The Dutch Elections

Now that the German Constitutional Court has approved the ESM, the next hurdle for the EU is the Dutch election, held today. Here is a good summary of the debates (the article is worth reading in full):

Debates should be great opportunities for populists. Although normally boring, the populist may spark some fire in a debate by making bold and harsh attacks on the mainstream. A debate gives an opportunity to stick out and to juxtaposition the elite interests of traditional politics with the ones of the man on the street. Furthermore, populists get unedited access to a fairly sizable portion of the common people they want to represent. With little journalistic intervention, what is being said gets straight to the audience. This begs the question of how the two populists on the far right and the not-so-far-anymore left anymore of Dutch politics have actually been performing over the past weeks. Did the debates help their campaigns?
The simple answer is no. So what happened, and why did Geert Wilders from the Freedom Party (PVV) and Emile Roemer from the Socialist Party (SP) apparently fail to seize the opportunities provided by a sheer debate marathon?
Wilders, like him or not, he is a great debater. With largely prepared one-liners and bold attacks on multiculturalism and Europe, Wilders is always good for laughter and for spectacular debate moments. No different this time, Wilders certainly had his moments. For instance referring to the Labour Party – the Partij van de Arbeid – as the Partij van de Arabieren, the Party for the Arabs, or in a debate about health insurance costs saying rising costs should be paid for by the Greeks, not by the sick people – de rekening bij de Grieken, niet bij de zieken. But there were also moments when this strategy appeared to be working less well. A moment in the RTL debate for instance, when, although the topic was a different one, Wilders slipped in this year’s mantra, a strong anti-EU message. People started laughing, not about his statement but about the ridiculous boldness with which Wilders repeats this message in the most unsuitable situations. They were not laughing with him, they were laughing at him. The campaign did not help Wilders in the polls, but did not damage him either, showing a stable 12 percent of the electorate supporting him. It seems as if people are getting tired of his style, his rhetoric, so more than the core of his voters would not be mobilized (which is not to say that he was irrelevant – the PVV and Wilders were just not the big players in the campaign).
Former primary school teacher Roemer in terms of appearance and expression is much closer to ordinary man than Wilders. The campaign showed dramatic consequences for the SP. In the debates, in particular the first debates, Roemer had to face a strategic problem. The positioning as the populist left opposition had boosted the SP into hitherto unknown heights in opinion polls. For some weeks during the summer it looked as if the SP would become the biggest party, with Roemer having a good chance of becoming Prime Minister. So he had to look “prime ministerial”. By going in that direction, Roemer lost authenticity in the first debates and dramatically lost support in the polls after the first debates. The SP electorate wants a populist, and if they don’t get the populist they can just as well go with the more serious alternative on the left. And with PvdA candidate Diederik Samsom there was an alternative that became more and more viable, closing a 10-percentage point gap between the Labour Party and the Liberal front-runner VVD within a matter of two weeks.
If one were to advise the PVV and the SP on the strategy for the next campaign, on basis of what we saw over the past weeks, one should probably tell Roemer to go back to who he was when he was successful, a left-wing populist, and tell Wilders to go out and re-invent himself if he wants to continue playing a significant role in Dutch politics. But let’s see whether the polls are in fact reflected in the outcome tonight.

A Dictionary of Political Insults

This might help while away the time during a long political speech:

Et tu Twitter?

Will Twitter make le tutoiement universal. This is the momentous issue of the day considered here:

Antonio Casilli, le chercheur cité par la BBC, explique comment l'emploi du "vous" sur Twitter peut aujourd'hui passer pour aussi déplacé que celui du "tu" dans des circonstances inappropriées. "Vouvoyer quelqu'un - ou s'attendre à ce qu'il vous vouvoie - implique une hiérarchie. Il s'agit donc d'une brèche de taille dans le code de communication [des réseaux sociaux], une tentative de réaffirmer des rôles sociaux asymétriques, une distance qui compromet la cohésion sociale".

To which I say a hearty "Who cares?"

Bilger on Cohn-Bendit

A surprising, lyrical homage by a rightist, Philippe Bilger, to a leftist, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. If only political dialog were always like this.

