The rise of the radical right is one of the most remarkable features of our current historical moment. In 2018, the governments of eight countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) are led by far-right, nationalist, and xenophobic parties. These parties also have polarized the political terrain in three major EU countries: in France, the National Front lost the presidential election run-off in 2017, having reached the extraordinary high of 33.9 percent of the vote; in Italy, the Lega Nord has become the hegemonic force of the right-wing front and created a new government, thus marginalising Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia; and in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland entered the Bundestag in 2017 with almost 13 percent of the vote, a result that significantly weakened the position of Chancellor Angela Merkel and compelled the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to renew its coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The frequently praised ‘German exception’ has vanished, and Merkel has announced her intention to rethink her ‘generous’ policies toward immigrants and refugees. Outside the EU, Putin’s Russia and some of its satellites are far from being the only bastions of nationalism. With the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, the rise of a new nationalist, populist, racist, and xenophobic right has become a global phenomenon. The world had not experienced a similar growth of the radical right since the 1930s, a development which inevitably awakens the memory of fascism. Its ghost has reappeared in contemporary debates and reopens the old question of the relationship between historiography and the public use of the past. As Reinhart Koselleck reminded us, there is a tension between historical facts and their linguistic transcription1: concepts are indispensable for thinking about historical experience, but they can also be used to grasp new experiences, which are connected to the past through a web of temporal continuity. Historical comparison, which tries to establish analogies and differences rather than homologies and repetitions, arises from this tension between history and language.
Today, the rise of the radical right displays a semantic ambiguity: on the one hand, almost no one openly speaks of fascism—with the notable exceptions of the Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, or the National Party in Slovakia—and most observers recognize the differences between these new movements and their 1930s ancestors. On the other hand, any attempt to define this new phenomenon does imply a comparison with the interwar years. In short, the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality. Therefore, I will call the present moment a period of postfascism. This concept emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation; it certainly does not answer all the questions that have been opened up, but it does emphasize the reality of change.
First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.2 In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.3 And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism. Of course, there were enormous differences between this regime and historical fascism—the cult of the market instead of the state, television advertisements instead of ‘oceanic parades’, and so on—but Berlusconi’s plebiscitary conception of democracy and charismatic leadership strongly evoked the fascist archetype.4
This small digression shows that fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic,5 but also transhistorical. Collective memory establishes a link between a concept and its public use, which usually exceeds its purely historiographical dimension. In this perspective, fascism (much like other concepts in our political lexicon) could be seen as a transhistorical concept able to transcend the age that engendered it. To say that the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are democracies does not mean to posit the identity of their political systems or to pretend that they correspond to the Athenian democracy of Pericles’s age. In the twenty-first century, fascism will not take the face of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco; nor (we might hope) will it take the form of totalitarian terror. Yet it is also clear that there are many different ways to destroy democracy. Ritual references to the threats to democracy—and in particular Islamic terrorism—usually depict the enemy as external, but they forget a fundamental lesson from the history of fascism: that democracy can be destroyed from within.
Indeed, fascism is a key part of our historical consciousness and our political imaginary, but many aspects of today’s context complicate this historical reference. Prominent among these new circumstances is the rise of Islamist terrorism, which commentators and political actors often define as ‘Islamic fascism’. Since the new radical right portrays itself precisely as a bastion opposed to this ‘Islamic fascism’, the word ‘fascism’ appears more like an obstacle to our understanding than a useful category of interpretation. This is why the notion of ‘postfascism’ seems more appropriate. Notwithstanding its evident limits, it helps us to describe a phenomenon in transition, a movement that is still in transformation and has not yet crystallised. For this very reason, ‘postfascism’ does not have the same status as the concept of ‘fascism’. The historiographical debate on fascism is still open, but it defines a phenomenon whose chronological and political boundaries are clear enough. When we speak of fascism, there is no ambiguity as to what we are talking about, but the new forces of the radical right are a heterogeneous and composite phenomenon. They do not exhibit the same traits in every country, even in Europe: from France to Italy, from Greece to Austria, from Hungary to Poland and Ukraine, they have certain points in common but are also very different from one another.
Postfascism should also be distinguished from neofascism, that is, the attempt to perpetuate and regenerate an old fascism. That is particularly true of the various parties and movements that have emerged in central Europe over the last two decades (Jobbik in Hungary, for instance) that openly assert their ideological continuity with historical fascism. Postfascism is something else: in most cases, it does indeed come from a classical fascist background, but it has now changed its forms. Many movements belonging to this constellation no longer claim such origins and clearly distinguish themselves from neofascism. In any case, they no longer exhibit an ideological continuity with classical fascism. In trying to define them, we cannot ignore the fascist womb from which they emerged, insofar as these are their historical roots, but we should also consider their metamorphoses. They have transformed themselves, and they are moving in a direction whose ultimate outcome remains unpredictable. When they have settled as something else, with precise and stable political and ideological features, we will have to coin some new definition. Postfascism belongs to a particular regime of historicity—the beginning of the twenty-first century—which explains its erratic, unstable, and often contradictory ideological content, in which antinomic political philosophies mix together.
The National Front, a French movement with a well-known history, epitomizes these transformations. It is in many regards an emblematic force, given its recent success and its presence today in the European political spotlight. When the National Front was founded in 1972, it was obvious that it had sprung from the womb of French fascism. Then over the next decades it managed to bring together various currents of the far right, from nationalists to Catholic-fundamentalists, Poujadists and colonialists (in particular, nostalgists for Algérie française). The key of this successful operation possibly was the relatively short historical distance that separated it from Vichy and France’s colonial wars. The fascist component was able to bring the others together and served as the driving force of the party at the moment of its foundation.
The National Front had begun to evolve already in the 1990s, but it was only when Marine Le Pen became its leader in 2011 that the party really started to shed its skin.6 Its discourse changed, and it no longer claimed its old ideological and political principles; it even significantly repositioned itself on the French political stage. Concerned for its respectability, the National Front sought to join the Fifth Republic system, putting itself forward as a ‘normal’, painless alternative choice. Of course, it opposed the European Union and the traditional establishment, but it no longer wished to appear as a subversive force. Unlike classical fascism, which wanted to change everything, the National Front’s ambition is now to transform the system from within. One might object that even Mussolini and Hitler conquered power through legal channels, but the objection doesn’t hold; their will to overthrow the rule of law and wipe out democracy was clearly affirmed.
Far more than a political legacy, Marine Le Pen’s line of descent from the early National Front takes the form of biological filiation: it was the father who handed power to the daughter, thus giving the movement clear dynastic traits. But this nationalist party is now led by a woman, which is something wholly unprecedented for a fascist movement. The National Front is also marked by tensions which are most obviously apparent in the ideological conflict between father and daughter, and indeed between those currents attached to the early National Front and those that want to transform it into something else. The National Front has begun a metamorphosis, a change of line, which has not yet crystallised; the transformation is still ongoing.
