From time immemorial, persons who feel oppressed and/or ignored by the powerful have resisted those in authority. Such resistance often changed things, but only sometimes. Whether one considers the cause of the resisters to be virtuous depends on one’s values and one’s priorities.

In the United States, over the past half-century, there emerged a latent resistance to what was seen as oppression by “elites” who enacted changes in social practices offensive to certain religious groups and ignored rural populations and persons whose standards of living were declining. At first, resistance took the path of withdrawal from social involvement. Then it took a more political form, finally taking on the name of Tea Party.

The Tea Party began to have some electoral successes. But it was dispersed and without a clear strategy. Donald Trump saw the problem and his opportunity. He offered himself as a unifying leader of this rightwing “populism” and catapulted the movement into political power.

What Trump understood is that there was no conflict between leading a movement against the so-called Establishment and seeking power in the state via the Republican Party. On the contrary, the only way he could achieve his maleficent objectives was to combine the two.

The fact that he succeeded in the world’s strongest military power heartened like-minded groups all across the world, who proceeded to pursue similar paths with steadily increasing numbers of adherents.

Trump’s success is still to this day not understood by the majority of leaders of both U.S. mainstream parties who search for signs that he will become what they call “presidential.” That is to say, they want him to abandon his role as the leader of a movement and confine himself to being the president and leader of a political party.

They seize upon any small sign that he will do this. When he softens his rhetoric for a moment (as he did in his February 28 speech to Congress), they do not understand that this is precisely the deceptive tactic of a movement leader. Instead, they feel encouraged or hopeful. But he will never give up his role as movement leader because the moment that he did this he would lose real power.

In the past year, faced with the reality of Trump’s success, a counter-movement has emerged in the United States (and elsewhere) that has taken on the name of Resist. The participants understood that the only thing that can possibly contain and eventually defeat Trumpism is a social movement that stands for different values and different priorities. This is the “why” of Resist. What is more difficult is the “how” of Resist.

The Resist movement has grown with remarkable rapidity into something impressive enough that the mainstream press has begun to report its existence. This is the reason that Trump constantly inveighs against the press. Publicity nourishes a movement, and he is doing what he can do to crush the counter-movement.

The problem with Resist is that it is still at the stage where its many activities are dispersed and without a clear strategy or at least not a strategy they have yet adopted. Nor is there any unifying figure who is able at this point to do what Trump did with the Tea Party.

Resist has engaged in manifold different actions. They have held marches, challenged local congressional representatives in their public meetings, created sanctuaries for persons menaced with state-ordered expulsions, interfered with transport facilities, published denunciations, signed petitions, and created local collectivities that meet together both studying and deciding upon further local actions. Resist has been able to turn many ordinary persons into militants for the first time in their lives.

Resist however has a few dangers before it. More and more participants will be arrested and jailed. Being a militant is strenuous and after a while many people tire of it. And they need successes, little or big, to maintain their spirits. No one can guarantee that Resist will not fade away. It took the Tea Party decades before they got to where they are today. It may take Resist equally long.

What Resist as a movement needs to keep in mind is the fact that we are in the midst of a historic structural transition from the capitalist world-system in which we have lived for some 500 years to one of two successor systems — a non-capitalist system that preserves all of the worst features of capitalism (hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization) and its opposite, a system that is relatively democratic and egalitarian. I call this the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre.

We are living in the chaotic, confusing situation of transition. This has two implications for our collective strategy. In the short run (say, up to three years), we must remember that we all live in the short run. We all wish to survive. We all need food and shelter. Any movement that hopes to flourish must help people survive by supporting anything that minimizes the pain of those who are suffering.

But in the middle run (say 20-40 years), minimizing the pain changes nothing. We need to concentrate on our struggle with those who represent the spirit of Davos. There is no compromise. There is no “reformed” version of capitalism that can be constructed.

So the “how” of Resist is clear. We need collectively more clarity about what is happening, more decisive moral choice, and more sagacious political strategies. This does not automatically come about. We have to construct the combination. We know that another world is possible, yes, but we must also be aware that it is not inevitable.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2017
Word Count: 935
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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One year ago, the French 2017 presidential elections seemed very assured. There were three parties that mattered: the center-right Les Républicains (LR), the center-left Socialists (PS), and the far-right Front National (FN). Since in France there are normally two rounds with only two candidates permitted in the second round, the key question always is which of the three will be eliminated in the first round.

It seemed sure at the time that the FN would be in the second round, incarnating anti-Establishment sentiment. It seemed equally sure that President François Hollande, were he to seek re-election, would lose badly. This meant that the LR candidate would be in the second round. This would be especially true if LR chose Alain Juppé and not former President Nicolas Sarkozy. Most people thought that Juppé was far more likely than Sarkozy to attract Socialist and centrist voters and thereby more likely to win the presidency.

Hence the general view a year ago was that the Establishment parties would prevail and that Juppé would win. How wrong these expectations turned out to be. If Trump’s election in the United States and Brexit’s victory in the UK were unexpected, they pale beside the current unexpected situation in France. There are six plausible candidates for the presidential elections, and all of them (yes, all of them) claim to be anti-Establishment. Furthermore, which two of the six will be in the second round is, as of today, anyone’s guess. Between now and April 23, 2017, the first round of the presidential elections, the electorate seems extremely volatile.

Here’s why. France’s complicated system is intended to favor the two main Establishment parties. It usually works. It presumes however that everyone is called upon to vote twice. This time, there have been four times to vote — first of all in two rounds in the primaries and then two times in the presidential elections. That means that a voter in the first round of the primaries had to anticipate the result in the third election (first round of the presidentials) to decide for whom to vote in the first round of the primaries. The result of this impossible task for the voters is that the results of the primaries could be very surprising, and indeed they were.

The LR primaries were the first, occurring on Nov. 20 and Nov. 27, 2016. In this primary of right and center-right voters, there were three main candidates. The two with seemingly strongest support were Sarkozy and Juppé. The third, and far behind in the polls, was François Fillon. Fillon campaigned as somewhat anti-Establishment, emphasizing the evil of financial misappropriations, of which Sarkozy was being charged and Juppé convicted in the past. He also was ultra-conservative on social issues, appealing to a Catholic vote.

Fillon surprised everyone. In the polls he had been running third with only about 10% of the voters. In the vote, he jumped about 30 points and came in first. His victory was so decisive that Sarkozy, who came in third, endorsed him (if only to hurt Juppé). And Fillon easily prevailed over Juppé in the second round two to one.

Next came the left primaries. Anticipating a humiliating defeat, Hollande withdrew from the race before the primary. His Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, immediately entered the race and was expected to win, at least in the first round. Valls stood as the Establishment candidate, supported by the right wing of the French left and quietly by Hollande.

Two former ministers of Hollande stood as left candidates against Valls. Arnaud Montebourg had resigned because of the austerity policies of Hollande. Benoît Hamon had been fired by Hollande because he opposed these policies within the cabinet. Both of them felt that Hollande and Valls had betrayed the left. It was expected that Montebourg would come in second to Valls, and perhaps might win in the second round.

None of this happened. Valls came in second, not first, in the first round and Hamon, not Montebourg, won. Hamon had refused to endorse the record of Hollande and Valls in their time in government, and insisted on discussing new future policies, offering one of importance. Suddenly, the left within the left primary seemed strong. Hamon picked up endorsements from many different left factions and was able to trounce Valls in the second round with almost 58% of the vote.

Two other persons are in the race. One is Emmanuel Macron, a former minister of Hollande who thought his policies were insufficiently pro-neoliberal, and formed his own party, En Marche!. Macron refused to enter the left primary. He stood on his program — very neoliberal in economic matters but at the same time very progressive on all social questions. The other person in the race is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has for years proposed himself as the left of the left. He calls his party “La France insoumise,” meaning those on the left who resist and will not allow themselves to be subjected. For this reason, he has rejected as not leftist all those who have served in Hollande’s government, even if they later resigned or were fired.

Macron assumes that his program would appeal to middle-class voters across the left-right spectrum. After the left primary, many Valls voters who were angry about Hamon’s leftist stance initially threatened to switch to Macron. Macron thereby seemed to pose a threat to Fillon in the first round of the presidentials. Mélenchon has no illusions that he could win this time but he is preparing the future. He is very unlikely to respond to Hamon’s call for left unity behind him.

