Periods of political transition, in which the old world dies while the new world takes time to emerge, always produce a fundamental collapse in morality. Principles no longer have any currency, the truth gives way to political slander and dignity is no longer in vogue. This is precisely what the incumbent ruling majority under Emmanuel Macron has demonstrated since the first round of the legislative elections last Sunday June 12th.
Having been elected twice thanks to a principled vote to keep out the far-right, Emmanuel Macron has allowed his own political camp to discard the values that he had brandished for his own benefit under the guise of an injunction to voters based on republican principles. In the majority of the sixty or so constituencies where in this Sunday's decisive second round of the elections candidates from the broad left and environmental alliance NUPES will go head-to-head against candidates from Rassemblement National, the presidential coalition has equivocated about whom its voters should back. Indeed, it has even giving a little boost to the xenophobic, identity-based and authoritarian far-right.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
On top of this political cynicism we have also witnessed the crudest of political discourse employing an unspeakable intellectual vulgarity. Making no attempt to control them, the presidential party has allowed some of its candidates eliminated in the first round or who are at risk in the second to portray the leftwing opposition as monstrous bogeymen, unleashing tirades in which words ending in '-ism' have become scare words that have lost all normal meaning. This is nothing other than a sinister repetition, in the form of tragic farce, of that old refrain from the forces of conservatism in the 1930s when they were faced with the possibility of democratic and social change: “Better Hitler than the Front Populaire” (read Fabien Escalona's analysis on the return of the 'Red Peril').
Emmanuel Macron himself spoke in similar vein as he addressed the cameras on the tarmac at Orly Airport near Paris on Tuesday June 14th just minutes before flying off to visit Romania, Moldavia and Ukraine, jumbling up his responsibilities as head of state and his posturing as a campaigning politician in an unthinkable way.
Euphemistically portraying the current war as “disorder”, without bothering to refer to the person responsible for it, he called for a “strong majority to ensure order” because “nothing would be worse than to add French disorder to world disorder”. He then declared: “The Republic must not miss out on a single vote on Sunday.” Even worse, in his final appeal for a “Republican surge” he had no compunction in transforming his opponents on the Left into enemies of the Republic.
An old and constant conservative chorus, this speech by the head of the party for order added lack of decency to its sense of archaism. Even though the six-month French presidency of the European Union has scarcely distinguished itself faced with Russia's aggression, other than in its hasty concern not to humiliate the warmonger behind the Russian attack, you have to have lost all sense of proportion to compare the situation created in Europe by the Russian invasion of Ukraine to that which would occur in France after a victory, even a relative victory, by the leftwing and environmentalist alliance. You also have to have forgotten the dignity of the office, part of whose function involves a responsibility for the country's unity, to dare to decree that one's opponents are excluded from the Republican camp.
“The [French] Republic is invaded by reactionaries of all types. They adore it with a curt and terrible love. They embrace it in order to suffocate it.” This warning from Émile Zola in the middle of the battle to establish the innocence of Captain Dreyfus against – at that time too – the party of order, is still relevant. The Republic that Emmanuel Macron brandishes consists of a dead kind of order; an order of social immobility, democratic impediments and foul ideologies. Based as it is on the defence of privileges and injustices, this vision of order stands opposed to society's vitality, its aspirations and its search for empowerment, its impatience and its hopes, of which the undreamt of union of the Left and environmentalists is both the product and the expression.
The compliment deserves to be sent back to where to came from: for Emmanuel Macron's presidency is the very incarnation of disorder. It has constantly spread and created disorder. It has done so by sapping the lifeblood out of democracy – evidence of this is the unprecedented abstention rate that has followed election campaigns deprived of any genuine confrontation between ideas and political programmes. It has done so by humiliating the people – never has state repression reached this level of violence amid official denial that police officers have abused their powers.
It has done so by spreading hate – it is under this presidency that the ideology of the far-right has become normalised by the media and in particular politically, including the theme of identity politics (read Stéphane Alliès's opinion article on this). It has done so by giving a helping hand to neo-fascism - having been elected to block it, this presidency has achieved the feat of increasing the ascendancy of the far-right, which is now on the threshold of historically unprecedented representation in Parliament (read the analysis by Fabien Escalona et Donatien Huet and by Lucie Delaporte). It has done so by shirking the climate emergency – to the point where it has turned its back on the Citizens' Convention and instead pursued policies that are damaging to the environment (see the video by Jade Lindgaard).
In summary, it has spread disorder by destroying political credibility - going back on its word, through unkept promises, crude manipulation, stripping words of their meaning … the peak came with the recent announcement by the presidency of a new national council of reconstruction to oversee pressing policy issues, the Conseil National de la Refondation (CNR) which quite deliberately has the same initials as the old wartime French Resistance body the Conseil National de la Résistance. This move came just before legislative elections to elect a new National Assembly whose very job is supposedly to draw up, debate and vote on new laws.
