In the classic days of the Republic of Venice, you could lodge a complaint against the government by slipping a paper into the bocca di leone, the lion’s mouth, a kind of proto postal box. The lions’ mouths were distributed around town and were often highly specified: this one to get hot over taxes, this one to complain about garbage in the canal. Their purpose was not just, as some imagine, secret denunciation but also open protest; the authorities would witness the disquiet, register the grievance, and then, possibly, do something about it.
The just-concluded elections for the European Parliament have some of the character of lion’s-mouth communication on a continental scale. The European Parliament is, like the Venetian Senate, mostly a pro-forma talking shop with limited power: actual political power still resides in the national governments, while the power to initiate and implement all those European rules and decrees with which “Brussels” supposedly encumbers its members—such as classifying bananas according to how bendy they are—remains largely in the hands of the bureaucrats and technocrats of the European Commission.
Yet the election results have meaning, and they have been cast, rather too narrowly but understandably, as another victory for the extreme right—a victory particularly noxious in France and Germany, where more or less openly neo-fascist parties won startlingly large shares of the vote. In France, the R.N., or Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National), won the most seats, under the guidance of Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the movement’s notorious antisemitic founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. That outcome, though not entirely unanticipated, led President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and call for new parliamentary elections, which will be held in two rounds, later this month and then in July.
The rise of the far right in Europe might help Americans deprovincialize their own crisis. The single wave has struck many coastlines. Whatever is happening is happening everywhere. Why what is happening is happening everywhere is still under scrutiny, with the same explanations offered in Europe that are already familiar to Americans. The popular notion, intended to rationalize the irrational—that what is happening is a revolt of those dispossessed by globalization against neoliberalism or the like—seems as empty there as it does here. Jean-Yves Dormagen, a leading French pollster, sliced and diced the results for the magazine Le Point, and noted that the R.N. electorate—like the Trumpite one in 2020—is largely old and rural and relatively rich, though also, as in the U.S., less educated. And, as in the U.S., the real divide is cultural: country against city, old against young, people with diplomas against people without them.
The nameable cause of this general revolt is a fear of what’s perceived to be uncontrolled immigration. This involves both the movement, over several generations, of new ethnicities and old faiths into Europe and also the more recent crisis cap of hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers arriving via the Greek islands and southern Italy. No country, including the United States, has ever dealt happily with the panic, no matter how unfounded, prompted by mass migration, legal or clandestine, and the Europeans are doing no better. The rural foundation of the populist impulse also involves a revolt against European agricultural regulation associated with continent-wide efforts to address climate change. The rural protest in Europe is, ironically, anti-green.
The specificity of the R.N.’s rise in France is complicated, however, by an uncertainty about whether it is merely a grumble in the lion’s mouth, as Macron’s people suspect, or an actual ongoing rebellion. It is one thing to vote the far right into power in a relatively powerless institution, and another to endorse its governing of France. This is the gamble that Macron has made.
The result of this summer’s election will depend on how effectively the parties of the far right and the far left can form coalitions with the old moderates. This is harder to do than it might seem. On the right, the few remaining old-style Gaullists are deeply divided about joining up with the once diabolized R.N. The leader of the Republicans, Éric Ciotti, proposed an alliance with the R.N. and was booted out of his party the next day. Le Pen’s expected coalition with the still more extreme and openly anti-Islamic Reconquête! party, led by Éric Zemmour, stalled—to the point that the leader of the party’s European list, Marion Maréchal, turned on Zemmour to back the R.N., an act that he referred to as “the world record for treason,” but which he also desolately recognized as “familial.” Maréchal is, among other things, Marine Le Pen’s niece.
On the left, there was an instant agreement to call for a nineteen-thirties-style Popular Front, but this idea is already showing strain, given that neither the old-school nor the new-school social democrats, under the leadership of Raphaël Glucksmann, the son of the humanist philosopher André Glucksmann, will support for Prime Minister the fading demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the populist left party La France Insoumise. So Macron believes that he can emerge if not victorious then at least in command of a still divided hémicycle, as the French call the National Assembly, presiding from the center over “two extremes.”
Two general truths appear. First, as in the U.S., the rise of the far right can obscure the continuity of the center: the largest groupings in the European Parliament will still be of the rational right and the reasonable left—just as the truth, concealed by the antidemocratic Electoral College, is that Trump, even now, is unlikely ever to win a majority of the popular vote. (And as Anne Applebaum, a historian of the Gulag, has pointed out, none of Europe’s far-right leaders are as far right as Trump is, or as recklessly contemptuous of the rule of law.) The second general truth is that the great divide of European and American politics is no longer between left and right—as it was first symbolized in the French hémicycle at the time of the Revolution—but between authoritarian, antidemocratic demagogues of both sides and those who represent, however uncertainly, the upholding of liberal democracy, pluralism, and tolerance.
The other animal mouth that Italians talk about is that of the wolf; to tell someone “Into the wolf’s mouth!” is the equivalent of saying “Break a leg!” The idea is that it is better to throw yourself directly into a crisis than to try to avoid it. (That’s what actors do.) Macron’s gamble is that to throw yourself at the wolf may be better than waiting for the wolf to come and get you. If he’s right, Americans might learn something from that thought, too. ♦