As Europe’s “Year of Elections” progresses, events in London and Paris over the last week or so have brought greater clarity to the political landscape in both countries and give some interesting insights into the state of their politics. So much so, in fact, that we could have entitled this essay “A Tale of Two Cities”, echoing Charles Dickens’ famous novel from the mid 19th century[1]. For what the result of the first round of France’s presidential election shows us, and what we are seeing in the UK – more specifically, in England – as the parties prepare for June’s general election are different aspects of a common theme.
To France first, then, where Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen emerged as narrow victors in the first round and will contest the winner-takes-all second round on 7 May. Both history and the opinion polls suggest that Macron – a man who is just 39 years old, who has never been elected to any office, who has no deputies in the Assemblée Nationale (the French lower house of parliament), and whose party En Marche![2] is only about a year old and has almost no structure, organisation or candidates – will win, much to the relief of political leaders across the rest of the EU[3].
How he will then govern without a power-bloc in parliament remains to be seen, though the relief that France has avoided a more extreme government will no doubt stand him in good stead, at least initially.
The real story of the vote on Sunday, though, was the eclipse of the traditional major parties, the centre right and the socialists. The centre right candidate, François Fillon, eventually found the weight of the scandals attached to him too much to overcome, while the candidate of the Socialists, Benoît Hamon, was humiliated with just 6% of the vote, less than a third of the vote that the independent (and hard-left) socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon received.
It is not too much to say that French politics has been completely changed, from a Left-Right debate to a Centrist-Extremist debate, or perhaps more specifically a Globalist-Nationalist one. For fully 65 years from the Second World War, politics in France, as in most major European countries, broadly accepted the mixed market economy, and latterly also accepted its increasing globalisation, and the debate was conducted around the question how to allocate or distribute the wealth that the market economy created. Centre-right parties across Europe tended to believe in a smaller state and a smaller degree of redistribution, while centre-left parties saw a greater role both for the state and its powers of taxation. But none questioned outright the value of integration into global markets per se.
In France, and indeed in several other countries (the UK among them), this narrative no longer seems to hold. Instead the debate is becoming one between those who seek to engage with the international market and those who pursue social protection via economic nationalism. And there is a new Impossible Trilemma, it seems: one can have any two of an open economy, a strong redistributive state, and prosperity – but not all three at the same time.
Germany is the stand-out exception among major European countries in resisting the siren calls of nationalism, with the traditional major parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, still for the moment prospering. This is probably because memories of 1933-1945 are still strong enough to inoculate the German people against overt nationalism. But even Germany cannot solve the Trilemma completely – as many German workers will testify, the social safety net and active redistribution policies of the period till about 2000 have been markedly weakened in the last 10 years, and many employees have far fewer rights and protections than their parents did.
In this sense, Le Pen, for all that many commentators despair of and deplore her policies, does at least have the merit of coherence: she understands the Trilemma, that economic nationalism and social protectionism go hand in hand, and that the alternative is globalisation and internationalism, with all that that entails for the weaker or left-behind members of society. Ironically, one statesman she resembles quite closely in this analysis is Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany in the last part of the 19th century and very much both a nationalist and a creator of the strong social state (I am indebted to my good friend Gerry Holtham for this observation).
But from the Socialists in France, there was no such coherence. They also put forward a policy of social protectionism – there were more similarities between Le Pen’s economic policies and Hamon’s than most people realise – but did not accept the economic nationalism that this would require. And they had no answer when they were asked how they would achieve their aims, how they would solve the Trilemma.
Which brings us back to the English side of the Channel, and the other of the Two Cities of Dickens’ tale. For Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is in exactly the same bind that the French Socialists were: they would like to provide a strong social safety net and significant wealth redistribution, but they eschew the economic nationalism that this would need to have a chance of working.
Where France and Britain differ slightly is not in whether the debate has moved from Left-Right to Globalist-Nationalist – it has, in both countries – but that instead of being between the parties, this debate is in the UK taking place within the major parties. If the Labour Party is very obviously a house ill at ease with itself, with a leader who cannot decide what the party policy is even on such fundamental issues as the economy, Brexit and nuclear defence, the Conservative party is no less riven between two factions, with Remainers as the Globalists and Brexiteers as the Economic Nationalists. And it is not easy to see how the election that Theresa May has called will help her overcome this deep-seated and long-lasting divide.
Which begs the question, why did she call the election? It was certainly not for the reason she gave in her press conference outside Number 10: the concept that “Britain is coming together but Westminster is not” is palpably not true and a sad departure into spin and alternative truths for this usually most straightforward of politicians (and if it was true, the idea that an unnecessary, unwanted and potentially divisive election would help cure the problem is even stranger). Nor do we really think it was about kicking the Labour Party when it is down – that would have been possible at almost any time since Corbyn took over the leadership.
Rather, we suspect firstly that the recent budget was a major wake-up call for the prime minister, as she realised – perhaps to her surprise – that people do care what was in the Tories’ 2015 manifesto, and she cannot just ignore the promises, rash or otherwise, that her predecessor David Cameron made. Mrs May wants to be free of promises such as the “triple lock” on pensions and the commitment not to raise taxes, and at the same time she wants to cast in iron her policies such as the reinvigoration of the grammar school system and her commitment to Brexit so that the House of Lords is restrained from causing difficulties over them.
And secondly she will be eyeing the period immediately after Britain leaves the EU, which will most probably be in early 2019. That would have been just one year before she had to go to the country, and as the EU-27’s negotiating stance becomes a little clearer after the triggering of Article 50, even the more optimistic of Brexiteers are beginning to accept that there may be a difficult transition period. So she has manoeuvred well to win herself two more years for the transition to calm down before facing the electorate again.
That it will indeed be Mrs May who calls and fights the 2022 election seems not in doubt – not since Tony Blair’s triumph in 1997 has a UK election looked such a foregone conclusion, and if Mrs May is not returned as prime minister in June it will make Brexit and Trump’s victory look like very minor surprises in comparison. But who she will find as the leader of the opposition in five years’ time, or even whether the Labour Party holds together to be the official opposition at all, is less certain. For in the last of our links between the French and British political scenes, the centre-left in both countries seems to be in abject retreat, devoid of personalities, policies or prospects.
For the orthodox centre-left in Britain and France, it is not so much Dickens’ novel “A Tale of Two Cities” that sums up their position, as George Orwell’s classic “Down and Out in Paris and London”.
[1] We cannot resist quoting at length Dickens’ opening sentence in his book, possibly one of the most famous openings of any novel: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”. A better summary of the attitudes of the Brexit and Remain camps in Britain, as the country approaches its June election, would be hard to find.
[2] In English, “Forward!”, or “On the move!” It also happens “by chance” to have the same initials as Emmanuel Macron.
[3] Other leaders in the EU-27 have not hidden their relief and delight that Macron, a centrist and pro-EU federalist, has emerged from the first round unscathed and now looks set to win the presidency. So much so, in fact, that led by Merkel herself they have broken the iron rule of politics in the EU and commented on another country’s election before it is decided. The fiction that Merkel and others were simply “congratulating Macron on his first round victory” fools no-one – this was as close to interference in another country’s democratic process and endorsement of one of the candidates as Europe has ever seen.