Next! I’m going to run fast through the next few, as they are now small scorers, and I also did not manage to finish this before the first round ended.
The next party is a refoundation of an old staple of politics:
I have friends in the Green Party so I don’t want to say bad things about EELV (there is little to be said that’s bad about them), and to be fair, this poster isn’t bad, it’s just not great either.
Jadot is running for the left-wing party EELV (Europe Ecologie les Verts). EELV was born of the coalition of several small parties or altermondialistes (alternatives to globalization) personalities going together first in the 2009 European elections. The Europe Ecologie part is an amalgamation of several environmental and social justice figures, such as José Bové (an activist fighting against GMOs, corporations, and globalization with unrestricted trade). It wasn’t meant to be a professional party, but rather a coalition of individuals with a same concern for the environment and a social platform of justice and fairness. The Green Party, on the other hand, has a long history on the French political scene, if not one that’s fairly confidential. It’s existed mostly through the coalition that it has forged, and the environmental parties in France have had a complicated history. There are or were, officially, about four green parties or clubs in French politics. The best known is EELV, the fusion of Europe Ecology and the Green Party. The Green Party itself has existed more or less since the 1970s, although it was apolitical in a way at its foundation, choosing a non-aligned position (neither left nor right wing) in the 1980s. This position became untenable in the 1990s, when it became clear that the conservative parties of France were not going to join the environmental effort (partially because in the 1990s, hunters and fishermen were still a political force). The best-known representative of the Green Party in France, and the person who perhaps can be considered its Founding Father and spiritual Father, is Antoine Waechter. Born in Mulhouse, Alsace, Waechter was the main figure behind the “neither right nor left” effort, perhaps as a concession to his pragmatic Alsatian education: common sense has no political party. In Alsace, he is most known for his efforts to reintroduce, with great success, the beaver, which had been hunted into extension, and then had to fight for resources and territory with the nutria, an invasive species from South America particularly easy to recognize from its orange front teeth. The nutria, as a side note, is a good illustration of climate change: until the 1980s, it was relatively rare in Alsace, because it cannot survive long winters and harsh climates. In the 1990s, the effect of climate change being felt increasingly, the continental summers of Alsace (hot and humid a good portion of the summer) and now warmer winters made it a perfect home for the nutria, and its population exploded. The nutria is particularly happy to consume corn, which has become somewhat of a monoculture in some parts of Alsace, and it enjoys the stem of the invasive algae that is now a common sight in the many urban canals of the region (these plants are themselves a good hint of global warming: they thrive in warmer waters and suffocate all the other vegetation around them). They’ll occasionally feast on American crawfish that’s also an invasive species (but no one is unhappy with that), and snails. Go walk in Strasbourg, and you’ll see many of these guys–it’s ubiquitous, perhaps more than in other big cities in France because Strasbourg is surrounded by water and marshes where they thrive.
Anyways. The Green Party left its neither nor position in the 1990s, to somewhat great success, and in the late 1990s, it ran with the Socialist and Communist parties in an alliance called the Pluralist Left (la gauche plurielle). It’s on the strength of that alliance that Lionel Jospin became Prime Minister after the disastrous lower chamber dissolution Chirac made in 1997 (he dissolved the Assemblée National because he couldn’t get what he wanted from its majority, in the hopes of getting a stronger majority, and to his surprise, he ended up with a left-wing PM because the alliance got the majority of the vote. Talk about miscalculation).
Generally though, the Green Party had been relatively modest until its alliance with the Europe Ecology movement, after the 2009 European elections. In the last European election, its strong position made EELV, effectively, one of the biggest parties in France, and translated in their win in several big cities in France (Bordeaux, Lyon, and Strasbourg, for example), but those elections don’t necessarily translate the national presidential one for several factors: one is that the European elections, for example, are largely ignored by voters and have very high abstention rates. But they also are easier for the EELV coalition to some extent because young pro-Europe people are more likely to find their programs relevant and interesting in the European parliamentary elections, as EELV is one of the most pro-European parties running. European regulations have frequently run ahead of French ones, so it’s easy to see Europe as an ally in the fight against environmental destruction, especially when the Green Party veterans can point to several transnational successes of the past: the reintroduction of the salmon in the Rhine River, for example, is largely an example of transnational European cooperation between Germany, France, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Austria and the Netherlands. In the 1960s-1970s, the Rhine was a toxic dump wasteland, but thanks to coordinated efforts and millions of euros, there are now salmons reproducing naturally in the Rhine, although 8 French dams continue to block its travel in some parts of the Rhine, as well as port activity in the Netherlands. The goal is that within the next five years, salmon can run back from the estuary to the city of Basel unimpeded.
EELV is also surfing on a new phenomenon: the loss of interest of young French voters for traditional methods of civic expression like the vote, in favor of direct action and non profits. This has benefitted EELV because many of the most media-figures of the party are longterm activists (like José Bové, or even Jadot himself) who have ground experience in building momentum.
The poster above isn’t particularly bad, but it’s also not particularly imaginative: a green background seems almost like the obvious choice. The picture is interesting in that it gives a complete different story than the slogan here: to faire face is to confront reality, to measure up to what we have to fight for and against, but Jadot isn’t facing, he’s looking off to the right, above the shoulder of the audience. This discrepancy makes the poster less efficient, and more vague. The abundance of close ups in suits also doesn’t help this poster: it’s hard to distinguish it from the many other close ups.
All in all, it’s a forgettable poster, which is never a great thing in politics.
Yes there are close to a dozen candidates to the election right now, with the following distribution: two centrists, four right to far right candidates, and five left wing to far left candidates, but I won’t do all of them.
First up is this guy:
Macron is the incumbent, and technically he is not of any major party, although he pilfered his votes largely from the MoDEM (centrist party) and the Républicains (conservatives).
There is not much history to explain here: Marcon is an UFO of politics.
There is one major thing here: Macron, prior to being elected in 2017, had never held an elected office. He is what we call in politics a “technocrat”–precisely the kind of people that the Yellow Jacket movement is fed up with, so it’s interesting that he was elected.
He’s got a couple of things going for him: he’s pro-start up and business, he’s a Millenial, a former investment banker, and, well, he is a white guy (some people find him attractive, that is not me). He was elected at 39, making him the youngest person to ever become French president in the history of the position (in case you are wondering, the second youngest president of France was Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte–future Napoleon III–and the third youngest was Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, the centrist elected president in 1974 and who then got booted after just one term (extremely rare), giving France this now forever cult video of him walking out after the single most awkward goodbye ever).
Macron’s main electoral target is currently one of the groups going the most to the polls: the young to middle-aged white-collar worker. Like Sarkozy, Macron is also fond of saying classist and offensive stuff like “it’s easy to find a job, just walk across the street” (to a person saying they were having difficulties finding a job in their sector), “you do things in the way they ought to be done if you want to do your revolution: you get a degree, learn to feed yourself, and then you can give lessons to others” (to a high schooler who’d just interrupted his speech by singing the International Workers anthem), “if you want to look serious, put on a suit.” (to factory workers striking against a new labor law). He believes that the French are reticent to change and stuck in the oats (not entirely untrue), and his solution is to confuse honesty with blunt condescension. In fact, he reminds me of a certain former provost I knew who once explained the inability of an administration to make important funding decisions more than two weeks ahead of the end of classes in May by saying uncertainty was part of real life, and people should get used to it instead of whining.
Back on track, sorry. Macron’s inability to read the room has resulted in some very funny moments, like when ge posed with two shirtless guys in the French Caribbean, one of whom was flipping the bird to the camera, or when he turned the Elysées Palace into an electro-techno-dance nightclub and posed with the performers (which is about as cringe as you can imagine, given he’s now old enough to be the father of older Gen Z kids).
He’s not aligned with any big parties, but that’s possible in France because the campaign finance system is very different than the US system: up to the campaign limit, the state finances campaigns. If they don’t reach 5%, they have to reimburse this amount, but reaching that limit was largely possible in the past, even for “fringe” parties. This means that pretty much every bank will loan candidates fairly high sum of money.
Now, I don’t want to diminish Macron’s career performance: he became deputy general secretary of the Presidency in 2012, only two years after meeting Hollande (the position is sort of a Deputy Chief of Staff position), then Minister of the Economy and the Finances. This is a remarkable feat, because although it sounds like a boring ministry, and not especially more important than the position of Prime Minister, or Justice Minister or Foreign Affairs Minister, it is one of only 5 positions in the government called “ministères régaliens”, i.e ministries formerly represented by the King’s authority and persona, and that concern the sovereignty of France: justice, army, police, the ability to coin money and levy tax–economy–, and diplomacy. Those correspond today to these 5 ministries: Defense and Military, Economy and Finances, Justice, Interior, and Foreign Affairs. Those are the most coveted position, and they are also, consequently, the positions that have traditionally been harder glass ceilings to break for sexual and racial minorities. The first female Justice Minister was Elisabeth Guigou in 1997 (under the Jospin socialist government), the first black person to become minister was Christiane Taubira in 2012 under the Hollande presidency (note: I am not saying first person of color, because there is an ethnicity issue here that is touchy: Rachida Dati technically became the first woman of color to hold that title in 2007, under Sarkozy, but while she is of Northern African descent, Dati does not define herself publicly as a woman of color, and refutes that label. She will, however, if gingerly, define herself as someone “issue de l’immigration”, someone issued from foreign-born parents, in her case Algeria and Morocco).
When he ran in 2017, Macron was a virtual unknown in politics. The Minister of Economy might be very prestigious in political terms, it’s also a position that is rarely under the limelight. The ministry of justice comes often with the Keeper of the Seal position (the title is a royal inheritance, this was the person tasked with keeping the royal seal before) and is very visible, the interior and forreign affairs are highly visible positions, but traditionally, people forget who is at the Economy, and Defense, pretty quickly after they are nominated.
