France 2017 Election Thread

Niccolo and Donkey Friday 9 Dec 2016

In secular France, Catholic conservatism makes a comeback

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François Fillon, a conservative candidate in France’s 2017 presidential election, samples food during a visit to a butcher shop in Chantenay-Villedieu, western France, on Dec. 1.

CHARTRES, France — For many French voters, François Fillon is more than a leading contender for president in next year’s elections: He is viewed as a crusader in the throes of a holy war.

When Fillon handily won both rounds of France’s conservative primaries last month, he campaigned mostly on a genteel conservatism of economic restructuring and strengthened national security. But in a country that firmly defines itself as “secular” in its constitution, Fillon’s unexpected victory represented an astonishing prospect: the political reawakening of Catholic France after decades of slumber.

As right-wing and populist leaders across Europe — such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France — increasingly turn toward Christian values, Fillon has ignited a wave of nostalgia for a nation of traditional families and quaint village churches. It is a nation that he and many of his supporters say is under siege from the dual threats of multiculturalism and Islamist terrorism. As evidence, conservatives cite the slaying of an 85-year-old village priest in July by Islamic State-inspired militants, explaining it as an assault on the essence of France.

Fillon, the presidential nominee of the center-right party now known as the Republicans, has repeatedly pledged to defend “family values” — which has often translated into staunch opposition to same-sex marriage and, lately, to adoption by same-sex parents. When the fervent Roman Catholic responds to terrorist violence, he often does so in the lofty language of religious rapture. The war against the Islamic State, he wrote in his recent book, is “a battle of the end times,” sounded with “trumpets of the apocalypse.”

Catholics carry a statue during the “Grand Pardon” procession on July 26 in Sainte-Anne-d’Auray, western France. (Jean-Sebastien Evrard/AFP/Getty Images)
In short, what he promises is a return to his nation’s roots. And in his eyes, those roots are fundamentally Catholic.

Although France is renowned for strict prohibitions on religious displays in public spaces — notably on certain types of veils worn by many Muslim women — it is also a country of some 45,000 Catholic churches and one whose public holidays are almost exclusively Christian in origin. France does not keep statistics on race or religion, but a vast majority of its citizens are said to be either practicing Catholics or agnostics from Catholic backgrounds.

Some insist that France would not exist without the Catholic Church: The nation’s oft-invoked creation myth begins, after all, with the baptism of Clovis I, who united the kingdom of the Franks in the 6th century. And if the French Revolution of 1789 sought to banish religion from public life, it never eradicated religion from private life.

“We have a secular state but not a secular society,” said Matthieu Rougé, pastor of Paris’s St. Ferdinand des Ternes Catholic Church and an expert in political theology.

“The majority of the French are recognized as cultural Catholics. They may have studied in a Catholic school, they marry in churches, and they baptize their children. They are Catholic,” he said. “All our streets, the names of our towns and villages — everything is related in some way to the Catholic faith.”

In provincial towns like Chartres — and in Fillon’s native northwest region — that ancient relationship is apparent everywhere. Anchored by a majestic medieval cathedral, Chartres is home to a relic said to be the tunic that the Virgin Mary wore at the birth of Jesus. In a country where a majority of the public opposed the “burkini” on grounds that it violated secular values, this fragment of cloth draws thousands of pilgrims every year.

Voters in Chartres said Fillon appealed to them because he defended Catholic virtues that, in their eyes, France has forgotten as it has evolved into an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan society.

“Mr. Fillon is a true Catholic, a man of tradition and rooted to the place he is from,” said Odile Steinmetz, 82, a retiree and practicing Catholic, who voted for him in both of the primary rounds.

Philippe and Sandrine Mathieu, 51 and 41, respectively, work in a framing shop near Chartres Cathedral. Although they described themselves as non-practicing Catholics, both said Fillon’s Catholic identity appealed to them at least as much as their perception of his seriousness.

“For 20, 30 years, there’s no social cohesion in France,” said Philippe Mathieu. “We’ve lost our values.”

Asked to define these values, Sandrine Mathieu explained that they had sent their children to local Catholic schools instead of public schools because “there they say, ‘Bonjour, madame.’ ”

These sentiments, analysts say, suggest the emergence of a new French conservatism increasingly focused on the concept of patrimony, an amorphous sense of cultural inheritance largely unrelated to matters of policy or the economy.

“These voters consider themselves as legitimate defenders,” said Denis Pelletier, a historian who specializes in Catholicism. “They are defending France. There is economic liberalism there, but mostly there are traditional family values, authority and a sense of the moral order.”

