Beware the ‘risen people’

France is facing arguably its most unpredictable election in decades. The hugely-unpopular Socialist President François Hollande has declined to run for a second term after his approval rating with the electorate slumped to just 4%.

France, it seems, is eager for change. And in the turbulent world that gave us Britain’s exit from the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as US President, anything is possible.

In a speech at the weekend, Marine Le Pen – leader of the Front National – launched her presidential campaign promising to put France first by freeing it from what she described as the “tyrannies” of globalisation, Islamic fundamentalism and the EU.

Madame Le Pen’s brand of populist nationalism tinged with xenophobia is appealing to many French people. Her party currently controls 358 of the country’s 1,758 regional councils.

Shockwaves

Her popularity – and the real possibility that she might become France’s next president – is causing ructions in the political establishment and sending shockwaves through the bourgeois.

France, not unlike Great Britain and the United States, is deeply divided between those who see parties like the Front National as the only hope for regeneration and those who vehemently reject the worldview espoused by people like Madame Le Pen, UKIP’s Nigel Farage and President Trump.

But shouting at their voters and calling them ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’ is unlikely to change their mind.

The disaffection in France which the Front National is tapping in to is real. Novelist Édouard Louis gives a vivid account of his upbringing in the part of France that is left behind in his 2015 book En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule (released in English this week as The End of Eddy).

Poverty

Louis, born in 1992, grew up in Hallencourt, a village in the north of France where many now find themselves living below the poverty line. He describes how the village declined as one-by-one industrial and factory jobs disappeared until there was no opportunity for the working class to…work.

Louis said he wrote the book to “give a voice to these people, to fight for them and with them, because they seem to have disappeared from the public eye”.

He describes growing up with “the language of the excluded classes, which is completely absent from the public arena.

“When you make a language disappear you make the people who speak it disappear. My family would vote for Marine Le Pen, saying, ‘we do it because she’s the only one who talk about us, the little people’. That wasn’t true, but it reveals the sentiment of invisibility that strikes the dispossessed.”

That sentiment of invisibility is something that the political elite needs to urgently address rather than castigating those who are left behind for their political choices. The powers that be should heed Pearse’s warning: “Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people who shall take what ye would not give”.

It’s been reported that Dublin City Council is to spend €30,000 of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It seems an odd use of money given the fact that the local authority is always claiming to be cash-strapped. But, money aside, it’ll be interesting to see how the events that created the Soviet Union will be commemorated. Will, for example, focus be given to the tens of millions of people killed under communist rule? Let’s hope it doesn’t descend into an historical nostalgia exercise lauding the Bolsheviks ‘ideals’.

Exaggeration robs words of power

It’s become popular in some sections of the media to compare President Trump to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini or leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler. It reminds me of ‘Godwin’s law’,  the internet adage which asserts that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1 – that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone else to Hitler.

When overused, comparisons with Nazism and Hitler tend to lose their power and effect. Mr Trump is no Mussolini or Hitler, he’s more akin to the one-time Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi: a dangerous populist with an inflated sense of his own ability.