Suddenly a new major development occurred. Fillon was exposed as having misrepresented himself as the paragon of financial honesty. He had put his wife and his two sons on the government payroll for what was asserted to be fictional work. This has not been unusual practice in France, but the amounts of money in this case were so large and the deed so contrary to the claims of Fillon’s candidacy that LR began a big discussion about a so-called Plan B — to replace Fillon with someone else.

It turned out that replacing Fillon would be still worse for LR than leaving him as the candidate. This was because there was no single candidate that was obvious. And the struggle to choose any one of them would tear apart LR. In addition, Fillon counter-attacked, apologizing for misdeeds, and asserting that he still could win. Plan B disappeared and Fillon remains the LR candidate. The question is how many voters did he lose for the first round of the presidential elections because of his transgressions.

So, as I said, everyone claims to be anti-Establishment. In reality, Fillon and Macron are close to playing that role. That leaves Hamon as the one with most credentials to represent a real change. But in order to win the first round of the presidentials he has to hold the Socialist party in line (so far he is doing that), attract Mélenchon’s voters, attract ecologist voters (so far he is doing this), and attract centrist voters. This is quite difficult.

So where are we? FN’s Marine Le Pen has received about 25% of the polls steadily for over a year. It seems she is at a plateau, but a high one. She is trying to appeal now to disillusioned Fillon supporters. Macron is rising in the polls. So is Hamon. Mélenchon isn’t budging. And, as the cartoonists are saying, Establishment is the others.

Should Hamon succeed, however, this will be a major worldwide event. It will be the first major race in recent years in Europe (or elsewhere for that matter) in which a left candidate, openly left, has won. This will reverse a worldwide trend of candidates and parties moving to the right.

As the economic turmoil continues to spread, the idea that one can win as a leftist may again become legitimate. It’s a bit equivalent to what might have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary in the United States. But remember, this all depends on voters guessing now who will be the candidates in the second round of the presidentials. Assuming Le Pen gets 25%, that leaves 75% to be divided among five other candidates.

The first round of the presidentials are not until April 23, 2017. This is a fairly long time for voters to make a difficult decision. The polls show that intensity of support is thin, especially for Macron. That is why we can expect great volatility in the polls. There is no way to be sure who can get the probable 20% needed to be in the second round of the presidentials on May 7, 2017.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 February 2017
Word Count: 1,449
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Most politicians, journalists, and academic analysts describe the relations of China and the United States as one of hostile competition, especially in East Asia. I disagree. I believe that the top of both countries’ geopolitical agenda is reaching long-term accord with the other. The major bone of contention is which of the two prospective partners will be the top dog.

When Donald Trump says that he wants to make America great again, he is not in the least outside the general consensus of the United States. Using different words and different policy proposals, this futile ambition is shared by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, even Bernie Sanders, and of course the Republicans. It is shared as well by most ordinary citizens. Who is ready to say that the United States should settle for being number two?

When, in 1945, the United States had definitively defeated its great rival Germany, it was set to assume the role of hegemonic power in the world-system. The only obstacle was the military power of the Soviet Union. The way the United States dealt with this obstacle was to offer the Soviet Union the status of junior partner in the world-system. We refer to this tacit accord as the Yalta arrangements. Both sides denied that there was any deal, and both sides fully implemented it.

The United States dreams of reproducing a Yalta-like arrangement with China. China scoffs at this idea. It considers the days of U.S. hegemony as over, believing that the United States no longer has the economic strength to underpin such a status. It also believes that internal disunity renders the United States impotent in the geopolitical arena. On the contrary, China seeks to impose a Yalta-like arrangement in which the United States would be the junior partner. The closest analogy would be the post-1945 relationship of Great Britain with the United States.

China believes that slowly but surely its economic strength will be increasingly unstoppable in the coming decades. It believes that it can hurt the United States economic well-being far more than the reverse. In addition, it believes it will attract other Asians who resent having lived for at least the past two centuries in a world dominated politically and culturally by Europeans.

China’s analysis to be sure has two weak points. China may be overestimating the degree to which it can continue to dominate worldwide productive superiority. And it is haunted by the fear that the country might be pulled apart, as has happened often in Chinese history. A deal with the United States might minimize the impact of these dangers for China.

