Laura Herta Gongola
Key words: extremist parties, |
Assistant Lecturer Faculty of European Studies Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania |
Sergiu Miscoiu
Le Front National et ses répercussions sur l'échiquier politique français 1972-2002
Cluj-Napoca, EFES, 2005, 123 p
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Out of the numerous academic works concerning extremist parties, Sergiu Miscoiu's National Front… strikes us from the very introduction by the self-assumed effort to accomplish a `well-rounded' analysis of the issue rather than to refer to some particular details of it. Does the author succeed in this challenging mission? In order to answer this question, one must acknowledge the defining nature that the author attributes to the Front National that of a political phenomenon. In Miscoiu's understanding, the Front National is a political phenomenon by three basic characteristics the mechanisms of its explosive growing, its duality (as "a synthesis of both various traditions and the contemporary anti-system currents", p. 4), and the unpredictability of the consequences that it generates. JSRI • No.12 /Winter 2005 p . 138 Keeping in mind this founding definition, Miscoiu approaches the Front in a rather well-inspired three-part structure. The first part ("Conditions") begins with a long (maybe even too long) chapter in which the author broadly describes what the French literature defines as the "conditions de possibilité" ("the conditions of possibility") that allowed the explosion of the National Front (FN) in the middle of the 1980s. The scrupulous description of the social and economic environment leads us to the author's conclusion that the crises that took place in the 1970s were socially acknowledged by the French society only in the middle of the 1980s (pp.7-20). This engendered a number of particular popular expectations, most especially that of restoring the Welfare State of the 1950s-1960s. The political shift from the right wing to the left in 1981 (analysed in the second chapter), seen by the "people" as a major step towards this restoration, proved to be a false promise. At the same time, as the author indicates, the French political parties undertook a process of "re-orientation", meaning that, in an effort to enlarge their electoral base, they "slowly abandoned their extremes" (pp. 24-25). A keen reader could find here the key to understanding the Front's political outburst as a correlation between the step-by-step opening of a left-right two-sided political space (demonstrated by the analysis of the evolution of the four main parties, pp. 24-37) and the realisation of the long-lasting nature of the social and economic crisis, as described in the previous chapter. If the ideological and electoral space are prepared, it remains to be seen whether a new political party can gain sufficient strength in order to conquer it. The "phenomenological story" of the National Front is thus dissected by the author in the next 61 pages of the second part (suggestively called "Décryptages"). The schematic but comprehensive "Radiography" (the third chapter of the book) of the Front is composed of a critical history of its origins and evolution and of an analysis of National Front's themes and ideology. Miscoiu puts forward a sociological explanation of FN's programmatic positions, as the Front has always followed its authoritarian but charismatic leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, rather than an orthodox political line. Moreover, Miscoiu shows that the entire programmatic scheme of the party is built around this leader's personal capacity to make inspired and unchallengeable changes in the public discourse of the Front (pp. 53-63). But the part in which the author succeeds the most in demonstrating the rightness of the phenomenological definition of the FN is to be found in the fourth chapter (pp. 64-74). The Front is depicted as a "sophisticated synthesis" of the traditions of what was commonly described as being the extremist right wing; the Front is thus a political building with the unique capacity to gather, in a heteroclite but paradoxically coherent melting-pot, the traditionalist, the fascist, the nationalist and the national-socialist currents. In Miscoiu's view, the various post-war predecessors of the Front (analysed in the last part of this chapter, pp. 70-73) have failed precisely because they were unable to benefit from the experience of the anti-establishment parties of the past. The fifth chapter, dealing with the Front's electoral dynamics, is trying to illustrate this assumption by separating the political history of the FN into two periods the "pre-electoral" period and the electoral period (pp. 75-82 and 82-99). The conclusion is that the Front became able to benefit from the general societal crisis (presented in the first part) only from the moment when it became capable of using to a large extent its synthesising capacities. The pinnacle of FN's success is, without any doubt, the 2002 presidential election, when Jean-Marie Le Pen was able to participate in the second round. But Miscoiu does not deal with the "2002 momentum" as with something peculiar for the FN, but JSRI • No.12 /Winter 2005 p . 139 integrates it in the general evolutionary trend that he has analysed in the whole book, as "a response of the people to the societal crisis and the political and civic demission". If the reader is not convinced yet, the author deepens the analysis in the third and last part called "Confluences". Its two chapters ("The National Front neither Right Wing nor Left Wing?" pp. 100-109, and "The Left Wing and the Right Wing Facing the Front", pp. 110-119) present the reactions and the counter-reactions of the French political parties who suddenly found themselves confronted by a "political phenomenon". The French noun bouleversement seems to describe in the best manner the evolutions of the political spectrum of the 1990s: the decay of the Communist Party, the vacillations and the dismembering of the centre-right wing Union for the French Democracy, the oscillation and the hesitations of the Socialists (which finally proved to be fatal for the former Prime Minister and presidential candidate in 2002, Lionel Jospin), and the Pyrrhic victory of Jacques Chirac in the same troubled year are all circumscribed to a scheme-play in which the Front seems to be, at the same time, an arbitrator and a butcher. Finally, I have to draw attention to the most original element of Miscoiu's analysis the logical and step-by-step demonstration of the existence of the "two Fronts" (pp. 102-107). There is an imaginary one, which occupies only the far right wing of the electoral spectrum; it served for the left wing as a fascist enemy and a scapegoat for nearly two decades but proved to be equally dangerous for it as for the "collaborationist" right wing. And there is a real Front, anticipated, in the early 1990s, by only a few scholars and NGO activists and endowed with the power to collect votes and to support the popular discontent from the very extreme left to the very extreme right of the political spectrum. Miscoiu thus succeeds in showing that the Front is, once more, rather a phenomenon than a party with a regular evolution, who, in the author's words, "does not cease to teach us precious lectures" about the vulnerable character of the contemporary political systems. JSRI • No.12 /Winter 2005 p . 140 JSRI • No. 12/Winter 2005 |
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