France is in Political Turmoil

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Everyone in Europe is watching France as its election for the National Assembly nears June 30. It could become a watershed moment for the whole continent.

On June 9, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) won the most seats in the country’s election for its 81 members to the European Parliament. With 31.4 per cent of the vote, it was good for 30 MEP seats.

The RN had come first in 93 per cent of France’s 36,000 villages, towns and cities. In doing so, it broadened its appeal significantly beyond its historic redoubts on the Mediterranean coast and in the northern rust belt.

The party more than doubled the vote for President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance centrist alliance, which scraped into second place on 14.6 per cent of the vote, just ahead of the Socialists in third with 13.8 per cent. They each got 13 seats. The far-left France Unbowed (LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon won almost 10 percent and nine seats.

The result pushed Macron to call a snap parliamentary election. (A second round will be held July 7 in constituencies where no candidate won an initial majority.)

Even prior to the vote, there were many who deemed the RN so dangerous that they would consider using force to stop it. A well-known French radio comedian in March suggested an armed revolution in the event Marine Le Pen is elected president in 2027. Mahaut Drama made her comments during a debate at a left-wing media festival in Paris. Yet Le Pen’s party has been attracting members not usually considered far right.

In January this year, the philosopher Luc Ferry, a minister in President Jacques Chirac’s Gaullist government twenty years ago, rejected the idea that a vote for Le Pen was a vote for fascism -- and the RN in May broke with the right-wing Alternative for Germany after a prominent member seemed to excuse some members of the Nazi SS in World War II.

In March Fabrice Leggeri joined the RN. He, like Macron, is a graduate of ENA (L’Ecole nationale d’administration), the finishing school for France’s bureaucratic elite. Leggeri served as the head of Frontex, the EU border agency, between 2015 and 2022.

The leader of France’s Republicans, Eric Ciotti, has backed an alliance with the RN. “We say the same things, so let’s stop making up imagined opposition. This is what the vast majority of our voters want. They’re telling us, ‘Reach a deal.’ We are no longer in the aftermath of World War II.”

This sparked an outcry in his own party since such an alliance would break a decades-old taboo. But Jordan Bardella, president of the NR, on June 14 announced that his and Ciotti’s parties would put up joint candidates in 70 of France’s 577 constituencies, hailing what he said was a “historic agreement.”

The Republicans would then be allied with the RN in the assembly. This is important because when constituting a government, Macron will need to choose a prime minister who can command the support of a majority in the National Assembly. After decades of being labeled pariahs, the RN may finally become part of the French political establishment. As parliamentary leader of the RN in the forthcoming election, Bardella would become the next prime minister.

The 28-year old’s official biography is that of a young man who grew up in Cité Gabriel-Péria, a deprived estate in the Parisian banlieue (poor area) of Seine-Saint-Denis. Both his parents are of Italian origin. After living with the scourge of drugs, poverty, lawlessness and uncontrolled immigration, he came to believe that only the right-wing RN had the answer.

But the family wasn’t really poor, and Bardella did not go to the nearest state school, but to a semi-private Catholic establishment. “The young Bardella had a foot on either side of the tracks,” according to journalist Pierre-Stéphane Fort, the author of a critical biography of the RN president, “Le grand remplaçant: La face cachée de Jordan Bardella (“The Great Replacement: Jordan Bardella’s Hidden Side”).

A recent BBC story described Bardella as being more pragmatic than ideological. He never attended university and has no experience of government. He joined the RN (then known as National Front) at 16 when Marine Le Pen was taking over the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who led it until 2011.

Marine expelled her father in 2015 following an interview in which he described Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history.”  Under her leadership, she ran for the presidency against Macron in 2017 and 2022 and lost both times.

Le Pen and Bardella have also vanquished Eric Zemmour and his competing party, Reconquête, founded in 2021. He had managed to win over her own niece, Marion Maréchal, who led the Reconquête list June 9 and polled a little above five percent, earning the party five Euro MPs.

When Zemmour promised to run Reconquête candidates against RN ones June 30, Maréchal abandoned him and took three of her newly-elected Euro MPs with her to the RN, leaving Zemmour with only one MEP in Brussels.