Democracy is much more than the holding of elections and government by the majority: it's a type of custom, of virtue, of scruples, of civic sense, of respect for your opponent; it's a moral code.
An enthusiast for presidential absolutism, Emmanuel Macron was signalling in advance his scorn for Parliamentary power. There was a time, long ago, when he was planning his raid on the presidency in 2017, that in addition to General Charles de Gaulle, creator of the Fifth Republic, Emmanuel Macron placed in his political pantheon a man who had been the most consistent opponent of excessive presidentialism. “No one had more of a sense of justice than Pierre Mendès France,” Macron wrote at the time in his book under the unlikely title of Revolution (XO editions, 2016).
But that principled reformer, who never practised rabble-rousing or dealt in lies, is reaching out from beyond the grave to admonish the current president. “Democracy is much more than the holding of elections and government by the majority: it's a type of custom, of virtue, of scruples, of civic sense, of respect for your opponent; it's a moral code,” wrote Mendès France in 'La verité guidait leurs pas' ('Truth guided their footsteps'), published by Gallimard in 1976.
The code that holds sway in the world of Emmanuel Macron has clearly become amoral. After the campaigns to demonise certain groups, a process that began as soon his first presidency began to encounter difficulties, and in which the disparaging term “separatist” and the label “Islamo-Leftist” were emblematic, it was very clear that virtue, scruples, a civic sense and respect for one's opponents were out of fashion for good.
How else can we understand political leaders, who are supposed to know history and know how to read, daring to transform the social and environmental manifesto of the NUPES alliance – whose reformist radicality remains profoundly democratic – into some form of totalitarian hell? One just has to read a recent opinion article in The New York Times – no leftist newspaper – to grasp the scale of the image of shrivelled mediocrity that they thus give of France, its public debates and its leaders.
This abandonment of principles and this scorn for the truth is accompanied by a rejection of any political honour, as mercilessly exposed by the issue of sexist and sexual violence.
Like the child in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes who points out that he is in fact naked while his courtiers pretend not to be aware of this, a secondary school pupil called Laura from Gaillac in south-west France bravely unmasked this imposter of a government when she recently questioned the president about this issue. This is a government that claims to defend the cause of women by keeping in post male ministers who have faced repeated and well-documented accusations over their behaviour towards women. A reading of the legislation that applies to companies in this area is enough to make clear that the government is failing to respect the very laws that it has itself enacted and by which all employers are bound, independent of any judicial referral or recourse.
The day may perhaps come when we will all be able to understand the amorality of a presidency that is uniquely preoccupied by its day-to-say survival, in an era when the current challenges and emergencies require vision, ambition and high-mindedness. For the time being it is down to us, with our votes, to punish this sham by turning politics once again into a collective project, one with shared horizons and a common cause.
To do this we must choose the alliance of the Left and environmentalists even though this does not mean giving a blank cheque to those who will be its elected representatives.
As well as the conviction-based reasons for voting this way, reasons which are completely respectable and relate to an emergency social and environmental programme whose initial measures are politically legitimate and economically coherent (see the analysis by Mathieu Dejean and by Romaric Godin), there are also three reasons of principle for doing so. These reasons can be shared by many citizens, and go beyond partisan labels or persuasions.
First of all, voting for NUPES is voting for change through the parliamentary route, through the revitalisation of deliberative democracy, through the construction of a majority based on ideas, and voting against the risks that are inherent in the personification of the presidency, which generates an excess or abuse of power.
Next, voting for NUPES is voting for a pluralist majority, guaranteeing the independence of its political components, favouring the diversity of its expression and the development of points of agreement, which is the reverse of the knee-jerk and disastrous discipline generated by a presidential majority.
Finally, voting for NUPES is voting for the political dynamism of society itself, of its independent expression, its struggles and mass movements, in the hope of encouraging effective representation of the working classes, as opposed to professional politics that has been taken over by career politicians.
This vote of principle is not about compliance or obedience. Always grounded in the reality documented in our journalistic work, Mediapart's electoral stances – in the past for François Hollande against Nicolas Sarkozy, and more recently for Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen – have never prevented us from carrying out, with just as much vigilance and independence, a critical examination of the policies carried out by the camp who benefited from our stance, and of those who were in charge of them too.
“Our job is not to please, nor to cause harm, it is to dip our pen in the wound.” During the nearly 15 years we have been in existence, Mediapart has always followed this approach of the French journalist Albert Londres, including towards those political groups who make up NUPES. Tomorrow it will apply all the more so to the alliance of the Left and environmentalists as this approach chimes with the need for democracy that leads us to take a stance in favour of this parliamentary change.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this opinion article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter