Transcript
MR. JAMES B. STEINBERG: Good morning and welcome. There's a special prize for all of you who showed up this morning and managed to get through the traffic and the weather, but we're delighted that you're here.
We're going to talk about the French elections coming up this Sunday, but also more broadly about the implications in Europe and for trans-Atlantic relations. We're fortunate to have three of our finest, thoughtful analysts here at Brookings to join us today.
We're going to begin with Phil Gordon who is the Director of our Center on the United States and France. He'll talk about what this means, what the choices were, how we should interpret the tea leaves. And I told Phil that he has to make a prediction as to how it's all going to come out so we'll find out today.
MR. PHILIP H. GORDON: Turn off the recording.
MR. STEINBERG: We'll follow that with E.J. our expert on issues of the left who is going to talk with us a bit about the internal implications in France, and particularly the implications for the left impression.
And we have the special privilege of having Ivo Daalder here who is the only one who can pronounce the names of most of the right-wing figures that we're going to be watching over the coming months more broadly in Europe. He'll look at the broader problem of the extreme right in Europe.
Without further ado, I'll turn it to Phil.
MR. GORDON: Thanks, Jim.
We've all had about ten days already to digest the first round of the elections and figure out what happened. What I'd like to do is just offer a few brief comments on what happened last week and then ask some questions about the future, and not just the Presidential second round this Sunday, but I think even more importantly the legislative that follows, and then finally what the lessons of this election in France were.
The first comment on the vote last Sunday is this. We're all here, frankly, because of this impression that was given of a massive shift to the far right in France. You read in the papers about the surge of the far right and so on.
The point I want to begin with is to say I don't think that happened. There was a slight rise for the extreme right in France but the fact that Le Pen made it to the second round gives us the impression of a much greater shift than actually took place. You can show that in a lot of ways.
Le Pen got about 16.9 percent last Sunday, but keep in mind that seven years before that he got 15 percent, and seven years before that he got 14 percent. So over the spectrum here we get a rise of less than three percentage points over 14 years.
Now because of the high number of abstentions in this election, a record number of abstentions, the percentages are even magnified more. So if you actually look at the number of votes he got you see that he got 200,000 more votes than the last time. In other words, seven years ago he got 4.6 million and this time he got 4.8 million. That's not what you would call a surge.
Now you might say, but hold on a minute, there was another far right candidate, Bruno Megret. He got lots of votes, so you see there is a surge in the far right.
I think if you want to be fair look at the last time again when there was another far right candidate, Philip De Villiers. A little bit different, but nonetheless, extremely conservative rightist candidate who got a million and a half votes last time. So if you look at the numbers in that way you can add Le Pen and Megret together this time and see that they got almost 5.5 million votes. But if you add Le Pen and De Villiers from last time, they got over six million votes, and as a percentage of the people who voted, Le Pen and De Villiers actually got more than Le Pen and Megret.
So all of that suggests to me that while it's quite shocking, perhaps, that 4.5 million French people voted for Le Pen ten days ago, it's not what it seems. If you look at it in terms of registered voters you also don't see this dramatic rise.
Also, just the general shift to the right that we're going to talk about more broadly in the context of Europe is hard to argue in the French case. The center right lost many more votes this time than the center left.
So don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that there's not a very serious issue and that we don't need to draw lessons from the Le Pen vote, we do. But I think we also need to see it in perspective.
Another point about last week's election is that the rise of the far right to the extent that it happened is not the only story here. In fact in some ways it's not even the most interesting. Just to note some others for our discussion, I think the fragmentation of the political system is just as interesting and important. We had a record 16 candidates this time and seven of them got over five percent of the vote so you had a real explosion of the political system and fragmentation, particularly on the left, and E.J, will talk about the left. But that's where it was the most dramatic, where Jospin lost 2.5 million votes compared to last time. I think the abstention rate sent a message. An unprecedented abstention of nearly 30 percent. If you include blank ballots, over 30 percent.
Then a couple of other messages I think are quite important to recognize, even if you take the abstention into account. The anti-globalization message. If you add up the percentages of all of those who are deeply hostile to economic liberalism and globalization, you get 48 percent. So nearly half of those who bothered to turn out sent a message that said they don't like globalization. The same is true about the European Union. Forty-three percent of those who bothered to turn out voted for candidates who are deeply hostile to the EU. I think all of these points are equally worth our attention to the so-called rise of the far right.
The last comment about last week's election, and it derives partly from what I've said so far, is that the sending of Jean-Marie Le Pen to the second round was an accident. I think it's fair to say that the French electorate, to the extent that electorates could speak, did not go to the polls intending to send Le Pen to the second round. They did it accidentally. By that I mean, you can look at that in a lot of ways as well. I mean I think what happened is that for months the media and the opinion polls and the experts were telling us and everyone in France that it was obvious that it was going to be Chirac-Jospin. We all counted on that, we assumed it, the polls told us that, and so voters were more free than ever to use their first round vote as an expression, as a protest against the leaders, as a way for those who were deeply engaged for the more extreme candidate to vote for them, but not necessarily to put Le Pen into the second round, which he managed to achieve by less than one percent. So the fragmentation is relevant here too. I think any of the candidates on the left that you would presume closer to Jospin than Le Pen—Chevenement, for example, or Christiane Taubira who is oriented near where Jospin is on the spectrum, they were the Ralph Nader's of the election last week. They drew enough votes from Jospin to send Le Pen into the second round.
It's not only true based on the assumption that a lot of people used the protest vote, but even in exit polls, when people actually were asked why did you vote for the candidate you voted for, only 23 percent of those who voted for Le Pen said because I want him to become President of France. That number for Jospin-Chirac was 70 and 73 percent. So people who were voting for Chirac and Jospin were saying I want this person to become President. People who voted for Le Pen, by their own admission, three-fourths of them had another reason to vote for Le Pen other than making him President.
Okay, that's all to try to put it in perspective. Nonetheless something quite dramatic happened in terms of the level of abstention, the level of anti-globalization, anti-EU and far right, and the question is why it happened. I think the analysis of this in the media over the past week and a half has been good, I don't need to go on too much about it.
The one thing I would underline is the perceived lack of choice. I think the effect of the French left moving over the past 20 years to the center in terms mainly of its economic policies, but broadly, left the voters with the impression that Chirac and Jospin were exactly the same thing.
