period of lepenism and the return of borders

2024-07-06 13:33:46

A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister of the possible Lepenista government, Jordan Bardella, summed it up in a previous sentence France 3 TV His group’s motto: “No Frenchman will allow himself to live in a house without doors or windows. Well, the same goes for a country.” To put it another way: Modern nations need borders that can be hermetically sealed.

At the heart of the rapid development of the national right, with its view of immigrants as a threat to the importance of France, lies the growing sense among many French that They no longer feel at home in their own country. It is not the only part of the lepenist noise. But it is still very powerful.

This persistent conflict includes several elements: the feeling of dispossession, the anxiety of alienation and the competition for work with immigrants, especially Muslims from the former African colonies. At its core, it is a complaint about a lost identity in a globalized world, with ever-changing threats.

Many of those who felt disconnected from the new economy shunned or voted to leave at other times. No more. Now they are succumbing to proposals from the extreme right, which benefit national interests.

Marine Le Pen at one of her election events. Photo: AP.

Classic groups, right and left, are considered complicit in the policy that has created precariousness and helplessness. Ultra politicians have used these worries and angers, giving researches and prescriptions against the grain of the world that is running today on the blocks. To set yourself apart, to raise boundaries, is to disappear.

Lepenism has benefited from these cracks. But it’s not the only group with that issue. It also spread in the United States with Donald Trump’s insults against immigrants – “the poison of this country”, he called them – and their threats to close the borders. Brexit is justified with similar calls. The unthinkable became thinkable and the message has now become pure dynamite against the regional construction of the European Union.

A new fact is that the debate on immigrants, which is the exclusive subject of xenophobes, has moved to the center of the debate. The extreme right takes the banners of social ideology from the left and, in doing so, spreads the view that immigrants become a source of national identity, take advantage of social safety nets and import violence.

As a result, the stigma attached to the extreme right, once seen as an enemy of democracy, has faded.

Jordan Bardella, the future Prime Minister of France in a Lepenist government. Photo: BLOOMBERG

Threats to immigrants

A few days ago, the newspaper Chance On the front page, he summarizes his warnings about the threats of immigration against that of the leprosy system, which recommends removing dual nationals from the public service. Posted to the letter, he said, “the difference will affect millions of people over hundreds of jobs.”

The classic right has tried to hedge the bet. Just as Macron wanted to revoke the right to citizenship for children born in France to foreign parents and the court opposed it, Biden closed the border to asylum seekers. Both decisions respond to the fact that many, in both countries, demand policies to stop immigrants.. And that is a growing right.

In France, the situation worsened by its own history. The modern nation is built from a central institution and a provider State that uses language as a sign of identity. It was Richelieu, president of Louis XIII, who created in 1635 the National Academy that supervised the use of the language. For the ultras, being French is speaking French from the couch. These days, newspaper accounts show an outward contempt for foreigners: “Where did that accent come from?”. He is a staunch national leader and is today plagued with discontent with a historically successful State that has problems restoring its past.

Marine Le Pen has worked hard to clean up her father’s racism and classism. He renounced his anti-Semitism, did not call for leaving the EU and his tone was more moderate. Even so, the central view that immigrants dilute the national identity – presented as something glorious and mysterious – persists: barriers must be put in place.

The rejection. A march against the right in the Place de la République in Paris (AP).

These calls for a return to national borders occur, paradoxically, at an important time in history. Never has there been so much wealth; and never before that production grew geometrically, driven by technology that accelerates concentration.

Immigration is not the cause of the problems, as Le Pen would like, but rather an effect of something biggerr. European historians have compared the modern era with the beginnings of technology. Classic German economists were then horrified by the social costs of the process.

To stop the threat of rebellion, he called for an urgent solution to what he described as “the aporia of civil society”: in the midst of excessive wealth, society is not rich enough to control the lack of poverty and the expansion of the elite.

You should not believe that this is a thing of the past. The extreme right has managed – and how successfully – to remove the electoral income from this great problem that, in a way, continues to be ours.