France

Macron May Keep the Presidency, but Le Pen Has Already Won Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has worked hard during this election campaign to soften, even detoxify, her image. It seems to be working. “I think she’s full of good ideas,” Cyrielle Bernard, a 19-year-old who lives in this picturesque Burgundy town, told me one afternoon last week, chatting in the tobacconist shop where she works. Of all the candidates, she said, “I think she’s the most logical.” ......... Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats. ......... In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017. ........ The same winds that brought Brexit and helped elect President Donald Trump are also blowing through France. ....... Ms. Germain, who works as a house cleaner, dislikes Mr. Macron. “He always has that smirk,” she said. That smirk is a problem for Mr. Macron. He has a tendency to talk down to people — to say “let me explain to you,” rather than listen. ........ how deeply entrenched Ms. Le Pen’s hard-line views on immigrants have become and how she has successfully recast anti-immigrant rhetoric into practical policy recommendations. ........ Her father” — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former presidential candidate and the longtime leader of the far-right National Front party — “was completely racist. She’s not. She wants everyone to respect our ways. If you go to Africa, you respect African law. Her father just wanted to kick them all out.” ........... Such views are not uncommon, especially in small towns in France with little to no immigration. ......... She wants asylum seekers to be processed abroad and has said her first act as president will be to propose a referendum on immigration. ......... “A lot of them take advantage of the system and aren’t integrated in France,” she told me. ....... Ms. Le Pen has managed to widen her consensus by combining far-right positions on immigration with a left-leaning defense of public spending and social welfare. ........ she has promised to eliminate income tax for people under 30 — and her once extreme positions appear less so now that the center right has also adopted much of the same rhetoric, especially on national-identity issues. Help came as well from Éric Zemmour, whose firebrand declarations made her seem more moderate. ........ “We’ve tried the right; that didn’t work. We’ve tried the left; that didn’t work. Maybe we need to try the far right, with a woman in power.” ........ The unemployment rate fell to its lowest in 13 years ........ it is hard to win saying, “Imagine how much worse things could have been.” ....... She proposes “reducing VAT tax, raising low salaries and pensions, spending more on health and education.” ....... Mr. Macron, by contrast, has become the embodiment of frightening economic trends, even if they predate him and extend far beyond France. ........ Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her respect for Vladimir Putin. .......... “Lots of voters are tired of voting against their own convictions in order to block the far right — ...... That anti-far-right alliance, he added, is “much weaker than 10 or 20 years ago.” .

The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism Democratic capitalism is showing signs of deep, systemic sickness in the United States, Europe and Australasia, even as varieties of state or authoritarian capitalism are slowly becoming entrenched around the world, particularly in China and Russia. ......... In the developing world, democratic capitalism has always had a mixed reputation. While the West preached its freedoms at home, it happily engaged in political and economic exploitation abroad. ........... as of 2017, 88 of 195 states were classified as “free,” compared with 65 of 165 in 1990. ........ After the end of the Cold War, however, four structural challenges emerged to endanger the future of democratic capitalism: financial instability, technological disruption, widening social and economic inequality and structural weaknesses in democratic politics. ....... The 2008 financial crisis, one sign of a systemic sickness, occurred because of poorly regulated financial elites. The costs to governments and peoples were bailouts, lost jobs and more public debt. Governments had to scramble to save capitalism from itself as financial markets failed to self-correct. As a result, the markets privatized their profits and socialized their losses. Only one top bank executive went to jail. The taxpayer, by and large, paid the bill. And democratically elected governments were routinely tossed out because they had either failed to prevent the crisis, or were unable to manage the resulting public debt — or both. Another crisis could push the system to its breaking point. Yet a weakened Dodd-Frank Act in the United States now makes a repeat of the 2008 crisis more likely. All at a time when governments have even less room to respond. ............ Democracies, like corporations, can now be hacked. Social media distorts the free flow of facts that has been the lifeblood of democratic capitalism. .......... The financial and technological challenges are compounded by a rising economic inequality. The extreme concentration of wealth in the United States in recent decades is well documented. The new barons of capital and technology thrive while the American middle class stagnates and the American dream fades. ......... In the United States, unrestricted campaign financing continues to undermine democracy. The spectacular corruption of the electoral redistricting system — gerrymandering — only compounds the problem. ....... As Western democracies look increasingly sick, other systems of governance are now on offer. Russian nationalism .......... China has become increasingly confident in its own model, described as authoritarian or state capitalism. And its “Beijing consensus” is held up to the non-Western world as an example of a more effective form of national, and even international, governance. ........ The American social contract needs to be rebuilt through a revised New Deal. The social impact of technological change must be politically managed, rather than left to the market. Finance should return to its historical role as the servant of the real economy, rather than its master. And the Supreme Court must set a new direction on campaign finance (by overturning the Citizens United decision), gerrymandering and some of the crazier interpretations of the Second Amendment used to justify a breakdown in basic law and order. ........... Both represent the enduring idea of freedom. Yet both rest on increasingly fragile political and economic institutions. History cautions us against any belief that democratic capitalism will somehow inevitably prevail. Unless, of course, we make it so by tending the garden while there is still time. .

