France’s choice: disruption or disaster
STILL reeling from the latest terrorist attack, France goes to the polls today in febrile mood
The country feels critically unsettled. A sense of crisis appears to be overwhelming the fiercely unyielding centralised state, which is so crucial to dictating both national security and the very essence of what it means to be French.
On this election day, both those pillars of government authority appear to be crumbling.
To start with, France’s intelligence agencies seem incapable of guaranteeing the safety of the people. France is now a country where presidential candidates are instructed to wear bullet-proof vests to rallies, where the Champs-Elysées is struck days before a crucial poll, and where security advice to citizens can sometimes simply amount to a vague “Stay off the streets”.
Some 239 people have been killed by terrorism in France since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. If the first duty of the state is to protect its citizens then, when it cannot, voters are of course tempted to reach for alternative remedies at the ballot box.
The second aspect is yet more fundamental. The French state, since the Revolution, has tried to impose a coherent, unique French identity across the country, rolling it out from the administrative heart in Paris. On language, culture and religion, France has been intolerant of deviation from the secular, intellectual, Académie Française-imposed norm. And proudly so.
That “Our way or the highway” attitude is admirable in many respects. But it does mean that French identity has been far less elastic than that of some other nations.
Arguably, the upshot is that the state has no idea what to do if large numbers of its citizens — especially second- and third-generation North and West African Muslim immigrants — reject the classic model of French identity.
No country has the definitive answer to this. But France’s difficulties, because of its history, geography and inflexible bureaucratic understanding of how to foster national unity, are particularly acute.
So the place is clearly in an inflamed, almost revolutionary mood.
No wonder, then, that three of the four principal contenders in today’s election are radically at odds with the usual products of the party system: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the old communist; Marine le Pen, the National Front leader; Emmanuel Macron, the independent.
Although they disagree violently about what to do about it, they agree that the status quo is unsustainable. They are also united in not having the answer — being either extreme or, in Macron’s case, empty.
They represent the unknown. And until Thursday night’s attack, it seemed certain that French voters were prepared to risk all and positively embrace the unknown. They still might.
But almost a third of voters remain undecided. That bodes well for exprime minister François Fillon, tainted by scandal certainly, but undeniably assured and reassuring. The irony if he does win? The man many dismiss as an establishment stooge promises to be utterly reformative, both economically and culturally.
That radical upheaval, though, is far better than a disastrous leap into the dark. — © The Daily Telegraph, London