The French vote: Nationalism, Anti-Europeanism, or Anti-globalisation?

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday May 01, 2002 16:15 by Anne Ruimy - rocky road environmental magazine editor at rockyroadmagazine dot com Mullagh, Co. Clare, Ireland +353(0)65 708 7144

The French protest vote, directed against pro-European parties, appears to be as much a protest against parliamentary democracy or what is left of it after decades of it being undermined by the forces of globalisation, than a protest against the corrupted political class. All parliamentary democratic systems are essentially the same, depending on how votes are cast. Only if meaningful choices are offered to voters, will a sufficient level of consensus emerge. But nationalism is not the only alternative to globalisation, and fascism not the only alternative to parliamentary democracy. There are alternatives, democratic ones at that. The anti-globalisation movement is moving beyond the stage of protesting to creating possible solutions.

The French media has scrambled to find strong words to describe the shock caused by a vote that pits the National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen against current president Jacques Chirac in the final round of the election for president.

Now they are trying to describe the reaction on the streets of France's major cities, which have seen continuous protests, in complete contrast to the voter apathy that produced a 28 percent turn out - the lowest in French presidential electoral history.

Political commentators have given prominence to the "protest vote" theory rather than to rising support for the traditional anti-immigrant themes of the National Front. Adding protest votes and abstentions, Le Monde gives a figure of three out of five who voted against candidates likely to be in government.

A protest vote then. But protest against what? Political analysts say it was aimed at corruption among the political class, against the European process at the root of immigration, job losses and violence, and, perhaps, a panic vote in the face of insecurity, factory closures, delocalisations and globalisation.

Politicial parties outside the system are more in tune with a disempowered populace that sees important decisions affecting their lives made undemocratically, in secret, than the governmental parties. In her last public meeting before the first round of the elections, the trotskyist candidate Arlette Laguiller said: "Despite what the commentators are saying, it’s the first round that counts, because that’s when electors can truly express their opinion and tell those who govern them what they think of their politics.

"The problem of the first round is to know if we are going to approve the two men [Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac] who have governed this country together for the last five years and who, in different words, propose the same politics.

"To vote for one of them, anyone, would mean to approve the voluntary impotence of the political power to oppose mass layoffs, unemployment, rising poverty, thousands of families made homeless, the decline in health services and the despair of youths who see no future."

Le Pen is not ignorant of the true aspirations of the people either: "You the excluded, the steelworkers, the workers of all those industries ruined by the Euro-globalisation of Maastricht, you the farmers forced into ruin, you the first victims of crime in the suburbs and the cities," he told his supporters as the results came in.

The scale of the shock to the political system created by these results is reminiscent to the rejection of the Nice Treaty last June. Then, Irish voters rejected a certain idea of Europe, days before anti-globalisation protests in Gothenburg, where a summit of EU leaders was taking place.

The French protest vote, directed against pro-European parties, appears to be as much a protest against parliamentary democracy or what is left of it after decades of it being undermined by the forces of globalisation, than a protest against the corrupted political class.

If the French vote is inscribed within any trend, it is about anti-globalisation not neo-nazi sentiment. The protest votes in Ireland and now France have brought together unlikely bedfellows. The anti-globalisation movement shares some of the values of the far right. Anti-Europeanism is one, as are attachments to land, identity, traditions, local culture. But is nationalism the only alternative to globalisation?

It's not, and that’s what the anti-globalisation movement is about. There are significant differences between it and what the far right stands for. "Socially to the left, economically to the right, and, more than ever, nationally French," is how Le Pen summarizes his politics.

Unlike most trends within the anti-globalisation movement, Le Pen and his party members are strongly pro-capitalism. Other differences include the attachment of the far right to Christian moral and religious values, and of course the fact that the anti-globalisation movement is intrinsically an internationalist and not a nationalist movement.

All parliamentary democratic systems are essentially the same, depending on how votes are cast. Only if meaningful choices are offered to voters, will a sufficient level of consensus emerge. And there are alternatives, democratic ones at that.

The anti-globalisation movement is moving beyond the stage of protesting to creating possible solutions. One of the slogans of the movement is "another world is possible".

The system some of its members promote is anarchism, which unlike its presentation in the media is not synonymous to chaos. Politically, it would function as a non-hierarchical system, where all decisions are made at a grassroots level. But the movement has yet to devise and agree on practical ways of implementing such a system, and the reflexion, discussions and arguments are only starting.

An open letter from the French "sans-titre informal affinity network of groups and individuals" questions the movement’s attempts at self-organising through emails and meetings: "How can mutual trust be proposed as an organizing principle, when clearly people do not really know each other, nor much about each other's practices? Is there not a degree of ambiguity in trying to combine a practice aimed at creating a mass movement (propelling the masses into motion) and a theoretical discourse aiming for ‘decentralisation and autonomy,’ two concepts which seem diametrically opposed?"

Meanwhile such forms of participatory democracy are being tested, in countries that have experienced severe political and economical crises. The neighborhood assemblies that have mushroomed throughout the capital of Argentina since the December protests and rioting that toppled two presidents within the space of two weeks have achieved some concrete results.

But if anarchism is unpalatable to the political class and to many European citizens, there are more conventional solutions. If the political system was to be altered rather than overthrown, the French could look no further than Switzerland for its system, which is based on a communal grassroots vote rising to cantonal level and then to parliament.

Yet parliamentary democracy à la française has proved successful for many decades, before globalisation made a farce of it. After the French vote, politicians and the media have cried out against voter apathy, but voters don’t become apathetic for no reason.

Firstly, democracy needs to be restored by taking back power from the WTO, the IMF, G8, and the summits of European leaders. Secondly, a real effort needs to be made to end corruption and catering for the interests of big businesses.

French people will be faced with a choice more meaningless than ever on May 5, during the second round of the elections. If the protesters who descended en mass onto the streets of Paris, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Rennes and other major French cities after the first round were saying "Non" to Le Pen, most of them did not mean "Oui" to Chirac.

These were mostly the people who didn’t vote, or voted for anti-establishment parties. The Cercle Social group is amongst those who reject this meaningless choice, and appeal for a general strike: "There remains in front of us the fascist boss Le Pen and the gangster politico Chirac. Do we have to vote for the latter to beat the first, in the name of an unspecified republican front? And then what else? No question!"