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Francois Hollande has a tough challenge ahead, having won the French presidency.
EPA/Guillaume Horcajuelo

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has won the French presidential election with 52% of the vote, ousting sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy.

In hindsight, there have been few surprises in this campaign and election. Of course, many French people and commentators have been shocked or disappointed by the various twists and turns, but all that happened was predictable in a cold-headed analysis.

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France went to sleep last night knowing that almost a fifth of those who felt compelled to vote in the first round of the presidential election chose a party formed on an openly neo-fascist platform. Although the Front National’s Marine Le Pen failed to access the second round, her result is far more concerning than her father’s in 2002. Jean-Marie Le Pen received just over 16% of the vote and a ticket to the second round, but that particular election also witnessed a record level of abstention. This year, France saw one of its biggest turnouts since the birth of the Fifth Republic with ‘only’ 20% abstaining.

Therefore, while the Socialists celebrated Francois Hollande’s strong lead, and deservedly, the mood was in part dampened by the historic result of the FN. More importantly, its acceptance as a serious and normalised contender on the French political landscape proved of utmost concern.

Similarly, Mélenchon was not able to fully express his satisfaction at his impressive result (11%), and proclaim the possible rebirth of a strong left-wing alternative in France. While the Front de Gauche might have sown the seeds for the growth of another strong contender in French politics, Marine Le Pen’s exploit lessened its claim to have gathered the discontented.

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The first round of the French Presidential election is set to take place on Sunday. The latest polls have shown that right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy and his centre left contender François Hollande are set to win their ticket to the second round. While both are currently polling in the high 20s, an upset is not entirely ruled out as the campaign has shown strong support for three main outsiders: centre François Bayrou, but more importantly hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and extreme right Marine Le Pen. While Hollande has so far refused to embrace more left-wing politics, Sarkozy has recently made a clear move to recuperate Le Pen’s electorate.
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The Guardian believes she is ‘the most dangerous woman in France’, and less than a hundred days before the 2012 presidential election, Marine Le Pen appears to be the best contender the extreme right Front National has ever put forward. A sign of changing times, she is also only the second candidate the party has ever put forward for presidency in France. In a party like the Front National (FN), where tradition is a core value, there can only be so much change, and it is not surprising that it was the daughter of the old chef who was voted president of the party in January 2011. Nor is it surprising that, despite an effort to modernise and moderate aspects of the party, the broad lines of the programme remain unchanged, still based on a strong anti-immigrant sentiment and exaggerated nationalism. Right-wing populism, which made Le Pen senior a serious candidate for two decades, remains central to the politics of the party. In 2012, Le Pen’s success will be decided by her ability to broaden her appeal and reach new voters. Many commentators argue that her party has already become the main workers’ party and that this will deliver the Front’s best score ever. However, like her father and in a manner traditional to the extreme right, Le Pen has openly targeted the middle class and lower-middle class, those she feels are the most highly disillusioned with politics and ready to vote for anyone in order to vent their frustration. It is their degree of dissatisfaction that will be central to the success of the FN this year.

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This article will be published in the final issue of this year or the first issue of next year of Patterns of Prejudice.

An electronic copy might be available earlier.

Many commentators saw in the ‘poor’ result achieved by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2007 presidential elections the demise of the Front National. However, when asked by a journalist whether it was the end of her father’s political career, Marine Le Pen replied smiling: ‘I don’t think so. In any case, this is the victory of his ideas!’ In these question and answer lie the whole story of the Front National and its impact on mainstream politics in the past two decades. First, Le Pen’s defeat was exaggerated, the same way his victory had in 2002. In what was seen as the demise of the Front National, Le Pen managed to obtain almost 4 million votes despite the candidature of far right Philippe de Villiers and still ranked fourth in the tally. Furthermore, that Le Pen managed to retain these votes despite the adverse context was a victory in itself. The five years between the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections had indeed led to drastic changes in the way politics was done in France.

What is argued in this article is that the 2002 presidential elections did act as an ‘earthquake’ within French politics. However, this ‘earthquake’ was not so much triggered by a Jean-Marie Le Pen tsunami, but rather by a tidal wave of misinformation and misunderstanding of the real interests and novelty of the results of these elections. By concentrating on the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections, this article will highlight how this reaction led to the consecration of right wing populist politics best exemplified in the landslide election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.

