The times they are a changin’.

Just last week I wrote that “we are witnessing a racialization of French politics as increasingly colorful and woke youths reject the old generation’s quaint commitment to colorblind secularism as the bedrock of national identity.”

The latest sign of this is provided by Audrey Pulvar, a prominent TV journalist of Afro-Caribbean descent who recently switched to a career in left-wing racial politics as the deputy-mayor of Paris.

"Je préfère les réunions réservées aux noirs plutôt qu'interdites aux blancs. Mais si des blancs y participent, ils sont priés de se taire"@AudreyPulvar est l'incarnation du naufrage politique et moral de cette gauche pour qui il y a des racismes plus acceptables que d'autres. pic.twitter.com/D8cMViY46h

— Pierre Liscia (@PierreLiscia) March 27, 2021

Appearing on the popular TV station BFM, the Afro-Socialist politician had this exchange:

Pulvar: That people who are discriminated against for the same reasons and in the same way feel the need to meet together to be able to talk about it, that doesn’t shock me deeply depending on how it’s done. . . . I prefer meetings “reserved for” [a group] than meetings “forbidden to” [another group].

Journalist: You’re playing on words, this amounts to the same thing . . .

Pulvar: If there is a workshop on discrimination against black or mixed-race people, or black or mixed-race women, something tells me that 90% to 99% of the participants, spontaneously, will be the people concerned. If a white man or white woman happens to come to this workshop, I would tend to say that we shouldn’t throw them out, but we can ask them to be quiet. We can ask them to be a silent spectator.

The discussion was held in the context of controversy over coloreds-only meetings being held in French universities by the country’s leading student union (UNEF).

Pulvar was roundly criticized by conservative and nationalist politicians for these comments, with Marine Le Pen calling on prosecutors to investigate the politician of color for incitement to racial discrimination. Jordan Bardella, a nationalist Member of the European Parliament, denounced the Parisian left’s “hatred of whites.”

Le parquet doit engager des poursuites pour provocation à la discrimination raciale contre Mme Pulvar.

Il faut mettre fin à cette escalade raciste de la part d’une partie de l’extrême gauche qui s’affranchit de toutes les règles légales, morales et républicaines. MLP https://t.co/l2c6Ty3XOD

— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) March 27, 2021

Politicians across the left however backed Pulvar’s racialist discourse, including her own Socialist Party and the far-left Clémentine Autain and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This marks a drastic racial radicalization of the left in France: as recently as 2017, Mélenchon opposed such coloreds-only meetings.

Mélenchon said at the time: “I am totally opposed to this kind of event. I am shocked by the very idea that people hold racialized meetings. I do not believe in the existence of races and I think human beings are all the same and that a difference of skin color or hair does not break our similarity.”

2017
– Lea Salamé : une question sur les ateliers non mixtes
– Jean-Luc #Mélenchon : Je suis totalement défavorable. Je suis choqué par l'idée même d'appeler une réunion "racialisée".

2021 :
– Jean-Luc Mélenchon : Critiquer les réunions non mixtes, c'est être d'extrême-droite. pic.twitter.com/CJi7q3sJN9

— Daarjeeling (@Daarjeeling) March 31, 2021

As recently as 2017, Pulvar’s current superior, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, also opposed an “Afro-feminist festival” which would have had some blacks-only workshops. Meanwhile Le Monde has been providing fawning coverage of Pulvar.

This kind of open racial politics is a novelty in the mainstream French left. Previously, such rhetoric had been the preserve of marginal activists like Houria Bouteldja, an Algerian whose “anti-colonial” group, the perversely-named Party of the Indigenous peoples of the Republic (PIR), seeks to eliminate all barriers to immigration and deconstruct France’s identity and way of life. In Bouteldja’s estimation, immigrants should be under no obligation whatsoever to adapt to, let alone “assimilate” to, French society. Bouteldja referred to indigenous Frenchm people as “souchiens,” a diminutive of “Français de souche” (French-by-descent) which also sounds like “sub-dogs.”

Algerian “anti-colonial” activist Houria Bouteldja

Activists like Bouteldja did not face much persecution as long as they avoided aggressive anti-Zionism – she herself was happily employed at the government-run Arab World Institute. But when allowed on television, Bouteldja was treated as something like a punching bag whose “communitarianism” the mainstream participants could denounce together. Today, Bouteldja’s racialism is now officially embraced across the French far-left and center-left.

