[I've made edits in the list further down to reflect two countries I forgot to add when first writing the article.]
Nobody expected this! I’m sure a few people on the ground held hope. Macron clearly saw something in that feverish head of his that the rest of us didn’t. Yet with all the evidence of media coverage and polling, nobody could have predicted that rallying against the far-right would actually have…worked. Much credit is due to the French left for setting their differences aside and uniting for a higher cause in the short term. That’s pretty incredible given France’s famously fractious politics, and in particular the looming presence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a…complicating figure, somewhat analogous (to use a lazy analogy) to Jeremy Corbyn.
I actually think though that not enough credit is going to Macron’s party and their centrist allies. The French left could well have gotten a result comparable to this at the same time as the far-right won their coveted majority if Ensemble had collapsed as was anticipated. Instead, while Ensemble have lost their majority and then some, they’ve held on in second place, in what is a pretty marvellous recovery of fortunes relative to expectations. Basically, both the left and the centre both needed to hold, and they did. This left the far-right with around HALF of the seats they were hoping for. It’s a colossal underperformance and hopefully does more damage to them as they question what went wrong internally than a gridlocked Assembly can to the left and centre over the next three years.
I don’t know enough about France to explain how this came to be. What I do know is that an absolute catastrophe has been averted. The risk was simply too high that this would serve as an incredible layup to Le Pen winning the presidency in 2027. That would come with all of the powers that Charles de Gaulle foolishly conferred on the officeholder.
Instead, the far right have failed to find a winning electoral formula. Winning almost a third of the seats is still scary, but Le Pen won 42% of the vote in 2022; this isn’t unprecedented. And the left and the center each have hope now, though both need to elevate new candidates, and fast. Mélenchon making it to the runoff against Le Pen in 2027 isn’t just a scary thought because he could devastate European security and in particular Ukraine’s hopes, it’s a scary thought because it raises the odds a woman scarier than him will win.
I thought I’d do a little historical comparison for where the threat to France right now ranks. The far right, for all that they rightly distress democracies, have been remarkably unsuccessful historically. I’m making a distinction here between governance you could make the case for as far-right, such as colonial empires given their inherent dehumanisation of most of their people, and what we typically call the far-right. Specifically, I mean parties or factions outside the mainstream of a country aiming to take over and implement an extremist nationalist and oppressively discriminatory agenda that sharply breaks with preexisting democratic norms.
I’m sure I’ll be forgetting a few random countries and polities, but let’s tick off some notable far-right regimes historically:
Italy, 1922-1945: Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome. Rather than offer resistance, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as his new Prime Minister. Mussolini inaugurated what a fascist regime looked like, carried out the vile Libyan Genocide from 1929–1934, and after considerable struggles, conquered Ethiopia in 1937, Albania in 1939 and Greece in 1940-41. The Allies seized Italian East Africa in 1941, Libya in 1943 and made landfall in the mainland the same year, prompting Emmanuel’s coup and the Italian Civil War. The Italian Social Republic limped on for two more years before being put out of its misery along with its master.
Germany, 1933-1945: President Paul von Hindenburg chose the certainty of Hitler over the probability of the communists, in the belief that he could be controlled. I think we all know how that went. Mussolini may have first modelled fascism but Hitler’s perfection of the system definitively proved that far-right rule is the worst possible thing that can happen to humanity. Never was so much death dealt to so many people in so little time. (I’m sure there are some historical contenders, mainly by starvation caused by communist regimes, but I don’t think we need to turn this into a The Worst Olympics: the point stands well enough on its own that we owe to Hitler our everlasting fear of the far-right.)
Austria: 1934-1938: One of history’s weird irregularities is that we forget one of Hitler’s first acts of aggression was to snuff out a fellow fascist state in its cradle. By the way, I’m not counting all of Hitler’s puppet states on this list, but one certainly can’t dismiss the genuine domestic appeal and danger of fascism at the time in regions like Croatia and Romania. And in France. The country has never really reckoned with how many collaborators made Vichy France tick, from its persecution of Jews to its overseas intensification of imperial oppression, preferring instead to indulge in rose-tinted narratives about the Resistance - very brave, to be sure, but most of the country were not with them.
Spain, 1936-1982: You could write entire books and go back centuries to explain why the fascist coup happened, but the long and short of it is that in 1936 Spain elected the left-wing Popular Front, and General Francisco Franco became the leader of the far-right coalition in the Spanish Civil War. They won in 1939 and, by keeping the country out of World War Two and making himself useful to NATO as a member, Franco was able to maintain an iron grip domestically, though he ceded most of Spanish Morocco in 1956-58 and the Western Sahara in 1975. After Franco died that year, the monarchy led a gradual transition back to democracy and the rule of law that concluded in 1982. The Franco era remains a touchy subject, given all the murders. (I’m not counting the neighbouring Estado Novo regime in Portugal from 1933-1974 as fascist, but I don’t know much about Salazar’s time. Certainly they bear responsibility for bloody wars in Angola and Mozambique.)