After being elected he benefited from a high approval rate (over the 55% mark), which is quite remarkable because he was a minister under Hollande who had the lowest approval rate of a French president…Pretty much ever, I think (4%–I mean even at the height of the Watergate Richard Nixon still had a 24% approval rate, so you have got to be pretty committed to mediocrity to get that far down).
It did not stay that way long: a year after his election, Macron was down to 25%, although it’s now come back to around 45%. In 2017, Macron was a new, fresh-faced president, not from any major party. A year later, he was a standoffish guy who doesn’t know how to read a room. His prime minister was more popular than him (which is not a good look) for a little bit, which may have contributed to his dismissal/quitting later.
Macron’s strategy in 2022 is essentially to force a Le Pen run off again by alienating the left wing voters, denouncing a non existent “woke culture” in France, accusing activists of color of plotting to destroy the nation, and acting generally as if the Muslim immigration of France is a danger to the country and police officers have the right to beat the crap out of demonstrators. He’s steering the debate purposefully on this because the debate on the rise of poverty is one he’ll loose. By keeping the debate on Le Pen’s traditional grounds, he’s veering to the right, and eyeing the traditional right, but maybe also trying to prevent Le Pen from eating up his voter base. He’s also doing this a) because he was such a better debater than Le Pen in between the two rounds in 2017, and b) because he is hoping the prospect of a Le Pen presidency will force everyone to vote for him to save France from itself.
It’s a very risky calculus because 2022 is not 2017, but it’s likely to work, which is maybe why his poster is so terrible–he does not care. He’s used the war in Ukraine to eclipse the very real grow of an inequality gap in France, and he’s using it also to avoid campaigning because he’s not that popular right now, and images of Macron being booed might do more damage to him than anything else. I think he’s also over-confident and thinks it’s a won election.
Let’s summarize:
The thing he was going for: reassuring, warm, confident, honest, with everyone backing him, Nous tous=us all or to say it differently we are all in this together.
Where it fails:
The top of his head is cut off, his smile is smarmy (but trying to look modest, which is a look he stole from pal Sarkozy), the lack of a capitalized T to tous and the decision to put the two words on two different lines rather than one has the unwanted effect of saying Us against All by emphasizing the Us, and there isn’t a single person of color behind him.
As far as campaign posters go it’s not entirely terrible, it has good things…
Wait, no, it does not.
Fire your communication consultant (someone from McKinsey probably) now, Mr President. They are terrible.
Okay, let’s get this guy out of the way before we get into some of the major disasters of disastrous campaigns and minor candidates. I mean, at this point thes has become fairly arbitrary-but bow we are coming to the uninspiring lot, or flyers for people I have a hard time taking seriously, when they don’t have any parliamentary representation or come out of the woods once every five years, or are polling so far behind no one knows why they are still in there.
This guy is not entirely badly represented here, I just have nothing more to say on him than I did on Nathalie Arthaud, and at least she looked serious.
RED. RED EVERYWHERE. Okay, it’s not necessarily bad, but that is a LOT of red. The NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) was founded in 2007 as an offshoot of a far-left party, the Communist Revolutionary League. So hence the red.
I actually happen to like the guy who founded the NPA, Olivier Besancenot. He has a BA in history, and regardless of whether you agree with his positions, the guy is smart and has said plenty of intelligent things. Besancenot, for example, once remarked that while he defined himself as a Trotskyist and a revolutionary, revolution was to be reinvented, because no revolution had ever been successful without blood, and no revolutionary experiment had fully succeeded. He also was a great public speaker, and a charismatic figure.
Besancenot was a postman, and earned the nickname the Red Postman, from his opponents.
Let me take a detour here to explain one quick thing that has bearings on this (I know, the detours are long here).
French people know fairly openly that their own secret services have done bad bad things. The thing that’s very European though is that instead of finding this very shameful, the French have always been proud of their secret services’ dealings. Pragmatically, they have actually helped prevent a lot of bombings between the 1970s and the 2000s, but the dealings of these secret services are entirely intermingled with very very very bad things. The CIA is often presented as the ultimate evil machine of the West, making and unmaking regimes (and potentially trying to commit a coup against the De Gaulle government to prevent Algeria from becoming independent with the backing of the USSR, but that’s neither here nor there). But the French secret services, les barbouzes as we call them, have a deeply unsavory history. First of all–the word barbouze itself comes from the way the counterinsurgents working against the Secret Army in Algeria called themselves. The Secret Army (OAS) was the armed anti-independence resistance that tried to murder De Gaulle at the Petit-Clamart attack in the early 1960s. In response to the OAS, and to protect De Gaulle and his entourage and government, a number of veterans who knew him organized (more or less with his blessings, but the more or less is very murky) into various groups that became the formal core of the Secret Services under De Gaulle.
I spoke in the post on Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the SAC, the Civic Action Service, which was a Gaullist militia De Gaulle used in the 1950s and 1960s, and which was more or less openly comprised of former crime operatives, nationalist militiamen, and other unsavory characters. It’s more or less an open secret that these men almost all knew deep secrets of the Republic and found work into the government after the Algerian independence, whether they worked with the GRE (tasked with finding and destroying freedom fighter cells in Algeria), the SAC, or the SDCE (the actual secret services founded in 1943 by Free France generals), in the 1980s Mitterrand reorganized them into the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure). In the late 1980s, early 1990s, as the USSR was falling apart and the danger of the KGB slightly diminishing, a former director of the CIA said in an interview that in his opinion the DGSE was the scariest threat to US industrial secrets. Lo and behold, in 1990, the French were caught red-handed spying IBM. The Ariane rocket program and AIRBUS greatly benefitted (benefit?) from the work the DGSE does. On the other side of the espionage services in France is the RG, the general internal espionage organ of the French police, founded in 1907, and which in 2008 merged with the DST (Direction of the Surveillance of the Territory) under the umbrella term of DGSI. Almost all of these agencies had at some point or another either a bird of prey, a lion, or a sword and shield on their logo (the sword and shield one looked like the Mirror Universe for Star Trek, not going to lie).
Officially the entire budget of the DGSE and the DGSI are known. Unofficially, it’s pretty well established that their combined budget is well over a billion euros, and well over the official numbers. The DGSI is well-known for having political “papers”: if you’ve ever been in a student union, like me, you were likely to be in those surveillance papers in one way or another. For plausible deniability purposes, both agencies operate on a need-to-know basis, which means that when they get caught, political responsibilities are minimal, like when DGSE sunk the Rainbow Warrior in the 1980s, in New Zealand, using two French navy mines; or when the PRISM network’s ancestor (known under various codenames throughout its history) was revealed to the public; or when, in 1973, DGSI agents were caught installing microphones in the building of French left-wing paper Le Canard Enchaîné. Today, behind the NSA, the DGSE and DGSI have the second biggest intercepting capability for telecommunications–and this history started in 1888 when the NSA was not even in the thoughts of US politicians and general.
In 2007, during the presidential campaign, Besancenot denounced the generalized used of the TASER in France. Shortly thereafter the magazine L’Express realized Besancenot had been followed by a private detective, working for the French distributor of TASER, and who had collaborated with current or former officers of the French police (and likely secret services). The irritated CEO wanted to know if Besancenot drove a Porsche, but despite pulling the candidate’s financial records and pretty much everything he’d ever had his name on–very illegally of course–the detective did not find a single bad thing on the candidate (that’s rare in France), but the PE also got caught in the process.
Which, I mean, makes it really funny that Macron would complain about the Pegasus software and the Mossad spying on him, or Hollande complaining about the NSA spying on his conversations with Merkel, because, you know, pot, kettle etc.
Shortly after, in 2010, Besancenot stepped down. Officially, he wanted to avoid the kind of personality cult that Mélenchon, Chirac or Mitterrand had developed, but unofficially, it was pretty clear he was burned out by what had happed in 2007-2008 with the TASER France CEO.
Philippe Poutou was chosen to replace him, and we get here to our first actual, bona fide, blue-collar candidate of the election. Poutou is the only one who’s actually never held a white-collar job before 2019. The son of a postman and a housewife, Poutou was born near Paris, although he lives now near Bordeaux. Until he was fired in 2019 because of offshoring, Poutou was working in the FORD factory in Blanquefort, near Bordeaux.
The poster is the guy you get in a meeting. He’s almost always smiling, very approachable, very nice. It’s almost hard to take him seriously because he always looks like he is on in some joke no one knows (and perhaps he is–that we live in an absurd society that sells off everything, and the planet is on fire, but neither here nor there).
Like Nathalie Arthaud, this is a poster in situ of a demonstration (probably the same one actually), but instead of the realism of the picture, we get a reddish background that evokes the revolution. Blog, fire? But in any case, it makes Poutou pop off, so that works out great. The combination of the open shirt and the cap? I have mixed feelings about this one–on the one hand no one should have to be a penguin to be taken seriously in politics, on the other one, the fact that Arthaud gets flack for dressing down and he does not in this analysis. Nothing annoys me more that gender discrimination in representation, particularly in politics.
The black cap is a great touch–for the reasons highlighted in the analysis above, because blue-collar workers=cap, boss=hat, but also it’s a black cap, and black and red are the colors of the NPA, as well as the anarchist movement (and Poutou is also an anarchist, although that is not the label he is running under for the elections).