Aside from the fact that the two candidates weren't inspiring, they've both been around for too long, in different ways they weren't able to appeal to voters, but even beyond that the fact is most perceived them as more or less the same thing, and to the extent that they were frustrated and wanted an alternative, they had to turn to the extremes because you no longer had the left/right opposition where if you weren't satisfied with your current government you could vote for a more moderate opposition.
I think more than anything that led to this. The other interesting dimension, obviously, is the issue of crime which was very much used as an electoral tool both of the far right and by Chirac. Rising crime and insecurity led a lot of people to turn their votes in the end to the strongest anti-crime candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
One other word on Le Pen and why he did so well. The reasons are also well known—anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-globalization, anti-main stream candidates anti-Semitism. But let me put an asterisk on the last point because I think it's the most misunderstood of all.
I think especially in this country the analysis we've seen, there's been a lot of quick equations, there have been anti-Semitic acts in France, Le Pen is an anti-Semite, which he clearly is. Therefore, there were 4.5 million anti-Semitic votes in France. I think that equation is far too simple. I think the reason for Le Pen was much more an anti-immigrant, anti-Arab vote. Indeed, most of the anti-Semitic acts that we've seen in France have been attributed to immigrants, North African Arab communities and not the classical anti-Semitism that one knows from French history. So I think one needs to be very careful in equating this outcome with an anti-Semitic vote in France. I think the much more powerful factors were the ones I mentioned. Crime and insecurity. There are people really fed up with rising crime. And again, if you look at Le Pen's numbers on why people voted for him, 74 percent said that insecurity was the reason they voted for who they voted for, in this case Le Pen. For the French as a whole, 58 percent said insecurity.
That, by the way, is worth mentioning as well. For 20 years the top answer for the French voters has been unemployment. What do you care most about and why are you going to cast your vote for whoever you're going to cast it for? Unemployment. Sometime last year that flip-flopped with crime and insecurity so that now crime was the top reason, again 58 percent, when people were given three choices. But for Le Pen it was 74 percent and for Le Pen immigration at 60 percent made it into the top.
That's looking backwards. A few thoughts on looking ahead.
In some ways, and this is not just to get out of Jim's challenge of predicting the precise score on Sunday. It seems to me that it's actually the legislative elections that are more important. We're all focused on Sunday and it will be important to watch. The one semi-prediction I'll make about Sunday is I don't believe the polls that are sometimes showing 80-20, and there was even one this morning 81-19 for Chirac. For Chirac to get above 80 percent he would have to win over all of the votes that went to non Le Pen and Megret candidates and I just don't believe that all of those who voted for extreme left candidates of Green candidates or other types of nationalist candidates are going to get up and vote for Le Pen. Now it's possible that some people who voted for Le Pen the first round will say all right, I sent my message, I don't need to vote for him the second. That could bring you back closer to the 80-20, but I think it's far more likely that some people wake up with a surprise again when it turns out the polls were wrong, that there are a lot of people who will vote for Le Pen who don't admit it to pollsters. And I think in that sense we're more likely to see something closer to 25 than to 20.
But the fact is Chirac is going to win this weekend. He's going to be President. Then all of this other stuff will be behind us. Then what I think is interesting and very consequential for the French political system is what happens in the legislative election in June. That's even more difficult to predict, not only for all the reasons that legislative elections are always hard to predict, but at least normally you can try to figure out what people care about—crime, insecurity, unemployment, and which candidates stand for that and take a guess at how well they'll do. This time there are all sorts of other complicating factors. Let me just mention two because they both point in different directions it's all the more difficult to figure out who will win.
One is, I think what favors the right in the legislative election is the very strong argument that Chirac will have, assuming he wins on Sunday, that he needs a majority on the right. That if the French electorate packs France with another five years of cohabitation with a rightist President and a leftist National Assembly, this will only perpetuate the problem to voters who are fed up, divisions within the government and the need for the extremes in the eyes of those who aren't content with the way they're governed. I think that will be a strong case. The question is how many French people will go to the polls and say well my sympathies lie a bit more with the left and the socialists, but we've got to give Chirac a majority. It's hard to know, but I think that factor gives the right a strong chance to win.
On the other hand, however, you have the, just as the electoral system in the Presidential race created a strange or unique outcome, you have a unique electoral system in the second round which allows any candidate that gets more than 12.5 percent of registered voters in the first round to stay in the second round. And if you assume that Le Pen's candidates will get more than 12.5 percent in a number of districts, they'll stay in the race, divide the rightist vote, and let the leftist candidates pass ahead into the second round. That could easily lead you to a socialist or a leftist majority as to the legislative.
That is interesting—Let me just put it this way. Wherever your ideological stand is on which side you would rather see govern France, I think for the French political system that would be not the worst outcome, you can imagine worse ones. That would be a problematic outcome which leads us to a new cohabitation, it would delegitimize the President because the most recent mandate would be for the government, it would fuel the extremes and it would raise real questions about the entire system in the Fifth Republic.
Just a few final thoughts on bigger questions and then I'll turn it over to E.J. and the others. Overall what is the consequence or message from this vote? There's three things that strike me as important. One is, I think one can say it has hardly been good for France's image and for French-American relations. We've seen that in much of the commentary here. The fact that you get in France—We all know about the traditional tensions, the traditional perceptions of the United States, particularly Washington on France, but the fact that you get an apparent surge of the extreme right, more than ten percent of the votes to Trotskyite candidates, half of them going to anti-globalization, anti-Europe, racism. This was hardly good for France's image, and I think many French voters as we saw by the million who were in the streets yesterday will do what they can with their vote to try to correct that image.
Secondly, and this may lead to some of the things E.J. will talk about in terms of the left. I think it raises a real question for the future of the left's political and economic strategy and French economic reform more generally. In other words will the leaders, and particularly on the left, hear this message as we don't like globalization, we don't like liberalization? I mean the fact is that the socialists move to the center, they adapted to globalization, they felt that by just talking about it in a soft sort of way they could persuade their electorate to vote them in but it clearly didn't work. I think there's a real question for the next French leaders. Are we going to dare stand up to an electorate that seems to be saying we just don't like that stuff and we're tired of it. I think there's a real chance that they won't.