Japan, 1937-1945: Forgetting Japan in a list of far-right states is downright embarrassing so I'm back to rectify that error. Picking a departure point is tricky, because of my previously established lines that I'm judging states not for being imperialist, aristocratic empires but for establishing its blend of nationalist and anti-democratic rule even in the metropolitan areas, which in this time period includes political violence and militarism. Also because I don't know that much about Japanese history. I've selected 1937 as the departure point for Japan as the time at which the Emperor appointed Prime Minister Konoe, setting off the curtailment of domestic democracy, and enabling the Imperial Japanese Army to take the lead in invading China, culminating in the Nanjing Massacre. Historians rightly keen to challenge the West's racist stereotypes against Japan and more broadly the dismissal of non-Western countries as uncivilized should not confuse that with erasing Japan's own horrific crimes against peoples across Asia; in Vietnam alone, the five years of Japanese rule were often regarded as worse than the ten years of war against the French or the twenty against the Americans.
South Africa, 1948-1994: The Anglophone United Party lost an election to the Herenigde Nasionale Party, which promised Afrikaners the apartheid most of them craved. The National Party held ultimate power and ran their brutal regime for decades until they bowed to pressure and entered negotiations with the ANC in 1987. Apartheid legislation was predominantly repealed in 1991 and, though the NP remained in a unity government with the ANC for a couple years after 1994, the election those years really ended the years of far-right rule.
Israel, 1967-: I'm invoking the First Law of Frozen Peaches once again - I have strong views on the subject but, given I'm a meandering author who likes detours through history and weighing up lots of factors, any dissection of why I would judge Israeli policy so harshly is bound to get messy. I'd instead point to this writeup as an example of a writer being able to cut through the noise and boil the case down to its bare essentials. If I were to include South Africa on this list, as I have, I realised I'd also have to chuck in Israel. I pick 1967 as the year because I think that's a fair measure of when Israel transitioned from the prior twenty years' colonial project of establishing and securing a state in Palestine, to a neo-colonial project carried out by every government since of continuing to advance Israeli primacy backed up by force. That necessarily comes at the expense of the alternative: Israel taking its place amongst the concert of nations as one that reaches and prioritises peace with its neighbours and guarantees equality in practice for all its residents.
Russia, 2000-: This might seem like a wildcard take, but think about it: in just a decade Russia went from a committed communist leader (albeit a reformist), to a liberal free marketer (who also brutally crushed Chechens) in Yeltsin, to Yeltsin’s shock elevation of his Prime Minister, Putin, as his successor in 2000. Putin has since pursued not only domestic oppression, killing Russia’s nascent democracy in the cradle, but also an exception to the rule of post-WWII far-right rule: far-right countries tend not to invade others anymore, whereas Putin has fought not only the internal war in Chechnya but also invasions of Georgia and first Crimea and Donbass, then Ukraine at large.
Hungary, 2010-: Viktor Orban capitalised on the calamitous leak of the Őszöd speech, which destroyed public trust in the ruling Socialist Party, to win a supermajority and promptly commence his long-term project of constitutional reform to consolidate his power. Hungary became a migrant crisis frontline of resistance and, amidst typical fascist harassment of opponents like the left and intellectuals, has in particular made a habit of targeting Jews. Alongside Serbia, Hungary is one of Russia’s only allies in Europe.
Austria, 2017-2019: What seemed like an ominous augur for the future quickly ended in utter embarrassment for the far-right as their leader was caught in a sting operation receiving bribes and organising kickbacks.
Brazil, 2019-2023: Jair Bolsonaro was able to exploit the legal issues of the Brazilian left to win the presidency in 2019. His rule was calamitous not just in the usual far-right sense of oppression, but also in the gross mishandling of COVID and the danger he presented to the global climate through his destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Indeed, even the leaders of the army, air force and navy all resigned under him. However, he was just narrowly defeated in the 2023 election and, despite trying to pull a Trump, Brazil's democratic institutions held firm and threw him out.
Italy, 2022-: Italy is a model for European democracy, in a bad way: lots of small parties constantly form and dissolve new arrangements that leave the public bewildered and issues unresolved, while anger mounts over corruption and mismanagement. Giorgio Meloni's neo-fascist restoration capitalised on this public frustration with a consistent message, while, at the same time, giving the appearance of moderating down, and indeed she has so far governed simply as a conservative...but there is no way not to look askance at a Mussolini venerator leading Italy, or not to fear what might come down the line as her power grows. (Indeed, she is the most popular leader in the G7 - not actually popular, but it’s no mean feat to almost break even in a time of deep dissatisfaction with incumbent governments.)
What can we learn from these examples? Two things. One, they have a remarkably consistent tendency to despise democracy and to move, and quickly, to dismantle democracy once they get into power. (The USA might soon be joining this list.) Democracy itself must be on the ballot. Two, they capitalise aggressively on public disgust with democratic politicians once their collective efforts reach a breaking point of failure. So, um…don’t get there, and if you do, wake up and work together to get back from the brink, fast. Even if that means bringing JLM into the tent. I can't believe I'm saying this, but...well done to the French people.
If the far-right had won here, the cataclysm visited upon Europe would have been almost unprecedented. Of the list above, only Russia and Germany rank as clearly more important, both being bigger and more dangerous states than France. And, of course, Italy and Spain, only a tier below France in the European power rankings, had actual dictatorships, not just a bunch of extremist politicians taking over their Assembly for a few years. Yet if Marine Le Pen gets into the beating heart of the EU, with the power to decide everything from the fate of France's immigrants to what happens in New Caledonia, the far right will receive one of their biggest wins in all of human history. The clock starts ticking down now to prevent that, and put in place somebody who can say, once and for all, "Non!".
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