Two Ways of Seeing the Election in France

Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron defeated his far-right challenger, Marine Le Pen, by sixteen percentage points. In the US, centrist commentators responded with glee. Progressive commentators, despite favoring Macron, reacted with alarm. Their different reactions reveal a lot about the emerging American debate over how to defend liberal democracy in the post-post Cold War age.

But first, a word about this week’s Zoom call. It will be on Friday at Noon ET, our usual time. Our guest will be S. Michael Lynk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967. (Yes, it’s a long title.) Last month, he became the first UN investigator to accuse Israel of practicing apartheid. We’ll talk about that conclusion, about how the UN functions when it comes to Israel-Palestine, and about the charges of antisemitism that he has, predictably, endured. Join us.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Back to the French election. On the surface, the differing reactions from centrist and progressive American pundits are a simple case of seeing the glass as half-empty or half-full. On the half-full side, Macron performed better than polls had predicted and won by a large margin. On the half-empty side, Le Pen performed better than she had during France’s last presidential election, and better than any far-right candidate in modern French history. 

But look deeper and the differing reactions reveal something more significant: Centrists are happier than progressives because they’re judging the results by a different metric. For centrists, what matters most is the election’s impact on French policy toward Russia. For progressives, what matters most is the election’s impact on French policy toward its most vulnerable citizens, particularly French Muslims. If you care primarily about the former, Macron’s victory is something to cheer. If you care primarily about the latter, you’re relieved but hardly in a cheering mood.

For America’s centrist Russia hawks, the distinction between Macron and Le Pen could hardly be clearer. He’s sent weaponry to Ukraine. She’s warned against it. He wants to limit imports of Russian energy. She doesn’t. He’s accused Russia of committing war crimes. She wants a rapprochement with the Kremlin, which has in the past funded her party. It’s no wonder that US commentators concerned primarily with keeping the pressure on Vladimir Putin are thrilled.

But for those American progressives who worry less about the way France treats Russia and more about the way it treats own Muslim citizens, the results are less comforting. It’s not just that Le Pen, who pledged to ban women from wearing headscarves in public, won more than four out of every ten votes. It’s that, in Macron’s effort to blunt her appeal, his government has—over the years—indulged in a tremendous amount of anti-Muslim bigotry itself. If you judge Macron primarily on his policies toward Putin, he may look like a champion of liberal democracy and human rights. But if you judge him primarily on his policies toward French Muslims, he doesn’t look that way at all.

Over the past several years, Macron’s government has responded to incidents of jihadist violence by demonizing Muslims and Islam. In 2019, Macron’s education minister suggested that teachers ask Muslim mothers to remove their headscarves if they wished to chaperone school trips. In 2020, his interior minister denounced the fact that French supermarkets have separate aisles for halal and kosher food. Then last February, in a debate with Le Pen, that same minister accused the far-right leader of having “gone a bit soft” because she now allegedly believed “that Islam is not even a problem.” That same month, Macron’s minister for higher education announced an investigation into “Islamo-leftism” (whatever that is) at France’s universities. (If that doesn’t appall you, just substitute the phrase “Judeo-leftism.”)  

Then, last August, Macron pushed through an anti-separatism law denounced by Amnesty International as a “serious threat to rights and freedoms in France.” Under its auspices, the French government has closed 718 mosques, Muslim schools and associations for encouraging separatism and seized assets worth 46 million euros, often on what human rights groups call vague and specious grounds.

There’s lots to criticize about the Democratic Party, but it’s response to rising Republican Islamophobia has been far more principled than this. What Macron has done is roughly equivalent to Hillary Clinton responding to Trump’s assault on Muslim rights by adopting Ted Cruz’s views on the subject.

The gap between the way US centrists and US progressives see French politics would have been even clearer if France’s strongest leftist contender, Jean-Luc Melenchon, had edged out Le Pen in the first round of voting and faced off against Macron in yesterday’s presidential runoff. Melenchon, a French version of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, has been by far the most courageous of the major candidates in defending the rights of French Muslims, which helps explain why he won the bulk of their votes. But he’s also a longtime skeptic of NATO. If you judge France by the way it treats its vulnerable minorities, Melenchon is far more devoted to freedom than Macron. If you judge France by how hard of a line it’s willing to take over Ukraine, on the other hand, then freedom’s greatest champion is Macron.

Get used to this divide. It’s the kind of argument Americans had frequently during the Cold War, which is the last time great power rivalries dominated US foreign policy. During the Cold War, hawks tended to judge foreign governments by how hostile they were to the USSR. For Ronald Reagan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, even repressive anti-communist rulers like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and P.W. Botha in South Africa were still, ultimately, on the side of freedom. Progressives like Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy were more likely to judge foreign governments on their human rights records at home. Today’s debate differs from that one because there’s a third camp: Tucker Carlson’s. This camp both disdains liberal democracy and sympathizes with at least one of America’s great power rivals, Russia. For Carlson, Marine Le Pen’s soft line on Putin and her hard line on Muslim rights are both points in her favor.

But despite the differences between the last Cold War and this one, Americans are in the early stages of another big argument about what constitutes defending freedom overseas. From India to Poland to Vietnam, the world is filled with governments whose commitment to freedom looks very different depending upon whether you define freedom as upholding human rights at home or upholding America’s side against its great power enemies. How you view the outcome of yesterday’s election in France is an indication of where you’re likely to come down.

Other stuff:

For the Jewish Currents (subscribe) podcast, I discussed the rising violence in Israel-Palestine with political scientist Dana El Kurd and Jerusalem-based attorney, Daniel Seidemann.

An insightful twitter thread about the dynamics of the Israel-Palestine debate on American campuses.

If you want to understand the Democratic Party, read this.

A convincing argument against turning the war in Ukraine into a new cold war.  

Twenty-nine years ago: Yitzhak Rabin versus Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

See you on Friday,

Peter