Sensible Right on course to win in Europe and US, even if UK is out of step

By Conrad Black

The European elections, the first round of the French elections to the National Assembly, and the latest developments in the US presidential election are all movement in the same direction, at more or less the same pace. The British election is an outlier which can easily be distinguished.

The French voting essentially replicated France’s vote in the European elections and contains no surprises. Altogether too much is being made of the theory that there is a move to the far Right. Marine Le Pen has not said anything that qualifies as an extremist statement for years.

For those who seek moderation, particularly in so fluid and politically sophisticated a country as France, far more worrisome than the Ralliement National vote of approximately one-third of the total is that the leftist alliance came in at 28 per cent.

The largest contingent in that bloc is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, which apart from its apparent belief in free elections and freedom of expression, is an outright Marxist party. It advocates a 100 per cent tax on incomes above €360,000, and a massive government-executed redistribution of wealth on an un-meritocratic basis.

Apart from that, it also advocates withdrawal from NATO and scrapping the Fifth Republic in exchange for a Sixth Republic that would entrench a slightly palliated version of the dictatorship of the working class.

Obviously, the French would not approve such an insane enterprise, and Mélenchon’s communist, socialist, and Green allies probably would not approve it either, but at this stage in its history, France cannot easily afford the absurd distraction of having to consider it.

Mélenchon claims to be inspired by Jean Jaurès , the sensible and pacifistic leader of France’s socialists who was assassinated at the outbreak of World War I. In practice, he much more closely resembles the longest-serving French Communist Party leader, Maurice Thorez, who Stalin told Charles de Gaulle in 1944 was “a better patriot than he is a communist — if I were you I would not put him in prison, at least not right away.”

The fact that the bloc supporting President Emmanuel Macron, which received approximately 21 per cent of the votes, is apparently trying to make arrangements for the second round with the Left rather than the RN is disturbing.

Mme. Le Pen seems to be following the same political roadmap as François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, who both lost twice running for president before winning on the third try. The fifth Republic, which General de Gaulle devised, effectively ended the centuries-old dispute between monarchists and republicans by creating a monarchy and calling it a republic with a renewable seven-year presidential term.

It has been the most successful form of government in all of the thousand-year history of France as a distinct jurisdiction. Much may depend on where the Republican vote of approximately ten percent will go but an outright NR majority in the National Assembly would be preferable to a pantomime horse composed of the present supporters in the far Left clinging to the Matignon by their fingernails.

If Le Pen’s prodigy, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, is elected prime minister, it would enable the Ralliement National  to cut its teeth in government at the same time that it expends its honeymoon as a new party in office, ensuring that the presidential election of 2027, in which Macron cannot run for a third term, will be between less exotic and more well-known political alternatives.

Much more dramatic than these events in Europe has been the sudden collapse of the diaphanous facade of the Biden re-election effort in the United States. The so-called debate between the likely candidates was not only a startling exposé of the cognitive deterioration of the incumbent, who never in his career of more than fifty years in federal office was considered more than a very pedestrian journeyman and no Lincolnian debater, abruptly and excruciatingly revealed by the light of the television studio in Atlanta, the ghastly infirmity of this inept and substantially failed administration.

It is hard to escape the suspicion that the powers that be in the Democratic Party, led by former presidents Obama and Clinton and the congressional leaders and principal state governors, did not push the president into this debate in order to force him to relinquish the nomination. Whether they did or Biden blundered into the trap spontaneously, he is finished as a candidate and it will be a considerable but not insurmountable challenge to put someone more serviceable than the vapid Vice President Kamala Harris in his place.

Whoever it is who emerges as the Democratic presidential candidate at their convention in Chicago in August, with barely two months before the election on November 5, will have to answer for the failings of this Democratic administration.

Prior to Covid, Trump had a full-employment, low-tax, minimal-inflation economy, had ended oil imports and almost ended illegal immigration, had avoided any significant setbacks internationally, had managed the environment well without imposing a green terror and had a much lower rate of urban crime then prevails in America today.

The Trump who made it easy to be disliked and was turned into a hate-figure by the leftist national political media whom 85 percent of Americans rightly mistrust, has been replaced by a gallant underdog Trump fighting successfully, thanks to the Supreme Court this week, against a shameful and unconstitutional perversion of the Justice Department into a dirty tricks operation conducted for the benefit of the regime.

Even Europeans who have gulped down the anti-Trump Kool-Aid will be relieved when they see an updated version of him in office.

The only important jurisdiction now pedalling in an opposite direction to Europe, France, and America (including Canada which will almost certainly elect Conservatives next year), is the United Kingdom, and that is for an extraordinary reason.

For the first time in the 300-year history of the office of prime minister, five successive occupants of that office in seven years (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak), have conspicuously failed, requiring that their Conservative party be given a good thrashing at the polls.

The Labour Party, which will replace it with a huge majority, will be completely incompetent as well as ideologically misguided and will restore the tradition that only Tony Blair has violated, that no British Labour Party leader wins two consecutive full terms.

The British dalliance with the Tories, unlike the previous extended incumbencies of Churchill and Macmillan and Thatcher, has been such a disaster that the governing party has to be destroyed and rebuilt. Four years from now, that task will have been accomplished, the British will have had more than they can stand of Labour’s amateurish posturing. Britain will get in step with the post-Macron French, the Trump-revival Americans, Signora Meloni in Italy, the CDU-led Right in Germany, and Pierre Poilievre and the Canadian Conservatives.

It is all unfolding sensibly, though on many days some persistence is required to detect that.

 

First published in the Brussels Signal