The results of the first round of the French regional elections sound like the manifestation of a terrible political crisis in our country. Indeed, the victories of the far-right National Front suggest that this party --with its lies, hatred, and the rejection of democracy-- might end up leading several of France's regions.
With the 2017 presidential elections already on the horizon, the dynamic this could create should not be overlooked.
Therefore, the main parties (the Republicans and the Socialist Party) must dedicate themselves, where necessary, to sacrificing their own lists in order to block the National Front. The Socialist Party should, despite some positions taken by regional leadership, remove its listings for the second round in Nord-Pas-de-Calais/Picardy, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur and Alsace-Champagne-Ardennes-Lorraine. The first secretary of the Socialist Party has already announced that the party will drop out of the first two regions, a move that should be welcomed. It would be pointless to add disgrace to defeat. Letting the FN take over these regions would open an avenue for hate in the next presidential elections, further endangering democracy and its values.
But beyond these inevitable tactical decisions, the outcome of these regional elections should also induce the Republicans to question their responsibilities.
First, the party's refusal to initiate real equality of power and revisit the national project has meant that it failed to seize the momentum and hopes that came out of the 2012 elections. That refusal deprived the left of its ability to support a strong cultural agenda, an agenda against which the National Front now progresses by reaping the fruit of French fears born of the upheavals of globalization and non-extinguished passions linked to our colonial past.
Then, the division of the infantile left created a paradoxical situation in which, despite having received a decent number of votes, the left is now in a position to be defeated in several regions. The left must cease to be a divided power that demands its potential allies to match its social-liberal agenda-- those allies who accuse the people in power of having an excessive love for the market. Normally, we would call this behavior childish. In the current circumstances, it can more accurately be described as suicidal.
Obviously, the right has an extremely heavy historical responsibility in this situation. Their frantic race populism has strongly contributed to trivialize the discourse and the proposals of the National Front. It's worth remembering that they were once held on the edge of Republican legitimacy. The evil genius of this strategy is Nicolas Sarkozy, who has instilled the French with a hysteria of security concerns, mistrust vis-a-vis Muslims (who, in 2007, were deemed problematic because they slaughtered sheep in their bathtubs), a rise of identity madness and sick debates, and, last but not least, his Grenoble speech, which stigmatized the Roma and opened the door to discussions of stripping them of their nationality.
More generally, the political class suffers from two phenomena. First, a visible form of defiance vis-a-vis society, a society deemed unsafe by parties of complacent and ineffective apparatchiks-- to say nothing of their incompetence. But also, in connection with this apparatchisme, the political class suffers from a staggering lack of turnover, which is now (falsely) embodied by the National Front!
But the picture would not be complete if we did not talk about the media, which, since 2011, has highlighted the National Front's demonization strategies and its racist discourse. The game that the FN is playing against the rest of the world has too often been framed by the media, who saw it as a source of suspense, or a way to disseminate, via the words of the FN what many of their leaders and journalists were thinking, namely: "But really, the Arabs are pissing us off, especially since my son was beaten up after school and little Mohamed, with his degrees, can now reach positions of economic, political or social influence."
But, despite this buffet of culpability on the part of politicians and the media, the responsibility of voting still lies with the voters, among whom we've seen two problematic trends: abstaining, and voting for the National Front. Both decisions deserve to be questioned. Just weeks after the attacks aimed at injecting the virus of civil war in our country, is it the right decision to retreat into a vote that facilitates the mad nightmare of our enemies, or to abstain altogether, allowing the worst to happen anyway?
This post first appeared on HuffPost France. It has been translated into English and edited for clarity.