The Far Right Is Rising... Will France Fall Under the Heel Of The Fascist Boot?

French Election Results Were Very Bad For Democracy

The far right went crazy yesterday— but we’ll leave MAGA out of this discussion. First their MAGAty cousins in Israel, the overly-entitled Haredi extremists who we looked at last week. Since they know they can get away with it with impunity, they were rioting in Jerusalem yesterday, aggrieved because they’re losing some of their unfair privileges— like draft avoidance. 

The Times Of Israel reported that thousands of them clashed with the police as they set fires and attacked the car of Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, one of them— and on his way to join their protest. They’re “angry at their own lawmakers who, as members of the coalition, backed a recent move to revive a bill from a previous parliament that would lower the current age of exemption from mandatory service for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from 26 to 21 and ‘very slowly’ increase their rate of conscription. Protesters on Sunday carried signs reading, ‘We will not enlist in the enemy army,’ and ‘We will die and not enlist,’ as they blocked an intersection that leads to a heavily ultra-Orthodox area in the capital. Some protesters were seen in footage attacking a car carrying Goldknopf, who heads the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, as he drove home in Jerusalem. According to Hebrew media reports, demonstrators threw stones at the minister’s car, beat the vehicle, and hurled insults as he passed by. Police intervened after several minutes, safely evacuated him from the area. Not long after, former UTJ leader and minister Yaakov Litzman’s was also attacked as he encountered the protesters, who smashed the windshield of his car... After nightfall, the crowd made its way toward central Jerusalem as it become increasingly violent.”

So is Paris; not really— the protests there were pretty calm, even solemn. Last night as the vote counts showed that the extreme right had won the first round of balloting, anti-fascist protests erupted in La Place de la République. In case you haven’t been following the snap French election, centrist President Macron called an election when the fascists did extremely well in the European Parliament voting last month. He thought he was calling the voters’ bluff. Instead, the  turnout was gigantic (almost 68%) and his neoliberal coalition was stomped into the ground. The fascists won about a third of the votes. The left wing coalition won around 29% and Macron’s centrists took just 21%, a rebuke so clear that his premier, Gabriel Attal cancelled one of Macron’s unpopular declarations— this one to put new limits on unemployment benefits— due to be signed today. Attal, a former leftist himself, knows better; he should have done that last week when there was still time to save his party. During the campaign, he did promise to lower electricity bills, link pensions to inflation and provide aid to first-time property buyers— although the fascists trumped that by promising to raise the minimum wage by 14%.

To win in the first round, you have to get 1 more than 50% of ballots cast, representing at least 25% of registered voters. This doesn’t happen often— but it did yesterday. 77 deputies were elected outright, 38 fascists (including Marine Le Pen in Pas-de-Calais), + 3 right-wingers with whom the fascists are allied. 33 deputies were elected from the left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front (including party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon from Marseille), and just 5 were elected from Macron’s coalition. 

Round 2 will be next Sunday, July 7. Mélenchon has pledged that in all constituencies where the fascists are in first place and his coalition is in third place, his candidate will withdraw and support the non-fascist. Attal indicated yesterday, the centrists would do that same… and even Macron— who hates the left— has been dragged into agreeing with that strategy.

France’s version of Rupert Murdoch, multi-billionaire Vincent Bolloré, has thrown his media empire against democracy and in favor of a fascist France, embittered after it came out that he had basically bought former President Nicolas Sarkozy. Bolloré pushes fascist politicians and their agenda at every opportunity and is getting much of the blame for precipitating a rightward shift in French politics.

As part of it’s coverage of the election last night, the NY Times reported that Macron’s desperate appeals “fell on deaf ears because, for all his accomplishments including the slashing of unemployment, Macron had lost touch with the people to whom the National Rally appealed. Those people, across the country, said they felt talked down to by the president and that he did not understand their struggles. Looking for a way to express their anger, they latched onto the party that said immigrants were the problem, despite an aging France’s need for them. They chose the party, the National Rally, whose leaders did not go to elite schools. The rise of the National Rally has been steady and inexorable. Founded a little more than a half-century ago as the National Front by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and by Pierre Bousquet, who was a member of a French division of the Waffen-SS during World War II, it faced for decades an ironclad barrier against its entry into government. This was rooted in French shame. The collaborationist Vichy government during World War II deported more than 72,000 Jews to their deaths and France was determined that never again would it experiment with an extreme-right nationalist government. Le Pen threw her father out of the party in 2015 after he insisted that the Nazi gas chambers were a ‘detail of history.’ She renamed the party and embraced the smooth-talking and hard-to-ruffle [Jordan] Bardella as her protégé. She also dropped some of her most extreme positions, including a push for leaving the European Union. It worked, even if certain tenets remained unchanged, including the party’s euro-skeptic nationalism and its determination to ensure that Muslim women be banned from wearing a head scarf in public. Also unchanged was its readiness to discriminate between foreign residents and French citizens, and its insistence that the country’s crime level and other ills stem from too many immigrants, a claim that some studies have challenged.”

Yesterday the French Union of Jewish Students warned that "danger is imminent."

The French debates weren't like... the U.S. debate