Universidad Estatal a Distancia, Costa Rica

Boletines-Artículos

In the second round of presidential elections, a lot is at stake today in France. For some time now, this country has been arriving at the polls in cockroach wings. Mixed feelings combine. The need for change risks spurring disruptive directions. This is frightening. But it is a country with structural problems that seek, so far without remedy, solutions at the ballot box. Hence the discouragement in the face of elections, with the daily anguish of an increasingly hard life. The vote gathers the same citizen's anger that leads to constant street protests.

As contradictory as it may seem, this is the good news. The established French democracy still requires answers based on democratic legitimacy. So as far as the good news goes. The frustration accumulated in years of industrial dismantling pushes in crescendo towards the right its working class, submerged in massive unemployment in territories abandoned to their fate. The popularity enjoyed by the emblematic French left is bankrupt.

In the first round, Anne Hidalgo, Socialist mayor of Paris, represented the traditional party of Mitterrand and was left with a miserable 1.7% of votes, without even the right to a State subsidy. The traditional right did not fare any better. Valérie Pécresse of the Republicans, the party that grouped the center-right coalitions of De Gaulle's 5th Republic, also collapsed. She also failed to achieve the 5% required to redeem political debt.

In 2017 and already dropping, Socialists and Republicans were excluded from second round, for the first time in history, but, at least, they achieved 26% of votes. This time they do not add up to 7%. The collapse of traditional politics is complete, at the presidential level. There is a total recomposition of the Gallic political spectrum, divided, among emotions and prejudices, by frustration, anger and fear.

Disturbingly, political preferences continue on an increasing course towards left and right extremes. In 2017, the extremes scored less than 50%. In 2022, they reached 58%. Citizen discontent is reflected in spontaneous movements such as the Yellow Vests. And even to the ballot boxes comes this systematic anti-system force, from the extreme left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's "La France Insoumise" to the extreme right of the provocative Eric Zemmour of the Reconquista party and Marine Le Pen of the National Rally.

Representing two France, this Sunday Macron and Le Pen will dispute the seat of the Elysée. French dualism is a constant theme in the lackluster contemporary democratic song. Political myopia was universal. There is no place in the West where globalization has not left painful wakes of straggling losers. The weakened state let abandonment grow to the rhythm of the unknown force of market spillovers. Thus came Brexit, Trump and the perennial populist threat in Europe. For some time now the reader has been familiar with these letters.

France, like so many developed countries, lives splintered realities. Two incredibly opposite worlds separate the cosmopolitan urban landscape from the pre-industrial and rural countryside. In large cities, the standard of living has improved, even pandemic. Peripheral France, on the other hand, has 10% more poverty on average, more unemployment and has reached a point of such distress that special programs sell products that are about to expire for those who have less than 300 euros available per month for food.

These horizons are not so far apart. The center of booming Paris is surrounded by a miserable peripheral circle. In the depressed banlieue of Trappes, 25 km south of the Eiffel Tower, Mélenchon swept 61%. In the abandoned steel factories of the North, Le Pen reached 48%. And that duality is replicated in town after town.

This time, however, the social discontent and the permanent controversy over an institutionalism burdened by privileges, incompetence and corruption contrasts with Macron's renovating management. His mandate addressed massive labor trainings, initiated costly reindustrialization investments in Deep France, reformed the educational system and streamlined social programs. He thus achieved the political consolidation of a broad middle-class centrist community that nurtures a party 5 years ago non-existent: La República en Marcha. The pandemic stopped it in its tracks. Macron's primarily economic and business accent had to land. The neo-liberal president did not hesitate and reoriented himself, socializing without labels, towards purely welfare. And he did it with panache. This dried up the flows of the traditional left and right.

Fueled by bad policies of reception and assimilation of migrants, the extreme right is still anchored in xenophobic prejudices that are still dragging on. But its drive does not capture the majority of the electorate. Hence Marine Le Pen had to adapt her inflammatory xenophobic and anti-European rhetoric to day-to-day needs in order to present herself as a moderate, nationalist and at the same time socially popular option. She is the champion of the forgotten France of the territories. The results of this effort have her in the second round.

Compared to 2017, both Macron and Le Pen improved their electoral result in the first round. But those who did not vote for them were more. In this second round, Macron discovered that his flow was dangerously close to that of Le Pen. He had to desist from his confident idleness. In the first round he successfully played the statesman card on the Ukraine crisis and did not even accept debates. The imminent danger of Le Pen forced him to a campaign that, more than new proposals, emphasizes the danger for Europe and, perhaps, the world, of a French president who weakens NATO, undermines the European Union and stimulates threatening populisms beyond France.

