
the absentee vote would have been rallied to it--a third would
not be an unfair estimate--, France as a collective whole is
not prepared to think through a fascist mind. As for what some
observers have questioned about the hidden recesses of its soul,
we'll have to stand with the conviction that the soul is merely
illusion.
Yet that illusory soul was what remained
deeply disheveled in the wake of the first-round vote. Adjacent
to pragmatic explanations, prominent were descriptions of folly,
or even madness. The French voting public would have grown mad
in its suicidal split voting and absenteeism. The debates in
LIBERATION coalesced into judgment cast on the experiment of
protest voting. Peter Slotherdijk's Symbolist paean to the fantastic
possibilities afforded by the French political system basked
in the fair smells of the Parisian springtime ("En ce Dimanche-Gras
francais": May 3, 2002). By contrast, Salmon Rushdie ("En
France, des illusions dangereuses": April 30, 2002) witnessed
streaks of madness in an erring vote reminiscent of Situationist
drifting. As an appropriate alert their readings pointed as much
to the left's wide-ranging protest vote as to the FN's meager-by-comparison
17%.
But "madness"? It appears that
this is the way innovative, progressive politics is to be stamped
these days. It oddly triggers memories of Kissinger castigating
Chilean voting collectives as irresponsible, all the better reason
to back up the military plotters. (Perhaps we needn't dwell into
such history: Christopher Hitchen's rants against the post-9/11
left would surely do.) Ever since exit polls unveiled the unimaginable
on April 21, the French press, media, political class and many
of its intellectuals, called for the population to keep their
good sense and shift their vote to Jacques Chirac. To be more
accurate: they downright threatened the electorate to do so.
The media pleaded painstakingly with
the accused and cowardly Le Pen voters, or at least his invisible
ones. And the ploy was effective. In his Marseilles stronghold,
Le Pen campaign staffers suffered to pad a hall that would have
otherwise been tearing at the seams. As the last major FN rally,
it was a defining moment for Le Pen's inertia in the lead-up
to the runoff.
Whether Le Pen's voters had receded into
the shadows or dwindled to a hardcore, the results of the first
round showed there to be no greater amount of representative
interest for the Front National in France. The professed 17%,
in addition to FN renegade Bruno Megret's 5%, never tallied at
the 22% of the entire voting public as claimed, but only of those
who actually voted. Taking the 28% of absentees into account
with the additional 5% of destroyed votes, that 17% should have
shrunken rapidly to 12% on anyone's pocket calculator. This score
changes little from the one the FN has reaped in every major
election for 15 years. Yet the media plowed ahead, equating the
runoff election to a struggle pitting democracy against fascism,
while leaving the protest vote to vanish in a blur of panic.
In the runoff, absenteeism was slashed
to 20.29%, with the number of blank or destroyed ballots holding
steady at about 5%. In the end, the two far-right parties rallied
to barely gather 18%--totalling at about 15% of the entire vote,
then. Faced with the media's solid opposition, the far-right
only managed to increase its ranks by 10%, though that figure
does represent about 6 million French citizens.
While it's undeniable that the FN's brand
of nationalism is tainted by racism and nostalgia for the Nazi
grandeur best portrayed in Leni Riefenstahl films, the equation
with anti-democracy is seriously flawed. No matter how much the
media may have wanted to protect the French public from what
it appeared to not comprehend, the oblivion into which the protest
vote sank is too symptomatic for the story to stand.
It's of capital importance to bear in
mind how the FN has actually prospered under democracy. It's
vital to understand how democracy and the far-right conservative,
racist nationalism and roughneck politics of a Le Pen has benefited
from democracy--or 'democracy' so-called. This has very little
to do with any presumed liberal generosity endemic to this system
toward forces that seek its destruction. These exist, of course,
and they're incarnate in the skinhead shock troops partaking
of Le Pen's closest entourage.
Still, were there a blindspot to the
horrified reaction in the rise of the far-right and the risks
France faced, it's that Le Pen's team are intent on correcting
what 'democracy' has become. Wherever the far-right may lead
and whatever the political system they might choose to impose
in the future if and when given the opportunity, the plain fact
is that the FN are integrally part of French democracy. By contrast,
as long as French democracy affords such coexistence with the
sophisticated and refined ethnic-centered bigotry of the FN,
can the media and intellectuals still make claims for the sacred
status of democracy and the need to be affiliated to it?
Nothing suggests that the FN would remain
devoted to the system through which it reached its pedigree.
Whether they do or don't almost remains irrelevant given that
many of their policies have been tended to by center-right--and
center-left--governments. This is the democracy the French media
has corralled the electorate into ratifying.
Was it then folly or madness to open
the Pandora's box-- or can of worms-- in protest via democratic
and non-democratic means to dispersing the megaliths of the French
political class? Both Sloterdijk's spleen ("the left's return
to power presupposes that it bid farewell to the wounds of the
20th century: to the expressionist esthetic of extremism and
the taste for the radical") and Rushdie's reality therapy
("After being fooled on Afghanistan, the European left is
now being fooled about itself"), cast as they are from opposite
sides of the observer's street, do end up meeting. In their ink
we read that progressives who question whether this is the appropriate
form that democracy should be taking are actually scratching
at the surface of the great taboo.
For those among us who share in the need
for such ballot action, 'street violence' or 'insecurite' cannot
ever be accepted as the result of immigration. What these terms
refer to is a complex, disconcerting cluster of torn democratic
aspirations and ever-increasing oligarchic influx into legislative
possibilities. A decaying society results from computation overkill
ultimately demeaning education in the liberal arts, matched with
both the socialized pressure of empowerment solely through employment,
and the macabre flip-side of ravaging social inequality. To claim
this decline as caused by the efforts made by foreign workers
to do the jobs that Europeans would not is the vision from which
we cannot hesitate to part. Moreover, foreign 'workers' have
also become 'professionals' from abroad. Their contribution has
sustained the growth of Western societies-- often to the detriment
of their own ancestral ones.