Personally, I am not against coloreds-only meetings as such. The problem is in the hypocrisy of the motive and the lack of reciprocity. There is no doubt that the left would reject ever granting indigenous Europeans the same right. What’s more, it’s perfectly understandable that blacks and Arabs would want to have meetings for themselves. That is perfectly natural for the members of any self-respecting race or ethny. But why hypocritically couch such racial meetings as a response to discrimination, that is to say white malfeasance?

No, Audrey Pulvar, own up to your racial activism and I am sure we will find a solution amenable to everyone and where indeed you’ll never have chance to be oppressed by white folk again.

Le @PCF aura bientôt 100 ans. Ce grand parti a tant compté dans l’histoire de l’émancipation et celle de la conquête des droits des travailleuses et travailleurs… La caricature dont il fait parfois l’objet résiste peu à l’examen des faits. Bon anniversaire cher.e.s camarades ! pic.twitter.com/UjNQfpPYXg

— Audrey PULVAR (@AudreyPulvar) December 17, 2020

This is a good a time as any to recall that Audrey Pulvar had recently wished the French Communist Party a happy 100^th birthday as “a great party which has so counted in the history of emancipation.” She is now also pushing trans activism as the latest progressive crusade.

Indeed, uber-gentrified Paris is currently governed by a Socialist-Green-Communist coalition with strong Zionist, Afro-racialist, and feminist tendencies. Not only should one have privilege and power, but one must also be acknowledged as the victims, as the moral betters of one’s opponents, all the while having absolutely no consistent principles of government nor any courage to oppose, as the egalitarian left normally would, the ethno-state of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Arab lands and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians.

Une synthèse !

Time and again, we are somberly warned of the grave threat to democracy posed by Marine Le Pen as the leader of a quasi-fascistic party, the National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN). Yet, what the French politico-media class seems to fear most is a bit of genuine democracy, unmediated by slippery politicians and smarmy journalists.

Le Pen recently announced that her first measure if elected Présidente – an increasingly-plausible scenario – would be the holding of a “great referendum” on immigration. She told France Inter radio:

My first decision will be the organization of a referendum on immigration. Because it’s now been decades that the various governments have been taking decisions on immigration without the French people ever being heard or questioned on this topic. According to opinion polls the French people has disagreed for decades with the policy that is being conducted on immigration.

Le Pen was somewhat vague on the content of the referendum, mentioning “several questions” that would be posed, including presumably one on the FN/RN’s years-old signature promise: a reduction of net immigration to a quasi-negligible 10,000 per year.

She also presented two other main planks. One is the partial suspension of the Schengen Agreement, which ensures check-free circulation between EU countries, to longer apply to non-EU nationals. Somehow French borders would have to be tightly monitored for non-EU nationals while letting European citizens through. How this would be done is unclear, but in any case it’s very common for national governments to temporarily/semi-permanently reinstitute border checks despite their Schengen commitments.

The last plank would be a tax break for the “middle classes.” Le Pen’s economic policy, once defined by a protectionist and anti-EU social nationalism, now seems decidedly fluctuous.

In other news, the liberal-globalist establishment paper Le Monde is really fretting about a potential Le Pen win.

According to several polls, around half of left-wing voters (defined as those voting for the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the center-left Anne Hidalgo, or the Green Yannick Jadot) would abstain from voting in the event of a Le Pen-Macron second round presidential election. The paper claims that voters are less likely to see in Le Pen a fascist menace and many are tired/disgusted of voting for Macron, “president of the rich,” as a lesser evil.

What’s more, the French left is extraordinarily divided with currently around a dozen candidates. Le Monde laments these “kamikaze” candidates make a Le Pen-Macron runoff more likely and, naturally, urges in an editorial for a revival of the “republican front” to disenfranchise and exclude nationalist voters through a cartel of all the other parties.

Finally, we are witnessing a racialization of French politics as increasingly colorful and woke youths reject the old generation’s quaint commitment to colorblind secularism as the bedrock of national identity.

Controversy is now focused on France’s main student union, the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), has been openly organizing coloreds-only meetings so participants can talk about their feelings without the oppressive glare of white people. There is talk of defunding or even abolishing the union, but it is being backed by various left-wing leaders like Mélenchon and the Socialist Benoît Hamon, who are increasingly giving up on the principles of the secular colorblind left.

Ethnic and religious polarization provides fertile ground for Le Pen. If she wins, appeal to direct democracy seems like a worthy gambit. Referenda are a regular feature of democratic life in neighboring Switzerland and have ensured that the Swiss people actually have some say over their national destiny. The British referendum on leaving the European Union – whatever one thinks of that – has ultimately been acted upon despite the kicking and screaming tantrums of vast swathes of the establishment and traditionally-dominant “educated” strata of the population.

