I want to reflect, before this absurd French election campaign ends, on some of the effects it has already produced.
The End of the Fifth Republic: The constitutional form of ’58 was born in open contrast to the excesses of parliamentarism, de Gaulle’s idea was simple, reduce the powers of Parliament and strengthen the executive by introducing the figure of a president who was not a referee but the protagonist of the game. The system worked and allowed France growth, influence and stability thanks to the silent consensus spread among the electorate that this system served to ensure that the heirs of Vichy were cut out of the political game. The mechanism was simple and worked by guaranteeing the role of the right to Gaullism, that of the left to the Socialist Party and with the Communists tolerated but always kept on the doorstep of power.
It was the egg of Columbus, but you just had to look Le Pen’s results in the presidential elections to understand that the omelette was coming: 1974 0.75%, 1988 14.38%, 1995 15%, 2002 16.86% arriving Jean Marie in the run-off against Chirac, then in 2017 his daughter Marine goes to the run-off with Macron collecting 21.3% and in 2022 again arriving at 23.4%.
It is now clear: the Macronian experiment of giving life to a technocracy run by the leftor by something that comes from the left, was defeated in France as in Italy by politics that returned to the field thanks to the right which, contrary to all narratives, still seems to believe that the will of the voters counts for something.
The Emergence of a Horrible Left: the systematic application of the republican bloc in the face of the arrival of the barbarians, has prevented a balanced development of the left which, deprived of liberal antibodies and legitimized simply by belonging to the anti-Le Pen bloc, has transformed itself into a landfill of the worstanti-Semitic, anti-European, anti-National, anti-everything, where only extreme and irrational proposals are listened to, accompanied by violence and extremism.
Mélenchon is the perfect result of this journeyan old Trotskyist is a staunch supporter of Maduro and Chavez, wants to leave NATO but supports, with many ifs and buts, sanctions against Russia after the aggression against Ukraine, is pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist but slips on increasingly anti-Semitic issues, dreams of a taxation of up to 90% for income and accuses the European institutions of excessive neoliberalism. In short, more than a politician he is a situationist and the best idea was to create the brand “la France insoumise” the indomitable France with which he almost reached the runoff in the presidential elections of 2017 and 2022 and will have a notable, if useless, success in the current legislative elections.
Confirmation of the Ukrainian curse: I personally fully support NATO’s policy of aid to Ukraine but I cannot ignore that all the protagonists of the first hour of the support for Ukraine they were defeated electorally, the English Conservatives were destroyed in the elections, Draghi was sidelined, Rutte had to resign, Scholz is a walking dead, Macron is managing a dramatic defeat, Morawiecki lost a long time ago and we don’t even know if Biden will be a candidate.
The disappearance of any form of liberalism from French political practice: transforming the presidency into something similar to a constitutional monarchy with the presidential cabinet churning out over 95% of legislative output and ministers simply signing papers while parliamentarians push buttons, this is the situation that has led the President to feel he has the right to dissolve a legislature simply by following his personal whim.
Liberalism is first of all a method through which we understand reality through the lens of individual freedom, where the single citizen/individual with rights and duties is placed at the centre of political action and where a rigid division of powers preserves from the arrogant action of the State towards which We liberals maintain a vigilant distrust intact. This approach is completely denied in the current semi-monarchical France which has transformed itself into a centralist and dirigiste megastate, governed by an elite favoured by the President and born from the Grande école, incapable of questioning itself and renewing itself.
I conclude with an invitation, Let’s not be fooled by the withdrawals and from the anti-something fronts, everything that was supposed to happen happened in the first round, the second will only be the result of political alchemy that in an attempt to mix water with oil will make the future parliament ungovernable, indulging in Macron’s last hope: trying to manage the chaos.
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