In the face of this new far-right ascension, it would be a dangerous illusion to look at the EU as the ‘remedy’. Despite a huge rhetoric about the European idea, the outcome of several decades of EU policies is institutional failure. The contrast between contemporary EU elites and their ancestors is compelling. It is so strong that, by reaction, one would be tempted to admire its founding fathers. I am not speaking of the intellectuals that, like Altiero Spinelli, imagined a federal Europe in the middle of a terrible war. I am thinking of the architects of the EU: Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, and Robert Schuman. As Susan Watkins recently reminded us, all of these figures were born in the 1880s, at the apogee of nationalism, and grew up in a time in which people travelled in horse-drawn carriages.7 They probably shared a certain European conception of Germany: Adenauer had been mayor of Cologne, De Gasperi had represented the Italian minority in the Hapsburg Parliament, and Schuman grew up in Strasburg, in German Alsace before 1914. When they met, they spoke German, but they defended a cosmopolitan and multicultural vision of Germany, far from the tradition of Prussian nationalism and Pan-Germanism.8 They had a vision of Europe, which they sketched as a common destiny in a bipolar world, and they had courage, insofar as they proposed this project to peoples that had just come out from a continental civil war. Their plan of economic integration—coal and steel—rested on political will. They conceived a common market as the first step toward political unification, not as an act of submission to financial interests. For better and for worse, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand were the last to act like statesmen. They did not have the same stature as their predecessors, but neither were they simple executives of banks and international financial institutions.
The generation that replaced them at the turn of the twenty-first century has neither vision—it boasts its lack of ideas as a virtue of postideological pragmatism—nor courage, insofar as its choices always depend on opinion polls. Its exemplar is Tony Blair, the artist of the lie, opportunism, and political careerism, today hugely discredited in his own country but still involved in several lucrative activities. A convinced Europeanist—the most pro-European among postwar British leaders—he embodies a mutation: the birth of a neoliberal political elite that transcends the traditional cleavage between right and left. (Tariq Ali calls this the ‘extreme centre’.9) Blair has been the model for François Hollande, Matteo Renzi, the leaders of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), and even, to a certain extent, Angela Merkel, who rules in a perfect harmony with the SPD. Today, neoliberalism has absorbed the inheritors of both social democracy and Christian conservative currents.
The result of this change was the impasse of the European project itself. On the one hand, this lack of vision transformed the EU into an agency charged with applying measures demanded by financial powers; on the other hand, this lack of courage impeded any advance in the process of political integration. Obsessed by the opinion polls, EU statesmen are completely lacking in any strategic vision; they are unable to think beyond the next elections. Paralyzed by the impossibility of coming back to old national sovereignties and unwilling to build federal institutions, the EU created a monster as strange as it is awful: the ‘troika’, an entity that has neither a juridical and political existence nor democratic legitimacy, yet nevertheless holds real power and rules the continent. The IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the EU Commission dictate policies to every national government, evaluate their application, and decide on compulsory adjustments. They can change the executive itself, as occurred in Italy at the end of 2011 and in the summer of 2018. In the first case, Mario Monti, the man with the trust of the ECB and Goldman Sachs, replaced Berlusconi; in the second, President Sergio Mattarella refused to nominate the Minister of Economy of a government supported by a parliamentary majority because many newspapers depicted him as ‘eurosceptic’, that is, hostile to the EU currency. Monti was an unelected ‘technical’ leader charged with applying the recipes decided by the ‘troika’. In 2018, Paolo Savona was replaced by Giovanni Tria, an economist whom the troika could consider more reliable, in exchange for a series of concessions to the Lega Nord’s xenophobic and authoritarian demands. The right to decide on human beings’ life and death—the right that distinguishes classical sovereignty—is precisely the right the ‘troika’ imposed during the Greek crisis, when it threatened to asphyxiate and kill an entire country. When the ‘troika’ does not have specific interests to defend, the EU no longer exists and breaks up: for instance, faced with the current refugee crisis, each country wants to close its borders. In these circumstances, xenophobic politicians are no longer incompatible with EU governance.
This overwhelming power does not emanate from any parliament or from popular sovereignty, since the IMF does not belong to the EU, the ‘Eurogroup’ is an informal gathering of EU finance ministries, and the ECB (according to its own statutes) is an independent institution. Thus, as many analysts observed, the ‘troika’ embodies a state of exception. Yet this state of exception does not share many features with the dictatorships of the past that, according to classical political theory, expressed the autonomy of the political. In the EU’s current situation, this state of exception is not transitional; it constitutes its normal mode of functioning—the exception has become the rule—and implies the complete submission of the political to the financial.10 In short, it is a state of exception that establishes a sort of financial dictatorship, a neoliberal Leviathan. The ‘troika’ fixes its rules, transmits them to the different EU states, and then controls their application. This is, in the final analysis, the ‘ordo-liberalism’ of Wolfgang Schäuble: not capitalism submitted to political rules, but a financial capitalism that dictates its own rules. Statesmen may act as ‘commissars’, in a Schmittian sense, but the Nomos (a kind of existential law) they embody and to which all juridical rules are subdued is economic and financial, not political. Thus, the constitutive contradiction of our modern democracies in which a juridical-political rationality coexists with an economic-managerial rationality has finally found a solution with the erasure of the political body—democracy—by a technique of government.11 In other words, government has been replaced by governance, the result of a financialization of politics that has transformed the state into a tool of both the incorporation and the dissemination of neoliberal reason.12 Who could better personify such a financial state of exception than politicians like Jean-Claude Juncker? For twenty years he led the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which he transformed into the fatherland of tax avoidance capitalism. The definition of the state coined by Marx in the nineteenth century—a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie—has found its almost perfect embodiment in the EU.
If the EU is unable to change course after experiencing the trauma of Brexit, one might well ask how it can survive at all—and whether it even deserves to. Today the EU does not stand as a barrier to the growth of the far right but fuels it. Indeed, the unravelling of the EU could have an unpredictable effect on how these movements develop. If the EU were to break up, sparking an economic crisis, the far right could well radicalise: postfascism could thus take on the traits of neofascism. This process could spread from one country to the next, through a domino effect. Nobody can reasonably rule out such a frightening scenario, which further emphasises the transient and unstable character of the ‘postfascist’ right.
We are yet to reach such a point. Today, the dominant force in the global economy—finance capital—is not gambling on these movements, whether that means Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election or the neofascists in other countries. In fact, finance capital supports the political pillars of the EU, which is to say the ‘extreme centre’ parties. These forces opposed Brexit, just as Wall Street backed Hillary Clinton in the US election. The scenario described above, in which the radical right reaches power and the EU disintegrates, would have to involve a recomposition of the dominant social and political bloc across the continent. In a protracted situation of chaos, anything can become possible. This is essentially what happened in Germany between 1930 and 1933, when the Nazis broke out of the margins and a movement of ‘enraged plebeians’ became the unavoidable interlocutor of big business, the industrial and financial elites, and then the army. In the interwar period, fascism claimed to be an option against Bolshevism. Differently from the 1930s, however, the current European crisis does not appear to open the way (at least in foreseeable terms) to a left solution. The lack of a credible left alternative has many contradictory consequences.