While there are natural risks of misfire, the referendum is a powerful means for Le Pen to appeal to yellow-vest voters and sanctify policies with the blessing of the Popular Will. There is no surer way of blowing through the inevitable and systemic attempts at sabotage by the legacy politico-media class. En avant !

Olivier Echeinlaub (ed.), Pour un Réveil européen: Nature – Excellence – Beauté (Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie).

In Europe today, it is easy to fall into permanent numbness amidst the omnipresent falsehoods, frivolousness, and slouching. That makes it all the more remarkable when one encounters some who resist, some who hold to an ethos, to the legacy of an entire civilization . . . an invigorating oasis in the most sterile spiritual desert.

Thus I came across this remarkable little book by the Iliade Institute, “For a European Awakening,” with contributions from over a dozen French activists fighting for the cause of indigenous Europeans and their exceptional civilization. The book is part of Iliade’s growing collection of attractive paperbacks for the European wishing to reconnect with his roots and look to the future without flinching, covering issues as varied as European identity, poetry, demonization by the media, the Middle Ages, and the European dimensions of Shakespeare and Nietzsche.

The authors include a wide variety of contributors from the French identitarian cultural ecosystem, including teachers and university professors, historians, book and magazine editors, PhD students and graduates, and the occasional high civil servant and corporate manager. Among them we have the philosopher Alain de Benoist, Iliade co-founder Jean-Yves Le Gallou, and the young Thibaud Cassel, an alumnus of the European institutions.

The book represents an ethical synthesis, almost a manifesto, of what we might indeed call the Iliadic or Vennerian school of French identitarianism. The collection seeks to give intellectual and practical answers to the question: How is a self-respecting European to behave today? The work is organized according to the three Iliadic slogans:

• Nature as foundation.
• Excellence as goal.
• Beauty as horizon.

The result is an impressive medley of essays on topics as varied as economics, urban development, environmentalism, spirituality, work, and political philosophy.

The Iliadic school emphatically affirms the spiritual continuity of European civilization, from the ancient Greeks through the Romans and medieval Europeans right up to the moderns. One can rightly ask: Is there really such a Tradition – and not a fundamental instability – in European history? And anyway what of this survives among the rapidly declining, sad, and squishy Europeans of today? What commonality is there between the Greek explorer-pirate and citizen-soldier, the Roman farmer-legionnaire, the Christian knight or monk, the early-modern scientific and world-conquerors and . . . the European of today – the less said about which the better? What is really left of the mos maiorum, the ancestral traditions that sustained our societies?

Iliade does not propose a return to any particular tradition – Stoic, Christian, or other – but a kind of general elevated ethos drawing from Europe’s varied spiritual roots. One may deem it post-Nietzschean or neoclassical. At bottom, it is an elitist, aristocratic ethos challenging us to achieve individual excellence within an organic community, guided by the Hellenic trifecta of Nature, Excellence, and Beauty.

In terms of politics, there is a muscular rejection of the social contract, in favor of an Aristotelian vision of flourishing grounded in human nature, that of, inter alia, a social, spiritual, unequal, intergenerational, and hereditary animal. Hence a decidedly particularistic and biocentric worldview: “Ethos does not mean for the Greeks a universal morality founded on the opposition between good and evil: ethics is the way in which beings bear themselves in the face of the world over the course of their usual sojourn. The ethos of a people draws its roots from a tradition and rests on transmission” (147).

The basic fact of continuity with ancestral tradition lies in human nature. Indeed, we need “a realistic conception of human nature . . . based on the teachings of ancient wisdom bolstered by the discoveries of modern European science” (p. 31). Iliade happily integrates the latest biological science – the Anglo-Americans have long had a much stronger empirical tradition – into a very French intellectual tradition of deep knowledge of history and philosophy. Indeed, the reader gets something of a crash course in Greek and Roman ethical terminology, with ample references not only to French authors, but also and especially to great German thinkers (Schmitt, Jünger, Hölderlin, Heidegger . . .).

The historian Henri Levavasseur admirably sums up the insane hubris of the blank-slatist emancipatory project against human nature:

In the name of the struggle against all forms of discrimination, the advocates of the “blank slate” are determined to deconstruct the classic anthropological categories. They want to definitively impose, first through media and social pressure, then through judicial and State coercion, a “fluid” model of identity, meant to replace “natural” families and nations, entities considered to be oppressive or outdated. In this view, the sovereign individual must be able to choose its identity in complete autonomy: the social order has no other role than guaranteeing the existence of this free choice. . . . This deathly ideology however is crashing against the wall of reality . . . (p. 32)

This vision applies naturally to nations – considered as nothing more than contractual economic spaces – and, in horrifyingly surreal fashion, to biological sex itself. The result however of going so brutally against the grain of human nature is merely ugliness, sickness, and chaos, as witnessed by the perpetual ethnic strife of multicultural nations.

The revolt against identity – the last constraint – seems to flow quite naturally from the general collapse of behavioral standards since the Second World War, what we might call the Great Slouching:

Though it may seem difficult to establish objective criteria of “conduct” [tenue], everyone can instinctively define what must be rejected: unkemptness, vulgarity, slackness. The latter takes various forms: slackness of the body (flabbiness or exhibitionism), of behavior (lack of self-control, neglect of rules of courtesy), of the spirit (intellectual laziness, conformism), or of the soul (loss of a sense of honor, lack of courage or lack of faithfulness to one’s principles). (p. 152)

This ethical collapse naturally coincided with and entrenched Europe’s cultural and geopolitical collapse. The historian Philippe Conrad observes: “The ‘dark Twentieth Century’ witnessed global power’s center of gravity move to North America, itself bearing a new model of civilization, initially inspired by Wilsonian universalism and liberal illusions” (p. 8). Europe’s decline was aggravated by societal liberalism, most spectacularly expressed in France with the May ‘68 protests, a decline only partially masked by ongoing technological progress.

A strange phenomenon in postmodern life is the schizophrenic attitude towards differences between men and women. On the one hand, our culture denies that there are any significant psychological differences between men and women which might explain the radically different preferences of the sexes in many sectors.

If virtually all UberEats food delivery bikers are men and virtually all nursery caregivers are women, this is certainly not the product of differing psychology and physiology (indeed, such notions are oppressive stereotypes), but purely because men and women have been socialized differently since infancy. More to the point, any under-representation of women in some prestigious and influential sector – politics, tech, universities – cannot be justified on this basis.

Conversely, feminists will sometimes argue that women bring unique added value because of their differences from men. We have often heard the argument, well-grounded or not, that women-led nations did better during the COVID crisis. This is a socially acceptable argument to make, while naturally any claim that men might be better suited to any prestigious role will lead to immediate professional termination.

Personally, I believe such double standards themselves stem from the differences of male and female psychology in humans. Two studies found that girls are more egalitarian than boys as early as four years old:

In Study 1 we compared the egalitarian behavior and attitudes of American girls versus boys by tabulating the extent to which each gender awarded the same number of stickers to, and liked to the same degree, two puppets. One puppet followed the child’s instructions or actions while the other did not during a drawing task in which the child played the roles of leader and peer. In the peer role, girls exhibited more egalitarian behavior than boys. In Study 2, French‐Canadian children were shown two drawings by unknown peers—one messily and one neatly colored—, then asked to distribute stickers to each peer’s drawing. Again, girls exhibited more egalitarian behavior than boys. Results suggest the origins of gender differences in egalitarian behavior occur early in life and merit further investigation.

As young as age ~4, girls are more egalitarian.

When evaluating drawings, boys were more likely than girls to award more stickers to more skilled drawings, whereas girls were more likely than boys to award the same number of stickers to both.https://t.co/ll6ZxXfe28 pic.twitter.com/L61tA6mx0z

— Cory Clark (@ImHardcory) February 26, 2021

This basic egalitarian tendency – to favor equal outcomes regardless of objective performance – seems to me to underpin a tremendous amount of today’s political correctness. Our societies are being simultaneously feminized, demasculinized (witness the declining sperm counts, testosterone, and muscle mass of today’s males), and infantilized. This appears to be the product of the combination of soft living enabled by the postwar Affluent Society and the steady ratcheting up of egalitarian ideology in the media and academia (a significantly self-reinforcing dynamic).

The now firmly-entrenched West-European Nanny State reproduces in many respects the matriarchal psychology and totalitarian ethics of Kindergarten: one must submit completely, one must say or do nothing that would hurt the feelings (let alone harm the interests) of any child, and everyone will be taken care of. In this scenario however, the helpless “children” to be protected come to encompass every real or imagined victim group: people of color, sexual minorities, migrants, and, of course, women. In this context, frankness of speech is completely devalued and indeed subject to extreme social ostracism.

