Polls predict that Marine Le Pen, candidate of the far-right National Front party could take 38% of the vote. Even if she loses on Sunday, some commentators believe that this campaign has paved the way for a victory in France’s 2022 election.

Viewed from Pakistan, this situation is a direct blow to a country which, in our minds, has been the bastion of democracy, rationalism and enlightenment.

France’s embrace of Le Pen is all the more concerning because, in Pakistan, we know exactly what autocratic populism looks like, and what it can lead to.

Pakistan’s first populist ruler
Founded in 1947 during the Partition with India, Pakistan started its journey into nationhood in the turbulent 1950s, after an independence bill liberated the Indian subcontinent from the British empire.

Ordinary Pakistanis were struggling to eke out an existence. But the new nation’s leaders were experimenting with an ideology, inspired by “two nation theory” of Pakistan’s main thinker, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, that advocated for separated nations for India and Pakistan based on religion. To some extent this communal approach prevented the more critical progressive left from developing in Pakistan.

The 1960s gave rise not only to industry but also to numerous economic crises that challenged the fragile young nation. By the end of the decade, frustration was on the rise among the Pakistani people. Widespread protests ultimately brought down president Ayub Khan in 1968, ending Pakistan’s first military dictatorship.

This change opened the doors for Pakistan’s first populist leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whose Pakistan People Party (PPP) emerged at the end of the 1960s atop a rising tide of public approval and support. People loved its slogan, “roti, kapra, aur makan” – “bread, clothing, and a home” – and in 1970 Butto was democratically elected as Pakistan’s fourth president.

That’s how Pakistan entered the age of populist politics: at the ballot box. The PPP expounded the same goals that we hear contemporary populist parties claim, namely that of freeing the state from tyrannical and incompetent rulers.

Zulfikar Bhutto speaks as President of Pakistan on the war with Bangladesh, NFO archive.

In the troubled context of the war with India and the subsequent creation of independent Bangladesh in 1971, Bhutto maintained his grasp on power. In 1973 he was elected Pakistan’s ninth prime minister, claiming that he wanted to bring democratic changes to the country.

His populism took an anti-imperialist guise, which garnered wide domestic support given both Pakistan’s own history and the state of world affairs at the time, which included US atrocities in the Vietnam War.

But when his power was challenged, particularly on labour and trade questions, Bhutto abandoned democracy. In 1977 he imposed martial law and curfews throughout the country.
The civil unrest that followed galvanised General Zia ul Haq. He deposed Bhutto in a military coup that same year and had him hanged in 1979.

A repetitive pattern of populist leaders
This pattern that has been repeated in Pakistan since then. Our shaky democracy never found stability after Zia, who was killed in a plane crash in 1988.

Four successive democratic governments were unconstitutionally ousted by military leaders, truncating their five-year terms and creating a chaotic alternation between civilian and army rule.
Democracy would not return until 2008, when the Pakistan People’s Party won a presidential election on a wave of sympathy for the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto (daughter of Zulfiqar). For the first time in nearly 20 years, a government was able to complete its five-year term.

Imran Khan, populist opposition leader and former star cricket player, leads an anti-government protest in Islamabad, April 28 2017. Faisal Mahmood/Reuters

Today, Pakistan once again stands at the crossroads of civilian and military rule. The unpopular sitting government lost credibility with the Panama Papers scandal – in which the huge financial assets of incumbent Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s children were exposed – and opponents like the former cricket player Imran Khan are now suggesting that the military should take over.
The media’s role in populism

France is still very far from dictatorship, of course. But Pakistan’s history shows that opening the door to populist leaders is a big step towards a dangerous and unknown future.
If you flirt with extremism, you have to be willing to accept its dire consequences.

Today, populism in Pakistan has a broad and idealistic agenda, ranging from sustenance for the poor to changing the world order. Its euphoric 1960s ideals failed because they assumed the possibility of change as a “push-button operation”.

Still, populism has now become a cultural norm here. It grows from the inner contradictions of a democratic power structure that’s corrupted, incapable of solving social and economic issues and prone to passing liberticidal laws. And it thrives on right-wing patriotic, xenophobic and anti-politics rhetoric. France, take note.

Populist rhetoric also suits the sensation-hungry, ratings-seeking corporate media. In Pakistan the media has openly espoused populism by regularly portraying politics as a dirty game of power-hungry politicians. This narrative gives rise to cynical and anti-politics attitudes within the general public.