A fundamental pillar of classical fascism was anti-communism. (Mussolini defined his movement as ‘revolution against revolution’.) There is nothing comparable in the postfascist imagination, which is not haunted by Jungerian figures of militiamen with metallic bodies sculpted in the trenches. It knows only bodybuilders trained in ordinary fitness centres. Communism and the left are no longer its foremost, mortal enemies, and it does not transcend the limits of a radical conservatism. In this postfascist mental landscape, the Islamic terrorist who has replaced the Bolshevik does not work in the factories but hides away in the suburbs populated by postcolonial immigrants. Therefore, in a historical perspective, postfascism could be seen as the result of the defeat of the revolutions of the twentieth century: after the collapse of communism and the social-democratic parties’ embrace of neoliberal governmentality, the radical right is in many countries becoming the most influential force opposed to the ‘system’, even as it resists showing any subversive face and avoids any competition with the radical left.
But such a position is not only advantageous to the radical right. In the 1930s it was anti-communism that pushed Europe’s elites to accept Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. As several historians have pointed out, such dictators certainly benefited from the many ‘miscalculations’ made by statesmen and the traditional conservative parties, but there is no doubt that without the Russian Revolution and the global Depression, the economic, military, and political German elites faced with a collapsing Weimar Republic would not have allowed Hitler to take power. Today, economic elites’ interests are much better represented by the European Union than by the radical right. The latter could become a credible interlocutor and a potential form of leadership only in the event of a collapse of the euro, pushing the continent into a situation of chaos and instability. Unfortunately, such a possibility is far from impossible. Our political elites evoke the ‘sleepwalkers’ on the brink of 1914, the holders of the ‘European concert’ who fell into catastrophe completely unaware of what was happening.13
The far right has different faces in different countries and cannot be fought in Greece in the same way as in Germany, France, or Italy. However, we can draw several indicators from the French example, in a country whose political system enormously amplifies the far right whenever presidential elections are held. After the earthquake of the 2002 contest, in which Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round for the first time, the National Front was able to set the domestic political agenda. Fifteen years later, Marine Le Pen’s presence in the second round of the presidential elections seemed a normal development, and today she leads the opposition to Emmanuel Macron. When Nicolas Sarkozy was Interior Minister he promised to ‘clear out’ the banlieues [suburbs with large working-class and ethnic-minority populations] and then as President he created a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. In a climate of tension aggravated by terrorist attacks, the national government under Socialist president François Hollande adopted the far right’s agenda even further. Thus, the head of government, Manuel Valls, first proclaimed a state of emergency and then made an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to pass laws stripping terrorists of their French citizenship, in a context of indiscriminate police violence. Republican rhetoric has given way to ‘security’ measures. Political dissent and social movements opposed to the government were presented as a threat to national security, while the state enacted a policy of discrimination and suspicion against populations of postcolonial origin. These latter, perceived as a source of terrorism, are the most likely to have dual citizenship and thus most affected by the threat of their French nationality being removed. If we do indeed need an authoritarian and xenophobic state to guarantee national security, then the National Front will always appear as the most credible force to provide this. These special laws, which Macron decided to maintain, include many proposals that have always been advanced by the National Front.
Governments of both the right and the left have implemented austerity policies, as does today’s French government, which presents itself as being of both right and left. In response to this, Marine Le Pen claims to defend the interests of the ‘white’ popular classes, the ‘French of French stock’ (français de souche). This is enough to attract a section of the popular electorate which had previously taken refuge in abstention in response to its abandonment by the left and its loss of a political compass.
Many scholars depict today’s far-right movements and parties as a new political family based on a shared ideology: ‘national-populism’.14 In France, this concept appeared on the intellectual scene in the mid-1980s, above all thanks to Pierre-André Taguieff, who sought to give it a more systematic definition.15 At first sight, such a notion seems more pertinent today than thirty years ago, for there is now a much more obvious difference between a party like the National Front and classical fascism. But the concept of populism has been so widely abused that it raises a robust and justified scepticism. On the one hand, its free-floating and all-encompassing boundaries make it almost ungraspable; on the other hand, it is impossible to speak of ‘populism’ as a fully fledged political phenomenon, with its own profile and ideology. There is a certain consensus among historians that this term does apply to some nineteenth-century phenomena, like the Russian and American populisms (the Narodniks since the 1860s, the agrarian People’s Party between 1892 and 1896), Boulangism in France in the early years of the Third Republic, or the great variety of Latin American populisms in the twentieth century,16 but populism is above all a style of politics rather than an ideology. It is a rhetorical procedure that consists of exalting the people’s ‘natural’ virtues and opposing them to the élite—and society itself to the political establishment—in order to mobilise the masses against ‘the system’. But we can see such rhetoric among a great variety of political leaders and movements. Over recent years, the accusation of ‘populism’ has been levelled against Nicolas Sarkozy, Marine Le Pen, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France; Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom; Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Salvini, and Beppe Grillo in Italy; Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Pablo Iglesias in Spain; Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States; and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Nestor Kirchner and then his wife Cristina in Argentina. Given the enormous differences among these figures, the word ‘populism’ has become an empty shell, which can be filled by the most disparate political contents. Considering the elasticity and ambiguity of this concept, Marco D’Eramo points out that it does more to define those who use it than those to whom it is usually applied: it is a political tool useful for stigmatising opponents. To constantly brand political adversaries as ‘populists’ more than anything reveals the disdain that those who brandish this term have for the people. When the neoliberal order, with its austerity policies and its social inequalities, is set up as a norm, all opposition automatically becomes ‘populist’.17 ‘Populism’ is a category used as a self-defence mechanism by political elites who stand ever further from the people. According to Jacques Rancière:
Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividing of the people; to govern without politics.18
Judging by the European newspapers, from El País to La Repubblica, Le Monde, The Guardian, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the growth of populism is rooted in both social policies—the challenge to austerity, the call for a rise in the minimum wage, the defence of public services, and the rejection of public spending cuts—and a politics based on xenophobia and racism. This is but a further example of the confusion that the word ‘populism’ can produce. According to this logic, anyone who criticises the neoliberal politics of the ‘troika’ is a populist. Syriza in Greece (until 2015, at least) and Podemos in Spain today have thus been regularly defined as populists. That is how all kinds of antiestablishment politicians can be put in the same bag, as long as one merrily ignores the radical ideological differences between them. The concept of populism erases the distinction between left and right, thus blurring a useful compass to understand politics.
