The Price Of Crushed Hopes And Unheeded Hurts.

The Spring Of Hope: In 1848 the peoples of Europe rose in their millions to revivify the revolutionary demands of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The crushing of this "European Spring" set in motion the self-destructive philosophical and political movements which culminated, 85 years later, in the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor. We must hope that the convulsions of 2016-17 do not signal the beginnings of another such catastrophe.

 

TWO YEARS: 1848 and 1933; are linked by the consequences of political disillusionment and despair. In Germany, the “Year of Revolutions” – 1848 – ended in failure. The fervent hopes of German youth for a unified, liberal and democratic nation were dashed. In the years that followed they would be told that: “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.”
 

Eighty-five years after “the great mistake” of believing in “speeches and majority decisions” had curdled the German intelligentsia’s faith in the rational values of the Enlightenment, the grandson of their disillusionment and despair, Adolf Hitler, was appointed Chancellor of Germany. On 30 January 1933, “iron and blood” ceased to be the effective means of achieving specific national ends, and became ends in themselves. Abandoning the voices of reason for the fiery counsel of political dragons has only one ending – and it is neither happy nor civilised.
 

The year separating June 2016 from June 2017 may yet be similarly identified as the starting-point of a catastrophe every bit as terrible as the one which kicked-off in 1933.
 

It has been a year of incoherency and incomprehension: of primal political screams and contemptuous dismissals. A year in which everything has been demanded and nothing has been conceded. A year of brute force and sophisticated manipulation, in which the champions of both political approaches remained committed only to exploiting the divisions they had created.
 

There will be those who advance the election of Emmanuel Macron as evidence that reason has finally triumphed over passion. That the madness which began with Brexit and descended into the delirium of Trump has, at last, been tranquilised: appropriately, in the home of the Enlightenment – France.
 

But this would be to confuse the shrewdness of Charles De Gaulle, the father of the Fifth French Republic, with a genuinely democratic solution to the still very real problem of organised political irrationality. The run-off presidential election was devised by De Gaulle as the last line of defence against both the residual evil of Vichy fascism and the growing menace of France’s Moscow-oriented Communist Party. A prophylactic against extremism – not a cure.
 

And against the daughter of Vichy, Marine Le Pen, De Gaulle’s constitution has held the line. But that in no way makes Monsieur Macron the positive choice of the French people. He has become their President not on account of the man he is, but on account of the woman he is not. Nor should we be dazzled by the 66%-34% result. Madame Le Pen’s father, in his 2002 run-off against Jacques Chirac, secured barely a fifth of the votes cast. His daughter has lifted that fraction to more than a third. The National Front now calls itself the largest single political force in France.
 

A similar number of Frenchmen either abstained or left their ballot papers blank. Macron owes his “victory” to the votes of two-thirds of two thirds of France. If the supporters of this former investment banker attempt to claim the run-off result as a positive mandate for the neoliberal programme his “En Marche” movement is advancing, then the partisans of irrationality and brute force will advance their own claims – on the nation’s streets.
 

Macron’s task, now, is not to strip French workers of their rights by presidential decree, but to make sure that 2017 does not become the year of unheeded hurts, in the same way that 1848 became the year of crushed hopes. He assured his cheering supporters outside the Louvre that his greatest wish is to bring the French people together. Now that would be a real victory!
 

Because hurts unheeded and hopes crushed do not disappear, they fester and weep, poisoning the blood of a nation’s politics, raising its temperature to fever heat, spawning the hallucinations and delirious ravings of demagogues for whom hurt and hope are meat and drink.
 

We do not know what sort of Europe might have emerged had the “Year of Revolutions” not ended in despair and disillusionment. Had her best and brightest children not, over the next 85 years, convinced themselves that it was possible to go “beyond good and evil” and return unscathed.
 

But the Europe which actually emerged from 1848’s crushed hopes – that we do know.
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 May 2017.

Outsiders In?

