The Autocracy Clock Ticks Towards Midnight
Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron have made bad situations much worse
If there was an Autocracy Clock, like the nuclear Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, last week the minute hand would have advanced from, say, five minutes before midnight to three. Joe Biden’s debate performance would account for one tick, and the other would register the dreadful showing of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party in the French legislative elections whose first round was held yesterday. It was a bad week for democracy.
The consequence of a Donald Trump victory would be much worse for America–and for the world–than a legislative victory by the right-wing National Rally would be for France. But it’s suddenly become easier to imagine an alternate path here at home. I share with virtually all Democrats–save for Joe Biden, his retainers, and his wife and sister--the belief that Trump can be defeated if, and perhaps only if, Biden steps aside. The very act of doing so would generate an immense wave of relief, gratitude and hope that would attach both to Biden himself and to almost any possible successor, so long as the process of selection was seen as legitimate. George Washington’s decision to step aside after two terms was the great act of self-abnegation that proved to the world that the American republic truly was different from European monarchies. Joe Biden should fasten his mind on that heroic example.
Au Revoir, Macronie
Macron, like Biden, made a terrible decision for which he must now answer. An almost Napoleonic sense of destiny has given this brilliant young man the courage to take risks that would have frightened off normal people–above all, the risk to create his own political party out of thin air and to run for President in 2017 as a virtually unknown 37-year-old. This self-belief seems to have persuaded him that he could win yet another reckless gamble by calling a snap election after the crushing defeat his party suffered in the ballot for the European Parliament three weeks ago. Instead, after the first round the National Rally is leading in a clear majority of constituencies. Macron has done the one thing that French voters of the left, center and moderate right most feared–opened the door to a far-right government.
Why has this happened? In France, as across Europe, right-wing populist parties vaulted to the fore after over a million migrants arrived on the continent from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in 2015. That tide has ebbed, but the number of arriving immigrants remains historically large in many countries, as it does in the United States. Polls show that immigration was the second-most important issue for voters on the eve of the election, just behind purchasing power–which is also the most salient issue for American voters. Like voters in Italy, Germany and elsewhere, the French are turning to the National Rally out of anger over cultural displacement and fear of déclassement–loss of class status.
Yet each episode of democratic erosion has its own distinctive elements. Seven years ago the French elected Macron without ever believing in his program, or perhaps fully understanding it. Many citizens cast a vote utile in order to stop Marine Le Pen, head of what was then called the National Front; they voted to protect the republic. In between the first and second rounds of that election I spent a day with Macron volunteers as they knocked on doors in a working-class development outside of Bordeaux. I was mostly struck by the volunteers themselves, well-educated young men and women who felt stifled by the national climate of immobilisme. Several called themselves “liberal,” as Macron himself did–a word that in France traditionally conjured up something like Social Darwinism, though Macron clarified that he meant something more like an “opportunity society.” At the time I wrote, “There is very little evidence that French voters have become more enthusiastic about globalization or the EU or painful labor reforms” that they had poured into the streets to resist under the two previous regimes.
This election may signify not that the French have tired of the republican values they once cherished but that they have rolled Macron around in their mouth long enough without ever liking the taste, and have finally spat him out. Macronism never rooted itself in France; indeed, writers often used the expression “Macronie” instead, to distinguish the figure from the doctrine. As his biographer Sophie Pedder put it in Revolution Francaise, “Macron’s program was always Macron”--his optimism about himself and France, his embrace of the future in a country in love with the past, his belief in globalization and free markets and “le start-up nation.” His advocates–usually people like him–hoped that he would be the one to finally make the French more pragmatic and less doctrinaire, more. . .Anglo-Saxon. It didn’t happen.
If this really is the end of Macronie, we should acknowledge that the president, like Joe Biden, accomplished a great deal that he set out to do. Macron made it easier for firms to hire and fire, reformed pension laws, raised the age of retirement and largely eliminated a wealth tax that was driving the rich out of the country without raising much revenue. He made France Europe’s favorite destination for foreign investment. Yet because he did not turn the French into Macronistes, he was forced repeatedly to circumvent the National Assembly to force his agenda through. Each legislative effort was titanic. Over time, the issues Macron cared about were eclipsed by immigration and the cost of living. He addressed the first by drafting a bill so draconian that Marine Le Pen embraced it–and France’s Constitutional Court rejected much of it. That concession only further drained his support.
In retrospect, Macron may come to be seen as a leader who tried to apply in France a version of the neoliberal medicine that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder applied to the U.S., the UK and Germany a generation earlier. The rapid growth of economies in the West in the 1990s seemed to vindicate the faith in globalization and market liberalization. Macron came along too late; his policies never achieved the economic lift-off that might have persuaded a skeptical French public. And neoliberalism has fallen out of favor even in Washington and London. Both the left coalition–the New Popular Front–and the RN promise to return to a more statist France. That appears to be how the French like it.
But France will still be a democracy on the other side
That said, this battle of economic models–and even of immigration and foreign policy models–falls within the ambit of traditional politics. The debate among the standard-bearers of the three groupings–Jordan Bardella, the National Rally’s 28-year-old prime minister heir apparent; current Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, and Olivier Faure of the New Popular Front–was positively uplifting compared to the spectacle that Americans witnessed. All three were young and well-spoken; none trafficked in lies and conspiracy theories. They just vehemently disagreed.
Several days before the election, Jérome Fenoglio, the editor of Le Monde, published an extraordinary editorial in which he called on “all genuine democrats” to preserve French democracy by voting for almost anyone save the National Rally. The far right may still be kept out of government should voters do so in the second round. Yet the dangers of which Fewnoglio warned fall well short of the contempt for the rule of law or the cult of violence which a Trump victory would bring. The far-right’s vow to overturn the ancient tradition of birthright citizenship and to bar certain professions to people holding dual citizenship violate profound republican values, but they do not actually threaten democracy.
Of course should a party that still appeals to the racists and anti-Semites who constituted its base fifty years ago gain the presidency in 2027, there would be far more to fear. At least France will have three more years to ward off that fate.