If America’s leadership in the world has you in the diplomatic doldrums, buck up: You could be in France. Today, citizens there are selecting their next president. Alain Belorgey, the mayor of the tiny community of Saint-Prix-les-Arnay, where I lived for 2½ years, said many French people were describing the choice before them as one “between the plague and cholera.”
Over the first six months of 2016, I spoke to many groups of French people about the American presidential race. It was challenging to use their language to explain my own, as when I employed the French term “double entendre” to introduce them to “Feel the Bern.” Thankfully, when one candidate said, “And he referred to my hands — if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem,” the French media had no trouble deciphering the allusion.
My French friends and acquaintances, who ranged from communist to conservative, were troubled by the possibility of our current commander in chief. On Sunday, April 23, it was their turn to confront their demons as the pendulum of democracy swung back to the land of Voltaire, Chanel and Daft Punk for the first round of presidential elections.
The incumbent, Socialist François Hollande, had some remarkable achievements during his five-year term. He garnered international derision for being photographed wearing a helmet while riding the back of a motor scooter on his way to a tryst with a woman who was not his partner. He failed to dent a stubborn unemployment rate that hovers around 10 percent and feels like 20 percent on the ground. Upon his election, he had a 60 percent approval rating, highest among European Union heads of state. By November 2016, that number had dipped to 4 percent, surely the lowest ever for a democratically elected official in the 21st century. In a decision that shocked no one, he declined to run for re-election.
The seeds of discontent in France were not silent when I lived there, but they appear to have burst into bloom this spring. In the first round, with the eyes of the world upon them, voters rebuked the entirety of the French political establishment, selecting Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist without a political party; and Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front, a far-right party, as their choices for a second-round runoff. “My” town of Saint Prix chose Le Pen, meaning I lived in the midst of right-wingers, a mirror image of the lefties that populate my hometown of Norwich.
Because I miss France at a just-on-the-edge-of-unhealthy-but-probably-OK level, I seized the opportunity to reach out to French friends here and abroad for some reaction. Mayor Belorgey explained, “French people no longer have any confidence in the political class. They consider all their representatives to be more or less rotten.” He continued that Le Pen and her National Front Party “nourish themselves with hate and malcontentedness” stemming from unemployment and immigration.
Edward Bradley, a professor of classics at Dartmouth and a naturalized French citizen, recently returned from a lengthy stay in northeastern France. He echoed Belorgey’s sentiment, saying that the problem with the classe politique is that no one in it has a working-class background. The elites running the show “are not representative of the French people.” He noted the possibility of absenteeism today; sometimes it seems the safest thing to do is stay home.
“For superstitious reasons,” Lebanon resident Annabelle Cone, a French-American, didn’t dare make a prediction about today’s election. She described the mood in France as “normal: beaucoup, beaucoup d’angoisse.” When one repeats the beaucoup in a sentence with anguish in it, things are not good. She hopes Macron can “resolve some problems that have been on the table for decades. But I think I am too optimistic.” (Let’s save those problems — labor unions vs. employers; taxes; education; constant strikes; the limits of the social safety net — for another day.)
Back on the continent, a retiree in Dijon described both “surprise and disappointment” from a first round “without precedent, that reshuffled the cards of a well-established political game in France.” He continued, “The traditional right and left of French politics are dead.”
One dispirited friend sent me a message “before I commit hara-kiri.” He predicted, like most of the polls, that Macron will win today, but worried that absenteeism could result in a Le Pen victory. His prognostication for the next president’s term was grim: “five years full of uncertainty, half fog, half smoke.”
Upper Valley resident and “Frenchwoman of America” Marie Fourcaut, of Hanover, seemed baffled by her country’s vote two weeks ago: “How did the National Front and Le Pen get so many votes?” Despite the fuzzy forecast, she still dares to hope for a France that “evolves, grows, and stays open to the world.”
Ominously, Mayor Belorgey said, “Designating the other as responsible for all our evils is always a good recipe for catastrophe.” Speaking of which, it seemed fair for my French friends to chime in on our own leader. “We still don’t understand how he was elected …We don’t take him seriously, and we wonder if he will even finish his term. We consider him an amateur and a provocateur,” one man from my corner of Burgundy said. A small business owner added, “He seems not to be very reflective, more impulsive. We don’t see him as someone menacing, rather as someone who is immature but capable of committing a grosse connerie,” a colossal mistake.
As a political nerd, this global electoral intrigue usually excites me, and brings to mind Mae West’s observation: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” Today, however, the current climate — in France, Washington, Moscow, the Philippines, Syria, the Korean peninsula — is one part exhausting, one part mesmerizing, one part infuriating, one part disorienting, and three million parts concerning, one for each of Hillary Clinton’s “illegal” votes. Here’s hoping the French people — who have given the world omelettes, Champagne and the Statue of Liberty — channel The Thinker and play their part in steering civilization onto a road of reasonable, quiet, lasting peace.
Mark Lilienthal lives in Norwich. He can be reached at mlilient@gmail.com.