Le Pen has lost to Macron again. What can this tell us about the state of Western politics, and is populism still a relevant force given its many electoral defeats?
With France just having reelected the incumbent Emmanuel Macron, it would be easy to assume that the wave of populism that has been ascendant across Europe and North America has died down. Macron faced his populist opponent Marine Le Pen again, just like five years ago, who has a strong working class following and some radical proposals concerning immigration much like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Giuseppe Conte, and Tino Chrupalla; and much like most of her populist peers Le Pen was defeated at the polls. Anti-immigrant populism has in a sense shown itself not to be electorally viable, populists stints in power have often been brief and they struggle to get reelected unlike the state-bearing parties of the centre right and centre left. Even after Le Pen sanded down all her edges and tried to appeal to more mainstream voters she was defeated; does this mean that the mid 2010’s style populism is no more?
As mentioned, by one measure the populists star appears to be fading. With Donald Trump leaving office some of the momentum of the populists movement faded in 2020. Still, Joe Biden’s victory was fairly close and across Europe populism was still doing well. On the other hand, France is a good case study in how populists are changing the political landscape, as political scientist Catherine Fieschi writes in a recent essay published in the Economist, the mainstays of French politics, the republican and socialist parties, have been completely obliterated since 2017. Le Pen may have lost, but the margins were a lot tighter for Macron this time around compared to in 2017. At the same time other radicals like Jean-Luc Mélenchon are doing well in the polls; Mélenchon was only a few percentage points short of becoming Macron’s challenger in the second round. Populism can’t seem to stay in power, but seems to always threaten to win elections.
One of the most interesting aspects of the contemporary populist movement is to me the fact that it is largely constructed on negative rather than positive aspirations, by which I mean that populists are mainly against things they dislike rather than for things they do like. Trump and Le Pen are anti-immigration and anti-establishment, tangible dislikes which can drive policy, but are generally for more nebulous concepts like ‘taking back control’, ‘sovereignty’, and of course ‘making America great again’. Voters across the West are clearly expressing that they are not satisfied with the world their politicians have built; and in rust belts with few jobs and hollowed out welfare systems, who can blame them? What ultimately makes me sure that populists will keep being a powerful force in Western politics is the fact that our political discourse is trapped in a binary state when centrist figures defend the current state of affairs which radicals desperately want to tear down.
A common trope of this sort of centrist-radical debate is that centrists argue that the radicals’ proposals can’t be implemented due to legal or economic constraints. “You can’t stop taking in immigrants, that would ruin the economy”, “You can’t raise corporate taxes, multinational companies would move away taking jobs with them”, “You can’t impose tariffs on foreign products to help national industries, that’s against EU law”. These specific arguments are of course made up examples, but I’m sure you’ve come across one form or another in your national politics. The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that it betrays a fundamental lack of imagination. The rules and structures making radicals’ proposals impractical were made by mortals and can be changed. As much as I think politicians like Le Pen and Trump misdiagnose their societies' problems, and as much as reflexively blaming immigrants is not going to solve anything, opposing those voices on procedural grounds is unimaginative and cowardly.
The reason populists are popular is that they rightly point out that our current societies have problems, and that our economic, political, and social structures are flawed and often fail the vulnerable. Pointing out flaws is a crucial step to improve, and the flaws that populists point out are real, but the remedy isn’t to tear it all down. Change should be a process rather than an event for it to be productive. After the dust settles revolutionaries will often face many of the same problems after the revolution as were there before. On the other hand, preventing radicals from tearing it all down isn’t enough, and establishment politicians like Macron and Biden seldom have any real visions either. They often focus on smaller scale ameliorations rather than fixing underlying problems. For example, Biden wants to forgive some student debt instead of actually changing the way universities are funded and thus he can, if successful, make life a little easier for his educated millennial voters while the same voters' children will be forced to take on the same level of debt to fund their higher educations.
Macron and Le Pen are good representations of the state of Western politics in the early 2020’s. One wants to preserve the system and the other wants to destroy it. I think we’re likely to be stuck in this binary dynamic of preserve/destroy the system for quite a while still, and in a world where this is the primary political cleavage there will always be a place for the Le Pen-style right-wing populist. Le Pen may be defeated once more, but she and others like her will continue to be relevant until there is a new force in Western politics which has an ambitious positive agenda while at the same time being interested in preserving the current structures that do still work.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about French politics here, or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by Ashley Fontana feom Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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