To make matters worse, the press covers some of the world’s demagogues, in the US as at home, in a very light manner. Such populist extremists are, of course, happy to win more positive media spin.

A dangerous frustration
Some 8,000 kms from Islamabad, frustrated men and women in France are sick of politics, too. Watching their presidential debates and TV talk shows, they want to see someone who will secure the nation to bring back their lost pride.

Le Pen’s nationalist proclamations that France should “not [be] dragged into wars that are not hers” and other Trump-style “make France great again” slogans have become popular simplifications.

When the decision is upon them, will French voters enter the populist realm of “the fantasmatic”?

Populism can be far more dangerous than it seems, taking all forms of constraints, from negating the diversity of society to censoring individual liberties and free speech.

Abstract from Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator Speech’

Are the French ready for that?

It would be devastating to see France – a nation built on the ideals of transparency, equality, freedom, responsibility and compassion – taken down in a tragedy of its own making. Life is not a reality show, and demagogues do not make good rulers.

Take it from a people who know: there is no glorious past waiting to be restored. There is no golden future, either.

As the prophet Zarathustra pithily put it, “Not perhaps ye yourselves, my brethren! But into fathers and forefathers of the Superman could ye transform yourselves: and let that be your best creating!”
 

Altaf Khan, Professor, University of Peshawar

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Campaign posters of the 11 candidates in the French election. Left, right and centre can seem pretty blurred in 2017 France. Eric Gaillard/Reuters

From abroad, the situation seems puzzling to many commentators. According to the newspaper China Daily, for instance, the election is particularly “messy” (because it’s confusing).

While five candidates appear to have emerged as favourites from the 11 who qualified to stand for election, their platforms, the values they promote and their political affiliations (except for a few) are not very obvious.

Indeed, France is witnessing a “political blur”, in which the clash between left- and right-wing ideologies seems long gone. Just ahead of the first round of the polls, 42% of French people have declared that they still haven’t made up their minds.

The second round of voting will take place on May 7.
 

Labels that date to the King

Left and right are old labels, dating back to the French Revolution. In 1789, the National Constitutive Assembly met to decide whether, under France’s new political regime, the king should have veto power. If so, it queried, should this right should be absolute or simply suspensive, for a period of time.

When voting, supporters of the absolute veto sat on the president’s right, the noble side. According to Christian tradition, it is an honour to be seated at the right side of God, or to the right of the head of the family at dinner. Those who wanted a highly restricted veto were seated on the left.

Thus, the layout of the room took on political significance: to the right, supporters of a monarchy that sought to preserve many of the king’s powers; to the left, those who wished to reduce them.

In the 19th century, this vocabulary was increasingly used to describe the political leanings of members of the French parliament.

The great advantage of these labels is their simplicity: they reduce complex political ideas to a simple dichotomy. It also makes it easy for people to identify the “right” side, to which they belong, and the “wrong” side, which they condemn.

From the 19th century onward, sub-categories quickly developed, aimed at placing every politician on a kind of spectrum from left to right. In this way, political parties can be said to be more or less left wing, or more or less right wing, in relation to one another.

Soon, people were talking about “right-wing coalitions”, “left-wing blocks”, “centre-right”, “centre-left”, “far-right” and “far-left”, and the like.
 

‘The clash of two Frances’

At the beginning of the 19th century, the left-right divide essentially distinguished supporters of an absolute monarchy from those of a constitutional monarchy.

It would later set monarchists against republicans, then conservative republicans against the modernists who implemented the major social reforms of the Third Republic that included the freedom of the press, freedom of association, the right to belong to a trade-union and divorce, among other things.

At the turn of the 20th century, the left-right debate essentially covered the divide between the defenders of Catholicism and advocates for the separation of church and state. This shift, which took place in 1905, would often be referred to as “the clash of two Frances” – Catholic and anticlerical.
 

From the 1930s onward, the economic divide came to the fore, with the left advocating for socialism and the right calling for economic liberalisation.

By the 1970s, the liberalisation of social mores had become a key issue, with continuing debates on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, marriage equality and euthanasia. The same is true of immigration and openness to the world, which stood in opposition to cultural, social and economical protectionism.
 

Parties with many faces

In France, the divide grew in several political realms. In his famous work, The Right Wing in France, political historian René Rémond defined three separate right-wing currents: the legitimist and counter-revolutionary right, the liberal right, and the Bonapartist right, authoritarian and conservative.
 