Then finally, the last thought is about Europe. The Constitutional Convention has gone on, Europe is on the verge of a big enlargement and on major decisions about its structure. Will French leaders, or broadly, European leaders, be prepared now in this context, given the message that they think they just heard, to say I know what the problem is, let's give more power to Brussels and let's see how that works. That doesn't seem to me to be very likely either.
I'll end on that note and turn it over to E.J.
MR. E.J. DIONNE: I think the text for the day is de Gaulle's famous line, "How am I supposed to govern a country that has 757 kinds of cheese?" I think what you saw in this election was the question: was the difficulty inherent in a presidential election with 16 candidates, all of whom can fragment the vote to the extent that Phil talked about.
MR. STEINBERG: You can probably amend that, E.J., by saying 757 kinds of "smelly" cheese. The analogy works even better.
MR. DIONNE: There's truth to that.
On Le Pen, unfortunately for the sake of argument I don't disagree with a single thing Phil said. I do think it's very important before I talk about the left to underscore something he said about Le Pen. Mike Elliott of Time Magazine put it well. He said, "Le Pen is an equal opportunity bigot," and I think there is danger of over-interpreting one form of bigotry over another. I think the relevant political factor right now has much more to do, as Phil said, with Arab immigration than it does with anti-Semitism, but given Le Pen's history, there would be nothing stopping him from veering into the other if it were politically useful to him. And perhaps there is a lesson for everyone else in Le Pen's equal opportunity bigotry which is that both religious minorities and ethnic minorities share an interest in a tolerant society.
What I want to talk about is how this election has put a large wrecking ball into the house that Francoise Mitterrand built. Mitterrand, as you know, was the French President elected in 1981. He served two terms. But the moderate Socialist party, the contemporary left in France, is really a life project of Mitterrand, and he built it going back to de Gaullist years in 1965. In 1965 Mitterrand surprised a lot of people by getting 45 percent of the vote in a campaign against de Gaulle, pulling together all kinds of anti-Gaullist dissident elements and that began his project of creating a mass socialist party, which was the old French socialist party. It was so antique that its name was the French Section of the Workers International. That doesn't look good on political advertisements these days. Mitterrand reorganized it as the Socialist party and when Mitterrand started his project the Socialists were decidedly smaller than the French Communist party. I like to say the only really good news out of this last election is that after all these years the Trotskyist finally beat the Stalinists in France, and the all French Communist party collapsed.
But when Mitterrand started out, the Communist party was the dominant force on the left in France, not only electorally, not only in its control of a lot of city halls which provided a very strong machine for the Communist party, but also to a significant degree in the world of the intellectual left in France. And Mitterrand basically killed French Communism by embracing it. He created an alliance with the Communists that reached a first achievement in the 1974 election where Mitterrand very nearly beat Valery Giscard d'Estaing. He got over 49 percent of the vote and basically never stopped running for President.
He was finally elected in 1981, brought the Communists into the French government, and contrary to what a lot of other people expected, the world didn't collapse; liberty in France didn't collapse. On the contrary, what collapsed was French Communism.
Mitterrand, as you know, pursued a fairly consistent left of center economic strategy right up until 1982. This strategy ran into a lot of trouble proving that we keep coming back to Trotskyists. Trotsky was right. You couldn't have socialism in one country. There were currency crises, the French economy was in trouble, and Mitterrand made his famous correction to the center. When Phil talked about the sort of Socialist party's move to the center, you could argue it really began in the early '80s when Mitterrand made this shift.
The communists left the government. The Communist headquarters in Paris is this enormous Stalinist-looking building. It was known as the bunker, and I had the joy as a journalist of sitting outside this room while the Communist Party Central Committee (and they still called it that)f was meeting to decide whether it would stay in the government or not. And at the time it really didn't matter because if they had stayed in the government they would be endorsing a much more conservative economic program and it could have discredited themselves and their members by pulling out. They created a kind of rupture with the left from which they never recovered.
Mitterrand was rather easily reelected in 1988. The margin wasn't big, and I think it's very important that France has been for a long time the way American politics is now. France I think has been a 50/50 country going back to 1789 give or take a few percentage points. But in 1988 Mitterrand won with over 52 percent of the vote which was really quite significant for the left, and over time the Socialist party's role became dominant on the left.
I think what's very dangerous for the French left and in particular the French Socialist party is, as Phil noted, that what you saw is the collapse of the kind of central power on the left of the French Socialist party. If you added up all of the votes for left candidates or candidates who might be seen as left candidates, they actually out-polled Jospin in this election. And again, it's important to emphasize that Le Pen would not be where he is today if the Socialist vote hadn't fragmented. Jospin ran about 2.5 percentage points behind Le Pen. That's not a lot of votes. I think it came to about 270,000 votes, the last I looked at the count. Any number of factors could have pushed enough votes to Jospin to allow him to win.
There were three Trotskyists on the ballot. I think the comparison to Ralph Nader is quite fair. Not because Ralph Nader is a Trot, but because some of the forces behind this Trotskyist vote are some of the same forces behind the Nader movement, in particular, as Phil said, opposition to globalization. Arlette Laguiller, the leading Trotskyist candidate, might be sort of seen as the Harold Stassen of world Trotskyism. She has run time after time after time and she can be an appealing figure in her bluntness. The fact that she got over five percent of the vote in this election really is a sign of how disgruntled so many voters were, not only on the left but more generally with the political system and with the leadership of Jospin and Chirac. The real dynamic here was an electorate that was both frustrated and bored, and that is a very dangerous combination for democracy.
I think the French system was supposed to be a brilliant system. The Economist had a very nice editorial right before the election explaining why the French had constructed a sensible system. People can blow off steam in the first round and then get serious in the second round. What you saw here is that the system collapses when there's more steam than seriousness, and that's what happened in this case.
The failure of Jospin is not only a lesson for the French left, but it really raises problems for the whole moderate left project around Western Europe and, for that matter, in the United States. It's a problem for third way politics.
Jospin was interesting because rhetorically he always rejected the third way, saying this was too moderate. He was much more authentic in his socialism, yet in practice, Jospin governed very much as a third way politician. In truth there wasn't a vast difference between the way Jospin governed and the way Tony Blair governed, and especially as the Jospin term went on, he was a rather decent capitalist prime minister which is why he was hoping to get reelected but which caused him problems on his left.
