FORTHCOMING MANUSCRIPT – OUT THIS MONTH
What has led to the recent revival of the extreme right in Western democracies such as France and Australia, and what impact has their success had on mainstream politics? What shift has taken place in recent times as ideas and groups that once were considered marginal and undemocratic have come to play an important part in mainstream politics?
A poll published last week in Le Monde confirmed a very worrying trend in French politics. Following Marine Le Pen’s breakthrough in the 2012 presidential election, wherein the Front National leader received more than 6.5 million votes, and its first members of parliament since the 1980s were elected, the extreme right party appears increasingly normalised in French politics. When Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the 2002 election as a result of the poor performance of the two mainstream parties, hundreds of thousands of French people took to the streets to express their disgust at a party that’s rooted in neo-fascism.
Ten years on, things have changed dramatically and there were very few demonstrations when Marine Le Pen beat her father’s 2002 record by more than 1.7 million votes. More importantly for the future of the party, this latest poll shows that the mainstreaming of extreme right discourse has succeeded and that the stigma attached to the party has all but disappeared. Indeed, only 18 per cent of respondents in Le Monde believed that the UMP should fight the Front National (down from 38 per cent in 2002), while 28 per cent felt that, depending on the circumstances, alliances were a valid strategy (up from 15 per cent).
With Gerhard Hoffstaedter
MOOCs (massive open online courses) and more freely available lectures and university content are transforming the education landscape, and alliances between academia and corporations are ever-increasing. But this revolution in education might pose a lethal threat for hardly commodifiable disciplines such as those of the humanities.
Hundreds of thousands accessing knowledge for its own sake is even more cause for rejoicing than if they were receiving diplomas, a commodity in exchange for their learning. In a way, TEDx, Coursera and others like them are taking part in the democratisation of education by removing it from the shackles of consumerism and the market, a place where truly emancipatory education has no future. However, such developments must be advanced with caution, as their consequences on the production of knowledge could be detrimental, in particular within the fields of humanities and social sciences. Continue reading When the possible death of humanities is a progressive development
Let’s be clear, access to quality lectures for free is a fantastic achievement, allowing hundreds of thousands to access knowledge for its own sake. But with Tedx, Coursera and others like them taking part in the democratisation of education by removing it from the shackles of consumerism and the market, there is a risk that such developments will be detrimental to the exploration of knowledge in the long term.
Carole Cadwalladr recently reported in the Observer that free online access to tertiary courses and lectures was set to revolutionise education. She imagined a United Kingdom where “the ‘second-tier’ universities … could struggle in the brave new free education market world”. What her piece ignored is that these universities are already struggling, not because of the “free education market”, but because of the hegemony of free market strategies in education. This is particularly striking in the humanities, an area of study to which only one paragraph was dedicated, but that could be the greatest loser in this recent transformation of the education landscape.
Continue reading Could online courses be the death of the humanities?
On 9 October, a speech by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard went viral. Gillard accused the Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott of hypocrisy, and said she hoped ‘the Leader of the Opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation’. These were strong words. Across the globe, Gillard was praised for tackling an issue which has become a recurrent theme in Australian politics and took on a new dimension when Abbott became leader of the Liberal party in 2009.
This came after Abbott had tabled a motion to remove Peter Slipper, the Speaker of the House of Representatives who is currently involved in various fraud and sexual harassment scandals. While the content of the motion may have been reasonable, the fact that it came from the ‘Mad Monk’ was the final straw for Gillard, whose time in office has been marked by reccuring gender-based attacks. Abbott knew the path was a dangerous one for him; in 2010, he declared he had ‘always been very wary of debates involving women’.
“Anti-white racism” is big news in France. But while concern over the real or perceived bigotry faced by white people was previously limited to the National Front, a statement from Jean-Francois Cope, the secretary general of Sarkozy’s UMP party has ushered this buzz-phrase into the mainstream.
