Macron and the Defense of the Republic

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/opinion/roger-cohen-french-election-macron-le-pen.html

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After a French police officer, Xavier Jugelé, was killed in Paris last month, a service was held at Paris police headquarters. His grief-stricken civil partner, Etienne Cardiles, described their love and, addressing the murderer, said, “You will not have my hatred.”

It was a statement consistent with the resolute, dignified response of France to the terrorism that has struck it in recent years. The Republic, tested more than the United States of late, has not succumbed to fear or fanaticism. It has held the line and so has reinforced, in a time of indignities, the dignity of the French state.

France faces a choice between many things Sunday as it votes to elect either the rightist Marine Le Pen or the centrist Emmanuel Macron as president, but the most fundamental issue is whether to uphold or abandon the values of the Republic, whether to hold the high ground or descend into the mire.

The French state is the most animate of inanimate things. It breathes. Absent religion in any official form, absent the monarchy, the state is what the French have to represent the high ideals and aspirations that, as descendants of the Revolution, they must somehow embody. The question before the French now is whether to stain or sustain that body.

If Le Pen were elected, a shadow would fall across France and Europe.

Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, forged the National Front in a racist, anti-Semitic image befitting the descendants of Vichy, the lap-dog French government that did the Nazis’ bidding. He dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail” of history and called the Nazi occupation “not particularly inhumane.” Immigrants from North Africa were no better than scum. She has worked hard to excise, or camouflage, all that.

Election posters refer to her only as “Marine”; there’s no mention of the party; and she’s attempted to supplant xenophobic fanaticism with a nationalism that argues against immigration — particularly Muslim immigration — on security and economic grounds.

The makeover, combined with Le Pen’s political agility and down-to-earth affability, has been effective. Whereas her father got 18 percent of the vote in the 2002 runoff, she will almost certainly get more than double that. She could even, if the blow-up-the-system far left becomes her enabler through massive abstention, edge out Macron.

That is unlikely. Polls show Macron, the young upstart of this election, with a clear lead. But it is not impossible. Marine Le Pen’s National Front has joined the mainstream.

The factors that have contributed to her rise will be familiar to Americans who thought Donald Trump was a joke, then an unlikely contender, and at last discovered he had become their president. They include rage against the establishment; a conviction that globalization is a rigged system for the wealthy; exasperation at impunity for the financial engineers of the 2008 meltdown and the euro crisis; the cultural and economic chasm between wired metropolis and dystopian periphery; growing inequality; and hollowed-out industrial heartlands.

Something is happening. We don’t know what it is. Le Pen is the voice of that something.

She is also the mouthpiece, still, of a racist and Muslim-hating party; a fierce opponent of the European Union that ushered the continent from its darkest hours; a fully fledged member of the rising nationalist-autocratic club with its branches in Moscow, Ankara and Washington; and a proponent of a France-first nationalism whose endpoint, as former President François Mitterrand observed, is war.

Her party makeover is a sham. She still denies French responsibility for sending 76,000 Jews to their deaths during World War II; she still does business with Holocaust deniers; she and her entourage still traffic in the vilification of Islam; and she still strains for some whiff of Gaullism that would dispel the stench of Vichy.

In short, the choice Sunday is clear. Emmanuel Todd, a prominent left-wing intellectual, has said he will abstain “with joy.” Some leftist supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who received almost 20 percent of the vote in the first round, have attempted to equate Macron the capitalist and ex-banker with Le Pen the racist xenophobe as equal examples of iniquity. That does not fly. It is a form of moral and intellectual dishonesty.

The French left should examine its conscience carefully before any decision to abstain, or risk abetting the descendants of the rightists and Fascists who opposed the Popular Front of Léon Blum. In 1936, Blum became the first Jew and the first Socialist to be French prime minister but, indicted by the Vichy government, he was later imprisoned at Buchenwald.

Macron is an unknown quantity. Nobody is sure what he has in his gut. But he has shown courage, especially in his support of the European Union and his resistance to disparaging caricatures of refugees, and he is determined to revitalize a stagnant France. In this moment, he is the best hope for France, for Europe and for civility.

What French voters can say on Sunday is: “You will not have my hatred.” I believe they will. And if they do, the world should thank them.