World News: French Elections - Demagoguery or Rationalism

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Category: World News - Europe

Published on Wednesday, 20 April 2022 15:09

Written by Olivier Longhi

In the presidential election aftermath, the homeland of human rights will be faced with a crucial choice, between demagoguery and rationalism. Now bathed in a destructive Manichaeism, France is rediscovering itself in the face of a new destiny.

Perhaps never under the Fifth Republic presidential election has taken on such a dimension. If the 1981 election, which saw the election of François Mitterrand, had sounded like a warning shot in institutes dominated since 1958 by the Republican right, the other votes finally turned out and a posteriori rather dull offering a left-right divide that has now become obsolete.

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And it is for this reason that the 2022 meeting contains all the ingredients to stay apart in the history of the Fifth Republic. Here there are no more polite clashes between two blocs, overwhelmed by globalization and obsessed with the preservation of the Welfare State in one form or another.

What the 2022 election reveals is the existence of two social classes if the expression is still relevant: The first, popular, earthly, and attached to a tradition lived as the guarantor of a cultural and historical continuity undermined by an unfortunate globalization; the second, more elitist and Europeanist, involved and invested in a contemporaneity lived as a global progress, technical or social.

Chaos or Light

The confrontation of these two visions of the past, present and future expresses in fact an opposition that could quickly prove irreconcilable in the long term because animated by demands that tend to reach the satisfaction of both.

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To summarize the situation as a fight Tradition against Progress would be both reductive and gratuitous as the complexity of the debate between them is proving to be very delicate. Because beyond a simple confrontation that is embodied between two candidates, it is truly a choice of society that arises in the homeland of Human Rights.

Not that the presidential election of 2022 gives birth to chaos or light, but it is certain that the result will give a severe inflection to the France and Europe of tomorrow. Matrix of its destiny but also, to its measure, of the continent on which it is established, the France poses by its choices a certain number of directions to be taken if only, by way of example, in the construction of Europe.

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Long entrenched in the comfort of its history, the France has spent five years in a particle accelerator (Yellow Vests, Pandemic and War in Ukraine) which revealed the strengths and weaknesses of a country with multiple fractures, knowingly or unconsciously, ignored and yet already denounced in 1995 by Jacques Chirac during the presidential campaign of the time.

Nostalgia and Modernity

A nation presented as serene and disciplined, the land of Voltaire and Rousseau has become the scene of an almost Manichean split between those nostalgic for a past that has never existed and the thurifers of a modernity that carries all progress. And in between?

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This creates a void with unanswered forms of question. Does this mean that the landscape of France has changed so much that it would be limited to presenting the appearance of a latent struggle between two factions with opposing ambitions? However, if the current societal climate is still far from that which prevailed at the time of civil wars, such as those that enameled Rome in the first century BC, the ideological fight between Populares (party of the people of Rome) and Optimates (Party of the elites) is well underway.

And for the record, Rome, unable to manage these fratricidal conflicts because of outdated institutions that were unsuited to the developments of the time, had sunk into a crisis that defeated the Republic. Repeat again?

Bio: Olivier Longhi has extensive experience in European history. A seasoned journalist with fifteen years of experience, he is currently professor of history and geography in the Toulouse region of France. He has held a variety of publishing positions, including Head of Agency and Chief of Publishing. A journalist, recognized blogger, editor, and editorial project manager, he has trained and managed editorial teams, worked as a journalist for various local radio stations, a press and publishing consultant, and a communications consultant.