Whether or not these divisions still exist today is open to debate. What is certain is that there is still a significant difference between the conservative, more authoritarian right that favours an economy in which the state plays a regulatory and protective role, and the liberal right that favours deregulation, less restrictive labour laws and more entrepreneurship.

Today’s French Republican party represents the latter position well, from former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The Bonapartist right – often identified to Gaullism after the former French president Charles de Gaulle (1959-1969) – can now be partially identified with Marine Le Pen’s National Front, which prizes a strong leader, order and patriotism.

In truth, for each overarching area of political debate, there are at least two right wings and two left wings. Concerning family values and gay marriage, for instance, a minority on the right are open to increased tolerance, while a minority on the left are rather reluctant.

The same can be said of immigration. Not everyone on the right is convinced by restrictive immigration policies, while open immigration policies are far from universally approved of on the left.
 

Don’t forget the centre

Centrist positions are often difficult to pin down. Those who self-identify as centrists sometimes occupy the middle ground on certain main political issues but stand to the left on one issue and to the right on another.

Early 20th century radicals, often characterised as defenders of secularism and basic freedoms, were also economically liberal, and generally considered as having “their heart on the left but their wallet on the right”. Centrists from the Christian Democratic tradition, who favoured social protections, dialogue between workers and management, and oppose unchecked economic liberalism, were also conservative on family issues.
 

While it is possible to identify broad schools of thought that can be classified as right, left or centre over the long term, policies vary greatly over time. We cannot ascribe unchanging, universal content to these categories.

These days, we cannot even say that the right is for the status quo or that the left wants change, as has sometimes been claimed. When it comes to the welfare state, people on the right clamour for reform, whereas those on the left want to defend social protections.

Still, in each era, centre, left and right have served as signposts, allowing us to classify political parties, politicians and the ideas they promote.
 

The 2017 presidential election deepens the divide

In the right- and left-wing “primaries” that took place a few weeks ago, French parties selected candidates who clearly illustrated their ideological differences.

But this process also revealed more left- or right-leaning positions within each camp, as demonstrated by the second-round primary between François Fillon and Alain Juppé, on the right, and, on the left, between Benoît Hamon and Manuel Valls.

It’s likely that the majority of those who watched the first televised debate on March 20, prior to the first round of voting, would have similarly placed candidates on the spectrum of left to right.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate for “La France insoumise” (the rebellious France), embodies a type of social protest. He refuses any alliance with the current left-wing government and takes more radical stands on institutions, Europe and economics than the Social Democrat Benoît Hamon.
 

Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister responsible for a large share of President François Hollande’s economic policy, is running on a centrist platform. A strong proponent of liberal economic policies, he also supports a certain social safety net and the integration of immigrants while opposing discrimination against minorities. He is trying to attract moderates from the left and the right.

In other words, Macron seeks to build an electorate comprised of Socialists who find Benoît Hamon too lefty and of Republicans or centrists who find François Fillon too far to the right. That marks a clear difference between this mainstream right and the populist, protectionist, anti-European extreme right represented by Marine Le Pen’s National Front.
 

Not all the same

So why is the belief that there is no real difference between left and right so commonly held?

This view can be traced back to opinion surveys from the 1980s. A growing number of people now claim that the concepts of left and right have lost all meaning. Yet these same people, in the same surveys, happily self-identify on a continuum of left to right and define their political identity in these dichotomous terms.

They also respond differently to a variety of political issues, as compared to their self-established position on that scale.

This apparent paradox can be explained. Many people who personally feel more left wing or right wing according to their convictions also believe that governments tend to implement similar policies when in power. They therefore expect clear political platforms that can be summarised as left wing or right wing but are ultimately disappointed by the outcomes.

As a result, candidates make promises to attract votes without taking into account how difficult they may be to implement. But selling right- or left-wing ideas during an election campaign also serves to make people dream – capturing hearts and minds at the expense of considering the realities that elected governments must face.

Translated from the French by Alice Heathwood for Fast for Word.
 

This article was originally published in French
 

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Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

One panelist, journalist Sonia Mabrouk, argued that Muslims in France are constantly used by opportunists, from politicians to intellectuals, as a constituency to serve their own purposes.

The incident recalled the final televised debate of France’s 2012 presidential election, when then-candidate François Hollande sparred with incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy over the “Muslim vote”.

Hollande was in favour of extending the right to vote in local elections to non-EU citizens living in France, while Sarkozy argued against it. The president claimed that such a move would lead to “identity-based voting practices” and “divisive sectarian demands”.

Women, it’s worth remembering, were once suspected of voting with their sex.