Even the most nuanced, sharp, informed, and rigorous attempts to conceptualise populism inevitably fall into this epistemological trap. Populism becomes an abstract category formalised in a set of general features—authoritarianism, radical nationalism understood as a political religion, charismatic leadership, dislike for pluralism and the rule of law, a monolithic and homogeneous vision of the ‘people’, demagogic rhetoric, and so on—which certain far-right and leftist movements undoubtedly fit. In order to define this abstract category, however, one must ignore both their historical genealogies and their social and political aims, which dramatically diverge. If, according to Federico Finchelstein’s assessment, ‘populism is an authoritarian form of democracy that emerged originally as a postwar reformulation of fascism’, a matrix to which it would remain ‘both historically and genetically linked’, it is very difficult to understand his typology, which includes ‘neoclassical populism of the left’, a political current embodied by Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales in Latin America and by Podemos and Syriza in Europe.19 Isaiah Berlin was not completely wrong when, displaying his old conservative wisdom, he pointed out the futility of building a kind of ‘Platonic populism’. Carrying forth this exercise, he observed, many scholars have developed a curious Cinderella complex: ‘there is a shoe—the word “populism”—for which somewhere there must exist a foot.’20
One further example may also shed light on this misunderstanding. While they are often all bundled together under the label ‘populism’, there is a fundamental difference between Latin American populism and postfascism. When we look at his political style, we see that Hugo Chávez was a populist par excellence. He often used demagogy as a technique of communication and regularly appealed to the people, which he purported to embody. Sometimes he was right to make such a claim: in 2002 it was a popular uprising that saved him from the attempted coup d’état organised by the Venezuelan right and the US Embassy. Whatever their limits, the Latin American populisms seek to redistribute wealth and have the goal of including in the political system those layers of society that are ordinarily excluded.21 The political economy of these experiences is certainly a matter for further discussion—the inability to use oil income, which represents almost all the state’s wealth, to diversify the Venezuelan economy, has led the country to the brink of catastrophe following the fall in the price of a barrel of oil—but the goals of these Latin American populisms are essentially social. Charismatic leadership and plebiscitary deliberation are certainly not genuine forms of democracy, but the antipopulist campaigns against these governments by El País and The Financial Times are grounded in different motivations: in Latin America, left-wing populism was the most consistent form of political resistance against neoliberal globalisation.
Conversely, the ‘populist’ parties in Western Europe are characterised by xenophobia and racism, and their goal is precisely to exclude the lowest, most precarious, and marginal layers of population, meaning first of all immigrants. Marco Revelli is thus right to define right-wing populism as a ‘senile disorder’ of liberal democracy, a ‘revolt of the included’ who have been pushed to the margins.22 Considering this radical difference, the concepts of ‘populism’ and ‘national-populism’ generate confusion instead of helping to clarify the terms of debate. They focus exclusively on a political style which can be shared by currents of both left and right, thus blurring its fundamental nature. From this point of view, populism is a twin of ‘totalitarianism’, another successful concept that, emphasising some obvious but superficial analogies between fascism and communism, depicts them as political regimes sharing a common nature. Both populism and totalitarianism are categories that suppose a vision of classical liberalism as a historical, philosophical, and political norm. They also suppose an external, aristocratic gaze, coming from distant observers who adopt a superior and condescending attitude with respect to an immature and dangerous vulgus. Even a nuanced analyst like Jan-Werner Müller, whose essay on populism is an exercise in criticising the frequent abuses of this concept, finishes by considering it a warning for our rulers, blindsided by the deep crisis of our liberal democracies’ institutional forms of representation.23 As Marco D’Eramo writes in a review of Müller’s essay:
The conventional discourse on populism today is the work of intellectuals fancying themselves as counsellors to the Prince. Naturally, those who produce it do not regard themselves as part of the “people”, to whom they adopt a paternalistic attitude, surveying them at times with benevolence, more often with impatience and exasperation, not to speak of alarm.24
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US election has shifted the political axis to the right worldwide, and its consequences are felt at the global level, including in Europe. Nonetheless, his triumph should be carefully analysed in its proper context. Until the eve of the vote, Hillary Clinton’s victory appeared so inevitable that the final result came as a surprise and a profound trauma. For the New York Times, the Democratic candidate had a more than 80 percent chance of winning, and after her defeat its readers had the impression of having been suddenly pitched into a nightmare, of experiencing a counterfactual history in real life. People felt they were living an alternative reality, like Charles Lindbergh’s victory in the fictitious 1941 election described by Philip Roth in his The Plot Against America, the postwar United States dominated by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany depicted in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, or Robert E. Lee’s victory against the Union imagined in the recent HBO series Confederate.
Because Clinton’s victory was considered so inevitable, Trump’s success seemed like the violation of a ‘law of history’. For an Italian, this was rather less surprising, after our own twenty years of Berlusconism. We were already rather blasé, despite the obvious recognition that Trump’s victory will have much more fundamental effects. If we look more closely at the results of the US election, the conclusion we have to draw is clear: what the media failed to predict was not some enormous wave of neoconservatism, which did not in fact take place, but rather the collapse of the Democratic vote. Trump won thanks to the peculiarities of the US electoral system, securing many fewer votes not only than Hillary Clinton (he trailed her by almost 3 million) but also Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. His victory owed to Clinton’s collapse in a series of traditional Democratic strongholds. We are not seeing the ‘fascistisation’ of the United States, as if the country had been hypnotised by a new charismatic leader; rather, we are seeing a deep rejection of the political and economic establishment, with mass abstention and a protest vote captured by a demagogic and populist politician.
Throughout the campaign, parallels were repeatedly drawn between Trump and Benito Mussolini. Trump was defined as a fascist not only by liberal-left publications like The Nation or The New Republic, but also columnists in the New York Times and Washington Post (including a neoconservative analyst like Robert Kagan) and even former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.25 These were often superficial analyses, focused on the Republican candidate’s individual personality. They underlined those of his traits that most closely resembled those of the classic fascist leaders: Trump presents himself as a ‘man of action’ and not of thought; he gives vent to his offensive sexism, parading his virility in a particularly vulgar and outrageous way; he weaponises xenophobia and racism as propaganda tools, promising to kick out the Muslims and Latinos, paying tribute to the police when officers kill black Americans, and even suggesting that given his background Obama is not a real American. His promise to ‘make America great again’ means, first of all, to make it white again.26 He played on the chauvinism of his electorate and posed as the defender of the popular classes hit hard by deindustrialisation and the economic crisis that has exacerbated social inequalities since 2008.27 When he makes TV appearances, his charisma bursts into Americans’ living rooms: he does not hide his authoritarianism, and he uses demagogy to contrast the situation of ordinary Americans (who he is not part of and has always exploited) and the corrupt Washington political system. During the TV debates with Hillary Clinton he even threatened to send her to jail once he was elected president. All these fascistic traits are undeniable, but fascism is hardly reducible to a particular political leader’s personality.
