France and Britain Just Gave the Finger to Fascism

There is now ample evidence that people with democratic systems of government actually like them, and would just as soon keep them, flaws and all.

There seems to be a strong backlash occurring in several European countries, a trend toward shoring up democracies threatened by toxic authoritarian forces. In Poland last year, then in France and Britain last week, actual voters — as opposed to deeply compromised opinion polls — gave a big middle finger to the fascists in their midst.

I don’t pretend to understand the electoral systems of these countries — let alone their political currents — but I’m struck by the apparent connections between different elections in different countries, and what they might be saying to us.

I’ve spoken before of Poland, where ten years of vicious minority rule was overturned at the ballot box. A ban on abortion was the galvanizing issue — sound familiar? — and it brought an overwhelming number of voters to the polls, many for the first time, despite a 24/7 media campaign of lies and character assassinations so relentless, they made Fox News look warm and fuzzy.

Most Poles were voting for anyone but the vile people in power. And while it left them with a coalition government still trying to find its feet, they did manage to throw the bums out.

The results in France were just as shocking. In the first round of voting in late June, it looked certain that Marine LePen’s ultra-right National Rally (NR) party would win enough seats in the National Assembly to name the prime minister and wield real power for the first time. Emmanuel Macron would still be president — still the head of state — but he’d have a fascist prime minister at the head of the Assembly, sabotaging his agenda at every turn. Liberal democracies everywhere looked on in horror.

But then, in the run-off election last week, everything flipped. Without getting into the mechanics of how it happened, the New Popular Front (NPF) — a party that didn’t exist a month ago — managed to capture the most seats in the Assembly, with Macron’s Renaissance party taking second place. National Rally came in a poor third, so even though it gained more Assembly seats than it previously had, it was effectively shut off from the reins of government.

The key, as in Poland, was massive turnout. People saw the first-round results and got furious at the idea of putting these thugs in power. The big beneficiary of that fury, New Popular Front, is a cobbled-together alliance of about a half-dozen leftist parties — each with its own small piece of the electoral pie — who set aside their considerable differences for the specific purpose of heading off National Rally. They advanced no real policy objectives beyond the continuation of a functioning democracy. And it worked.

As in Poland, the French election leaves a lot of mess to pick up. Macron will now have to corral a quarrelsome coalition of left-wing factions in the Assembly, and try to get them to play nice together. He’ll also need to deal with a sizeable bloc of National Rally fascists on his right, whose mission will be to obstruct whatever his government wants to do, and to generate a constant din of ultra-right propaganda for the consumption of its brainwashed base. Macron is well aware that fighting off fascism is expensive and exhausting.

While Macron’s government is expected to be gridlocked for the foreseeable future, at least it’ll still be in the hands of grownups. That’s how we measure progress these days.

The results in England last week were more expected, but telling in their own way. The overthrow of the Tories after 14 years of institutional mismanagement was in no small part a backlash to Brexit, which has arguably been far more destructive to Britain than Trump’s entire four years was to us. It took way too long for the British electorate to come to its senses — to say, enough is enough — but remarkably, it did. The margin of victory, and the scale of the turnout, speak loudly of how pissed-off people were.

But while the Tories espouse a relatively mild version of rightist nonsense, let’s not forget that the Brexit movement, in 2016, was very much a Russian intelligence operation, just as Trump’s election was a few months later. Brexit is, in fact, an ongoing Putin victory, in that it can’t be undone, only worked around. Now, the ascendant Labour Party will need to pick up the pieces of a wrecked economy, something Democrats here are quite used to after Republican administrations.

So what are these elections trying to tell us? What learning can we bring to our own fraught political situation?

For one thing, we can see that the power of negative partisanship is stronger than ever. The people voting in these elections weren’t voting for anything. Much like those who favored Nikki Haley in the GOP primary, they were voting against what they considered a clear and present danger to their way of life.

The Beltway media, by so dishonestly aggravating the current tribulations of Joe Biden, is obscuring the fact that Biden is not what this election is about. Fear and loathing of Trump remains the prime motivator.

Which means Biden is a fungible component. I expect him to run and win, but if he were no longer on the ballot, I don’t think it would cost Democrats a single vote.

Another point we can take, perhaps, from these elections, is that the support for fascist parties in Western countries is only about one-third of likely voters. This is fairly consistent across the electorates we’re discussing.

These ultra-right parties all use classic fascist propaganda tactics — especially the scapegoating of immigrants and other “others” — to keep their voters ignorant and pliable. But while these tactics are being aggressively sold in liberal democracies all over the world, only about a third of voters are buying it.

In a multi-party system, as in most of Europe, one-third of the electorate is enough to make a serious run at power. Italy now has a right-wing government, in large part because there were too many parties in the race, which allowed Giorgia Meloni’s tepid version of fascism to win with only a third of the vote.

But when normally fractious parties band together — as in Poland and France — the fascist takeover can indeed be thwarted. This tends to lead to quarrelsome coalition governments, which might just be the price of saving a democracy.

Not that our two-party system is doing any better. MAGA Republicans are, yes, a mere one-third of the electorate, and that shouldn’t be enough to sustain a real party — especially when it’s thoroughly despised by the other two-thirds.

But it corresponds to rough estimates of the people most likely to vote for Trump. With such a meager base, Trump would’ve been run out of town long ago, were it not for the Electoral College — the Founders’ most enduring blunder — which gives any Republican, no matter how nuts, a real shot at the presidency.

But Trump will need more than a third of the votes cast to carry any of the swing states. And while it’s true that his one-third is baked in, it’s hard to see where the rest will come from. Nobody is ambivalent about Trump.

One final thought. The ability of European democracies to resist fascism at the ballot box is not unrelated to the victories Democrats have rung up in virtually every election since the fall of Roe v Wade.

In all these cases, here and abroad, the fascist insurgency was fierce, but the resistance was fiercer.

I’ll take that as a good thing.