Members of the clergy explain this increasing embrace of religion in the context of recent terrorist attacks, which they say have drawn many secular French Catholics back into churches for the first time in years.

“In a moment of uncertainty,” said Pierre Durieux, an official in the Catholic diocese of Lyon, “the Christian faith becomes a source of solace for so many. The church is a community that allows people to continue to explore their strong emotions, confront their fears, through ritual and prayer.”

For Steinmetz in Chartres, the church is the last line of defense in France’s war on terrorism.

“With Daesh,” she said, using an alternate name for the Islamic State, “we have to take back our country and guard its Catholic values. Because they want to kill us all.”

Niccolo and Donkey Friday 9 Dec 2016

Time to think the unthinkable about President Le Pen

Could President Marine Le Pen trigger article 50 without a parliamentary vote? Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty , that is, to take France out of the European Union, following Britain. Such is the question I find myself discussing in Paris with leading French experts. Provisional conclusion: since France, unlike Britain, is a presidential democracy, she could probably do it herself initially, but it would then require parliament to vote a revision of the French constitution. The mere fact that my French friends raise the question, even very hypothetically and three-quarters-jokingly, is a sign of the times. What was it Rousseau said ? “To be sane in a world of madmen is in itself a kind of madness.”

It is, of course, unthinkable that the leader of the rightwing, populist, anti-immigration Front National should become president of the French republic in elections next May. Just as it was unthinkable that Britain should vote to leave the EU and unthinkable that the US would elect Donald Trump. I have come here partly to seek reassurance that the unthinkable will not happen again, this time at the very heart of Europe . I will take the Eurostar back to London very far from reassured.

To be sure, most of those I talk to are still confident that she will lose to François Fillon , the candidate of the centre-right. In the second round of the presidential election, voters of the centre-left will rally round, holding their noses to vote for Fillon – for the sake of the republic. After all, in 2002 they voted for Jacques Chirac to keep out Marine Le Pen’s father, the founder of the Front National, sighing “better the thief than the fascist” . Protest votes in European and local elections are one thing, but a presidential election is serious.

Fillon, with his strong conservative Catholic patriotism, and his reassuring personal solidity, can win back many Front National voters in rural, urban and suburban France . On current polling, both the leading candidates might get about a quarter of the votes in the first round, on 23 April, but in the second, on 7 May, Fillon would walk home with about two-thirds of the votes. Thus far the conventional wisdom and opinion polls, which served us so well in Britain and the US.

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François Fillon, left, ‘has a combination of social conservatism and economic liberalism that risks alienating voters on both counts’. Photograph: Jean-Francois Monier/AFP/Getty Images
Now for the doubts. Fillon has a combination of social conservatism and economic liberalism that is unusual in France, and he risks alienating voters on both counts. He takes conservative Catholic positions on issues such as surrogate motherhood and gay marriage. At the same time, he wants to deregulate the economy, slash 500,000 public sector jobs, reform the national health system and cut welfare benefits. Libération recently caricatured him on its front cover with a Margaret Thatcher hair-do . Voices are raised against this French Thatcherism even in his own party. For voters coming from the fragmented left, this may be too much to swallow, so they may abstain in the second round. But the economic liberalism also makes him vulnerable among the working-class and petit-bourgeois voters he needs to win back from the Front National. They want to be reassured and protected, not challenged à la Thatcher.

Underneath is the general sense of malaise, with economic growth barely reaching 1% last year and close to 25% youth unemployment; a resentment one encounters at every turn against a political class seen as remote, self-serving and corrupt; and a widespread desire to give the whole bloody system a good kicking. While Fillon is not from the classic Parisian elite, he is clearly of the establishment. As one person close to Le Pen put it: “ Fillon, il est système .” And then history just seems to be going this way at the moment, with Trump and Brexit normalising populist choices.

Last but not least, Le Pen is a strong candidate, the very model of a modern populist, who marshals all these arguments forcefully. Take a look at the Front National official Facebook page and watch her Wednesday evening TV interview embedded there. There she is, smiling down from the top of the page, with a nice blue rose (appropriating the Socialists’ symbol, but changing the colour) that lies horizontally between the words “Marine” and “Présidente”. Note the “e” on the end of “Président”: she would be France’s first female president.

