Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

*** 20-Apr-17 World View -- EU officials increasingly fear a Marine Le Pen upset victory in France's elections

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

• EU officials increasingly fear a Marine Le Pen upset victory in France's elections
  
• Marine Le Pen fights accusations of anti-Semitism
  
• The threat to the 'European project'
  

****
**** EU officials increasingly fear a Marine Le Pen upset victory in France's elections
****


Far-right politicians: Marine Le Pen of France, and Brexit champion Nigel Farage of Britain (AFP)

Marine Le Pen, leader of France's far-right Front National party is
still considered to be a very long shot to become the next president
of France, but it's no longer considered an impossibility, mainly
because of three factors: the unexpected passage of the Brexit
referendum in Britain last year, the unexpected election of Donald
Trump in the US last year, and a trend of rising nationalistic,
xenophobic political parties in countries across Europe in recent
years.

The first round of the presidential elections will be held on Sunday,
April 23. There are 11 candidates, so it's almost impossible for
anyone to win by getting over 50% of the vote. The top two candidates
will then take part in a runoff election on May 7, to determine the
final winner. President François Hollande, a Socialist, has had
abysmal popularity ratings, and so has chosen not to run for a second
term, a decision unprecedented in modern times.

The polls put the top four candidates at around 20% each. Emmanuel
Macron is the youngest, a 39-year-old former investment banker, and
former economy minister under Hollande. He's considered to be the
favorite among the mainstream "globalist" European politicians.

The early favorite was Republican François Fillon, but his support has
crashed because of a scandal where he allegedly arranged for his wife
to receive a large salary for a job that required little or no work.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the far-left candidate, a kind of political
mirror image of Marine Le Pen, though not entirely. Le Pen is
anti-immigration, while Mélenchon is pro-immigration, but the two
candidates do agree on one important issue: Neither of them likes the
euro currency.

Although Le Pen could flame out in the first round, it's widely
expected that she will be one of the two leading candidates.
Mainstream politicians are hoping a second round matching Le Pen with
Macron. In that case, it's expected that Macron pick up voters from
the candidates that have dropped out, while Le Pen's core group of
supporters would stay the same, with the result that Macron would
defeat Le Pen by a wide margin.

The scenario that most fear is that in the first round on Sunday, the
two winners would be the two extremes, the far-right Le Pen and the
far-left Mélenchon. This would be considered a disaster for the
eurozone, as either one would like to return to the original French
franc currency.

After last year's unexpected Brexit and Trump victories, there's a
great deal of anxiety among European politicians who fear that
anything could happened. BBC and Market Pulse and Foreign Policy and Euro News and Daily Signal

****
**** Marine Le Pen fights accusations of anti-Semitism
****

Marine Le Pen is the current leader of the Front National party, which
had a strong history of anti-Semitism under its previous leader and
founder, Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust
denier.

At some point, she came to the conclusion that she and the Front
National party could not become successful without completely breaking
its anti-Semitic past. She did so by breaking with her father, and
banning him from the party. She has not repeated any of her father's
anti-Semitic remarks, and has even condemned them. But in interviews,
she's always asked about Jewish issues, and her answers are always
heavily scrutinized by a mainstream press that is as consumed with
hostility to her as with Donald Trump.

One of the most controversial examples occurred in a recent interview
where she insisted that France was not responsible for a July 1942
atrocity known as "Vel d'Hiv," where French officials rounded up
13,000 Jews and turned them over to the Nazis to be deported to
Auschwitz. She had scramble to explain that the "real" French
government at that time was in exile, while the perpetrators of the
atrocity were the puppet government in Paris under Nazi control.

In fact, Le Pen has appealed to Jewish voters by saying that she's
best support of Jews because she's so strongly opposed to Muslim
immigrants, essentially using one form of xenophobia to claim that
she's innocent of another form of xenophobia. It's quite a remarkable
argument.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, there are two
important things to be noted here, things that I've written about many
times.

First, nationalism and xenophobia do not come ftom the politicians.
They come from the people. If Marine Le Pen had not stepped forward
to represent anti-Muslim and possibly anti-Semitic voters, then
someone else would have done so, because the people were demanding it.

What a politician can do is represent nationalistic and xenophobic
voters, but then do everything possible to ameliorate the worst abuses
of those attitudes. As I've noted in the past, Donald Trump has
backed off from his early remarks Mexicans and Muslims, and appears to
have adopted a course that takes into account the anxieties of his
supporters, while preventing any abuses from taking place. Theresa
May in Britain is similarly trying to chart a course that accommodates
Brexit supporters, while avoiding total disaster for Britain's
economy.