The open shirt is a common thing lately–Mélenchon had the same in 2012, with a rising black jacket that made it almost look like he was wearing a Mao collar. Not unlike Arthaud’s poster, the demonstration behind him as the dual goal of showing him as a man of the people, but it also works as a way to make the poster more dynamic–he’s walking with us. The color that sets him off from the rest contributes to this impression of just a very dramatic break. The smile works to give hope, and the slogan–their profits are not more important than our lives–is very in line with the whole poster. Not too harsh, not too dark, but rather hopeful and warming. Besancenot wanted a bloodless revolution, and I don’t know if Poutou believes in that, but he’s trying his darnedest.
I’ve been going around in circles trying not to talk about this guy, for whom I have no personal affinity, but we are trying to talk about presentation, not my personal taste. I will let you guess what political color he is.
Yup, it’s hard.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Méluche as some of his base calls him, is a far-left politician. His ideas are not that far off of the Communists, with whom he presented a common platform and candidacy in 2012, but they are somewhat distant this year, for many reasons.
Okay, so now that I’ve talked about how thoroughly unsavory the French right is, and the far-right Le Pen family, I need to add the Socialist party to this, which is great because then I won’t have to repeat this later on for the actual Socialist Party candidate, Anne Hidalgo. To put Mélenchon on a US scale, first, I’ll say he’s probably around Bernie Sanders (complete with the race representation issue, btw). He’s probably a little to the right of the Squad. Like Bernie (although I don’t know if Bernie would define himself formally as such), he is a historical materialist–and that drives his vision of racism in France, which is really really color-blind (Bernie has somewhat the same issue in that he’ll answer “it’s the economy” to every questions on systemic racism, fortunately he’s got the Squad in his corner to rectify the progressive record on this). It also drives his vision of what constitutes capitalism, labor relations, the trajectory of history, and the idea of nationalism. On the latter, I have to underline that the predominant vision of history amongst the historian community in France espoused a form of historical materialism for a very substantial part of the 20th century, for example on the idea of what led to the birth of nationalism and the idea of nation-state, or the history of economic relations in France. It took the influence of the Annals school, and particularly of Fernand Braudel, for the discipline to escape from under the thumb of Marxist views of the world, particularly, to say broadly, the vision that economies and labor forces only drive history.
Unfortunately, a lot of politicians don’t seem to have made that switch, and that limits their ability to read the room, especially in terms of intersectionality. Méluche is one of those people, just to position him on a number of philosophical and historical issues.
To back up a little: Mélenchon started his political career in the Socialist Party. Under François Mitterrand, he became a prominent regional leader, and then was elected on the higher chamber, the Senate (the Senate is not elected by voters directly, but by indirect suffrage through elected officials, so it’s traditionally been more conservative, making his election quite outstanding). JLM grew up in Morocco, when it was still French, and was born there (he is what we call in French a “Pied-noir”, a Blackfoot). He’s got a very traditional left-wing background: one or two school teacher parents, went to college, and became a high school teacher before he rose up through the rank to senator and later undersecretary of education, under the Jospin government in the later part of the 1990s.
In the 1980s, when he rose to a more prominent place in the Socialist Party (PS in French), the party was dominated by larger-than-life leader François Mitterrand.
If Pasqua was the Don Corleone of politics, Mitterrand was the Lucky Luciano (minus getting caught): same flashy tastes and sense of staging. Mitterrand grew up in a catholic, conservative bourgeois family of Jarnac, a small town north of the Gironde Estuary and Bordeaux. Mitterrand grew up comfortably: their house had an electrical system already in 1922, which wasn’t rare in my home region of Alsace, thanks to German ingenuity during the German occupation of 1870-1918, but was exceedingly rare in the rest of France in the 1920s, minus Paris of course. Mitterrand was, and is still, exceedingly popular in some circles of the PS, although his legacy is now murkier.
In short, Mitterrand started off as a nationalist activist, and cozied up to a lot of unsavory criminals before he moved to the left. In the 1930s, young Mitterrand was close to militants of the far-right terrorist group La Cagoule. He regularly participated in xenophobic demonstrations after the 1929 financial crisis reached France in 1932, and wrote in the column of a newspaper he freelanced for how desolate he felt about the internationalization of the Quartier Latin in Paris (employing with great effect the trope of the Babel Tower, something the French revolutionaries of 1789 LOVED, see Abbé Grégoire’s Report on the situation of French in France in 1793).
During WWII, Mitterrand first served as a non-com officer in the Maginot Line, after which he was sent east as a POW. He escaped though, and started his own network of resistance, after first joining a Pétain group, which complicates his war legacy.
The French resistance was partially left-wing (essentially communist), and partially nationalist–although antisemite, xenophobic and rabidly anticommunist, the French nationalist movements could not condone the idea of Germany as a master, especially after WWI, which was still fresh in many memories. Mitterrand joined the fight and used his cover as a volunteer in Pétain’s French Legion of Volunteers (a vet group serving as moral caution to the Nazis and Vichy). During the way, he Mitterrand received a very prestigious award from Pétain’s hands for his service to Vichy. According to left-wing politicians, and resistants he served with, they all knew he was receiving it, and he essentially received it because they were using him as a mole and it was a perfect cover.
This is the murky part of his legacy there: Mitterrand is the guy who participated in the liberation of the Dachau and Kaufering camps, where he found his friend Robert Antelme and saved him from typhus–Antelme went on to write of the most important books of the war in French, L’espèce humane (The Human Species) where he describes his life in the camps. But Mitterrand also vouched for, along the founder of L’Oréal André Bettencourt, for Eugène Schueller, a sinister individual who was part of the leadership of La Cagoule. Mitterrand joined after the war the “Republican Left”, an assemblage of people who were left-wing but anticommunist.
This is where I should underline that in France, the JOC was a particularly active pre and postwar group. JOC is the acronym for Young Christian Workers (Jeunesses ouvrières chrétiennes), a similar movement to the YMCA, but more to the left of the YMCA. Founded in Belgium in 1925 by Fr. Joseph Cardjin, the movement was an assemblage of socialist and generally humanist left-wing activists, who sought to help workers movements across the globe, and who were deeply embedded in Christian communities. Even though in the 1960s the movement took a hard-left turn that increasingly distanced it from the Church and people like Mitterrand, the popularity of the movement explains why, in France, and Europe, part of a generation of children born on or after 1925 frequently joined the JOC and were deeply invested both in a Christian ideal as well as left-wing and humanist policies. The JOC was part of the resistance during WWII, and out of its three cofounders, only Fr. Cardjin survived the war.
Before he turned away from it, Mitterrand was part of numerous associations linked to the JOC and the JEC (Jeunesses Etudiantes Chrétiennes). It was very frequent and very common at the time–and the secularism of the socialist party was not anywhere as entrenched as it is now. The JOC stayed very popular until its hard left turn in the late 60s–my own mom was part of summer camps organized by the JOC, many Jesuist priests were part of the JOC, including the one who oversaw my dad when he was a summer camp counselor. What we see now as an incompatibility between religion and social progress in France was a given in the 1920-1960s period, and even beyond (many JOC leaders called their members to vote for Mitterrand in the 1980 presidential campaign). Mitterrand was not an UFO–his catholic roots and socialist allegiance were not out of the ordinary for the times. Mélenchon, our candidate above, started off in this tradition: he worked as a freelance cartoonist for a Christian newspaper, and he’s been known to give interviews to major Catholic newspapers like La Croix, which other left-wing candidates tend to avoid.
Mitterrand’s career is marked by absolute control over the PS starting in the late 1970s. It’s hard to say the extent to which his unsavory dealings with the Cagoule and his underground dealings helped him, but let’s say the Socialist Party of the 1970s-1990s was not unfamiliar with what we call in French “le bourrage d’urnes”, a term that speaks to the tradition of fake voters in primaries (this past year, a dog and a dead guy voted in the right-wing party’s primary, so that’s not a tradition of the past). The Socialist Party of the pre-war period was a Socialist party deeply steeped into the workers union movements, and it relied on a network of non-profits. There were big figureheads of the Left at the time, like Jean Jaurès or Léon Blum, but the 1936 social net wins were very much a collective, concerted effort. The postwar period, both in the Communist and Socialist Party is driven by men who’ve just spent four years fighting in the resistance, and welcome the type of cultist, strongman figures that Marx is so fond of. In the 1970s, the right and left start to crystallize around two big figureheads who will dominate the 1970s-1990s, Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand. They have a lot in common, although on polar opposite sides of the spectrum: they are both deeply involved in financial dealings that would have them jailed (fictional jobs with paychecks given to friends, blackmarket type of dealings etc), they both have numerous affairs (Mitterrand had at least two illegitimate children and although Chirac does not have any official illegitimate child, there’re long were rumors of a son in Japan, a country whose culture he admired and loved. Also, full disclosure, my great-uncle, René Sieffert, received high awards from Church who admired his work on Japanese literature, but I have no hidden sympathy for Chirac because of this, rest assured).. They also both belonged to the free masons, came from somewhat opposite side of the spectrum and moved to the other side as adults: Chirac from a secular and republican (in the left wing sense of the early 20th century definition) of teachers, Mitterrand from a conservative Catholic family.
