Anaïs walks the walk. When we receive our annual tax bill, I can feel her disappointment. “That’s it? That’s all?” she’ll say as I shudder in the corner as if stricken with polio.
“You just say that because you can vote,” I tell her, bringing up a sore subject for us, one which I remind her of every election cycle when I stay at home and brood while the rest of France decides my future for me. As the years pass, it becomes more and more infuriating to be unable to vote in this country, especially one with such a high abstention rate. I’ve even considered proposing a vote “proxy” idea, where foreigners can vote in the place of lazy apathetic French who’d rather play Xbox.
Anaïs sympathized, to a point: “Well, get off your ass and become French, then,” was her usual response, which I always found a bit of a blunt solution.
She knew it stung, especially considering I vote overseas as a Democrat from the state of New York, a vote about as worthless as a candy wrapper. But Anaïs believes all movements start with one vote, and when our French friends tell us they didn’t have time to vote in a certain election, whether it be municipal or European or parliamentary, I can see her seethe. Anaïs cares, maybe too much. Once I came home to find her draped over the radio crying, looking like someone in the forties who’d just received news about Pearl Harbor. I assumed the worst, only to find out it was just the announcement of the cabinet for the recently elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Seeing I had no skin in the game, Sarkozy, to me, was a blast. He was a weird Eurotrash version of a bad American president. He had billionaire friends and didn’t apologize about it. He went for jogs in his FDNY T-shirt and Yankees hat. He had no qualms screwing over his right-wing constituents, and there was always an angry scowl to him as if becoming president was a score he settled with those who bullied him at school. “Sarko” was kind of a test run for a new mold of French president, one more rough and populist on the edges. He didn’t have the grande école pedigree his predecessors had, and he once told a heckler to “Casse-toi pauvre con” (get the fuck out of my face, you loser), which wasn’t a phrase you’d hear from the Mitterands or Pompidous of the world. He separated from his wife, Cecilia, the day he was elected president and then shacked up months later with Carla Bruni, a famous model/singer who’d once dated Mick Jagger. The best thing about Sarko was that his goal of Thatcherizing France “travailler plus pour gagner plus” (work more to earn more), blew up in his face and forced France back into the streets, inflaming a latent anger I’d been waiting forever to see.
Under Sarko, unrest was palpable. We had our bad guy, but just when it seemed as if France was getting its resistance mojo back and giving me some political direction, Obama was elected, plunging France once again back into its Lyme-diseased apathy. All of a sudden, the United States was no longer a neocon warmongering crooked sub-prime-banking foothold to protest. It was Kennedy-esque and forward thinking, and when my friends saw clips of Obama at the White House Correspondents’ dinner and compared him to the stiffs France continued to turn out, they could only shrug with “bah. . . . oui” sighs. “Of course you have Obama as president. You’re constantly changing,” my friend Nicolas told me. “We still have a feudal system in place. We never change.”
But France was changing, slowly, and the one who benefited the most from the Mitterrand/Chirac/Sarkozy sloth was Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter, who’d gradually climbed in the polls since taking over the FN from her father in 2011. Weirdly, Marine Le Pen’s message, aside from dittoing her father’s xenophobia and populist nationalism and hatred for Europe, also homed in on what those in my café had voiced to me in those early years: France needed to break with the same old heads, but in a robust way.
Listening to Le Pen and her supporters, it felt as if I’d been following a conversation that wasn’t at all what I thought it was. Those who felt disgusted and fed up weren’t at all apathetic, I realized. They were revolutionary and angry, many hopped up on “pull down the circus tent” self-destruction, something that hadn’t reared its head since 1914, when the entire continent committed suicide, or in the Vichy days, when France sold its soul. In 2016, as President François Hollande’s popularity dropped and Le Pen rallies grew larger and larger, I feared for the French and this place I knew as home, not knowing it would be my own country shooting itself in the foot come November.
