Petit Déjeuner and other European stuff

Having spent last weekend campaigning, I expected to produce a decent diary this week. However, as I sit down to compile this, I have a streaming cold, so it’s going to be rather less substantial than I’d hoped.

Anyway, today is election day in France, the Presidential run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. The polls all expect Macron to win handsomely; Mme Le Pen is naturally saying she can still win, but her campaign staff are saying that they will regard it as a victory if she gets 35%. That may well be pitching expectations so that they can appear jubilant if she hits 40%, but it will take abstentions on a massive scale for her to win. The purity-obsessed Left are encouraging abstention because Macron isn’t sufficiently progressive for their delicate sensibilities, but it would be astounding if that happened. Apart from the far Left and Le Pen’s own party, political figures from the entire political spectrum are urging people to vote for Macron.

There was a head-to-head TV debate on Wednesday which got very acrimonious. All the commentary says that Le Pen did herself no favors, and the polls the following day showed that she lost 3% (and Macron gained 3%) overnight.

Libération‘s take on the debate:

In this tense debate, Emmanuel Macron quickly took the lead. Faced with an opponent whose impulsiveness he knows, and of whom he has recently condemned the “grossness” in an interview, the candidate of En marche waits for her attack. Leaving Marine Le Pen to multiply offensives and take the risk of aggressiveness and inaccuracy. And denouncing, on numerous occasions, the “nonsense” of the candidate of the National Front. The latter accuses the former minister of having favored, for dark motives, the sale of mobile operator SFR to the billionaire Patrick Drahi (shareholder of Liberation ). “You have no national spirit, do not defend the best interests of the nation but private interests, ” she says. “Madam Le Pen, you are reading a sheet that does not correspond to the file you are talking about, it’s sad for you …” Macron replied calmly, referring to the notes that dotted his opponent’s table and which referred to another industrial case, the sale of Alstom to General Electric. A spear thrown in a professorial tone from which he scarcely deviates, and which she regularly raises.

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The positions are reversed at about 11 pm, when we come to the European question. Late on, but a crucial subject, as it appeared in recent days as a weak point of Marine Le Pen. It is then Emmanuel Macron who is interrogative and offensive, trying to push the frontist on the defensive: “The euro is important. Do we get out or not? I did not quite understand. “” There will be the franc, “ she replies. “So we’re really coming back to the franc?” Macron said. The former Minister of Economy is on sure ground: stretched between the importance of this measure in her program and its rejection by public opinion, Marine Le Pen has developed a complex system involving a national currency and a unit of States and central banks. It is then the “globalist” Macron who advocates the little people, “the peasant of Cantal, the producer of apples, all those who sell their products in euros … The saver …” So many potential victims of the program of Marine Le Pen, renamed “high priestess of fear”. The formula will nevertheless inspire the frontist with one of her best liones: “In any case, after this election, France will be headed by a woman: it will be me, or Mrs. Merkel.”  What a way to try and erase the incredible confusion that engulfed the European discourse of the candidate at the end of her campaign.

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There was no lack of discussion but a detour in the field of law. An area on which the two opponents are not equal, so many are the cases aimed at Marine Le Pen, her relatives or her movement. Macron speaks from the heart: “The party of scandal is yours. The one who will not go before the judge is yours. […] When the judges do not rule for you, you say they are not honest. […] You are not, by these remarks, worthy to preside over the institutions. You are a danger to them. “ An indictment to which Marine Le Pen contrasts this strange reply: ” Okay, okay, okay, okay. I hope you will not find out that you have a hidden account in the Bahamas. “ An insinuation without proof, which confirms little more than the Lepenist shipwreck.

While the Merkel line was a good one from Le Pen, she only said it once. Macron, on the other hand, used “France deserves better” over and over again — at least a dozen times according to most commentators.

Much of the French commentary in these last few days has been fairly impenetrable to those not versed in the intricacies of French issues, so I’m now going to quote a rather good piece by Ian Birrell from the British i newspaper. (Yes, we do have a paper called “i”, which was launched as a compact version of The Independent. The Indy is now online-only, but i continues on paper.)

If polls are right, the European establishment can soon breath sighs of relief. Although we have learned not to take anything for granted in today’s politics, and his lead shrank last week, Macron looks set to be crowned as youngest French head of state since Napoleon Bonaparte.The 39-year-old technocrat was barely known just three years ago. Now he is on course for comfortable victory in Sunday’s second round of voting as voters from left and right unite to thwart the far-right.