In the campaign, beyond the fact that Jospin is not necessarily the most exciting of candidates, but even if he had been somewhat more exciting, he still had a core strategic problem. He couldn't decide whether to run on his record, which was rather presentable, or whether to run as a socialist as a candidate of the left to try to rally the left vote. He did a little bit of both at various points in the campaign and the result was something less than a coherent message to the French electorate. However, I don't think you can blame all of the problems of the campaign on Jospin because I think this is a structural problem for parties of the left around the Western democracies.
I think one thing that's clear is that third way parties are far better at saying what they're not than at saying what they are. If you remember Tony Blair's famous statement: "We are neither the old left or the new right." Now that begs the question: what exactly is the third way? In Britain, Tony Blair was helped by the fact that the economy was very good and by a rather uninspiring, to put it gently, conservative opposition. But Jospin has the same problem.
I think one of the issues that the left really hasn't resolved is exactly where it does stand on globalization. And globalization, I believe, is a much bigger problem potentially. We could argue about this, but I think it's a bigger problem for parties of the left because the parties of the left have always depended on working class voters who are now the voters especially affected by the costs of globalization; they're especially affected by, in France and elsewhere, this rise in crime, and they tend to feel most deeply the effects of the immigration. It's their neighborhoods that are more likely to be next to immigrant neighborhoods. This is not unique to France; this was true in Britain which also, at times, has had the same kind of anti-immigrant politics through their own national front.
So you have all these factors and a left which I think is quite understandably ambivalent about the whole project of globalization. There is a general sense that the countries of Europe have no real choice but to go into the global economic system. Parties of the left are not fully trusting of it.
Europe, as well, is a problem for parties of the left. Europe has split the left in various countries for a very long time. The French Communists were long critical of Europe. They're much slower to being Gaullists than they were to being Europeans. The British Labor Party split over Europe in the 1970s. It has become a much more European party since. So I think the left has to figure out how it deals with globalization. It has to deal with the challenges of third way politics and with the construction of Europe. This will be very difficult.
I think that you are seeing the same problems in Germany on the same day that Le Pen got into the runoff. The Social Democrats lost an important state election in Germany. Immigration again is becoming an issue in Germany which the Christian Democrats have been able to take advantage of.
Of course the left had almost exactly the same structural problem in Italy that Jospin had in France, which is to say the left (including what is left of the old Italian Communist party, now renamed) won a very responsible, fiscally responsible government in Italy. They cut the budget deficit, they got Italy into Europe, and for that they were rewarded by defeat in the election at the hands of Burlesconi [ph].
The last point I want to make is about the legislative elections because I agree with Phil that we know Chirac will win, we just don't know what the margin is. I always say a political pundit should always say: I make predictions and sometimes they're about the future. I, like Phil, am skeptical of the polls. It wouldn't surprise me if Le Pen got a substantial vote partly because I think some people on the left simply won't be able to bring themselves to vote for Chirac. It will be a real test of the left's attitude toward Le Pen versus Chirac. Not that there's any support for Le Pen, rather their vote attests to their disapproval of both candidates.
The real test will come with the legislative elections. In one respect, I think the Socialists really need to do well in those legislative elections. You saw the beginnings of this sort of rupturing on the left in the presidential election. The Socialists really need to reestablish themselves as the predominant party on the left by doing well in these elections yet the left may in some ways be better off losing these elections and not cohabiting with Chirac.
One of the things you really did see in this election is what happens when there is no legitimate opposition. The parallel to the Le Pen vote this time was the period of the grand coalition in West Germany back in the '60s and '70s when the vote of the far right in Germany also went up when the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats governed together. I think it's a recipe for a rise in, if you will, non-system votes when you have this kind of governing alliance. Yet the problem for the Socialists, I can assure you they will not be working hard to lose the election. They won't be working hard to lose the election because while there is a danger to them of cohabiting with Chirac there may be an even greater danger from being in the opposition, because I think if the left is in the opposition these pressures, these splits over globalization and over the European project, will play themselves out without, if you will, the discipline of having to govern, and it could actually create more problems than the left faces today.
They say on Sesame Street, "It's not easy being Green." Right now in France it's not easy being left. Thank you.
MR. IVO H. DAALDER: Let me turn from the left to the right, and that's not a normal position for me. That's not a political statement about where I stand, but it is what I'm supposed to do.
Let me start off by saying that if you look at what has happened in Europe in recent times there are two very disturbing things happening. First you had an upsurge of anti-Jewish violence of the kind that you haven't seen in many, many years. You had burnings of synagogues, the fire bombings of kosher delis in Brussels, the desecration of grave sites throughout much of Europe, attacks on Hasidim in Germany, swastikas painted on Jewish schools, even anti-Semitic cartoons in mainstream European newspapers like La Stuampa.
The police in Berlin for the first time in more than 50 years have warned Jews not to adorn themselves with the Star of David, with donning yarmulkes, etc. This is serious business, what is happening in Europe.
Secondly, we have seen the electoral triumph not just of Le Pen in the last two weeks, but we have seen a surge of electoral victories on the far right. At times these movements are anti-Semitic, at times they are anti-Fascist, they are in fact fascist, at times they're anti-immigrant, but they are all far right.
It started in 1999 in Switzerland where the normally, on the right-hand side Farmers Party had a new leadership that became deeply anti-immigrant, deeply anti-EU, and immediately doubled the share of its vote, gaining 23 percent in 1999.
It moved then eastward to Austria where Jorg Haider who had praised Nazi employment policies in the past and talked of Auschwitz as Nazi punishment camps, secured 27 percent of the vote and a place for his party in the government.
Then from Norway in the north to Italy in the south, one by one, rightists scored one electoral victory after the other. You had King Carl, Carl Hagen in Norway, who secured a second place finish for his party and a place in government. You've got Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini in Italy, again entered the government as part of a new victory for Berlusconi. Pia Kjaersgaard's People's party in Denmark became a highly anti-immigrant party, came in third in the elections. And the government on the center right in Denmark now relies on its votes to stay in power. And the hard rightist Roland Schill captured no less than one-fifth of the vote in Hamburg just in elections last year. In Belgium Vlems Blok led by Filip DeWinter who recent called Mr. Le Pen his brother in arms, won well over a third of the vote in Antwerp, Belgium's second city and harbor town.
