It’s official. Emmanuel Macron will be the next president of the Republic of France. After two disheartening victories in the U.S. and the U.K. from the anti-immigration, racism-fueled right, a threat to the future was for once alleviated in the predicted defeat of Marine Le Pen. Finally, people around the globe can sigh in relief and thank their lucky stars that at least one country will remain untouched by the rapid and disconcerting spread of this harmful ideology, right? Well, maybe it’s not quite the time to rest on our laurels. I’d like to present the unsettling potential truth that a fire has been started with the rise of nativism and populism which cannot be so easily extinguished. Marine Le Pen is very clearly not the first example of this, and I am of the firm opinion that she will not be the last.
It seems as if the world is engaged in a war between three starkly different ideologies. First, we have the far right, embodied in the likes of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Then, there’s the left, such as Bernie Sanders and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And of course, we have the center right, who we all know as our (almost) saving graces: Hillary Clinton and Emmanuel Macron. However, maybe the center-right is not nearly the answer to all the problems we have been presented by the far right.
It is widely agreed that the center right is the status quo, and under this particular status quo, nativism and populism are allowed to slowly brew until they eventually come to a boiling point. While I’m in no way implying that in the choice between Clinton and Trump I wouldn’t choose Clinton in a heartbeat, I am saying that Hillary Clinton really wouldn’t have done that much good for the long-term, big picture.
France got lucky, but there’s only so long until their luck runs out just like the rest of us.
Macron didn’t come from an empire, he wasn’t a woman, and he was, by many people’s standards, an outsider. These are the reasons why he was able to do what Hillary couldn’t, and even those reasons are strangely reminiscent of the opposition. Now, under the political climate that has been brought about, in the U.S. every supposed victory of Trump’s will be attributed to his nationalist ideology, and every wrongdoing by Macron will be attributed to the moderates/liberals. This is because people have grown tired of the way things have always been, which is a giant reason of why Hillary didn’t win because she wasn’t presenting any sort of significant change where Trump was (but we’ll get back to that later). While the French will not face nearly the same short-term problems that Americans will face under Trump, it’s really only a matter of time.
So what can we do now? There’s really only one answer: change. The people want change, and they want it so badly that they are even willing to turn to Donald Trump to get it. Many people agree with the leftist ideals perpetuated by Bernie Sanders, but they have been told for years that it’s impossible and to stop dreaming and to face the “reality” that the only way we liberals can get what they want is through the likes of Hillary Clinton.
That is exactly why I am telling you the opposite: be an optimist, an idealist. Dream.
While Bernie Sanders might not have been perfect, if you’re a liberal it’s nearly impossible to argue that he wouldn’t have been better than Clinton to stop the rise of populism. Yes, the fate of the world has dodged a lethal bullet through the defeat of Le Pen, but we are still deep in the war, and it’s going to get harder and harder to dodge the bullets as the war goes on. I would argue that, if you are a liberal, the only way to progress forward from this is to back candidates that are actually progressive. We have a couple of years in the U.S. to regroup and try to change our climate. Do not allow your spirit to be crushed.