As long as Mitterrand was on the stage, no one else could really aspire to be the Boss, so it’s not too suprirrisng that it’s after his retirement from public affairs that Mélenchon started off his own party. In a way, Mitterrand’s dealing with nationalist groups is a good prediction of the fact that the PS moved to the right in the mid-1990s, sustained by a generation of socially more conservative leftists, whose Christian proclivities were not as much of the JOC type. Mélenchon is an old fashioned JOC-type: he stated in an interview that he reads the Bible, and he frequently gives interviews to Catholic papers, but h e might be the only one to have moved to the left of the left in the 1990s. Starting with Lionel Jospin and Ségolène Royal, there is a looming generation of politicians in the 1990s who although they’ll maintain (as Royal did) that faith is a private matter, are certainly not super warm to LGBTQ rights because of their personal beliefs. As a Prime Minister under Chirac, Jospin, ironically, is responsible for the passing of the civil contract in France, one of the major advances of LGBTQ rights in France in the 1990s–but what at the time was presented as a concession to the more conservative sensibilities of some MPs of the PS (to not go for marriage equality) increasingly looked like a personal choice when in the early 2000s, under pressure from their Green allies, the PS established marriage equality in its platform, to the protests of Jospin.
Perhaps it’s easier to understand Mélenchon’s position here too if one remembers his mother was excommunicated from the Church when his parents divorced–as he has said multiple times, he distrusts the Church as an institution, but he doesn’t dislike faith, and seems more religious than Hollande was (Hollande publicly said he did not believe God exists).
Growing up politically under Mitterrand’s influence has made Mélenchon a very egotistical politician–when his HQ was raided by police on suspicion of financial malversation in the 2017 campaign, he slapped a police officer and proceeded to bar access to the door, spouting “L’Etat chest moi.” (people who know French history will recognize the Louis XIV authoritarian quote: the state is me-I am the State).
The flyer here is remarkably similar to the one Nathalie Arthaud’s team produced. A close-up of the candidate, looking above the shoulder of the audience, towards the future, although, weirdly, here, the candidate looks to the right, but that might be more a technical issue of not reversing the picture rather than a deliberate choice. Visually, I find this poster hilarious: the forced smile that is supposed to incite optimism and the idea of the future (which should pair well with the slogan “another world is possible”) instead makes you wonder what he ate to make that sour face. Fish that went bad? Too many prunes?
By contrast, his 2017 poster was much better:
Strength, determination, calm: those are all great qualities to project, not “OMG find me a bathroom now”.
Interestingly, or remarkably, as you want, the red that is normally associated with his party has completely disappeared, perhaps in an effort to appeal with the people who are fleeing from the Socialist Party (polling at a maximum of 3%) and the Greens (polling at 4.5%–under 5%, parties don’t get reimbursed for their campaign. It’s out of pocket, which almost sunk the Republicans after the disastrous 2019 European campaign, after they limped above the 8% mark, while already under a heavy debt burden from the Sarkozy years–all the French major parties have huge debts, including the Le Pen party, which owes millions to a Russian bank, hence the weird line MLP is playing with Putin).
I mean it’s not just that the closer picture and angle is not great with the red tie combination, it’s also the background that’s not contributing, and the smile. The. Smile.
My flyer is slightly different than the campaign poster: it has some verbiage under the picture and by virtue of contrast, the picture looks even more out of whack in terms of exposure than it does here. There are also a couple of campaign promises points below, none of which are particularly defined, but they underscore the priorities of the party, with three particular items in bold blue letters: real gender equality, send France to an alternative ecological path, and become a non-alined anti-globalization nation. I find interesting that the proposal of changing the constitution to the 6th Republic is not in bold here. It’s a left-wing proposal that’s been fairly popular in the left wing of the Socialist Party, mainly because the 5th Republic’s constitution is the brainchild of De Gaulle, but it’s not a proposal that has a significant traction outside of the left.
Also, render unto Caesar and all that: the guy has some guts. On the back of the flyer that came in the mail for us there is another picture. At first I thought that was a better picture than the front one, but no: it’s the cover of his memoirs/political pamphlet, published with Seuil publishing. Under the guise of a flyer the state distributes for free for the parties, Mélenchon sells his book. I’m not sure it’s moral, but it’s apparently legal, dear reader.
The picture sort of takes the cake though: when I got it out of the enveloppe we received for the vote, I laughed out loud. It’s already increasingly hard to take seriously a guy who uses holograms and odor projectors for his meetings, I…
I don’t know what to tell you. Sometimes marketing and consultants are not great (see the McKinsey consulting scandal Macron is currently dealing with).
Also, side note, this picture looks eerily like the one he already used for his 2012 poster, but aged and cut off. It worked way better in 2012–well it worked better if you were going for the revolution and class clash:
Look, he CAN actually smile! or at least look like he is determined and not whatever the first poster above is.
I am not, believe it or not, in these posts about the first round of the election, not trying to alternate between left and right wing candidates, it just so happens that this one caught my eye almost at the same time as the previous one I posted about (Nathalie Arthaud and the Workers Party). I’ll let you guess the political spectrum of this guy, but then we are going to have to talk about him in greater depth.
Nicolas Dupont-Aignant is not per say a right wing candidate, but he is somewhat of an UFO in French politics: a nationalist, sovereignist, anti-EU, anti-NATO candidate who also happens to not be (in appearance at least) a totally horrible human being, and also happens not to be mentioning the word immigration over and over and over again in his program (twice inside the leaflet if I’ve counted correctly, and on his website none of the major proposals deals with immigration per say, outside of a vague “let’s close the Schengen space). We will see in a minute that he’s not without problems, but NDA attempts to navigate the line between left and right with proposals that he draws from both, and he’s so far been very successful at sounding actually like he is a nice guy (he’s…problematic to say the least, but he is not Marine Le Pen, although that is a low bar).
First, let’s get something out of the way: NDA is one of the oldest running candidates in this election. By this I mean that he’s one of only 3 candidates who’s been running in every presidential election since 2012 (this is his third–the other two are Marine Le Pen, and the far-left candidate I’ll talk about next, Jean-Luc Mélenchon).
NDA has cultivated, since the start, two things: one is his positioning as the only true heir to De Gaulle’s legacy. This is a recurring theme in the right, of course: De Gaulle founded the postwar right wing in France, and had to walk the line of getting away from the conservatives who’d been installed in Vichy, while not outright condemning Pétain, whom he respected as a WWI hero. He legitimized his party as a republican right through his own figure, and it got increasingly hard for the right to detach itself from him. Interestingly, while De Gaulle cultivated this image of debonair, fair, honest and strong leader, he knew perfectly well how to maneuver the political scene, and there is more than one murky thing happening under his leadership, behind the scenes–he found his own party in 1947, the Rally of the French People. The RFP was founded in Strasbourg, my hometown, which is a very interesting proposition, because many decades later, in 1971, the Postal Bank of Strasbourg, Avenue de La Marseillaise, will be the stage of a massive bank robbery–some call it the heist of the century–in which a billion Francs (about the same in today’s euros) were whisked away in 5 minutes from the hallways of the Central Postal Bank in Strasbourg. This money was stolen by the so-called Lyonnais Gang, formed around ex-SAC officers. The SAC (Service d’Action Civique) was a militia formed by De Gaulle to protect the interests of his party and his policies.
The Strasbourg billion, it’s now more or less an open state secret at this point, was used as a war chest by the successor to De Gaulle’s UDR (itself the successor of the RPF), the RPR, founded in 1976. At this point, the people who claimed De Gaulle’s heritage were well-known figures of the French conservative parties of the 1990s: Jacques Chirac and Charles Pasqua–Pasqua was, in short, the Don Corleone of French politics. He had his hands in illegal casinos, oil trading, armament, illegal cigarette trading, and according to Newsweek was friends with most of the preeminent mafia figures of Corsica, the South of France, and Lyon. He was perhaps the single-most corrupt politician on the 1970s-1990s, although not the only one, but you’ll find more than one French person who remembers him fondly, despite the Pasqua laws that deprived children of foreign parents born on French soil of the jus solis citizenship rights. A lot of this fondness has to do with his record on security during his stints as Minister of the Interior–he is most remembered for being the guy who ordered the French assault police to nail the terrorists who’d taken a plane hostage in Marseille to the door, likely preventing a 9/11 style kamikaze operation.
This is the party that NDA loved, and while De Gaulle promoted the reconciliation between France and Germany, and the construction of Europe to put an end to the slaughter of young Europeans, the RPR of the 1980s and 1990s wasn’t exactly pro-EU. Under the impulsion of Pasqua, the RPR is best remembered as the party that introduced the campaigning style that prevails today, and which is centered around a TV debate during the 8pm news between the first and second round, between the two top candidates (a format they stole to Kennedy, btw, and which turned against Chirac in 1988, when he famously asked Mitterrand to stop treating him as his Prime Minister, and instead consider the two of them as two candidates on equal standing–to which Mitterrand answered with a pithy: “Yes, Mister Prime Minister.”). Pasqua was vehemently anti-Europe, but as his grasp on the RPR slipped (he was radioactive to Chirac, who’d successfully taken control of the party, risen to president after Mitterrand stepped down, and managed to bury his less than savory past under a giant rug), so did his anti-European proclivities. Chirac then transformed the party into the UMP, to support his late 1990s political ambitions, and Pasqua’s loss of influence became felt in the (apparent) support Chirac gave to the European constitutional treaty (I say apparent because he jettisoned that very nicely by putting it up to a popular referendum and used it as a way to sow discord in the Socialist Party).
The RPR, as I showed above, and then its successor the UMP, was also a party of “financial affairs” that only Mitterrand was able to equal on the left. Very few leaders of the party, including NDA who ran against Alain Juppé to become head of the party before leaving it, would have ignored some of the most unsavory aspects of the above, although it’s probably only Pasqua and Chirac were privy to the links between the SAC, the Strasbourg bank robbery and their party. But NDA did not leave it because of his integrity, no, he left it when it became clear that the right was becoming more neoliberal and pro-globalization.
His second stick is very Pete Buttigieg–he was for a while the mayor of a Paris region town, who has very high electoral approval rates, and is selling himself on the national stage because, you know, he was a good mayor to a town of less than 30, 000 people.