April 20 was the great Macron-Le Pen debate. In 2017, Macron had crushed her. That humiliation is reputed to be responsible for Macron's huge margin of victory, 66% to 34%. This time, Le Pen came better prepared. Perhaps Macron overestimated her rhetorical strength. Neither overwhelmed. But that plays against Macron, because Le Pen held her own on mined ground and, compared to 2017, for the voter it was an unexpected surprise. It will not change the numbers, but anything is possible.

Mélenchon was only 1.2% behind Le Pen. His 7.7 million voters will decide the contest. He asked his supporters not to give a single vote to Le Pen. But the left demands concrete social intentions from Macron. Macron's narrative is not to make, however, last-minute compromises. His axis is to counterpose to the anger against the system the fear of an imminent danger. From 4 points of difference, in the first round, he went to 11 points of advantage. But it is all very volatile. After the debate, it decreased to 6%. Macron's victory seems a fait accompli, were it not for the fact that in politics nothing is written in stone.

Versión en inglés

POR VELIA GOVAERE VICARIOLI

En la segunda ronda de elecciones presidenciales, mucho se juega hoy en Francia. Hace tiempo ese país llega a las urnas en alitas de cucaracha. Sentimientos encontrados se combinan. La necesidad de cambio arriesga espolear rumbos disruptivos. Eso asusta. Pero es un país con problemas estructurales que buscan, hasta ahora sin remedio, soluciones en las urnas. De ahí el desaliento frente a las elecciones, con angustias cotidianas de una vida cada vez más dura. El voto recoge el mismo encono ciudadano que lleva a constantes protestas callejeras.

Con todo lo contradictorio que parece, esa es la buena noticia. La asentada democracia gala obliga aún a respuestas fundadas en legitimidad democrática. Hasta ahí llegan las buenas nuevas. La frustración acumulada en años de desmantelamiento industrial empuja in crescendo hacia la derecha a su clase obrera, sumida en desempleo masivo de territorios abandonados a su suerte. La popularidad que gozaba la emblemática izquierda francesa está en bancarrota.

Accese el artículo completo en: https://www.nacion.com/opinion/columnistas/francia-entre-frustracion-ira-y-miedo/GP7ZQWLNDFFOXJRIKKSBDFOEOQ/story/

Artículo publicado en Periódico La Nación, 23 de abril 2022.
La autora es coordinadora de OCEX y catedrática de la UNED

Free translation

By VELIA GOVAERE - Professor UNED

"While enjoying his morning tea, a Londoner could order any product of the earth by telephone and wait for it at his doorstep. Right there he could risk his fortune by investing in the natural resources and businesses of any country. And, if he wanted to, he could secure transport to any part of the world. The slightest obstacle would have offended and surprised him. That state of affairs was the most undisturbed thing in the world, for him".

These sound like the words of today. They are not. It was indeed John Maynard Keynes when he described life in London in 1913. The world was then enjoying its first "globalization". In 1910, Norman Angell, Nobel Peace Prize winner, had written that a world war would be impossible because economies had become too interconnected. Shortly afterwards, the Great War broke out and that stability, so seemingly empowered at that time in history, was shattered. Assumed immutable, the freedoms to travel, invest and trade were swept away in the trenches.

Only 50 years later came our present globalization, after two World Wars that economic logic was powerless to prevent. If anything was learned from that fanciful sense of security, it was that trade and financial interrelationships do not prevent wars. Only politics can achieve that. National retreats and so-called defensive blocs are instead breeding confrontation.

The war in Ukraine has not yet fully defined the contours of its scope. No shortage of analysts see it as the first act of a Third World War. Without going as far as such ominous predictions, it would not be far-fetched to say that today we share the same blindness held up by Keynes's Londoner.

Not even 15 of the first weeks after the Russian invasion, the world has not yet been able to grasp the dimensions of this war. The real protagonists, belligerents and co-belligerents, are in the process of shaping an international military bloc. The objectives of each camp are expanding day by day. We are facing a long-term military escalation, a war of attrition that, in addition to destroying Ukraine, will transform the geopolitical framework of the world economy.

The Ukrainian defense war is becoming, under US leadership, a very expedient crusade against Russia. Increasingly, its purpose is becoming akin to an effort to redraw the geopolitical map of the world, thanks to the might of its military industry and its hegemony over Europe, now compounded by an arms race. The Biden administration spends more on military support for the Ukrainian government than it spends on climate change. This speaks volumes about its priorities and says a lot about the opportunity that the Ukrainian war provides the United States for its own strategic repositioning in Europe and Asia.

