Pandora's Ballot

The fortnight between the first round of the presidential elections to Sunday's runoff sparked an intensewriting frenzy among the French. The on-line site of LIBERATION featured dozens of daily comments, reactions,analyses and debates. How Jean-Marie Le Pen had ended up in the second-round of the elections, for the firsttime and beyond all expectations, fostered explanations that proliferated from two main sources. One centeredon a pure luck factor, the other on the rising tide of the European far-right.

Recall that in the French political system, the president is elected through a direct vote. TheConstitution of the 5th Republic, implemented by De Gaulle in 1959, allows for numerous candidates to appearin a first round, with the two leading scorers being entitled to a second-round or runoff election. Thepresident is ensured with majority rule.

With the elections now over, France has confirmed to its own satisfaction a refusal to flirt with thefar-right. Jacques Chirac, cumulating the votes of the former 'plural left' coalition, has been swept to alandslide victory in his bid for re-election. Tallied at a historically high 82.14%, he has crushed his rivalthe far-right contender, Le Pen. The French political and media establishment played its card firmly byproclaiming Chirac's re-election as a 'victory for democracy and the Republic.'

The first round saw the total left vote hover at 45%. Leaving aside any speculation as to how much of theabsentee vote would have been rallied to it--a third would not be an unfair estimate--, France as a collectivewhole is not prepared to think through a fascist mind. As for what some observers have questioned about thehidden recesses of its soul, we'll have to stand with the conviction that the soul is merely illusion.

Yet that illusory soul was what remained deeply disheveled in the wake of the first-round vote. Adjacent topragmatic explanations, prominent were descriptions of folly, or even madness. The French voting public wouldhave grown mad in its suicidal split voting and absenteeism. The debates in LIBERATION coalesced into judgmentcast on the experiment of protest voting. Peter Slotherdijk's Symbolist paean to the fantastic possibilitiesafforded by the French political system basked in the fair smells of the Parisian springtime ("En ceDimanche-Gras français": May 3, 2002). By contrast, Salman Rushdie ("En France, des illusionsdangereuses": April 30, 2002) witnessed streaks of madness in an erring vote reminiscent of Situationistdrifting. As an appropriate alert their readings pointed as much to the left's wide-ranging protest vote as tothe FN's meager-by-comparison 17%.

But "madness"? It appears that this is the way innovative, progressive politics is to be stampedthese days. It oddly triggers memories of Kissinger castigating Chilean voting collectives as irresponsible,all the better reason to back up the military plotters. (Perhaps we needn't dwell into such history:Christopher Hitchens' rants against the post-9/11 left would surely do.) Ever since exit polls unveiled theunimaginable on April 21, the French press, media, political class and many of its intellectuals, called forthe population to keep their good sense and shift their vote to Jacques Chirac. To be more accurate: theydownright threatened the electorate to do so.

The media pleaded painstakingly with the accused and cowardly Le Pen voters, or at least his invisibleones. And the ploy was effective. In his Marseilles stronghold, Le Pen campaign staffers suffered to pad ahall that would have otherwise been tearing at the seams. As the last major FN rally, it was a defining momentfor Le Pen's inertia in the lead-up to the runoff.

Whether Le Pen's voters had receded into the shadows or dwindled to a hardcore, the results of the firstround showed there to be no greater amount of representative interest for the Front National in France. Theprofessed 17%, in addition to FN renegade Bruno Megret's 5%, never tallied at the 22% of the entire votingpublic as claimed, but only of those who actually voted. Taking the 28% of absentees into account with theadditional 5% of blank or destroyed votes, that 17% should have shrunken rapidly to 12% on anyone's pocketcalculator. This score changes little from the one the FN has reaped in every major election for 15 years.

Yet the media plowed ahead, equating the runoff election to a struggle pitting democracy against fascism,while leaving the protest vote to vanish in a blur of panic.

In the runoff, absenteeism was slashed to 20.29%, with the number of blank or destroyed ballots holdingsteady at about 5%. In the end, the two far-right parties rallied to barely gather 18%--totaling at about 15%of the entire vote, then. Faced with the media's solid opposition, the far-right only managed to increase itsranks by 10%, though that figure does represent about 6 million French citizens.