Trump has not been raised to power by a mass fascist movement, but by his TV stardom. From this point of view, the better comparison is with Berlusconi rather than Mussolini. Trump is not threatening to make an army of black shirts (or brown shirts) march on Washington, for the simple reason that he does not have organised troops behind him. He was able to embody the popular exasperation against the elites in Wall Street and Washington, of which the Clinton family had become the symbol. Yet he is himself a representative of the country’s economic elite. Trump’s personal fight against the establishment is all the more paradoxical given that he is the candidate of the Republican Party, the so-called Grand Old Party (GOP) that stands as one of the pillars of this same establishment. Thus far he has proven more effective in transforming the GOP—during the election campaign almost all Republican grandees had to distance themselves from his candidacy—than he has in building a fascist movement. Trump has managed to exploit the Republican Party’s identity crisis and loss of ideological landmarks, a crisis that has characterised it since the end of the Bush era. Politically, he represents an authoritarian turn on the political terrain, but on the socioeconomic terrain he displays a certain eclecticism. He is both protectionist and neoliberal: on the one hand, he wants to put an end to the free trade treaty with Mexico and to establish customs barriers with both Europe and China, while on the other hand he wants to radically reduce taxes and completely privatise social services. He is thus determined to dismantle the Obama administration’s already rather modest social policy, especially in the field of health care.
From this point of view, the new right in Europe, with its opposition to the euro, is much more ‘social’ than Trump is. In the United States, it was Bernie Sanders who represented the social opposition to the establishment. Classical fascism was not neoliberal; it was statist and imperialist, promoting policies of military expansion. Trump is anti-statist and rather isolationist; he would like to put an end to America’s wars and (notwithstanding multiple contradictions) seeks a reconciliation with Putin’s Russia. Fascism has always supported the idea of a national or racial community, while Trump preaches individualism. He embodies the xenophobic and reactionary version of Americanism: the social-Darwinist self-made man, the vigilante who asserts his own right to bear arms, the resentment of the whites who are becoming a minority in a land of immigration. He secured the vote of a quarter of the eligible electorate by interpreting the fear and frustrations of a minority, just as WASP nationalism did a century ago when it rose up against the arrival of Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish migrants from southern and eastern Europe.
We could thus define Trump as a postfascist leader without fascism, adding—here following the historian Robert O. Paxton—that the US president’s fascist behaviour is unconscious and involuntary, for he has probably never read a single book on Hitler or Mussolini.28 Trump is an uncontrollable and unpredictable loose cannon. When we put things in proper historical perspective, it is clear that this is not the same thing as classical fascism. The historical comparisons allow us to draw analogies, but we cannot map Trump’s profile onto a fascist paradigm from the interwar period. The context is simply too different.
We could say that Trump is as distant from classical fascism as Occupy Wall Street, the 15-M movement in Spain, and the Nuit Debout movement in France are from the communism of the twentieth century. The social and political opposition between these forces is just as profound as the historical opposition between communism and fascism. But if this works as an analogy, this does not mean that the subjects of either pole identify as heirs to that twentieth-century history. In other words, to speak of Trump’s ‘fascism’ is not to establish a historical continuity or to point to a legacy that he has consciously embraced. Undoubtedly, there are some striking similarities. Trump claims to be standing up for the popular classes who have been hard-hit by deindustrialisation and the 2008 economic crisis, yet does this not by attacking the main force responsible—finance capital —but rather by pointing to scapegoats. His election campaign also reproduced various elements of the fascist anti-Semitism of the 1930s, which defended a mythical, ethnically homogenous national community against its enemies. Jews were fascism’s particular enemy; Trump has altered and lengthened the list so that it now includes blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and non-white immigrants. The incredible divide between rural and urban America, which the election revealed (Trump lost all the cities, even in states in which he won over 60 percent of the vote) demonstrates the long-standing link between economic crisis and xenophobia. Faced with the unstoppable rise of multiracialism, fear and xenophobic reaction have spread across white America. A politics based on scapegoats uses and amplifies this. In Trump’s rhetoric, the word ‘establishment’ reproduces and reformulates the old anti-Semitic cliché of the virtuous, harmonious, serene community rooted in the land under threat from the anonymous, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and corrupt metropolis.
Some of the analogies are ludicrous, almost parodic. The videos of Trump landing in his aircraft, descending onto the tarmac, and addressing the crowd gathered on the runway—an excited crowd of individuals armed with their mobile phones, holding them out for a photo in a strange substitute for the fascist salute—bring to mind the opening scenes of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s film on the Nazi rally at Nuremberg in 1936, in which Hitler flies over the city before being welcomed by the delirious crowd. But this is a merely accidental analogy. Unlike Mussolini or Hitler, Trump has probably never read Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895)29—the bible for old-style charismatic leaders—and his skill as a demagogue instead owes to his familiarity with the codes of television. It is probably true that a lot of his supporters would count as an F (fascist) in Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno’s 1950 classification of the ‘authoritarian personality’.30 But fascism is not reducible to the temperament of the leader nor (however important it may be) the psychological disposition of his followers.
The problem lies precisely in the fact that he does not have a programme, and this sets him apart from historical fascism. In the catastrophic context of the interwar period, fascism was able, despite its ideological eclecticism, to propose a total alternative to what looked like a decadent liberal order. In other words, fascism put forward a project for society, a new civilisation. Trump promotes no alternative model for society. His program is limited to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. He does not want to change the United States’s socioeconomic model, for the simple reason that he himself draws enormous benefit from it.
Fascism emerged in an age of strong state intervention in the economy, a characteristic shared by the Soviet Union, the fascist countries, and the Western democracies, starting with Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’. It was born in the era of Fordist capitalism, of assembly-line production and mass culture. Trump has emerged in the age of neoliberalism, in the age of financialised capitalism, of competitive individualism and endemic precarity. He does not mobilise the masses but attracts a mass of atomised individuals, of impoverished and isolated consumers. He has not invented a new political style; he does not want to look like a soldier and does not wear a uniform. He shows off a luxurious, terribly kitsch lifestyle that resembles the backdrop of a Hollywood TV series. He embodies a neoliberal anthropological model. It is difficult to imagine Mussolini or Hitler as real estate promoters. This is what separates Trump from the nationalist, racist, and xenophobic movements of old Europe, which seek a measure of respectability by breaking free of their fascist origins. Paradoxically, whereas the United States has never had a president as right-wing as Trump, fascist ideas are probably less widespread today than they were sixty or a hundred years ago, during McCarthyism or the witch hunts of the Red Scare.
This is not to say that Trump’s victory is an isolated event. It makes up part of an international context that also includes the crisis of the European Union, Brexit, and the French presidential election of spring 2017. It is part of a general tendency in which movements emerge to challenge the established powers-that-be and to a certain degree globalisation itself (the euro, the EU, the US establishment) from the right. These rising forces do map out a sort of postfascist constellation. But this is a heteroclite tendency that brings together various different currents of sometimes very varied genealogies.