As for the United States, one day reality will sink in and a junior partner role might come to seem better than no deal at all. In this regard, Trump may speed up the process. He will bark, threaten, and insult, but he will not make America hegemonic again. In this sense, a Trump regime will disabuse more Americans than any sober version of the same ambition, such as that represented by Obama’s presidency.

In any case, the hidden dance between China and the United States — the unavowed search for partnership — will remain the principal geopolitical activity in the world-system for the coming decades. All eyes should be on it. One way or another, China and the United States will become partners.

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 January 2017
Word Count: 555
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Short-term prediction is the most treacherous of activities. I normally try never to do it. Rather, I analyze what is going on in terms of the longue durée of its history and the probable consequences in the middle-run. I have decided nonetheless to make short-term predictions this time for one simple reason. It seems to me that everyone everywhere is focused for the moment on what will now happen in the short run. There seems to be no other subject of interest. Anxiety is at its maximum, and we need to deal with it.

Let me start by saying that I think 95% of the policies Donald Trump will pursue in his first year or so in office will be absolutely terrible, worse than we anticipated. This can be seen already in the appointments to major office that he has announced. At the same time, he will probably run into major trouble.

This contradictory result is the consequence of his political style. If we look back at how he has won the presidency of the United States, he did it against all odds with a certain deliberate rhetorical technique. On the one hand he has constantly made statements that responded to major fears of U.S. citizens by using coded language that the recipients interpreted as support for policies that they thought would alleviate their multiple pains. He did this most often either by brief tweets or in tightly-controlled public rallies.

At the same time, he was always vague about the precise policies he would pursue. His statements were almost always followed by interpretations by major followers, and quite often these were differing, even opposing, interpretations. In effect, he took the credit for the strong statements and he left the discredit for the precise policies to others. It was a magnificently effective technique. It got him where he is and it seems clear that he intends to continue this technique once in office.

There has been a second element in his political style. He tolerated anyone’s interpretation as long as it constituted an endorsement of his leadership. If he sensed any hesitation about endorsing him personally, he has been quick to wreak vengeance by attacking publicly the offender. He required absolute fealty, and insisted it be displayed. He accepted penitent remorse but not ambiguity about his person.

It seems that he believes the same technique will serve him well in the rest of the world: strong rhetoric, ambiguous interpretations by his varied panoply of major followers, and in the end rather unpredictable actual policies.

He seems to think that there are only two countries other than the United States that matter in the world today – Russia and China. As both Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger have pointed out, he is using the Nixon technique in reverse. Nixon made a deal with China in order to weaken Russia. Trump is making a deal with Russia in order to weaken China. This policy seemed to work for Nixon. Will it work for Trump? I don’t think so, because the world of 2017 is quite different from the world of 1973.

So let us look at what the difficulties ahead are for Trump. At home, his greatest difficulty is undoubtedly with the Republicans in Congress, particularly those in the House of Representatives. Their agenda is not the same as that of Donald Trump. For example, they wish to destroy Medicare. Indeed they wish to repeal all social legislation of the last century. Trump knows that this could bring a revolt of his actual electoral base, who want social welfare at the same time that they want a deeply protectionist government and xenophobic rhetoric.

Trump is counting on intimidating Congress and making them toe his line. Maybe he can. But then the contradictions between his pro-wealthy agenda and his partial maintenance of the welfare state will become blatant. Or Congress will prevail over Trump. And he will find that intolerable. What he would do about it is anyone’s guess. He doesn’t know himself since he doesn’t face up to this kind of difficult situation until he has to.

The same thing is true in the geopolitics of the world-system. Neither Russia nor China is ready to back down in the least from their present policies. Why should they? These policies have been working for them. Russia is once again a major power in the Middle East and in the whole of the ex-Soviet world. China is slowly but surely asserting a dominant position in Northeast and Southeast Asia, and increasing its role in the rest of the world.

No doubt both Russia and China run into difficulties from time to time and both of them are ready to make timely concessions to others but not more than that. So Trump is going to find that he is not the alpha dog internationally to whom everyone must give obeisance. And then what?