No one can any longer consider himself immune to the repercussions of this war and, furthermore, there is no guarantee that an unpredictable and fateful development that would compromise our very same civilization can be avoided. For the time being, in addition to Ukraine, the other casualty appears to already have become the globalization of the world.

For years, political forces of anti-globalization nationalism have been growing. In 1996, Renato Ruggiero, Director-General of the WTO, had warned: "Free trade cannot guarantee the distribution of the wealth it creates. This is the task of governments". But those words blew in the wind. No one wanted to give ear to the anguish of populations that had been abandoned. The cold was not in commercial blankets, but in politics.

In 2019, Nobel laureates in economics, Duflo and Banerjee, put it bluntly: "in this disaster, politicians have played and are playing a major role". According to them, "gains and losses from trade have been unevenly redistributed and this reality is counterproductive". That has led to Brexit, to Donald Trump coming to power and to the rise of populism everywhere.

The malaise of globalization (Stiglitz, 2002) unleashed reactionary political forces, everywhere. Corporate offshoring created the protectionist social base for nationalist populism in the United States and coincided with China's economic rise. A sense of loss of hegemony gripped the US political elite. Trump unleashed a trade war against China and raised tariffs from 3.1% to 19.3%. Biden stayed on that course. This trade and technology war with China is nestled among Democrats and Republicans.

The Russian invasion adds to this background as a coup de grâce to globalization. It is an aggravated phase, because the military is linked to the financial, local politics to global impacts, and confrontation replaces multilateral understanding. The war in Ukraine, a geopolitical earthquake of unforeseeable consequences, is a turning point in world history.

Nicolas Baverez of Le Point (7/03/2022) thinks that globalization is definitely dead. Its political foundations are crumbling. Globalization is open borders, financial interconnection, economies intertwined and open, multilateral systems universally accepted. These inferences presuppose peace, not geopolitical confrontation and an arms race.

The decline thus heralded will not be autarky. Trade will continue, but cloistered in closed spheres of influence. Its dynamics will be based on preventive war needs, such as a strategic struggle over access to energy, crucial raw materials, key infrastructures, disruptive industries.

Nationalism has reared its head and no one will ever feel completely secure again. We are not there yet, but we are getting there. Ross Douthat (NYT, 12/03/2022) speaks of a "retrofuture": the emergence of blocs and a return to yesterday's world, that of 1913, but in the infinitely more dangerous context of the 21st century.

The Pope Francis refuses to join a crusade against Russia as an outstanding model. Macron is holding a dialogue. Scholz resists. Major countries refuse to be cobelligerent and do not apply sanctions against Russia. Xi Jinping calls for a crusade for peace. These are pockets of civilization that are seeking a negotiated solution.

It is common sense, but the winds of war are overpowering. Nothing seems to dampen them. The war in Ukraine is already more than that. The course of confrontation is very powerful and it is hard to oppose the morbid euphoria of war. But it must be done. Great voices are silent and this silence must be broken. It is amazing that the struggle for peace has become so controversial, when it has never been so decisive. We cannot give up. It is the feasible utopia that will save the world.

Versión en inglés

POR VELIA GOVAERE VICARIOLI

“Mientras disfrutaba su té matutino, un londinense podía ordenar, por teléfono, cualquier producto de la tierra y esperarlo en su puerta. Ahí mismo podía arriesgar su fortuna invirtiendo en recursos naturales y empresas de cualquier país. Y, si quisiera, asegurar transporte hacia cualquier parte del mundo. El menor obstáculo lo habría ofendido y sorprendido. Ese estado de cosas era lo más inalterable del mundo, para él ".

Parecerían palabras de hoy. No lo son. Era John Maynard Keynes quien describía la vida en Londres, en 1913. El mundo gozaba, entonces, de una primera “globalización”. En 1910, Norman Angell, premio Nobel de la Paz, había escrito, que una guerra mundial era imposible porque las economías estaban demasiado interconectadas. Poco después estalló la Gran Guerra y se vino al traste esa estabilidad, tan aparentemente empoderada en aquel momento de la historia. Asumidas como inmutables, las libertades para viajar, invertir y comerciar desaparecieron en las trincheras.

Accese el artículo completo en: https://www.nacion.com/opinion/columnistas/ucrania-y-la-utopia-de-la-paz/UHGX77CZOZBWHEIGHUAVFLPS2I/story/

Artículo publicado en periódico La Nación, 14 de mayo 2022.
La autora es coordinadora de OCEX y catedrática de la UNED

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