If ‘populism’ is often defined as a form of ‘anti-politics’, one has to understand what this term really means. For Pierre Rosanvallon, populism is a ‘pathological’ form of politics, that is, the ‘pure politics of the unpolitical’ (la politique pure de l’impolitique).31 The triumph of the ‘unpolitical’ (or anti-politics) simply means that representative democracy is paralysed and ultimately ‘vampirized’ by ‘counterdemocracy’, a set of counterpowers that is both needed by democracy and susceptible to killing it. This could appear as a naïve return to Rousseau, but instruments for evaluating and putting checks on power—referendums, transparency, permanent controls, elimination of any intermediate bodies between the citizens and power—may destroy democracy when they bring the principle of representation itself into question. According to Rosanvallon, these counterpowers create a gap ‘between civic-civil society and the political sphere’ that can be both fruitful and dangerous: on the one hand, ‘social distrust can encourage a salutary civic vigilance and thus oblige government to pay greater heed to social demands’; on the other, ‘it can also encourage destructive forms of denigration and negativity’.32
The philosopher Roberto Esposito defines ‘the impolitical’ (impolitico) as a disillusioned approach to politics that reduces it to pure ‘factuality’, to pure materiality: the classic Schmittean vision of modern politics as a secularised form of the old political theology has become obsolete.33 Modern politics consisted of the sacralisation of secular institutions—first of all the state sovereign power, then the Parliament and the Constitution—as a substitute for the old monarchy based on divine right. The emblems and the liturgies of absolutism were replaced by republican rituals and symbols. In this vision, political forces embody values; political representation has an almost sacred connotation and pluralism expresses a conflict of ideas, a powerful intellectual commitment. Today’s statesmen universally consider themselves good pragmatic (and, most important, ‘postideological’) managers. Politics has ceased to embody values and has instead become a site for the pure ‘governance’ and distribution of power, of the administration of huge resources. In the political field, they no longer fight for ideas, but instead build careers. The ‘impolitical’ reveals the material reality that underlies political representation. What today is usually called ‘anti-politics’ is the reaction against contemporary politics, which has been divested of its sovereign powers—mostly subsisting as empty institutions—and reduced to its ‘material constitution’—the ‘impolitical’—that is, a mixture of economic powers, bureaucratic machines, and an army of political intermediaries.
Viewed as the embodiment of ‘anti-politics’, populism has countless critics. But these critics are mostly silent on its real causes. Anti-politics is the result of the hollowing-out of politics. In the last three decades, the alternation of power between centre-left and centre-right governments has not meant any essential policy change. For the alternation of power means a change in the personnel who are administrating public resources, each using his or her own networks and patronage structures, rather than any change of government policies. This development is combined with two other significant transformations in both civil society and state politics. On the one hand, we see the growing reification of public space—the site of a critical use of reason in which the authorities’ actions are analysed and criticised34—for this space has been absorbed by media monopolies and the communications industry. On the other hand, the traditional separation of powers is put into question by a continuing shift of prerogatives from the legislative to the executive power. In this permanent state of exception, parliaments are dismissed from their original function of making laws and compelled to simply ratify laws that have already been decided by the executive. In such a context, it is inevitable that ‘anti-politics’ will grow. The critics who denounce populist ‘anti-politics’ are often the same people responsible for these transformations: pyromaniacs disguised as firemen.
Postfascism no longer has the ‘strong’ values of its 1930s ancestors, but it purports to fill the vacuum that has been left by a politics reduced to the impolitical. Its recipes are politically reactionary and socially regressive: they involve the restoration of national sovereignty, the adoption of forms of economic protectionism, and the defense of endangered ‘national identities’. As politics has fallen into discredit, the postfascists uphold a plebiscitary model of democracy that destroys any process of collective deliberation in favour of a relationship that merges people and leader, the nation and its chief. The term ‘impolitical’ has a long history dating back to Thomas Mann, one of the leading representatives of the Conservative Revolution in Germany at the end of World War I.35 But contemporary forms of anti-politics do not only belong to the right. In Italy, the Five Star Movement incarnates a regressive critique of representative democracy, but it is also able to canalise the search for an alternative to the current crisis of politics. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to stigmatise ‘anti-politics’ by defending actually existing politics is doomed in advance.
The new forces of the radical right certainly do have some features in common—first and foremost, xenophobia, with a renovated kind of rhetoric. They have abandoned the old clichés of classical racism, even though their xenophobia is indeed directed against immigrants or populations with postcolonial origins. Second, Islamophobia, the core of this new nationalism, has replaced anti-Semitism. We shall return to this point. They certainly also have other themes in common, but nationalism, anti-globalisation, protectionism, and authoritarianism can be embodied in very different ways, with certain ideological shifts. The National Front no longer calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, but it demands a strong government and a sovereign state that refuses to submit to the power of finance: it proposes an authoritarian, autarchic nationalism.
There is a certain coherence to such discourse, even if no longer grounded in a strong ideology. The militarist and imperialist rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco is no longer credible. Postfascism does not want to rebuild colonial empires or foment war, and its opposition to Western wars in the Middle East on first glance looks like ‘pacifism’. Of course, even classical fascism was characterised by incoherence, tension, and conflict. Italian Fascism and German Nazism brought together a variety of tendencies, from the futurist avant-garde to conservative romanticism, from agrarian mythologies to eugenics. As we shall see, French fascism was a galaxy of political forces, ‘leagues’ and groups far beyond Marshal Pétain’s ‘National Revolution’. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, ideology played a very important role in this galaxy – and certainly far more so than it does among the forces of the radical right today. Behind the National Front we do not see intellectual figures comparable to the Action Française leaders Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, or to Robert Brasillach and Henri de Man, the exponents of collaborationism in Nazi-occupied Paris and Brussels.
Some attempts to renew the far right and to transform its political forms have taken place in France in the last decades, but even its most dynamic and sophisticated current, the GRECE,36 is an intellectual circle rather than a political group. Its leading figure, Alain De Benoist, does not seem to have played any direct role in the metamorphosis of the National Front. Today, the defence of its ideas in public debate is assured by intellectuals and television political pundits like Éric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut, who are neither fascist ideologues nor members of the party. Those who, like Renaud Camus, theorist of the ‘great replacement’ of the French population by immigrants, have openly declared their support for the National Front are not so numerous. They may be brilliant essayists and do not hide their ambition to become the equivalent, in today’s France, of Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, but their influential role depends almost exclusively on their overwhelming presence on TV talk shows.
