WOID XVIII-50. Sadness in Sarkozie
[reprinted from WOID: a journal of visual language]
I)
Talk of wretched refuse. Courtiers who fell from grace in the Early Roman Empire were shipped off to live among the Black Sea barbarians. Courtiers who fall from grace in France’s Sarkozian Empire get shipped off to America. David Martinon, former spokesman for France’s right-wing President Sarkozy, is rumored to be the future French consul-general in New York just as under Augustus Caesar the poet Ovid was sent away in exile. Ovid had apparently seen some sexual shenanigans at the Imperial Court, but there can’t be many sexual shenanigans at Sarkozy’s court to be discovered.
The reasons behind Martinon’s exile will unfold this Sunday, March 16, when the French people vote in the second round of their municipal and local elections. The first round turned into a premonition of rout for Sarkozy’s UMP party, and by all indications the second round will root the rout in reality. Over half of the French Départements (corresponding roughly to American states) are already held by Sarkozy’s left-wing opposition, and the number will climb; as many as twenty-five large towns (by French standards) may shift from right to left. Martinon’s fall from residency is merely the first fallout from a disaster foretold: like many French politicians he’d been parachuté into the UMP bastion of Neuilly – French for "carpetbagger." Despite Neuilly being Sarkozy’s own district, Martinon was greeted with such hostility that he had to withdraw his candidacy.
II)
Of course the upcoming elections won’t change the fact that Sarkozy’s people hold an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly and control the wheels of a highly centralized government. But they mark a shift in the political winds of a type that has occurred periodically since the early years of the French Revolution, when the Jacobin government, centered in Paris, set out to extirpate the Many-Headed Hydra of Federalism. France to this day is overwhelmingly run from the center (viz, Paris), and any rebellion in the provinces can be read as a rebellion against that center and its political priorities. The one point on which all parties agree is that the first round of voting, last Sunday, was a protest vote. Sarkozy’s people blindly insist the French have sent a clear message that Sarkozy’s reforms aren’t happening fast enough.
In fact, the actual nature of this protest may be of far-reaching import, far beyond the actual shift in political power. For over a decade, French protest against the Government in Paris, like Americans’ protests against the Washington Beltway, has been mostly captured by the Right, with Le Pen’s infamous Front National as its standard-bearer. But the Front National has collapsed, in part because a substantial portion of its rhetoric was taken over by Sarkozy. In tomorrow’s second round of elections almost all of the protest vote will come from the Left-of-Center, the Left, and the Far Left.
This is due to the rather complex runoff system in which all parties may enter lists of candidates in the first round. If no party gets an absolute majority in the first round a second round is scheduled to include all parties that received at least ten percent of the vote. Parties with at least five percent in the first round may join up with other parties. In the first twenty years of the Fifth Republic a similar system worked to exclude the French Communist Party since right-wing groups could always be counted on to form a united front against the Red Peril in the second round. After 1981, when the Communists and Socialists joined forces, the system favored the Left until the Communist Party collapsed and was thrown under the bus by the Socialists.
This time around, though, the old divisions aren’t working. François Bayrou’s MoDem party, touted as a centrist alternative, is not in a position to negotiate anything in particular, in part because of its poor showing in the first round, in part because it has no choice, in those instances where it ended up in third place in the first round, but to betray its voters by siding with the Socialists against Sarkozy, or Sarkozy against the Socialists. Bayrou himself will probably be tossed out on Sunday. Excepting a couple of particularly nasty second rounds scheduled in the old Red Belt at the periphery of Paris the Socialists and Communists have managed to stay out of each other’s way. In the deeply riven northern port of Calais, the Front National withdrew in order to favor the UMP against the Communist peril – most likely favoring Sarkozy’s party with a big fat sloppy kiss of death.
III)
Time will tell; but the apparent winner in all this is a very small party, a Trotskyite groupuscule, The LCR or Revolutionary Communist League, led by a likeable postal employee named Olivier Besancenot. The LCR has run a handful of candidates, still more than twice as many as previously, and this time its percentage in the first round has passed the ten-percent threshold in a fair number of elections. This puts the LCR in a position to do what it does best, which is to not cut deals. In a situation where the real balance of power will barely be changed by the outcome of local elections, Besancenot intends to use these elections as preparation for the real struggle, which will take place in the streets. Besancenot also wants to dissolve the LCR into a wider organization without any particular ideology except its opposition to capitalism and globalization – the protest party par excellence. Si licet in parva, the next elections may see the rise of a kind of Front National of the Left, a minority of determined progressive spoilers with enormous leverage on the street and at the ballot box. We could live with that.