This why the international dimension
of the protest cannot be underestimated. As France is the cradle
of modern politics, it was only fitting for the more determined,
for the more democratic, to utter their voices there first. The
low score of the Communist Party is completely part of the rejection,
and by no means a symptom of the left's failure. It has long
been out of the game. This progressive protest, ranging anywhere
from a quarter to a third of the vote, has now been strikingly
shorn of its reasonable passion with the media's complicity.
As for Le Pen voters, well, they could be 'understood', and 'swayed'.
But the protesting left, deprived of a soul, had lost its mind.
At least out-going Prime Minister Lionel
Jospin's team kept smart job-creation programs as a priority.
As Martine Aubry, ex-Minister of Labor, reminded viewers in her
post-election comments, recent French immigrants are tired of
being promised new measures of social integration instead of
new jobs to integrate. Without this, even the most cynical politician
recognizes there can be little appeasement in the near future.
A MBA-flooded market doesn't translate into new job creation--especially
in a country like France where few are convinced of the US's
simple prescriptions for a strong economy.
In the first round, then, over 25% of
voters sent a pragmatic message to both the governing plural
left coalition and the democratic system it bolstered. The fact
that they were able to, as opposed to what Americans like to
believe their Constitution affords, has demonstrated the broader
scope of democracy in France. Sloterdijk's analysis hits right
on here. In terms of real power, of course, the results of the
first-round stand almost symbolically, as little of that vast-ranging
expression holds the weight of parliamentary representation.
It may be a kind of direct democracy, as many progressive political
analysts are working toward. Still, devoid of representation,
we merely wind up in square one. And that square lies in the
city, street and alternative media.
By constrast, Rushdie was willing to
settle for much too little and, as far as I can see, much too
late. If the result of pressing for greater democracy renders
a system foolishly vulnerable to fascist elements, it just banishes
a very living rejection, which is that democracy as it exists
now in the West is simply too restrictive.
It's restrictive in terms of debate,
as the press has now fallen entirely into the sparse hands of
a few media conglomerates promoting the ideal object: monopoly
control through ever greater mergers. It's also policy-constrained,
as lobby-groups, i.e. former politicians seeking favor from government
on behalf of corporations at exuberant consulting fees, interfere
with the legislative and executive process. It's truncated judicially
with the international loopholes allowing for existence of tax
shelters, or 'the fiscal paradises' better named in other languages.
They're surely among the great obstacles to a more fluid tax-collection
system without which, as the right may declaim to great effect,
the public sector has its hands tied. The problem is not the
public sector however, nor that the latter stifles free enterprise.
The problem is that the insidious hands siphoning funds from
especially profitable public sector firms have now jumped ship
into private gardens, given that tax shelters have skyrocketed
through the facilities of the 'modernized', 'globalized' economy.
These factors and others have allowed
the courageous expression of the French voting public to reject
'democracy' as they see it instituted in their country. It's
no easy decision to make. Most of Anglo-America's brightest minds
do not hesitate to consider this power as stark lunacy. Then
again with the Bush team sitting in the Oval office, Anglo-America
lost its claim as the world's most democratic nation in January
2001. To which, all Rushdie can say is vote for Chirac: "the
result will be a few more years of him. But it's the price to
pay. The garden cannot be left to the serpent." But what
good is a garden deprived of the sowers?
Le Pen's death knell resounded when Ernest-Antoine
de Selliere, head of the MEDEF, France's leading chamber of commerce,
rejected the FN economic platform item-by-item. As one of the
plural left coalition's bitterest opponents, especially regarding
the 35-hour work week, the MEDEF were able to cleanse their rep
and assert their allegiance to democracy.
In case the print and television media
weren't successful in spreading enough fear through the population,
a secret poll was conducted by the Renseignements Generaux, the
French national intelligence agency. In the leak through which
it was meant to spread, Le Pen was given a 42% finish. An addendum
forebodingly did not exclude victory. Claimed to be tested amongst
three other target groups, it's obvious that those involved in
the polling deserve to be fired. That's assuming, of course,
that their intent of spreading fear via disinformation was left
unmet.
I was concerned at one point about the
attitude the 'provinces' might display toward the capital's parochialism.
But 20% abstention remained, and Pandora was appeased despite
the lost chance at a photo-op of the faces inside voting booths
as they checked off their compulsion to vote for conscience's
sake, obeying the categorical imperative to vote for democracy
in utter disgust.
Gaullist observers have spoken optimistically
of the Republic's strengths, about how the Constitution of its
5th incarnation has been approved through this second round.
LE FIGARO's Alain Gerard Slama, one of France's leading conservative
political analysts, was quick to emphasize that the incredible
power endowed to Chirac in his landslide victory has enabled
real policy decisions. "Tout est dans ses mains": everything's
in his hands, he insisted during the post-election coverage on
the international French station, TV5. If the future depends
on how he'll manage the victory, Chirac's already limping through
its lopsidedness in a desperate attempt to efface the memory
of the plural left. And I do ultimate beg to differ with Mr Slama:
everything depends not on Chirac, but on June's legislative elections
with or without the media's assent.
Norman Madarasz
is a philosophy researcher. He has lived in France, and now lives
in Rio de Janeiro. He welcomes comments at normanmadarasz@hotmail.com.
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