As the French go to the polls on April 23 and May 7 to elect their new president, the question reemerges: is it reasonable to assume that Muslims’ voting behaviour is based on their religion and on the Quran?
 

The impact of religion on votes

Some 93% of French Muslims cast their ballots for François Hollande in the second round of the 2012 presidential election, according to a poll by OpinionWay. That’s 41% above than the national average, since Hollande was ultimately elected with 52% of votes.

Several attempts have been made to explain why French Muslims voted almost unanimously for the left.

In their 2012 book Français comme les autres? (As French as everyone else?), political scientists Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj concluded that the impact of religion on the voting practices of believers should not be overestimated.

Catholics in France and in the United States, for example, vote in ways diametrically opposed to each other. In France, people who identify as Catholic are today markedly in favour of the conservative Républicains, particularly since the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013.

In the US, on the other hand, they tend to vote for the Democrats, a more socially progressive party.

How can this difference be explained? According to Brouard and Tiberj, Catholics in the US vote Democratic for precisely the same reasons that Muslims in France went for Hollande’s Socialist Party: they cast their ballots for candidates who support minority rights.
 

Both groups are often found among racial and religious minorities – American citizens of Latin American origin and people of Maghrebian or African background in France – who have faced economic and social marginalisation in their respective countries.

In France, on the other hand, Catholicism is the main religious faith. Hence the difference in voting orientations (though a bastion of left-wing Catholic voters has also historically existed in France).

In other words, religion is not the be-all, end-all of a believer’s political choices.
 

Identifying as Muslims

Though the impact of faith must be taken with a grain of salt, it is not entirely irrelevant in the context of elections. Qualitative research I conducted in 2012 and 2013 found that the vote of French Muslim citizens I interviewed was indeed influenced by their religious identity.

Being a Muslim did not predetermine their answer to the question, Who should I vote for? But it did lead people to ask, Who shouldn’t I vote for? The impact was negative, helping them eliminate candidates deemed Islamophobic, rather than positive ([I] choose a candidate who defends my values, including religious values).

French Muslims took into account laws banning the headscarf or niqab, a veil that covers the face, as well as public comments against Islam, for instance, when weighing different candidates and their platforms. Candidates’ positions on foreign policy were also considered, with military interventions in Muslim-majority countries particularly frowned upon.

This is similar to how French citizens who identify as Jewish tend to be especially sensitive to antisemitism and to the position of candidates regarding Israel.

According to my study, being a Muslim can have three different effects on a person’s vote: it can consolidate a choice previously made, based on factors unrelated to religion; it can help select among a few candidates on the basis of the Islamophobia criterion; and when a candidate’s attitude towards Muslims is negatively perceived, it can destabilise and change a person’s political orientation.

Take, for example, Youssouf, a self-made man who in 2007 voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, the Republican party candidate. But in 2012, after what he called “the unashamed Islamophobic discourses and public policies targeting Islam made by him and his governement”, Youssouf decided to vote for the left-wing François Hollande. Even though Youssouf didn’t at all like Hollande’s stance on economic and social issues.

Because of their lower socioeconomic status and the marginalisation they face, many French Muslims, especially those living in France’s banlieues (suburbs), might simply choose not to vote.

Some of them justify their abstention with religious explanations, claiming that “voting is not halal”, since France is not a Muslim country.
 

Calls for abstention in 2017

Generally, this position is only held by a minority of highly orthodox Tabligh or Salafist Muslims. But today, several public Muslim intellectuals, including leaders who are not necessarily from those sects are calling for an “active abstention” by Muslims of the 2017 presidential election. The intent is to escape the constant trap of voting for the “lesser of two evils”.

Nizarr Bourchada, leader of the Français et Musulmans (French and Muslim) party, advocates a similar approach. His is one of the first French political parties to claim a strong attachment to both Islamic and French Republican values.

This echoes French author Michel Houellebecq’s prescient 2015 novel Soumission (Submission). Set in 2022, the book imagines the rise to power in France of a Muslim political party that imposes polygamy and prohibits women from wearing clothes that make them “desirable”.
 

Within a few weeks of publication, Soumission had become a bestseller in France, Italy and Germany. It bolsters the idea that a collective vote of French Muslims, or at least their federation into a political party, would be a threat for French society.

The reality is quite different. But whatever the outcome of this election season, it seems that the fantasy of a “Muslim vote” will continue to haunt Europe’s imagination for years to come.
 

Fatima Khemilat, PhD Student, Sciences Po Aix

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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