“The Scream” is the popular name given to an 1893 composition created by Norwegian Expressionist artist Edvard Munch.
Munch recalled that he had been out for a walk at sunset when suddenly the setting sunlight turned the clouds “a blood red.” He sensed an “infinite scream passing through nature”.
As we quickly run through the first month of 2021, we find ourselves in the midst of a global political silent scream, with the only notable nation currently showing any evidence of even a gentle shift away from the political right being the United States.
Europe is a global leader in many different ways today, including politically. With 446 million inhabitants in the European Union, it is regarded throughout the world as one of the most desirable regions to live in and is often the number one choice among people leaving their own country for political and safety reasons. Today more than ever, the world needs demonstrable political leadership from its most well-established democracies.
France 24 news reporter Emmanuelle Chaze, an expert on European politics, summed things up perfectly in a tweet last week. She argued the far-right could very well end up winning the 2022 French elections – something that most experts felt was close to impossible.
The way presidential elections work in France is often two elections two weeks apart. The first round of the next presidential election will be held between April 8 and 23, 2022. The second is two weeks after the first. Should no candidate win a majority of the vote in the first round, a runoff will be held between the top two candidates two weeks later, which will almost certainly be the case.
A truly excellent site, built by France 24 for the 2017 elections, compares all of the political platform differences between Macron and challenger Marine LePen. Most of the issues then will apply to the 2022 election as well, with the most noticeable shifts going even further to the right.
Marine LePen is Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter. He is a convicted racist and was leader of the National Front (FN). In 2016, he repeated an old anti-Semitic slur that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail of history.” While under his daughter’s leadership the party has distanced itself from xenophobia and Holocaust denial, if elected, her party’s platform would be among the most far-right agendas of any party elected to lead a democracy in at least a half-century.
Even before the 2017 election, Marine Le Pen called for an end to legal immigration in France. Her party would repeal laws allowing the many illegal immigrants currently in the country to become legal French residents.
And as Emmannuelle Chaze pointed out in a tweet, where we are today is a perfect breeding ground for exactly where we will silently scream if we find ourselves there tomorrow.
The reason it’s important to pay attention to the French elections today is that this isn’t about the French elections. It’s about a steady creep to the political right among the nations that have been seen not for decades but for centuries as the most stable democracies in the world.
If you think France is an outlier, just walk across the border to Germany. Just over a year ago, the ultra far-right AfD party didn’t just show well in Brandenburg and Saxony state elections, they surged to historical highs, eclipsing any reasonable predictions of their success.
Everything around Berlin, a comparatively liberal, global city, has gone far-right in four years. While it might seem these things happen overnight, the only overnight piece is international news coverage. The virality we see from news of the shift to the right ignores years of warning signs, exactly what we have been seeing in France.
And over in Italy? Italy is far too complex to really even mention in this piece. Suffice it to say that after toying with Italian neo-fascism just a couple of years ago, the end result is a nation that is essentially a failed state. For regular Italians, even those most basic government services could be close to impossible to access, and this was before the global pandemic. It is a nation in political shambles with almost nowhere to go but up in terms of the political stability of its institutions and how the nation actually functions day-to-day.
In the United States, people justifiably want to know why political events happening far outside of their backyard should matter to them.
The answer is simple: They matter because of the Rule of Law.
The Rule of Law, something American political culture and society holds so close to its heart, isn’t elastic. A nation and its people either believe in the Rule of Law or they don’t. It’s not something that can be allowed to come in and out of vogue or be made malleable.
The ‘rule of law’ refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions, and entities public and private, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards.
Once adopted, laws need to be clear, consistent, and stable. There always needs to be predictability in how laws are enforced and they can never be influenced by things such as corruption, political patronage, nepotism, or arbitrariness. These absolutely central elements of the rule of law are the core of democracies.
So, as the coming months and couple of years approach and fly by, we all need to keep an eye on other parts of the world at the same time as we look in our own backyard. The fundamental tenets of any democracy require a certain amount of maintenance and when you defer it for too long, you find yourself as a nation in the uncomfortable spot of many nations with not only a long democratic history but nations that actually were formative to democracy itself find themselves today.
