Party crisis in France

The result of the first round of the presidential election held in France on Sunday has certified that Emmanuel Macron aspires to reelection on April 24 with more margin than the polls predicted last week, Marine Le Pen is consecrated as the headliner of the extreme right to challenge the system and the left succumbs resoundingly to the division, the internal rivalries and the disastrous legacy left by the presidency of François Hollande. The defeat of the progressive offer is not even mitigated by the third place achieved by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with an electoral base that includes components of visceral protest capable of transferring its support to Le Pen in the second round.

The other finding, no less disturbing because it was anticipated, is that the great political actors of the Fifth Republic, the heirs of Gaullism and the refoundation of Socialist Party promoted by François Mitterrand, They have been shipwrecked in a sea of ​​contradictions. Nothing that they have represented for more than half a century will have continuity in the future because the tenor of the identity crisis that they must overcome has historical dimensions. Not even the approach to ultras postulates of Valerie Pecresse, candidate of the Republicans, beyond what was advised by prudence at the beginning of the campaign, has prevented the demagogue Eric Zemmour far exceeds it in votes and that, at the height of nonsense, a significant part of its voters can lean in the second round for Marine LePen despite his call not to do so.

Although there are many causes that explain the collapse of the traditional party system in France, perhaps the most relevant of all of them is the inadequacy of post-Gaullism and social democracy to profile of a changing society, increasingly heterogeneous and further removed from the patterns of political behavior forged by the great personal and ideological references of the Fifth Republic. The fact that May Macron be the great hope of the establishment to save the system does not fail to underline this departure from the political logic of the past. The president is an ideological hybrid, perhaps a conservative with social concerns of varying intensity, who disappoints the traditional right as soon as the sociological left, but who survives the onslaught of populism through an updated version of the presidential figure. It is neither, nor does it claim to be, a continuation of the tradition embodied for different reasons by Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand, but it emerges relatively unscathed from the cross-class discontent so prevalent everywhere.

It remains to be seen if these attributes of the president are enough to contain Le Pen within two weeks or if the protest vote plus an abstention above what was foreseeable favor Le Pen. The mobilizations of 2002 to prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen from occupying the head of state and of 2017 to contain his daughter were useful, but the side of the disappointed is growing who consider the discourse of the political elites to be ineffective, insufficient to face inequalities, needs and challenges typical of a community affected by the imbalances of globalization, the debate on the management of migratory flows and the erosion of the social pact, three crises shared by the vast majority of developed societies. That it is the extreme right that can raise the flag of social unrest is as dangerous as it is disturbing.