Macron's Victory and the Need for 'Leftist Globalism' in France

So, this most extraordinary of French presidential campaigns is finally at an end, and politicians in Berlin and Brussels - along with liberals and anti-racists everywhere - can breathe a sigh of relief. Contrary to those on the left who, in a politically bankrupt display of mauvaise foi, had claimed that a banker is as bad a fascist: this was the right choice. There was, it turned out, no shock result, an outcome that would have put a fascist in the Elysee and would surely would have dealt a fatal blow to the European project.

Nonetheless, this election ought rightly to have shaken the liberal establishment to the core - if establishment it still is, after Brexit and Trump.  For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, neither of the candidates to make it through to the second round represented a major party of the traditional left or the traditional right. Instead, French voters chose between two 'outsiders': Marine Le Pen, an extreme right-politician whose xenophobic, France-first ideology exists on a populist terrain where the labels right and left begin to lose meaning. And the political newcomer, Emmanuel Macron, socially of the left, economically of the right, but - above all - beyond left and right: a globalist, whose movement's name, En marche! (and the dynamism that it is intended to evoke), is simultaneously vacuous and profoundly accurate.  An aesthetics, then, (and aesthetic, rather than politics, might be the right term here) of dynamism, an imagined future, diversity, and the global, on the one hand, that confronted an aesthetic of retrenchment, the misremembered past, the mono-cultural, and the nation, on the other.

In those simpler, pre-Brexit times, with their comfortable certainties, politics seemed to run - and citizens tended to vote - along the lines of left and right.  The annus horribilis of 2016 changed all that: the shock victories of Donald Trump in the US and of the Brexiters in the UK seemed to stem from deep but new forms of social division: On the one hand, there are those who embrace, and feel that they benefit from, the mobility and flux of globalization, who are content with transnational flows, economically, politically and demographically, and seek to foster forms of belonging, whether pan-European or cosmopolitan, that transcend the nation state and national culture. On the other hand are those who feel that they are on the sharp end of globalization, marginalised or "left behind", who seek to retreat behind walls and protectionist economic policies, and who long to curb the fluidity of a globalised world with strict immigration controls, to turn back the clock to a mythical past of national homogeneity. Not right versus left, then, but nativist versus globalist.

(Under Teresa May's strong and swivel-eyed leadership, the Tory Party has cynically and rather simply adapted to this new situation by stealing UKIP's nativist ground and gunning for a 'hard Brexit'. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party has shown no such adaptability. Paralysed by its divisions, it continues to be unable to make even basic decisions: whether it is for the transnationalism of the single market or against it as the machinery of rootless capital; whether it stands in solidarity with the world's huddled masses and for immigration, or whether it stands against immigration and in defence of local workers and their jobs.)

With Macron's victory in the second round, it seems as though France has, for the time being at least, chosen a different path to that of Brexit Britain and Trump's America.  Nonetheless, the extraordinary success of the Front National, under its xenophobic and protectionist banner, points to a society that is no less affected by these searing social divisions. And these fractures will not disappear overnight.

This primary division, globalist versus nativist, is often presented as one of the elite versus the people. Unfortunately, this is generally the case. Globalisation, in its neoliberal guise, has tended to make the few richer and the many poorer. Two lessons stem from this. The first is for Emmanuel Macron and the globalists: Macron has promised to address the injustices of globalisation and to show that he can make globalist economic and social policies work for all. As he himself admits, this is a huge task. If he proves unable to make at least a reasonable success of it, the people might yet come to regret their decision to back him on Sunday. And should they take their revenge at the ballot box in 2022, the future may look very bleak indeed for France and for Europe. Second, there is a lesson for the left, in France and elsewhere: as was noted by Giles Fraser in a piece in the Guardian last week, what was extraordinary about this campaign, and in particular about the Macron-Le Pen debate last week, was that Le Pen was able to steal the terrain of anti-capitalism for the extreme right. The challenge of the left is this: how is it possible to put forward a critique of, and an alternative to, the unjust and immiserating forces of global capital that can stand up to, and does not make common cause with, racism and nativism. In essence, for both Macron and for the left, these challenges are similar: how to construct a popular, leftist globalism. That is, a globalism that is economically and socially just, that welcomes the foreigner, and that builds a fairer world for all.

Image of Emmanuel Macron (C) 'Le Web' (CC BY 2.0).