It seems that in its attempts to achieve republican respectability, the National Front is doing ever more to distance itself from extremist neofascist thinkers like Alain Soral, and it is worth noting that it was not Marine Le Pen but Éric Zemmour who waged a campaign around the idea of the ‘great replacement’.37
This is an additional symptom of an unfinished mutation, which puts into question the traditional categories used to analyse the far right. Beyond the differences between the French, Italian, and German cases, the ambition of classical fascism was to ground its politics in a new project and a new worldview. It purported to be ‘revolutionary’; it wanted to build a new civilisation and sought a ‘third way’ between liberalism and communism.38 Today, this is no longer the concern of the radical right. Historically, fascist nationalism needed to set itself in opposition to some sort of ‘other’. First came the Jew, the mythical vision of a sort of anti-race, a foreign body that sought to corrupt the nation. Added to this was a sexist and misogynous worldview in which women would always remain submissive. Women were considered the reproducers of the race; they had to take care of the home and raise children and not play a role in public life.39 One could point to cases like Italian fascist Minister of Culture Margherita Sarfatti (who was also Jewish) or the propagandist Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, but they were exceptions. Homosexuality was another figure of the anti-race, the embodiment of the moral weakness and decadent mores that stood at odds with the fascist cult of virility.40 Today, all this rhetoric has disappeared, even if homophobia and anti-feminism are very much widespread among the radical right voters. In fact, such movements often claim to be defending women’s and gay rights against Islamism. Pim Fortuyn and then his successor Geert Wilders in the Netherlands are the best-known examples of this LGBT conservatism, but they are not exceptions. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland is opposed to gay marriage, but its speaker in the Bundestag is Alice Weidel, a lesbian. Florian Philippot, the former secretary of the National Front, does not hide his homosexuality, and Renaud Camus is an icon of French gay conservatism.
While there have been far-right figures involved in movements such as the Manif pour tous beginning in 2012, which sought to oppose the introduction of equal marriage rights and adoption by gay couples, Marine Le Pen did not speak out on this issue. She left this role to her niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, who is certainly influential but also has much less exposure. In their TV and radio appearances, National Front cadres speak up for the right to wear miniskirts, against Muslims who supposedly want to impose the burqa (or the burkini) and who practice forced marriage. All this is part of the tensions and contradictions in postfascism that we have described above. Postfascism starts out from anti-feminism, anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia; the radical right continues to bring these impulses together. The most obscurantist layers vote for the National Front, but at the same time, the latter adopts wholly new themes and social practices, which do not belong to its own genetic code. Thus, Marine Le Pen’s ambiguous position on gay marriage and the Manif pour tous is not simply a tactical choice. It reflects a historical change that the far right has been forced to acknowledge, in order to avoid becoming marginalised. The European societies of the early twenty-first century are not what they were in the 1930s: today, advocating the relegation of women to the domestic sphere would be as anachronistic as demanding the return of French colonial rule in Algeria. Marine Le Pen is herself a product of this change and is well-aware that remaining bound to old ideological clichés would mean alienating wide layers of the population.
What was most striking with the Manif pour tous (beyond the idiosyncratic and ultra-reactionary aspect of certain groups) was the fact that conservative opinion, which we often call the ‘silent majority’, was now taking over the streets. And this occupation of public space involved the adoption of aesthetic codes that come from the left—think of the posters of May ’68—and whose meaning the protestors had inverted. This appropriation and diversion of symbols and slogans that do not belong to their own history reveals a certain degree of ‘emancipation’ from the right-wing ‘canon’, as well as a general redefinition of the intellectual landscape.41
The main feature of today’s postfascism is precisely the contradictory coexistence of the inheritance of classical fascism with new elements that do not belong to its tradition. Wider developments have encouraged this change. The National Front is engaging in politics in today’s world, a world in which both the public sphere and the political field have experienced a deep metamorphosis. The twentieth century had its great mass parties, which had their own ideological bedrock, their own social base, a national structure, and deep roots in civil society. None of this exists any more. Political parties no longer need an ideological arsenal. Across Europe, governing parties of both left and right no longer need to recruit intellectuals; they instead recruit experts in advertising and communications. This is also true of the National Front, which assiduously manicures its image, its slogans, and its talking points. Political style is becoming ever more important, precisely insofar as ideology is disappearing. Faced with this new context, nationalism no longer seeks to define the national community in racial, cultural, or religious terms, but rather in terms of resistance against the threat of globalisation. Donald Trump clearly represents an extreme case of this ‘anti-political’, postideological eclecticism. During the presidential campaign, he was careful not to align himself with an ideology, and even the most conservative elements of the Republican Party kept their distance from him. He changed his opinion on all manner of issues from one day to the next, albeit without ever abandoning his ‘anti-establishment’ line.
Nations were long defined in ‘objective’ terms—stable communities rooted into naturally defined territories, ethnically homogenous peoples, unified economies, cultures, languages, and religions. Nations were almost ontological entities endowed with a providential destiny of which history was the mere reflection. In the last decades, scholars have begun to consider nations as sociocultural constructs, following Benedict Anderson’s pioneering work Imagined Communities.42 In the public sphere, the old nationalist rhetoric has declined and the conservative discourse has shifted from the nation to national identity. Almost the whole right has now reformulated ‘the nation’ in terms of identity. In Italy, the far right’s xenophobia has often actually been anti-national, as in the case of the Lega Nord, which initially sought to break the ‘European’ and wealthy North of the country away from the poor, Mediterranean South. From 2013 onwards, its leader Matteo Salvini has attempted to change this by allying with neofascists—notably the movement CasaPound—and replacing the Lega’s original anti-Southern line with a generalised xenophobia.43 In France, it was Nicolas Sarkozy who made this ‘identitarian’ turn even before it was later adopted by Marine Le Pen. She belongs to a generation that never underwent the traumas that French nationalism experienced in the twentieth century: she did not witness either the Vichy regime or the war in Algeria. Her political formation took place in a scenario in which all the constitutive elements of fascism had already disappeared. In the 1970s or 1980s there were still a lot of nostalgists for Vichy, Algérie française, and Indochina—today, no longer.
This is not to say that the racism of the far right has gone away, but it has significantly blurred its original fascist matrix. In this sense, ideology is no longer a problem for the far right. All in all, its relationship with fascism is rather like social democracy’s relationship with socialism. Today, social-democratic parties around Europe have adapted to neoliberalism and excelled in dismantling the remnants of the welfare states that they created in the wake of World War II. Historically, the French Socialist Party was opposed to Gaullism, and in the late 1950s it opposed the advent of the Fifth Republic, which it saw as an authoritarian turn. But then it adapted to its institutions and abandoned all its own values in the name of economic ‘realism’, stigmatising as ‘populist’ whoever criticised its policies. The movements that uphold a Marxist-Leninist discourse and adopt the stylings of interwar communism are mere sects, while most of the radical left has abandoned any such rhetoric. In France, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste born in 2009 initially sought to go beyond the old revolutionary Marxist discourse by adopting a new language. If the programs of Podemos, or indeed of Syriza at the moment of its first electoral victory in 2015, stand radically opposed to neoliberalism, they appear rather moderate as compared to the 1970s social projects of the Union de la Gauche’s common programme, the German SPD or the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party). We have simply entered into a new regime of historicity: in the neoliberal world, the defence of the welfare state looks subversive. From this point of view, the ideological ‘incoherence’ of the far right is nothing exceptional: it reflects a change to which almost all political forces are subject.
