On 3/6/2011 5:41 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> A Facebook friend of mine - a Serb living in Paris - is far more
> worried than you and says she experiences racist shit every day as
> soon as anyone hears her accent.
> Regardless of whether she wins or loses, the effect will be to force the mainstream parties to embrace Xenophobia Lite, no?
You're right, but the question is whether this is worse than it was before the crisis.
Before the crisis, Sarkozy ran in 2007 on a platform of open Thatcherite economics and Sam Yorty-style, crack-heads-in-the-ghettos law and order. The crisis, and the protests that have happened since, totally discredited the Thatcherism, which has been largely abandoned (except quiet, behind-the-back stuff). The contrast with the US, where the discourse was seized by Tea Partyism, is remarkable.
On Marine LP, what's interesting is that cause and effect are reversed. Sarkozy tried to co-opt the FN's electorate by hitting the xenephobia theme to a degree that had never been done by the mainstream right before. But it backfired on him - the effect was merely to "banaliser" the FN's xenephobia. This has made many people in the center-right very nervous and made Sarkozy look like a dangerous and dull-witted sorcerer's apprentice rather than a strategic genius.
Then, when Marine LP took over the FN from her dad, she cleverly transformed the party's image. She junked the neoliberal economics, embraced a very left-sounding economic discourse based on soaking the rich and protesting neoliberalism and globalism. And she erased the antique ultramontane Catholic identity stuff in favor of a supposed defense of secularism, which is cover for a Pim Fortuyn-style anti-Islam. In other words, she's made the FN more mainstream and occupied a terrain where Sarkozy can't compete (anti-neoliberalism). Hence her high poll numbers. The "Bradley effect" when it comes to polling about the FN seems to have disappeared.
So yes, in many ways things have gotten worse on the xenephobia front in France. But in another sense, you might say that xenephobia hasn't spread, it's just come out of the closet as an open issue. In my view, this is better than leaving it as a festering "non-dit" where it infects everything without anybody addressing it head-on. This forces the center-right to decide if it's a republican force or not. In other words, as Israel Shahak used to say (according to Hitchens), these are "encouraging signs of polarization."
As with everything else, I could be wrong about this.
SA