The second important point is that nationalism and xenophobia are
growing around the world. Whether it's Chinese vs Japanese, Chinese
vs Vietnamese, Buddhists vs Rohingyas in Myanmar, Hindus vs Muslims in
Kashmir, or Sunnis vs Shias in the Mideast, nationalism and xenophobia
have been growing around the world, in one country after another.
This is what always happens in a generational Crisis era, and it
always leads to major wars or world wars. The Local (France) and Books and Ideas and Atlantic and News Max

****
**** The threat to the 'European project'
****

The phrase "European Project" refers to the efforts, begun in the
1950s, to take steps to prevent another massive war in Europe.

It's hard today to remember the mood of the public in those days.
Here's what Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1950 book, The Origins of
Totalitarianism:

> [indent]<QUOTE>"Two world wars in one generation, separated by an
> uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no
> peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor,
> have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the
> two remaining world powers [America and the Soviet Union]. This
> moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all
> hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of
> the old world order with all its traditions, or for the
> reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been
> thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and
> revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been
> spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate
> circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena --
> homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an
> unprecedented depth.
>
> Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we
> depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to
> follow the rules of common sense and self-interest -- forces that
> look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other
> centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between
> those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything
> is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those
> for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their
> lives."<END QUOTE>[/indent]

The purpose of the European Project was to prove that mankind was not
completely powerless after all. If Europe could set up a new world
order that would prevent the "sheer insanity" of another world war,
then the European Project would succeed. This lead to the Treaty of
Rome in 1957, and eventually to the formation of the European Union.

What we see today is huge centrifugal forces pulling the European
Project apart.

Whether it's the Brexit referendum in Britain, Marine Le Pen in
France, the "True Finns" in Finland, the Alternative for Germany (AfD)
in Germany, the Golden Dawn party in Greece, the Jobbik party in
Hungary, or any of the nationalistic movements in other European
countries, what's become clear is that people, particularly young
people, have no fear or concerns about the lessons learned in World
War II. This is what Generational Dynamics tells us always happens.

In the last century, there were two world wars that destroyed Europe.
The first World War was also devastating for Russia and the Mideast,
while the second World War was also devastating for Japan and the
Pacific. However, there were other massive wars in the last century,
in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas. These wars of the last century
are not well remembered by Americans, since Americans were not as
heavily involved, but they're well remembered by the people of the
countries that fought in them.

And that's just the last century. If you look at the earlier
centuries -- the 1800s, the 1700s, the 1600s, the 1500s, and so forth
-- there were also massive wars in Asia, Europe, the Mideast, Africa
and the Americas in those centuries as well. No century has ever
escaped this.

The point is that these huge, massive wars have not yet begun to occur
in this century, and so people, especially young people, have come to
believe that they never will. And yet, there's absolutely no hope of
avoiding them. Anyone can see that the world has become increasingly
unstable in the last 10 or 15 years, and that countries around the
world have become increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic. It's
like the world is a pressure cooker, ready to explode.

France enjoyed "La Belle Époque" starting in 1871, with advances in
the arts rather than wars. That was the "Old World Order" that Hannah
Arendt was talking about in the quote above. And yet, World War I
exploded in 1914 completely without warning, when a high school
student decided to shoot an Archduke of another country.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Hannah Arendt was
right -- that powerlessness is the major experience of our lives.
Politicians are powerless to stop the flow of generations, as young,
foolish generations displace older, traumatized, experienced
generations, and repeat all the mistakes of the past, once again, over
and over. BBC and Washington Post and AFP

Related Articles

• Angela Merkel tries to unify a fractured Europe on its 50th birthday (25-Mar-2007)
  
  
• The global rise of xenophobia (22-Aug-2010)
  
  
• European leaders debate how the European Union can survive after Brexit (02-Mar-2017)
  
  
• Britain's Tony Blair calls for the people 'to rise up' and reverse Brexit (18-Feb-2017)
  

KEYS: Generational Dynamics, France, Marine Le Pen, Front National,
François Hollande, Emmanuel Macron, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, Donald Trump, Britain, Brexit, Theresa May,
Vel d'Hiv, Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
European Project, La Belle Époque

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John J. Xenakis
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