Message from France that Blair must not ignore

DUMAS could have written the script for the French presidential election. Jean-Marie Le Pen burst into a predictable duel between two old musketeers and stole a sword. It is as if Athos and Porthos, surprised in companionable quarrels behind the Luxembourg, were forced to unite against an intruder.

So at least until after the second round, hostilities are suspended between moderates. In consequence, there will be more votes for Le Pen. For the main parties, mutual cosiness is not the solution: it is their problem.

To voters who want them to fight for convictions, cohabitation is carve-up.

Compromise is collaboration. The Euro-model of democracy, which overvalues marginal parties and minority opinions, is designed to perpetuate moderation by compelling compromise.

Extremisms, according to the theory, cancel each other out. In practice, voters get frustrated and occasionally unleash a demon among the swine, someone to disturb the equilibrium, like the Austrian enfant terrible Jorgen Haider, or the anti-immigrant "ruler of Rotterdam" Pim Fortuyn, or Le Pen.

The effect is recurrent, therefore predictable. So we can relax - or can we?

Since yesterday, pundits and politicians evince a new anxiety: the nationalist Right, they say, is resurgent. Europe is in danger. The great civilised consensus of our time - liberalism, pluralism, Europeanisation and globalisation - is under threat. The rise of Le Pen, according to this morning's columns in most European newspapers, is part of a vast phenomenon.

Resentment of immigrants and fear of crime have brought spectacular successes for extremists in odd spots around our continent. The greatest danger, perhaps, is that we shall all be suckered by Le Pen's rhetoric into believing in his "new dawn".

To keep today's news in perspective, it is important to remember the peculiarities of yesterday's election.

Lionel Jospin is the kind of politician people need but do not want: a political plasterer who can smooth cracks and paste coalitions together.

Le Pen has few such constructive or even cosmetic qualities: he is a demolitionman who can detonate crisis and crack the pillars of the Establishment - an explosive demagogue, for whom newspapers are touchpaper to ignite electoral emotions.

Like Chirac, in one respect, he is classic bad-boy of the kind French voters love: he proudly exhibits the scars of countless scandals. Jospin is good at everything in politics, except being a candidate, which is Le Pen's great strength.

Apathy warped yesterday's outcome, although a turnout of 70 per cent is rather impressive by contemporary standards. Apathy is a disease of democracy. Post-ideological consensus takes value from votes. Electors make a rational calculation of their impact and conclude that it is not worth going to the polls. It is a symptom of indifference or ennui - not necessarily a sign of revulsion from the system, much less alienation. It exaggerates the apparent strength of extremists and protesters, who nurse enough inner outrage to go to the polls.

TODAY ' S genuinely Euro-wide phenomenon is not so much the rise of the Right as the retreat of the Left. Jospin's supporters are bleating with resentment at the Trotskyite candidate, Arlette Leguillier, whose six per cent of support supposedly let in Le Pen.

Communists, loony- Left and militants took a few percentage points more.

The real story of the statistics is quite different. The combined Left vote has crashed in France.

Jospin's Socialist party has become a bourgeois simulcrum of its former self - a sell-out outfit like Blairite New Labour. It lost all coherence by cohabiting with Chirac to the Right, and compromising on the Left with a lot of tiny, sectional parties which held the balance of power. It got its just deserts from the voters. The communists-- a great historic party in France - have withered, as they have almost everywhere, as their class-constituency has shrunk and their historic predictions of class warfare have failed.

The most apathetic voters have been the workers of the big industrial cities. The centre is the only ineradicable part of the democratic spectrum: at the moment, the Right is offering the only challenge to ideological uniformity.

This does not mean, however, that the Left's loss is necessarily the extreme Right's gain. In Germany, another election made today's front pages: the debacle of the ruling SPD in the contest for the regional parliament of Magdeburg. Here the extreme Right has also suffered meltdown, dissolving in dissent since a highpoint in 1998, when it got nearly 13 per cent of the vote.

The Left's ebb has left most European shores - in recent national elections in Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Italy and Norway - occupied by the moderate Right. Le Pen's first-round presidential vote has barely increased since the last election. His party has lost all but one of its mayoralties.

None the less, if there is no need for panic, there is no room for complacency, either.

We are not on the verge of a Europe-wide lurch to the Right, but we do face potentially uncontainable problems: in the long term, copybook conditions for the revival of all kinds of authoritarianism could recur.

Toleration is under strain in a continent of increasing cultural diversity.

When we are glutted with freedom, we overvalue lawand-order. Bewildered by the pace of change, people turn to "noisy little men" and easy-sounding solutions.

For mainstream politicians, the worst response is to try to pre- empt them by wooing extremist votes. The Blair Government has already veered to the Right in the hope of escaping a fate like Jospin's. By deserting the weak for the strong - being a chum for wealth and superpower, instead of a champion for the poor and oppressed - New Labour forfeits principles and imperils trust.

The British electorate is viscerally moral-and-middleminded.

First-past-thepost elections are hostile environments for parties like Le Pen's. British parties will succeed best by sticking to the Centre.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, and author of Civilisations.

Copyright 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.