happily for Emmanuel Macron, the French ultra-left, which despises him for being, in their opinion, a proud elitist who is congenitally incapable of sympathizing with the bulk of his compatriots, believes him to be less dangerous than the chauvinist Marine LePen that, despite all her efforts, she has not been able to get rid of the epithet “far right” that will surely accompany her until the end of her days. Ironically, her reputation in this regard owes much to her aversion to Islam, a religious cult that is so staunchly conservative that it is, by common standards, more “right-wing” than any Western political organization.
Be that as it may, it is striking that, just a generation ago, theto most of Le Pen’s electoral clientele, who obtained more than 40 percent of the vote, I would have almost automatically opted for a communist or a socialist. It would seem that in France and other European countries what happened many years ago in Argentina is being repeated when the working class opted for what was then supposed to be a decidedly right-wing movement.
Had it not been for the help provided to Macron by the Trotskyist JeanLuc Mélenchon, a character who, according to ideological geometers, occupies a place as far from the “center” as Le Pen, although at another end of the spectrum, the result of the second electoral round in which the president was re-elected by a margin more than satisfying. In France, the majority is fed up with the status quo. Like so many other Europeans, not to mention North Americans and Latin Americans, including Argentines, there are many who want something different, but there is no consensus on what the alternative to the existing order should look like.
The apparent impossibility of conceiving a model that, in addition to reflecting the most reasonable desires of the majority, is capable of perpetuating itself in such changeable and demanding times as the current one, has made politics an essentially negative activity. There are no longer positive projects like before, when for tens of millions of people schemes drawn up by generations of intellectuals came to matter more than life itself. The terrible failure of the utopias that so many men and women sought building in the course of the last century is at the root of the corrosive skepticism that affects all societies of European origin. It’s almost always a matter of the lesser evil.
HAnd here is a reason why what the Ukrainians are doing has had such a strong impact on the western imagination. Perhaps, as many have pointed out, the spectacle being offered by a people who are heroically fighting for values such as freedom, national sovereignty and democracy is anachronistic, but it reminds many of times when it seemed to make sense to sacrifice for the sake of lofty ideals.
For politicians who are serious about their craft, the fact that well-defined ideologies have lost their power of attraction is a very big problem. Some, including Macron, do their best to manage protests from those who feel left to their own devices. They try to contain them. Others, like Donald Trump and, of course, Cristina Fernández de Kirchnerset themselves up as tribunes of the people in order to take advantage of the general malaise for supposing that they would be an almost inexhaustible source of votes, but the populists who act in this way run the risk that, after starring in a stage of euphoria, they see themselves converted into targets of those who are demanding changes as profound as they are diffuse that they are not in a position to consolidate.
To succeed, leaders like Macron who want to preserve the existing system need to keep those who threaten to blow it up divided. In his case, he has done so by promoting some economic reforms that could serve to placate the already poor (14%, according to official figures) and the many who fear for their own future, while, faced with the challenge posed by Islamism Militant, he has spoken with a degree of vehemence worthy of Le Pen and the even more combative “far-rightist” Eric Zemmour, of the secessionist danger that, in his opinion, he poses thanks to the imposing dimensions that Muslim communities have reached in his country. It is a variant of the “triangulation” strategy successfully applied a quarter of a century ago by politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in order to woo leftists and right-wingers alike.
For the traditional French parties, the Socialist and the Gaullist who, before Macron’s emergence in 2017, had alternated in power since the Second World War, the electoral process was an unmitigated disaster. In the first round, they did not even get enough votes to ensure that the state covered campaign expenses; they are bankrupt not only intellectually but also financially.
Although in the final stages of the campaign Macron did try to make the electorate believe that he really cared about the problems of ordinary people, no one ignores that he is much more interested in international politics than cumbersome local details. Since Angela Merkel has retired, she sees herself as Europe’s natural leader in extremely difficult times. In her own way, she is as nationalistic as Le Pen, but unlike her, she cares much more about the role of her country – that is, of himself – in the great world drama than merely internal affairs. Naturally, his pretensions in this sense annoy those who attribute them to his “Jupiterian” vanity and hope to see him stumble.
In the opinion of many Europeans and North Americans, Macron has been too ready to “understand” Vladimir Putin for reasons that could be described as geopolitical, since he is reluctant to give up the dream of adding Russia to the European Union to make it a superpower. stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon and thus could dwarf the United States and China. Before the elections, Ukrainian spokesmen complained about their supposed closeness to Putin until they were told that all the other significant candidates, characters like Le Pen, Zemmour and Mélenchon, they were even more willing to ingratiate themselves with the Russian and, in some cases, depended directly on “Moscow gold” and other benefits that Kremlin propaganda operators could give them.
That Macron is a born internationalist, a “Davos man” who takes for granted that one must adapt to the political, economic and technological changes that until yesterday were only making the world a single gigantic market, has greatly harmed him on the internal front, since Judging by the results of the first round of the electoral process, the majority of his compatriots do not like what is happening at all. He goes without saying that the French are not the only ones calling for a drastic change of course. Everywhere, the growing gap between the fewer and fewer who are in a position to take advantage of globalization and those who have seen their own standard of living fall or, at best, stagnate, is forcing politicians to modify their points of sight. For better or worse, globalization no longer seems inevitable.
Due first to the pandemic and, lately, to Putin’s attempt to seize Ukraine As the first step in the reconstruction of the tsarist empire, many governments are alarmed by the social consequences of the deindustrialization process that was driven by the idea that everyone would benefit if China and its neighbors took charge of the production of material goods and the workers in Western countries will concentrate on more cerebral tasks. It did not occur to them that the Chinese would not settle for long with the humble role that would correspond to them, or that there would be hundreds of millions of Westerners who would never be able to contribute much to the “knowledge economy” that was installed.
The human costs of deindustrialization promoted by Western corporations and by politicians who appreciated the anti-inflationary effects of an abundance of relatively cheap Chinese-made goods soon became apparent. Predictably, the “export of jobs” impoverished a substantial part of the old working class, which lost ground to the “urban elites” who, for a while, have managed to prosper thanks to new technologies. While the rise of Trump in the United States should have warned globalization advocates that the social changes underway would have far-reaching political consequences, few were willing to understand the seriousness of what was happening until the difficulties caused by the The need for developed countries to import goods as rudimentary as masks, in addition to more sophisticated medical supplies, from China forced them to face them. Likewise, the dependence of Germany, Italy and Austria on the oil and gas they buy from Russia prevented the European Union from showing solidarity with Ukraine soon, as a good part of its population in the member countries would like.
