Ganging Up On the Populists

I wrote here about the first round of French elections, in which the “far right” National Rally scored an impressive plurality of votes for the National Assembly. But round two is coming up, and the left-wing and the relatively centrist (Macron) parties are combining to try to stop the “far right” from winning an outright majority in the National Assembly:

At least 200 candidates have stood down days before France’s run-off election as President Macron and a left-wing coalition seek to block the hard-right National Rally from gaining an absolute majority.

Centrist and left-wing parties are hoping tactical withdrawals before the second round of voting on Sunday will prevent the far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen winning a mandate of 289 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, which would allow them to form France’s next government.

The idea is to create two-candidate races in which all the other parties can combine to out-vote the National Rally. But things aren’t going smoothly:

A total of 125 left-wing candidates have withdrawn and 75 from Macron’s camp, according to Le Monde. However, in a sign that the president’s authority may be collapsing, some senior centrist figures said that they would not join the coalition.

It is striking that in France, as in a number of other countries, perhaps including the U.S., politicians of vastly different convictions are willing to unite against the “far right.” Why? In Europe, the defining characteristic of “far right” parties is their opposition to mass third-world immigration. That is a populist issue, of course, and beyond that they tend to be more or less populist. But how is that “far right”?

France’s left-wing parties are truly leftist; they want, among other things, price controls on basic commodities like groceries and gasoline and a confiscatory tax on wealth. Yet this is somehow more palatable to “centrists” like Macron than curbs on immigration.

The international liberal press–the linked article is in the London Times–smears “far right” parties by implying that they have something to do with the Nazis (in the case of Giorgia Meloni, it is Italian Fascists):

The result [of the first round of voting] raised the prospect of a hard-right party taking office in France for the first time since the Second World War when France was under Nazi occupation.

So the National Rally is like the National Socialists of the 30s and 40s? But the socialism is all on the other side, and no journalists ever take the trouble to explain what the Rally, or other populist European parties, have in common with the Nazis–who, as Hitler himself said, were far left, not far right. It is not for nothing that they called themselves socialists and championed endless state power, like today’s left-leaning parties.

Much more could be said, but for now, let’s conclude with the observation that mass third-world immigration is the ultimate issue dividing the left (various elites) from the right (everyone else) across much of the Western world. And on this issue a large majority, in every country I know of, are on the side of the “far right.” Whether the majority will get the policies they want, or will be frustrated by establishment legerdemain, remains to be seen.

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