A Very French Garden of Forking Paths
On the French campaign trail with Metternich and Borges
Casualties of War
The man standing in front of me on line to place his bets, what does he know ? While I’m waiting for a pack of Slow Death, served with a smile, he’s looking for a quick killing, a reversal of all the chances that brought him to this very spot. If he wins big, he can buy one of those properties the Russians are flogging in Biarritz.Â
Me ? I’m just throwing the political I-Ching, to see how eight or so fallible humans play their cards in the run-up to the French elections.
Pity the bettor, who’s sure of a Sure Thing. Pity the architect or the general, who lays it all out in advance.Â
Nothing easier, nothing, at this moment, less sure than French politics, who faces who in the second round of presidential elections less than a month from now. That, in itself, is a bracing, uplifting feeling. The table is wobbly, the world is at war, and anything can happen. The French are a nation of contrarians. Could they throw a little sand in the gears of fully automated modern politics ? Â
Here’s how I called it in February, before the war : Â
Second Race at the Electoral Longchamps, April 24 (bets as of February 14)
Favorites : Macron the 3:1 favorite vs. Le Pen, a re-run of 2017. Sleepytown. Heavily favored : Macron vs. Pécresse. Two breeds of Neo-Liberalism, neck and neck. Fireworks Derby : Mélenchon le Marseillais vs. Zemmour le Vichysois. 1:6 against it happening. Wild Card : Mélenchon vs. Pécresse (the moderate choice, the woman’s face, for those who can’t stand either Macron or Le Pen) in the final stretch, the outsider vs. the cautious manager.
Those were my calls for the presidential race a month ago, when another site first commissioned this piece. Then, arguments over vaccines (President Macron calling those who refused the latest booster ‘disloyal citizens’ while across the pond Sleepy Joe bleated on about dis- and misinformation) were all the rage. Mask mania was still being enforced and the French were busy indulging in their quinquennat obsession, What Happened to the Good Old Gaul We Used to Know ?
It all seems so quaint now, so far away. Ukranian refugees and others are crowding Gare de l’Est and train stations around the country. The disastrous, far-away war has sped up discontents sleeping in the national bloodstream. A quick look around is in order.
The Ides of March arrived a day early in France. In a stunning turn-around, candidate Emmanuel Macron lifted the vaccine passport as of March 14th, ending mask mandates for public spaces, clubs and concert halls. He folded. Covid is no longer of use politically. A new way to strike fear in the populace has arrived: Vlad. Will it help the French forget Manu’s failures in Africa, with the Gilets Jaunes, his evident discomfort when face to face with the French in person?
What a Difference A War makes
Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has unleashed the gravest humanitarian crisis in Europe since WWII, the disaster growing worse by the day. If you can bear to think about policy, continental defense, NATO and energy sources are finally getting the close inspection they deserve. And those who cozied up to the dictator are squirming.
What will it take to stop Poutine ? Will Vlad make a grab for beautiful, historic Odessa ? European leaders look like deer in headlights. In Versailles last week they seemed to be offering entreaties to Moscow. Inviting Ukraine to join the EU at the normal and not the fast-track speed was purely symbolic. More importantly, they refused America’s demand to stop buying Russian oil and gas. Fearful of economic chaos, they also protected the banks and transaction systems that finance the energy trade with a hostile state. The EU’s President said something about ‘working for energy independence,’ everyone applauded and it was time for the photo shoot.
The gathered leaders look for all the world like wobbly pins in Vladimir Putin’s private bowling alley. Their communique confessed to a certain ‘évident faiblesse après le choc de l'invasion russe en Ukraine.’
And so, with the bassline of Edwin Starr’s War pounding in my ears as I write, we must admit that war is hell but quite efficient in revealing things leaders would rather hide.
Forked Tongues and Forking Paths
When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold – Metternich (1848)
Is Metternich’s aphorism, scribbled in a diplomatic cable while workers gathered outside the Austrian consulate’s windows, still la phrase juste ? In this sense, yes : the collapse of political parties here in France may be a harbinger for the rest of the continent.
A month ago the French MSM (Libération and Le Monde included) were gloating over the endless fragmentation of the Left, while the Right was visibly tearing itself to pieces in front of their faces, a story they preferred to ignore.
Is the Right-Left schema about to be tossed in the poubelle (trashbin) of history ? People are disenfranchised. The long-established parties work phenomenally well as cash machines (witness the English Tories’ dedication to Russian oligarchs), but not so good on delivering what they promised the voters. As the parties become more schlerotic and inflexible, people feel ever more politically homeless, unable to define where they stand on a spectrum that no longer makes sense. France may not exactly be leading the way but it is part of the trend (see Scotland where the so-called independence party is hemorraging voters and candidates). The cash-fat political parties are in free-form, slow motion collapse.
For the French Left, that ‘vast program’ of progrés, inside-outsiders, anarchos and philosophes, being at each other’s throats is a veritable tradition. It’s how they entertain themselves in between losing elections. The Greens, those charmless suburbanites who always know better, follow suit, with the recently deposed Sandrine Rousseau wailing, ‘Our grand political strategists are total dorks. Macron is going to crush us. We’re boring, boring, boring.’ You can see why she got the heave. One can only stand so much reality.
Now that the right wing has joined in the fracas, we’ve truly entered a political garden of forking paths. Each choice leads to a different alley, some with escape routes, some not. Never forget that at the end of Borges’ story, Yu Tsun killed his host in order to send a signal to his control. Expect more of that.