While it's undeniable that the FN's brand of nationalism is tainted by racism and nostalgia for the Nazigrandeur best portrayed in Leni Riefenstahl films, the equation with anti-democracy is seriously flawed. Nomatter how much the media may have wanted to protect the French public from what it appeared to notcomprehend, the oblivion into which the protest vote sank is too symptomatic for the story to stand.

It's of capital importance to bear in mind how the FN has actually prospered under democracy. It's vital tounderstand how democracy and the far-right conservative, racist nationalism and roughneck politics of a Le Penhas benefited from democracy--or 'democracy' so-called. This has very little to do with any presumed liberalgenerosity endemic to this system toward forces that seek its destruction. These exist, of course, and they'reincarnate in the skinhead shock troops partaking of Le Pen's closest entourage. Still, were there a blindspotin the horrified reaction to the rise of the far-right and the risks France faced, it's that Le Pen's team areintent on correcting what 'democracy' has become.

Wherever the far-right may lead and whatever the political system they might choose to impose in the futureif and when given the opportunity, the plain fact is that the FN are integrally part of French democracy. Bycontrast, as long as French democracy affords such coexistence with the sophisticated and refinedethnic-centered bigotry of the FN, can the media and intellectuals still make claims for the sacred status ofdemocracy and the need to be affiliated to it?

Nothing suggests that the FN would remain devoted to the system through which it reached its pedigree.Whether they do or don't almost remains irrelevant given that many of their policies have been tended to bycenter-right--and center-left--governments. This is the democracy the French media has corralled theelectorate into ratifying.

Was it then folly or madness to open the Pandora's box-- or can of worms-- in protest via democratic andnon-democratic means to dispersing the megaliths of the French political class? Both Sloterdijk's spleen("the left's return to power presupposes that it bid farewell to the wounds of the 20th century: to theexpressionist esthetic of extremism and the taste for the radical") and Rushdie's reality therapy("After being fooled on Afghanistan, the European left is now being fooled about itself"), cast asthey are from opposite sides of the observer's street, do end up meeting. In their ink we read thatprogressives who question whether this is the appropriate form that democracy should be taking are actuallyscratching at the surface of the great taboo.

For those among us who share in the need for such ballot action, 'street crime' or 'insecurite' cannot everbe accepted as the result of immigration. What these terms refer to is a complex, disconcerting cluster oftorn democratic aspirations and ever-increasing oligarchic influx into legislative possibilities. A decayingsociety results from computation overkill ultimately demeaning education in the liberal arts, matched withboth the socialized pressure of empowerment solely through corporate employment, and the macabre flip-side ofravaging social inequality. To claim this decline as caused by the efforts made by foreign workers to do thejobs that Europeans would not is the vision from which we cannot hesitate to part. Moreover, foreign 'workers'have also become 'professionals' from abroad. Their contribution has sustained the growth of Westernsocieties-- often to the detriment of their own ancestral ones.

This why the international dimension of the protest cannot be underestimated. As France is the cradle ofmodern politics, it was only fitting for the more determined, for the most democratic, to utter their voicesthere first. The low score of the Communist Party is completely part of the rejection, and by no means asymptom of the left's failure. It has long been out of the game. Perhaps not surprisingly, this progressiveprotest, ranging anywhere from a quarter to a third of the vote, has now been strikingly shorn of itsreasonable passion, all with the media's complicity. As for Le Pen voters, well, they could be 'understood',and 'swayed'. But the protesting left, deprived of a soul, had lost its mind.

At least out-going Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's team kept smart job-creation programs as a priority. AsMartine Aubry, ex-Minister of Labor, reminded viewers in her post-election comments, recent French immigrantsare tired of being promised new measures of social integration instead of new jobs to integrate. Without this,even the most cynical politician recognizes there can be little appeasement in the near future. A MBA-floodedmarket doesn't translate into new job creation--especially in a country like France where few are convinced ofthe US's simple prescriptions for a strong economy.