Interestingly, the town he was the mayor of is a very very not at all rural town. Here is the satellite picture of Yerres:
Yerres is part of a string of towns that surround Paris. It’s a fairly indebted town, and while you might say it has some green spaces (with a forest in the South and a hill on the North), it would be a stretch to say it’s the countryside. As the mayor of Yerres, NDA conducted a center right policy: fiscally conservative (debt renegotiation, cancelling of infrastructure updates), somewhat centered on public safety (creation of a forest police unit to prevent drug selling in the forest south of the town, CCTV cameras everywhere), but somewhat socially and environmentally friendly (creation of municipal, rent-controlled housing, use of recycled pool water to clean the streets, use of low-voltage lightbulbs in the streets, special housing for abused women, publicly stocked open pantry for low-income families). Yerres has, and would be defined, as a suburb, clearly not a rural town.
Still, that’s the background NDA chose–and to be fair, while he is the only one who has done it this year, historically, having a rural village behind you is a fairly common place thing. Look, for example, at this poster, which is Hollande’s 2012 presidential campaign effort.
yeah, I don’t get it either: change is now, but your background is the single most traditional image of France you can imagine, with rolling hills and villages. I mean, I think there is a logic behind this, but not sure.
So, granted, France stayed a massively rural country much much much later than most Western European countries, in part thanks to an infrastructure that was designed to service and feed Paris, and nothing else much. But France, like most Western countries today is defiantly not a rural country. 80% of the French live in what’s considered a city, and more than one French out of two lives in a city bigger than 100, 000 people (which is, like, a lot for a country of about 67 millions people). There are rural spaces left, but generally, much like in the US, it’s not what I’d call the dominant feature of French demography. Yet, in almost every single election since 2002, candidates have either had a village, or a cow (or a baby cow) in the back. In a country where the Agricultural Fair in Paris every year is a hit show, that’s somewhat understandable–but it’s also disquieting because it is geared towards an anti-modernity outlook. The France of the villages, the one the two children protagonists visit in the book “Le Tour de France par deux enfants” (Two children’s tour of France, a nationalist book made to teach children how beautiful their country was after the traumatizing defeat of 1870 against Prussia, which features a chapter on the Lost Provinces of Alsace and Lorraine), is a vestige of the nationalist past of France. Ironically, historically, that is the France that Parisian politics of the Republic have tried to harmonize, homogenize, and generally culturally destroy (see the bloody columns of Vendée), so it’s funny to see it as a model of true France.
It’s a similar movement as the one when Sarah Palin talks about “true America”, a trope that’s existed since Mark Twain and the pastoral novel, which took root against the urban novel, except it does not have the Frontier connotation in France. In fact, I don’t think Palin would like this rurality very much, because it calls back to a pre-capitalistic, pre 19th century France, a rurality where mutual assistance was a dominant force, perhaps as much as it calls back to a more homogenous, religiously and racially speaking, France.
That’s what both Hollande and NDA are going for, ironically from opposed standpoints.
Rural France is too often treated with contempt by Parisians, and its inhabitants thought of as second-rate citizens by internet and infrastructure providers. In my mother-in-law’s village the top internet speed is about twice as slow as my hotspot in my rural village of 6,000 people in the US.
There is a layer in this village background of this: the callback to a country where solidarity and your neighbor were the prime concern of local governments–it’s not necessarily a strong callback to pre-capitalism times, as Hollande’s choice probably indicated, but it’s a callback to simpler times with no right or left wing. NDA’s program is a good illustration of this: it calls for a greater popular power, the end of social inequality, and less contempt for the France that’s not Paris.
The additional layer with NDA’s poster, which does not exist in Hollande’s 2012 campaign poster is the very preeminent church in the background. NDA is a Christian conservative, and one of those people who opposes secularism where Christianity is concerned, but loves to tout it when Islam makes an appearance.
And that is the fascinating part of this particular campaign–while NDA is known for saying things like “there is so much anti-white racism in France,” “we should stop the immigration flow,” and very clearly has very variable beliefs in term of secularism, he manages to not be dubbed as a racist. He’s got a reputation for being on the left of MLP, in all likelihood because he is fond of the popular referendum (think White House petition), and because he is very vocal about social inequality.
It’s logical in his case–he dislikes neoliberalism on the principle that it gives an unfair advantage to global International corporations, so the rural village is also a way to be somewhat anti-capitalist, without having a demonstration in the back (he comes from the party of Law and Order after all). But make no mistakes: the France that NDA harks back to is one of cultural homogeneity and whiteness. NDA is anti-immigration, even if the word immigration only appears twice in his 16 proposals for France on the website highlighted above. He’s also a very fervent partisan of the “racism against white people theory”. And, interestingly, he poses here as a defender of provincial France–that should make him logically opposed to the left’s Jacobin and centralist political model, but no. NDA is vehemently against the European Charter to Protect Minority Languages (if you read French, this is what he writes about it). Publicly, he even decried the victim syndrome of pro-regional language groups that, according to him, presented regional languages as an endangered species when they were now taught in public schools.
FYI: that is a gross misunderstanding of what the Jospin 1999 reform of education is about. It introduced the possibility of taking an optional “regional language and culture” exam at the end of high school degree, the baccalaureate, but I have never met anyone who did not have any prior local language education, got to high school, and got taught enough regional language to be fluent while in public school. . And re: the regional languages no longer being threatened–Alsace would like a word with NDA on the subject. In 1997, there were 80% of Alsatians who were speakers of the local dialects in one way or another. It’s now down to 50%, and only about 25% of Alsatians can pass it to their children (about 10% only use it predominantly at home, against close to 30% in 1997). If that is not disappearing, I don’t know what it is.
Finally, the “Choose freedom” slogan: NDA is a huge opponent to public health measure taken during the pandemic. For him, and a number of former Marine Le Pen entourage members, the health measures taken by the French government are a dictatorship that’s fascism (totally the same as concentration camps, obviously). To choose him is not only to choose integrity (ha. As if he never knew what was happening in the RPR in the 1990s!), but also to choose a France that’s not lost its social net of yesteryear–that part where, before communists tried to take over France–society was family, faith, culture, and solidarity-based.
It’s odd to think of NDA as a good guy, but this is what the poster screams.
But it also screams of a very white, very male, very traditional values France, which sure is pre-colonization and fairer, but is also a France that a) does not exist anymore, b) is a disquietingly homogenous society with very little place for difference, including regional difference. NDA is happy to celebrate “local cultures”, but one wonders what these are without languages. This is also one of the reasons the extreme-right wing has done better locally than many conservative parties, big or small like NDA’s: in the 1990s, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s national front was the only one which sent programs translated in local languages for local and national elections. It was also one of the few, if not the only party at the time, to have a cohesive French Caribbean and French oversea territories strategy, which explains the strong foothold it had in predominantly black territories: if you want to get to people like this, it’s not by evoking the spirit of 1789 and a Jacobin understanding of languages not at as a strength but as a destructive force off the Republic, which is the reading mainstream parties have done in France since about 1875 of regional identity (they are old, archaic, dangerous). People at the fringes of the Republic, who’ve been treated by it as something to civilize and put in line, don’t take well to being dictated policies by people who’ve never stepped foot in their territories, in the name of an abstract egalitarian Republic that awfully looks like cultural annihilation to them (see the recent riots in Corsica).
Next up is this poster–not particularly striking at first, but I find the reactions to it interesting from a gender studies perspective.
Okay, so this one is an easy one: the hammer and the sickle on the bottom right corner give it away very easily: it’s a far left party. France has no less than 4 or 5 far left parties/candidates running this year, although one is staunchly refused the far left label, but we will come back to this.
The flyer I got differed a tiny bit from this one–it was clearer that the candidate was amongst an union demonstration, probably the ones that happen every year in France for Labor Day.
As an aside, Labor Day in France is on May 1st, not in September. The date is also a labor movement celebration, but it is not arbitrarily chosen, it originally commemorates the troops shooting at a pacific labor demonstration on May 1st, 1891, in the town of Fourmies, in the North of France. France had legalized the right to striking and unions prior to the movement, in the mid-1880s, which is why the events in Fourmies were so shocking to the country. The military killed 9 workers, mill workers mostly, and the memory of that event sustained the labor movement for the rest of the century and part of the next. May 1st is often cited as a holiday Marshal Pétain (the head of the repressive Vichy government) installed, but that is not actually true–Georges Clémenceau (whom I mention in post 1 to explain the inverted color spectrum in France versus the US) had his Senate vote it in 1919. If you’ve read my first post on the campaign flyers, you know this chamber was conservative, so it might come as a surprise that they legalized the work day of 8 hours, and made May1st a holiday in the same movement. In fact it shouldn’t be–it was to counter the rising influence of the Communist Party, and the French International Workers Federation (the SFIO, which had yet to split between communists and socialists at the time). Clémenceau made the quick calculation that if he made this concession, he could dominate the political field, and he was right.
During WWII, Pétain dubbed the day “Labor and Social Concord Day,” which is actually an apt descriptor of what Clémenceau intended: give away a little to buy social peace. After the war, because oft he misrepresentation that Pétain had invented May 1st, and with the progressive disappearance of the Fourmies events from collective memory, there was a brief moment to change the date because of its tenuous affiliation with Pétain. Fortunately, French historians were prompt to remind armchair historians (which is, as one of my college history professors reminded us every year, every French, because history is a discipline for which laypeople have a a deep-seated interest in France) that May 1st was not a Pétain invention.