Valerie Pécresse, Valerie Pécresse, what to say of the candidate for the center-right Les Republicains ? No one can think of anything to say about her, and no one goes to her rallies to hear what she’s saying. The supposed front-runner represents a party with an invisible candidate selling an negligible program. She did something once but no one can remember what it was. After April she will undoubtedly go back to doing it again. Les Republicains now becomes a repository of regional also-rans. Finishto, as my trilingual Mexican coworker in the chicken slaughterhouse used to say.
(Even her selection as the Républicains standard-bearer is suspect: late last month it was revealed that a dead man and a live dog somehow voted for her. Take your support where you can get it. Valerie rolls on as if nothing unsavory had occurred, and indeed, all is not lost: Douglas now has 37,000 followers on Twitter after announcing he too is running for president.)
The real drama is a little further to the right, in that nebulous territory that screams traditional values while leading untraditional lives. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Marine Le Pen-Eric Zemmour operetta.
Marine Le Pen of Rassemblement National hardly needs an introduction. Her father Jean-Marie, a militaire in the Algerian war and maybe a torturer too, founded the National Front which his daughter inherited, renamed and somewhat successfully de-toxified. But we’ll never forget those photos in Nazi gear from the New Year’s Ball in Vienna, madame ! You’ll never live that down either.
Eric Zemmour is the author of The French Suicide, a book which refuses to go out of print, proving there is life after death. An inveterate presence on TV, he was one of the first to declare his candidacy last fall.
The two are united by their now-quiet love of Moscow’s blustery autocrat, but in Zemmour’s case, he’s polyamorous and fond of Victor Orban as well. Le Pen’s party arranged a sweetheart loan from a Russian bank while Zemmour guards his words and admires from a distance. Repressive regimes are his thing: furiously backpedaling now, he spent the fall and winter lecturing the French on how the Vichy government during WWII was a Really Good Thing for Jews and everybody else.
With Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias visible for all the world to see, some of Zemmour’s brazen rabble have been giving the Nazi salute at his campaign appearances. Zemmour seems to combine all the opposites : a distasteful personality who writes popular bestsellers while apparently living half his life in television studios, an immigrant outsider in the hunt for the French crown, and now, a Jew with Nazi followers ! You can have it all. Only in France, you say. And now this parsimonious man has done the world a favor : he has split the Le Pen family apart.
It’s been called the century’s political ‘marriage of convenience.’ (Apologies to le Canard Enchaîné where this cartoon was lifted.) Marion Maréchal is a Le Pen by birth, Marine’s neice. She’s the sexy thinker of the family who flirts with ideas and movements, such as leaving the Euro, Generation Identitaire, opposition to gay marriage and more. Like her family, she runs for office and loses but never goes away. Instead she joins think-tanks before becoming bored with them. What’s a girl to do in ’22 ? She quit her aunt’s Rassemblement National and...Eric Zemmour came calling, calling, calling. Last Sunday, the two made it official. ‘I’m absolutely convinced that Eric Zemmour is the best placed in this election, in spite of the polls…’ Her wedding vows were full of gaffes like that, as if she’d already realized her mistake.
It was left to Marine Le Pen to speak the truth for the first time in her life. She demanded Zemmour close down his campaign or be the reason Insoumise lefty Jean-Luc Mélenchon walks into the election’s second round. The cat is out of the bag ! Zemmour’s reply ? An artful silence. He’s too busy gloating over Marion. Act Three to come.
Polls are suspect now, too. The majority are conducted on-line, which is to say the data is harvested from the choices provided by the polling organization. Some 28% percent of France’s population either have no access to the internet or never go near it. That would be the 14 million French youth just over the age of 18 or those too grumpy to adapt to the new age of digital enlightenment. Polling organizations tell us there is a 2% margin of error in their findings. They are too modest by many magnitudes.
The Grand Game continues apace. Vlad bulldozed into Ukraine to cure his nightmare of Russia falling like Artic sheets. Europe is America’s favorite battlefield, they feel at home here. The tectonic political shift goes on, without winners. If European elites had managed an independent foreign policy, we wouldn’t be here, would we ?
Second Race at the Electoral Longchamps on April 24
(Bets as of March 15)
 Macron vs. Le Pen. An impossible rematch now, with Le Pen dragging an effigy of Putin wherever she goes. Macron would eat her alive. He won’t get the chance. Macron vs. Pécresse. Highly unlikely given Pecresse’s lackluster campaign. Selling the same vineager as Macron on the same street corner, she has nothing to distinguish her brand. What has she ever done apart from being a charmless manager of lowered expectations ? Fireworks Derby : Mélenchon le Marseillais vs. Zemmour le Vichysois. This contest already happened in a debate televised in late January, during which the two candidates went mano à mano as politely as they could. (When M said, ‘Well then, sir, you are a racist,’ we howled. Only that ? What about vulgar fantasist, necrologist, vendor of spicy but rotten stew ?) The question is, does Zemmour, trailing heavily in the polls, pull the plug ? He won’t. Wild Card : The Big If. If Zemmour stays in, the right wing vote splits three ways, Le Pen, Zemmour, Pécresse. If one or more of the left marginals says basta before the first round and pledges his votes to Mélenchon, the race is on and we’ll see Mélenchu face to face with Manu, the street fighter vs. the banker’s boy wonder. Politics suddenly becomes worth arguing about again. Could happen, although Mélenchon will probably spoil it, missing 2nd place by a hair. That’s how I’m calling it.