France and the Left’s Global Slump

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/opinion/france-and-the-lefts-global-slump.html

Version 0 of 1.

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.

The details are different in every country, but a theme cuts across much of the industrialized world. In France, Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States, the political left is struggling. It is struggling, in particular, to win over many working-class voters who were once its loyal supporters.

Yes, the French left — and much of the rest of the world, including me — is breathing a sigh of relief this morning, because Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, emerged from yesterday’s first round of the presidential election as an underdog to win. But Le Pen still has a path to victory, and that’s terrifying for many reasons.

She has a path partly because working-class French voters who supported the Socialist Party in past decades have drifted away from it. As a result, France’s Socialist prime minister, François Hollande, is historically unpopular, and the Socialist candidate yesterday failed to make the runoff. Le Pen will face a centrist named Emmanuel Macron, who leads En Marche!, a new political party.

For more on France’s turmoil, I recommend an essay from this weekend, by Christopher Caldwell in The Wall Street Journal, and a post-election editorial in The Times.

Beyond France, center-right parties have dominated politics recently in both Germany and Japan. The British Labour Party is so dysfunctional that it fumbled a chance to prevent Brexit, as Jonathan Freedland has explained in The New York Review of Books. One of the few exceptions to the left’s losing streak is Canada.

In the United States, of course, Democrats control neither the White House nor Congress. If you’re tempted to excuse this by noting that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, I’d point out that Democrats also hold only about one-third of state legislatures and governorships.

The situation is so dispiriting because the political right, while it is more successful at the ballot box, often lacks solutions to the problems plaguing the working class. Just look at the mess of President Trump’s first 100 days — or the demise of the traditional conservative party in France.

But the right has still done a better job of winning over voters. That France’s first-round election wasn’t as catastrophic as it might have been for the left doesn’t change this fact. The left, across much of the world, still needs a more persuasive appeal than it currently has. Finding one should be an urgent priority for progressives.