May 1st is also the day that Le Pen Sr chose in 1988 for his Joan of Arc celebration–I’ll pass here the details of why the far-right celebrates Joan in France, but that is not a new phenomenon–she was coopted by nationalists when she reappeared in French-lore at the end of the 18th century, but particularly in the 19th century. Every year since then, May 1st is often a day of high alert for Parisian police, and regularly makes the news for the theatrical stage it’s become, with regular fights between far-left and right parties.
The background of my flyer shows very distinctively the banners of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Fight) behind the candidate, and it shows also more clearly than the campaign poster that Nathalie Arthaud is walking and looking towards the left, ahead of the audience’s shoulder. She is wearing a very simple outfit, which our comm consultant (see part 1) calls “a schoolmarm outfit” (she uses professor in the French version, but what she means is a derogatory way of describing an old-fashioned professor, with all that implies in France: a left-wing, provincial person, with limited ideas, either totally against discipline or too much of a disciplinarian, in short someone who cannot do–so they became a teacher).
The consultant from post 1 isn’t the only one to have described Arthaud this way, and her historical predecessor, beloved favorite of political caricature, Arlette Laguiller, made a profession out of dressing like this, and similarly got denied for it.
Not too put too fine a point on it (okay fine, totally putting too fine a point of it), but the gender discrepancy is absolutely astounding: two of the other far-left candidates dress in similarly dressed down ways, or in ways that remind the audience of a school teacher. One also has glasses that are similar and wears also a forced smile like Arthaud does.
Bizarrely, no one has commented on their outfit saying they looked “banal, “schoolmarm-like”, or any of the other pejorative terms that have been attributed to Laguiller, and now Arthaud. If y9ou speak French, it’s worth Googling Les Guignols de l’Info and Arlette Laguiller to see how bad it was.
This poster is nowhere near as bad as many commentators have made it out to be: it shows a humble candidate, without overplaying the blue-collar thing like another far-left candidate does, it shows the power of unions, and it has no pretension of being anything else than what it is. Of all the posters, this might the most pared down and honest, despite its greater composition.
But! I cannot also not apply the same criticism of classist issues that I made in post#1: blue-collar does not have to have to mean dressed down, and I feel conflicted on this one. On the one hand, Arthaud is not pretending to be dressed down, as Philippe Poutou, another far-left candidate is. She is actually quite tastefully dressed, not too flashy, not too modest. On the other hand, it would be refreshing to see a female far-left candidate wear a suit once in a while, just like the male Communist candidates have been doing for a while now, although I understand why Arthaud is refusing this thatcherian model of politics.
In any events, the effect she’s going for is working here, and it’s also interesting that she’s one of the few candidates who hasn’t chosen a solid color background this year.
Election flyers time! Go here for part 1, the Communist Party flyer.
This week, the French are voting for the first round of the presidential elections. It’s coming at a moment no one could have predicted as this tense, with Europe trying to wean off of its energy dependency as Russia is invading Ukraine. This has been one of the foremost issue in the recent weeks, all but eclipsing the rest of the election topics, and the corollary of gas prices has been at the forefront of the campaign (which is, in all honesty, a refreshing change from the usual fare of immigration and public safety).
Here is my readout of the the posters of the election.
This next poster could not be further from my personal political beliefs, but it’s also one that has things to say, if only as a cautionary tale. Let’s see if you can guess the party’s leanings:
So, I should say that this was kind of a trick question: in France the blue is for conservative parties, and the red is for left-wing parties. This color-coding is very old, and dates back to the post-World War I era, when the elected chamber was heavily peppered with veterans. French soldiers wore blue pants and jackets in the trenches, and a deep blue coat for ceremonies (with very visible red pants), so the elected chamber was nicknamed “blue horizon”. The government subsequently nominated (France had at the time a similar constitution to Italy now, so the Chamber’s dominant party or alliance of parties determined who was to be Prime Minister, while the President held a largely representative function and was not elected by direct universal suffrage) was led by Clémenceau, a war hero, and was an assemblage of right-wing party later known as the Nationalist Bloc. Thus blue came to be associated to the French equivalent of the US Republicans today, and the red, for the socialist and communist conferences, were used as left wing colors. In 1920, at the Tours Congress, the French SFIO, which until then had been a single party, split into the Democratic Socialist Party, and the Communist Party, and they adopted respectively pink and red as colors in the later part of the century.
So, considering blue as a conservative color, deep blue is the color of very conservative parties in France, and in this case a nationalist party, the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National). A brief history (okay not so brief) of the FN:
It’s almost 8pm when the Citroën DS of President Charles de Gaulle leaves the Elysées Palace on a warm and dry summer–in fact France is undergoing a major drought, following an exceptionally cold Spring. At 8:10pm, on a roundabout of Le Petit Clamart, a town Southwest of Paris (near Versailles), a man standing near his SIMCA car waves a newspaper. Unbeknownst to the General, his wife Yvonne, their son-in-law Alain (who is also the General’s aide de camp), the chauffeur, and the secret services agents following in the next car, this is the signal a band of terrorists from the OAS was expecting. The Secret Army Organization, a terrorist organization essentially formed by a coalition of organized crime bosses, and army officers, was dead-set against Algerian independence. Despite their work to undermine it, bombing and attacking indiscriminately Algerian groups and French government positions and officials, independence had happened earlier that summer, in 1962. The year before, they’d frustratedly watched the Algiers putsch attempt fail when the military commanders of Oran and Constantinople had stayed loyal to De Gaulle (a French resistance hero, and a revered war commander of the French Free Army during WWII).
As my father tells the story of the putsch, De Gaulle placidly told the anti-independence “I understood you,” and then threw everyone in jail. It’s a tad bit more complicated than this (sorry Dad!): De Gaulle’s government had heard about the putsch through the secret services. The day of the putsch, after a message announcing the military had seized control of Algiers awoke the city at 7am, De Gaulle had a general and several other officers and civilians compromised in the Coup arrested. The next day, in a foreboding move that Juan Carlos will steal in 1981 in Spain, De Gaulle appeared on television at 8pm, in full 1940 uniform and regalia (including his multiple medals he’d already earned before and during the war, as De Gaulle was a very good military strategist). He called onto soldiers and civilians to stop the Coup, stating that the quartet of generals and their officers who had seized power were only the face of a secret army of fanatics who saw the “Nation and the world [only through] their distorted delirium.” He concluded his call with the outcry: “Frenchmen, Frenchwomen! Help me!”
Thanks to transistor radio, his call was heard all over Algeria, and conscripted soldiers, the real unsung heroes of the failed Coup, rose up against their commanding officers. Just like in Vietnam, many already questioned the legality of what France called “a special police operation,” especially in the face of increasingly hostile world coverage. So when their C-I-C asked them to stand down and prevent the fall of the Republic, conscripts heard him live. And answered in kind.
This was the De Gaulle that the OAS was attacking–not the one who would be revealed later to have facilitated the rise of his own private militia, the SAC (Service d’Action Civique-Civic Action Service) through his secret services’ careful management of organized crime in Algeria. De Gaulle had a mythical status, which only grew after the attempt on his life.
The OAS shot over 150 bullets that day, but fortunately for De Gaulle and his entourage, the shooters were either poorly trained or the drivers were very good, and none of the De Gaulle family members died. The front tires of De Gaulle’s DS were blown, but thanks to the world-famous hydraulic suspension Citroën is known for, the car stayed on the road and was able to drive away to the Villacoublay airport, its original destination. De Gaulle and his wife were saved by the quick eye of their son-in-law, an army colonel, who reportedly shouted to his father-in-law “To the ground, Father!”. As a side note–it’s not the first time De Gaulle was under fire: he famously stayed upright and calm as snipers were raining bullets on the Te Deum mass he’d called for in Notre-Dame, at the end of WWII, so his reputation as being fireproof was nothing new, but stories were immediately born about him staying upright in the car, which isn’t true. If he’d stayed upright, he would have been killed–but thanks to the quick-thinking of his son-in-law, he dodged to the ground and was saved. Another legend/potentially true but really impossible to verify was born that day around Yvonne, De Gaulle’s widely invisible wife, normally, (who was way more discreet than Mamie Einseinhower, so this story is quite out of character for her). Reportedly, as they arrived at the airport, Yvonne was only worried about one thing, the chicken. Chicken is the English equivalent of “pig”: it doesn’t just mean the animal, it’s also a slang for cops. “Did they shoot the chicken?”, bellowed Yvonne. No, answered the secret services, we are all well and good–but she was actually speaking about real chicken, the one they’d had delivered frozen from Fouchon, sitting in the trunk of the presidential car. The OAS operation was dubbed “Charlotte Corday,” by the way, from the anti-French Revolution activist who murdered Revolutionary and French Republic Founding Father Marat in his bath (“They couldn’t corrupt me, so they murdered me,” he supposedly wrote/said as he died), so you can probably gather where the democratic system was going after De Gaulle’s assassination, in the OAS’ wildest dreams.
Those officers got caught, but the grumbling opposition, built on former paratroopers (most of whom were guilty of torture and genocide in Algeria, but never saw the front of a La Hague tribunal, because France), continued through political groups like the GUD (Group Union Defense) or the ON (Organisation Nationale/National Organization).
In the late 70s, these people saw with increasing alarm the rise of François Mitterrand and his socialist party (ah, the good old red scare that justifies every fascist attempted coup, including the possible support of the CIA to the Algiers Coup in 1961!). Before the 1973 legislative elections, they started to organized more formally, but it was after Valérie Giscard D’Estaing’s failed reelection that they started on the national scene for good. Not that they were very happy with VGE to start with–but his loss came with the rise of Mitterrand, and that was the scarier part.
