SUCH GAUL
Small Earthquake in France
Le Pen will go nowhere, but Europe's left is left behind.
The most important thing about the first round of France's presidential elections is not that the arch-chauvinist and hypernationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen will be the runoff's sacrificial lamb to the corrupt and uninspiring Gaullist, Jacques Chirac. The French electorate was clearly bored by the political establishment, 16 politicians imagined they could finish first or second, and Mr. Le Pen accurately predicted "the only possible surprise is me." As sometimes happens in such contests, the only candidate with a clearly defined position and a somewhat charismatic personality prevailed over the vague and the colorless.
Nobody believes that Mr. Le Pen will defeat Mr. Chirac, but he has achieved no less than two historic triumphs: the elimination of the Socialist Party's candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and the end of all hopes for a dominant Franco-German center-left alliance at the heart of the "new Europe." Henceforth, Europe will be dominated by a center-right bloc that runs from Tony Blair's England to Jose Maria Aznar's Spain and Silvio Berlusconi's Italy.
Ironically, this political earthquake was not accomplished by the kind of conservative political consensus that elected Messrs. Aznar and Berlusconi. Mr. Jospin was done in by a combination of the fickleness of his own people and the indifference of the electorate (nearly 28%, the highest percentage in the history of modern France, stayed away from the polls). Had the leftist voters concentrated their favors on Mr. Jospin, or had more of his own people showed up to vote, he would easily have finished second, and today the polls would undoubtedly show a neck-and-neck race for the presidency, instead of predicting close to 80% for Mr. Chirac against Mr. Le Pen. The socialists have only themselves to thank for handing the former a free pass to another seven years in the Elysee Palace.
The suicidal behavior of the French left bespeaks a more profound crisis in the European left and the growing strength of center-right and outright right-wing parties and candidates across the continent. The failure to rally around a single candidate, and the parallel failure to turn out their own voters, shows the extent to which the French Socialists have lost both a compelling political vision for the country and the discipline required to be a winning organization. Meanwhile, Mr. Aznar in Spain has won two elections by big margins, and Mr. Berlusconi in Italy has huge parliamentary majorities that will keep him in office for a full five-year term--a rarity in postwar Italy. Denmark has recently voted against the euro, and, in the biggest surprise of all, the center-right carried last weekend's elections in Saxony, a long-time leftist stronghold in what used to be East Germany. If such a region can vote out the Social Democrats, the auguries for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the upcoming German elections are now decidedly negative.
The defeat of the left in the European heartland--in France by their own hands, in Germany by their political opponents--is a major event, which will unfortunately be missed by most of the headline writers and deep thinkers. They have chosen to focus on Mr. Le Pen himself, and to attempt once again to frighten their readers with misleading visions of a re-emergent "fascism," just as they did when elections in Austria led to the inclusion of a chauvinist party in the ruling coalition a couple of years ago. Mr. Le Pen reflects the xenophobia of a substantial minority of French citizens toward the many millions of Arab and African immigrants--many of them illegal--who have taken up residence in and around major French cities in the past 20 years or so. Mr. Le Pen insists that he is a friend of France's legitimate Arab community, but he wants stricter immigration controls and instant deportation of any illegal immigrant caught committing a crime. He promises to cut taxes in half, give preferential treatment to French men and women for all government jobs, and crack down on crime.
Some years ago, he described the Holocaust as a footnote to European history, thereby earning a reputation as a nasty anti-Semite, but recently he has surprised many by strongly supporting Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. One may deplore all or part of this program, but it doesn't add up to fascism, which was a mass movement leading to a single-party dictatorship that promised to transform the world into something altogether new and dynamic. Mr. Le Pen is a reactionary elitist who speaks French with an old-fashioned elegance no longer heard, not a fascist. His vision of the French future is an idealistic vision of the French past.
In any event, we will not have to worry about Mr. Le Pen for more than the two weeks until the runoff. When Mr. Chirac is reelected, he will have to lead his country in a very new Europe, but not the center-left Europe so long imagined by most of the intellectuals and fashionable politicians. Through no particular merit of his own, Mr. Chirac will be a major player in a center-right Europe that will be more suspicious of the mounting power of the European bureaucracy in Brussels, less inclined to dissolve national identities in a new continental union, and keen on retaining more initiative in national legislatures.
Jean-Marie Le Pen will not win the French presidency, but his political victory is indeed substantial, perhaps even historic. By exposing the hollowness of the leftist vision and humiliating the long-time Socialist hegemon of French politics, he has provided Europeans with a welcome opportunity to rethink their own identities and to reshape their own policies.
Mr. Ledeen is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, "The War Against the Terror Masters," will be published shortly by St. Martin's Press.
