FROM WASHINGTON:
The presidential race in France feels heavier than it ought to, because it’s carrying the past eight years of European history in it. Marine Le Pen’s ambush of Emmanuel Macron at the soon-to-close Whirlpool factory in Normandy — her selfies with the guys on the picket line, his lectures booed and whistled at — felt grimly familiar. To Macron’s credit, every political position is going to rob a Peter to pay off a Paul in one way or another, and it took real courage for him to stand in front of the men and women who will foot the bill of his liberal program and tell them, basically, to suck it up. But the whole incident felt like Greece in 2015 again. If you follow the analogy to its logical finish, the Front national is 2017’s Syriza: the voice of the ordinary people, the angry and the walked-all-over, defiantly holding onto their sovereignty in the face of the Brussels technocrats.
A strange kind of Syriza! No one would have expected this from the Le Pen clan. Jean-Marie, the founder of the Front national, enjoyed a certain image of himself as France’s Ronald Reagan, the ultra-liberal — and that in a time of ferocious American meddling in the affairs of other countries, rapidly expanding gaps between rich and poor, and Thatcher across the water facing down the striking miners. Now Marine is talking about raising walls, where Reagan demanded they be torn down. She rails against the EU’s assault on French sovereignty, and recently promised the people of Chad that as President of the Republic, she would respect African sovereignty. (While also expanding the French military presence there…?) And now she’s taking selfies on the picket line. Macron is left to play a hapless Thatcher, condemned by an iron lady to play the Iron Lady.
The ironies of the past year have been staggering, haven’t they.
Macron is obviously intelligent, but while his economic program is far more detailed and comprehensive than Le Pen’s — in the last debate she had almost nothing to say about anything that wasn’t Macron and his connections — he is going to have to work hard to earn the faith of the French people. The polls have consistently handed him the election (although they handed Clinton the election, too), but his battle is going to continue for the length of his term. I have yet to hear him explain how liberalizing labor laws, for instance, will help a factory worker whose job is now in Poland, or a trucker whose route is now driven by a Romanian. I have yet to hear him sound like he cares. In Amiens his arguments — again, his very brave arguments — sounded dangerously like lectures. You dumb children. He did it again during the debate, and it almost cost him the night. Macron didn’t win the debate: Le Pen lost it.
She could have won it. Physically she dominated it. Le Pen had the excellent luck to inherit her father’s strong build and massive head. Macron, in his strangely-matching jacket and tie, looked like an upstart undergraduate. Le Pen looked like a village chief from Asterix. If you watched with the sound off, you would assume he was being eaten alive.
It was her mendacity, of course, that undid her — her bold undetailed claims, like Trump’s, that she could solve every problem, her insinuations about Macron’s personal finances, her insults and her hectoring. Le Pen might be playing at Syriza, but it’s a ruse, and the real Le Pen, the old Le Pen blood, rushed to the fore during the debate: she tried to win the debate by force, by lies and by verbal bludgeoning, which is exactly what the Front national has always stood for.
There’s a reason that Le Pen’s electoral program breezes through economic strategy, apart from French-first hiring laws, vague tax cut promises, and a confused kind of Brexiteering. Le Pen the workingman’s chief, Le Pen the hero of the picket line, Le Pen the Syriza for the hard-working big-handed mustachioed Frenchman who loves his county, is a scam. This past week Le Pen declared herself the only candidate fit to deal with Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump. By implication she added her name to that list. We have a decent model, then, of what a Le Pen presidency might look like: the rotting countryside and ruined towns of Russia, in the shadow of a tiny caste of billionaires. Modi and his bumbling, Muslim-baiting, chest-beating liberalism, attacked by his own party for running a businessman’s government. The billionaire American speaks for himself.
We’ve seen Donald Trump in a hardhat, too.
The recent leak of Macron’s emails is telling. Nothing came of it. But it is one more sign of government by bludgeon, by trolls and hackers, by an international militia of Twitter lynch mobs and wheezing, neckbearded Blackshirts.
That, of course, doesn’t help the fisherman struggling to keep abreast of fishery regulations, written in very strict Bureaucrat dialect, by men in suits whose lives never depended on a catch or tank of fuel. That Le Pen is friends with the man who conjured Hell on Earth in East Aleppo is a distant thought for a man who may not have a job next month. I don’t mean to blame them. I don’t mean to blame any Frenchman who loves his country as he loves his family — they do still exist. And I don’t mean to blame the European Union, or the Euro, or Germany, or the Bundesbank.
I mean to blame, well, Macron, who believes that the free movement of goods and capital within the Union is worth any price, and that free movement of people does not mean free movement laws to protect those people, like floors under wages across the Union.
The choice tomorrow is between liberalism and a fouler, more brutal liberalism. Neither choice is good, unless you write for the Economist or own stock in Gazprom. But one choice still promises a France that stays at the economic and cultural heart of Europe, a France open to, and relevant in, the world. The other choice points eastward, to the anaerobic decay of closed-off Russia, to the humiliations and outrages of state racism, and to politics soiled with all kinds of filthy fingerprints.
For Europe’s sake and for France’s, the Windrose endorses Emmanuel Macron for the Presidency of France. Kyrie eleison.
The Windrose 