Le Pen was a former paratrooper, who was never tried for torture–but there is circumstantial evidence he participated in special operations with the goal of kidnapping Algerian civilians. Over the years, he has widely denied these allegations, benefitting from anecdotical stories such as the fact that he was one of the few officers who, in Algeria, had Muslim enemy fighters buried with Muslim rites (allegedly, Krim Belkacem, one of the leading figures of the FLN, the Algerian freedom fighters group, told him in 1970 that he escaped assassination attempts only thanks to his attention).
What’s certain: JMLP was born into a blue-collar family, and had always had a reputation for trouble. In high-school, he got expelled for fighting and reputedly lost his right eye in a fight. During his years studying for his law JD, he reportedly was so flamboyant and combative that he was asked to step down from his VP position in the Student Council.
The independence of Algeria primed him for the waiting arms of the extreme-right organizations of France, and he became increasingly close, before and after it, to OAS members.
JMLP is obsessed by French history, and he doesn’t like the path the Republic is on, especially the rise of postcolonial immigration. A few examples: in 1963, with a former French volunteer of the Waffen-SS, Léon Gaultier, he opened a music business specialized in editing military music and historical speeches (you can guess which type of speeches he published). In 1972, some members of the Order Nouveau (New Order, a sinister nationalist and antisemite organization close to former pro-Vichy and Waffen-SS veterans), impressed by his publishing work, asks him to become a candidate for the legislative elections in a newly founded party the National Front. Shortly thereafter, JMLP seized control of the group.
Le Pen is a talented public speaker, but the specter of the Vichy Regime is too close still, and his party stagnates below the 5% scores. On November 2nd, 1976, a bomb destroys part of his Parisian apartment. Marine, his youngest daughter from his first marriage, is 8, and she is traumatized.
This is relevant because it’s always been my theory: JMLP doesn’t believe half of the outrageous stuff he spouts. He is a troll. He relishes the attention, and, like Trump, he has very little core political convictions–his political sense is mainly built on several core beliefs: no one says no to JMLP, he is a born-brawler (think Ray Kelly, former commissioner of NYC and former Marine and boxer), JMLP is unpredictable, there is an international conspiracy against the sovereignty of nations, and democracy is bad because it is not willing to get its hands dirty to help him rise and protect everyone, Everyone Is Out To Get Him, Authoritarian Regimes Are Good, Weak People Should Die. The rest is just a natural deduction of this. He is basically a fervent follower of the idea that the strong should govern and the weak should die, but he will also sell mother and father to get to the spotlight. That makes him a great demagogue, but not really a man of convictions.
I also don’t think JMLP ever expected to become president–like Trump he just enjoys the personality cult, and the ability to say uncensored bad crap. Don’t be mistaken–he is a Bad Dude (TM), but his over-the-top personality long stopped being directed at taking power. He just likes to troll.
His daughter, on the other hand, that’s another issue altogether–first-of-all, her world is very different from her dad’s: he lived through the 1976 bombing as an adult, and took it as a badge of honor, as a former veteran who had willingly conscripted to fight decolonization three times would.
She lived this as a helpless child, and Marine Le Pen does not do well with helplessness. (None of the Le Pen do). Her niece Marion Maréchal (her older sister Yann’s daughter) is even worse–she grew up in a widely reviled family, a wealthy one (Le Pen started paying the high fortune tax in France in 1982). She is basically third generation frustration, hatred, and nationalism, and that is never a great combination.
Back to Marine LP. When her dad stepped down (under pressure) from the party, it was mainly because the party was now steadily making scores over 10-15%, and stagnating. Some leaders in the party saw the Le Pen patriarch’s association with former organized crime bosses, and generally neofascist rabble, as disquieting and an obstacle in the rise to power of the party, especially in the context of both a reckoning with Vichy and the reality of the French resistance, which starting in the 1980s was finally depicted as it always should have been–a minority movement–, and the work to unearth Algerian archives the newspaper Le Monde started doing in the early 2000s.
Le Pen Sr had led the party to an unexpected second round in 2002, though unintentional (the left-wing candidate, Lionel Jospin, was uninspiring, fairly socially conservative, and bad at campaigning), but his trolling now kept the Front from power, because the party kept hitting the Republican wall, named not for the US or French conservative parties, but for the general, unspoken consensus that no Le Pen was ever to hold the top power position: any candidate who ended running up against the FN in the second round of whatever elections from top to bottom was the candidate *everyone* should endorse, even if that meant voting against your own conviction.
The widely unspoken agreement was: No Pasaràn. They Won’t Pass–the anti-fascist outcry of the Spanish Civil War in the 1940s.
More prosaically, opposition to the FN also led the French government to switch back to a majority vote (winner-takes-all) after a brief proportional election (each party gets MPs proportionally to its scores) in the early 1980s. Interestingly, Mitterrand is the one who made that change, ahead of what looked like a hot mess of an end-of-term legislative election. He walked it back immediately after it resulted in the election of 35 FN MPs.
This “bold” personality that had led Le Pen to power now was a hindrance, and combined with outrageously bad management in the few towns the FN could win in the 1990s, led the party to oust him, first from power, then to force him into retirement and out of the party in 2015.
His daughter was named as his successor. Marine, also a lawyer, has almost always held a job in politics, with one single-minded focus starting in the early 2000s: clean up the party, sever the ties with organized crime and former OAS officers, kick out antisemites, skinheads…Generally clean house and throw out the guys who screamed FASCISM. The FN was now a respectable party, much like the pretense of the alt-right white supremacist Richard Spencer.
This strategy led the FN to a number of town administrations in the 2000s, which they still hold for the most. It also brought Marine to a third place at the presidential election of 2012, behind Hollande (Socialist Party) and Sarkozy (the right wing incumbent)–but it should be underlined that she only placed third (with the highest historical score for the FN) through a combination of the Republican Wall, and the fact that Sarkozy campaigned so far to his right that he seemed somewhat virtually indistinguishable. Sarkozy had overstayed his moment, shocking the wider voting public with harsh anti-immigration declaration, and leading even my moderately conservative (center-right) dad to vote for the Socialist candidate, Hollande.
In 2017, Le Pen Jr rose to the second round, and that’s when things started to be more complicated: under the weight of the 2008 financial crisis (which Europe was still not recovered from, to some extent, in 2015-2016), and the combined new respectability and general apathy of left-wing voters, Le Pen passed the mythical 15% bar no one in her party had ever passed at a national election.
But then, she fumbled her answer in the televised debate, much like Nixon made a piss-poor performance against JFK, and got confused between two issues. It’s not so much that people voted for Macron, it’s just that her performance was so dramatically bad that the Republican Wall survived one more election, and she lost. There was also a strategic change in the way the Powers That Be dealt with her party: up until her, the conventional wisdom had been that any attempt at judiciarizing the known links of the family with more or less unsavory elements, or any attempts to look into the party finances, or possible organized crimes links, would result into the triumph of JMLP who would emerge as a martyr.
This strategy having shown its limitations, the omerta was lifted in the early 2000s. It led to JMLP being declared ineligible, and 6 judicial affairs emerging during the 2016 campaign. This, combined to her bad public performance, led to MLP losing. Unfortunately, almost despite herself, she also emerged with a 30% score at the second round, which was historically unprecedented and showed the erosion of the Republican Wall–well and also the fact that no one was really that hot for Macron, whatever he thinks. Macron is a technocrat–someone who’d never held an elected public office position before he ran for president, and that’s a species that’s increasingly hated in Europe.
Objectively, newspapers were right to be worried that MLP would be elected on the first round (something that’s never happened in French history but is technically possible if a candidate has more than 50% of the vote). Unfortunately for her, high abstention rates worked against her. I know, it’s not intuitive, but in France the alt-right has a solid youth and blue-collar base. Trump was elected mostly by suburban white people. Until late in the 2010s, these people in France did not traditionally vote for Le Pen if they were salaried employees. Only independent contractors voters voted for her. But now, Le Pen had managed to present the image of a modern woman, taking a leaf from Meg Thatcher’s book, and that strategy worked with the youth in France, combined with an increasing structural unemployment of youth (France has one of the highest youth unemployment rate in the EU).
Unfortunately for her, a campaign that was about as interesting as a dead fish, combined with the warning shot that Trump’s election was, combined to make her score lower than it should have been, and Macron got elected.
For the 2017 campaign, MLP is running into a bunch of unforeseen issues: the Ukraine war has transformed Macron into a war leader–and most Western democracies LOVE their war leaders, especially if it’s for a cause as popular as Ukrainian democracy, and against Russia. Another issue is the possible Russian financing of her 2012 campaign, and her relationship with Putin, which is now a poisoned gift.
And finally, a public figure has emerged at her right–it’s no secret that a bunch of former leaders of the FN (now RN) have been disenchanted with Marine’s “polished image” strategy, and see her moderation as a hindrance to their road to power. Amongst them is her own niece, who has risen to power meteorically, becoming the youngest member of parliament ever when she was elected at 22 in the lower chamber, back in 2012. Thus enters Eric Zemmour, the devil-she-must-deal-with, and who is making her look like an angel by comparison. He polled way ahead of her at first, but he seems to lose steam as the campaign is progressing, and now the second round seems to predictably be slated to be her vs Macron.
