Beyond the nature of the leader, the changes of programme and the claim to represent the entire people, an essential element of populism is irresponsibility; this leads to the presentation of absurd economic programmes and untenable promises. This could be because membership of the euro and obedience to European trade regulations makes it impossible to come up with a realistic economic and social programme. The standard of living is falling, as we’ve known since the appearance of the Gilets Jaunes.
We have also realised, as a result of the pandemic, that de-industrialisation puts our country at risk. We no longer can produce certain basic goods, including the medicines and medical equipment needed in the event of a health crisis. We already know that the Ukrainian conflict will endanger our energy and food supply chains. We should, therefore, reindustrialise, not simplistically advocate freezing prices (Mélenchon), barring immigrants from social benefits (Le Pen) or pushing back retirement age to 65 (Macron). The constraints of Europe can only give shape to a political representation which can only express useless populist solutions. The French media-political establishment would certainly agree with my characterisation of Mélenchon and Le Pen as populists — but not Macron.
Yet Macron is constantly saying things that make no sense (I recommend, before starting on any of Macron's speeches, a quick re-read of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). Take reindustrialisation. During his campaign, Macron only treated it as a secondary theme. But he was also expressing vigorous, almost hysterical pro-EU beliefs. Yet the conditions for reindustrialisation do require protectionism, the competence to create money, and State investment by the state (in conjunction with private sector efforts), all of which the EU forbids. Projects that bear no relation to any concrete reality, agitatedly pushed by a leader subjected to no control: this is populism. Macronisme is the populism of the rich and the pensioners.
In the interests of balance, we should also address the irresponsibility of the other two leaders.
Look at Marine Le Pen, on the same reindustrialisation theme. As she talks about the nation and protectionism, she seems to have a better grasp of economic reality than Macron. But as soon as she mentions banning the Islamic headscarf, she creates a separate category of French citizens who are not really French, but who are immigrants and a burden. This disqualifies her economic reconstruction platform, which is revealed as fundamentally unserious. Refocusing the country towards a renewed industrial era is impossible without uniting the French people, including hard-working Muslims. Immigrants are similarly a part of the labour force who require protection. The economic project of the National Rally is revealed as a mere collection of words: phrases certainly, but not proposals as logical positivism might understand them.
In the case of Mélenchoniste populism, the reality is even simpler. Mélenchon rejects nuclear power. His project would be a fast road to underdevelopment, affecting all economic sectors. If his voters understand reality, Mélenchon’s ideology, sovereigntist one day, Green the next, doesn’t. His far-Left doctrine could best be called narcissism-Leninism, given the personality of the leader. But I am being unfair: Mélenchon’s refusal to demonise Islam as well as immigrants, in an Islamophobic cultural atmosphere, is admirable.
Marx rather than Mohammed
Traits of the current French situation do evoke classic populism — but with a difference. And this is related to the three different populisms currently in competition. Classical populism is born from a fluid, unstable electorate in an atomised society. Atomisation is now a fact in a French society once powerfully structured by regional opposition: there is the large secular Parisian area between Laon and Bordeaux, plus the Mediterranean coastline, and strongly Catholic regions with solid religious practice (the periphery).
But the French Church no longer exists sociologically. Its fall has been mirrored by that of competing secularisms, the last and most important of which was the Communist Party. Abstentionism, especially among young people, should it continue to rise, could lead to true populism. Instead, we see the emergence of three stable forces in a France that is evolving homogeneously albeit while regressing. The standard of living is falling for all social and age categories, a fall very obvious in the mapping of age, income and education in France. The country’s education levels are falling, but as much for the children of managers as as for the children of workers — a democratic decline, so to speak.
What is emerging is a poorer, well-structured France; it is not divided, like the United States, by any culture wars. Class contempt, which is real, does not have the intensity in France that it does in England: we have no equivalent to the expression "chavs". Moreover, the success of Rassemblement in regularly reaching the second round of presidential elections, with a working-class base (classified as extreme right), suggests that the working classes are by no means broken in France.
