Titre : The Second-Round Campaign
link : The Second-Round Campaign
The Second-Round Campaign
Dear Readers,You may find me surprisingly silent, just as everyone else has become vociferous. I confess that I'm tired. I've been traveling around the country giving lectures on the election. I spoke for two hours last night to interested Harvard students and will spend another two hours at Boston College today. Then it's off to Columbia in New York and from there on to Houston. So I'm talked out.
I'm also surprised. I had thought that the first round would lead to a clarification of the case for "stead as she goes." Instead, it has turned into a sort of zombie war, in which the undead hulks of the losing candidates stalk about feeding on poor Emmanuel Macron. For die-hard Mélenchoniens he has become the dread symbol of all they detest, the hypercapitalist neoliberal Euro/technocrat indifferent to the fate of the workers of the world, the very face of greed, the fattest of fat cats, the two-faced banker, nay, the two-faced investment banker, or better yet, the lying Rothschild banker who pretends to be neither right nor left, or both right and left, or both socialist and not-socialist--in short, a monster. For die-hard Hamonistes he is the usurper, the traitor to the party who stole its birthright, displaced its president, rejected its primary, and yet in the end a raflé la mise. And for die-hard Fillonistes, he is nothing but a Bolshevik in a suit.
Forgotten in all this bitterness over the victory of the wrong man is the real enemy, the Le Pen clan, which is eagerly wooing the Macron-rejectionists of all stripes by painting Marine as the fulfillment of their every fantasy and wish. Macron will close your plants; Marine will join you at the factory gate for a selfie party, and if snapshots of your unemployed self with the aggressively smiling blonde don't put food on the table, she'll promise to nationalize your industry, just as the left used to do back when there were real socialists running the show rather than forts en thème who married their French teachers. Macron will sell you out by governing with the likes of Xavier Bertrand; Marine will defend the working class by elevating fine, upstanding citizens like Jean-François Jalkh. Macron will besmirch the purity of La Grande Nation by permitting discussion of the darker aspects of the French past in public schools; Marine will scour away all the tarnish. Macron will surrender to the Germans and dissolve France in the acid of Europe; Marine will preserve la bonne vieille France in aspic, serve only le jambon de Bayonne in every school cafeteria of France and Navarre, and thereby drive out the foreigners who don't deserve to be called French merely by grace of le droit du sol.
The campaign itself has degenerated into a war of televised set-pieces. Macron meets with union reps; Marine outflanks him among the rank-and-file; Macron counters with his own jaw-jutting confrontation in the parking lot, reminiscent of Sarkozy's famous colloquy with the worker mounted on a crane: "Tu veux me parler, déscends de là si t'es un homme." Marine goes to sea with les marins-pêcheurs and plays with un poulpe. Macron meanwhile plays soccer in Sarcelles with la jeunesse des banlieues.
Eventually there will be a debate. Macron will defend globalization with arguments; Marine will tear it down with anecdotes. And then France will vote. Macron will be elected by a landslide. Make no mistake. Do not be distracted by the endless men in the street assiduously uncovered by the TV journalists, who naturally have no difficulty finding vendors in open-air markets or housewives on streetcorners prepared to declare, for the edification of all, "Ben, oui, je vote Front National pour la première fois, et pourquoi pas, on a tout essayé et la France va toujours mal." He will win nevertheless. And then the troubles will begin all over again. For those who see this election as a choice between continuity and change are in one sense right: France is traversing a storm, but those who think that the way out is to steer the ship onto the rocks (Change!) are wrong, while those who think that a safe harbor can still be reached if the necessary course corrections are undertaken in time (More of the same!) are right.
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