In terms of poster: she is doing a hard Thatcher sell here. Macron has been criticized for his relative youth and incompetence–she is showing an opposite side. It’s a sober poster, with a unified dark blue background, by contrast to the dark blue, much more informal poster of the first round in 2012 (which was strangely similar to a Sarkozy one, btw), or, God forbid, the campaign aberration of 2017, which showed her sitting on her desk with a short skirt. I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to choose a second round poster like this, but she quickly discovered what showing a “more vulnerable” or “sexy” side implies for women in politics: this poster, against Macron’s poster of the time, made her out to be too young, strangely younger than, and more incompetent than the guy who was running against her, potentially the youngest president ever, and also someone whose only background was holding a ministry and studying public affairs. This second round should have been much harder for Macron, but this communication mistake combined with her debate fumble made it a slam dunk even for someone as unappealing as Macron.
She’s learned from her mistakes, and she has thatcherized her image considerably here, which is smart (hey, I don’t make the codes, blame my patriarchal home country for it). Even the choice of a discreet gold pendant and a straight face contrasts with the disaster that was her weird tilt on the 2017 second round poster. The white shirt below her dark blue tailor helps bring in a nice contrast, but it also veers attention away from her chest, when her 2017 poster over-sexualized her. It’s a boring poster, and she is selling the respectable female politician hard, and playing the “responsible woman” card super hard, but contrasted to the disaster that is Macron’s poster this year, it finally makes her look like the experienced politician she didn’t look like in 2017.
Never underestimate Marine Le Pen. Many have made this mistake before, even finding her nice in contrast to her dad.
But when fascism knocks again, it’s not going to be wearing Stormtrooper uniforms, as goes the popular meme.
It’ll wear the suit of a formerly-chain-smoking-survivor-female-politician, who’s likely going to survive Eric Zemmour against all odds.
Again, Le Pen is not the imbecile her niece makes her out to be. She might have mastered the art of saying nothing and vacuous political speech, but she is not dumb.
Let’s see if her strategy of respectability bears its fruit–she is also playing her skin here, as her niece’s desertion to Zemmour shows.
This week, the French are voting for the first round of the presidential elections. It’s coming at a moment no one could have predicted as this tense, with Europe trying to wean off of its Russian energy dependency as Russia is invading Ukraine. This has been one of the foremost issue in the recent weeks, all but eclipsing the rest of the election topics, and the corollary of gas prices has been at the forefront of the campaign (which is, in all honesty, a refreshing change from the usual fare of immigration and public safety).
Now, I’m going to give out my age here, but my first election as a voter was in 2002. Twenty years later, the front runners are more or less the same, but with a generational (and talent) gap. Polls are giving Macron, the incumber, and Marine Le Pen ahead, followed closely by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who is actually the only one in this election who is not a somewhat new face from the early 2000s).
Before the war in Ukraine, Macron had already heavily played his hands so that Marine Le Pen would be his opponent in the second round of the election. As a reminder, French presidential elections are in two rounds: the first round determines who amongst the dozen or so candidates goes onto the second round, and the second round is about who is the best of the two. A few additional rules are of interest: to run for the presidency in France you need to be French (duh), at least 18 of age, be a legal voter, never have been found guilty of a crime, and be of “good moral standing” (although that’s not defined). You also need, and this has been the case for a while now, to find at least 500 elected representatives to sponsor your candidacy–this was explicitly implemented with the goal to avoid prank candidacies, but this year it kept left-wing former minister of justice and MP Christiane Taubira from running.
The French electoral system recognizes what it calls “le vote blanc”, white voting, or the action of not selecting either candidates, but it also does not provide a minimum percentage for an election, nor does it count the white vote in any significant way–a candidate could theoretically be elected with only 5% of eligible voters, and, let’s say, 65% of white vote as well as 30% of abstention, although that has never happened for a couple of reasons: one is that voter registration is now automatic in France, IDs are free of charge, and every eligible voter on the list receives a packet with election dates and election candidates. Each packet contains a paper bulletin (with only one name on it, none of the complicated card systems the US has), and flyers from the candidates presenting their programs. For the national elections, those are always, by law, in French, but since the 1990s, some candidates to local elections have chosen to have their program translated in regional languages (particularly in Corsica and Alsace, regions where local dialects are still very vibrant).
These are the basics of the presidential elections.
Now onto what really interests me here: the flyers!
I have just received them (as an eligible voter living in the US, I am voting in Jersey City, as my district–the Northeast and Atlantic Region–is dependent upon the New York Consulate for all things but vital statistics. I am not going to complain though, some people have to drive upwards of 5 or 6 hours to vote).
Here is my readout of them, an exercise I do every year with my students (or on social media), and a little context for each.
I am not a communication specialist, but I have a background in history, and I have taught French for marketing purposes before–I am also a pop culture aficionado and a literature and language professor, so I’d like to think that while I am not an expert, I do have some expertise in related domains. Those are not in any particular order of preference, in terms of politics, they are ranked by how well they’ve attracted my eye, or how good they are compared to previous campaign posters/flyers. I will also state right away that I disagree with most of the things written in this article, where a French public radio gave these poster to a communication consultant, and although her insight is valuable, it’s also short-sighted in a number of ways (I do have a tendency to be very frank, that’s my Alsatian side), not the very least because it’s written from the point of view of someone who is not a historian, and someone who is very Paris-centered in her analysis (her contention that one of the candidates speaks French badly, while the transcript is riddled with grammatical mistakes and her way of speaking is really not that great, grammatically speaking, stems not from an objective description, but from the fact that the poor chap happens to have–o tempora, o mores–an accent. How dare he sound provincial!).
First up, Fabien Roussel. I’ll put the street poster below (the flyer looks exactly the same, and the quality is better than what I could do taking a pic with my phone). I’ll give you a few seconds to guess which political party this person belongs to.
If the small lettering in the bottom right corner did not give it away, this is the Communist Party candidate (PF= Parti communiste Français). A couple of notes and first impressions: at first viewing, this is not at all like the usual fare for the PC, and it doesn’t especially scream “The People” (which our consultant rightfully noted, but she missed the historical reference of the slogan). The PC’s historical color palette has always been, of course, a deep red. The French Communist Party does not use, and has not used, the sickle and the hammer symbol since the 1970s or thereabout, after the revelation of Stalin’s crimes. It has used the terminology PCF, with the French added, ever since that time too, to distance itself from the Soviet crimes. It was an abundant symbol in the 1920s, and the 1930s, but after the war posters essentially revolved on Maurice Thorez, head figure of the party, and an extremely popular one at that, and on symbolic “worker figures”. Soviet art is, and has always been very color-coded and geometrical, so the PCF was in this line, with very bright color and simple lines. Even though the posters switched to photography in the current era of politics, they kept that simplicity and geometry until roughly the late 1980s. The use of photography as a persuasive mean has made them a bit messier, but this poster above goes back to a long and cherished tradition of the party, although it differs starkly in the color-code it uses there, with a fuchsia and purple dominant background.
For reference, here are a couple of posters from different eras (you can toggle between the different eras by moving the vertical cursor):
Note that the modern era, 2019 poster looks awfully like AOC’s campaign poster for her first election.
Another note: the PCF was the king of personality-cult type of poster (see this page for a more extensive comment on this, as well as a couple of references of books on the subject of Soviet-era PCF flyers), so it’s not entirely out of character for them to have a poster centered around a person, although the historical candidate of the 1990s, Robert Hue, chose often to have a crowd around him, but that also corresponded to his jovial and communicative character–Maurice Thorez had crowds below him, as any respectable cult-leader would. No crowd here, but the poster’s full face reminds me of the full face, single-figure posters of the 1930s-1950s, often featuring families. The intent is slightly different, as these would often look above the audience to the future, but it wants to be hopeful. This corresponds to the slogan, La France des Jours Heureux, which any respectable French historian will immediately recognize as similar to the 1936 Left Front (le Front Populaire) sort of vocabulary.
The suit–well the suit doesn’t scream blue-collar worker (and we will see that other popular, left wing parties use that to their advantage), but I disagree that it screams antithetical to a popular (populist?) imagery.
First-of-all, once and for all, can we dispel the notion that all politics can do the “Bernie Sanders at the inauguration look”? Imagine if Michelle O or AOC had shown up in old pants, a North Face winter coat, and homemade mittens at the inauguration in 2016. The press would have gone WILD. Every female politician (except Arlette Laguiller in her later years, but that’s a debate for another time) knows that if they show up in anything less than a suit, they’ll be crucified–if you have a medium handy, ask Meg Thatcher what she thinks of the idea that a woman can be in politics without heavily coded clothing.
Second-of-all, I think it’s presumptuous and classist to assume that someone who is poor is necessarily badly dressed–it’s about as classist as the numerous posts I saw during the Yellow Jacket movement in France that mocked the strikers for having iPhones. There is this thing called credit y’all. I own an iPad Air, an iPhone, and an SUV, all bought with credit cause I don’t have that kind of money. Note that Fabien Roussel is the son of a L’Humanité journalist–the newspaper that was the PC official organ, and is owned in a coop by its reporters. He certainly isn’t dirt poor, and there is something to be said for having an actual blue-collar worker at the head of the PC. But by the same token, he isn’t a business CEO, and I actually find annoying the idea that someone in a good suit cannot possibly be blue-collar. My grandpa, a mason and stoneworker, rocked his suit, y’all.
The gist of it: it’s a modern flyer that also calls back cleverly to previous design codes of the party. Its slogan is retro without being nationalistic retro, although it’s perhaps too cryptic at this point. Not that I would ever vote for this guy, but he manages to make himself look warm, and call back to an era of social prosperity where his party helped chip away at inequality, so that’s always great. Honestly, I pick this one as my top contender for best flyer, not because it is inherently great (it has many flaws, one of which being that it is way too complicated to read for a political poster), but because this year all the others are so dull and lifeless, it’s going to take all of my willpower to go through the flyers and programs, so I give this one props for being actually interesting visually.
The Traveling Scholar | AC Sieffert, PhD 