In his forthcoming book, Manifeste pour une droite décomplexée (Manifesto for an unabashed right-wing), Jean-François Copé declares he is willing to ‘break taboos’ and to denounce the growing ‘anti-white racism’. This mainstreaming of a type of discourse which until recently was limited to the marginal extreme right demonstrates clearly the worrying trend French politics is following. There is little doubt that such a headway into this kind of politics is bound to reinforce Marine Le Pen’s normalisation. Continue reading Le Pen’s attacks on Islam are no longer veiled
Labor has just lost another election in Australia to the opposition in an electoral race that was dominated by negative messages, where both parties attempted unsuccessfully to differentiate themselves from their federal counterparts. This is just the most recent illustration of the limits of modern parliamentary democracy in Australia.
Such issues dominate the media and will have a significant impact in the election of an unpopular leader next year as Australian Prime Minister, be they Labor or Liberal. Both are currently unable to improve on their low approval ratings, with neither able to inspire populist hope, or engage in a substantial policy debate.
This kind of anti-politics is turning voters away from the democratic process and politics in general.
Being able to vote for a “lesser of two evils” rather than for a positive vision of society and politics is proving unsustainable for voters, as the situation in Queensland is proving. After delivering the LNP a landslide victory, voters are now dismayed with the LNP for implementing its austerity measures. Resistance in the form of petitions, demonstrations and public outrage are now emerging in response.
Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has won the French presidential election with 52% of the vote, ousting sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy.
In hindsight, there have been few surprises in this campaign and election. Of course, many French people and commentators have been shocked or disappointed by the various twists and turns, but all that happened was predictable in a cold-headed analysis.
Continue reading France 2012: Sarkozy’s battle with the right hands Hollande the presidency
France went to sleep last night knowing that almost a fifth of those who felt compelled to vote in the first round of the presidential election chose a party formed on an openly neo-fascist platform. Although the Front National’s Marine Le Pen failed to access the second round, her result is far more concerning than her father’s in 2002. Jean-Marie Le Pen received just over 16% of the vote and a ticket to the second round, but that particular election also witnessed a record level of abstention. This year, France saw one of its biggest turnouts since the birth of the Fifth Republic with ‘only’ 20% abstaining.
Therefore, while the Socialists celebrated Francois Hollande’s strong lead, and deservedly, the mood was in part dampened by the historic result of the FN. More importantly, its acceptance as a serious and normalised contender on the French political landscape proved of utmost concern.
Similarly, Mélenchon was not able to fully express his satisfaction at his impressive result (11%), and proclaim the possible rebirth of a strong left-wing alternative in France. While the Front de Gauche might have sown the seeds for the growth of another strong contender in French politics, Marine Le Pen’s exploit lessened its claim to have gathered the discontented.
The first round of the French Presidential election is set to take place on Sunday. The latest polls have shown that right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy and his centre left contender François Hollande are set to win their ticket to the second round. While both are currently polling in the high 20s, an upset is not entirely ruled out as the campaign has shown strong support for three main outsiders: centre François Bayrou, but more importantly hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and extreme right Marine Le Pen. While Hollande has so far refused to embrace more left-wing politics, Sarkozy has recently made a clear move to recuperate Le Pen’s electorate.
Continue reading Sarkozy’s ugly campaign
The Guardian believes she is ‘the most dangerous woman in France’, and less than a hundred days before the 2012 presidential election, Marine Le Pen appears to be the best contender the extreme right Front National has ever put forward. A sign of changing times, she is also only the second candidate the party has ever put forward for presidency in France. In a party like the Front National (FN), where tradition is a core value, there can only be so much change, and it is not surprising that it was the daughter of the old chef who was voted president of the party in January 2011. Nor is it surprising that, despite an effort to modernise and moderate aspects of the party, the broad lines of the programme remain unchanged, still based on a strong anti-immigrant sentiment and exaggerated nationalism. Right-wing populism, which made Le Pen senior a serious candidate for two decades, remains central to the politics of the party. In 2012, Le Pen’s success will be decided by her ability to broaden her appeal and reach new voters. Many commentators argue that her party has already become the main workers’ party and that this will deliver the Front’s best score ever. However, like her father and in a manner traditional to the extreme right, Le Pen has openly targeted the middle class and lower-middle class, those she feels are the most highly disillusioned with politics and ready to vote for anyone in order to vent their frustration. It is their degree of dissatisfaction that will be central to the success of the FN this year.