The trend has continued this year with the former Marxist and openly gay Pim Fortuyn winning an astonishing 34 percent of the vote in Rotterdam, the second largest city in Holland. And now polling for elections to be held in two weeks time at a victory margin of 22 seats out of 150 in the Parliament, and perhaps even becoming the second or third largest party in the Netherlands—a man who nobody had heard of until six months ago. And of course you had Le Pen's victory which we mentioned a little earlier.
Coming on top of the anti-Semitic violence, Le Pen's victory and the fears of more to come, today there are local council elections in Britain and there are worries about the British National Front perhaps doing much better than it did last time which was gaining 0.2 percent of the vote. And of course the Dutch elections on May 15th. There is a profound shock throughout the European elite about what is happening to Europe.
I agree, and I think it's very important for us to understand here, that one should not conflate anti-Semitism and the far right. I think Phil is exactly right, these are two different trends. But nevertheless they are trends that are important to take account of and to figure out what is going on.
Le Pen and his European ilk represent the ugly side of European politics. They are the Ugly Europeans, as one commentator has put it. A side that many in Europe had thought was left behind with the Nazis and the Fascist defeat in the middle of the last century.
Their anti-immigrant message is deeply racist and it is intolerant of diversity. They openly advocate sending foreigners, specially those of color, back to where they came from. Much of the ire is directed not against Jews but against Muslims and other people of color, and of course many including Le Pen continue to be anti-Semitic in their rhetoric.
Pim Fortuyn has said that his country is full, therefore nobody should be allowed in. He has also openly denigrated Islam as a second rate religions. Carl Hagen in Norway has said that if you let immigrants in you will have social conflict by definition. And the People's Party in Denmark ran election posters with a blonde looking girl that said when she retires Denmark will be a Muslim majority country.
The far right is also profoundly anti-European, seeing the EU as a bureaucratic behemoth that determines their national destiny with little if any outside control.
Why this upsurge of violence and rightist support? The anti-Jewish violence is tied I think directly to what's happening in the Middle East. Is it not coming from the mainstream European population but it is in fact linked to Muslim immigrants within the cities. The battle that is seen taking place in the Holy Land is now being transferred to the cities of Europe. I think that is a disturbing development but it is not the same as saying that the European right, as I mentioned, has embraced anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence.
So the real issue to focus on is the popularity of the far right and not to confuse, as again George Will did today in the Washington Post, the popularity of the far right with the surge of anti-Semitism in Europe.
There are a number of explanations, four of which I want to focus on. First, we're seeing a natural swing in European politics. We're seeing the swing of the pendulum from the left to the right. Four years ago 13 out of 15 EU countries were governed by the left, the center-left. Today that pendulum has begun to swing. Although in Britain, in Germany, and indeed in France still today, the center-left remains in power. In France that may no longer be the case in June; in September that may no longer be the case in Germany, though I wouldn't bet on it; and in England it certainly is going to be the case, but that may be proof that the UK is going to be the exception to the rule.
The far right has come in or near power as supporters of center-right governments throughout much of Europe. In Italy, in Portugal, in Denmark, in Norway, they have either a seat in power or they are directly responsible for a parliamentary majority of the center-right government that is there. So you have a natural swing, and because the center-right is starting to take over politically in Europe and needs support from somewhere, they look to the far right in order to sustain themselves in government in one way or the other.
The second reason for the rise of the far right is the failure to integrate immigrants into the society of Western Europe. Unlike the United States where the melting pot seems to work and has worked for many many decades, in Europe the melting pot has been a failure. You have ghettos of first, second and third generation immigrants throughout Europe in which people, whether locally, either local-born or coming to the country anew, are living together, often in places with high unemployment, often came as either guest workers or as people from former colonies who have very little hope, seething with anger, and indeed creating social conflict within the societies as well as within their own places.
Low skilled local workers fear immigrants as displacing their places of employment and many resent the fact that asylum seekers and refugees and immigrants indeed are coming to their country living on the social security system that is financed by the majority of the native population.
As a result there are key sections in Europe, in European society, that are easy prey to the hopes and the easy sloganeering and the simple solutions that the far right uses in order to attract political power.
Third, much of national policy today is made in Brussels. It is not made in Paris, not in Copenhagen, not in Oslo, not in the Hague. The European Central Bank now controls monetary policy in the Euro zone and the Eurocrats perhaps have significant control and say over key aspects of national policy from immigration to the environment from social mores to agriculture.
The result is a deep sense that the nation is losing control over its own destiny and there's crisis of national identity that is going on throughout Europe. Not just in France, but throughout Europe. The far right has skillfully exploited that crisis to its own despicable end.
You are now seeing people, interestingly enough, in Europe who are anti-European, no longer willing to be anti-European because it is becoming part of the far right. I have people in my own family who have been highly skeptical of the EU but are not no longer willing to say that for fear that they will be accused of being Pim Fortuyn voters, which is the last thing they would do.
Finally, another issue touched upon by both E.J. and Phil, a final reason is that the mainstream political parties of both the center-left and the center-right have in many cases abandoned their political distinctiveness. Jospin and Chirac basically had the same platform. In Holland you had a purple coalition in which the reds on the left and blues on the right have governed together for eight years. It's very strange to have that kind of grand coalition politics. And as E.J. mentioned, it happened in Germany. What happens is when you have the system parties occupying government, anti-system sentiment tends to rise on both sides of the political spectrum, not just on the left and the right. I don't actually know what the percentage would be if you add the anti-system left and the anti-system right together in the French vote, but I bet you it's well over a third. Probably 40 percent when you start adding it up. That is an anti-system vote, that's 40 percent or 35 percent or something like that. It's a significant vote. It's a significant sense that there is something deeply wrong with the normal political system. But social democratic parties and conservative parties throughout Europe have accepted the market, they have accepted fundamentally that there has to be an intensive social safety net, and they have accepted an internationalist foreign policy. Three issues on which they debated themselves for much of the post war period, but now they all basically agree.
None of the parties have an answer to how to deal with immigration and none of the parties have an answer of how to deal with the perception that the power and control is shifting from national capitals to Brussels. Indeed, Europe and immigration are a taboo subject in Europe politically. They are not talked about. We talk about immigration as a problem as opposed to racism as a problem which is also—the two are not necessarily the same but they often are. And we don't talk about it. Jospin didn't talk about it, Chirac doesn't talk about it, and much of the European mainstream politicians don't talk about it.