In the TV interview, she has the Faragesque and Trumpian knack of seeming to speak the language of ordinary folk. She is standing for election “in the name of the people”, she says, whereas Fillon is standing “in the name of the European commission, in the name of the banks, in the name of Monsieur Schäuble”. She defends “the return of the nation … and democracy”, adding that “many countries have made this choice”. She mentions first the US, then Britain, then Italy voting “no” in the recent referendum. Oh yes, and, “I defend the rights of women”.

What would she do about Europe? She wants a referendum on France’s membership of the EU: “I’m not afraid of the people.” She will organise the referendum, she says emphatically, and she will respect the result.

No, I’m not predicting Frexit. If there’s one thing you can safely say about the French it is that they don’t have a British attitude to Europe. But Europe Day next 9 May, two days after France’s presidential decider, could be a gloomy one.

Welund Friday 9 Dec 2016

The only appropriate name is "Frogxit."

Ferdinand Saturday 10 Dec 2016

This is a disingenuous conflation of Europe and the EU. In 2005, the French and the Dutch rejected the EU constitution through referenda in the face of campaigns supporting it from both the mainstream left and right political and media classes. I can easily see the French rejecting the EU.

Welund Saturday 10 Dec 2016

The question is not what the French people think, as we can see from the referendum, but whether the French political system will allow a change even today. The French will have to avoid the "Republican" alliance or whatever it's called between the Cons and Socialists, and vote against Fillion, who is at least pretending to be Euroskeptic. CorrecT?

Småland Thursday 5 Jan 2017

Le Pen Shouldn't Count On Putin's Money

I though this was interesting, I suppose Putin would prefer Le Pen, but Fillon wouldn't be so bad either I suppose?

Perhaps it was to sweeten her appeal to Russian banks that Le Pen reiterated this week that she didn't consider Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine illegal. She recognizes the referendum held in the peninsula after non-uniformed Russian troops took control of it. That earned her more airtime on Russian television but no loan offers so far, perhaps because Francois Fillon, the center-right candidate more likely than Le Pen to win the presidential election this year, is also an opponent of European sanctions imposed on Russia since the Crimea annexation. Russia likes the nationalist parties to stir up trouble in Western countries, but President Vladimir Putin is a realist, and the benefits of keeping Fillon friendly -- something helping his rival would likely not achieve -- are far greater than those of funding Le Pen.

An anecdote: I asked my friend with family in France how they would be voting. He said he didn't know but that he suspected they would vote for Le Pen. Apparently they would change the subject any time he brought it up and he said that they would never never admit voting for her. The same phenomenon of hidden votes that we have seen in all other recent elections I guess.

Tony Thursday 5 Jan 2017

Everyone's waiting for a critical mass of high-profile people to tell them it's ok to start goose-stepping again.

You can count on people to be cowards.

WiRE Thursday 5 Jan 2017

Hitler and his SA street fighters were the uncowards who did this in the 20s and basically did it anyways, street fighting , in beer halls and grew into a true "people's army" with 6+million fighters. Never believe it can't happen again.

opcorn:

Saruman Wednesday 18 Jan 2017

I am going to make an effort to focus on what happens in France in 2017 in particular because I think France, along with the Netherlands are the biggest opportunities to further upset the apple-cart, so to speak. I'm not that optimistic about the German elections (look at Merkel's approval rating! Ridiculous!), but I will try to follow them as well.

Here were Le Pen's strongest regions in the first round of the 2012 Presidential election fwiw:

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Testos Terone Wednesday 18 Jan 2017

I'm betting on Fillon winning the presidency in the second tour facing Le Pen. Ex-Prime minister Valls has absolutely no chance while he carries Hollande's party and legacy (Socialist Party). Then the neoliberals are divided between two parties: conservative neoliberals (Fillon, Les Républicains) and the socially liberal, economic neoliberals (Macron, En Marche).

Seeing as the French people historically prefered corruption over a Le Pen, this election will likely resemble the one in 2002. And as the French system is made to stop radical elements from winning the presidency. In the first tour, Fillon and Le Pen will most likely win the most votes, then for the second tour, all the liberals who were defeated in the first round will join together to stop the Front National. The chances of Le Pen winning a second round against a neoliberal coalition led by a experienced conservative politician is very unlikely at this moment.

A terrorist attack between the first and second round of the elections could change everything though. There's still time for the the Thatcherites to make enormous blunders and for Le Pen to finally be able to organize unite the working class real left who are abused by neoliberals policies and the right who are displeased with the libertine ideas professed by the current French government. Two groups completely compatible that would be enough to beat the neoliberal coalition in the second round.

And I haven't even taken into account the massive immigration between 2002 and 2017.

France 2017 Election Thread

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