World News: French Elections Lean Right

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Category: World News - Europe

Published on Monday, 01 July 2024 13:08

Written by Olivier Longhi

If the European elections of June 9 confirmed the rise of the far right, they also reveal a crisis of confidence in democracy today as routine and castrating, the opposite of its original foundations made of consensus and shared expression.

Whatever the result of the early legislative elections on 30 June and 7 July, one obvious observation is clear: democracy defends itself every day and therefore calls for a permanent fight to ensure its survival.

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France, which has opted for this mode of operation since the French Revolution, despite a few successive post-revolutionary episodes of a royalist or imperial nature, has, for several years, as the abstention rates testify, allowed a form of cancer to grow within its own ranks aimed at relentlessly criticizing the democratic system.

Sovereignty of the People by the People

Of course, it is not the only one, as evidenced by the political regimes in Europe or in the world that tend to evade democratic ideas and principles in favor of a government by a dictator or a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where vague democratic principles are mixed with a plethora of authoritarian concepts that all tend to discredit the idea of sovereignty by the people for the people.

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The fight is therefore unfinished, contrary to what many thought, considering democracy as an acquired, inalienable and irreducible fact. The breakthrough of the far right in the European elections on 9 June demonstrated that not only was democracy in danger, but that, worse! The latter was threatened by political forces capable of bringing him down body and soul.

Make no mistake, the rise of the far right in France certainly reflects a general loss of confidence in the political class and the lack of future prospects for certain social classes, but also a patent democratic deficit. Precisely, it is the very idea of democracy that has not been sufficiently defended because it has become routine to the point of forgetting that in the end it was more a matter of privilege than banality.

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Erosion and Perversion

The individual expression for the benefit of the collective that the right to vote represents, the first constituent element of any healthy and non-perverted democracy, has undergone a slow but steady erosion over the years, an erosion based on the idea that a single vote, supposedly lost in the mass, would change nothing.

An error of judgement and especially of the functioning of democracy which is established on the contribution of each person. Failing to do so feeds the thesis defended by the far right, which argues that the democratic system is perverted by using it to guide it to power and then deconstruct the system in question more or less quickly.

Therefore, the objectives of the far right appear clear, but it is worth remembering them: to exploit the ignorance and a form of despair of the social body to prosper at the ballot box to bring down a system that it despises. The mechanism, although well-established, as history testifies, does not cease to repeat itself, sometimes successfully, but be careful that it does not end up becoming a routine as well.

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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.