No need to panic over the rise of the right in France

Recent victors of the robust right do not represent a move to dangerous new ground where no one is safe, argues Sholto Byrnes

Francois Fillon is socially conservative and open about his traditional Catholic values. Eric Feferberg / AFP

Soon after the victory of Francois Fillon in the French Republican Party primary on Sunday, the hand-wringing began. Mr Fillon served as a relatively nondescript prime minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, one of two heavyweights he unexpectedly vanquished to become his party’s standard-bearer in the forthcoming presidential election.

But despite his rather dull manner and less than thrilling speeches, he is, according to various reports, a “hard right politician”, “as big a threat to liberal values” as the National Front leader Marine Le Pen; he is “co-opting the far right’s message”, and is another manifestation of the alarming rise of right-wing populists throughout much of the world.

There are many of us who would rather wish the original favourite, Alain Juppe, had won instead. Another former prime minister (and foreign minister), Mr Juppe campaigned on a theme of unity and inclusiveness. He prefers integration to assimilation and opposed calls for a nationwide ban on burkinis. He warned against nationalism and was introduced at one rally as “the antidote to populism”.

Mr Fillon, on the other hand, is socially conservative and open about his traditional Catholic values. Quite apart from his demand for austerity in the nation’s finances, he wrote in a recently-published book that “the bloody invasion of Islamism into our daily life could herald a Third World War”. He wants to cut immigration and is well-disposed towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin. France’s likely next president – the assumption is that he will defeat Ms Le Pen in the second round of the elections – is certainly no optimistic multiculturalist.

But the narrative that Mr Fillon’s selection is another example of a dangerously right-wing trend is too alarmist by far. A crucial distinction needs to be made. Populism and nationalism are on the rise, it is true, and liberal values are under attack. But the parties and candidates that are succeeding are, in general, within the boundaries of politics as we have known it since the Second World War. It is the robust right, not the far right, that is winning. The two are being conflated; hence the doomsaying. But they are not the same.

Consider the evidence. However well the National Front has been doing in France, it will be Mr Fillon, not Ms Le Pen, who will win the presidential election.

In Britain, UKIP has won European elections, and claimed four million votes in the last general election. But the party has only one MP and stands no chance whatsoever of winning power. Moreover, its success has displaced the truly far-right British National Party. UKIP has arguably expanded the limits of what is politically acceptable in Britain, and many consider that to be detrimental; but it has also effectively destroyed the electoral prospects of a genuine pariah party, which surely should be counted as a positive.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, regularly attracts brickbats for his unashamedly illiberal views. But his party, Fidesz, is a member of the EU-wide European People’s Party, along with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the French Republicans. Fidesz is robust right, for sure. But the country’s real far-right, the neo-Nazi Jobbik party, is far from power, even if it managed to win 20 per cent of the vote in the last election.

What of Donald Trump, you say? Here too, there is less to worry about than those who had to retreat to “safe rooms” on hearing about his election would have you believe. As I argued in these pages recently, his belief in big government harks back to the Eisenhower/ Nixon era of more pragmatic Republicans, while his appointees thus far again conform to the “robust right” description, but certainly not the “alt right” (even Stephen Bannon, if you believe a recent New York Times profile, is not the extremist of caricature). Further, they are almost all men and women of great experience.

The rise of this type of right-winger may be of scant comfort for those who consider themselves “citizens of the world”. But we should remind ourselves that the real far right – such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, currently on trial for alleged hate speech, or Germany’s AfD – may be doing better than in the past, but they are not winning elections.

Nationalism, a begrudging attitude towards immigration, promotion of traditional values: they have always been part of the mainstream spectrum, mostly but not always on the right. Anyone who seeks to deny that should remember the swaggering patriotism of France’s General Charles de Gaulle, or Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 speech in which she warned that Britons were afraid of being “swamped by people of a different culture”.

Transnational liberalism, on the other hand, may be regarded as a more recent innovation, and one that has dissolved too many old certainties for the benefit of the few, not the many.

It is clear that huge numbers share British prime minister Theresa May’s view when she said: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”, and that charity, as the saying goes, does indeed begin at home.

There are some who see themselves as primarily part of larger communities, whether they be a new international cosmopolitan class or the global Ummah. They will find the tendency towards insularity disappointing.

But these recent victors of the robust right do not represent a move to dangerous new ground where no one is safe. We have been here before, and we will doubtless do so again in the future. So put away the hankies, dampen the hysteria. There will be time for those if and when a real far-right winger gets elected.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia