(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
A few days before the recent election in France two young people from Johannesburg studying in Europe were told to “go home” in a bar in Paris. A brazenly racist pop song including lyrics such as “good riddance — and don’t come back” had gone viral on TikTok and opinion polls indicated that the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) would win the coming election.
The RN, previously known as the Front National, has its roots in French colonialism and collaboration with fascism. In 2015, it began a modernisation project by moving away from open antisemitism and towards sympathy for Israel while escalating its cultivation of hatred against Muslims.
At its 2018 congress Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Donald Trump, received a standing ovation as he declared that the party’s members should “let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists. Wear it like a badge of honour.”
In the lead-up to the recent election one of the party’s candidates declared that “not all civilisations are equal”. Another said that some people “have remained right above bestiality in the evolutionary chain.”
No centrism in France
Since coming to power in 2017 French President Emmanuel Macron ran the kind of putatively centralist administration that, misrepresenting economic questions as technocratic rather than political matters, enables the rich to accumulate ever more wealth and power while other people become poorer and their lives ever more precarious.
These kinds of political arrangements are inevitably unstable and often result in both increasing electoral abstentionism and ruptures, frequently sudden and fast moving, against the consensus that they aim to naturalise in the name of necessity. These ruptures can run to the left or the right.
At their best the ruptures that run to the left work to build a counter politics rooted in solidarity, connected to popular movements and struggles and committed to building a more inclusive economy and more participatory forms of politics.
The ruptures that run to the right substitute economic and political inclusion with a psychological sense of belonging to a superior group of people. They avoid the emergence of vertical political antagonisms between elites and the rest of society by cultivating horizontal antagonisms among the people, often in terms of intensely racialised hostilities to migrants.
This is the path taken by the far-right parties in power in Hungary, Italy and Switzerland, and holding significant influence in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Germany.
In the end the RN was not able to win the French election as many centrists made tactical votes for the left to keep out the far right. The quickly pulled together Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), an alliance of the left, emerged as the largest bloc in the National Assembly with 182 seats. The Macronists won 168 seats and the RN and its allies won 143 seats.
Tories collapse in the UK
Three days before the election in France British voters decisively turned against the Tories. Years of austerity and contempt for people had resulted in a visible crumbling of infrastructure and institutions. Impoverishment had worsened to the point where one in three children are living in poverty and one in five are going hungry.
There was massive corruption during the Covid crisis. One investigation showed that contracts worth about R200 billion were given to companies run by friends and associates of Tory politicians, companies with no previous experience in the work for which the contracts were awarded.
The Labour Party won 64% of the seats in the House of Commons with only 34% of the vote. It won more votes in 2019 when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn, and only won a decisive victory this time around as a result of a collapse in support for the Tories.
Keir Starmer took control of the Labour Party after Corbyn had been declared unelectable by the political-media elites and ruthlessly defamed amid a general purge of the left. The Guardian played a scurrilous role in the attack on Corbyn, joining the misrepresentation of a lifelong anti-racist as an antisemite.
Starmer enjoys the enthusiastic support of the economic and media elites that were so hostile to Corbyn but is not a popular figure. His support for Israel as it devastated Gaza angered many Labour supporters, and he is particularly unpopular among ethnic and racial minorities.
Andrew Feinstein, the South African activist who now lives in London, argued that Labour and the Tories “are virtually indistinguishable in their offers of permanent austerity, forever wars and environmental degradation” and stood against Starmer in his constituency in protest against his position on Gaza. Feinstein won a little more than 7 000 votes, bringing Starmer’s margin of victory down by 17% from the previous election.
The far-right Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage took 14% of the vote, winning four seats and coming second in more than a hundred other constituencies. Ominously the combined vote for the Conservative and Reform parties was higher than that of Labour.
On the left the Greens took 7% of the vote and five independent pro-Palestine candidates won seats, including Corbyn, who ran as an independent.
James Schneider, the astute political strategist who ran Corbyn’s campaign, described the election as a “loveless landslide” in which the Conservatives were routed despite Labour winning less votes than in the previous election. “Labour,” he argued, “takes office with the task of depoliticising the population and propping up the status quo.”
Much like Macron, Starmer has scant chance of achieving the former goal while remaining committed to the latter. Schneider argues that while the Conservatives and Reform will seek to build a right-wing bloc there is “the possibility of a progressive bloc emerging, after the Greens and pro-Palestinian independents, including Corbyn, took a combined nine seats, four more than Farage’s Reform UK”.
Credibility crisis at home
Like the Tories, the ANC has been punished at the polls for crude corruption, casual contempt for the people it governs and an unwillingness to build a more inclusive economy. It rules with the support of only 16% of eligible voters in an election in which only 39% of eligible voters participated. The Democratic Alliance has half that support and its progress in terms of access to power is solely a result of the collapse in support for the ANC.
Like Starmer’s new government in the UK, the government of national unity in South Africa does not have a broad democratic mandate or the kinds of policy commitments that could build a more inclusive and just society.
It includes Gayton McKenzie, in some respects a European-style far-right populist, as well as the Freedom Front Plus. Its primary challengers in parliament are forms of crude, corrupt and authoritarian populism with the uMkhonto weSizwe party taking hard-right positions on a number of issues.
We have nothing like the capacity of the French left to quickly and effectively organise against the right on the electoral terrain, let alone the depth of progressive organisation, intellectual work and popular commitment present in countries such as Brazil and Mexico, where left governments are in power. We do not even have anything like the set of small but significant left electoral experiments under way in the UK.
Álvaro García Linera, the brilliant former vice-president of Bolivia, recently argued that “in these times, the extreme right is defeated with more democracy and greater distribution of wealth. Not with moderation or conciliation.”
If the left in France is to keep the right at bay, it will need to take this seriously in terms of its programme. If the left in the UK is to do the same, it will need to build on the support for the electoral experiments underway outside the Labour Party.
We need to understand that in the absence of a viable left, authoritarian populism, some of it deeply right-wing, will be the only force ready to take the political space opened up by the evisceration of political questions about land, wealth and power in favour of technocratic management that claims a general stake in an exclusionary order.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut and a research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.