Elections in France Could Bring Extremists to Power

French voters begin the two-round process of electing a new National Assembly (their House) on Sunday, and the fear — or is it a frisson? — is that Nazis will take most of the 577 seats in the venerable old Palais Bourbon.

With slogans plucked from antiquity — “Fascism is at the gates!” “Vote New Popular Front!” — demonstrators make an extraordinary show of virtuous indignation against racism, police brutality, Islamophobia, and other ills of our times.

Individuals claiming to be “teachers” and “feminists,” among other subcategories of substitutes for the people (popolo, peuple, popular), man imaginary barricades while littering the streets, one guesses, with non-GMO carry-outs from joints run by Asian and African entrepreneurs. (READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: Every Spring Sport Has Its Glories — And Its Shame)

This from pals in France with whom I have been on the phone for the past couple of weeks, trying to figure out why President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Assembly and called a snap election. Granted, his Renaissance Party did not have a majority in the chamber, but does he expect to get one with this ploy which is permitted under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, instituted in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle and drafted by Michel Debre, one of his close associates and first prime minister. I mention this because the smart money is that very few people — in France, I mean — know this, and while they know who de Gaulle is they most of the time cannot place Debre.

They don’t know that Debre was a Catholic of Jewish parentage who did not think well of France-bashers. Nor do they know that the pre-World War II  “popular (ie, “people’s”) front” was led by an eminent,  literate gentleman, head of France’s Socialist Party, named Leon Blum.

Jewish though nonobservant, highly cultured, Blum agreed to a tactical electoral alliance with the Communists and Radical Republicans (center-leftists) in 1936 because a coalition had formed around anti-Semitic, anti-parliamentarian, anti-republican parties for the explicit purpose of overthrowing France’s constitutional order. Blum won the election, and though he waffled on foreign policy (even supported the Munich agreement), he pushed for rearmament to prepare for war with Germany. Arrested by the pro-German Vichy government, he survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp and worked to restore French democracy following World War II.

Apologies for the digression, but it is relevant to the present situation. Notwithstanding some wrong calls on policy, Blum never abandoned liberal democracy. He saved the “old house” of French socialism by leading a faction that after World War I rejected Lenin’s instructions to form the French Communist Party (PCF). He fought the radical left all his life and was not surprised when the PCF obeyed Stalin’s orders to support the Nazi-Soviet Pact that gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland, starting World War II.

The “New Popular Front” is far from the humanism, however misguided, of the original. It is led by lifelong leftist firebrand, Jean-Luc Melenchon, whose alliance with anti-communist liberals and social democrats defies reason. Leaders of the soft left, including the Socialist Party, are joining with an apologist for river-to-the-sea anti-Semites to secure a few parliamentary seats.

A Cover for Shameless Cynicism

The “stop fascism” hysteria is a cover for shameless cynicism. If there is a fascist threat in France it is coming not from the Rassemblement National, led by Marine Le Pen, but from movements implanted in the immigrant neighborhoods of France’s major cities that share the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian affiliate).

On the phone over the past fortnight, I get the impression that many in France are no less stumped than I am as to why Macron gambled on new elections. He may hope the French people, their minds concentrated as at a hanging, will return to a center-right majority. But with both Macron’s party and the remains of the Gaullists (now called Republicans) in disarray, such a majority would in most prognostications have to include the Nationalists led by Marine Le Pen.

Macron has branded Melenchon and Le Pen as twin opposites, but the moral equivalence is not there. Whatever sins of anti-Semitism and racism Marine’s father Jean-Marie committed have been disowned. Marine Le Pen is rock-solid on Israel’s fight against Hamas and denounces the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism in France since the 1940s.

