The Colombian presidential
elections of April 1970 pitted Minister Misael Pastrana against former general
and (peaceful) dictator[1] Gustavo
Rojas Pinilla. Into the night, Rojas was
leading in the vote count until the Interior Minister ordered radio stations to
stop broadcasting partial results. By
morning, several regional voting stations had issued corrected results and
Pastrana was declared the winner.
Thus was born the M-19, the
most famous left-wing guerilla movement of the 1970s and 1980s. As one of his founders later remarked, “if the General couldn’t get a fair election,
there was no point for us to go on fighting in the political arena”.
Two decades before, the 1948 assassination
of Liberal leader and presidential candidate Eliecer Gaetán, a populist “progressive”
albeit anti-communist, had triggered a civil war ultimately resolved by the coming
to power of General Rojas Pinilla.
Frustrating voters’
aspirations or manipulating elections often leads to upheavals, regardless of
culture or geography.
The April Revolution of 1960
overthrew South Korean President Syngman Rhee when people realized that he
denied them alternatives and had falsified the results of the vice-presidential
elections.
Similar uprisings or revolutions
occurred in the Philippines (1986), Bahrain (1994), Indonesia (1998), Ukraine
(2004), Ivory Coast (2010) among others.
Which brings us to France, a
country of great sophistication with a penchant for sudden popular outbursts.
Politicians, jurists and journalists’
arguments notwithstanding, it is a fact that, today, French voters are effectively
“denied” a vote for political change.
Current presidential candidates include:
Jean-Luc Melenchon (far left, admirer of Hugo Chavez), Benoit Hamon (left
of socialist President Hollande who kicked him out of his cabinet), Emanuel Macron
(former Minister of Finance in Hollande cabinet, probably center-left), François
Fillon (former Prime Minister of President Sarkozy, center-right/right) and
Marine Le Pen (president of the National Front, right/far-right).
No sooner was Fillon leading
the polls that he was the subject of an anonymous attack in the press about
remuneration that his wife had received to serve as his assistant in Parliament. The dossier was well researched and presented
him in the worst possible light. A panel
of three judges was formed to investigate whether or not any abuse had taken
place. While it doesn’t look good to employ your wife, and for a while your
children, it doesn’t seem that he committed any crime or abuse given the statutes
that apply to the funding of congressmen staff in France. Nevertheless, he dropped precipitously in the
polls and has been fighting for his political life ever since.
Marine Le Pen, who was shown
as winning the first round of the voting, was also the target of attacks from
Brussels for similar issues (employment of assistants) and from French justice
regarding campaign financing and other matters.
But unlike Fillon, she has refused to appear in front of the judges,
alleging interference with her campaign.
No other candidate has been targeted,
only those right-of-center. The likely calculation
of the attackers is that Fillon will not make it to the second voting round (since
no one is expected to win over 50% in the first round), setting a
Macron-Le Pen contest with Macron winning it.
Such a second round field would be damaging for France as Fillon is the only candidate with an honest
diagnosis of what ails France, and both a plan and the will to engineer a
recovery. Le Pen’s economic program is unrealistic,
while Macron’s is so timid as to have little impact over a 5 year mandate.
However, the attacks on
Fillon could also backfire on the plotters.
While Le Pen and her National Front are described as extreme right, they
are, in reality, very populist and nationalist.
And while many of Fillon’s voters approve of conservative economic policies,
they are energized by issues such as immigration and regaining sovereignty from
Brussels; to them, Macron’s economic program is marginally more attractive, but
Le Pen’s nationalism is a bigger draw.
Add to that the spite that their candidate was torpedoed by the left and
Le Pen could become a real magnet for Fillon's base.
The election of Donald Trump,
and its aftermath, is often presented as what France (and its neighbors) could
expect in case of a Le Pen victory. I
think it would be worse. France is much
more centralized than the US, it is deeply enmeshed in the eurozone and the
European Union, its society is less harmonious, and its economy is more
fragile. Finally, there is its culture,
which produced three revolutions: 1789, 1848 and May 1968.
Countries only make the
painful changes that they need after touching bottom, not before. France has drifted downward for a long time,
but it hasn’t touched bottom yet.
However, manipulated elections gone awry could push it down hard and
trigger, not change, but chaos.
There is still the
possibility that Fillon will win and gradually get France back on the upswing,
Or that Macron will win,
ushering an era of stagnation and rising frustration and division,
There is also a chance that
Le Pen wins, installing a forceful president with only 2 seats out of 577 in
the National Assembly, little hope of building a governing coalition or attracting first class cabinet candidates, and a dangerous economic agenda.
Three possible election
outcomes, and I don’t know what probability to attribute each one of them.
[1]Rojas Pinilla was an
unusual dictator in that he was put into the job by both Conservative and
Liberal parties to bring an end to their bloody fighting and reestablish peace.