* * *
Following Trump’s victory and during the months leading up to the French presidential election in May, I suffered a sort of election PTSD. The impossible was now possible. Yet nobody seemed to care.
“I don’t think you understand. She’s going to fucking win!” I found myself shrieking at friends, killing any enjoyment to be had at the dinner table. For me, Le Pen was the third part of the apocalypse puzzle falling into place; the one that started with Brexit and was followed by Trump, which would eventually start the process of the dissolution of Europe, the end of NATO, the death of the euro, and John’s abdicating his right to a sound sleep.
Up until now, and despite its lame politics and general inertia, I still found France quirky and classy, kind of like the older woman you cross on the ground floor of your building, who is still chic despite the fact she hasn’t paid her common charges in years. With Le Pen, this older lady became something darker, inhabited by a growing specter who’d been haunting me since my arrival. Not only did Dad ruin my honeymoon, daughter had slowly weaseled her way into my daily life, constantly yapping on the radio and talk show circuit, harping on about her fetish issues of immigration and Europe, two subjects that she knew she could finally divide France. Like Trump’s, her base came largely from two areas, the disenfranchised industrial north and the south, areas where the FN had been formed in the early seventies by ex-Algerian Pied Noirs, who’d felt betrayed by Charles de Gaulle’s decision to pull France out of Algeria. As patriotic and “Made in France” as it now claimed to be, the FN has its roots in the OAS (Organisation armée secrète), a clandestine paramilitary group formed in the sixties that attempted to assassinate De Gaulle outside Paris in 1962.
The common refrain in the media was that the FN follower was MAGA à la Française, a voter suffering from his or her job moving overseas and the notion that his or her old way of French life had been abandoned by the culturally diverse France of today. But that didn’t tell the whole story. There were affluent FN supporters, many in the south, who were simply happy to find their racism echoed on a national scale. Where Le Pen differed from Trump, though, was that nobody underestimated her ability as a candidate. She wasn’t the bombastic glass-eyed blowhard her father was. She was a lawyer, who’d been revered, feared even, as a cunning debate adversary, and her ability to turn an argument upside down in her favor with an oozing grin made her more French Ted Cruz than Donald Trump. Like Trump, Le Pen was shameless, taking precious time out of her spring 2017 campaign to visit Trump Tower to make it look as if she was having meetings with the president-elect, when in fact she was just riding up and down the escalator and chatting with French advisors inside the local Starbucks. The whole thing was surreal from a French standpoint, but from a New Yorker’s point of view, it was pathetic. “Who goes to New York and hangs out at Trump Tower?” a friend from New York asked me, not really knowing who Marine Le Pen was. He was right.
Not only did the extreme right now have their voice, so did the far left, in the form of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a crusty political dinosaur who’d refashioned himself in the French media as “le French Bernie Sanders.” Compared to Mélenchon, though, Sanders is Mitt Romney. Mélenchon advocated stuff even the French socialists found out there, including a 100 percent tax on income earned over a certain amount and creating a new axis of allies that included the tried and true democracies of Russia and Venezuela.
Mélenchon lived in the Tenth. We shared the same café in the morning, and I’d see him sometimes huddling with his younger staff in the corner, with a grizzled look, as if he just swal
lowed lye. Mélenchon was a gruff interview but great orator, which made him the perfect guest for political talk shows. He was adored on the left for zinging the right and loved on the right for torpedoing those on the left that he called “gauche caviar,” the French equivalent of “limousine liberal.” What nobody knew was that Mélenchon actually thought he could win. And while everyone cheered on his takedowns and laughed at his quips on the campaign trail, he gradually climbed in polls, growing a predominantly youth-based party called La France Insoumise (Unbowed France). The possibility of a Le Pen/Mélenchon runoff in the second round was becoming real. And what scared me was that when faced with the choice of France being a borderline Maoist country or a Fascist one, centrist voters might choose to stay home, making a Le Pen path to victory even more probable.