La Patrie En Danger! The prospect of a victory for the French National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, looms over the future of the European Union. In the year of Brexit and Trump many would consider it "Strike Three - and your out!" for the neoliberal order. Will the key issue of immigration drive New Zealand politics in a similar direction?

 

IF FRENCH VOTERS advance Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon to May’s run-off presidential election, the European Union will tremble. Both the far-right nationalist, Le Pen, and the far-left firebrand, Mélenchon, are committed to a fundamental reconstitution of the European Project. Victory for two such uncompromising enemies of the status-quo would send crushing shockwaves through the entire European political class.

 

The French punditocracy are, however, supremely confident that this worst-case scenario will not eventuate. As they see it, the pro-EU, neoliberal standard-bearer, Emmanuel Macron, will squeak through just ahead of Mélenchon and the scandal-plagued conservative, François Fillon. Faced with the prospect of the quasi-fascist Le Pen, they argue, conservatives, socialists and the far-left will be forced to unite behind the “centrist” Macron. Extreme ideas, rejected repeatedly by the French electorate will, out of fear of even more extreme ideas, finally secure their long-delayed admittance to the Élysée Palace.

 

Or will they? The colossal cynicism underpinning such a “choice” may stick in the French electorate’s craw. Given the choice of a France fastened to the Procrustean Bed of the EU’s unyielding rules and regulations: or, the fast-fading glories of historical France; the France of hilltop villages and cathedral towns; the France of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; then, who knows, they might just vote for Marine Le Pen – and the cynicism of the political class be dammed!

 

Here in New Zealand, meanwhile, the leader of NZ First, Winston Peters, will be assessing the results of the French elections with particular care. As the man who predicted both Brexit and Trump, Peters has every right to feel confident of his ability to both interpret and exploit the worldwide populist surge.

 

Scornful of the pollsters’ ability to any longer intercept and measure accurately the volatility of twenty-first century popular opinion, Peters relies upon the direct, face-to-face feedback of the public meeting to inform him of the electorate’s mood. He understands that those sufficiently motivated to come out to a political gathering are also the ones most likely to vote. Even better, they are the civic-minded types who encourage others to join them in doing their democratic duty. Opinion leaders in their local communities, they will put into forthright public utterances sentiments that their less confident neighbours only mutter in private.

 

In other words, one modest meeting in a suburban community centre may contain multitudes.

 

If reports of such meetings are accurate reflections of the opinions of active citizens (as well as those of citizens who can be easily activated) then NZ First’s leader will be in no doubt about which “hot button” issues he needs to push.

 

The biggest and hottest button of the 2017 General Election may be summarised in the question: “Who the heck are our politicians listening to? Because they’re sure as hell not listening to us!”

 

All over the world, this is the question which aggrieved and alienated voters are asking.

 

There is no shortage of answers. Among those accused of commandeering the attention of the people’s representatives are: bankers; corporations; politically correct elites; “the lying media”; globalisers. Ordinary, decent, hard-working people; people who pay their taxes and follow the rules; people like themselves; have, in the opinion of these voters, been shunted aside and their preferences ignored. Or, even worse, they have been made to feel that, in the greater scheme of things, they no longer count.

 

The alienated and aggrieved look around them for evidence of their displacement and everywhere, from Taihape to Toulouse, their unfriendly gaze settles on the ones who were not present in the land of their childhood; their parents’ country; but who are now everywhere they look. Speakers of foreign languages; wearers of outlandish clothes; followers of unfamiliar faiths; purchasers of “their” real estate, “their” local businesses, “their” local clout: immigrants!

 

In New Zealand, as Peters well knows, this anger with the immigrant extends not only to the record numbers of people arriving from overseas, but also to those who have emigrated from those impoverished fragments of New Zealand which, until quite recently, had been reserved for the losers of the great colonial struggles of the nineteenth century. Successful Maori generate almost as much rancour among aggrieved Pakeha voters as successful “Asians”.

 

If France’s two populist “outsiders” advance to the second round, what conclusions will our own populist outsider draw from their success?

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 April 2017.