Moreover, whereas the Melenchonistes are openly in favor of dismantling the Fifth Republic and “refounding” France along post-colonial demographics, the nationaux say and repeat they have no intention of challenging the institutions of the Republic, one of which happens to be presidential prerogatives in foreign affairs, regardless of who controls the Assembly. This has been the norm — termed co-habitation — when the legislature and the executive are controlled by different parties

The decades-long habit of viewing the national movement in its most xenophobic light — a habit that, admittedly, Jean-Marie Le Pen did little to discourage (as your correspondent reported in these and other papers) — obscured, though it should not have, the connections between immigration and security. (READ MORE: The French March Against Anti-Semitism)

Thus, feminist organizations and teachers’ unions protesting in the streets against fascism seem to be more concerned with the nationalists’ alleged anti-democratic tendencies than with the breakdown of order in public schools, where Islamists forbid girls to participate in sports or physical education and demand changes in the curricula to suit their views of history.

Nothing perhaps could be more cruelly symptomatic of what is at the gates of France, indeed inside the gates, than the recent beating and rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl at the hands of thugs mouthing anti-Semitic hate. And it cannot be dissociated from the far left’s apologetics for Hamas and its years-long campaign to stigmatize the police.

The defender’s public order will be mobilized, with reinforcements from the gendarmerie and support from friends and allies, Bundespolizei, carabinieri, New Scotland Yard, FBI, and NYCPD, to keep the streets safe for the tourists who will be visiting during the Olympic Games (July 27-August 11). No one can object (except the Islamo-gaucheries), but where will this leave ordinary French guys and dolls?

Going on in circles about this on the trans-ocean WhatsApp, it becomes clear this, in the end, is why no one gets these elections. No one gets these elections because no one wants to talk about the most important issue in France today — the loss of France to anti-French forces from within and without. No one, that is, except the Rassemblement National, which is the reason it is accused of “fascism.”

Nor does anyone mention, and here you will forgive me a touch of pedantry again, Charles de Gaulle’s attitude in this matter. Yet it could not be clearer or more relevant.

“Muslims, have you seen them? With their turbans and djellabas (baggy pants), you can see they are not French!”

He was diagnosing a “clash of civilizations” avant la lettre, but he also was being pragmatic: “If you offer them citizenship,” (this was proposed as a way to end the war in French Algeria), “what will stop them from coming here, where living standards are so much higher?”

And his famous quip: “Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises [his home town] will be called Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquees.”

These well-known Gaullian lines were repeated and published in best-selling books, notably C’était de Gaulle, written by his close associate and minister, Alain Peyrefitte. No one has ever claimed these and similar statements such as the rapid doubling and tripling of the Muslim population are fabricated or do not reflect his convictions. But they are no longer recalled in public. Lately, they have been referred to in small circulation journals, such as Causeur and Revue des Deux-Mondes, that try to break through the politically correct mindset (called, aptly, la pensée unique) that cannot admit France for decades has been up against a growing existential threat from within. (READ MORE: A Message From Europe)

De Gaulle was neither racist nor Islamophobic. He viewed with pride the successes of countless Muslim emigrants who, whether in humble jobs or elite professions, embraced France. However, he anticipated that there would be a normal communitarian trend in neighborhoods with a dense Muslim population.

By now, large numbers of immigrants have gone full Islamist, or have been forced to by the thugs who prey on them — about which you hear no objections from Melenchon’s La France Insoumise party, which translated means “France Unbowed,” which is ironic indeed considering he has bowed to the descendants of the invading hordes stopped at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel’s Christian army.

This surely is why Pierre Rigoulot, a true Tocquevillian liberal (and occasional TAS contributor), who always opposed Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and would prefer to see Macron get his act together and start behaving like a statesman instead of a self-regarding technocrat, this time says that if the choice in his district is between a Melenchoniste and a national, he will vote for the latter.

But let us remain calm, he says. The two-stage election will most likely produce another dysfunctional assembly, wherein the Islamo-left and the nationaux will command large blocs but not majorities. It will then be up to Emmanuel Macron to rise to the occasion and make do with a minority government.

Maybe he will be inspired by the Games? They began as the vision of an idealistic Frenchman, Pierre de Coubertin, in the 19th century.

The idea was to play fair and with generosity toward your opponents. A fine example came in the 1924 Games, also held in Paris, when the British track team, led by Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, showed the kind of manly virtue that the American Jesse Owens, in turn, would display in 1936 in Berlin.

Come on, Manny, Manny Martel! You can do it!

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