Let me conclude by putting all of this in perspective, and it's important to put it in perspective because so far the far right still only represents a very small fraction of the European vote, often no more than a tenth, never more than a fifth. It is important to understand that 80 to 90 percent of the European electorate does not vote for the far right. Europe is not about to return to the 1930s. It is far too prosperous, it is far too developed, it is far too democratic to do that.
It is also important to take account as you interpret different votes of the electoral system that is producing these votes. A 17 percent victory by Le Pen in the first round makes him the runner up. A 17 percent nationwide vote in Britain wouldn't get you a single seat in Parliament. Electoral systems do make a difference. And nobody, if there were a 17 percent vote, would necessarily have the same kind of reaction in Britain as they did in France, although if they came out of nowhere that would be different. But the electoral systems are important in order to understand what is happening.
Also there is good news in Saxony-Anhalt where the SPD lost, the Social Democrats lost. It is also true that the far right collapsed which had 13 some percent four years ago and had nothing, or virtually nothing this year.
Nevertheless there is a responsibility here for the mainstream political parties of the center-right and center-left. They are responsible for part of what is happening. They need to find a way to address the immigration issue and the integration of newly arrived and old immigrants. There are many people in Europe who have been there for decades, generations even.
They must close the democratic deficit with regard to Europe. You have to find a way for people to regard what is happening in Europe as somehow directly under their control or at least they have a say about it.
And above all, they must begin to talk openly about all of these issues. They have to take the immigration and Europe taboos off the table and start talking about them while they still continue to confront the far right for the racist and intolerant attitudes that they are and they must be defeated.
MR. STEINBERG: Thank you, Ivo. Let me begin by asking a question that sort of picks up on this. It seems to me that the center parties have a big choice here in two different strategies that they might pursue. One is to say what they need is a more vigorous and convincing defense of the policies that they have pursued, pro-globalization, pro-Europe and the like. And the other alternative basically to co-opt the dissatisfaction by moving away from this consensus and it would presumably have very big implications for, at least in the near term, the whole process of European construction, general trends on economic reform and the like.
I'd be interested for each of you to speculate for the major parties, particularly in France and Germany which we're going to be watching fairly closely over the next few months, what do you think their likely strategies are? Are they going to fall into temptation? They're basically saying there are a lot of voters out there and we need to find a way to connect the dissatisfaction with the prevailing consensus.
MR. GORDON: I think that problem is posed most acutely for the French left or the Socialists, and I think they're in a real danger of drawing the wrong lessons from what happened.
The dilemma, as we've all described, is that the strategy of the French left was to finally say after the experiments of the Mitterrand years in the early '80s when they veered sharply left and tried to implement the economic policy of the left, it failed disastrously and they took advantage of that failure to move to the right and basically over the course of 15 years said we accept globalization, we accept the basic principles of the market in capitalism and so on. And yet we're going to talk about it a little bit differently. We're not going to do what Blair and Schroeder and the right do, we're going to adapt while convincing our public that we're still looking after them, we're going to tame globalization, and we're going to reassure the left.
That is not a bad strategy. I think there's a real chance here that what I describe as an accident, putting Le Pen in the second round, could easily have played differently. Let's say we don't have Taubira in the first round and Jospin gets that one percent more he needed to get rid of Le Pen. Then in the second round there's a real chance that Jospin would have won and we would all be sitting around saying how clever the left's political strategy was. It was to adapt to globalization so you can bring down unemployment by a million, which they did. It gave a very good record to run on. But politically it was clever because he managed to talk softly and reassure the leftist voters.
My point is that we are a few freak accidents away from having that analysis today, and that's what the party would have concluded as well. Jospin's [party] would have been in a dominant position. In other words, the pragmatic moderates on the left would be in a dominant position and that would have been the lesson.
However, I think it's more likely that given this failure, Jospin is now out of politics. It depends on what happens in the legislative, but on the wake of the presidential elections, I think there's a greater chance that they'll say we got a message from the left and this adaptation doesn't work, and that will be even reinforced by a victory by the right in the legislative elections. Then I think as either of you suggested, it could be worse for the left. Then it really has to look at itself and say what do we do now? I think the problem is even worse because I don't think that the moderate socialists can go along with a Mitterrand-like strategy again. Mitterrand was the disaster of the French left in the late '60s, '70s, regained the hegemony of the French left by moving left first. I think if they try to do that again they lose the pragmatists and the moderates of Fabius, Strauss-Kahn and so on, and it actually would divide the party. In other words it would finish the party. It would be done because the Socialist part, at least some of them would have to maintain a different strategy.
But I think the real crisis for the left is the real danger that they draw the wrong lesson and decide to try to recuperate this anti-Europe, anti-centro movement.
MR. DIONNE: I broadly agree with that. Let me switch to the right. Somebody, as Ivo says, has to be straight forward about the immigration problem. There was the same fight in the '60s and '70s in Great Britain where there was a kind of leap in the census to shove the immigration issue under the rug. You didn't have a Le Pen there, but you did have the rise of Enoch Powel, and he didn't do it by getting into a runoff; he got his influence through Poland where you consistently found that about a quarter to a third of British people, depending on the moment, were willing to propel Powel and his anti-immigrant posture over the other two major parties, Labor and the Conservatives.
What you had in Britain is that both parties moved toward a much tighter, tougher position on immigration, and I think, to use the example that Ivo cited of the West German state election, one of the reasons the far right vote collapsed is because the Christian Democrats have taken advantage of some of this anti-immigrant sentiment. They have not become a far right party, but they've started speaking to the anti-immigrant vote, and I think what you're going to see with the parties of the center right is some sort of rhetoric that is directed toward this anti-immigrant voter.
The trouble they're going to have is that these European economies need people. They need the workers. So there is this contradiction between what they're going to need to say rhetorically to recoup some of this vote from the far right, and what needs to be done economically to keep workers flowing in, at least as long as you don't have some sort of terrible economic turn.