On Learning a Foreign Language

My thoughts in The New Yorker along with those of David Bellos and Lydia Davis.

Noiriel Analyzes the FN Vote

Historian Gérard Noiriel analyzes the FN vote. Key point:

A partir des années 1980, la bureaucratisation de la société et la crise de la grande industrie ont liquidé les mouvements de masse entraînant une perte d’autonomie du politique au profit des médias. La « démocratie de partis » a laissé la place à la « démocratie d’opinion ». Le retour de l’extrême droite sur le devant de la scène est à mes yeux une conséquence directe de ces mutations. Le triomphe de la politique-spectacle a créé en effet des opportunités dont s’est saisi Jean-Marie Le Pen, en développant la stratégie des « petites phrases » conçues comme des « bombes médiatiques » qui prennent leur place dans l’actualité au côté des crimes, des catastrophes, des procès etc.

Les journalistes, pris dans les rouages de cette machine médiatique, sont contraints d’accorder de l’importance à ces poseurs de « bombes », contribuant ainsi à l’héroïsation des leaders d’extrême droite. Puisque ces derniers sont devenus des personnages centraux du récit médiatico-politique, les électeurs se sentent autorisés à voter pour le Front National. La réputation sulfureuse de ce parti séduit tout particulièrement ceux qui n’ont plus rien à perdre et qui cherchent à exprimer de la façon la plus radicale possible leur refus d’une société qui ne leur fait pas de place.

This argument strikes me as superficially appealing but empirically unfounded. Is it really true that that the FN "particularly attracts those who have nothing more to lose?" There is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the answer is no. The FN has found support in many segments of society, including retirees and small businessmen who definitely have something to lose. Its working-class support has been increasing, and some of that may come from the unemployed, but some of it also comes from the employed, who have their jobs to lose and fear losing them to immigrants willing to work for lower wages.

What Noiriel wants to call attention to, I think, is the fact that most of the public discussion of FN voters is conducted by "the political-media complex," a fancy term for people like himself and me, who speak of FN supporters as the Other and have no direct contact with the milieux in which a vote for the FN is a live option. We impute attitudes and emotions we do not really fathom: hence the "suffering" narrative, which Noiriel rejects as confabulation. That may be true, but in what respect is "the nothing more to lose" narrative an improvement? Isn't it just another name for the same thing?

Where I think Noiriel is right is in his perception of the way in which Lepenist barbs and provocations, echoed by the media, are used to construct an anti-systemic image. For voters whose judgment is that "the system" has failed them, the response is to seek the candidate whose provocations seem most disruptive of what they see as the routinized and ritualized exchanges that constitute the mainstream discourse. In the ensuing surenchère of acerbic attitude, anti-system candidates compete with each other in a closed rhetorical universe that hives itself off as a separate realm of what Noiriel calls the "democracy of opinion," in which one opinion is deemed as good as another simply because it is voiced and without need for the kind of justification once provided by ideology in the "democracy of parties." Hence the intense media interest in the Le Pen-Mélenchon face-off in Hénin-Beaumont. Nothing of consequence will be decided here, but the battle of provocateurs will surely défrayer la chronique.

Ayrault's First Major Problem

Via Arun Kapil on FB and Bloomberg News:

When spoken, his family name is colloquial Arabic in many countries for the third-person singular possessive form of the male sex organ.

Resistance Again

See my previous post on the prégnance of the resistance theme in French political culture. After Mélenchon, Sarkozy:

Au terme d'une semaine qui a vu sa dynamique de campagne s'affaisser, devant une marée de drapeaux bleu, blanc, rouge, le challenger Sarkozy, qui jouait là une de ses dernières cartes avant le premier tour, en a donc appelé, dans de grandes envolées, à la "résistance" du peuple français. Multipliant les références historiques, le président-candidat a appelé les quelques dizaines de milliers de personnes présentes (100 000 selon Jean-François Copé, 50 000 officieusement), à "renouveler l'exploit qu'ont accompli les hommes de l'après-guerre".