The problem facing France is that this emerging ternary political structure — a conservative party (Macron); a popular party (Le Pen), a petty-bourgeois party (Mélenchon) — is blocked by the institutions and the electoral system from having a fair parliamentary representation. In a German-style proportional system, the existence of these three forces would lead to an Assembly in which all of them would be represented and where MPs would negotiate issue by issue. This would lead to different majorities on issues of reindustrialisation (i.e. on the exit from European constraints), on religious issues, on pensions and on public services and so forth. The system would work by negotiation. But the majority vote eliminates one of the three components necessary for the balance, instead producing a political scenario that doesn't relate the actual social situation in France.
Yet let's not romanticise the virtues of cultural balance. The fracture between Mélenchon's and Marine Le Pen's electorate reflects an ethical division on issues of immigration and Islam, and the like. It would seem that the two groups are today not so much in agreement with each other as with the situation in France. It’s their leaders who really are the true prisoners of Parisian obsessions. They are lagging behind the country’s real fears, which are economic rather than ethnocultural, rather than Islamophobia or anti-Islamophobia.
That Eric Zemmour, with his older voters, achieved a comparatively small score, is a sure sign of this. Marine Le Pen’s relative success arises from a campaign centred on cost of living rather than immigration. If she fails in the runoff, it could be because she reintroduced the Islamic headscarf theme in her campaign between the two rounds. The current French system dynamic downplays religious or ethnic criteria, replaced these by sharply rising economic worries. What we’re seeing is the return to Marx rather than Mohammed. The remarkable efforts of the central elites to keep religious themes alive would not seem to be the central problem. The rise of a gerontocratic power, on the other hand, seems to very worrisome.
The gerontocratic question
Second round voting intentions suggest two categories are poised to vote overwhelmingly for Macron: young people under 25, and more importantly, in terms of proportion and mass, pensioners, 70% of whom plan to vote for Macron. A narrowly-elected second-term President Macron would owe his victory to the retired, since Marine Le Pen would in this hypothesis enjoy a majority among those who actually work. One might say that he would not, in political philosophy terms, be legitimate since he had been elected by the old.
This, effectively, is the definition of a gerontocratic political system. It is quite significant that the current central issue of Macron's campaign is retirement. His flagship first -ound measure, which he frantically tried to forget in the last two weeks, was to delay retirement until 65. This project seemed to please pensioners who seem to think, according to polling, that it is quite normal to make younger people work longer than them.
Classical political philosophy, from Hobbes to Locke, Montesquieu to Rousseau, based its assumptions on political actors with a median age of 25 to 30. When universal suffrage was finally established, first for men, then for women, it also corresponded to a median voter age of about 30. Today we are faced, as a result of accelerated ageing, with voters above a 50 in median age.
Many political decisions (or indecisions) taken over the last decades could be the result of this growing gerontocracy. Advanced, extreme free trade has resulted in the crushing of young people’s income and employment opportunities in our "Western democracies", even those with a higher education. The Heckscher-Ohlin theorem demonstrates that the most scarce local group finds itself most disadvantaged in international exchanges: these are the young people in rich countries. The old men in power and the politicians who represent them don’t care.
As far back as 2011, Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason sought to model intergenerational money transfers. In rich countries as a whole, average consumption age was still lower than average production age, but not by much, indicating that the old were not yet pumping out an exaggerated share of production. In countries such as Germany and Japan, however, the tipping point was near. Nine years later, the Covid epidemic saw the confinement of youth and working people to save the elderly, who were the only ones truly threatened en masse by the epidemic. The Great Lockdown was perhaps the most spectacular manifestation of the new gerontocratic power. An update of Lee and Mason's calculations is urgently needed. It is perhaps here that the French election takes on its most universal meaning.
We must consider the distinct possibility that France will elect Sunday a president who is against the will of the French of working age. This gerontocratic problem is far more dangerous for democracy than all the worries expressed about populism, the far right, Islam or terrorism.
The unpalatable truth emerging from the growing weight of pensioners in the overall electorate is that, for the first time since 1789, there is a valid argument against universal suffrage and representative democracy. It is not normal that the inactive should decide for the active, who produce goods and children. No society can long survive massive transfers of resources to the old at the expense of the new generations. If we want to save representative democracy, we will have to find an electoral formula that allows the active population to remain in power, or even better, to return to it.
Additional data journalism by Sophie Muscat. Translated from French by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.
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