Le Pen’s election would be catastrophic. The myopic far-left clustered around Jean-Luc Mélenchon may struggle to see much difference between a fascist and a former banker, but defeated conservative candidate François Fillon was spot-on when urging supporters to back Macron by saying extremism leads to despair and division.“The Front National is well known for its violence and its intolerance, and its programme would lead our country to bankruptcy and Europe into chaos,” he said.

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Yet many people have missed the real significance of Macron. For he may be centrist, but he has adopted the tools of populism to pose as an upstart disrupting traditional politics.
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Macron is a moderate insurgent who challenges conventional party politics almost as much as the loathsome Le Pen.Yes, he has been lucky, his bold bid for the Élysée aided by abject incompetence of a bumbling socialist president and corruption claims swirling around Fillon. And he is certainly a more consensual character than the hate-fuelled populists of left and right.

Yet it is no coincidence the two traditional French groupings were left floundering in his wake. They came third and fifth in the first round vote, left without candidates in the run-off for a presidency they held between them for 60 years.He says he is turning a new page in French political history.

He is right, even though his victory would show voters standing up for their nation’s traditional values over a person preaching fear and division. France would have shown other mature democracies that optimism can oust pessimism, liberalism can defeat dark forces of nationalism, youthful enthusiasm can win the day over embittered elders.

But getting elected President is one thing, governing another, as at least one other person has been finding. It remains to be seen what kind of legislature will be elected at the end of June. En Marche! is hardly a party yet, and is certainly not organized well enough to win huge numbers of seats. About the best Macron can hope for is a centrist group holding a balance.

Don’t examine this analogy too closely, but imagine Michael Bloomberg had somehow formed a Centre Party and been elected President last year. Senators Manchin, Heitkamp, Angus King, Flake and Portman have signed up with him, Centre Party candidates managed to get elected in a dozen House districts, and a few blue dogs and sane Rethugs have defected to the Centre since the election so no party has a House majority. The Centre group has voted so that Schumer is leader of the Senate, and Ryan remains Speaker. How much of what President Bloomberg wants to do is actually going to get done? Yeah, yeah, yeah, DC isn’t Paris and the USA isn’t France, but I hope that gives you an idea of what Macron will be up against assuming the polls aren’t incredibly wrong.

Those of you who clicked through to the Birrell piece will have noted that it was topped and tailed by some remarks about the British election.

Introducing it a couple of weeks ago, I asserted confidently that it was going to be a single-issue election about Brexit. I was only half right. It is turning out to be a single-issue election, but the issue is Jeremy Corbyn. The satirical mag Private Eye has the following guide to “Those Conservative 2017 Election Policies in full”:

Foreign Aid: Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour leader

The NHS: Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour leader

The economy: Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour leader

Social Care: Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour leader

Trident: Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour leader

And they’re not wrong. Apart from Brexit, Theresa May has marched into the center ground — at least rhetorically. Gone, for instance, is the usual Tory stuff about tax cuts; in fact, such little as they’re prepared to say about tax makes it pretty clear to me that they know they’re going to have to raise taxes as the economic effects of Brexit bite harder. Theresa May is a poor public speaker, and her speeches have little substance, but she’s still going to win a landslide

Thursday’s local elections in most of England and Wales (though not London) were the best the Tories have had in decades and the worst Labour have had in some time. UKIP, which previously achieved a level of success by enticing former Labour voters troubled by “economic anxiety” which they could blame on Europe, collapsed completely, losing all the seats they defended, delivering their voters to the Conservatives.

The Lib Dems made net losses, although our performance was described as “patchy”: in those areas where we are actually strong, we did OK, but we did badly elsewhere. Having breezily predicted gains of 15-20 seats a couple of weeks ago, I’m now thinking more in terms of four or five, taking us to the heady heights of double figures. We are liable to spend June 9th taking grim satisfaction that at least we weren’t massacred the way Labour were.

Here’s another i piece, this time by Sarah Ditum, which is painfully accurate:

Here’s more dismaying news: though the hard-left is tentatively recognising the disaster for Labour, when it comes to attributing responsibility, it’s still high on self-regard and wishful thinking.There are many reasons for Labour’s long-term decline, and Corbyn himself is a symptom as much as he’s a cause.But for the left, the guilty party is obvious. Labour has lost because of the voters.