The campaign had also been rocked by something that usually doesn’t happen in French politics. Hollande, the presiding president, channeled his inner LBJ and chose not to seek a second term, something that hadn’t been done since the Fifth Republic was formed. Hollande enjoyed a popularity rating similar to that of New Jersey governor Chris Christie. His own party had abandoned him for his having pandered to the right too many times. He’d reneged on promises made during the campaign, and the economic programs he’d implemented had only just started bearing fruit, much too late to stop his downward spiral from spiraling further. It also seemed Hollande hated the job. His suit never really fit him. He’d put on weight. He’d cheated on his girlfriend, the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, with the actress Julie Gayet, and was paid back in full when Trierweiler published a tell-all that became a best seller. To his credit, Hollande never milked the Paris terrorist attacks as other cynical presidents might have done. He was steady and solemn afterward, appearing at the site of the massacre at the Bataclan the night of the shooting to grieve with strangers despite obvious security risks. To me, it was his shining moment. Hollande did what leaders should do but rarely actually do on those occasions—not make it about them. In a way, Hollande was a throwback—a genuinely funny politician (rare) who was insanely intelligent and completely unfit for the job. He’ll likely go down as a French Jimmy Carter, someone who had the right intentions, but who lacked the political tenacity and luck to leave much of a legacy. Yet when I’d bring up to friends that maybe Hollande’s most deft political move was to drop out at the right time to help prevent a Le Pen victory, my declaration was met mostly with disdain. “He’s bowing out because he sucks,” one friend said. “He should have bowed out when he was born.”
Hollande’s decision to retire made him look downright saintly compared to François Fillon, the center right candidate and early favorite who’d become enmeshed in a scandal when it was revealed his wife and two children had been receiving salaries as members of his parliamentary staff, salaries that didn’t make sense considering they never worked for him. Fillon at first denied the allegations, and then, when it was made clear he had misappropriated funds, he doubled down on the shamelessness, claiming the scandal was an orchestrated witch hunt aimed at sabotaging his marriage. As the first-round vote loomed, between calls from his own party to bow out and his determination to stay on, Fillon’s campaign took on Anthony Weiner proportions.
Fillon’s downfall was one of many October surprises that made this French campaign feel downright American. The only thing that helped me keep faith was the first-round debate, a four-hour round robin featuring all thirteen candidates from across the spectrum. The equivalent you couldn’t find in America, because if you did, it would feature a member of the John Birch Society up onstage with a Nation of Islam candidate joined as well by two libertarians, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. All on network TV, in prime time. The star of the debate was an ex-factory worker, Philippe Poutou, who represented Le Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) and who wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, which was an upgrade from his usual white tank top. Early into the debate, Poutou came out swinging. His nothing-to-lose brass allowed him to cut major candidates to the bone, reminding each of their lame record and personal hypocrisy. Next to him stood Nathalie Arthaud from the Lutte Ouvrière (Worker’s Fight Party). Her strident screams about offshore accounts and bank graft made Poutou seem like Jeb Bush. Next to Arthaud was Jean Lassalle, whose six-foot-eight frame and heavy Basque-accented French gave him the air of a Spanish Lurch from The Addams Family. This was democracy, I told myself. Everybody had their say, and French voters could now go to sleep thankful, knowing they’d never vote for any of them.