Hence a spectacular self-reinforcing dynamic: the more power women acquire, the more our societies emphatically affirm that women are oppressed. Government and private institutions across the Western world are adopting ever-more systematic “positive discrimination” in favor of women: women-only training programs (especially in STEM) and, especially, quotas for female management. Actually, we no longer live in times virile enough to even recognize the discriminatory nature (“positive” or otherwise) of these programs.

In all this, the objective facts of biology are of no import. It matters not that sex differences in brain structure are well documented, as are massive sex differences in preferences (e.g. David Buss), largely in accord with what we expect for men and women’s vastly different reproductive incentives over our evolutionary history. Men would thrive or die according to their fighting ability in coalitions with other men. A particularly successful man might have dozens of children, while many would have none at all. Reproductively successful women by contrast would spend much of their life pregnant or caring for children, with absolutely no reason for her to have any particular appetite for risk.

Today, this evolutionary history would naturally explain why men are more violent than women by an order of magnitude, why men are far more prone to risky behavior (dangerous driving, stunts, heavy drinking . . . take your pick), but also why men are far more likely to engage in the risky business of becoming entrepreneurs and founders of start-ups. Most men are not particularly successful, but a few have the talent, drive, and luck to break through with a Star Wars, an Apple, or a SpaceX. Once the business is well established, the assorted naggers line up to redistribute the wealth. The dynamic is identical to a wife’s nagging her breadwinning husband to redistribute resources in the form of a family vacation (documented in photos to demonstrate social status to peers) or expensive private education for the children. The only difference is that the latter is comparatively legitimate.

Naturally there will be both cultural and biological components to observed sex differences – and, pointedly, the biological component will inevitably to some extent also produce cultural tendencies towards such differences – but the idea that these differences are purely cultural is absurd.

The City of Paris offers a unique perspective on France’s feminist future. Paris proper represents the urban core of 2.15 million inhabitants. That’s the famously gentrified and exorbitantly overpriced Disney Land familiar to numberless tourists from across the world. If President Emmanuel Macron represents mildly autistic entrepreneurial pure globalism, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo represents the trend of multicultural matriarchal social-democracy.

In a telling manifestation of the schizophrenia at the heart of moneyed globalism, Paris – a city unaffordable to working people, not least because of mass property investment by moneyed interests the world over from Emirati princelings to Russian oligarchs and African dictators – is governed by a Socialist-Green-Communist coalition.

Hidalgo’s deputy, the “ecofeminist” black former journalist Audrey Pulvar, hailed the hundredth anniversary of the French Communist Party saying: “This great party has counted for so much in the history of emancipation and the conquest of workers’ rights… the caricature which it sometimes subjected to does not resist to an examination of the facts.” Thus was celebrated a century of sterile totalitarian tyranny and mass-murder.

Le @PCF aura bientôt 100 ans. Ce grand parti a tant compté dans l’histoire de l’émancipation et celle de la conquête des droits des travailleuses et travailleurs… La caricature dont il fait parfois l’objet résiste peu à l’examen des faits. Bon anniversaire cher.e.s camarades ! pic.twitter.com/UjNQfpPYXg

— Audrey PULVAR (@AudreyPulvar) December 17, 2020

This is indicative of the structural left-wing bias of the French democratic system. While Communists co-rule in Paris, any conservative politicians suggesting alliances with nationalists will be marginalized, demonized, and effectively eliminated. And this is despite the fact that the Front/Rassemblement National has no clear relationship, let alone a filiation, with the authoritarian right-wing régimes of the 1930s and 1940s.

This time, it’s for real!

Earlier this year, the French press released the results of a super-secret survey which found that, if forced to choose between nationalist leader Marine Le Pen and worn-out centrist-globalist President Emmanuel Macron, 48% would vote for Marine to lead their country.

Never has any Le Pen been reported to be within striking range of victory in this way. The pollsters claim that Le Pen’s score is explained by her securing of about one third of the center-right electorate and the mass abstention of left-wing voters who might normally vote for Macron to “bar the way to fascism.”

It’s hard to gauge how accurate the poll is. For one, the detailed results remain unpublished and the margin of error for second-round presidential polling is high. A June 2020 poll found that in a similar scenario 45% would vote for Le Pen and 55% for Macron. That’s still a loser, but far ahead of Le Pen’s actual electoral score from 2017: a disappointing 33.9%.