Le Pen stated during the campaign that the New Popular Front, an alliance of left-leaning parties formed by Mélenchon to contest the election, would be an “abomination for the country.” It’s clearly now or never for the National Rally.

 

Will Belgium Survive?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Belgium doesn’t really have a “national” election. The country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.

Most Flemish voters can only vote for Flemish parties, and French speakers can vote for French-speaking parties. In the capital, Brussels, Belgians can pick and choose.

This has created a fragmented political landscape. Traditional parties don’t operate nationwide. They split into Flemish and French-speaking parties decades ago, catering to their own regions. The far-left Workers’ Party, which operates as a single, national party, is the exception to the rule.

To be able to govern and choose a prime minister, Flemish and French-speaking parties have to form a coalition at the federal level. Traditionally, Flanders has leaned right while Wallonia has been a left-leaning bastion. That has made forming a federal government a difficult feat.

In Flanders, in this June 9 election, migration was a top concern, with people calling it the “biggest problem.” That explains the position of Vlaams Belang, an anti-immigration party calling to close the borders. In Brussels and Wallonia, purchasing power was the main concern. As well in Brussels, the recent wave of drug-related violence and organized crime had an impact. A quarter of Brussels residents listed security as one of their priorities.

The Flemish right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and Francophone liberal Reformist Movement (MR) were the two victors of the election, which saw Belgian voters move to the right. Both campaigned on platforms advocating economic reforms to cut back the country’s spiraling government deficit.

The Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats Party (Open VLD) suffered a heavy defeat, with less than seven per cent, resulting in the resignation of its leader, Alexander De Croo, as prime minister. He had led a seven-party coalition government which was formed after almost 18 months of talks following the previous elections five years ago.

A new government is likely to coalesce around the rightwing N-VA, which beat its arch-rival, the far-right Vlaams Belang, into second place in the key Dutch-speaking Flanders region.

The far-right Vlaams Belang party, which had led the polls in Flanders in recent months, grabbed 22.8 per cent of Flemish votes, but failed to overtake its Flemish conservative rival N-VA) which became Belgium’s biggest party with around 24.5 per cent of Flemish votes. 

The French-speaking liberal MR came first in Brussels and French-speaking Wallonia, with about 30 per cent of the Francophone vote. The centrist Les Engagés finished with 21 per cent of Walloon votes. The results were a shock to the centre-left Socialist Party (PS), which has led the region for decades, but came in at 22.6 per cent. 

“The big difference between the PS and the MR is that MR preaches work whereas PS preaches laziness,” said MR party member Gjergj Dodaj. 

The separatist Vlaams Belang wants to split the country, starting with a “declaration of sovereignty” backed by a Flemish majority. N-VA has dismissed separatism in the short term and wants to reform the Belgian state into a “confederal” one instead, moving all power to the regional level but keeping a national brand for things like national defence. “Flanders has more than ever chosen for more autonomy,” N-VA leader Bart De Wever said during his victory speech

But any kind of separation would have to be negotiated with other parties, including Francophone ones. Some French-speaking parties have opened to the idea of reforming the state but adamantly dismiss splitting the country entirely.

Vlaams Belang has so far been blocked from entering governments as mainstream parties vowed to exclude it from power under a “cordon sanitaire” doctrine referring to a protective barrier put in place to stop them.

The initiative to launch coalition talks to form a national government would seem to lie with the centre-right parties. Ahead of the election, De Wever ruled out governing with Vlaams Belang; he will now have to find allies from the centre and centre-left to form a majority in the country’s federal parliament.

“We’re completely moving away from the traditional Belgian narrative of the last 50 years, according to which Flanders is on the right and Wallonia is on the left,” Vincent Laborderie, a professor at UCLouvain University, told the AFP news agency.

The results have set the country on course for months of challenging coalition talks.

 

Can Russia Remain a Great Power?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The Ukraine war drags on with no end in sight. At first, western observers assumed Moscow would gain a speedy victory. When that failed, prevailing opinion did a complete about turn, and began to predict a Ukrainian win. That also now looks like wishful thinking.

President Vladimir Putin won’t withdraw troops from the regions that Moscow has claimed as its own and he demands Ukraine drops its aspirations to join NATO.  Otherwise, Russia refuses to end the conflict.