I agree, I think that the other point Ivo made which is very important to both parties, the party of the right and of the left, is the illusion of Europe as the non-democratic entity that even sometimes seems to speak a strange language. I think it was Jim Hoaglund who noted that Le Pen used active verbs and Jospin and Chirac used such easily acceptable language as European construction. In other words, there was a kind of abstraction within the establishment parties and a kind of force of rhetoric especially on the far right, but also on the anti-European left. We haven't talked about Chevenement who didn't get a big vote but did get about 5.5 percent of the vote. Chevenement was historically a left wing socialist who has now become a kind of nationalist anti-European figure. Oddly, Chevenement drew votes out of the Socialists and probably a few votes out of the far right. Le Pen might have done better if Chevenement had not been on the ballot. And I think that for parties to the left, if you do not have some sense of small "d" democratic control over European institutions, you are going to continue to have this rising alienation.
The last point I would like to make is that I can't see the French Socialists going all the way left after their experience, after their long experience in power. I think some of the shift may be as much rhetorical as it will be real, but it's clear that they have to address the anxieties of working class voters who in many places have been historically on the left and shifted in significant numbers. There's a big debate about this, but there is evidence that they did shift for Le Pen. So you had this old Communist [palet] which was an old Communist bastion, with Le Pen getting a very small vote there. That's something that has to petrify the left.
MR. DAALDER: I agree with both what E.J. And Phil said. The natural strategy for the right is in fact to start taking the immigrant issues and the crime and law and order issue and make them its own. Actually that gives an opportunity to the left to occupy the center. As the right moves further right, the center opens up for the left and you can have—Schroeder can say listen, I am the man who will take care of your economy, I am the person who is going to run on the third way ticket, etc., we need to deal with immigrant issues through integration as opposed to exclusion. There are real debates here if you want to have debates you can have on how to deal with the problems of the moment. We need to close the democratic deficit which is a good left wing argument within Europe as opposed to saying we don't do Europe any more, which is the temptation that the right may have.
The problem that Schroeder has and the problem that the left has is they're the governing party so they aren't, naturally you've got an anti-government sentiment and the electorate is in fact willing to throw you out. Schroeder said I'm going to reduce unemployment. He hasn't been able to do it. That's his biggest problem right now, for him to maintain in saying I have the sensible policies. It's difficult when you're in fact defending a record that you haven't been able to fulfill. It's easier for Tony Blair because he did what he was supposed to do. He had a rising economy. That's why he won.
Whereas I think the financial strategy for the left is to start to occupy the center and for the right to move right. The fact is that because of the political pendulum, if the left has to defend government it becomes more difficult to do that and the right has an ability to take the anti-immigrant, anti-European sentiment and still attack by staying in the center and probably win. I think at the moment, if I happened to be a betting person, Stoiber is going to win in Germany because it's easier for him to make that argument than it is for Schroeder to make the other argument.
MR. STEINBERG: Questions?
Q: David Sands at the Washington Times. I guess mostly for Mr. Daalder.
Looking within the far right itself in Europe you mentioned the brothers in arms comment, but I'm reading that Mr. Blocher in Switzerland rejects Le Pen. That Haider has problems with Le Pen, the people in Italy. How much of an international far right movement is there in Europe across borders, linked between these guys?
MR. DAALDER: I think it's very small. These are national movements. But they are clearly, somebody like Bossi, which is not even a national movement, it's a local, northern Italian movement. Jorg Haider comes out of regional politics. So I think these are not linked except in two ways. They are all anti-immigrant, particularly anti-non-white immigrant. In that sense they're dealing with similar phenomenon in similar ways. They're also predominantly anti-European. The degree to which they want to pull out of Europe is still a debatable phenomenon. For example, Pim Fortuyn is worried about certain aspects of Europe, doesn't want to pull out of the EU. Le Pen is more anti-European than he is. There are distinctions. But in Denmark and Norway, Norway of course is not a member of the EU which helps, but also strongly against coming back into the EU.
These are national movements within national political leanings that do have common rhetoric and common perspectives, but other than DeWinter and Le Pen, and actually DeWinter's embrace of Le Pen. I don't even know of anybody else who is trying to make this a single European wide issue for the moment. It's contrary to their interests, because they are saying they're nationalists. They're defending France, Norway, Denmark, Belgium as opposed to Europe against the onslaught from abroad. So linking with other European brothers in arms is not necessarily a smart thing to do.
Q: Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers.
How would any of you defend against the charge that not only communism, not only socialism but the left generally is intellectually and morally bankrupt? Do the rest of you agree with what E.J. has described as being better able to say what you're against than what you're for?
MR. DIONNE: I don't believe the left is intellectually and morally bankrupt. I do think they have a political problem. I think that the parties in the left in Europe are the parties of the democratic left and they stand, broadly speaking, for what they have stood for since the end of World War II—which is a market economy within the context of a strong welfare state and regulatory protection. That's what they were for then and now.
I think the difficulty is that that project is much easier to pull off in a less globalized economy. I think that globalization puts a lot of pressure on governments that regulate and redistribute. I don't think that's peculiar to the French left or any left. I think it's a challenge to parties of the left. And one of the reasons parties of the left went toward a European solution is that they believed that it might be easier to do certain regulatory things on a European-wide basis, which the fight over IBM and some of those mergers suggest is true.
So I don't think it's a case of moral bankruptcy. I do think it's a case that they have a structural political problem that when the economy goes well doesn't cause them too much trouble, as Blair suggests; and when the economy has trouble or when another set of issues such as the crime issue in France arrives, they have trouble coping politically, and that's the problem they have now.
MR. GORDON: We can over-read the failure of the left. As Ivo suggested, a lot of it is natural cycles. It's simply easier to be in opposition than it is to be in government. And we're seeing a normal cycle and I suspect we'll see it get back.
It's also hard for government—Politically, and that's why I think E.J. is right, you distinguish between their policies, their ideology and politics. It's hard to inspire people in a vote with moderate centrist policies. Especially when the opposition gets to take advantage. And that's magnified in a case like the French where you have a voting system that allows people to vote their frustrations rather than their interest in seeing who goes to the next round.