Perhaps Le Pen’s progress is indeed explicable with what Le Monde calls her “permanent normalization”: she is perpetually moderating her discourse and sending signals to make herself more “presidentiable” in the eyes of the mainstream media and skittish center-right voters (think pensioners and bourgeois Catholics disturbed by Afro-Islamization, but also wary of the potential instability and incompetence of a Le Pen presidency, particularly in the economic sphere).

Le Pen’s closer advisor and brother-in-law Philippe Olivier says: “There is no more detoxification, now is the time of presidentialization.”

The moves towards normalization include praise for Charles de Gaulle (loathed by Le Pen père for his abandonment of the 1 million Europeans of French Algeria), the commemoration of the victims of the Vel d’Hiv, agreeing with the media that the “Great Replacement” is a baseless conspiracy, and providing only qualified support for the persecuted group Generation Identity on grounds of free speech.

A sign of Le Pen’s attempt to break out of the “far-right” ghetto and join forces with the mainstream right: three heads of regional lists on the National Rally (RN) ticket are not RN members (the ecological essayist Hervé Juvin and the conservative politicians Jean-Paul Garaud and Thierry Mariani).

Le Pen no longer calls for the abrogation of the Schengen Area of free movement within the European Union, but only that non-EU nationals would be checked at France’s borders with European neighbors (how that would be done is unclear). Talk of leaving the euro common currency and restoring the franc are long-gone. In a recent op-ed in L’Opinion, apparently ghostwritten by high civil servants supporting the RN, Le Pen argues that studiously repaying national debt is a point of honor and morality.

In a debate with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the Macronist even sought to attack Le Pen from the right saying: “you’re practically soft now.” Indeed, Le Pen now is very careful to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Islam is “a religion like any other” with its place in France, she says, reserving her trademark “far-right” rhetorical fury for the government’s failure to eliminate “Islamism.”

All this begs the questions: Is a Le Pen victory plausible? Does it even matter at this point?

From a purely tactical point of view, whatever the complaining of dissident nationalists, I have to say Marine Le Pen is broadly right. Yes, her dutiful submission to “house-training” by the media is disgusting and dishonorable. However, assuming one wants a shot at winning, there is not much alternative given France’s electoral setup.

France does not have proportional representation like in Italy – where it can pay to have a nationalist position appealing to only a part of the electorate – but a winner-take-all-system. You simply cannot afford to alienate 51% of voters, even if 25% love you for it.

But France also does not have a purely bipolar political system like the United States, where a Donald Trump could sweep to victory by first taking over the mainstream conservative party and then crafting a message to appeal to almost-half of voters. Le Pen’s game is not to take over a conservative party but to make her historically oppositional nationalist party into a default party of government.

Are the polls credible? A first point: one should not take anything the media says at face value. They make their living by the sensationalism of cultural street-walkers. The media has for decades had a symbiotic love-hate relationship with the Le Pens: at once giving them a voice and tantalizingly suggesting the possibility of a salutary/horrifying nationalist victory (ratings!), while also viciously defaming and demonizing them, in line with the media’s role as the Guardians of Morality. Call it the forty-year cocktease.

Personally, I am skeptical of a Le Pen victory, but I have been wrong before. French voter preferences really are very stable on the whole and the RN (former FN)/Le Pen brand is nothing if not established and polarizing. I don’t see what has changed in the last five years (as opposed to the last 40) to change a critical percentage of voters’ minds. Then again, I am not a formerly apolitical gilet-jaune prole, nor a bourgeois Catholic pensioner. Perhaps some of these groups are more open to Le Pen now, and some leftists will be so disgusted with the Macron presidency as to not vote for him to block “fascism.” But I find that hard to believe.

More prosaically, Le Pen regularly tops the charts of negative approval ratings, with ~47-51% of French people having a negative opinion of her. Although, admittedly, there has been improval of her net negative rating from -34% in January 2020 to -26% in February 2021.

Who knows! A lot could happen, or not happen, between now and April 2022. French national politics has gone from a stable bipolar system to an incoherent winner-take-all toss-up for whichever personality can win at a particular moment every five years, the whole system readjusting according to that personality’s party, with no coherent opposition. Far-left, Green, Socialist, conservative, nationalist, and centrist-globalist candidates all could plausibly make the second round. And the outcome of the second round cannot be foreseen with great confidence.

Another question: would a Le Pen victory even matter? The 2010s feel like a different era, the heady years of the euro-financial crisis and the migrant crisis, when our governments’ hapless flailing made it seem the whole liberal-globalist order was on the verge of collapse.