By early Monday morning, we will know whether the opinion pollsters have finally got it right for a change or have muffed it yet again. This time in France. However, that is the least significant feature of the second round of the Presidential election that has attracted global attention.
The reason is not because pollsters have shown Emmanuel Macron, the favourite of ‘cosmopolitan’ Europe trailing. Far from it! There are expectations that if French voters do what the European Establishment hope they will do, Macron, a 39-year-old former banker who ousted both the mainstream socialists and the traditional Right to take the lead in the first round of the contest, will win quite easily. The nervousness stems from the fact that of late voters have been defying odds, electing underdogs and taking unexpected risks.
I am, of course, referring to last year’s referendum outcome in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the United States. If the French were to emulate the lead of the Anglophone countries, Marine le Pen will be the next President of France and send the world and the financial markets into a complete tizzy.
That le Pen is, in the best sense of the word, a political disruptionist seems the least part of the Establishment’s worries. Margaret Thatcher, when she was first elected in 1979, was committed to breaking the mould of British politics and destroying a cosy consensus that had led to the UK being dubbed the ‘sick man’ of Europe. Equally, President Trump also won on the promise to “drain the swamp” that Washington DC had turned into and restore power into the hands of ordinary Americans. The Trump project is still work in progress but Thatcher did change the face of Britain unrecognisably-and for the better.
The question therefore arises: Why should the rest of the world worry remotely if by a strange constellation of stars and planets, le Pen pulls off a major upset. Yes, I know it will upset the Francophiles who still take inspiration from the legacy of Robespierre and Napoleon and believe in some form of spurious version of Republican universalism. It will also disorient those who have some over-romanticised view of how the French regained their sovereignty from the Nazis in 1944. Many of le Pen’s followers, particularly those associated with her pugnacious father, trace their political pedigree to Marshal Petain and Vichy. It will also anger those Europhiles for whom the European Union isn’t merely a multilateral arrangement but a new European Mission.
Yet, win or lose, the question that surely must be asked is: What has happened in France that has put le Pen in the position of a credible runner-up, if not an unexpected winnerIJ The reasons are well known. Globalisation has thrown thousands of French workers out of jobs for reasons they just cannot fathom. The urban landscape of France has changed unrecognisably in a generation to the point that in some cities the native French wonder if they are foreigners in their own country. And most distressingly for a very large number of people, a group of arrogant Eurocrats, backed by an intellectual elite, has poured scorn and disdain on people who are bewildered and disoriented by a change they just don’t appreciate.
What is happening in France isn’t unique. The same reaction can be found among Germans who have seen their comfortable insularity destroyed by the mass influx of people with whom they have nothing in common and for whose tragedy they bear no responsibility. The same reaction was evident in northern England where traditional labour Party voters voted in droves to quit the EU because they just could not identify with an European project that left them shaken.
Maybe this is racism. Maybe this is Islamophobia. But these labels are alien to people who just want to live in their cultural comfort zones. They can stomach gradual change but when this is accompanied by a complete lack of sympathy and understanding by people who presume to know better, upset turns to anger. We have seen this all over the world.
The desire to control our own lives is at the centre of democratic impulses. It also consists of the right to be heard with respect and minus intellectual condescension. The past 50 years has thrown up a global cosmopolitan consensus which multilateral bodies such as the EU and even the United Nations have carefully nurtured that sets the standards of what constitutes the correct way of thinking. Anything that violates this consensus is either sought to be denied or buried in a heap of jargon-filled abuse. Entire academic disciplines have been constructed by these high priests of cosmopolitanism that are based on intellectual immodesty.
le Pen may not be everyone’s idea of a wholesome protest. But history doesn’t flow out of a laboratory, as some grand theorists imagine. How people vote in France won’t matter in India. But somewhere along the line there are common problems relating to heartless globalisation, demographic change, religion-based terrorism and the loss of national identity that have to be confronted. To deny that these are real issues will not make them disappear. Denial will force a movement of ideas from the fringes to the mainstream. That is the real lesson from this year’s electoral exercise in France. Whether Macron wins or le Pen triggers a Trump-like upset, the battle for the soul of a nation will continue.
We are, in fact, experiencing a variant of this in India.