Macron or Le Pen: Is there much of a choice?
With Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen through to the final in France, people of a conservative disposition might feel themselves spoilt for choice. You can have either the believer in free markets and open societies or the upholder of sovereignty and national identity. In both cases, the Left doesn’t get a look-in. But what if it isn’t like that at all? What if Macron, far from opposing the big state, is just a more technocratic version of the usual dirigiste from ENA? What if Le Pen, far from wanting a nation’s genius expressed in its vigorous parliamentary democracy, is just a spokesman for joyless resentment, looking for handouts for angry white people? Maybe both of them mentally come from the left — he “progressiste” obsessed with equality, she the rabble-rouser exploiting nostalgia for working-class solidarity? From a British point of view, the whole thing feels back to front. Macron loves the EU in part because he sees it as a bastion of free trade. Le Pen hates it, in part for the same reason. That is not how we see the EU, but perhaps if we were French, we would.
Which result would better serve the cause of Brexit? Obviously, a Le Pen victory would precipitate a crisis in the EU, weakening its negotiating hand against us. On top of Brexit and Trump’s victory, it would be a thumping rejection of the internationalist complacencies of the last 50 years. It is unbearable to see the joyful pretence in Brussels, the FT etc that Macron is “antiestablishment” — their collective exhalation of relief at the prospect that the same people will still be on top. On the other hand, is there a single Le Pen policy, apart from Frexit, that any reasonable conservative would admire? A Le Pen victory could make what the French call “le système” look desirable and discredit the cause of Euroscepticism. “On est
chez nous”, they reassure one another at Front National rallies. I find it hard to work out whether that is what we in Britain should want France to be.
A French friend tells me that Macron represents the “Uber-isation” of politics. I suppose that makes Le Pen the spokesman for the black cab interest. I want to live in a country which manages a modus vivendi between these two schools of thought. If life is all Uber, it will be freer and cheaper, but also more ignorant and grotty. If life is all black cabs, prices will be too high. Perhaps such peaceful coexistence is an impossible dream.
Journalists have hunted down Tim Farron, the Liberal-Democrat leader, about Christian views of homosexuality. Originally, they asked him the wrong question, doctrinally, by inquiring whether he thought “homosexuality” was a sin. This was an easy one for him to repudiate, since an involuntary disposition is not a sin. I forbore to point this out, since I didn’t want to make their persecution of poor Mr Farron any easier, but recently, they had realised their mistake and began pressing him to state whether gay sex was a sin. Farron at first resisted. Obviously the right people to turn to for answers on this sort of thing are the religious authorities, but they are so coy nowadays. Mr Farron is right that we should not have to read about this in the Lib-Dem manifesto. But he has now capitulated to the media and declared that he has decided that gay sex is not a sin. This is the secular equivalent of Henry of Navarre’s view that “Paris is worth a Mass”.
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