In the first round, then, over 25% of voters sent a pragmatic message to both the governing plural leftcoalition and the democratic system it bolstered. The fact that they were able to, as opposed to whatAmericans like to believe their Constitution affords, has demonstrated the broader scope of democracy inFrance. Sloterdijk's analysis hits right on here. In terms of real power, of course, the results of thefirst-round stand almost symbolically, as little of that vast-ranging expression holds the weight ofparliamentary representation. It may be a kind of direct democracy, as many progressive political analysts areworking toward. Still, devoid of representation, we merely wind up in square one. And that square lies in thecity, street and alternative media.

By contrast, Rushdie was willing to settle for much too little and, as far as I can see, much too late. Ifthe result of pressing for greater democracy renders a system foolishly vulnerable to fascist elements, itjust banishes a very living rejection, which is that democracy as it exists now in the West is simply toorestrictive.

It's restrictive in terms of debate, as the press has now fallen entirely into the sparse hands of a fewmedia conglomerates promoting the ideal object: monopoly control through ever greater mergers. It's alsopolicy-constrained, as lobby-groups, i.e. former politicians seeking favor from government on behalf ofcorporations at exuberant consulting fees, interfere with the legislative and executive process. It'struncated judicially with the international loopholes allowing for existence of tax shelters, or 'the fiscalparadises' better named in other languages. They're surely among the great obstacles to a more fluidtax-collection system without which, as the right may declaim to great effect, the public sector has its handstied. The problem is not the public sector however, nor that the latter stifles free enterprise. It is thatthe insidious hands siphoning funds from especially profitable public sector firms have now jumped ship intoprivate gardens, given that tax shelters have skyrocketed through the facilities of the 'modernized', 'globalized'economy.

These factors and others have allowed the courageous expression of the French voting public to reject'democracy' as they see it instituted in their country. It's no easy decision to make. Most of Anglo-America'sbrightest minds do not hesitate to consider this power as stark lunacy. Then again with the Bush team sittingin the Oval office, Anglo-America lost its claim as the world's most democratic nation in January 2001. Towhich, all Rushdie can say is vote for Chirac: "the result will be a few more years of him. But it's theprice to pay. The garden cannot be left to the serpent." But what good is a garden deprived of the sowers?

Le Pen's death knell resounded when Ernest-Antoine de Selliere, head of the MEDEF, France's leading chamberof commerce, rejected the FN economic platform item-by-item. As one of the plural left coalition's bitterestopponents, especially regarding the 35-hour work week, the MEDEF were able to cleanse their rep and asserttheir allegiance to democracy.

In case the print and television media weren't successful in spreading enough fear through the population,a secret poll was conducted by the Renseignements Generaux, the French national intelligence agency. In theleak through which it was meant to spread, Le Pen was given a 42% finish. An addendum forebodingly did notexclude victory. Claimed to be tested amongst three other target groups, it's obvious that those involved inthe polling deserve to be fired. That's assuming, of course, that their intent of spreading fear viadisinformation was left unmet.

I was concerned at one point about the attitude the 'provinces' might display toward the capital'sparochialism. But 20% abstention remained, and Pandora was appeased despite the lost chance at a photo-op ofthe faces inside voting booths as they checked off their compulsion to vote for conscience's sake, obeying thecategorical imperative to vote for democracy in utter disgust.

Gaullist observers have spoken optimistically of the Republic's strengths, about how the Constitution ofits 5th incarnation has been approved in this second round. LE FIGARO's Alain Gerard Slama, one of France'sleading conservative political analysts, was quick to emphasize that the incredible power endowed to Chirac inhis landslide victory has enabled real policy decisions. "Tout est dans ses mains": everything's inhis hands, he insisted during the post-election coverage on the international French station, TV5. If thefuture depends on how he'll manage the victory, Chirac's already limping through its lopsidedness in adesperate attempt to efface the memory of the plural left. And I do ultimate beg to differ with Mr Slama:everything depends not on Chirac, but on June's legislative (general) elections, and that with or without themedia's assent.

Norman Madarasz is a researcher in philosophy. He has lived in France, and now lives in Rio de Janeiro.He welcomes comments at normanmadarasz@hotmail.com. Thisarticle originally appeared in CounterPunch on May 7, 2002.