Misled voters were offered “real Labour” under Corbyn, and they turned away.It’s an article of faith that the Conservatives are evil, and what reason could anyone have for voting evil apart from being evil? That some voters might have simply weighed the options – and decided that the brittle, robotic ideologue is still the least-worst candidate compared to the fractious shambles – is not a hypothesis that gets house room.

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Calling Tories evil isn’t political thinking. It’s quasi-religious thinking, a puritanical division of the world into the saved true believers and the ideological damned.And yet, those damned are part of the nation that Labour supposedly seeks to govern; more than that, Labour cannot govern unless it reclaims swing voters from the Tories.This is an unpopular truth, and one that the left has been through interminable contortions to avoid.
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Winning means winning over one-time Conservative voters. Winning means serving one-time Conservative voters, and indeed current Conservative voters, and Conservative members too.The state of fire-purged purity sought by the left is entirely and utterly incompatible with holding office, and only by holding office can Labour do the things that Labour exists to do: create growth, redistribute wealth, protect the NHS and comprehensive education systems, promote equality.
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The hard-left has been happy to martyr itself electorally, and in doing so, it’s surrendered the country to Conservative rule.If there’s any wickedness in politics, it’s not in Tory voters: it’s in the self-righteous leftist ninnies who’ve given up on their own nation.

I’m going to finish this week with a piece from the Frankfurter Allgemeine. The main American event having been the House’s passing of the AHCA, commentary directly on it is pretty much unreadable because it largely consists of rehearsing European smugness that the USA has a barbaric health system which would shame most developing countries, let alone a developed one. But it seems to have brought Hillary Clinton out of the woodwork, and since these diaries originally started as part of the effort to get her elected, this piece seems appropriate:

Now, however, Clinton seems to have re-armed herself again – and thus proves that giving up obviously does not belong to her life concept. At the beginning of April, she gave the New York Times her first interview after the election defeat in which she sharply attacked the Trump government and was thoroughly convinced that the first months of Trump were chaotic. Now she is also talking about the content: According to a report by CNN , she wants to found an organization to finance “resistance groups” against Donald Trump. There are many activist groups that have impressed Clinton since the election in November, according to the report. That is why, together with former supporters and donors to her election campaign, she is currently working to start her organization “Onward Together” to underpin these groups and to provide financial support in the fight against Trump….In her organization, Clinton wants to work as a mediator between potential donors and activist groups. According to CNN, the project, on which she is working with together with her finance chief, Dennis Cheng, and her former Deputy Secretary of Sate, Judith McHale, could start next week.

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Hillary Clinton is back in the political debate, though it is still unclear how she wants to shape her public role in the future. American media speculated extensively in recent  weeks whether she would work again as an attorney or be more active in the Clinton Foundation, which was so controversial in the election campaign and provided Trump so much ammunition. One thing, however, seems certain: she will probably neither want nor be able to mount another candidacy in 2020, because the reservations of many Democrats against the Clintons continue, despite the Russia affair and how chaotic the first Trump months have been.

Most of all, it will not have escaped Clinton that her era is irretrievably past – and the hopefuls have for some time been different. When the Democrat, Jon Ossoff — only a 30-year-old — from Georgia, narrowly failed in April to win outright a  special election for the House of Representatives, he was celebrated as a hero because of his charisma, which some already compared with the young Obama.

For a brief moment, the Democrats got a sense of how they felt to feel hope and enthusiasm. Ossoff, for many Democrats, is the future. Hillary Clinton, Resistance notwithstanding, is the past.

I find the tone of the last couple of paragraphs a tad harsh, though I very much agree with the meaning. She should not be a leader of the Resistance, but she can be a powerful supporter. There’s no reason for her to remain silent: she’s got a lot of worthwhile things to say. But her most important asset now is something some people criticize her for — she knows an awful lot of rich people and has political contacts all over the United States. If she can get the money from the rich people and direct it to activist organizations who can use the money effectively, that’s of much greater use than the Middle-Aged Turks begging to get bankrolled by Republicans.

The Democrats have always lacked the equivalent of the Kochs. If Hillary can manage to mobilize big money to back the Resistance, she will be doing a lot of good. As I’ve certainly seen in Britain, alienating the centrists and rejecting any compromise with anyone who isn’t deemed truly progressive is the path to electoral oblivion.

On which note, I’m off to nurse my cold.