That’s because Russians consider this a defensive war against a Western alliance seeking to end Russia’s status as a great power – or worse still, to dismember it. For them, Putin provides a patriotic response to western abuse.

Putin has also warned that Russia could provide long-range weapons to others to strike Western targets in response to NATO allies allowing Ukraine to use their arms to attack Russian territory. He reaffirmed Moscow’s readiness to use nuclear weapons if it sees a threat to its sovereignty.

Andrei Tsygankov, a professor in the Department of International Relations at San Francisco State University, in his article “Irreplaceable Russia: Fortresses and Bridges of the ‘Russian Idea,’” published in the October/December issue of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, has written about Russia’s conception of its mission in the contemporary world.

“Understanding Russia as a fortress defending itself (and the world) from alien --primarily Western -- expansion,” he writes, “is characteristic of Russian thought since its emergence” as a state.

Russia continues to aspire to great power status and so is averse to relations with Western nations that would make Russia a “junior” partner. It seeks friendship with like minded countries who challenge the Western alliance, such as China.

“Faced with strong pressure from the West, Russian thought has often prioritized protection against the expansion of Western civilization,” Tsygankov asserts. While Russia is dwarfed by NATO in conventional forces, Russia nonetheless pursues “red lines” with Western nations; in particular, the exclusion of Ukraine from Western alliances.

Russia does not seek direct confrontation with Western nations as it is aware of the conventional imbalance. Russia prefers relations with individual nations and political parties rather than organisations like the European Union or NATO.

Russia encourages Euroskeptic nations like Italy, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia, and supports nationalist parties like the Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France and the Alternative fur Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) in Germany. Through its ties to these groups, Russia encourages internal discord within Western countries themselves.

Russian-Western relations now hinge on the situation in Ukraine and seem unlikely to improve. Tsygankov also speculates that the United States and Western allies may have to move beyond their current economic containment policy to deter Russia.

So what comes next? The historian Stephen Kotkin, now a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, outlines several possibilities.

In his piece “The Five Futures of Russia And How America Can Prepare for Whatever Comes Next,” in the May/June 2024 issue of the influential periodical Foreign Affairs, he reminds us that western countries, including the United States, have learned the hard way that they “lack the levers to transform places such as Russia and, for that matter, China: countries that originated as empires on the Eurasian landmass and celebrate themselves as ancient civilizations that long predate the founding of the United States.”

One possibility Kotkin presents is “Russia as France.” A nation with deep-seated bureaucratic and monarchical traditions, France also has a fraught revolutionary tradition. “For centuries, France’s rulers, none more than Napoleon, threatened the country’s neighbours.” But this is no longer the case.

Russia, too, possesses such a tradition, one that will endure regardless of the nature of any future political system. But it may cease being a threat yet retain its memories “as a source of inspiration.” This is Kotkin’s preferred scenario.

Less palatable is “Russia Retrenched.” Some Russians might welcome a transformation into a country that resembles France, but others would find that outcome anathema. Nonetheless, Russian nationalists may come to realize that Putin’s policies have led the country into a self-defeating trajectory. Historically, “such realizations have precipitated a change of course, a turn from foreign overextension to domestic revitalization.”

Defiantly pro-Putin Russian elites boast that they have developed an option that is better than the West: the Chinese-Russian bond. But, Kotkin points out, “The great and growing imbalance in the relationship has induced analysts to speak of Russia as China’s vassal.” This “Russia as Vassal” outcome is not one most Russians would endorse.

Even worse is the idea of “Russia as North Korea.”  This would see a country that has become “domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons, and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing.”

And finally, there is “Russia in Chaos.” Past Russian states have disintegrated in the twentieth century, both times unexpectedly yet completely. Tsarist Russia fell apart in 1917, the Soviet Union in 1991. “There are many plausible hypothetical causes for a breakdown in the near future,” Kotkin contends. “Countries such as Russia with corroded institutions and legitimacy deficits can be susceptible to cascades in a sudden stress test. Chaos could well be the price for a failure to retrench.” The reverberations from such a worst-case outcome would be immense and would be felt across the world.