The 2017 French presidential elections were a small political earthquake, radically questioning the traditional dichotomy between left and right which had hitherto structured the Fifth Republic. In this sense, they are comparable to what happened in Italy at the beginning of the 1990s, when the Democrazia Cristiana, the Partito Comunista Italiano, and the Partito Socialista all disappeared, or the recent Spanish elections, which saw Podemos and Ciudadanos emerge as contenders alongside the traditional right and left parties (the Partido Popular and the Socialist PSOE). Nonetheless, the election did not mark the turning point for the far right that many had announced and feared. As predicted, Marine Le Pen did reach the run-off, in which she secured almost 34 percent of the vote (over 10 million ballots). But given what had been expected—it had seemed not only that 40 percent was within reach for Le Pen, but even that she would likely surpass this threshold—this result was judged disappointing for the National Front and prompted a small crisis within its leadership.
How can we explain all this? Marine Le Pen was happy enough to be set in contrast to the outsider Emmanuel Macron: from her point of view, the situation in the second round could hardly have been more favourable. Macron, the young candidate who she faced, is a pure distillation of the establishment: a graduate of the ENA (finishing school for the French élite) and former director of Rothschilds business bank as well as Minister of the Economy in a highly unpopular government. The right-wing candidate François Fillon was swamped in scandals linked to revelations over his use of patronage, while the Parti Socialiste’s campaign was paralysed by the legacy of a discredited president and the rise of a left-wing challenger, the France Insoumise candidate Jean Luc Mélenchon, an echo of Podemos. Marine Le Pen thought that in this face-off with Macron she could appear as the candidate of all patriots, of the defenders of national sovereignty, the authentic representative of la France profonde against the globalist candidate of international finance, the man of Brussels and the Troika, much more at ease in the City of London and in Wall Street than in the poorer regions of France. In short, she would stand for the nation against globalism.
But she did not manage to seize the opportunity. Political analysts and even her own aides took the unanimous view that she ran a very poor second round campaign, and her performance in her TV debate with her opponent was simply disastrous. Many spoke of tactical errors and messaging weaknesses, but perhaps there was a deeper reason for her failure, likely linked to the antinomies of postfascism. Her campaign was weakened by the fundamental instability of her approach, which expressed the incomplete transition between the fascism of the past (the matrix of her movement) and a nationalist right that is still unable to prove its legitimacy or respectability according to the canons of liberal democracy. During the TV debate with Macron, Marine Le Pen did not use fascist language. Her racism was softened, and while her xenophobia was clearly apparent it was also inflected with a rhetoric that is in fact commonplace among all right-wing politicians. Nonetheless, her proposals ended up looking confused and vague: her hesitant approach to the question of the euro revealed a surprising incompetence, and her authoritarian tirades seemed far from convincing: no one could seriously believe that under her presidency there would be a more effective fight against terrorism. In short, her aggressive rhetoric, her obvious demagogy, her inability to make a reasoned argument and the very vague character of her proposals showed everyone watching that this candidate did not have the stuff of which statesmen are made.
Marine Le Pen is no longer a fascist, but she has not converted to democracy, either: she remains in the balance between these two poles. She is no longer a fascist, in a world that no longer accepts the ideology, the language, and the practices of the old fascism, but the ghosts of fascism continue to follow her around. Nor is she a democrat, because her words show that her conversion to democracy remains instrumental, insincere, and inauthentic. She has proven unable to go beyond a pure and simple denunciation of the powers-that-be and present herself as the herald of a credible governing force. Over the recent decades of austerity and the social and economic violence enacted by governments of all colours, the National Front has succeeded in channelling the popular classes’ revolt, becoming the outlet for the malaise and the suffering that are on the rise across wide layers of society, but it has not become a party of government. Its progress, and its limits, mirror that of other nationalist and xenophobic parties around the EU, which have experienced similar ‘defeats’ in recent years, from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom and Denmark.
More broadly, the French elections introduced a new element in the debate on populism. Macron’s victory itself marked the rise of a new type of populism, in some ways already prefigured by Matteo Renzi in Italy; a populism that is neither fascist nor reactionary, neither nationalist nor xenophobic, but a populism all the same. Like Renzi, Macron presents himself as a politician who has freed himself from the ideologies of the twentieth century: beyond both left and right, he has created a government in which ministers from both sides of the divide work side-by-side in harmony. Young, cultured, brilliant, tactical, bold, and polished, Macron has really taken on board Machiavelli’s lesson that the authentic politician’s ‘virtue’ consists of his ability to exploit the circumstances in which he is operating (his ‘fortune’) in order to conquer power. In fact, he faced extremely favourable circumstances: the left was exhausted by its stint in power, the right was drowning in corruption, and the electoral system allowed him to move from his 24 percent in the first round to a vote by acclamation in the run-off, playing on fears over the rise of the National Front. Following Machiavelli’s lesson, Macron pitched his language to attract voters of both the right and the left. His economic policy will be neoliberal and thus favour the ruling élites, but he will be progressive on questions of social policy, defending the rights of women, gays, and ethnic minorities. He has even won over a section of the youth of Maghrebian or African origin, firstly by defining colonialism as a ‘crime against humanity’ and then by explaining that in Silicon Valley and Wall Street computer scientists’ and traders’ value is measured on the basis of their ability to do their jobs and not their origins, their religion, or the colour of their skin.
Macron is the zero degree of ideology. The enraptured media has emphasised his pedigree as a philosopher—he was a student of Paul Ricœur’s44—but other than the Machiavellian realism mentioned above, his political philosophy is limited to a radical pragmatism covered in a thin layer of humanism. During his presidential campaign he did not call for support for a project or a set of values, but for himself personally, as he presented himself as the nation’s saviour, the man of providence. His desire to reform France through presidential decrees (including on such fundamental questions as the labour law) clearly asserts the supremacy of the executive over the parliament and reveals an authoritarian propensity that gives his presidency a ‘decisionist’, Bonapartist character. He presents himself as a charismatic leader—a ‘Jupiterian’ one, according to the supportive media. He is backed by European institutions, French bosses, and international finance, and yet also boasts of having demolished the Fifth Republic’s traditional two-party system, just as Renzi first emerged as the man who would ‘scrap’ the Partito Democratico’s old leadership. In short, Macron embodies a new neoliberal, postideological, ‘libertarian’ populism.45 Many progressives have been seduced by the charms of this young politician, whose manners and culture seem to make him the opposite of a Sarkozy, not to mention Berlusconi or Donald Trump. But once again, as is always the case with populism, all this simply describes a political style. Behind his affable mannerisms stands a new conception of politics that expresses, almost unmediated, the new ethos of the neoliberal era. This ethos is competition, life conceived as a challenge that is organised according to an entrepreneurial model. Macron is not of left or right: he embodies the homo economicus who has arrived in the political arena. He does not want to set the people against the élites; rather, he offers the élites to the people as a model. His is the language of enterprise and banks: he wants to be the president of a productive, creative, dynamic people that is able to innovate and earn money. But so long as the law of the market rules the world, the vast majority of people will always lose out, and this will continue to feed nationalism and xenophobia. We can bet that five years of ‘Macronism’ are not going to make the National Front go away.