As the French establishment ponders how to respond to the success of the [insert political label of choice] National Front in the first round of France’s local elections on Sunday, an article in the Financial Times by Jean-Yves Camus inadvertently underlines the extent to which that country’s establishment is out of ideas.
In this passage he suggests that France’s establishment right should split into two:
Defeating the extreme right will take more than fancy presentation. It requires a new political offer. This probably means the Republicans have to disappear altogether, so that a single but divided party can be replaced by two distinct families of the right.
One ‘family’ would look like this:
[It would] stand for an illiberal democracy of the kind the FN [the National Front] favours, in which the majority imposes its will on smaller groups and keeps France out of globalisation.
I’m guessing that Camus doesn’t think too much of this particular family.
And the other half of the right?
[It] would be committed to more European integration, free-market economics and a multicultural society.
So that’s the “more outward-looking version” Camus favors, a family of the right dedicated to deepening the post-democratic “European integration” that has long since turned toxic (and, by the way, stands for corporatism, not the free market) and the defense of multiculturalism, a long-discredited ideology that has brought only ruin.
If that’s the ‘right of center’ answer to the country’s woes, France really is in trouble…..