This article will be published in the final issue of this year or the first issue of next year of Patterns of Prejudice.
An electronic copy might be available earlier.
Many commentators saw in the ‘poor’ result achieved by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2007 presidential elections the demise of the Front National. However, when asked by a journalist whether it was the end of her father’s political career, Marine Le Pen replied smiling: ‘I don’t think so. In any case, this is the victory of his ideas!’ In these question and answer lie the whole story of the Front National and its impact on mainstream politics in the past two decades. First, Le Pen’s defeat was exaggerated, the same way his victory had in 2002. In what was seen as the demise of the Front National, Le Pen managed to obtain almost 4 million votes despite the candidature of far right Philippe de Villiers and still ranked fourth in the tally. Furthermore, that Le Pen managed to retain these votes despite the adverse context was a victory in itself. The five years between the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections had indeed led to drastic changes in the way politics was done in France.
What is argued in this article is that the 2002 presidential elections did act as an ‘earthquake’ within French politics. However, this ‘earthquake’ was not so much triggered by a Jean-Marie Le Pen tsunami, but rather by a tidal wave of misinformation and misunderstanding of the real interests and novelty of the results of these elections. By concentrating on the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections, this article will highlight how this reaction led to the consecration of right wing populist politics best exemplified in the landslide election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.
Unlike many of its western counterparts, Australia has been spared powerful surges of the extreme right throughout its history. While the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw European democracies threatened time and time again by movements relying on ethno-exclusivism and thriving on capitalist crises, Australia suffered only relatively weak extreme right bursts whose impact remained marginal. Even the rise of the One Nation Party in 1996, as sudden as it was impressive, showed the limits in the Australian context for organisations which have proved long-lasting in Europe.
This brief outline could bear a simple conclusion: Australia is immune to the extreme right. However, through a study of some of the most important extreme right failures in Australia, this article shows that rather than being immune, the country was spared an extreme right because of the policies put in place by mainstream parties and governments. By analysing mainstream politics in times of extreme right resurgence, this article highlights that by negating the extreme right’s ability to appear as an alternative to the power in place, Australian mainstream politicians suffocated it.
The conclusion of this article demonstrates that while the Australian extreme right has been mostly inaudible since 2001, extreme right politics, such as ethno-exclusivism, still play a crucial part in the shaping of Australian politics, notably during election campaigns.
Keywords: extreme right, Australian history, ethno-exclusivism, populism, democracy
Two months to the French presidential election, the prospects of the extreme right Front National remain as high as ever. In many polls, Marine Le Pen hovers at between 15 and 20 percent and, in some cases, even leads right-wing UMP candidate and president Nicolas Sarkozy and centre-left candidate François Hollande. Such a high score for a party founded in the 1970s by neo-fascists is a worrying prospect. While history tells us that Le Pen would not stand a chance in the second round, it has also shown that France could take a terrible turn as a result of her mere presence.
In hindsight, I can gladly admit that my original reaction to the first day of Occupy Melbourne was wrong. As a left-wing cynic, weary from years fighting alongside the fragments of an old and obsolete reactionary left, I noted the usual suspects and assumed too quickly that these dogmatic, semi-cultish organisations would try to succeed in taking over the movement. I wrongly doubted the new faces would survive the first assembly and assumed most passers-by would leave when confronted by an outdated lecture on Marx or Lenin. While the left’s key thinkers are still relevant, their use as a quasi bible by self-righteous crusaders and vanguards sits somewhat uneasily in the struggle against the contemporary form of capitalism. Yet the idealist in me was still alive and I went back the next day to see how the movement had evolved. While the square was much less populated on that Sunday afternoon, there seemed to remain a spirit of freedom and independence which made me optimistic, if not for the future of the movement, for its relevance in the ongoing emancipatory struggle.
Continue reading Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