What he might do once his threats are ignored is again anyone’s guess. What everyone fears is that he will act precipitately with the military tools at his disposition. Will he? Or will he be restrained by his immediate inner group? No one can be sure. We can all just hope.

So there it is. In my view it is not a pretty picture but not a hopeless one. If somehow we reach in the coming year an interim stability within the United States and within the world-system as a whole, then the middle-run takes over analytically. And there the story, while still grim, has at least better prospects for those of us who want a better world than that which we presently have.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 January 2017
Word Count: 941
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Every country has mixed feelings about its future, but some are more self-confident than others. At the present moment, there are very few countries in which self-doubt does not seem greater than self-confidence. This seems to me true of the United States, both western and eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and most of Africa and Latin America. The biggest exception to this global worry and pessimism is China.

China tells itself that it is performing better in the world-economy than just about anyone else. To be sure, it seems to be performing less well today than a few years ago, but so is the rest of the world, and it is still doing better than the others.

China also tells itself that it is growing stronger all the time in its geopolitical position — first of all in East and Southeast Asia and now secondly in much of the rest of the world. It seems to be contemptuous of U.S. claims of a new position in Asia to which it says it is giving priority. To be sure, they do worry about the degree of self-control of the U.S. giant, especially now that the unpredictable Donald Trump is coming to power. But again China seems to think it can handle, even tame, what it considers to be U.S. arrogance.

The question is how realistic is this self-assessment of China? There are two premises embedded in China’s self-confidence, whose validity need to be investigated. The first is that countries, or rather the governments of states, can actually control what is happening to them in the world-economy. The second is that countries can effectively contain popular discontent, whether by suppression or by limited concessions to demands. If this was ever even partially true in the modern world-system, these assertions have become very dubious in the structural crisis of the world capitalist system in which we find ourselves today.

When we look at the first premise, the ability of countries to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system, the greatest evidence that this proposition is dubious is what has been happening in the last few years in China itself. Surely no state has worked as hard as China to guarantee its continued high performance. China has not left its activities to the workings of the “market.” China’s government has constantly intervened in economic activity within China. Indeed, it has virtually dictated what is to be done and how it is to be done. Yet, despite all that the government has done, China has been encountering of late worrisome setbacks. The government has been preoccupied with these setbacks, but the best it has been able to do has been to moderate them, not prevent them. I do not denigrate the actions of the Chinese government. I merely insist on noticing the limits of their efficacy.

If we look at the geopolitical arena, China has counted on being able to insist that other states recognize and implement its “one China” policy. Considering what the global situation was fifty years ago, China has done exceptionally well in this regard. Nonetheless, recently Taiwan seems to be regaining some ground in its struggle for autonomy. Perhaps this is a momentary illusion, but perhaps not.

The second premise is seeming even more dubious these days. Popular uprisings against regimes because of their harshness or the corruption they have fomented is not new. But they seem more frequent, more sudden, and even more successful than in the past. A good example is right next door to China — in South Korea. There President Park Geun-hye has catapulted downward in public favor seemingly from one day to the next. She has been impeached despite her impressive electoral victory and her control of the state’s administrative machinery.

A look at these popular uprisings shows that, while they often succeed in overthrowing the regime in power, they do not appear to create a lasting new regime. But this observation would be of very limited comfort to any regime, and certainly not to the present regime in China.

It is not that the Chinese government, and its interlocked partner, the Chinese Communist Party, are unaware of these arguments. Far from it! But they believe that they can and will overcome the obstacles and emerge over the next ten to twenty years as the dominant economic structure in the world. And, given this, they expect that they will prevail geopolitically over others, and in particular over the United States.

No one can be sure how this geopolitical rivalry will play out. I do counsel skepticism about the two premises of China’s self-confidence. I return, as I always do, to viewing the current world situation as part of a rivalry between two groups that are contending not about how to manage the current world-system or prevail in it, but rather about what should replace a capitalist system that is no longer viable, either for its super-elites or for its large oppressed classes and peoples.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2016
Word Count: 833
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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When François Fillon won the first round of the presidential primary of the right on November 20, 2016 with 44% of the vote, the French newspaper Libération headlined the story “The French Miracle.” The miracle was that all the polls up to the last minute had predicted he would come in third in a field of seven with little more than 10% of the vote.