* * *
After the first-round results, Emmanuel Macron and Le Pen were the two left standing. Le Pen I’d expected, but not Macron. During the debates, he seemed too reserved to be formidable, too young to be credible, and too bougie to carry any weight in rural France. Macron was everyone’s second choice, and for me, that was the kiss of death. It meant he was Hillary Clinton. But in France, everyone’s second choice is where you want to be as a candidate. What I’d known about Macron was that he came from the grandes écoles and had worked in banking at some point. He’d served under Hollande as economic minister for a few years, but he’d been keen enough to leave the sinking ship before it took him under. His wife was a lot older than he was. Sticking with the French tradition of not prying into the individual lives of each candidate, his unusual marriage was never an issue during the campaign. What was the issue was whether Mélenchon’s people on the left would vote for Macron. Many of the insoumises were acting like pissed-off adolescents, claiming they couldn’t vote for Macron, using the lame “there’s no real difference between the two” excuse. For them, ruled by a fascist or an ex-banker were the same. And unlike Bernie Sanders, who immediately endorsed Clinton at the Democratic convention, Mélanchon remained strangely coy when asked if he’d support Macron. His reply, “I’ll leave it up to my followers to decide for themselves,” felt like an enormous (and dangerous) dodge. Plus it was odd, considering that in 2002, Mélenchon had been one of the first on the left to support Chirac in the final round. Adding to my fear were the Fillon voters, who were bitter their candidate’s rightful path to the throne had been blocked by a vengeful press. Macron was Hollande II to them, and considering how unpopular Hollande was, Le Pen couldn’t do worse.
Amidst all this noise, I wasn’t convinced the French would build that Republican wall like they had in 2002. Too much seemed fractured now. Too many promises had been broken by previous administrations (right and left). There was just enough palpable disenchantment mixed with identity politics to make for that perfect Three Mile Island cocktail I’d witnessed November 8 in the United States. This country, which I’d so admired before, was just as petty and craven as America and going down the tubes right along with us.
* * *
What I never could have predicted was that the election may have been decided by something France doesn’t have and what America has too much of—cable news. According to French law, all campaigning and media coverage must cease forty-eight hours before the polls open. It’s designed to create a cool-down period during which Comey letters and million-dollar thirty-second spots can’t convince people to vote against their own interests.
Apparently nobody on the Russia hacker side received this memo, though, and during the two-day “no press coverage” blackout, a mysterious dump of thousands of emails from Macron’s computer flooded the Internet with, of course, rumors of offshore accounts and shady financial dealings, none of which could be verified or debunked in time. It was the kind of stuff InfoWars would dig up, and even if someone wanted to conjecture that the hacked emails could lead to something big, there was no network like Fox News cynical enough to pick up the story. Le Pen tried to comment but couldn’t. Mélenchon was stumped as well. And during the forty-eight hours, instead of a Julian Assange October surprise dominating French dinners and conversations, “Macron leaks” festered and collapsed under their now nothing weight.
Another wrinkle in the campaign law states netw
orks cannot broadcast exit polls or overseas ballot results before voting polls close. There’s no John King proclaiming South Carolina a clear winner after just 1 percent of the vote. There are no time zones either, to convince people on the West Coast it’s not worth voting. And since everything is muted until the last vote is cast, the result for every French presidential election is announced on the dot at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday May 7, in countdown fashion, with the next winner’s face appearing on your screen in a 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 tah dah! fashion.
Because of this, election night for me was like a horrifying New Year’s Eve celebration. “Three minutes, people. We have three minutes left!” I yelled as I ran around the living room, holding a throw pillow like a football. And as the seconds ticked down, I felt like a man whose time in France had just run out. I saw my visa running out and us having to move back to the States. I saw Otto’s friends in the neighborhood fearing for their parents’ immigration status. I saw our house in Normandy ransacked by the same assholes who’d driven by on ATVs the previous weekend screaming “Parigots de merde” (fucking Parisians!). And all the ghouls I’d seen on TV would now be in actual positions of power, the same way Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson and Steve Bannon were. The snakelike mouthpiece Florian Philippot would be providing daily bullshit presidential press conferences à la Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The toupeed blowhard Bruno Gollnisch would be secretary of state. Marine Le Pen’s niece, the twenty-eight-year-old Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the one who laced her talk with “c’est du délire” (it’s like, crazy), would probably serve as her Jared Kushner adviser. And Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the traitor center right Gaullist candidate who’d lent Le Pen his support after the first-round results, would undoubtedly be rewarded with prime minister. This is how it happens, I told myself. The small losses pile up, and all of a sudden, there’s a Trump in every country, like a chain of an extreme-right Starbucks.
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