Marine Le Pen Is as Dangerous as Ever When Ms. Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron, albeit with a worrying 34 percent share of the vote, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many hoped Ms. Le Pen, after falling at the final hurdle, would fade into obscurity. ........ She now has more chance of winning it than ever: After taking 23 percent in the first round, she’s within eight points of Mr. Macron in the second, on April 24. ........ she’s also embarked on a comprehensive effort to soften her image, renaming her party, downplaying the harsher elements of her platform and presenting herself as a warm, even folksy woman who loves her cats. ....... Ms. Le Pen is an authoritarian whose deeply racist and Islamophobic politics threaten to turn France into an outright illiberal state. She may pretend to be a regular politician, but she remains as dangerous as ever. For the good of minorities and France itself, she must not prevail. ....... She especially targeted minorities, “to whom,” she said bitterly, “everything is due and to whom we give everything.” ........ There is now barely any space in French politics to advocate for French citizens who don’t look, behave, pray or eat the way “traditional” French people are supposed to — let alone to champion the rights of immigrants and refugees. ....... In this environment, Ms. Le Pen can turn her attention to more everyday issues, such as rising energy bills and the cost of living, safe in the knowledge that on immigration, citizenship and “national identity,” she’s already won the argument. ......... For more than 30 years now, French political debate has centered itself around issues of identity at the expense of more pressing topics such as health care, climate change, unemployment and poverty. ........ Exploiting feelings of decline at the end of the 1960s — as France shed its colonial empire, lost the war in Algeria and submitted to American domination of Western Europe — the far right became a potent political force. ......... to defend its conception of French identity, evoking a thousand-year-old European Christian civilization threatened by North African Muslim immigration. .......... As people from France’s former colonies migrated to the metropole, the party focused obsessively on the supposed dangers of immigration. ......... “Tomorrow,” he infamously said in 1984, “immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup and sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son.” Such rancorous resentment found some sympathy in certain quarters of French society, where the homogenizing effects of globalization and the increased visibility of Islam among French-born citizens were held to be stripping France of its essential character. ........... With the rise of Islamist terrorism, Muslims were seen to be practicing an inherently violent religion that required containment by public authorities. To be a Muslim was to be guilty until proved innocent. ......... The past decade has taken this equation to a new level. The widespread fear now is not that a handful of people among nearly six million Muslims might pose a danger to public safety, but that all French Muslims by their very existence threaten the cultural identity of “traditional France.” ........ and passing a bill that gives the state power to monitor Muslim religious observance and organizations. ......... underneath the sheen of normalcy, the brutally racist ideology her party pioneered over the past 30 years is very much intact. ........ the company she keeps — she has associated with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Viktor Orban .......... Her administration would echo those in Brazil, India and other countries where a similar rightward slide has taken hold. For minorities, immigrants, dissidents and democracy itself, it would be a disaster. ......... As a French Muslim citizen born and raised here, I fear for my country. ...... it’s instructive that voters may elect a politician whose core ideology violates the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that France has long championed. In that irony lies the gap between what France could be and what it is. .

@RimSarah defends "liberty, fraternity, equality" in the face of Le Pen https://t.co/bnGoJbpZVT

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 22, 2022

A Biden Blood Bath? Biden’s approval rating had sunk to just 33 percent ......... only seven months out from the midterms. ....... a really sour environment for Democrats.” ..... a major part of the problem is messaging. “We’re scared of our own shadow on taxes,” he said in the interview, and it “makes no sense.” .............. They feel stuck and angry, they’re tired and overwhelmed, and that energy is being directed at Biden. ....... America has changed its mind and its mood. It wants a show and a showman to distract from its misery. Biden is not that. And he is being punished for not being a huckster. ........ Biden isn’t constantly tweeting and hamming it up for the cameras — in fact, too often, he has shied away from interviews — and his reticence has left a void of emotional connection to him. ........ Biden has moved from the macro to the micro, taking steps that will indeed benefit many Americans but are too narrowly focused to transform our society or fix the core problems that plague it ........ two major perennial issues are resurgent: crime and the economy. The fear of crime and the pinch of inflation aren’t abstractions or complicated foreign policy or perks for special interests. .......... oppression by conservatives in this country is like an amoeba: simple, primitive, pervasive and highly adaptable. It simply shifts its shape to fit the environment and argument. ........ Biden’s approval rating among people identified as Hispanics was even lower than it was among those identified as white. ........ Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues. .... we could well be looking forward to a Biden blood bath. .