Unlike many of its western counterparts, Australia has been spared powerful surges of the extreme right throughout its history. While the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw European democracies threatened time and time again by movements relying on ethno-exclusivism and thriving on capitalist crises, Australia suffered only relatively weak extreme right bursts whose impact remained marginal. Even the rise of the One Nation Party in 1996, as sudden as it was impressive, showed the limits in the Australian context for organisations which have proved long-lasting in Europe.

This brief outline could bear a simple conclusion: Australia is immune to the extreme right. However, through a study of some of the most important extreme right failures in Australia, this article shows that rather than being immune, the country was spared an extreme right because of the policies put in place by mainstream parties and governments. By analysing mainstream politics in times of extreme right resurgence, this article highlights that by negating the extreme right’s ability to appear as an alternative to the power in place, Australian mainstream politicians suffocated it.

The conclusion of this article demonstrates that while the Australian extreme right has been mostly inaudible since 2001, extreme right politics, such as ethno-exclusivism, still play a crucial part in the shaping of Australian politics, notably during election campaigns.

Keywords: extreme right, Australian history, ethno-exclusivism, populism, democracy

Published in Social Identities, 18-1, Feb 2012

Two months to the French presidential election, the prospects of the extreme right Front National remain as high as ever. In many polls, Marine Le Pen hovers at between 15 and 20 percent and, in some cases, even leads right-wing UMP candidate and president Nicolas Sarkozy and centre-left candidate François Hollande. Such a high score for a party founded in the 1970s by neo-fascists is a worrying prospect. While history tells us that Le Pen would not stand a chance in the second round, it has also shown that France could take a terrible turn as a result of her mere presence.

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In hindsight, I can gladly admit that my original reaction to the first day of Occupy Melbourne was wrong. As a left-wing cynic, weary from years fighting alongside the fragments of an old and obsolete reactionary left, I noted the usual suspects and assumed too quickly that these dogmatic, semi-cultish organisations would try to succeed in taking over the movement. I wrongly doubted the new faces would survive the first assembly and assumed most passers-by would leave when confronted by an outdated lecture on Marx or Lenin. While the left’s key thinkers are still relevant, their use as a quasi bible by self-righteous crusaders and vanguards sits somewhat uneasily in the struggle against the contemporary form of capitalism. Yet the idealist in me was still alive and I went back the next day to see how the movement had evolved. While the square was much less populated on that Sunday afternoon, there seemed to remain a spirit of freedom and independence which made me optimistic, if not for the future of the movement, for its relevance in the ongoing emancipatory struggle.

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A few weeks after the terrible events which occurred in Norway and cost the lives of dozens of innocents, the European extreme right is at a crossroads. Imbued in his self-righteous spirit, Anders Berhing Breivik might have dealt a serious blow to the short-term ambitions of the populist strategy implemented by parties from this fringe of politics in the past two decades.

As clearly expressed in his 1518-page manifesto, Breivik drew heavily on the work and opinions of many extreme right-wing and neo-racist ‘mainstream’ commentators and politicians to form his worldview. In fact, it seems that little was truly original. Of course, it would be both pointless and counterproductive to push blame for Breivik’s action onto the writings of a myriad of right-wing polemicists and politicians. Yet it is worth considering whether his will to take the irrational fears they instilled in people to their most extreme conclusion could prove enormously damaging for such ideas in the near future.

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The following thoughts came to me after a recent Melbourne Free University lecture on the Future of Feminism. The insightful presentation given by Melbourne Feminist Collective’s Neda Monshat and Alexia Staker led to a fascinating discussion in the second part of the event. Two points in particular finally convinced me to write about feminism and its future, if it is to have one.

My first concern is related to the presenters’ wish for all feminists to forget their differences and stand in solidarity with a broader movement, all allied behind a common cause. While this sounds like a great idea, I would argue that it is not only impossible, but not something to be wished for: some of the differences that exist between feminists and feminisms cannot and should not be overcome for the sake of unity. In fact, it would seem to me a defeat if progressive feminists were to make a pact with reactionary ones to create a unified movement over massive ideological disagreement. To me, this would signal the end of feminism as it should be. One recent example of the irreconcilable divide between different kinds of feminism is the ‘hijab affair’ and its various reactions in the western world.

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