This has been a bad year for pollsters, but a gap of this kind outdoes by far the far smaller predictive error in the U.S. elections. How did this happen and what does it portend for the general election to come?

The formal structure of elections in France is somewhat unusual. Unless a candidate wins over 50% of the vote on the first round (normally rather difficult to achieve), there is a second round a week later in which only those with the two highest number of votes on the first round are on the ballot. This works well if there are two main parties. In that case, the first round displays the range of views and the second round permits the smaller parties to rally round their favorite, which is supposed to be a choice between center-right and center-left.

The system breaks down when there are three parties contending, each of significant strength. This is currently the situation in France. At a national level, the three parties are currently the Socialists (center-left), the Republicans (center-right) and the National Front (far right).

The situation is even more complex because within the Republican Party, there were three main candidates: Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé, and François Fillon. Expectations had been that Sarkozy and Juppé would share the second round. This is what did not happen.

Sarkozy is a former president of France and also president of the Republican Party. Juppé and Fillon were both Prime Ministers, Juppé under Jacques Chirac and Fillon under Sarkozy. Sarkozy stood for a program that would appeal to voters attracted by the National Front and therefore would win on the second round of the national elections. Juppé stood for a program that would appeal to undecided centrist voters and even Socialist voters (both in the primary and in the general election). Almost no one paid any attention to Fillon’s program. The predictions were that Juppé would be a stronger candidate in the general elections and would therefore probably be the next president of France.

How wrong everyone was. Not only did Fillon come in first, but Juppé was next and Sarkozy only third, therefore being eliminated from the second round. Sarkozy promptly endorsed Fillon for the second round, detesting Juppé and merely scorning Fillon. The second round gave even more decisive results. Fillon got two-thirds of the vote cast.

Meanwhile, in the forthcoming primary of the left, the divisions are massive. It is probable that President François Hollande, whose figures of support are miserable and who has said he will announce whether he is standing for re-election sometime soon, will probably withdraw from the race. Otherwise, he risks the humiliation of not even winning the primary of the left. But since there is no one who stands out clearly on the left and probably no one who can rally the troops after a second round, it is likely that the left will not even have a candidate in the second round of the national elections.

If then the second round of the national elections has Fillon standing against Marine LePen of the National Front, it becomes urgent to see on what program Fillon is standing. Before the first primary, Fillon had published his three priorities, along with 15 specific measures to implement these priorities. The three were “(1) liberate the economy, (2) restore the authority of the state, to protect French persons, and (3) affirm our values.”

Translating slogans into clearer language, Fillon proposed combining a Thatcherite economic program to appeal to business-first voters, an anti-immigrant program to appeal to middle-class voters fearful of personal economic decline, and a socially-traditionalist program to appeal to right-wing Catholic voters. He had one other element in his support. Juppé had received the support of a major centrist figure, François Bayrou. But Bayrou had endorsed Hollande in the previous presidential election, and was considered a traitor by many on the right, who attributed Hollande’s defeat of Sarkozy in 2012 to Bayrou’s misdeeds.

If his combination of themes seems to you similar to those of Donald Trump and of the Brexit voters in Great Britain, you are not mistaken. The major difference lies in the two-round system in France. The question now becomes how effective LePen can be in a struggle with Fillon. The French mainstream center-left newspaper, Le Monde, warns of a weakness in the Fillon position. His support in the primary lacked what they call “the popular vote.” His support came largely from urban professionals and entrepreneurs plus retired persons. Popular classes by and large abstained from voting. Can Fillon keep these voters from finding a more adequate president in LePen?

LePen has already denounced Fillon as a spokesperson of class division, promoting the “worst such program that has ever existed.” Florian Philippot, vice-president of the National Front, thundered: “Savage globalization has its candidate; his name is François Fillon.”

Will the Fillon miracle fizzle in the general elections? Or can he find a way to get popular support, either by voting for him or at least by abstaining from voting? Whatever the outcome, France is clearly joining the rightward trend of the United States and the rest of the Global North. All eyes will now be on Germany, to see if it will resist this trend.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2016
Word Count: 941
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