When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Geopolitics

Have No Illusions, France's Far Right Is Still A Huge Threat

National Front leader Marine Le Pen at a party meeting
National Front leader Marine Le Pen at a party meeting
Jérôme Fenoglio

-Editorial-

PARIS — The electoral surge was on scale with the threat at hand: The rise in turnout from the first to second rounds of France's regional elections was so strong that it prevented the conquest of several regional governments by the far-right National Front party, which tallied the highest number of votes in its entire history.

Rejection was followed by refusal. Once again, voters of traditional parties, left- and right-wing, combined their votes to withstand a thriving far-right party, ultimately denying any side a true victory.

In the wake of the second round, these symmetrical ebbs and flows, the seemingly predictable reflexes, might seem reassuring, as if the old electoral clockwork of the past 30 years was still functioning — for better or worse. As if the National Front's time was bound never to arrive.

And yet, the results are in fact as worrying as they were after the first round. Now we see more clearly just how broken our democratic machinery is; even as we may be lulled again to not feel the urgency to repair it before it disintegrates completely.

Tempted by business as usual

On Sunday evening, leaders of both the establishment right and left vowed that they had learned their lesson from voters even more clearly than they had back on April 21, 2002, when the then leader of the National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round of the presidential election. All gave humble and cautious speeches. Yet, their first priorities were to find a way to position themselves for internal party battles in the coming months. The temptation to return to "business as usual" is once again particularly strong with the preparation of the presidential election in early 2017.

Elections have their own way of following in the logic of the one that came before. This denial of reality will, sooner or later, lead to a disaster. It would be quite troubling to move into the never-ending presidential campaign that lies ahead in 2016 without having first faced the many angers expressed at the polls. Starting with the despair of National Front voters, stemming from a feeling of helplessness facing mass unemployment, of injustice facing inequalities and of neglect by public authorities, all the frustrations that Marine Le Pen's party manipulates by stigmatizing scapegoats.

It will also be crucial to listen to the disillusionment of the huge number of people who have abstained from voting. These voters who only go to polls — until when? — to avert an immediate threat, who only vote, irregularly, "against," for lack of having found a project that would convince them to vote "for" someone or something. These citizens, especially the young, no longer feel the need to register on electoral rolls and feel more and more comfortable drifting away from the democratic life.

To handle this jumble of disappointments, there is much work to do. It includes a change in the voting method, a new reduction of the number of different offices a politician can hold simultaneously, a renewal of the political class, an opening to civil society.

But, in these times of designating scapegoats, it is also important not to put all the blame on political leaders. Elected representatives don't have the monopoly on cynicism and selfishness. To overcome this democratic crisis, certain public virtues that are fading away need to be restored: the sense of compromise, an appreciation for complexity, respect for dialogue, taking the long view.

At the end of a calamitous 2015 for France, our country cannot afford to spare itself a deep renovation of its political life. The 2017 presidential campaigns must be a laboratory for this. These goals are not unrealistic: After all, it was in Paris this same past weekend that — at the price of infinite patience, mutual concessions and cutting-edge diplomacy — that a major deal, that of the COP21, has just been signed between 195 different countries with a multitude of competing interests.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

Keep reading...Show less

The latest