France and Britain: both democracies, but worlds apart
(Shutterstock)
Sometimes France seems no distance at all: merely the few minutes it takes to cross the Channel on the Eurostar. Other times, it feels as if we are worlds apart. I did not expect to enjoy the inordinately lengthy French presidential election debate, but — thanks not least to the excellent simultaneous translators on France 24 — I watched to the end, even though it overran and lasted nearly three hours. Superficially, the presentation was not dissimilar from its British counterparts, but as the debate unfolded it became a revelation of how different our political cultures really are. The system that offers voters a choice between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen is as different from the one that produced Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer as it is possible for two democracies to be.
For expert political analysis, readers should turn to Denis MacShane, the former Europe minister and biographer of Mitterrand, who has been reporting regularly on the French election for TheArticle throughout the campaign. You will find his brilliant assessment of the debate here. For what it is worth, I share his view, with which the French public appears to concur, that Macron won again, if not as decisively as five years ago. He still runs rings around Marine Le Pen, but this time she did not lose her temper. Instead, she merely gave him her thin-lipped smile. If looks could kill, he would have been carried out of the studio in a coffin.
As for the President: he cannot disguise his sense of superiority. The challenger told him at least once not to lecture her, but he could not help doing so every time he interjected his withering little asides. Sometimes it seemed as if he was providing a running commentary on her manifesto, which he appeared to have memorised better than she had. By the end, viewers will have known a lot more about the National Rally than perhaps they would have wished.
Macron was determined to prove that Mme Le Pen’s programme was a hopeless muddle, as incoherent as it was illiberal. In that, he may have succeeded. But he was also reminding voters that on almost every issue, she was proposing to spend more taxpayers’ money than he was. Indeed, the parts of the debate that seemed most familiar to this British spectator concerned public services: teachers, doctors, nurses and many others were all offered generous bribes. In inflationary times, some will no doubt be tempted, even if they have to hold their noses to vote for any member of the Le Pen clan.
The real differences between France and the UK emerged when foreign affairs came up. Imagine a transgender Jeremy Corbyn, who rejects the EU because he wants socialism in one country and has no time for NATO either. At times, however, she also sounds like a more extreme Donald Trump, demanding the mass deportation of foreigners, the banning of the hijab or Muslim headscarf in all public places and the closing down of hundreds of mosques. On the headscarf, which is already banned in classrooms, Macron was hardly exaggerating when he warned: “What you are saying is very serious. You are going to cause a civil war. I say this sincerely.”
Even more shocking was their debate about the war in Ukraine. Macron seized the initiative by accusing Mme Le Pen point blank of being in the pay of Putin. She was forced to admit that her party had indeed taken out a loan from a state-controlled bank in Moscow. The Russian President, he said, was “your banker”. No matter how often she protested her patriotism, insisting that “I am a free woman”, she could not escape the impression that she was soft on Russia, if not in Putin’s pocket.
Yet the truth is that Macron himself has hardly been in the vanguard of support for Ukraine. His approach until very recently was to keep talking to Putin and France has, along with the other two big EU countries Germany and Italy, lagged far behind the UK and US in offering heavy equipment to Kyiv or pushing for tougher sanctions on Moscow. There seemed to be little difference on these issues between the two candidates, although Mme Le Pen was more vociferous in opposing a ban on oil and gas imports from Russia.
Neither of them mentioned Russian atrocities in Ukraine, let alone genocide — although Zelensky now says that more than 600,000 Ukrainians are believed to have been deported to Russia. The discussion in Paris seemed to be taking place in a parallel universe, with little sense of an existential crisis for Europe. Nor would a challenger from the Left, such as Jean-Luc Melenchon, have been much better at putting Macron on the spot. The main concern for both politicians seemed to be to reassure voters that France would never be dragged into the conflict.
The implication was that the moral burden of stopping Putin in his tracks could be safely left to other people: the Ukrainians themselves, the other East Europeans and of course les Anglo-Saxons. If Marine Le Pen really is the Pétain de nos jours, then Macron’s ambition is to be the De Gaulle — who did in fact remove France from NATO’s military command, as Mme Le Pen also proposes to do. Macron rebuked her sharply for even mentioning the General’s name.
If this all seems remote from our own politics, that is because history always casts a long shadow. The ghost of Churchill still hovers over British notions of leadership in war, just as the French fight over the legacy of De Gaulle. The constitution of the Fifth Republic, which he drafted and imposed, still dictates the parameters of political life in France. Europe loomed large in the debate, but not even the President saw the EU as any kind of restriction on French sovereignty. To their minds, Europe is simply France writ large. No wonder there was not enough room for the British in such a conception.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.
