Anger roiling French vote has parallels in California
For progressive coastal Californians who are curious to learn more about the causes of the populist uprising that fueled Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and has emotionally sustained him through his first 100 days in office, there is now another travel option available other than Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Bakersfield. Instead of driving to the Central Valley or flying to the Rust Belt, you can instead go to Paris.
French citizens voted last weekend in the first round of their presidential elections and catapulted conservative insurgent Marine Le Pen into next Sunday’s runoff. Le Pen and her National Front Party have long espoused a Trumpian agenda that features a strong crackdown on immigration, an equally strong resistance to multiculturalism, and an even stronger desire to exit the European Union. Le Pen finished second in last weekend’s voting and is a decided underdog going forward. But so was the British vote to leave the European Union. And so, of course, was Trump.
Similar movements have emerged in Greece, Italy, Austria and throughout the European continent, channeling an economic and cultural discontent similar to the emotional energy that has propelled Trump for the last two years. The overwhelming Democratic leanings of the larger metropolitan areas in California mean that most of us experience these reactionary attitudes only when filtered by Internet or cable television news. While we might be tempted to dismiss this rage when it emanates from struggling factory towns and isolated rural areas in this country, a similar message from the Champs-Élysées might force us to pay closer attention to the anger reshaping politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
Actually, Le Pen’s base of support comes not from the sophisticates in Paris but rather from the more resentful countryside. Just like in our country, this ideological schism falls largely along urban-rural lines.
The parallels are not precise, as the top finisher in France was Emmanuel Macron, an unapologetically centrist candidate who warned of the ideological excesses of his opponents from both the far right and the far left. But those French voters who chose this moderate option still found a way to reject their country’s political establishment. Macron’s conventional platform did not obscure the fact that he had never before run for elected office and would be France’s youngest leader since Napoleon Bonaparte. The candidates representing the nation’s two established political parties finished third and fifth in the voting, and the ultra-liberal candidate who finished fourth, the Bernie Sanders-esque JeanLuc Mélenchon, has thus far refused to endorse Macron.
Mélenchon, like Sanders, reminds us that angry populism is not the sole province of conservatives. The voters who might have supported a Trump or Le Pen-style candidacy here left California for Arizona, Utah and Texas many years ago, but our Golden State could be very fertile turf for a leftist insurgency in the not-too-distant future. The primary hopefuls in the campaign for governor next year will all try to position themselves as outsiders leading the fight against clueless and arrogant political elites, a potentially difficult task for three men who combined have held local and state elective office for a total of 60 years. But it should be of some comfort to them that Sanders, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, was considered an outsider when measured by his attitude rather than his resume.
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is the most ideologically liberal of the three California candidates, while Treasurer John Chiang can point to antiestablishment measures such as his effort to withhold the salaries of state legislators during a budget standoff several years ago. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa may be the most dispositionally well-suited to convince voters that he is the best choice to lead them in storming the gates of power. But even though all three are capable of running against a system of which they have been a part for decades, they could also be vulnerable to a challenge from an actual newcomer.
That’s why the declared candidates and their advisers keep such a close eye on wealthy former hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer, who could write a sufficiently large check to allow him to inform voters as to his populist credentials. A California equivalent to Le Pen cannot succeed, but the resentments against the political establishment that have allowed her to advance exist here, too. Just because no progressive Californian has yet figured out how to capture those passions doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.