That said about the French, I think far from bankrupt you could easily argue that they've got it exactly right. Aside from these oddities that kicked Jospin out of the second round, they address these modern problems in a way that you might advise them to. Adapt, get rid of all the ideological baggage of the past. The performance in the record was actually quite impressive, better than in France probably for 30 years. You look at economic performance during a five year period. Even managed, by the way, to remain the most popular French Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic in terms of four years into his Prime Ministership he was even quite popular. I the French case every parliamentary election since 1978 has seen the opposition win. The French have kicked out the government every time they've had the opportunity since 1978. So it's not surprising this time that it was tossed for the Socialists. My point is that compared to that record over the past 20 years. This government actually did pretty well. It lasted longer than all of the others. It was quite popular. Its economic record was very impressive. And it did that by embracing moderate policies while trying to reassure its left. I think that again, the oddities of this electoral system lead us to start talking about the total failure and bankruptcy on the left when in fact Jospin, it's perverse and I think unfortunate for France that the Prime Minister is seen as the most honest, decent and trying to do the right thing, has now been kicked out and the left is going to totally reassess an approach that might have been the right approach for the right time.
MR. DIONNE: I think Phil was right to underscore, that you're talking about a quarter of a million votes out of an electorate of 40 million, so that with a very small shift we would be telling a different story. In fact we probably wouldn't be up here. [Laughter]
MR. DAALDER: I agree with my colleagues.
Q: Mary Mullins.
I was just wondering about this anti-Semitism and the immigrants being most Arab or from Arab countries that support the Palestinians. What actually are the Europeans, it may be different for every country, maybe they're acting as an EU, what are they doing in this fight against terrorism movement?
MR. DAALDER: I think it's important to make a distinction. They're not Arabs primarily, they're Muslims for example. In England it's Pakistanis and Indian non-Muslim Hindus, the largest immigrant population. In the Netherlands they are Mallaccan and Moroccan, Surinam. This is a broad base and it depends on particular countries and particular histories. Of course in France it's North Africans and other colonies where it comes from. There's a large Turkish influence into Germany which comes out of the guest worker program. Same in Switzerland. You have to make distinctions.
If you look at what is, all the evidence suggests that the recent upsurge of anti-Semitic violence is not coming from your traditional European anti-Semites, ]ache] George Will. It is coming from the Muslim communities, particularly youth who are engaged in that kind of behavior because that's what they're watching on TV, frankly. They're watching as many of the Muslim Arab originating countries are watching Al Jazeera just as they are in the Arab world. There's a lot of hatred coming out or that. Understandable or not, let's not make judgments, but that's where it's coming from.
To equate that with the kind of European anti-Semitic movement that saw in the '30s and the '40s is just flat out wrong and in fact it needs to be reiterated time and again. This is very different. It's directly tied to what is happening in the Middle East. It is the same kinds of phenomenon that you're seeing throughout the Middle East, and it's now occurring in Europe. You have large immigrant populations that are being exposed to exactly this kind of violence and they're transforming it into Europe.
The mainstream European response to this is as it should be. It is being condemned. The perpetrators are being arrested, tried, and put in jail. And a general campaign against violence and anti-Semitism is taking place throughout Europe as you would hope develop prosperous, democratic countries of Western Europe do and that's easily what's happening.
I'm not worried about this is a phenomenon in Europe. I don't think it's a European phenomenon. I think it's a particular phenomenon taking place at a particular point in time tied to a particular set of incidents that are happening in the Middle East. It is not something you would like to see anywhere, but nevertheless, it's not something that represents a sea change in European attitude which is quite, frankly what most of Washington seems to think. The commentaryesque, the punditocracy out there seems to think that Europe is seething with anti-Semites, that what's basically happening is Nazis walking down the streets throughout Europe. That's just not true.
MR. STEINBERG: I agree with that. The one thing I would add which makes it a little bit more complicated and fuels this conflation of the two is that there's no doubt in many countries, and there's also variants within Europe, that there has historically been a certain amount of anti-Israeli sentiment which has definitely been stoked by the events of this last several weeks.
So what you're seeing is a foreign policy reaction. Even the elites and the people who were not anti-Semitic are becoming harshly critical of Israel, so that's giving an overlay here. I think a lot of the pundits, what they're seeing is they're seeing a Europe which is lining up, as it were, more pro-Palestinian and more anti-Israel. Then they're seeing anti-Semitism. So what they're saying is if they're so harsh on Israel and they're being so critical of Israel and these other things are happening, at a minimum the elites' critique of Israel is giving some legitimacy to the extreme anti-Semitism. I think that's why there's been so much focus on the La Stampa thing because it was, I don't think the La Stampa thing, it has been read as an anti-Semitic thing. I don't think it was anti-Semitic. I think it was brutally anti-Israel. If you see the two going together it leads you to believe?
MR. DAALDER: But it was certainly Israel. You're absolutely right.
MR. GORDON: The conflation between anti-Semitic acts and governmental policy that's critical of Israel leads to the conclusion among many of those talking about that, therefore these European leaders are anti-Semitic. I think it is possible to be critical of any government in the world's foreign policy without having to be accused of some sort of racism involved in that.
MR. DIONNE: It was always my impression when I was working there that the La Stampa cartoon was not an accident in the sense that there was—I noticed in the press generally much less sensitivity to what sounds like anti-Semitism or looks like anti-Semitism. And I saw moments when I was reading a paper and my mouth fell, saying we Americans would never say such a thing. I think there is a difference and it does naturally bother an American, Jew or non-Jew, to see some of that, and I think some of those cartoons about Sharon just viewed in the abstract reflect that different sense. Cultural sensitivity is a kind of weak word, but I don't know what other word to use.
Q: [inaudible]. What is the EU doing in the war against terrorism? What is their policy, what are they actually doing besides the British who are helping us militarily.
MR. GORDON: They're doing quite a lot in the areas of law enforcement. I mean you read the papers and every day there's a new arrest of someone linked to al Qaeda in European capitals, so I think they're doing a lot in terms of financial crackdowns, law enforcement. On the military side they haven't been particularly involved but they're getting more and more so and they're certainly offering to do so. It's the ironic situation where they were offering to send more troops than we were willing to accommodate.
So they haven't been inactive in the way some people suggest. There are certain things where there are differences. For many in the United States part of the war on terrorism means we need to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. That's a clear difference for Europe. For many in the United States the war on terrorism means giving very firm support to Sharon and what he's doing with Palestinians. That's a clear difference with Europeans. So it's not at all to say that we see the war on terrorism exactly in the same way. But it is to say that Europeans have been quite active in a number of important areas in the broader war on terrorism.
MR. STEINBERG: Thank you.